We don’t back down.
As all of us gather on the front steps of the school, I lean into Emma.
“Do you want to say something?” I offer. “About why we’re here?”
“Yeah,” she says, and I see a bit of that vice principal of the student council in her starting to come out. She’s composing herself, taking deep breaths. “But will you stand with me?”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
Girls watch as Emma and I take the top step. They gather in a tight knot around us.
“Hey, listen up!” I shout. “Emma’s got something to say!”
That’s when I see him. Seth. Off to the side by the front of the campus, apart from us girls. He’s standing there with a handful of other boys—some of the guys he sometimes eats lunch with. When he sees me looking at him, he nods. Then he gives me a thumbs-up, which is the corniest thing he’s ever done. I smile in return, then turn my attention back to Emma.
Emma looks out at the sea of girls in front of her and when she tries to speak, her voice cracks. I place my hand on her shoulder, and she looks at me, her eyes grateful.
“First I want to say thanks for coming out here,” she begins. “And I want to say that I didn’t want it to come to this. When Mitchell Wilson tried to assault me at a party last weekend…” Her voice breaks again. Then, from the back, I hear a girl shout, “We believe you!”
Emma squeezes her eyes shut, collects herself, then continues.
“I was able to get away. But then later when I tried to tell Principal Wilson, he wouldn’t listen. He told me that I’d imagined it! That it was nothing and to forget it. Well, I won’t forget it! And I don’t want the school to forget it either!”
Girls shout their approval at Emma’s words. They holler and clap and yell. I spy Claudia in the crowd, and her eyes are red from crying. My heart feels like it’s going to explode.
Suddenly we hear shouts behind us, and we turn to see Principal Wilson and Mr. Shelly and all the other administrators heading toward us like a snarling pack. Mr. Shelly has a clipboard, and he’s trying to write and walk at the same time. His jowls are shaking and his face is sweaty and red.
Principal Wilson has a fucking bullhorn in his hands.
“Girls, I order you to form a straight line so your names can be collected by Mr. Shelly,” he shouts into the bullhorn. “I am moving forward with suspensions for all of you as well as the process of expulsion.” He storms over to Emma and me.
“Emma,” he says, dropping the bullhorn to his side. “I told you this would be handled.”
“But you didn’t handle it, Principal Wilson,” Emma yells back, her hands balling up into fists. It’s jarring to see perfect Emma Johnson shout at authority like this.
And it’s pretty amazing, too.
I glance at the crowd of girls. Several of them are taking pictures with their phones.
“Am I to understand that you’re responsible for this Moxie group? Along with Lucy Hernandez?”
Emma frowns, confusion crossing her face.
“I planned this walkout, yes,” she says.
“And you were behind all the other Moxie activities?” Principal Wilson asks. “Along with Miss Hernandez?”
Emma shakes her head no, and I know it’s finally time. I turn and look Principal Wilson right in the eye, grateful for my height. I open my mouth and say as loudly as I can, “I started Moxie, Principal Wilson. I made the zines and the stickers, and I put them in the bathrooms. It was me.”
Emma’s eyes grow wide, and I hear a ripple of talk spread out among the crowd of girls. I know I’ve just doomed myself to never graduating from high school, but in that moment it’s all so worth it I wish I could say those words again for the first time.
“Wait,” says another voice, and my head turns to see Kiera moving up to the top of the steps. “Viv wasn’t the only girl behind Moxie. I helped organize it, too.”
Principal Wilson peers down at Kiera like he’s looking at a bug or smelling a fart. Kiera stares at him, unmoved.
“Kiera and Viv weren’t the only ones,” comes another voice from the crowd. I can tell without looking it’s Marisela. “I helped start Moxie.”
“Wait,” says another girl. “They aren’t the only ones. I helped, too.” It’s that freshman girl. The one who said Principal Wilson couldn’t punish all of us.
“I helped, too!” shouts another voice from deeper in the crowd.
It’s Claudia.
“Me, too!” yells another. And another. And one more and then another until each admission of guilt—each admission of proud ownership—trips over the next, and Principal Wilson is starting to lose his cool. He huffs loudly, snapping his gaze toward Mr. Shelly.
“Are you getting these names down?” he barks, and Mr. Shelly nods as he scribbles furiously on his clipboard.
“Look, Principal Wilson,” Emma says, raising her voice, “you don’t get it. We won’t be quiet anymore!” It’s then that I remember she’s the head of the cheerleading squad and the perfect person for this moment. She turns to face the crowd and cups her hands to her mouth.
“We are Moxie!” she shouts, her voice deep and rich. “We are Moxie!”
In an instant we are following along, clapping our hands 1-2-3.
“We are Moxie! We are Moxie!”
My palms are slick with sweat from the April sunshine and nerves and joy, but I clap and I shout, and I don’t care that the principal is steps away. And I know right now that if I live to be a hundred, I’ll always remember this.
I clap harder. I shout louder.
Principal Wilson grabs his bullhorn and starts shouting directions. We shout back, drowning him out. Our voices are so loud. So big. So much.
So beautiful.
Principal Wilson scoots over to the side to confer with Mr. Shelly and the other administrators. He points and gestures with his hands, desperate-seeming, and we keep shouting. We keep clapping. Finally, he grabs his bullhorn and yells at the top of his lungs.
“School is canceled for the remainder of the day. We will be moving forward with expulsion procedures for all of you. Exit the campus now!”
At this we erupt in a roar. It feels like a victory. We’ve won even if Principal Wilson is trying to get us to think we’ve lost. I turn and look at Emma Johnson, a girl I’ve hardly spoken to in almost three years of high school. A girl I always thought I had nothing in common with.
But really, she’s a girl from East Rockport. Just like me.
“Thank you, Vivian,” she says. And she reaches out to hug me. I hug her back, hard, and Principal Wilson’s desperate orders to disperse become background noise. Honestly, I can barely hear him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We scatter from campus as Principal Wilson barks over and over into his bullhorn that school is canceled. I lose sight of Emma in the crush of people. I lose sight of Seth, too. But Claudia grabs my hand and leads me to her Tercel. As soon as we shut the car doors, she turns to me, her car keys still in her hand.
“You made those issues of Moxie?” she asks, her eyes wide, like she’s seeing me for the first time even though she’s known me practically since birth.
“Yeah,” I say, the giddiness and chaos and shock of the afternoon still zipping through me.
“Wow,” she says, turning to stare out the front windshield, watching girls heading home, some of them still chanting about Moxie, still clapping their hands.
“Please don’t be mad I didn’t tell you,” I say, gripped with worry that Claudia won’t understand. “I didn’t tell anyone. Well, Seth knows. But only because he caught me putting the zines in bathrooms. And I did tell Lucy yesterday. But that’s only because I felt bad that she was taking so much of the blame for everything.”
Claudia turns her gaze back at me. I stop babbling. “Were you worried that I wouldn’t get it?” she asks. “Is that why you didn’t tell me?” I can’t tell if she’s hurt or curious.
“Maybe a little,” I
admit. “But also I thought the more people that knew about it, the riskier it was.”
Claudia nods. “I get it. And really, back when you put out that first issue … maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it. At all.”
“So you’re not mad?”
“No,” Claudia says, shaking her head. “Just … stunned. But also … sort of proud. No, not sort of. Really proud.” And she gives me the biggest, most glowing smile.
“Even though maybe I’ve just gotten us all suspended? And maybe expelled?”
Claudia rolls her eyes. “Did you see how many girls were out there today? More than half the girls in the school. Hundreds of us. I don’t care how good Mitchell can throw a football. His dumb daddy isn’t going to get to kick us all out of school.”
I burst out laughing. “Look at you and your tough talk,” I tease, but really I’m just so relieved. Relieved that the secret’s out, that Claudia understands, that she thinks we won’t get in trouble.
Claudia shrugs, full of false modesty. “Want to head to your house? You can help me figure out how to spin this to my parents.”
“Yeah, my mom’s at work. Let’s go.”
Not long after we’re camped out on my bed with sodas and our phones and Joan Jett curled up between us.
And that’s when we realize Lucy Hernandez has gone viral.
Using the girls’ pictures and videos from the walkout, Lucy has crafted a blog post not just about this afternoon but about everything that’s happened at East Rockport High School over the past year. Everything from the over-the-top expensive pep rallies to the bump ’n’ grab game to the crazy, arbitrary dress code checks. She tracks all of Moxie’s activities from the bathrobes to the stickers to the walkout. She even includes pictures of the zines I made. And then she shares the post on every social media outlet possible.
Not only that, she also sends it to all of these feminist blogs and websites she likes—blogs and websites run by cool girls in New York City and Los Angeles. Girls who seem like they exist in some other alternate universe that is nothing like East Rockport, Texas.
But they start to pick up Lucy’s story.
And they share and reblog and repost.
By dinnertime, Moxie isn’t an East Rockport phenomenon. It’s not even a Texas phenomenon. It’s spreading so fast it doesn’t feel real.
SMALL-TOWN TEXAS GIRLS STAND UP TO SEXIST PRINCIPAL [WITH VIDEO]
MOXIE GIRLS FIGHT BACK—AND TELL THEIR SEXIST PRINCIPAL WHERE TO SHOVE IT!
EAST ROCKPORT HIGH SCHOOL PUTS THE GRRRRRR INTO GRRRL POWER
“Damn,” says Claudia as she reads the latest headlines. By now we’ve eaten a frozen pizza and moved on to ice cream straight from the container.
“Claudia says ‘damn,’” I tell Lucy over the phone, taking a spoonful of chocolate. “And she’s smiling really big.”
“Tell her thanks,” Lucy says. “Can you believe this?”
“Given how this year has gone, I guess sort of yes and sort of no,” I say. “Are you still grounded?”
“Yeah,” says Lucy. “Thank God my parents didn’t take my phone away. It’s how I shared all of this.”
“What’s going to happen next?” Claudia asks out loud, scrolling through her phone.
“Claudia wants to know what’s going to happen next,” I ask Lucy.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “But I do hope all this attention means Principal Wilson and Mitchell don’t get away with what happened to Emma. Or to anyone else.”
“Lucy,” I say, smiling into my phone, “you’re a hero.”
“Oh, whatever,” she says. “You’re the one who started Moxie.”
“I started it, but we all did it,” I say.
“Okay, I admit it. I’m a hero,” she says. “But now I have to go help clean up the kitchen.”
“I can’t believe you’re sitting there in your room and your parents aren’t even aware that you’ve become a global phenomenon.”
“Maybe just an American one,” Lucy argues.
“No, some girls in England are talking about you,” I say.
“Oh, shut up,” she says. But I hear pride in her voice. And amazement. “I’ll see you later.”
“Can’t wait.”
After Lucy and I hang up, Claudia stops studying her phone and tosses it aside. She takes a few more mouthfuls of chocolate ice cream and asks, “So what is going to happen next? With Wilson, I mean. I don’t think he’s going to expel us, but do you think he’s going to pretend this never happened?”
“I don’t think he can,” I say, checking my phone. “Hey, look. It’s starting to get picked up by local news stations.” I catch a glimpse of Seth in one of the shots on a local news site, and I scroll through my texts, hoping for one from him. But there’s nothing.
Claudia and I venture into the den with Joan Jett following, and that’s where my mom finds us not much later, sitting on the couch and flipping through the local channels, listening to the big-haired news anchors talk about what they’re referring to as “a major protest” at East Rockport High.
“I just heard something about this on the radio,” my mom says, her eyes focusing on the television screen. “Vivvy,” she says, her mouth opening, her eyes widening. “Sweetheart, is that you on TV?”
* * *
Mom sets her phone down on the kitchen counter and rubs at her ear.
“Well, I think I finally convinced Meemaw and Grandpa that you’re not going to prison,” she says. Curled up in a corner on the couch, I eye my mom, who’s been very quiet since I admitted to starting Moxie by making the zines—something that sparked Claudia’s urgent need to go home.
“Are they mad?” I ask, my voice small. Mom doesn’t answer, just walks over to the cabinet where she keeps a small bottle of bourbon. She drops two ice cubes into a juice glass—plink, plunk—and then pours a decent amount of amber liquid over them. Only after she takes a generous swallow does she answer.
“I don’t think they’re mad, Vivvy. Just shocked.” She heads into the den and curls up next to me on the couch. “The Vivian they know wouldn’t do something like this.”
“Are you mad?” I ask.
Sip. Another sip. My heart pounds.
“I think,” she says, her voice soft, her words carefully chosen, “that I’m finally realizing that you’re more my daughter than I ever realized. And that the Vivian I know is … growing up.”
I hug my knees to my chest. “Is that … a bad thing?” My voice cracks a bit, surprising me.
At this, my mom’s eyes turn glassy almost immediately. She presses her fingertips up to her eyes, then gives up. A few tears snake their way down her face.
“Mom, please don’t be mad,” I say, scooting toward her. I guess I didn’t expect my mom to be thrilled. But I didn’t expect her to be acting like whatever this is.
“Oh, Vivian, I’m not mad,” she says. “I mean, maybe, like, 10 percent mad. That you kept it all such a secret.” She pauses, her voice a little wounded. “You didn’t feel like you could tell me?”
“Mom, I’m sorry,” I say, shifting with guilt. “It’s not that I didn’t think I could. It’s just … something I wanted to do on my own. But it’s not because I didn’t think I could trust you with it.”
“Okay,” she whispers. “Just so long as you always feel you can tell me anything.”
“I know I can, Mom,” I say. And then, maybe to make her feel like she was involved all along, I tell her, “I got the idea from your box of Riot Grrrl stuff, you know.”
“I knew I should have hidden that box in the attic,” she says, rolling her red-rimmed eyes.
“So you’re not crying because you’re mad?” I ask.
My mom shakes her head. “No, I’m crying because … because … hell, I don’t know why I’m crying. Because I’m proud and surprised. And because I’m old and you’re young—but not so young anymore, it seems. Because life is weird sometimes, and just when I think I have it figured out something weird happens again.�
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“So you’re really … proud?” I ask, twisting my mouth into a hopeful smile.
She eyes me over the glass of bourbon.
“Truthfully?” she says. “Yeah.”
My hopeful smile grows bigger.
She nods and takes another swallow from her glass. “Honestly,” she says, “I almost want Principal Wilson to try and expel you and all the other girls.” She laughs out loud all of a sudden, so loud she sends Joan Jett running out of the den. “If that asshole thinks he’s going to get half the girls in the school kicked out because he tried to cover up an attempted rape, he’s going to have to deal with me!” She punches an arm in the air, giddy.
“Okay, Mom, settle down,” I say.
My mother is about to answer me when the doorbell rings. It’s almost 9 o’clock at night.
“Is it John?” I ask, peering over my shoulder toward the front of the house.
“No, he’s still at work,” my mother says, heading toward the door. A few moments later she walks back into the den.
Seth is with her.
This fucking day.
“I’m sorry it’s late,” he says, glancing first at my mom, then at me. “I just really wanted to talk to Viv. In person.”
My mouth is dry. My arms have goose bumps. And Seth is standing there, looking at me with his dark eyes. I remember his thumbs-up from the walkout earlier today.
“Hey,” I say.
My mother’s eyes ping-pong between us until she finally speaks.
“Look, I might be a semi-cool mom or whatever, but you’re staying here in the den and I’m going to my bedroom,” she says. “I’ll have my door open halfway, by the way.” She gives me a knowing look and starts heading down the hallway before running back to grab the bottle of bourbon.
“So, hey,” Seth says after my mom leaves at last. He slides his hands into his jeans pockets.
“You want to sit down?” I ask him, and it hits me that I want him to sit down next to me so much. Like, I want him to sit down next to me for a really long time.
So Seth takes a seat on the couch, but he leaves a good foot or two of distance between us. He’s wearing the Black Flag T-shirt I like so much. He jiggles his knee. He gazes at our television even though it’s turned off.
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