Moxie

by Jennifer Mathieu

“Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” Kiera says back. She peeks over her shoulder and then in a hushed voice says, “Even though nothing bad happened after that last newsletter came out, we have to keep this quiet at school. To be safe.” She presses a piece of paper into my hand. I feel like a spy in an old movie.

  I look down and unfold the paper.

  I look up, smiling.

  “You came up with this?”

  Kiera grins. “Yeah, me and Amaya. After you and I talked … and after that last issue of Moxie, I got to thinking that I really wanted to make something happen. I know we have to be careful. But it just seems … worth it.”

  “This is so cool,” I say, and I realize I’m smiling so hard that my cheeks are aching a little. “How’d you get the hall?”

  “My grandfather is a Vietnam vet,” Kiera says. “I told him it was a girls’ club to talk about how to support the football team.” She smirks.

  “You didn’t!”

  “I really did.” At this she laughs out loud, and I do, too. I flash back to those elementary school days, to when Kiera and I would try to make our own Diary of a Wimpy Kid books together. We even had sleepovers at her house a few times when my mom had an overnight shift. Standing here, talking to her in the hallway, it seems crazy that we didn’t stay friends.

  “You know what?” Kiera says. “I broke up with Marcus.”

  My eyes open wider. Kiera had been dating Marcus Tucker—the center for the East Rockport Pirates—since the beginning of high school. They were a Serious Couple.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be,” says Kiera. “I didn’t like how he was treating me. Acting like he was God’s gift just because he played football. Him getting excited about me being on March Madness was enough to make me realize I was done.”

  I nod. “Good for you, then.”

  “Yeah,” Kiera says. “It hasn’t been easy, exactly, but I just decided to throw everything into organizing this”—she motions to the flyer—“and that’s helped.”

  “You need me to do anything?” I ask.

  “Just spread the word to any girls you think would be cool with it,” she tells me.

  I grin. “That I can do. This will be the perfect way to cleanse ourselves from March Madness.”

  Kiera rolls her eyes. “You see Emma Johnson won?”

  “I’ve actually been trying to ignore all that shit, but yeah, I saw. I’m not surprised they picked her.”

  “Me neither,” says Kiera. “Okay, I got to get to Spanish. But see you Saturday?”

  “Yes,” I say, my heart fluttering with excitement at the thought of it. “See you Saturday.”

  I think about Emma Johnson winning Most Fuckable Girl when I see her in English, sitting at her desk taking notes as Mr. Davies speaks. I think about inviting her to Kiera’s thing and it’s like thinking about inviting a debutante to a drunken tailgate. Emma hangs with the elite, with the coolest football players and the most popular cheer squad girls. And she was the one who spoke out against Moxie at the assembly.

  The reasons for not inviting Emma are good. But a passage from one of the Bikini Kill album liner notes about all girls being soldiers in their own way, even the girls with the big hair who go out with jocks, sticks in my mind. I unfold Kiera’s flyer again and see the words ALL GIRLS WELCOME. As the bell rings, I think about tapping Emma on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, I know we never talk and you barely know I exist, but I was wondering if you wanted to come to this thing for girls who are pissed about all this shit at East Rockport High that actually seems to work to your advantage?”

  But I don’t say anything. I just catch the flip of her honey-blond hair as she makes her way out of class.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I pull open the heavy door of the VFW hall and am immediately overtaken by the scent of stale cigarette smoke.

  “Phew, it smells like our den before my dad quit,” says Claudia, wrinkling her nose.

  Lucy, Sara, Kaitlyn, and Meg are with us, too. We all blink as our eyes adjust to the semi-darkness of the wood-paneled room that hasn’t been renovated since the 1970s at least. Old Lone Star and Shiner Bock beer signs hang in the corner by an empty bar.

  “Hey,” says Amaya, walking toward us. I look around. There are about twenty girls here. My heart sinks a bit. That’s a really small number of girls considering the size of East Rockport. But I remind myself that it’s still early.

  “Five dollars,” Amaya says, opening a shoe box. We all pull out our crumpled bills, and Amaya thanks us for coming and tells us we can put the baked goods we brought with us on the bake sale table.

  Most of the girls here are on the soccer team. Music thumps, and my friends and I clump together as we awkwardly walk the perimeter of the hall.

  “Hey, there you are,” Kiera says, coming up. She’s dressed in dark jeans and a bright pink top. She’s wearing pink lipstick to match. “Glad you made it.”

  “This is cool,” says Lucy, even though nothing is really happening. I know she wants Kiera to like her. To be glad she’s here.

  “Thanks,” says Kiera. She looks at her phone. “I’m hoping a few more girls come. I just heard from my friends Maci and Charity that they’re on their way.”

  “Cool,” I say, nodding.

  Kiera smiles and heads off, and my friends and I walk around, clutching our paper plates full of lemon bars and chocolate chip cookies.

  Around the room, girls have different stuff for sale, their wares spread out on card tables. Marisela Perez has dozens of tiny charm bracelets she’s made by hand, each for sale for five dollars. They’re delicate things, with tiny colored plastic beads lining them like gum drops.

  “These are pretty,” says Claudia, reaching out to touch one.

  “Thanks,” says Marisela, picking up one of her creations. “I just make them for fun and sell them to my cousins. This is the first time I’m trying to, you know, sell them to other people. But it helps me, too, since I’m on the soccer team.”

  “I’ll buy one before the night is over,” Claudia says, and Marisela grins.

  After we drop off our bars and cookies at the bake sale table, we keep exploring. We see jewelry, magnets, and stickers for sale. My heart wants to burst when I see a bunch of the Moxie zines—all the way back to the first one—laid out on a table in careful rows, free for the taking. I guess that Kiera made copies of existing zines because the images are a little blurrier and softer than in the copies I made.

  I recognize Kiera’s table immediately. It’s full of her drawings—a row of leafless trees in winter, stretching out to the horizon. Two hands clutching each other, their fingers laced together. A single eyeball, staring steadily back. Her sketches are all black and white and really remarkable. She’s come a long way since our Diary of a Wimpy Kid days.

  “This is … so cool,” says Lucy, barely able to contain herself. “It’s reminding me of my old GRIT club in Houston.” Claudia and the other girls seems a little less certain, but we decide to walk the perimeter in our awkward clump again—Claudia wants to get one of Marisela’s bracelets—and by the time we’ve made it around, a few more girls have spilled in. They look like underclassmen, uncertain and nervous. I lift a hand and smile hello, and they smile back.

  The door keeps opening and more girls keep coming in, enough that we have to start shouting over the music. It starts to grow stuffy and hot, and Kiera and Amaya open the windows because the air conditioner isn’t working so well, but our thin sheens of sweat start to make us all glow a bit. My friends and I decide to go for some lemonade.

  “Do you want regular or … fortified?” the girl behind the table says, eyeing us.

  “Fortified?” Claudia asks loudly, and the girl shoots her a look. I recognize her as one of the soccer players. I think her name is Jane.

  Lucy nudges Claudia with an elbow and all of us notice a paper bag on the floor with a slim bottle in it.

  “Vodka,” Jane whispers. She winks.
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br />   “Fortified, please,” Lucy says without hesitation as she forks over her money, and soon we are clutching plastic cups of special lemonade. It’s not long before Claudia starts bopping around to the beat of the music, a sly smile spreading over her face.

  “Claudia is way fortified,” she says to us, and we laugh. At this point the room is close to full, girls from almost every group at East Rockport High moving around and in between each other, handing over babysitting dollars and Sonic carhop dollars and weekly allowance dollars to buy Marisela’s bracelets and Kiera’s drawings and stickers someone made that read BOSS BITCH.

  We yell hey and hi and ohmygod at each other, and we hug and we kiss on the cheek and we catch up with each other, for once ignoring the unspoken dividing lines of race and class and grade and popularity that we’ve always lived by. Some girls are dancing in the corners, moving their bodies with the freedom that comes when no boy is watching you. It feels buzzy and dizzy and sweaty and so, so, so joyful. I think this is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like a Riot Grrrl, like my mom from way back when, but this is even better because it’s my own thing. It’s our own thing. The girls of East Rockport High. It’s Moxie, and it feels so real and alive and right now.

  An hour or so into it, Kiera makes her way to a tiny stage at the back of the room, and she grabs a microphone and taps it.

  “Uh, can I get your attention, please,” she asks. A lazy smile slips across her face and I’m pretty sure she’s had a fortified lemonade or two. I take a sip from my second one. My lips feel semi-numb.

  The room quiets down and we all turn to face Kiera. When she has our attention, she leans into the microphone.

  “Uh, first of all…,” she starts, taking a more than dramatic pause, “Moxie girls fight back!” To my delight and surprise, the girls around me cheer and scream and a few hold up their red Solo cups. Kiera keeps going. “This is a kick-ass lady event, and we’ve raised a ton of money for the girls’ soccer team, enough that we can buy uniforms from this century, I think. So thanks for coming. That’s it. Turn up the music.”

  Everyone cheers again, and soon we’re dancing, our bodies moving, one big mass of girls having fun. As I watch Lucy spin and knock her dark curls around, and as I listen to Claudia laugh and sing along (badly), it occurs to me that this is what it means to be a feminist. Not a humanist or an equalist or whatever. But a feminist. It’s not a bad word. After today it might be my favorite word. Because really all it is is girls supporting each other and wanting to be treated like human beings in a world that’s always finding ways to tell them they’re not.

  After another hour or so, it’s starting to grow dark outside, and Kiera makes another announcement into the microphone that they have to lock up the hall. Girls boo until Kiera promises to organize another Moxie meet up later, which gains more cheers. She reminds girls to walk home if they’ve had too much “grown-up lemonade” and to walk in groups.

  “I’m okay to drive,” says Sara. “I didn’t drink.”

  Kaitlyn and Meg go with her, but Claudia and I agree to walk home with Lucy, who doesn’t live too far from the hall and who walked to get here.

  “Maybe we should try to help clean up a little bit first?” Claudia asks, pointing at Kiera and Amaya and a few other girls folding up card tables and dumping cups into big black trash bags.

  “Yeah, that would be nice,” Lucy agrees. As she and Claudia busy themselves, I offer to lug some of the garbage bags to the Dumpster.

  When I push the back door open, the hot, sticky night air surrounds me like a too-tight hug. There’s a scraping sound as I shove the door open over the gravel parking lot.

  “Oh, hey,” a female voice calls out from nearby. I look up and blink my eyes, trying to adjust to the darkness, and spot Marisela and Jane pulling apart from what I can only guess was something more than just a friendly hug. Jane tugs down her T-shirt. Marisela coughs. I’ve stumbled onto a secret, and if it weren’t so dark, Marisela and Jane would be able to see just how much I’m blushing.

  “I was just trying to throw these out,” I say, pointing weakly at the bags by my feet. “I’m sorry I interrupted y’all.” I hope my voice reads it’s cool. There are two boys who are out at East Rockport, both of them seniors and both of them involved in the theater department. They hang out together and even though I don’t think they’re together together, everyone assumes they are, and they’re the regular butt of stupid jokes and promises that they’ll be prayed for. I can only imagine that they each have a calendar counting down the days before they can leave this place.

  But I don’t know of a single girl who’s come out in all my time at East Rockport High. I mean, there have been rumors, obviously. But that’s all they’ve been. Rumors.

  “You won’t tell anyone, right?” Marisela says, leaving the thing I’m not supposed to tell unspoken but obvious. I shake my head no and say, for emphasis, “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” And I know that I won’t. Not even Lucy or Claudia. Because in a town like East Rockport, what Marisela and Jane have going on is the sort of thing you can’t risk too many people knowing about.

  “Thanks,” says Jane. She crosses her arms in front of her, avoids eye contact, and my heart cracks a little for her, and for Marisela, too.

  “Here, let me help you,” says Marisela, and she grabs one of the garbage bags, and we haul them into the big blue Dumpster behind the hall.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well, I’m heading back in.”

  “’Kay,” says Marisela. Then, after a beat, she says, “Tonight was fun. I think this is the best night I’ve had in maybe my entire life.” Her voice is soft and slow, like she’s had her fair share of lemonade. When Marisela says this, Jane looks right at her and smiles so big you can see her gums.

  “It was a pretty cool night,” I say, grinning back.

  By the time Claudia and I walk Lucy home, we are yawning and dragging our feet on the sidewalk. It feels later than it is.

  “You can spend the night if you want, or I can drive you home,” Lucy offers. “I only had one cup of that lemonade, and that was hours ago.” We take Lucy up on her offer of a lift since our parents are waiting up, and we don’t have any of the stuff we need for a sleepover. I text my mom that I’m on my way. By the time Lucy drops me off, Claudia is half-asleep in the backseat.

  “’Night, Claud,” I murmur over my shoulder.

  “Hmmph.”

  “I’m so glad Kiera put that together,” Lucy says. “If it wouldn’t scare your mom and your grandparents, I’d honk my horn out of happiness.”

  I reach over and honk Lucy’s car horn twice—toot toot.

  “What the hell?” says Claudia, sitting up suddenly, blinking and rubbing her eyes. Lucy laughs, and I do, too.

  “Moxie!” I yell, getting out of the car.

  “Moxie!” Lucy yells back. She toots the horn one more time before pulling out of the driveway.

  My mom greets me at the front door.

  “Viv, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  I smile at her and pull her in for a sweaty hug. “Sorry, we were just being stupid.”

  “You stink!”

  “Thanks a lot,” I say, opening the refrigerator to hunt down something cold to drink. I pour myself some orange juice.

  “So how was it?” she asks. I’d told my mom I was going to a girls-only fund-raiser for the soccer team, but I’d been vague on the details.

  “Mom, it was so fun,” I tell her, “but I’m so tired.” I want to get to bed while my memories of the night are still fresh so I can fall asleep replaying them in my head.

  “Did a lot of girls show up?” my mom asks, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching as I down the entire glass of juice in a few gulps. I hadn’t realized how hot and thirsty I was.

  “Yeah,” I say, setting the glass in the sink. “Lots.”

  “That’s great,” my mom answers. “I love that the girls wanted to do that. Who organized it, exactly?”

  My h
ead is starting to ache a little bit. Maybe from the lemonade. I rub my temples and close my eyes.

  “It was just the girls on the soccer team and some other girls,” I say, edging my way down the hall.

  “I ran into Claudia’s mom, and she said it was some group called Moxie? She saw Claudia’s flyer for it?”

  I pause at my bedroom door, my back to my mom. “Oh, yeah,” I say, surprised Claudia didn’t keep the flyer better hidden. My heart starts racing. Should I tell my mom about Moxie? She would probably think it’s cool, and even have good advice for me about how to keep it going.

  But it suddenly hits me that Moxie isn’t all about me. And it’s certainly not about my mom. It belongs to all the girls at East Rockport High School. The heartbeat of the VFW hall is ours and ours alone.

  “Are you involved in it?” my mom says, not giving up. “Moxie, I mean. It’s a cool name.”

  “Well, I went to this thing tonight, so yeah, sort of,” I say, stripping off my sweaty clothes and searching for my pajamas. “Mom, I’m going to bed, okay? I’m just so sleepy. There was dancing and stuff, and I’m all achy. Can we talk more tomorrow?” I finally work up the guts to turn around and face her.

  “Sure, yeah, let’s talk tomorrow,” she says, but her eyes look a little sad, her voice sounds just the tiniest bit wistful. “It just seems like you had fun. You look like you had fun, you know?”

  “I did have fun, Mom, I promise,” I tell her, giving her a kiss on the cheek. After she leaves, I check my phone as I collapse into bed. There are a few messages from Seth. The last one reads, How was it? Fun I hope.

  I tap out one quick answer.

  sooooooo fun thanks for asking more tomorrow I’m sleepy! xo

  Then I toss the phone on the floor, and as I slide into sleep, my mind is full of images of girls dancing together and smiling and holding hands, taking up all the space they want.

  * * *

  The meet up at the VFW hall changes the energy at school—and in a good way. Girls who normally don’t have much to do with each other say hi in the hallways, smiling at each other when they pass. I mean, it’s still the same in a lot of ways—I hear guys arguing about whether Emma Johnson deserved to win March Madness even though she’s still a junior, and Mitchell and his friends still tell girls to make them sandwiches and try to bump ’n’ grab—but still, there’s something about those first few days after Kiera’s event that feel different. Like we’re all just a little bit more aware. Awake.