“Look, we need to figure out what to do about this,” I said, squeezing her reassuringly. “But I don’t think moving to New York is the answer.”
“It would help, though,” Helen mumbled.
“Yeah, I mean, sure, it would.” I left out the fact that neither of us could deal with Mom long term. “But we need to figure out a way to stop the rumors. Preferably at the source.”
“How’re you going to do that?”
“Well, for starters, I’m going to talk with Sean and Melissa.”
Helen shook her head violently. She had finally stopped crying, but her eyelashes were clumped together with tears and the areas around her eyes were smudged with leftover mascara from the fashion show.
“Sean’s not going to believe you,” she said. “And what can Melissa do? I don’t want everyone in the world to know about this!”
I sighed. She was probably right about Sean, but Melissa had firsthand experience. She’d fought back against Leah and Aimee’s rumors about her parents last year, and within a month or so, everyone had forgotten about it. Of course, it helped that she’d ditched Aimee’s ex-boyfriend, Matt Bouchard, about two weeks after they started dating. Apparently, he’d said something so gross about Asian girls that Melissa wouldn’t even repeat it to me. After that, Aimee didn’t have much reason to go after Melissa anymore.
“Melissa’s an expert in dealing with Leah and Aimee,” I said, trying not to let all those extra factors give me doubt. “She’d love the chance to get back at them.”
My suggestion of asking Melissa for advice seemed to calm Helen down. The red drained from her face and the facial contortions stopped.
“I don’t get why she’d pick on me,” Helen complained. “I’m just a freshman. I’m nobody!”
I laughed. Helen, despite the mean-girl skills she’d honed in middle school, didn’t recognize the obvious reasons Leah might want to take her out.
“It’s not funny!” Helen was looking teary again.
“You’re way prettier than she is, and you spend time with her boyfriend every day,” I explained. “It should be obvious why she’s doing it. You’re a threat.”
Helen smiled, as though the only thing that could bring her back from the edge was knowing she was better than Leah. “She’s really fake, isn’t she? Like, so fake you don’t know what’s under all that makeup.”
“Totally,” I said, absentmindedly agreeing while my brain leaped ahead to other things. If Helen was in this state, Leah’s lies must have taken hold with a lot of people—well, more people than I knew about anyway. It would be easy enough to get back at Leah, but so, so much harder to make things better for Helen. Once rumors got out, they were impossible to stop and could reach all the wrong people. And with Leah ten steps ahead of us, what could I possibly do to help?
10
I sat cross-legged against my bedroom wall, my US history homework fanned in front of me on the bed. As I worked, my bed slowly crept away from the wall, and I could feel my butt sinking down into the widening gap. Every few minutes, I had to readjust my bed, my homework, and my posture, but there was no way I was leaving my room now. Literally any other space in the house—the kitchen table, the kitchen counter, even the coffee table in the living room—would have been a more secure and comfortable place to do my homework, but there would have been no privacy. And I needed privacy because Kyle was supposed to call.
It wasn’t that I expected to have a super personal call with Kyle, but I didn’t want Dad overhearing, then grilling me about Kyle’s family, or how well I knew him, or what our plans were. Or insisting that he needed to meet Kyle before I could go over to his house. Or giving me some embarrassing speech about how teenage boys were only out for sex. And I didn’t need Helen, who was doing her homework downstairs at the kitchen table, making fun of me for being so obviously into Kyle. She would just distract me, and then I’d say all the wrong things.
And so I was glued to my bed, as awkward as that was, waiting for him to call.
It was now two thirty, and the phone still wasn’t ringing. What if he didn’t call? He’d said he would call, but he could just as easily not call. Boys didn’t call all the time. And while it wasn’t late in the day, it wasn’t exactly early, either.
After every multiple-choice question I answered on Ms. Andrews’s take-home history quiz, I looked at the lavender phone I shared with Helen in our bedroom. But it just sat there, not ringing.
I picked up the receiver to make sure it was working. It had a dial tone.
As I set the phone back down, I felt ridiculous. My obsessive phone behavior wasn’t going to make Kyle call any faster. Besides, I should be thinking of ways to help Helen, who actually needed me, instead of worrying about whether a boy would call. It was antithetical to the kind of feminist I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be someone who was pro-girl and pro-choice, and helping my sister, who had been victimized by abortion-stigma gossip. But I couldn’t help myself, no matter how hard I tried to focus on a very real problem.
I was waiting by the phone for a guy to call.
Kathleen Hanna would be ashamed of me.
I didn’t know her, but I knew she’d be ashamed of me. Oh, she wouldn’t call me out on it—she’d probably write about it in a zine instead. She’d be cool about it, but she’d make a point that it wasn’t part of the revolution to care whether some guy was going to call, even if he was cute and maybe liked you back.
Rrrrrrrrr. The phone rang. I jumped.
“Hello?” I said, grabbing the phone from its cradle before Helen or Dad might pick it up downstairs.
“Hi.” It was Melissa. My pulse slowed to near death.
“Why are you calling?” My voice surged with panic and irritation. It wasn’t a fair reaction exactly, because Melissa had no idea Kyle was supposed to call. But I needed to get her off the phone. Yes, we had call-waiting, but the longer I was on the phone with Melissa, the more likely it was that Dad would realize I’d been on the phone for a while and come up to my room to remind me to focus on my homework.
“Nice talking with you, too. I’m the one calling you back. You left a message with my mom? She just gave it to me.”
I put a hand to my forehead in embarrassment, as if Melissa could see me on the other end of the line. I’d called her yesterday as soon as Helen and I got home, but she’d been at a Cajun music festival in Lafayette with her dad. It was always a fifty-fifty chance her mom wouldn’t deliver the message, so I’d planned to try her again after Kyle called me. Which he hadn’t.
“That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry.”
“Ha! You were waiting on Kyle, weren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Melissa was definitely going to make fun of me for this, and I deserved it.
“You’ve got to chill. He likes you, or he wouldn’t have shown up Friday night.”
She was right. But there was a difference between recognizing Melissa’s logic and truly feeling it in my bones. And I didn’t feel it. Not because I doubted Kyle, but because no boy had ever paid much attention to me before.
“I know, but...” I stopped, feeling my eyebrows gathering in a frown. “I want him to call.”
“Fair enough,” Melissa said. “He’s pretty cute. Anyway, what else is up?”
I hesitated for a second. “So, you remember how Helen was acting weird when we went out to dinner with Sean and Leah?”
“Oh, God, don’t tell me this is about Leah and Aimee and the abortion bullshit.” Her voice dripped with disdain.
“Wait—when did you find out?” I didn’t try to hide my shock, because this kind of bombshell wasn’t something Melissa would usually hide from me.
“Literally this morning, at mass.” In contrast to our dad’s Christmas-and-Easter Catholicism, Melissa’s mom was a devout Catholic. She dragged Melissa to church every Sunday as her sole intervention into Mel
issa’s “wild” behavior. That was, her super liberal political activism. Her dad, on the other hand, golfed every Sunday morning.
“At mass?” I asked, horrified, as I imagined a priest condemning Helen from the pulpit for an abortion she didn’t have.
“Well, after mass, not during,” Melissa clarified reassuringly. “Jamie Taylor pulled me into the youth group room to tell me all about it.”
Jamie Taylor was a senior I knew of, but had never talked to in my life—she was that level of popular. I didn’t know that Melissa knew her, either, but it wasn’t nearly as surprising, since they apparently went to the same church. Also, Melissa had a way of knowing everyone.
“And you didn’t think to call me?”
“Athena, I’m calling you right now. I just got home! You know my mom. We had to stop at the Vietnamese supermarket on the way home because she wants to make pho, even though it’s eight million degrees out. I’m cursed to come from not one, but two cultures that seem to think soup is for hot weather.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But this has me worried. It’s not one of Leah and Aimee’s typical rumors. Helen could get expelled for this.”
Melissa sighed dramatically. “She’s not going to get expelled, because it’s not like teachers are going to believe this. And even then, your dad can provide proof that Helen wasn’t here all summer. But beyond that, this rumor is all based on abortion hype due to what happened this summer. All Helen has to do is show she doesn’t care about it, and then it’ll go away.”
Sometimes, I wanted to punch Melissa for her overly mature “I know how to handle things better than you” attitude. I was glad that the distance of the phone line prevented me from taking physical action I would regret.
“Yeah, but she does care,” I snapped. “That’s why she came to me, and that’s why I’m asking for your help. And I really don’t think this is the type of thing that will just go away. Not at our school.”
“Okay. So what do you think we can do about it? I mean, can we confront Leah? No. Can we confront Aimee? No. Can we disprove the lies without bringing your dad into it, embarrassing Helen, and making things worse? Probably not.”
Melissa was right, but I’d been telling Helen otherwise. I’d held out hope Melissa could help. She always had a solution for everything else.
“We can’t do anything?” Disappointment settled in my chest, mingled with powerlessness.
“I didn’t say that,” Melissa said. “But as of now, I don’t have any ideas. Whatever you do, though, you shouldn’t say anything to Sean.”
“Why?” I asked. “He’s my best friend!”
“Thanks. I thought I was your best friend.”
“You know what I mean. Why can’t I talk with him about this?”
“Because you’re his friend, but Leah’s his girlfriend,” Melissa said, stressing the world of difference between the two.
“Yeah, but—”
“I get it. He’s your oldest friend.” She emphasized the last two words like oldest definitely didn’t mean best. I’d heard it before. It was part of the Sean-me-Melissa dynamic in which I kept the two of them apart as much as possible. “But this is Leah we’re talking about. No one really likes her, but everyone is afraid of her, except for Sean, who actually does like her and is also probably afraid of her.”
My mouth was trapped in a quivering space between telling Melissa off and agreeing with her.
“That’s all true,” I said, finally. I started talking again before she could steamroller me. “But it’s Helen. I’ve got to talk with him about this.”
“Are you really that oblivious?” she asked incredulously. “Your sister flirts with Sean, and he flirts back.” I held the phone away from my ear to distance myself from Melissa’s suddenly loud voice. “I’m sure Leah has noticed it, even if you haven’t. You have no idea what Leah and Aimee have been saying to Sean just to forestall the inevitable on that one. And you know Sean—he’s not comfortable with the idea of any kind of impropriety, so he’d never do anything other than flirt, but it’s way different than last year, when she looked like a weird long-legged golden retriever puppy. He probably feels icky that he’s looking at your sister as anything other than a pest, not to mention that he probably feels guilty for looking at any girl other than Leah.”
I’d always suspected Helen had a crush on Sean. But it never felt that different from the kind of crush she had on Evan Dando or Eddie Vedder or River Phoenix or Will Smith or Jordan Knight. Sean was cute, therefore she liked him. And I didn’t think Sean returned any feelings for her, but he’d acted so oddly yesterday that all kinds of things were suddenly coming into question for me.
“She can’t seriously think of Helen as a threat,” I protested. “And even if Helen threw herself at Sean, and even if he liked her, he’d figure out some way to reject her and save her from embarrassment. And then he’d honorably tell Leah about it. That’s who he is.”
“It. Does. Not. Matter!” Melissa exclaimed, blasting my ear. “Because of who Leah is! And who Helen is! Helen’s not some kid anymore. She’s a babe.”
I wasn’t sure why I was arguing with Melissa. All the things she was shouting into my ear were things I thought, too. It shouldn’t surprise me that Leah had noticed them, or that her faith in her boyfriend’s faithfulness would be less than mine, or that she felt threatened by Helen. And I could understand her insecurity—being Helen’s less attractive sister and Melissa’s less outrageous friend frequently meant I melted into the background. It wasn’t quite the same, but I got it.
On the other hand, I didn’t go around starting shit about people.
“So, what now?” Melissa’s futility was starting to infect me.
She let out a sigh so heavy and breathy I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “I don’t know.”
This was the worst thing about Melissa. She was quick enough to make me feel like I was the least observant human on the planet, but she didn’t have any suggestions for fixing the problem. This was especially true when it came to Sean.
“There’s got to be something,” I said. “Think about how she works.”
“Well, we could spread an equally vicious, probably true story about her to everyone in school. Like that she put out so her doctor would give her free fake boobs.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Melissa could be too much. Like, all the time. “And besides, aren’t we supposed to be above all that?”
“Oh! I know! We could start suggesting that she and Aimee are secret lesbians!”
“Oh, come on! That’s not funny. Can we please try to find a real solution?”
“That would probably make the most sense.” She pretended she hadn’t heard me. “They quit cheerleading because of Coach Braden, because she was, you know, a lesbian. Maybe it’s true that homophobia masks latent homosexual tendencies!” She sounded excited to land on a plausible path to revenge.
But this kind of “solution” made me feel worse. Melissa would never seriously start a rumor about Leah and Aimee that depended on the homophobia of the masses, but even joking about it turned my stomach.
“See? That’s what I mean!” I exclaimed. “I know you’re trying to point out that Leah and Aimee are homophobic for saying they were quitting the squad because Coach Braden might-could be a lesbian, but it’s not working. It just makes you sound homophobic. And I need you to focus!”
Melissa was silent on the other end. I almost started to apologize for exploding at her, but another part of me overrode that. She’d gone too far, and I wasn’t sorry.
“You’re right,” she finally said. “I have no idea what to do. But let me think on it. And in the meantime, whatever you do: Don’t. Tell. Sean.”
Her words echoed in my brain long after I hung up the phone. What was I supposed to do if I couldn’t talk with the only person who could possibly help?
11
PopCRACKBzzzt. A painful blast of noise surged from the amp.
“Oh, shit, sorry.” I’d plugged in my bass without checking to see if the amp was on. A clumsy beginner’s mistake. I would never have done that at home, and I would never have done it in front of Melissa.
I was more than a little unnerved to be standing in Kyle’s rec room on a Tuesday afternoon, on what seemed to be a date, still in my ugly school uniform. We’d ridden the bus from school to his house, and now I had a pristine, gorgeous, vintage black-and-white Rickenbacker bass around my neck.
Nothing had felt real the entire afternoon—not the Rickenbacker, which was much heavier than my crappy Squier bass, causing me to hunch over; or Kyle’s rec room, with its complete microphone setup, a ton of amps, collection of vintage guitars, and full drum kit. The overly bright afternoon sun bounced off the whole room, making me feel like I’d entered into a fantasy world of dudedom.
The room was fully decked out, ready to be the ultimate classic rock bro space. On the walls hung posters of different generations of dude bands. The Sex Pistols. Nirvana. The Beatles crossing Abbey Road. The giant Rolling Stones mouth. A poster from a Led Zeppelin live show. Eric Clapton in guitar-orgasm face. The Who.
This was some kind of teenage boy dream room, if one of those teen boys was now in his forties.
Oddly enough, the rest of their house looked like the movers had arrived, dumped the furniture, and run away as quickly as possible. We’d passed through the living room, where everything was either in a box or covered in padded moving blankets, and the only seating was a set of metal folding chairs positioned in front of the TV, which was on the floor. It looked like Kyle’s mom had been wrestling the kitchen into order right before we arrived. The glass-front cabinets displayed all their dishware, but several boxes labeled “kitchen stuff” were unopened on the counter, and one of the drawers had been left open with half of the silverware placed inside. The rest of the silverware sat in the dish strainer by the sink.
Rebel Girls Page 9
