Moxie: A Novel

by Jennifer Mathieu

  “I don’t get why two Austin artists would move to East Rockport,” I say, changing the subject. I have to kind of shout because the pep band is starting its standard pep rally opening number, “All Hail East Rockport.” Some of the kids around us are stomping out the beat on the bleachers with their feet.

  “Maybe Marfa is done,” Claudia yells back. “Maybe they’re so cool they’re anti-cool. I mean, honestly, can you think of a more not-cool town than East Rockport?”

  I shrug in agreement. Claudia is right. There’s not much to do on weekends if you’re a teenager except cruise the Sonic and the Dairy Queen or try to find a stupid party. In terms of culture, the one museum in town is the Nautical and Seafood Museum of the Gulf Coast and the best part of going there is the fried shrimp-on-a-sticks that they sell in the cafeteria.

  “So, are you going to talk to him?” Claudia asks, not giving up. “He sort of reminds me of Johnny Cade in The Outsiders. Remember how you read that book in middle school and made me watch the movie, like, ten times? He’s so your type.” Claudia’s right. There’s something rebellious about Seth. But not too rebellious. Dangerous but approachable at the same time. I glance in his direction again until Claudia starts making loud, slurping kissing noises near my ear.

  “Okay, Claudia, enough,” I protest, shoving her gently in the ribs with an elbow. Like I said, I’m great at fantasy boyfriending, but the truth is I’ve never had a real boyfriend. It always stings to think about it, but I’m in eleventh grade and I’ve never gone out with anyone. Or even kissed a boy. I want a boyfriend because I kind of feel like a dork for never having had one, but I’ve pretty much given up on the idea that it’s going to happen for me in high school.

  As the cheerleaders form a pyramid and the pep band forces out a few more pep-filled notes, I manage to sneak one more peek at Seth. He’s still sitting there, his expression wandering somewhere on the border of neutral and bored. He lifts up one lanky arm and drags his hand through his hair and his bangs fall in front of his eyes.

  I wonder what his middle name is.

  I wonder what he smells like.

  I wonder what music he listens to, and I wonder what he looks like when he brushes his teeth.

  “Let’s hear it for the East Rockport Pirates!” comes a booming voice from the center of the gym floor. Principal Wilson is standing behind the microphone, his gut hanging over his belt, his face cherry red before he even starts yelling. Pretty soon he gets even redder as he bellows and shouts about the best football team in the world and how we all have to support the mighty Pirates and on and on and on.

  “I’m bored,” Claudia announces, her voice flat. She stares out over the heads of the girls in front of us, then yawns as if proving her point.

  Principal Wilson introduces Coach Cole and then Coach Cole introduces the football players and Mitchell Wilson and all the other boys trot out in their jeans and football jerseys over their shirts and Emma Johnson and the other Creamsicle girls do backflips and the pep band exhibits pep and Claudia yawns again.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a town that doesn’t revolve around seventeen-year-old boys who get laid way too often just because they know how to throw a football.

  “Folks, I want to remind y’all how important it is to come out and support your Pirates tonight because we’re going to need every one of y’all cheering as loud as you can, am I right!” Coach Cole hollers. The crowd hollers back, like they’re at a church service run by one of those preachers you see on TV. The rally continues like this until the bitter end when Jason Garza, the senior captain, whips his football jersey over his head and swings it around like a lasso before throwing it into the crowd, where a bunch of girls scream and lunge for it like a bouquet at a wedding.

  “Oh, shit, look at what he has on,” Claudia mutters. “Another one of his gross shirts.”

  Under his football jersey, Jason is wearing a white T-shirt with big black letters. It reads GREAT LEGS—WHEN DO THEY OPEN?

  “Gross,” I mutter. Jason is wearing the shirt in front of Coach Cole and Principal Wilson, but it won’t matter. He can get away with it. He always gets away with shirts like these, and he’s not the only boy in the school who likes wearing them. Boys being boys or whatever. The rest of the football players, including Mitchell, are laughing. I catch the expressions of some of the guys in the front bleachers, and they’re laughing, too. Jason even does a little attempt at a sexy dance in front of a few of the girls up front, shifting his hips around like he’s trying to keep up some invisible Hula-Hoop. The thatch of dark hair on his head makes him look like a rooster strutting around up there. The girls laugh and put their hands up in front of their faces, and I can’t tell if they’re grossed out or if they’re actually liking it.

  Then I notice one of the girls is Lucy Hernandez. Even from all these rows back, it’s easy to see she’s not smiling or giggling or laughing or even pretending to be grossed out. She’s just grossed out for real. This isn’t the first pep rally of the year, so poor Lucy should know by now that you never sit in the first few rows unless you’re a hardcore Pirates fan. Better to hide toward the back, like people who only go to church on Christmas.

  Jason must get Lucy’s disgust because he makes a point of gyrating his hips right up near her face, and she just looks away, down at the floor. She’s blushing. Everyone else is hooting.

  Something charges through my body, and I look down and see my hands are balled up into fists. I stare at them for a moment, surprised, and then will them to release.

  “All right, all right,” Principal Wilson announces on the microphone, “let’s get going to lunch, y’all. Why don’t we save that energy for the game, Jason.”

  The band plays its last notes as we stream out of the gym. I look back but Seth has been swallowed up by the crowd. I hope Seth Acosta is not the sort of guy who would wear a shirt that reads GREAT LEGS—WHEN DO THEY OPEN? He could look as hot as a young Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders, but I still wouldn’t want to hang out with a guy who wears a shirt like that. Even my fantasy boyfriends have to have standards.

  As Claudia and I head toward the cafeteria for lunch, we get pushed and bounced through the shuffle of the crowd, and I realize I’ve ended up near Lucy. She walks toward the edge of the hallway, her shoulder bumping into the row of lockers every so often. Her cheeks are still pink, and she’s not really looking at anyone as she makes her way down the packed hallway. I think about asking her to eat with us in the cafeteria, but the idea of breaking out of my regular social routine and talking to someone new seems exhausting somehow.

  After she spoke up in Mr. Davies’s class, I know Lucy is the kind of girl who isn’t afraid to be the center of attention even if it doesn’t make her too popular. It’s not so much that I want to be popular, because popular people at East Rockport High School are basically assholes, but I like flying under the radar. I wish I didn’t give a shit about what people think about me. Like my mom coming to school with blue hair. She was never dutiful or under the radar when she went here. That’s why she became a Riot Grrrl.

  When Claudia and I get to our regular table in the lunchroom with our friends Meg and Kaitlyn and Sara, I look for Lucy but I don’t see her. I don’t see Seth Acosta either. But I do see Jason with his dumb shirt on, cutting in line in front of some freshmen.

  GREAT LEGS—WHEN DO THEY OPEN?

  I have the urge to clench my fists again until the slivers of my mostly bitten fingernails dig into my palms.

  I wonder what Wonder Woman would do right now. Or my mom. Or the girl who sings that rebel girl song. The one whose voice was a weapon. The one who didn’t care if all eyes were on her. In fact, she liked it that way. What would she do to Jason? Maybe march right up to him and tell him how gross his shirt is? Maybe take a pair of scissors and cut it right off his body?

  He’d probably like that, though. He could show off his stupid six-pack.

  I take a bite of my ham sandwich and listen as Cla
udia and Kaitlyn and the others talk about where we should try to sit at the game tonight. I put my sandwich down and pick at the crust. I’m not really hungry.

  “So what time do you want me to pick you up?” Claudia says, kicking me under the table.

  “I’m not going,” I hear myself saying. I’m surprised at my own response. But also relieved.

  “What?” Claudia asks, frowning. “We were just talking about how I have my mom’s car.”

  “I’m not really feeling well,” I say, coming up with the easiest excuse.

  Kaitlyn reaches over and touches my forehead with her hand. She has, like, five younger brothers and sisters so she’s always doing mom-stuff like that.

  “You don’t have a fever, I don’t think,” she tells me. “Do you feel achy or cold?”

  “It’s my stomach,” I say, pushing away my lunch.

  “Eww, stay away,” says Meg, sliding her chair toward the other end of the table. “I don’t want to get sick.”

  Claudia is eyeing me carefully. Just a few minutes ago I was fine, checking out the new guy at the pep rally.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I admit. And I don’t. But something has shifted. It happened the moment I said I wouldn’t go to the game and now I can’t go back.

  Or did it happen during the pep rally, when I saw Jason’s shirt and realized my hands were in fists?

  Or did it happen before that?

  “Maybe you should go to the nurse,” Kaitlyn says. “Do you want one of us to walk you?”

  “No, I can get there on my own,” I answer. “But thanks.”

  “Text me later?” Claudia asks. Her voice is small and a little hurt, I think. But maybe she just doesn’t know what to make of my weird behavior. Honestly, I don’t either.

  Nurse Garcia lets me lie down on one of the cots in the back room of the clinic all afternoon. There’s no one else back there, and she turns the lights off for me. It’s nice and cool and quiet. When I shift positions, I hear the paper sheet crumple underneath me. The bell for sixth period to start comes and goes, and I pass the time staring at a poster that reads COUGH AND SNEEZE? ELBOW, PLEASE! A little stick figure girl and boy cough and sneeze into their stick figure elbows. I lie there through sixth period, indulging in the fact that I’m tucked away inside my little clinic cocoon while everyone else has to be in class. The bell rings again for seventh period and then again for eighth. And then, finally, the last bell of the day.

  “Feeling better?” Nurse Garcia asks as I step into the main clinic office, blinking my eyes at the bright lights.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “Thanks for letting me rest so long.”

  “You’re not one to fake it, Vivian,” she says. “And you don’t look quite right, to be honest. Just go home and stick to toast, bananas, and rice, okay? And get rest and drink lots of water. I’m sorry you have to miss the game.”

  “I’ll survive,” I tell her.

  Usually at the end of the day, Claudia and I meet by my locker, and we walk home together or try to catch a ride with someone we know. But today I grab my backpack and make my way out a side door, taking a different route than I normally do. I walk fast, leaving East Rockport High behind me as quickly as possible.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Meemaw and Grandpa are going to the game, and Mom has to work late again. I call my grandparents and tell them I’m not feeling well so I won’t see them at the stadium, and I call my mother at work and tell her my stomach is acting up and I’m staying at home. She gives me the same instructions as Nurse Garcia and reminds me to call her if I start feeling worse.

  But I don’t feel worse. I feel better. There’s something weirdly freeing about knowing that almost the entire town is driving into Refugio and I’m safely hidden inside my house all by myself.

  I let myself wonder for a minute if that new boy, Seth, is going to the game. If his weird artist parents are taking him there as part of their research for some performance piece they’re doing on Small Town Texas Life. Maybe he’s already begged them to let him move back home to Austin. Maybe he never even existed at all and is just a figment of my imagination.

  As dusk falls outside, I heat up a mini frozen pepperoni pizza and take it into my bedroom with me, balancing it on a paper towel. I love eating in bed. It feels so lazy and wrong and also so luxurious and awesome at the same time. After I carefully pick off and eat all the pieces of pepperoni but before I start in on the cheese, I find this documentary I watched once with my mom and start playing it on my laptop. It’s about Bikini Kill’s lead singer, the girl with the rocket-launching voice who sings that song about the rebel girl. I remember that when my mom and I watched the movie the first time, I glanced over at her during the closing credits. In the semi-darkness of our den, her face lit only by the flashing images on the television screen, I could see she was blinking away tears. But I could tell by the way she was smiling through her tears that she felt good and sad at the same time. Sometimes I wonder how old you have to be to feel really nostalgic. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to feel nostalgic for something you never actually got to experience yourself. I think that’s how I feel about the Riot Grrrls.

  I finish the pizza, wipe off my greasy fingers and face, and pat the bed so Joan Jett will jump up and snuggle with me as I keep watching the movie. One of the things Kathleen Hanna—that’s the lead singer’s name—talks about in the documentary is the idea of the bedroom culture of girls. Every girl has some super secret world going on in her bedroom where she can make and create things, and Kathleen thought it would be cool if girls could share what was happening in their secret spaces with other girls. That’s what Riot Grrrl tried to do. They tried to make ways for girls to find each other. Girls who cared about the same things and fought the same fights and liked the same stuff. But since it was before the Internet, they did it with zines and bands and lyric sheets and shows and cassette tapes they sold for five dollars.

  Sitting there in the semi-darkness of my own bedroom, watching Kathleen and the other Riot Grrrls on my laptop screen, I can’t stop thinking about my mom’s MY MISSPENT YOUTH box.About Wonder Woman taking out street harassers. About old Polaroids of girls with black lipstick who look like they are ready to take over the world with their attitudes. About neon-green flyers advertising a Riot Grrrl convention in Washington, D.C., and fund-raisers for rape crisis centers.

  Audacious. That’s a fancy vocabulary workbook word that would earn me extra points on any of Mr. Davies’s stupid unit tests.

  The Riot Grrrls didn’t care what people thought. They wanted to be seen and heard.

  Because they were audacious.

  I cuddle with Joan Jett on my bed while the documentary plays, and an idea that’s been building in the back of my brain begins to take shape. It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous, really. But I can’t stop thinking about it.

  Up until I was in third grade, my mom smoked cigarettes. She tried to be sneaky about it when I was really little, but eventually she knew I got wise to her and would apologize to me every time she headed out to the back porch to smoke.

  “Oh, Vivvy, I’m sorry,” she would tell me, sighing. “I’m really trying to quit, but it’s so hard.”

  My third-grade brain came up with an idea. Alone in my room, I cut out a dozen slips of paper the size of my palm and wrote things on them in black Sharpie like SMOKING KILLS and SMOKING CAUSES CANCER and I DON’T WANT TO LOSE MY ONLY PARENT. Looking back, I cringe at that last one, but I was an earnest third grader, and I was going for the jugular. After decorating them with skulls and crossbones and a stick figure that was supposed to be me crying next to a tombstone that read R.I.P MOM, I commenced the final part of my secret mission. I hid the signs all over the house. Behind her deodorant in the medicine cabinet. In her underwear drawer. Folded into squares in the carton of eggs. I even tucked one into her pack of Camel Lights.

  My mother found the first one (buried inside her box of Special K) and waved it at me during breakfast that morning.<
br />
  “Vivian, was this you?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “I don’t knooooooow,” I said, arching an eyebrow back. “It could be some anonymous anti-smoking person.” I loved playing some secret avenger. Even if in my heart I knew I wasn’t actually so secret.

  My mother rolled her eyes at me, but something funny happened after she found all of the cards.

  She stopped smoking. For good.

  My mission had worked.

  When the documentary is over, I give Joan Jett one last pet and go to my mom’s desk in the den for a few supplies. My body hums with excitement. I cross my fingers that our wonky printer that only works half the time will work tonight. And then I get the last item I need from my mother’s closet.

  I spill out all of my mom’s old zines for the hundredth time and look at them with fresh eyes. I’m taking notes. Or, to be totally honest, I’m kind of stealing. But I don’t think the girls who made Girl Germs and Bikini Kill and Sneer would mind. In fact, they’d probably be happy about it.

  I run one finger over the words of something called a Riot Grrrl Manifesto. I can’t remember ever reading it before. It’s in one of the Bikini Kill zines, and I wonder if Kathleen Hanna wrote it herself. I swallow up the words.

  Because we don’t want to assimilate to someone else’s (boy) standards of what is or isn’t.

  Because we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak

  Because I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will, change the world for real.

  I picture Lucy Hernandez’s stunned, hurt expression in class when Mitchell Wilson told her to make him a sandwich. I think about Jason Garza’s gross T-shirt and his swiveling, stupid hips. I imagine my life in East Rockport stretching out in front of me, a series of pep rallies and vanilla conversations in the cafeteria with dutiful girls I’ve known since kindergarten. I picture all the expected things that come after all that—go to college, end up with an okay guy and an okay job, and spend my Fridays in the fall at East Rockport High football games until I’m eighty years old.