Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  I let out a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to get into an escalating shoving war with some complete stranger or, worse, with one of Helen’s modeling friends’ relatives. I dog-eared the paperback page and shoved the book back into my bag.

  “It’s for English class,” I said. “I only looked like I was enjoying it. Mrs. Snyder’s nice, but everything she assigns is...”

  “Boring?” Sean was in regular college-prep classes, not honors, but we both had Mrs. Snyder. She mostly assigned us the same books, plus additional assignments for the honors class.

  “You read my mind.” Another thought started to worm its way under the relief that Sean, not some stranger, was sitting next to me. This was Helen’s fashion show, and he didn’t usually tag along to those. Maybe Leah was involved in some way with the show, which might account for the way things were between her and Helen.

  I waved at the stage. “So, uh, what brings you here to this fabulous display of...something?”

  Sean gulped nervously, but so imperceptibly that any other human who hadn’t known him since he was five might not have noticed. “Uh, Helen asked me?”

  It wasn’t like Sean to sound Wisteria-ish, which made his presence all the more intriguing. I leaned toward him like I would if Melissa was telling me about a juicy date, then backed off when I realized I was getting into his face about my sister.

  “When did that happen?” I asked incredulously.

  Sean put his hands up in protest. “It’s not like that! You’re always implying things that would get me into trouble with Leah. Who does know I’m here, by the way.” He raised his eyebrows in a way that might have implied it had been a bad decision to tell her. Or I could have been adding my own unfavorable reading to the situation. “After school yesterday, when you were off doing whatever you were doing with Melissa, Helen told me your dad wasn’t going to be able to make it today. She was kind of upset, so I told her I’d come.”

  “Uh-huh.” That wasn’t exactly Helen asking him to watch her fashion show, but I let it slide. Sean would just dismiss any questions about finer points of who invited whom as me “implying things.” And to be fair, I kind of was.

  “Hey, don’t ‘uh-huh’ me,” Sean said. “By the way, I heard Melissa drop you off after ten last night. And I mean heard. She really needs to get her alternator fixed. But you—I didn’t think you were the type to break curfew.”

  I could feel my cheeks turning red. Not because of Melissa, of course, but because I remembered the heat of Kyle next to me.

  “It wasn’t that late. And I didn’t break curfew. My dad extended it this year.” A giggly excitement began to bubble up inside me. I’d been puzzling out Sean’s attendance here, but I had my own news. News so big that it should be shouted by Christian Bale in Newsies. Sean was the only one I could really tell it to, other than the people who were already there. “So, you remember that guy in my physics class? Kyle?”

  “Oh, is that his name? Mr. Nice Booty?” Sean wiggled in his seat, which didn’t quite illustrate “nice booty” so much as “child who needs a bathroom.” I smacked his arm, as usual.

  “Yes, that’s his name,” I said. “You would not believe what happened! Melissa—she’s some kind of evil genius, I swear—she arranged for him to meet up with us at Highland Coffees, and then she went off to a corner, and we actually kind of had a date, and he invited me to go over to his house sometime this week, and—” I paused, gulping in air.

  “Whoa, whoa! Take a breath before you pass out,” Sean said. He raised his hand. “And give me a high five! I’ve never heard you create a run-on sentence like that before. Must have been some night!”

  I giggled again, uncontrollably and totally out of character, as I smacked my palm against his. “It was, but not like that—”

  I was about to launch into more detail about how amazing the night had been, when a voice blared over the loudspeakers near the stage: “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you all to our Teen Fall Fashion Extravaganza. Remember, our ladies and menswear shows will be held at one o’clock.”

  A middle-aged woman in front of us turned around to shush us, finger fiercely up to her mouth, but she didn’t need to. Sean and I sat up at attention, ready for Helen, our star attraction.

  “Up first, we have our casual fall look of a blazer and scarf. Paired with a chambray shirt, boot-cut jeans, and riding boots, the look is an instant classic that’ll take your daughter from Louisiana to New England,” the disembodied announcer said.

  Helen emerged from the curtains at the top of the stage. She strutted down the runway with an intense stare a world away from her goofy prance across the front lawn. The outfit was standard Ralph Lauren, not exactly the hottest teen fashion. But the brown houndstooth jacket and light blue shirt paired perfectly with Helen’s coloring, bringing out the blue in her eyes and the pink of her cheeks and camouflaging the smattering of freckles across her nose. She looked older than fourteen, like a more put-together version of a college student hanging out at Highland Coffees. Flashbulbs went off near the stage, where the modeling school’s photographer snapped away. Helen would probably con him into giving her the picture for her portfolio for free, even though parents were supposed to pay for them.

  “That’s our girl!” Sean clapped loudly as Helen got to the front of the stage. “Whoo!”

  The woman in front of us turned around again to glare pointedly at Sean, but he just shrugged at her. “She’s my friend. And her sister.” He nodded to me. “We get to clap for her, as loud as we want.”

  The woman’s glare softened slightly, but I could tell she was the type who enjoyed shushing.

  “How much you want to bet she’s mad Helen took her daughter’s spot?” Sean whispered. “I wasn’t being that loud.”

  “Probably,” I whispered. “Or she’s mad that we’re not going to stick around for the adult fashion show at one, and we can’t see her glorious Sunday best.”

  After Helen, each look grew more boring. Boys in polo shirts and jeans—why those needed runway exposure, I had no idea, since they were what 99 percent of the guys wore already—and girls in various short, pleated skirts and baby-doll dresses and burned-out velvet holiday wear. None of them wore anything nearly as cutting-edge as the pages that I had torn out of my magazines.

  Sean and I clapped for all of them, though, both out of politeness and to cover the snarky commentary we whispered to each other.

  Finally, Helen emerged again, the last in a tableau of a homecoming court. She was the homecoming queen, as I had no doubt she would someday be in real life. She would make the court this year, for sure. Her dress was a long forest green velvet number that pooled around her ankles. The neckline plunged low, and the fabric stayed close to Helen’s body, tight through her waist before gently skimming over her hips. She could have easily passed for eighteen.

  “Whoa,” Sean whispered, with enough appreciation in his voice that I would normally call him on it if I weren’t rock solid in my expectation of another denial. “Helen should be sending up prayers of thanks your dad isn’t here.”

  “She looks great,” I said defensively. “Don’t be mean about it.”

  “Who said I was being mean? All I’m saying is if he saw her in that dress, he’d keep her locked up until she was thirty.”

  He was right, but that wasn’t exactly the point. I felt unexpectedly proud of Helen. She walked the runway like a professional, despite the mall setting and the dozens of other nervous, giggling models who waved to their parents and friends. I could never stand there with so many people looking at me, judging the way I walked and looked and exposing my breastbone for all to see. So Sean and I stood up and clapped loudly as the models returned briefly to the stage, hoping Helen could see us in the audience.

  9

  “Did you see me?” Helen rushed over to us and plopped down in the empty folding chair next to Se
an. With her face scrubbed clean except for some traces of mascara, and back in jeans and a floral scoop-neck top, she no longer looked eighteen. Her enthusiasm and need for approval didn’t add any years, either.

  “You were amazing!” I said, surprised by how much I meant it.

  “Yeah, fantastic.” Sean took in a breath like he was about to add something else, but his eyes darted somewhere over my shoulder. I turned to follow his gaze to where a big old-fashioned clock hung outside the mall’s nicer jewelry store. It was almost twelve thirty. “Um, I have to go.”

  “Now? But I just got here! And Sara and Jennifer are with their families. I thought we could all hang out.” Helen’s smile melted into disappointment. I could relate—Sean had skipped out on my youth orchestra concert last year in favor of going on a date with Leah. It wasn’t even a special occasion for them.

  Sean stood up between Helen and me, and awkwardly patted Helen on the shoulder. “Good job walking. Keep it up, legs moving forward one at a time,” he said in a way that sounded almost dismissive. Helen’s crestfallen face must have gotten to him, though, because he switched his tone. “No, seriously, you did great, and I’m sorry I can’t stay to help you celebrate. Duty calls.”

  Sean didn’t have to say that “duty” was Leah, and not some randomly scheduled Saturday football practice. He shuffled past my legs to the aisle and darted through the crowds of parents celebrating their kids’ successes.

  I’d ask him about it later, but I wondered if Leah had given him some sort of ground rules—that he could watch the show, but not hang around with Helen after. She might consider Helen in the flesh too much of a temptation, even though there was no way Sean would ever cheat on anyone, let alone a girl who could ruin him as much as Leah could.

  Helen slumped back in the folding chair. “This sucks.”

  The way she said it got to me—two words so infused with sadness and disappointment. She’d just had her biggest triumph to date, and not only did Dad have to work, but I pretty much had to be dragged here, and Sean had ditched us as soon as the show ended.

  “Sucks? But you were so great!” I protested. I’d never understood why Helen had become obsessed with fashion, or why she wanted to be a model instead of, say, a fashion designer. But she was good at this, unlike most of the other kids. “I could never get up there and do what you did! And you looked great doing it! I think you could really be a model.”

  “If that’s so true, will you tell Dad so he’ll let me go to New York now instead of April so that I can audition for real modeling agencies and get a contract so I can do runway work?” she blurted out in one breath.

  “Umm, what?” She sounded more desperate than I’d ever imagined hearing her. She’d walked the catwalk like a pro, but now she was collapsing in front of me. I didn’t understand how my sister functioned.

  “Look, I need to get out of this town,” Helen pleaded, scooting into Sean’s empty chair and grabbing onto my arm. “Please.”

  “What’s going on, Helen?” My stomach sank with a feeling that it had to do with Leah, but I instinctively knew I should let Helen tell me instead of interrogating her. It wouldn’t help to start off by saying, Hey, I know Leah’s torturing you, but everyone’s been vague about it and then I forgot about it for a whole evening because Melissa arranged a surprise date last night with the boy of my dreams.

  It was honest, but not particularly nice.

  Helen’s eyes welled with tears, but she didn’t let them escape. First, she tried to ignore the tears by looking upward and blinking them back, while holding her breath and then letting it out in controlled bursts. When that didn’t work, she moved on to other measures. As soon as a tear welled up, she wiped her eyes, pretending she had something in them.

  Getting Helen to a state where she could talk was hard. I needed to calm her down, but I didn’t know how. I hadn’t seen her cry since she was eight, when our mom said she wouldn’t be coming back to Baton Rouge after finishing her master’s, and that she and Dad were getting a divorce. Crying in public was the antithesis of popularity promotion. I should know. I’d been branded a crier in elementary school.

  “I hate high school,” Helen said, letting a few words escape between held breaths and eye swipes.

  “Everyone hates high school.” I tried to sound as kind as possible. “If you like it, you’re a freak.”

  Helen half smiled. But then the tears welled up again, and her face broke into a deep frown. Now I knew why she didn’t cry in public. She looked like a baby ogre, with hints of old man around the eyes and mouth.

  “What if I want to be a freak?” she wailed. Tears rolled down her face, much faster than she could wipe them away. She gave up entirely and put her head down between her knees, her shoulders shaking. I awkwardly placed my arm around her.

  “Then I can’t help you,” I said quietly. “Because high school isn’t easy, not for anyone. Now, can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  Helen loudly sucked in a breath. After a few seconds, she exhaled with a hiss through her teeth.

  “I think Leah’s been spreading lies about me,” Helen said. “Or at least someone has. And people believe them.”

  “People will believe anything, if they want to.” So far, I had escaped Leah’s creative embellishments, but it was only because Sean was dating Leah. If that ever ended, it would be open season on my reputation. “What exactly are they saying?”

  Helen screwed her eyes shut and wound her mouth up again in that unfamiliar, frowning face. Her tight-lipped tears made it impossible to tell if the gossip was that bad, or if Helen, who had always been popular, just wasn’t used to high school’s big-league intrigue.

  “It started on the first day of school,” Helen said through sobs. “I heard someone whispering about me in the hall. I didn’t think anything of it, ’cause I’m kind of a giant, and people always gawk at the freakishly tall girl. I mean, I’ve been five-ten since the sixth grade, so I’m used to it.”

  She took another breath and continued, her voice thick and raspy. I’d never realized that Helen had been teased—or anything close to it—for being tall. A sudden pang of guilt hit me for missing out on times I could have helped my sister instead of fighting with her.

  “But it wasn’t just that. I kept hearing the whispers all day, and then the next, until that Friday Jennifer told me what they were. She knew it wasn’t true, she said, but she thought I should know.” Helen took a deep, shuddering breath. “Someone had been saying that I slept with Drew Lambert over the summer. I’ve never even talked to Drew Lambert!”

  My hand flew up to cover my mouth as I gasped. I didn’t want it to seem that helping Helen would be impossible, but this was worse than I had anticipated. Drew Lambert was a racist asshole. He’d been among the loudest to complain when Sean became the starting quarterback last year. He’d used words like jigaboo and jungle ape and threatened to hold a protest.

  “At first, I thought it was because Drew said he slept with me or something.” Helen sniffled with each sentence. “Which would have been bad enough. But people kept whispering things in the hall when I walked by. And people don’t whisper like that for sluts.”

  I cringed at Helen’s choice of words, but I got what she meant, and how much this was bothering her. People would talk, sure, about how this girl supposedly slept with that guy, but it didn’t usually involve outright hallway mockery. My mouth started to go dry in anticipation of something even worse than people saying you were sleeping with a junior-level white supremacist.

  She stared blankly at the rows of chairs in front of us, as though she was reliving something she didn’t want to tell me. I followed her eyes to the maintenance man carefully shifting the folding chairs back into precise rows for the next show. He didn’t notice us. Every once in a while, she’d reach her hand up to swipe away a stray tear or two.

  “Helen, we’re gonna have to go.” My
eyes darted from her to the maintenance man. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on now, or do you want to do it somewhere else? We can go if you want to.”

  Her face twisted up again, and she shook her head.

  “No, if I don’t tell you now, I don’t... I don’t know when I will.” She forced the words out through clenched teeth. “They were saying—I found out from Sara that they were saying it wasn’t just that I’d supposedly slept with him, but that I’d gotten pregnant and had an abortion, and you and Melissa had helped me. They were saying I was a baby killer.” She spat out the phrase. “And Angelle said I should quit the pro-life club, ’cause they shouldn’t have hypocrites in their ranks. I told her that it wasn’t true, but...” She shrugged, and her face folded back into the angry old-man cry face.

  Now I really didn’t know what to say. Not that I could talk with my desert mouth. These rumors were bad at our school, but they fit together like a plot meant to take down all three of us. Helen, for “having an abortion,” and me and Melissa, for helping her. There wasn’t anything wrong with having an abortion, or with helping a girl get one, but it wouldn’t matter. Like all of Leah’s best lies, this one was based on personal knowledge. She’d been at Sean’s house when Helen and I had our blowout fight about the issue last year. She was aware of Helen’s commitment to pro-life causes, and how Melissa and I were pro-choice. This was exactly the kind of gossip she designed for the masses to devour: an ounce of believability, an irresistible dash of political hypocrisy, and a pretty girl Leah wanted to take down.

  Even worse, the rumor could potentially get Helen expelled from school. St. Ann’s strict pro-life policy meant that any girl who got pregnant had exactly two choices: adoption or become a teen mom. Even then, the options weren’t good or fair because pregnant girls had to be homeschooled for the duration of their pregnancy. But abortion? Unthinkable. It was grounds for automatic expulsion if the school administration found out.

  But Leah’s lies weren’t merely designed to be believable and dangerous—they were designed to hurt personally. Helen cared because she was pro-life. Someone like Melissa would easily be able to fire right back and say, “So what if I did?” Helen couldn’t do that, though, because it would make her a hypocrite. But, right now, I didn’t care what she believed, only that she was hurting. I was going to protect her from this crap.