Moxie: A Novel

by Jennifer Mathieu

  “The football players?” I ask, my voice matching Kiera’s in quietness. “Someone has to pay for that food. The bill must come to hundreds of dollars every week.”

  “Who knows who pays for it,” Kiera answers. “But I’d be willing to bet it’s Mitchell’s daddy somehow. I do know the girls’ soccer team hasn’t had new uniforms since my mom went to school here. And I’m not exaggerating.”

  “Damn.”

  “Exactly,” Kiera tells me. She finishes drying her hands carefully and then the two of us stand there. It’s a little awkward. This is probably the most Kiera and I have said to each other since the fifth grade.

  “I wonder what the Moxie people will do next,” I say. I don’t know if I’m asking for ideas or just trying to throw Kiera off my trail. Not that Kiera would have any reason to suspect me.

  “So you think it’s more than one girl?” Kiera asks. “Whoever made Moxie, I mean.”

  “I have no idea, but probably,” I say. There’s another bread crumb leading her in the wrong direction. Just in case. “I mean, it sounded like more than one girl when I read it.”

  “Well, whatever they do next, it needs to be something bigger than this,” Kiera continues, holding up one hand. “I mean, this is cool and all, but they need a big F U in the face of Wilson. Something that gets more girls involved, too.”

  Kiera’s voice grows louder, more sure of itself, as she talks to me. For one dumb minute I start to think she made Moxie, not me. She’s probably better suited to lead it, anyway, whatever it is. I would rather hide in the back of the classroom than answer a question, and I just tried to wash off my hearts and stars the first chance I got. I bet if I told Kiera the truth she could take Moxie over and do a much better job than me.

  But the Riot Grrrls tried hard not to have a leader. They wanted the movement to be one where everyone had an equal voice. That’s just one more reason for me to keep my identity a secret.

  “Anyway,” Kiera keeps going, “it was an interesting idea at least.” She makes her way to the door and pushes it open. “Cool talking with you, Viv.”

  “Yeah, cool talking with you, too,” I answer. And it was cool talking with her. It was cool seeing at least one other girl who followed Moxie’s instructions. I wish I’d asked Kiera if she knew anyone else who had marked her hands. But just knowing Kiera’s out there makes me feel a tiny bit better. Slightly less alone and weird. I take a deep breath and stare at myself in the mirror.

  “Just go back to class,” I say. I repeat it again and again until finally I do, my hands still covered in hearts and stars.

  * * *

  Maybe running into Kiera was a sign because after American history, I spy a few senior girls who are into all the drama productions and who also sit on the outskirts of pep rallies and football games walking down the hall with their hands marked. And there are two freshman girls whose lockers are near my second period class. And a few more hearts and stars sprinkled here and there on girls I spot in stairwells and corners and in the back courtyard where kids hang out during our ten-minute break during third and fourth. Some of the girls I know by name and some just by sight, but we catch each other’s eyes and nod and smile shyly like we’re in on some secret. Like we’re each other’s golden egg on some strange Easter egg hunt.

  The same thing happens when I walk into English class and spot Lucy Hernandez seated in the front row with stars and hearts drawn with blue marker in delicate curls and swirls across the backs of her hands and down her fingers and around her wrists.

  “Hey,” I tell her as I make my way down the aisle, other students filing in, “I like your hands.”

  Lucy looks up from under her black bangs and a smile spreads over her face. I wonder if I’m the first person to talk to her all day. I kind of think I might be.

  “Thanks,” Lucy answers. “I like yours, too.”

  “Yours are really pretty,” I say.

  Lucy smiles even bigger. “Thanks.”

  I smile back, and then there’s that same awkwardness I sensed in the bathroom with Kiera, and I’m not sure what to say next. Even though I think there’s something else I want to say.

  Just then Mitchell Wilson and his crew walk in, loud and taking up space and probably warming up their next make-me-a-sandwich joke, and that feeling I got that afternoon in the cafeteria on the day I made the first Moxie comes over me again. The feeling that made me want to clench my fists and dig my fingernails into my skin and scream.

  I don’t, of course. Instead, I take a breath and tuck my hair behind my ears, then pull out my English notebook and a ballpoint pen.

  “All right, class,” Mr. Davies begins as the bell rings, “let’s go back to the notes on the Enlightenment I provided you with yesterday.” Just as my brain begins to seize up with boredom, the classroom door opens and Seth Acosta walks in.

  He heads to his desk, his binder and books clutched in one hand at the side of his lean boy body.

  He is dressed in black jeans.

  He has on a black T-shirt.

  He is wearing black Vans.

  And on his hands, drawn with careful precision in black ink, are small hearts and tiny stars.

  As he slides into his desk, fireworks explode in my gut and my heart pounds so hard I know I won’t be able to hear a thing Mr. Davies is saying, even if I were bothering to listen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Claudia earns a best friend medal and a million free chocolate cupcakes for the patience she gives me during the pre-lunch pep rally, when we tuck ourselves up at the top of the bleachers and I start whispering about Seth Acosta’s hands.

  “Okay, but why are you whispering?” Claudia shouts. “It’s loud as hell in here, and anyway, he’s nowhere to be found.” The school band is warming up again, playing the same five or six rah-rah songs they play over and over at the football games, and Claudia is right—we can’t see Seth anywhere in the school gym. “No one is going to hear you freaking out over Mister Magic Hands,” Claudia continues. Her eyebrows fly up. “Okay, now I get why you’re so into him. Magic hands.” She cracks up at her own words.

  I blush in spite of myself. “God, Claudia.”

  “Oh, like it’s not like that with you and him?” she asks, incredulous. “Like it’s totally not about sex? You’re just into him for his mind, right?”

  “Enough,” I manage, burying my head between my knees so she’ll stop. The truth is, Seth’s hearts and stars did make him one hundred times hotter to me. All through class as Mr. Davies had droned on, I’d watched Seth’s temporarily tattooed hands taking careful notes, pausing every so often to scratch the back of his neck or quietly tap his fingers on the side of his desk. I’d cringed every time I’d heard Mitchell or one of his friends open his big mouth, worried Seth was going to become the butt of a joke. But nothing like that happened. Seth has done such a good job of sliding himself into the margins of East Rockport by rarely talking or doing anything extremely good or extremely bad that even though he doesn’t look like most of the other students, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one noticing his every move.

  “Hey, can I sit here?”

  I pop up to see Lucy Hernandez standing a few feet away, balancing herself on a bleacher. Something about her standing up in front of us makes me realize Lucy is a big girl. Tall—even taller than me, which is saying something—with big hips, big eyes, big, full red lips. Even her dark hair is big, falling over her shoulders in curly tsunamis. At first I kind of want her to go away because I just want to talk to Claudia about Seth. Then I feel like a shithead for thinking that.

  “Sure, you can sit here,” I say. There’s no need to scoot down to make room. Claudia and I are in the real nosebleed section of the gym, with Sara and Kaitlyn and the other girls we normally hang out with several rows ahead of us.

  “Thanks,” Lucy says, sitting down next to me so I’m in the middle.

  “Hey, I’m Claudia,” Claudia says, shouting her name over my lap. “You’re Lucy, yeah?”
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  Lucy nods and smiles and tucks her knees up under her chin.

  “So you’re into that newsletter thing like Viv, huh?” Claudia asks, pointing at Lucy’s hands. On the gym floor, the East Rockport cheerleaders are doing their thing, led by Emma Johnson, as usual. The dance music piped in through the speaker system thuds as Emma and the other girls shimmy and shake in their spotless uniforms. Their moves are so precise, so perfect. The cheerleaders have these legendary three-hours-a-day practices all summer long, and I guess it pays off in the end.

  “You mean Moxie?” Lucy asks, answering Claudia’s question and holding up her hands. “Yeah, I thought it was cool. It reminded me of this club I was in at my old school in Houston.”

  “Is that where you moved here from?” I ask.

  Lucy says yes and, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the noise of the pep rally, tells us how her dad lost his job in June, so she and her parents and her little brother moved in with her grandmother in East Rockport. Her dad recently found a job as head of maintenance at Autumn Leaves, the town’s only nursing home, so now they’re here to stay.

  “At my old school I was vice president of this club called GRIT,” Lucy tells us. “It stood for Girls Respecting and Inspiring Themselves. It was, like, a feminist club.”

  “And people actually went to meetings?” I ask. I try to imagine a club like that at East Rockport and my brain turns cloudy with confusion.

  “Yeah, totally,” Lucy says. “We even had a couple of guy members. We did fund-raisers for the local women’s shelter and talked about stuff that we were concerned about. I was hoping there would be a club like that here. So I could meet other feminists, you know?” The way she says the word feminists so casually, so easily, sort of blows my mind. Claudia nods and smiles politely, but her eyebrows jump a bit.

  I’ve heard my mom use the word feminist when she talks to old friends on the phone. (“I mean, honestly, Jane, as a feminist that movie just pissed me off.”) Riot Grrrls were into feminism, obviously, but up until this moment in the gym I didn’t think of them as feminists so much as super cool girls who took no shit.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had a club like GRIT here,” Claudia says. “Wait, correction. I know we’ve never had a club like that here.”

  Lucy nods, her face wistful. Then she turns to me and asks, “Did you see that guy in our English class who had his hands marked?” I feel my cheeks heat up just a bit, but Claudia keeps her lips sealed, her eyes focused on the pep rally. I know she won’t ever say anything about my crush on Seth in front of Lucy.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “I think he’s new, too. Like you. I thought it was kind of cool.”

  “It was,” Lucy says. “But I’m surprised he didn’t get his ass kicked.”

  “Maybe none of the guys noticed,” I respond. “They were all too busy thinking about this.” I float my hand out in front of my face in the general direction of the pep rally. Principal Wilson is giving his usual come-to-Jesus speech about supporting our boys and blah, blah, blah. The football players start walking out in their team jerseys, and the students in the first few rows roar so loud my ears hurt. I glance around at the other students in the back rows. A girl I don’t know is slumped in a bleacher alone, totally asleep. A few skinny, pimply boys are grouped in a clump, staring blankly down at the gym floor.

  “Do you guys actually go to these games?” Lucy asks, her brow furrowed.

  “Usually,” shrugs Claudia. “But Viv bailed on me for the last one.”

  “I wasn’t feeling good,” I remind her. “But yeah,” I continue, answering Lucy’s question, “there just isn’t much else to do around here. So we go.”

  Lucy’s eyebrows furrow deeper as she thinks, I’m sure, of the one movie theater in town and the one twenty-four-hour Sonic Drive-In and the one main drag. None of those things are things that are any fun by yourself.

  “Hey, you want to come and hang out at the game with us tonight?” I blurt out, glancing at Claudia out of the side of my eyes, hoping she’s okay with it. But Claudia just smiles and says, “Yeah, you should come. It’s a home game. We won’t even have to drive far or anything.”

  Lucy chews on a thumbnail, her eyes still on the activity in front of her. My heart picks up speed a bit until she turns and looks at us and says, “Okay, why not. I’ll go.” Then she stares back at Mitchell Wilson and Jason Garza practically beating on their chests as they urge the crowd to yell louder and louder for them. Lucy’s eyes widen. “God, it’s honestly like Roman gladiators or something out there,” she says, giving the gym floor her best what-the-fuck face. “Like, they’re acting like they’re about to go wrestle tigers or lions or whatever.”

  “I know, right?” I answer, smiling. It really is the perfect description.

  * * *

  On the Friday nights when my mom isn’t working and there’s a home game, she’ll sometimes join Meemaw and Grandpa to watch the East Rockport Pirates play football. I wonder if it’s intensely depressing for her to have to sit in the same bleachers that, when she was a teenage girl, she totally shunned in favor of driving to Houston to go to punk rock shows. But she always says it’s fun for her now, as an adult, to just sit back and observe the spectacle.

  “It’s a display of testosterone-fueled hypermasculinity, sure,” she told me once, “but a person can only watch so much on Netflix all by herself on a Friday night before it starts to get really sad.”

  But this Friday afternoon as I stand in my bra and jeans digging through my closet to find something to wear to the game, my mom pops her head into my bedroom. The first thing I notice is her cheeks have a little more blush on them than usual and her lipstick looks fresh.

  “Hey, you’re going with Claudia tonight, right?” she asks.

  “Yeah, she’s picking me up.”

  “Okay,” she says, nodding. Then she moves into my room, but her steps are uncertain. My mom and I never hesitate to go into each other’s rooms.

  “Look, Vivian, I’m not going to be driving to the game with Meemaw and Grandpa, okay?” she begins, and I notice her smile is stretched sort of thin, the freshly lipsticked corners of her mouth not really turning all the way upward.

  “Are they not going?” I ask.

  “No, it’s just…” She pauses so long I finally pull a T-shirt on over my head. This seems like the type of conversation in which a person should not be standing around in just a bra and jeans.

  “Mom, what is it?”

  “Do you remember John, from the HEB?” she starts, her smile still fighting to stay a smile, her lighthearted voice sounding forced. I can feel the sides of my mouth sliding downward, but I’m not forcing it at all.

  “That guy who voted for the Republican?” I ask. I attempt to arch an eyebrow. I know I’m being a little pain in the ass.

  My mother rolls her eyes. At least her expression is finally authentic. “Yes, Vivvy, that guy.”

  “Yeah, I remember him.”

  “Well, you know, we work together at the clinic, and it turns out he’s one of the doctors for the football team. You know, he’s on the sidelines during all the games in case of an emergency. He just started doing it.”

  Wow, so he votes Republican and he tends to sexist Neanderthals on the side. Sounds like a real winner. To my mom I just say, “Okay?”

  “Anyway, he asked me to have a drink with him after the game. Maybe down at the Cozy Corner.” The Cozy Corner is the one bar in East Rockport that my mom goes to on the super rare occasion that she goes out with some of the other nurses from work. She says she likes that they have the Runaways on the jukebox.

  “Okay,” I say again because I can’t think of what else to say. I wonder if this Republican John dude likes the Runaways. Highly doubtful.

  “I just wanted to let you know I might be a little late getting home, but not too late,” she says, her fake smile back on her face, her voice a half-assed attempt at cheerful.

  “So he’s taking you to the game?” I ask. />
  “Yeah. He’s picking me up. You don’t have to come out of your room or anything. I told him I’ll just come out when I see his car.”

  “The car with the DELOBE bumper sticker on it?”

  “Yes, Vivvy.” Deep sigh. Half hopeful eyes.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well … have fun.”

  My mom lingers a few beats too long, and I know she’s debating whether or not she should keep on trying to talk about this. But she just pulls me in for a hug and a kiss on the temple. She smells like the vanilla extract she loves to use as perfume, and all of a sudden I’m sorry for everything.

  “Mom,” I say as she heads out of my bedroom.

  “Yeah?”

  “Have a good time.”

  Her eyes light up for real at last.

  * * *

  The game is actually fun. Claudia picks me up and then we go to Lucy’s neighborhood, where she’s waiting on the porch of a little green-and-white bungalow. When Claudia’s Tercel pulls into the driveway, Lucy bounces up, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt with red piping on the sleeves and collar. At least a dozen red plastic bracelets dance on one wrist. Her hands are still marked, too, like maybe she’s even touched up her hearts and stars a little.

  “Hey,” she says. “Thanks for coming to get me.” She slides into the back and immediately pops her head in between the driver and passenger seats. “This is the first time I’ve gone out or, like, done anything since I moved here.” She sounds a little breathless, like maybe she’s kind of nervous.

  “It was no big deal to come get you,” says Claudia, and the truth is, it’s easy to be around Lucy. When we meet up with Sara and Kaitlyn and Meg and the other girls we always hang out with, Lucy keeps up with them no problem, her easy, bubbly chatter acting as super hilarious new-girl commentary on the ways of an East Rockport football game.

  “Wait, how much money did they spend on that Jumbotron? Aren’t our math textbooks from the ’70s?”

  “When does Mitchell Wilson get trotted out on his golden chariot, pulled by white horses?”