Margie Kelly Breaks the Dress Code

by Bridget Farr

  “I have an idea,” Marcus says, scribbling on a sheet of notebook paper. “Why don’t you do an audit of the team? Mark down each question a person gets right with a plus sign, and a minus for each wrong answer. That way we’ll know who’s pulling their weight and who’s not.”

  He hands me the sheet of paper, which lists the team members. I know the Kings and Daniela (obviously), and Jamiya, Sean, Elman, and José from third period. Oh, and Xavier. That’s it.

  “I don’t know everyone’s names.”

  Marcus surveys the team. “For this first round, I’ll supervise. Elman, you’ll read questions.” Elman nods and moves to the podium between the tables. Marcus points to each person as he splits up the teams. “Sean, Caleb, Henry, and Kai: you’re Team One.” The boys take their seats. “Team Two: Mikey, Jamiya, Daniela, and you know Xavier.”

  Xavier smiles sheepishly at me. At least he’s not smirking and rubbing his victory in my face. Marcus points to a row of desks behind the tables. “In the bullpen will be José and Deven.”

  After grabbing a pencil, I sit at one of the desks behind Daniela’s table. She smiles at me, but I can see the fear behind her eyes. She wants to prove herself today, to make sure they know she deserves to be on the team. She gets this way every first day of school, any time we get a new teacher, constantly wanting people to know she’s smart and capable. If I were closer, I would whisper something encouraging, but I don’t want the boys to know that she’s nervous. We have to stick together on this one. I scan the list of names again, writing down a description for each unfamiliar face.

  Henry: Barcelona soccer jersey. Asian, maybe Korean. Cracks his knuckles.

  Kai: Green tips. Quiet. Very sunburnt nose.

  Caleb: Live Oak hoodie. White. Pencil twirler.

  Deven: Turquoise braces. Thick golden coils. Always checking his phone.

  “Ready, everyone?” Marcus asks, and before they can respond, he nods at Elman, who reads the first question.

  “Toss-up number one. Inspired by fables from the Ashanti people of Ghana, this trickster uses his wit and cunning to defeat much larger creatures. Having two forms, human and arachnid, this mischief maker is one of the great folk heroes. For ten points—name this—”

  A buzzer. Jamiya. “Anansi.”

  “Correct, ten points,” Elman says, and I put a plus sign by her name. The three bonus questions flash by as I try to figure out how to mark responses when only the captain responds.

  “Toss-Up number two. Pencil and paper ready.”

  Everyone’s eyes drop to their papers. I decide to flip my paper over. No reason I can’t practice, too.

  “An architect needs to find the length of each side of a square whose area is the same as a rectangle whose width is eighty and whose length is twenty. By computing the area of the rectangle—”

  A buzzer. Mikey. “Forty.”

  Elman nods. “Before the power mark. Fifteen points.” I put a plus sign by Mikey’s name.

  Marcus gives him a high five. “Nice work, man.”

  The routine continues for the rest of practice. Mikey has the most correct responses, followed closely by Jamiya. A girl. But no one gives her a high five after her right answers. No one says “Nice work.” Each time she answers correctly, Daniela and I smile, but the veteran boys don’t care, while the new ones seem shocked that she knew the answer, as if they can’t believe a girl is doing this well. Only Mikey nods at her after she answers, a small acknowledgment that she’s killing it.

  Daniela doesn’t answer a single question, even the ones I know she knows. Maybe she’s frozen because of nerves. She barely even contributes to the bonus question discussions. She’s going to have to start showing off her skills if we’re going to take over the crown.

  I place a plus sign next to Sean’s name. His first individual answer right. Within seconds, Marcus is giving him a high five. “That’s my man, all up on his modern speeches! Four score and all that!”

  That’s my man. Ugh. This school is not made for girls.

  Chapter 8

  On Friday during second period, I split the back page in my math notebook into two columns. Girls on one half, boys on the other. Using Marcus’s strategy to audit the Quiz Bowl team, I decide to audit my classes, boys versus girls. Boys get away with breaking the dress code. Boys run Quiz Bowl. I want to see if they dominate our classrooms, too. So far, Mr. De Leon has called on seven boys and not one girl. Not one. And it’s not like we aren’t raising our hands to answer the questions, because we are. This class has sixteen boys and fourteen girls spread evenly across the room. At first, I made a little grid where each person was sitting, B for boy and G for girl, but then it got too complicated. And I don’t know everyone’s name yet, except Xavier from Quiz Bowl, who is sitting in the front row next to the windows.

  “Number seven,” Mr. De Leon calls from his spot on the stool by the overhead projector. It’s hard to see the screen with the bright light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows, so Mr. De Leon writes in a superthick marker. He adjusts his tie, part of the standard guy teacher wardrobe of black pants, white shirt, black tie, and sneakers. “The missing factor is…”

  My hand shoots up. I look around. Two other girls raise their hands. Four boys.

  “Daniel,” Mr. De Leon says, and I put another tally in the boys’ column. “Nope, try again,” he continues. I must have missed Daniel’s answer. After an entire minute, Daniel finally guesses seven.

  “No. Look at your multiplication table.”

  We wait while Daniel digs in his notebook. It should be glued to the cover. We did that the first day.

  “Got it?” Mr. De Leon asks, and Daniel nods.

  “Now find four and slide over until you get to sixteen.”

  Again we wait. I’m going to be an old lady by the time he answers this question.

  “Four?” Daniel whispers.

  “Correct.” Mr. De Leon writes the answer in blue on the projection, taking a second to sip from a silver coffee mug printed with his name. “Number eight. The value of x is…”

  Bam. My hand is back up. This time I’m the only girl. Come on, girls. Get those hands up!

  “Margie.”

  What? I’m midtally in the boys’ section, and I haven’t even been paying attention to the questions, just raising my hand and putting down tally marks. My eyes scramble over the problem, the x and 32 and -7 and my answer.

  “Three.”

  “No.” Hands shoot up around the room. Wait a second. I look down at my page. Oh no, I read the wrong answer. I put my hand back up. “I’m sorry. I read the wrong—”

  “James?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Correct.”

  I scratch a mark in the boys’ column before abandoning my notebook and heading to the back of the classroom, grabbing the girl’s pink bathroom pass off the hook. I have got to get out of here.

  I slam my notebook down on the table next to Daniela when I get to Ms. Anthony’s world cultures class. I’ve been waiting to talk to her for hours since she had a lunch bunch with her Spanish teacher today.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” I say, dropping into my seat.

  Daniela doesn’t respond right away as she’s furiously writing out a toss-up question in her Quiz Bowl notebook, her lips mouthing the question as she frames it. I tap her shoulder. She holds up a finger. She flips back in her notebook and scans a page titled “Egyptian Mythology” before finishing her question. I read over her shoulder and only get “head of a jackal.” I tap her shoulder again with a huff.

  “Okay, sorry, what’s wrong? Why are you freaking out?”

  “I’m not freaking out!” I say, flipping past the colored-pencil maps in my notebook. “Okay. I’m freaking out, sort of, but for a good reason.” I grab my boy-girl audit sheet, now full of tallies, each class written in its own pen color.

  Daniela leans closer. “What is that?”

  “It’s an audit.”

  “What? Like f
rom Quiz Bowl?”

  “Exactly!” I say, tapping my two columns with the eraser on my pencil. “But instead of counting correct answers I’m tallying discrimination. And look. At. This!”

  She scans the two columns, her braid falling over her shoulder onto her chambray button-up.

  “Seriously?” Daniela says, turning back to her notebook.

  “That’s it? ‘Seriously?’ That’s all you have to say?”

  “I’m not trying to be rude, Margie, but this is my first set of toss-up questions, and I have to get them right. I don’t have time to look at your list right now.”

  “It’s an audit.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I scoot closer to her, my blue chair tilting. “You don’t think girls being treated equally is important?”

  “Of course I do,” she says, back on her Egyptian mythology list to write another question. “But I’m actually dealing with this for real right now. You know I blew it the other day at practice, and Marcus and Mikey are going to be harder on me because I’m the only other girl. And I’m a sixth grader. You’re using a lot of energy getting stressed out about who can wear shorts but you’re not really doing anything. You’re sort of just complaining.”

  I scoot back in my chair. “I’m not complaining; I’m gathering evidence.”

  “Okay, then. But it seems like a lot of time spent freaking out about this instead of trying to get back on the Quiz Bowl team.”

  Trying to get back on Quiz Bowl. Like I have any choice, like I can wish myself out of being the alternate.

  “Fine. I won’t talk about it anymore.”

  Daniela sighs. “You can talk about it, but can you just wait until I finish these? Then we can be angry together.”

  I smile. “Do you want me to read the ones you have done?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll have Jamiya do it when we meet after school.”

  “But there’s no practice today. Mr. Shao has a dentist appointment.”

  “I’m going to her house after school to work on Quiz Bowl stuff. She’s going to review my toss-ups.”

  I try to hide my surprise. “Eighth graders never hang out with sixth graders.”

  Daniela shrugs. “We’re the only two girls on the team.…”

  She must see my face because she pauses, reaching an arm to my shoulder. “I mean, you’re on the team, too, but you know what I mean. It’s different. And maybe you can come next time? I can ask her.”

  No way! How embarrassing to be the tagalong.

  “Do you want some Skittles?” Daniela asks, pulling a rolled-up bag of half-eaten Skittles out of her pocket. She always has candy; she loves Skittles almost more than Quiz Bowl. I hold out my hand as she drops in a few.

  “You gave me red and orange? Those are your favorites.”

  She smiles and goes back to her Egyptian mythology, and I take out my class notebook, knowing Ms. Anthony will be starting class soon. The bright colors of Ms. Anthony’s room do nothing to ease my frustrations. One wall is orange, another neon green, another purple, one yellow, as if she couldn’t decide on a color and just threw them all up on the walls. Ms. Anthony stands behind her computer, fussing with the enormous TV it’s connected to, grumbling at the remote. I actually heard her say a swear word the other day when I was sharpening my pencil near her computer. She didn’t notice me.

  “Okay, scholars,” Ms. Anthony says, stepping away from the computer. Ms. Anthony is one of the most impressive women I’ve ever met: she graduated at the top of her class at UT Austin with two degrees: education and international studies. She runs the Austin marathon every year and is one of the youngest teachers. She’s definitely the most fashionable. Today she’s wearing a floral tunic over black leggings and a thick neon-yellow chain necklace. She’s also one of the few Black teachers at our school. In an introductory slideshow, she told us about her Afro-Cuban family history and how she studied abroad in Japan for a year in college.

  “Okay, scholars,” she repeats because certain scholars weren’t ready. “Look at this picture. Think about it. What do you see?”

  On the board is a picture of a bunch of men who look how my grandpa Teddy would if he was still alive and—

  “The president!” a student shouts from the back of the room. Ms. Anthony frowns. She calls on Sophia from my PE class. “Thanks for raising your hand, Sophia.”

  “The president and his government?”

  “Close,” Ms. Anthony says. “Daniela?”

  “That’s the president and his cabinet members.”

  Ms. Anthony smiles. “Yes. Take a minute to talk to the classmate across from you about what you see.”

  Daniela frowns, wishing we were partners, but I’m paired with William from our old elementary school. William is pretty smart, but he never looks up from his doodling, so he doesn’t pull his weight.

  “So? What do you notice?” I ask William, trying to be polite. He continues to scratch Sharpie scales onto a snake slithering up his notebook. I wait a few more seconds, hoping he’ll glance in my direction. “Anything?” Nothing. “Obviously, I notice that it’s mostly men, which seems super unfair.”

  William shrugs. Is that a response or a stretch?

  “Thirty seconds!” Ms. Anthony calls.

  “I also noticed—”

  “All four ladies are smiling with teeth. Men have both teeth and no teeth showing. But women: all teeth.”

  “I don’t think Ms. Anthony cares about teeth,” I say, unsure what teeth have to do with anything. William hunches over his notebook again, sliding a red Sharpie over the snake’s forked tongue. I wish Daniela could rescue me.

  “Time!” Ms. Anthony calls, taking a seat on the tall red stool by the computer. “What do you see?” She pulls a stick from her jar of Popsicle sticks with our names on them. “Juan Carlos.”

  “I see people dressed up fancy, mostly the men in suits and some ladies in skirts.”

  “Okay,” Ms. Anthony says, swirling the sticks before pulling out another name. “Kaysie?”

  “I see people smiling for an important picture.”

  Another stick. “William?”

  Ha. Guess who should have been a better participant?

  “All the women are smiling with teeth, but only some of the men are. Some of the men aren’t smiling at all.”

  “That’s a great insight, William,” Ms. Anthony says, looking as surprised as I feel. I guess I underestimated him. “We’ll have to come back to think about why women are smiling this way and the men aren’t. Any other observations?”

  Several hands shoot up around the room, including mine. “Margie?”

  “Most of the people in the picture are men, which means that most of the people in charge of the government are men. At least the people picked by the president.”

  Ms. Anthony beams. “Yes, Margie. And is it unusual for the leaders of our country to be men?”

  The class shouts no, me loudest of all. I know men run the world. I’ve seen the tallies in my notebook. I tap Daniela’s shoulder and give her an “I told you so” look as I point to my audit. She smiles, shaking her head at me.

  “It’s definitely not unusual here in the United States,” Ms. Anthony says as she rounds the back table, tapping a boy in a blue T-shirt who is reading a book under his desk. He quickly slams it closed, his eyes now glued to the screen. “You’ll also notice that most of the people in the picture are white men, what we call ‘intersectionality of privilege.’ ‘Intersectionality’ is a word invented by a law professor named Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw that describes how our identities—how we define ourselves, how others define us—are complex. For example, I’m Black and a woman. Someone might be an immigrant and have a disability. And all those parts of who we are affect how we’re treated in society, and the power—or privilege—we have to make change. We’re not diving into that topic just yet, but keep it in mind. So far, we’ve been talking about the basic components of a civilization or a culture, and today we’
re going to talk about who runs those systems: men, women, or both.”

  Ms. Anthony taps her computer, and a photo of older Asian women wearing red head wraps and long skirts appears. They each hold a gold bell or some metal instrument. “These are the Mosuo women of China’s northern Yunnan province. They are one of the few matriarchal societies in the world. Their culture is changing with the addition of technology and increased global communication, but today we’re going to study some of their practices, as well as some other women-led cultures.”

  As Ms. Anthony passes out articles about these different women, I start to picture it: a world run by women. Women presidents, women football coaches, women making laws and running meetings and standing in photos in the Oval Office smiling with teeth or no teeth. An all-girl Quiz Bowl team. Ms. Anthony drops the article on my desk, and it covers my boy-girl audit, and even though I haven’t added a single tally mark since her class started, if I did, the numbers would be even. I look down at the Mosuo women pictured in my article.

  A women-led society here at Live Oak? Fat chance.

  But then again…

  Chapter 9

  On Saturday, I hide inside the Macy’s changing room, knowing in a few minutes Grandma will be pounding on the door, telling me to come out already, or tossing another hideous dress over the top. Thankfully, the lock on this room works. She barged in on me at Dillard’s. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she said as she tossed me an ankle-length satin dress that I could have worn for my First Communion.