Moxie

by Jennifer Mathieu

  “I wouldn’t say anything,” Seth says. “Not even if you covered me in fire ants or forced me to listen to, like, I don’t know … smooth jazz.”

  I grin. “What’s smooth jazz?”

  “Garbage,” Seth says, not missing a beat.

  We stand there for an awkward moment, and when Seth speaks again, he looks down at my feet.

  “Hey, do you feel like … I don’t know … hanging out tonight or something?”

  My heart is beating inside my throat. I hope Seth keeps looking at my feet because if he looks up, he’ll see it just below my chin, all four chambers pulsating at an astonishing rate of speed.

  “You’re … not going to the game?” I finally manage. Great. Now I sound like Suzy School Spirit.

  Seth frowns a little. “No, I’m not. But … you’re going, I guess?”

  “No!” I answer, louder than I’d intended. Of course, I had been planning on going to the game. What else is there to do? Even Lucy was going to come. But that was before Seth Acosta turned my life into an episode of a television show I would totally binge watch.

  “So you’re not going, then?” he asks, confused. He brushes his hair out of his eyes with one hand.

  “I wasn’t really, like, sure what I was doing tonight. But if you want to hang out, that would be cool.”

  I’ve never hung out with a boy or gone on a date with a boy or been asked to a dance by a boy or kissed a boy. Nothing with boys. Ever. And now this. It’s too astonishing to be real.

  But it must be real because Seth is saying something about coming by my house around 7 p.m. and maybe going to get something to eat, and then he is typing my phone number into his phone and saying he’ll text me later.

  “Cool,” I say, like this has happened to me every day of my life since sixth grade.

  Just then the bell rings. I mumble out a goodbye and Seth says goodbye, and as I make my way to my locker, I am totally positive I’m not walking but floating.

  * * *

  Claudia has to be the first person I’m going to tell about my … is it a date? A hangout? A … what? When I find her at her locker at the end of the day, she squeals at my news, gripping my hand and literally jumping up and down with excitement.

  “I hope you don’t mind this means I won’t be going to the game with you,” I say.

  “Screw the game!” Claudia answers, tugging me along after her. The entire walk home she helps me plan what to wear, what to do with my hair, whether I should wear lipstick. (I normally don’t, but it might be fun to this time, maybe.) Claudia has more experience with boys than I do. She kissed a few in middle school—I think her pocket-sized self and her adorable ski jump nose made her nonthreatening to boys in early puberty—and she dated this guy Colin O’Malley for a few months last year before he moved to San Antonio because of his dad’s job. In late night phone calls and texting marathons, she’d told me how she let him touch her under her bra and that it hadn’t felt particularly great—only like he’d been trying to squeeze the air out of a deflating birthday party balloon.

  The difference is Colin O’Malley was just ho hum. Even to Claudia.

  Seth Acosta is not ho hum or meh or vanilla or blah.

  He’s a stone fox.

  “What about your mom?” Claudia asks as we approach my house. “Hey, isn’t that her car in the driveway?”

  I frown. “I thought she’d be at work.” My mom is not something I’ve considered until Claudia mentions it. Since I’ve never had any interest from any guy, this isn’t a topic my mom and I have ever had to navigate.

  “I’m sure she’ll be cool with it,” Claudia says, and I hope she’s right. I mean, isn’t that who my mom is? The cool mom?

  After Claudia hugs me and practically makes me take a blood oath promising to tell her everything that happens immediately after it happens, I walk in and find my mom in the kitchen, making a sandwich.

  “You’re home early,” I say, setting down my backpack on the kitchen table. I thought I’d have at least an hour or two of getting-ready time in which to practice expressions and witty repartee in the bathroom mirror with my music blaring in the background.

  “Hey, sweetie,” my mom says, coming over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Power went out at work. Something about a screwed-up electrical box. So I get a free afternoon off.” She walks back to the kitchen counter and spreads mustard on a piece of whole wheat.

  “So,” I start, my heart thumping. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to talk about Seth with my mom. I mean, don’t get me wrong. My mom has always been 100 percent straight-up amazingly honest about sex and puberty and all that hormone shit, but it’s a lot easier to have those conversations when it’s all just theory, not practice. I mean, not that I’m going to be doing it with Seth tonight or anything. I’m not even sure he likes me Like That. Even though I totally pray that he does.

  “So … what?” my mom asks. She stops making her sandwich as she listens to my plans for the night. When I finish talking she gives me a small smile, but her eyes are wide with surprise.

  “So, I can go, right?” I can’t believe she’ll say no, but I realize I’m holding my breath.

  My mom presses her lips together, thinking for a second. “Oh … sure. Yes, of course you can go. I mean, I’d like to meet this guy first, of course.” She pauses, then laughs and shakes her head a bit. “Listen to me. I sound like a mom in a John Hughes movie.”

  I exhale. “Well, he’s picking me up around 7.”

  “So you’re not going to the game?”

  “No … we’re just going to get something to eat, I think. You’re going to the game, right?”

  “I was going to go with John, but I can meet him there later.” She glances down at her half-made sandwich, like she’s just remembering it’s there. I stand in the middle of the kitchen. We’re in uncharted territory, and everything feels a little off-kilter.

  “You don’t have to wait or anything,” I say.

  “No, I want to,” she insists. “And as far as what time you should be home … have I ever even given you a curfew, my obedient, well-behaved daughter?” She laughs again, but it’s almost a nervous laugh.

  I shake my head no and bristle a bit at her description of me. It’s true the only places I go are my girlfriends’ houses for sleepovers. Or sometimes to cruise the Sonic or the DQ on Saturday nights. My mother has never had to give her duitiful Viv a curfew. It makes me feel like a dork.

  “Let’s say 10-ish, okay? I’ll be home from the game by then.”

  I nod. Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll even be able to find enough to talk about with Seth for three hours without passing out from anxiety.

  “Well, I hope you have a great time,” my mom says, and this time her cheer seems more sincere. I head to my room to contemplate outfits, trying to shake off the awkwardness between us.

  Butterflies is too small a word to describe what’s going on in my stomach when Seth pulls up to my house at five minutes after seven. I peer through my bedroom window, my heart hammering. I see him get out of the car, slam the door to the red Honda he’s driving, and head up the front steps. I blink and swallow. How can he be showing up to my house? To see me?

  “Viv!” my mom calls out from the kitchen. “Your friend is here!”

  Your friend? You’re making this sound like a playdate, Mom.

  I walk out, hoping my black jeans and my mom’s old Houston Oilers T-shirt are cool but not trying too hard.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” Seth says back, nodding.

  “Mom, this is Seth from school.” What kind of a ridiculous introduction is that? Where else would he be from? The bus station downtown? The meth house?

  “Hi,” Seth says to my mom, who’s stretching out a hand. She and Seth shake and she’s pretty normal, actually, only asking how long it’s been since his family moved to town. He gives sentence-long responses, but not kiss-ass answers, which is good because my mom could see through that in a heartbeat.
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br />   “Well,” my mom says as Seth and I start to scoot toward the door, “have fun then, and I’ll see you by 10.” As she walks us out, she presses something into my hand. Once we head outside I peek down and see it’s a twenty. I slide it into my jeans pocket and catch my mother’s eye. She gives me a smile, and I smile back.

  “So, I get the sense the town’s going to be dead, huh?” Seth says, pulling out onto the street. “Because of the game? I didn’t think about that before.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “All the fast-food places are closed. Most of the restaurants, too.” Seth is driving out of my neighborhood, heading up Broadway toward town. He can’t have had his license for too long, but he drives cool somehow, his head back and his hands casually resting at the bottom of the steering wheel. After we get going, he adjusts the volume. The tinny sound of some band I don’t recognize but that sounds pretty catchy starts to spill out of the speakers.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  “Not really,” I say. The truth is I’m too nervous to eat, but I forced myself to down a granola bar before he came so my stomach wouldn’t start grumbling. “Maybe later after it opens we can cruise the Sonic.”

  “Wait,” Seth says, pulling up to a stop light and turning to look at me. “What’s ‘cruise the Sonic’?”

  I grin, and my eyebrows pop up.

  “Cruising the Sonic and the DQ is, like, what we do here on weekends. It just means driving aimlessly around those places to see who’s hanging out there and who you can talk to or whatever.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I answer. “You didn’t cruise the Sonic in Austin I’m guessing.”

  Seth laughs. “No. Definitely not.” His eyes glance out the driver’s side window at the empty strip malls and storefront churches and resale shops. “I’m still getting used to this place.”

  It feels easier, somehow, to talk when we’re in a moving car. I don’t have to look Seth in the eyes. I can glance out my own window instead.

  “You must miss it, I guess?” I ask. “Austin, I mean.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Seth says. He twists his mouth a bit like he’s considering what to say next. “The things is, my parents are artists. I mean, honestly, they can call themselves that because my mom comes from a shitload of money, if I can speak frankly. My grandparents are loaded and she lives off this trust. So she and my dad spend all their time prepping their art for different gallery shows. They do stuff with, like, textiles. My mom said she wanted to get away from Austin since it’s growing so fast and it’s not like it used to be in the ’80s or whatever. Like she needed some authentic small-town experience to be a real artist.”

  “So they picked here?” I ask, incredulous. “Of all the small towns in America?”

  “Yeah,” Seth says, his voice heavy. “I don’t think it occurred to them that it wouldn’t have killed them to wait two more years until I was done with high school. But whatever.” A tiny frown crosses his face.

  “Do you at least like their art?” I ask, glancing at him.

  “I guess,” he says. “I mean, it gets shown and stuff. I think they’re big names in the world of abstract textile art, which is, unbelievably, a world. People pay a lot of money for it. But to be honest, to me it just looks like a bunch of bedsheets folded weird.”

  I laugh out loud and Seth laughs with me. Just then we pass the U COPY IT with its OPEN sign flashing. I think of Frank in his red vest inside, flipping through a paperback.

  “Hey,” I say, pointing out the passenger window. “That’s where I make the copies of Moxie.”

  Seth peers out the window and nods approvingly. “Cool. That bathrobe thing seems to have worked.”

  “Yeah,” I say. It feels so strange to be able to talk about making the zine out loud with someone. But really good, too. “I’m not sure if I’m going to make another issue. But I kind of want to.”

  “You totally should,” Seth says.

  As we drive through town without a destination, the sun setting around us, I find myself telling Seth about my mom’s Riot Grrrl past and how it inspired Moxie. Then we start talking about bands. He’s heard of Bikini Kill but never heard them, heard them, so at Seth’s prompting I pull up “Rebel Girl” on my phone. From the opening beats, he likes it. I can tell.

  “That lead singer sounds like she could kill you with her voice,” he says, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “But, like, kill you in a good way.”

  “Totally,” I tell him, and my heart swells.

  We go back and forth on bands for a while, and Seth describes a couple of live all-ages shows he got to go to in Austin. I’ve never seen a band play live except for the East Rockport High School pep band, and I’m super intrigued as he describes how his ears rang for days afterward and how cool it was to get to talk to the band members while they were selling their own merchandise (only Seth calls it “merch”) at the shows. After I’ve stored up a list of bands in my head to check out later, Seth drives by Eternal Rest Funeral Home on Front Street. A small sign displayed in the front lawn under a floodlight reads DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE! WE CAN WAIT!

  “Wait, is that for real?” Seth says, nodding toward the sign.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “It’s this thing they do. They change it out every once in a while. Once they had one that said ‘It’s a beautiful day—look alive!’”

  “Are you shitting me?” he asks. “And people still give them business?”

  I shrug. “They’re the only game in town, so yeah.”

  At this, Seth makes a sudden right turn and pulls into the funeral home parking lot. He turns up the music a little bit and starts bobbing his head back and forth to the beat as he spins circles over and over.

  “Um,” I begin, turning to face him, totally perplexed, “what are you doing?”

  Seth grows serious. “I’m cruising the funeral home.”

  I explode with a loud laugh. “Cruising the funeral home? Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Seth insists. He mimes waving at imaginary cars, chin-nodding at invisible people nearby. “This is so dope,” he says. “I feel like I’ve finally figured out what East Rockport is all about. This is such a scene, man.”

  The nervousness from earlier has drained from me, replaced with aching cheeks from smiling so much.

  After we cruise the funeral home for a while, Seth says he’s getting hungry, and we find an open Jack in the Box on the outskirts of town. As we pull through the drive-thru, I offer Seth money, but he says he’s got it “this time.” (Does that mean there’ll be a “next time”?) I order a milk shake and some fries.

  “Y’all left the game early?” the scrawny, redheaded cashier asks as she hands us our food. She looks like she graduated from East Rockport twenty years ago and has been working at the Jack ever since. Her name tag reads SHAWNA.

  “We never went,” Seth answers.

  “Well, you’re missing something terrible,” Shawna replies. “I’ve been listening on the radio and they’re down 35–7 at the half.”

  “Damn,” I reply, my small-town instincts kicking in, ready to express dismay anytime the home team loses. “That’s a serious beating.”

  “I have faith they’ll come back,” Shawna says with a disapproving frown. “Go, Pirates.”

  “Go, Pirates,” Seth answers, holding his Coke up in a salute.

  Seth parks the car in the Jack in the Box parking lot and between slurps of his drink and bites of food, he asks, “Is football this big every year or just, like, this year?”

  I snort into my milk shake. “You are new,” I say. “The answer is every year. Every fucking year.”

  “You know, I played back home,” he tells me.

  I whip around, my eyes wide. “Now you’re shitting me,” I say. He might as well have told me he was studying to join the priesthood.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not shitting you. I mean, I was the kicker. I’m too skinny for any other position. But I was the kicker on the junior varsity
team, and I was going to go out for varsity this year until we had to move.”

  I slap the dashboard to emphasize my shock. “You were a football player? And you listen to Black Flag?”

  Seth’s smile cracks his face wide. “Yes! I’m not making this up. I can show you pictures when I’m done eating.”

  I try to visualize Seth in those weird short pants and huge shoulder pads football players wear and my mind goes blank. I never thought I’d have a crush on a football player. For a split second I feel a little like my mom on a date with Republican John. If this is even a date, I remind myself.

  “I’m sorry, I guess it’s just that … I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but here … here the football players are … like…”

  “Total assholes?” Seth offers, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, I’ve noticed. But just because a guy plays football doesn’t make him an asshole. Unless, you know, you think I’m an asshole, and you’re just hanging out with me because you feel sorry for the sad new kid at school.”

  I glance down at my milk shake. “You’re not an asshole,” I murmur, then take a loud slurp. You’re just a hilarious and totally good-looking guy who listens to cool bands and likes my zine, and that basically makes you the boy of my dreams, but you know, whatever.

  “That’s good,” Seth says, grinning. “That I’m not an asshole. Back home football was a sport people were into and everything, but it wasn’t the only thing people cared about, so players were more chill, I guess.”

  “Well, people aren’t chill about football here,” I answer. “Those players are the reason this town and this school exist. I mean, they’re what people get excited about around here. They’re what makes East Rockport worth living in for some people. The chance that this year we’ll make it to the playoffs, you know? The hope. You watch. Starting next week the talk will already be about the next season and how that will be the year we take state.”