Rules for Being a Girl
Page 6
Remember, girl: It’s the best time in the history of the world to be you. You can do anything! You can do everything! You can be whatever you want to be!
Just as long as you follow the rules.
Eleven
I’m headed for my locker the following morning when someone calls my name from down the hallway; I turn, and there’s Bex poking his head out of the newspaper room, the collar of his plaid flannel button-down just slightly askew.
“Hey,” he says cheerfully, gesturing me over. “You got a minute?”
“Um,” I say, glancing at the ancient clock in the hallway. A week ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about being alone in the newspaper room with Bex—would have welcomed it, even, the chance to have his whole and undivided attention—but it isn’t a week ago. “Sure.”
Bex nods and heads back inside the office, perching on the edge of the desk, but I hover awkwardly in the open doorway, crossing and uncrossing my arms.
“So,” he says, in that same cheery voice—and am I imagining it, or does it sound just the tiniest bit hollow? “I just wanted to chat really quick about the editorial you uploaded last night.”
“Sure,” I repeat cautiously. The essay was the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep and the first thing I thought about when I woke up—I think it’s one of the strongest things I’ve ever written—but something about that tone in his voice has me second-guessing myself all of a sudden. “Why, are you not into it?”
“No, no, I think it’s great,” Bex says quickly, holding his hands up. “It’s really smart, and thoughtful, and edgy—and obviously the writing is top-notch. I guess I just wanted to make sure you’d thought through all the angles before we published it, that’s all.”
I frown. “What’s there to think about?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Bex says, tilting his head to the side. “You’re taking some pretty bold positions, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I say slowly. “I mean, I didn’t think they were that bold.”
“Look, Marin, don’t get me wrong.” Bex smiles. “It’s a stellar piece. This school is just full of a bunch of dopes, that’s all. As your adviser, I want to make sure you’re prepared for whatever blowback might come your way.”
“You think I’m going to get blowback?” I ask, surprised. The idea hadn’t actually occurred to me, and all at once I wonder if that makes me completely naive. “From who?”
“I have no idea,” Bex says immediately. “Not from me, obviously. I just don’t want you to be taken off guard if people aren’t crazy about what you have to say, that’s all.”
I nod, crossing my arms a little bit tighter until it almost feels like I’m hugging myself. I’m getting the distinct impression he thinks I should pull the piece altogether, and part of me wants to agree with him—after all, the last thing I want is for people around school to think I’m some kind of militant feminist.
The other part of me can’t help but wonder if somehow this is related to what happened in his apartment.
“Isn’t that the point of being the editor of the paper?” I ask finally, forcing myself to relax my posture, to stand up straight and push my shoulders back like someone who knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to speak it. “Saying stuff that makes other people uncomfortable sometimes?”
Bex looks at me for a long moment, an inscrutable expression on his face. “Fair enough,” he says, as the warning bell rings for homeroom. “We’ll put it in the next issue.”
The seed of doubt Bex planted in my head spends all morning growing roots and leaves and flowers; by the time third period rolls around, it’s practically a national park. I’m hoping for a pep talk from Chloe before the bell rings, but when she scurries into Bex’s classroom her painted eyebrows are knitted tightly together.
“Okay,” she says, making a beeline down the aisle and perching on the edge of my desk, blowing a tendril of yellow hair out of her eyes and dropping her electric blue leather tote bag on the linoleum with a quiet thump. “Can we talk about your editorial for a sec?”
My heart sinks. “You don’t like it either?” I ask.
“No, it’s not that, I just—” Chloe frowns. “Wait, who else doesn’t like it?”
I shrug, glancing over my shoulder up at the front of the room and lowering my voice. “Bex was weird about it this morning. I don’t know.”
“He was probably just looking out for you.”
“Why do I need looking out for though? Like, what about this piece is so bad that—”
“It’s not bad!” Chloe interrupts. “It’s just . . . a little . . . shrill.”
My mouth drops open, stung. “What’s shrill?”
“I mean, your voice is shrill right now, for one thing,” Chloe teases gently, laughing a little. “Easy, tiger. I don’t know. It just kind of sounds like you hate all boys, first of all. Or like you think you’re experiencing some great oppression because you have to shave your legs. Or like you’re about to turn into one of those girls who doesn’t shave her legs in the first place.”
“Of course I’m still going to shave my legs!” I protest. “That’s not what I’m—”
“Look,” she tells me, “I’m not saying we should pull it. And I’m not even giving you a hard time for going rogue on me, even though I thought we were supposed to be coeditors of this whole thing. I just think you should be ready for blowback, that’s all.”
“Blowback?” My eyes narrow, suddenly suspicious. That’s the same word Bex used. “Did you talk to Bex about this?”
“What?” Chloe shakes her head. “No!”
For some reason I don’t entirely believe her, though it’s possible I’m just being paranoid. I don’t totally trust my own judgment today. Make that lately.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So we’ll run it?”
“We’ll run it,” she promises with a smile. She bumps my shoulder with hers before she sits down.
My editorial runs on the front page of the Beacon the following Monday, right next to the results of last week’s swim meet and this week’s lunch menu.
I find Jacob in the cafeteria before first period, where he’s eating an egg sandwich and scrolling through Snapchat on his phone. “Hey,” I call, relieved by the sight of him. I was up half the night wondering if I was making a huge mistake—opening myself up to all kinds of unnecessary drama, upsetting the status quo—but that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? After all, it’s just an editorial. And really, is any of it even that controversial? I mean, the rules for being a girl are ridiculous. Anyone can see that.
Jacob doesn’t smile back. “Hey,” he says, and that’s when I notice the paper spread out in front of him like a placemat.
“Don’t tell me,” I say, sitting cautiously down in the chair beside him. “You’re not a fan.”
Jacob shrugs. “It’s not that I’m not a fan,” he says. “It just . . . didn’t make me feel very good, that’s all.”
“It didn’t?” I ask, momentarily confused. “Why not? I mean, it’s not about you.”
“Maybe not,” Jacob counters, “but everybody’s going to think it is. Like, is this really what you think all guys are like?”
“The piece isn’t even about guys though,” I protest. “It’s about the expectations on girls, that’s all.”
“I guess,” Jacob says, sounding wholly unconvinced.
“You know, you could try to say something nice about it,” I snap, suddenly irritated. “Since I’m ostensibly your girlfriend and all.”
“Ostensibly my girlfriend?” Jacob’s eyes narrow. “What does that mean?”
I glance around the cafeteria, uneasy; it’s pretty empty at this hour, but we’re hardly alone. I can see a pair of freshmen a few tables over pretending not to listen. “It means I would love if you could try to be a little bit more supportive, that’s all,” I say, lowering my voice to a murmur. “I’m sorry. I’m just not a hundred percent sure about how people are going to react to it, so—”
“I don’t need your permission to write an editorial.”
“That’s not what I’m saying!” Jacob shakes his head. “Do you hear me saying that right now?” He sighs.
“Come on,” he says, reaching for my hand and squeezing. “I’m sorry you’re stressed out about it. If it makes you feel better, it’s not like people are exactly clamoring to read the Beacon the second it comes out.”
“Seriously?” I ask, pulling away. “Probably nobody even read it? That’s the best you can do?”
Jacob’s shoulders stiffen. “What’s your problem this morning, huh?” he asks, sounding honestly baffled. “Are you on the rag or what?”
I blink at him for a moment. “Okay,” I blurt, shoving my chair back with a loud, grating screech. Suddenly I don’t care who’s paying attention. “You know what? I don’t think this is working.”
“Wait a second.” Jacob’s eyes widen. “What’s not working?”
“This.” I gesture between us. “You and me, all of it. I think . . . maybe I just need some space. From you. Like, permanently.”
I’m actually shocked to hear the words come out of my mouth, and from the look on Jacob’s face, I can see he is too. Ten minutes ago, breaking up with him wasn’t even on my radar. But suddenly it seems like the only logical choice.
“What the hell, Marin?” Jacob stands up too, so we’re eye to eye, his chair clattering. “Where the hell is this coming from? Like, okay, I’m sorry I said that thing about you having your period. That was fucked. But it’s nothing to break up over.”
“Isn’t it?” I ask, although now that I’m actually thinking about it, it feels like so much more than that one stupid comment. It’s the list his lacrosse buddies made last year ranking freshman girls in order of hotness. It’s how he laughed at Deanna in the cafeteria. It’s his smirk when we talk about the dress code, and the way he always assumes I want Froyo and not ice cream. It’s a million little things that I told myself didn’t matter, except for all of a sudden they completely do.
“I don’t know, dude.”
“Fine,” Jacob says, throwing his hands up. He’s pissed now, his mouth gone thin and his cheeks an angry pink. “We’re done, then. You know, it’s probably better we break up anyway, if this is what you’re going to be like now.”
“Oh?” I raise my eyebrows. “And what exactly am I like?”
“Like this,” he says, waving at me vaguely. “You write some weird article and start acting like a total psycho and . . . what? Turn into some crazy feminist?”
I laugh out loud at that, a mean hollow bark. “Some crazy— You know what, Jacob? Maybe that’s exactly what I’m turning into. And maybe you can go screw yourself.”
For a moment Jacob just stares at me, his mouth opening and closing. I’ve never said anything like that before—to him, or to anyone. I’m waiting for the surge of horror, but instead I just feel kind of powerful. Maybe I should tell people to screw themselves more often.
“Okay then,” he finally says, crumpling his sandwich wrapper up into a ball and chucking it into the bin at the front of the cafeteria. “See you never.”
“See you never,” I echo, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and heading to my first-period class.
Jacob’s reaction to my editorial is a pretty good litmus test for the rest of the morning, all told. Dean Shepherd makes a big show of cowering like he thinks I’m going to hit him. Hallie Weisbuck makes a Hillary Clinton joke.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Chloe says consolingly at the beginning of Bex’s class. “Honestly, this is the most people have talked about the Beacon since we started editing it.”
“Headlines don’t sell papes, Marin’s crazy editorials sell papes?” I ask, riffing on Newsies, which we used to watch all the time back in middle school. Then I frown. “Oh, also, I just broke up with Jacob.”
“Wait, what?” Chloe’s hands drop. “Why?”
“Because—” I break off. All of a sudden His casual sexism randomly started to bother me when he said he didn’t like my piece doesn’t feel like the banner cause it did this morning. “Because—”
Chloe shakes her head. “Marin, what is going on with you?”
“Okay,” Bex calls before I can answer, leaning against his desk up at the front of the room. “You guys ready to get started?”
I slink low in my chair as he goes over this week’s vocab unit, then assigns a response paper due the following week. “I’ve got a new reading list for you all to take a look at,” he says, passing out a stack of papers. “I want you guys to pick one of the short stories on this list, then write two to three pages on one of the literary techniques the author uses.”
It’s an easy assignment, the kind of thing I’ll be able to knock out in an hour or two, but as I scan the list of authors I find myself frowning: John Updike, Michael Chabon, John Cheever. Before I can quell the impulse, my hand is up in the air.
“Yep,” Bex says, nodding in my direction. “Uh, Marin.”
“I’m sorry, I just—” I look around a little nervously. Dean Shepherd already has a smirk on his face. “Shouldn’t there be some female authors on this list? Or authors who aren’t white?”
Bex looks surprised for a moment; he glances down at the list, like possibly he hadn’t noticed the omission. He tsks quietly, then looks back up at me. “Ooookay then, Marin,” he says brightly. “Not into the list, huh? What do you think I should add?”
“Oh—um.” I hesitate, my mind going completely, terrifyingly blank. In this moment I honestly couldn’t name a single short story if my life depended on it, let alone one written by somebody other than a dead white guy. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it through that far,” I admit finally.
“Well,” Bex says in that same cheerful voice—slightly plastic, I think now, more sarcasm than actual friendliness. It’s the first time all year he’s seemed anything less than 100 percent chill about an assignment—although I guess it’s also the first time I’ve complained. “Make sure you let us know if you come up with anything, yeah?”
The class kind of chuckles, and I nod miserably, feeling my whole body prickle with embarrassment. Chloe shoots me an incredulous look. God, why couldn’t I just have kept my mouth shut? It’s not like I wasn’t drawing enough attention to myself already.
Bex is turning back to the whiteboard when there’s a knock on the open door. I glance over, and there’s Ms. Klein in the doorway in her navy-blue shirtdress and her big round glasses, her dark hair in a tidy bun on top of her head.
“Mr. Beckett,” she says, gaze flicking from him to me and back again in a way that makes me wonder if she heard the whole exchange. “I’ve got your attendance forms from Ms. Lynch. I told her I’d drop them off.”
“Oh!” Bex nods, shooting her a megawatt smile. “Thank you.”
By the time he gets back to his desk he seems to have forgotten about me, thank God. Still, I spend the rest of the period slouched in my seat, aching to disappear. Chloe makes a beeline for me once the bell rings for the end of the period, grabbing my arm and steering me out into the hallway.
“Okay, did you seriously need to add picking a fight with Bex in front of the whole class to the list of dramatic things you did today?” she asks, joking, but also not really. “Do you have raging PMS or what?”
“Oh, come on.” I don’t tell her I dumped Jacob for basically saying that exact thing to me not three hours ago. “I wasn’t picking a fight,” I defend myself instead. “It just felt like—”
“Marin!”
I flinch. I cannot take one more person giving me shit today. But when I turn around it’s Ms. Klein, holding her water bottle in one hand and a slim white paperback in the other. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
> “Um.” I look from her to Chloe and back again. “Sure,” I say, and follow Ms. Klein down the hall.
“I overheard your conversation with Mr. Beckett,” she tells me, and I grimace.
“I don’t know that I’d call that a conversation,” I admit. “I totally froze.”
Ms. Klein smiles. “It happens,” she says. “But it was a good impulse on your part—an all-white, all-male reading list is ridiculous. Next time you’ll have to be better prepared, that’s all. Here”—she holds out the book for my inspection—“this might be a good place to start.”
I look down at the title: Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay.
“You know,” she says, looking at me thoughtfully, “if you’re not happy with the way things are around here, you ought to do something about it.”
She heads down the hallway before I can ask her what she means exactly, then turns back to face me. “By the way,” she calls, “I really liked your piece.”
I read Bad Feminist in the library at lunchtime and in between classes and tucked into my bed late at night, and two mornings later I go to see Ms. Klein before the first-period bell rings. She’s sitting in the bio lab going over lesson plans, classical music playing softly on her phone beside her. Her shirtdress is a deep hunter green.
“Hi, Marin,” she says, smiling. “How’d it go with the book?”
“I think I have an idea,” I tell her, instead of answering. “But I need your help.”
Twelve
“I’m just warning you now, I don’t think anyone’s going to come,” I tell Ms. Klein two weeks later, perching nervously on the edge of a lab bench after the eighth-period bell. When I first had the idea for a feminist book club, the night after she gave me the Roxane Gay book, it seemed almost brilliant—what a great fuck you to Mr. DioGuardi’s ridiculous dress code and Bex’s sexist reading list, right? What a great fuck you to everything that’s been going on. I made fliers and agonized over our first book before finally deciding on The Handmaid’s Tale because that was what the library had the most copies of; I filed new-student-organization paperwork with Ms. Lynch in the admin suite.