I tuck some hair behind my ear, suddenly feeling bold.
“So you’ve never, like, done it?”
“No,” he says. His voice drops to almost a whisper. “You?”
“No!” I say, incredulous. “I told you I’ve never even gone out with anyone before.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, squeezing my hand again and laughing a little. “I was just wondering.”
I rub my thumb over one of Seth’s knuckles. I breathe in the minty, yummy smell of him.
“I think if you like someone a lot, like, a lot, and you really care about them, and you’ve been together for a while, it’s okay, though,” I whisper, my body humming. It’s what I’ve always believed to be true. Even before I met Seth.
“Yeah,” Seth says. “Me, too.” Bubbles are exploding under my skin and my cheeks are warm and I’m a little dizzy. I lean into Seth and we kiss and somehow it’s like a new kind of kissing. Kissing full of even more possibility, which is both scary and exciting.
Eventually I have to be getting home, so after one final kiss we pry ourselves apart and head back to his car. As Seth drives toward my house he says, “Valentine’s Day is coming up.”
“Okay,” I tell him, shooting him a look, “but I’m not having sex with you next week.”
Seth bursts out laughing. “I know! I was just pointing it out. Like that this thing, this societally approved day of romance, is occurring next week.”
“Yeah, Wednesday. Please don’t buy me a stuffed teddy bear from the Walgreens.”
“What?” Seth says, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, have we just met? Hi, I’m Seth.”
“The couples at East Rockport get really into Valentine’s Day in this super-cheesy way,” I say. “Lots of teddy bears that say I Wuv U on the tummies. Lots of cheap chocolate and grocery-store roses.”
“I could never do that to a Moxie girl,” Seth says, pulling into my neighborhood.
“Ugh, don’t say that, it makes me depressed.” I frown at my reflection in the passenger window.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to,” Seth offers.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I just wish things were different.” The heady, awesome day that the girls tagged the school with Moxie stickers seems like a million years ago. Since Principal Wilson’s threats at assembly and Lucy getting into trouble, things have gone back to East Rockport’s version of normal. Mitchell and his friends still ask girls to make them a sandwich. There was a brief but vicious streak of dress code checks at the end of January. We haven’t even tried to have another bake sale for the girls’ soccer team because doing it under a different name just isn’t as exciting.
“It’s cool you tried, but it’s hard to believe anything will ever permanently change that school,” Seth says, his headlights illuminating my street. “At least you know you have one more year and then you’re out of there.”
I frown, a little irritated. “Maybe, but it’s not like there aren’t going to be girls left behind after I leave. I didn’t do Moxie for me. I did it for girls.” I shake my head a little. “Forget it, that sounds like I have some huge crazy ego or something.”
“No, I get it,” Seth says, pulling into my driveway. I look up and see the lights are on. My mom’s home.
“I don’t know if you could really get it,” I say, sighing. “Not until someone plays the bump ’n’ grab game with you.”
“You can always play the bump ’n’ grab game with me, if that helps,” Seth says, and the tiny part of me that wishes he wouldn’t make a joke of it disappears as soon as we press our lips together.
“See you later,” he says with a grin, and I melt for the millionth time that night.
When I get inside, my mom is curled up on the couch, watching television.
“How was dinner?” she asks.
“Okay. Seth’s parents are these artists from Austin and they’re a little … I guess you could say intense.”
“Oh man, I know the artist-from-Austin type,” my mom says.
“I’m gonna get some ice cream,” I tell her. “You want some?”
“Sure, I’d love it.” She seems pleased. Maybe because we haven’t hung out like this in a while.
As I scoop out two bowls of chocolate and join her on the couch, I tell my mom about Zoe and Alejandro and even do an impression of Zoe, including her bad Spanish accent. My mother laughs hard.
“Don’t laugh,” I tell her. “They want both of us to join them for dinner one night.” My mother rolls her eyes but she keeps on laughing, and I’m glad. It’s been too long since we laughed together, talked over our days together, cuddled on the couch together. I wonder if John makes her laugh as much as I do sometimes. I hope he does.
We each take a few mouthfuls and then my mom says, “So it seems like you and Seth are getting kind of … do people your age say ‘getting serious’ anymore?”
“Mom, please.”
“I’m just saying you’re spending a lot of time together. I want to make sure you don’t have any questions.”
I think about Seth’s mother gift wrapping condoms and leaving them on his dinner plate. My cheeks redden just a bit.
“Mom, I promise you, if I have any questions, I will ask them. But no, it’s fine.”
“Fine?”
I give her a pointed look. “I really like him. A lot.”
My mom swallows a spoonful of ice cream and smiles. “Just asking. Don’t attack me.”
I decide I need to change the subject.
“Where’s John? I thought you’d be going out.”
“He had the late shift. I might meet him for breakfast tomorrow. Wanna come?”
I shrug. “Maybe. You want me to?”
“It would be nice.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”
My mom puts her ice-cream bowl down on the coffee table and leans in closer. Her long hair tickles my cheek.
“Thank you. I know you’re not a fan of John,” she says, her voice soft. A little sad.
“No, it’s not that, Mom…,” I begin. I think about Seth’s mom and how she makes her life all about her, and about my mom and how she makes so much of her life about me. I slide my own bowl of ice cream next to my mother’s and nuzzle under her arm. “Mom, do you ever regret getting stuck here in East Rockport because of me?” It’s easier to ask this since I’m not looking her directly in the eyes.
“No, of course not,” my mother answers. “I got away for a bit. I saw the world. I had lots of fun.” I think about the MY MISSPENT YOUTH box.
“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if my dad hadn’t died?” I ask.
There’s a pause, and I can feel my mother’s chest slowly rise and fall. “Of course,” she says, and her voice cracks just the tiniest bit. “But in this life you have to deal with what happens. You have to take what comes at you. And coming back here … I was able to finish school. I made my peace with Meemaw and Grandpa. They got to see their granddaughter grow up. Those are good things.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s true.”
“I know John isn’t who you expected me to end up with—if you even imagined me ending up with anyone at all,” my mother says, reaching over and running her gentle fingers through my hair. “Truth be told, when I was your age, I wouldn’t have expected me to end up with him either. But I really like him, Viv. I really enjoy being with him.”
I peer up at my mom, so she can see my eyes. I want her to know I mean it when I say, “I’m glad, Mom. I’m really glad. You deserve someone nice.”
My mom’s smile cracks her face wide open, and she kisses me on the forehead.
“You’re my best thing,” she says. It’s one of the things she likes to say to me. When I was little, she always said it when she was tickling me or braiding my hair or swinging me around in her arms.
“I love you, Mom,” I answer, snuggling up a bit closer.
“I love you, too, my sweet peanut.”
“You haven’t called me that in ages.”
>
“I know. It’s a little girl’s nickname. And you’re not really my little girl anymore.”
“Oh, come on, Mom,” I say, “don’t be cheesy.” But something about it makes me feel warm all over, like when I was tiny and my mom would wrap me in a fuzzy towel after my bath and snuggle with me.
“Aw, you never let me be cheesy,” she says.
“Fine, okay,” I say. “But just for tonight.”
“All right,” she says. “Whatever you say, sweet peanut.”
And we cuddle together for a while, not even needing to talk.
* * *
On Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, I show up at school and see girls carrying bags of cheap red-and-pink candy to hand out to their friends, and boys holding Walgreens teddy bears and sad, already-fading carnations. I know it’s a stupid, manufactured holiday, but I can’t help wondering if Seth is going to do anything for it. In my backpack is a book of Shirley Jackson short stories since we’d talked about “The Lottery” that one time in class, and Seth had seemed to like the story. I confess I feel pretty cool giving Seth a book of short stories by a horror writer for Valentine’s Day. It’s so not East Rockport.
But I can’t find Seth all morning. There’s nothing on or in my locker. I do get a text from him that reads Happy Walgreens Teddy Bear Day followed by a bunch of red heart emojis, and I wonder if Seth is just too cool for Valentine’s Day. Not even Shirley Jackson cool, but a completely different level of cool where the holiday just doesn’t exist.
My heart sinks a little with disappointment. And this makes me feel stupid.
But then it’s time for English. I walk in, and my stomach twists with nerves because I know I’m about to see him. Around me a few girls clutch their drugstore prizes of teenage love. A few of them are comparing gifts.
Then, as the bell rings, Seth walks in wearing a black hoodie over a black T-shirt. He slides into his seat and looks over at me, smiling.
He is so cute I really can’t breathe sometimes.
With a shrug of his shoulders he takes off his hoodie, letting it fall onto his desk chair. His T-shirt underneath is sleeveless and there, in black Sharpie marker on his left arm, is a carefully drawn heart, big enough for me to spot it clearly from my seat on the other side of the room.
And inside the heart—in coal-back, painstakingly drawn letters—reads the word VIVIAN.
Among the whispers of the rest of the class, Lucy turns to me and says, “Oh my God,” but I can’t see what her face looks like because I am staring into Seth’s dark, laughing eyes and I am grinning at him so hard and I am certain that I’m the first person on Earth to ever feel this awake and alive.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It’s Claudia’s idea to have a slumber party and invite everyone, including Lucy. She tells me about it as we walk home from school one early March morning, just the tiniest hint of Texas humidity in the air, a signal of what’s to come.
“It can be like when we were younger, in middle school. We can watch a bunch of scary movies, make sundaes.” She smiles at me.
“Look at you, Miss Nostalgia,” I say, smiling back.
“I just thought it would be fun,” Claudia answers. “Unless you’re too busy with your man.”
“No, not too busy,” I answer, blushing, but just a little. It’s getting easier for me to talk about Seth with my friends. Since his public display of Sharpie affection on Valentine’s Day, we are definitely an item at East Rockport High. And the highs I’m getting from our relationship (making out, hanging out, making out, hanging out) are enough to dull the mix of anger and sadness I feel when I think about how Principal Wilson managed to stomp out Moxie in one threat-filled assembly.
So the first Friday in March finds Lucy, Sara, Meg, Kaitlyn, and me huddled in Claudia’s bedroom, listening to music and eating chocolatey, salty snacks while Lucy puts temporary tattoos on our hands and all of us discuss the latest gossip.
“You know, this is way fun,” Meg says, peering at her temporary tattoo of Wonder Woman. “It’s been forever since we did something like this.”
“It reminds me of that slumber party scene in the movie Grease,” says Kaitlyn. “Let’s do mud masks.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Lucy mutters, and we all laugh. Claudia laughs the loudest. For a moment we are this perfect bubble of girl happiness and nothing can mess with it.
Until Sara stops scrolling through her phone and says, quite plainly, “Oh, shit. March Madness.”
March Madness. How could I forget?
“Let me see,” says Kaitlyn, scooting over to peer at Sara’s screen.
“What is March Madness?” Lucy asks, frowning. “You mean like the college basketball thing?”
“No, not like the college basketball thing,” Sara says with a sigh.
And so, sitting in a loose circle, we take turns filling Lucy in. March Madness at East Rockport is, in fact, inspired by the college basketball championship because it involves brackets and competition, but that’s the only similarity. It’s so gross that I half expect Lucy to break a window or scream in rage. But she just sits there as we tell her about this charming East Rockport High tradition.
Tradition implies something of value being repeated, I guess, but East Rockport High’s March Madness is empty of anything resembling values—not any decent ones, anyway. It’s a system of brackets with sixty-four junior and senior girls, about a quarter of the girls in each class. The rest aren’t included because they’re not deemed ballot-worthy. The brackets are created by the upperclassmen guys who rule the school—the jocks and the popular guys. The Mitchell Wilsons of our world. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they use some complicated system of voting and personal testimony to pit girls against each other as the brackets lead to one girl in the junior or senior class. The final girl is referred to—casually and frequently—as East Rockport’s Most Fuckable.
And the boys share everything online. Every bracket update and every girl’s name.
Lucy eyes Sara’s phone. I expect her to start raging as only Lucy can, but she just shrugs her shoulders.
“What can you expect from this place?” she says. “I need more Doritos.” She crawls away from Sara’s phone and digs her hand into a blue Tupperware bowl full of chips. There’s something about the defeated way she says it that makes me feel half like crying and half like raging myself.
“Claudia, look, you’re on it!” Sara gasps, using her fingers to enlarge the picture.
“What?” Claudia asks, but we all can see it’s true. Claudia’s made the first bracket. The only one of all of us who has. She blushes, and I wonder if she’s thinking about Mitchell in the hallway before Christmas break. I wonder how much that gross incident affected her placement.
“Remember when we were freshmen?” Meg asks. “We wanted to be on it. And we were jealous of the older girls who were.”
“Yeah,” says Claudia, like she’s trying to recall it.
“And now?” I ask, eyeing Claudia carefully.
Claudia just shrugs. “It’s gross. But I’m not going to lie. Now it’s like I’m tempted to check it. To see if I’m advancing or not.”
“That’s fucked up,” Lucy says from over by the Doritos. I tense up, but Claudia just looks at her and nods.
“Yeah, it is,” she says.
“We could make a pact,” I say. “That we’re not going to look at it again?”
Kaitlyn shakes her head. “That’s only going to work if we all agree to bury our phones in Claudia’s backyard and stay off the Internet for the next month. You can’t escape it.” I know Kaitlyn’s right, so I don’t respond. The only sound is Lucy chomping on her Doritos.
“Hey,” says Claudia, finally breaking the silence. “I think my mom has an old bottle of red wine hidden in the kitchen that she’s forgotten about. Everyone’s asleep. Do you want to see if we can find it?”
“Yes, please,” says Lucy. “Red wine goes well with fake cheese, or so I hear.”
&nbs
p; In no time we are sipping wine out of flowered juice glasses and laughing at our red-stained lips and teeth, and everything’s okay again, but the truth is that the March Madness brackets never leave my mind, not really. The picture on Sara’s phone has burrowed its way into my brain, and the idea of the girls of East Rockport being measured and ranked and compared on nothing more than their asses and breasts and faces makes it difficult to fall asleep, even after all the other girls—including Lucy—are sleeping peacefully around me, their light snores punctuating the quiet.
* * *
Later that week as I’m walking toward school, shuffling formulas I need to know for an upcoming math quiz through my mind, I spot Kiera Daniels sitting on the stoop of the school’s side entrance, fooling around with her phone. It’s still pretty early, and there aren’t many other students around. The sky is overcast, and it’s chilly, too.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she answers, peering up at me. “What’s up?”
I shrug. “Not much. What about you?”
Kiera shakes her head. “Just looking at this March Madness thing.”
I exhale. “Yeah.”
“I’m on it,” Kiera says flatly, holding the phone out toward me as if I need proof.
I think maybe it’s okay for me to sit down next to her, so I do, the cold cement of the stoop seeping through my jeans.
“Should I say … congrats?” I ask, uncertain. But Kiera just scowls.
“It’s stupid,” she announces. “It’s totally fucked on multiple levels.”
“I know,” I say, glad to be able to talk about it. “But it’s just this … this thing that happens. And nobody questions it.”
Kiera doesn’t answer. Just bites her bottom lip and stares at her phone again before clicking it off and tossing it into her backpack.
“You know what’s so infuriating to me?” Kiera says. “My boyfriend actually thinks it’s cool I got picked. Like it makes him cooler, which is just gross. And what’s also gross is it’s always a white girl who wins, anyway. And all the girls who aren’t white get pissed about it and it’s like, wait, isn’t it screwed up that anyone wins this bullshit in the first place?”
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