Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  I hadn’t asked him why this room got so much attention, which clearly made it special, and then I made a rookie mistake with the amp. It was like everything real disappeared when Kyle was around, including my sense of musicianship.

  “It’s okay.” Kyle checked that my bass was plugged in before turning on the amp again.

  “I’m not normally that clumsy,” I apologized. “I mean, I am that clumsy, just not with musical instruments.” I wasn’t sure which was making me more nervous:, being alone with Kyle or holding the Rickenbacker. Aside from Melissa’s ridiculously expensive violin, I’d never touched an instrument that cost more. My cello didn’t come close, and the other instruments here would have laughed my Squier out of the room.

  “Um, are you sure it’s cool that I’m playing this? It seems like this room is...” I gestured vaguely to the walls and the amps and the guitars.

  “A lot?” He smiled. “Yeah, it’s my dad’s first love. He moved all this stuff out of storage as soon as he got back to the States. He started his job a month before Mom and I got here, and it was the first room he unpacked. Mom hasn’t been able to catch up with him since.”

  “And she’s okay with that?” As soon as I said it, I realized how it might have come across. That the abandoned kitchen signaled something like giving up, especially in the face of the boy-town band room.

  “I think so?” Kyle shrugged, and his guitar bounced against his chest distractingly. “I know the kitchen’s driving her up the wall, but she wouldn’t have wanted my dad to touch anything in there before she got here. Same with the living room. She lives in terror of the day he buys a huge leather couch and ruins her aesthetic. In fact, she’s out right now looking at couches in New Orleans because nothing in Baton Rouge works for her.”

  He rolled his eyes a bit at the thought of going to New Orleans for a couch, but something about the way he said it reminded me of his hedged answer about Brussels. He didn’t want to say Baton Rouge sucked, and that he didn’t want to move here...but Baton Rouge really did suck, and it seemed clear to me that he hadn’t wanted to move here. But I could also tell he didn’t want to talk about it, and so I felt like I was getting to know only the parts of him that he wanted me to see.

  Or maybe I was overreacting. Maybe this moment was when I should be getting to know him, instead of jumping ahead to assume that because he didn’t tell me something within three seconds of knowing him, it would forever remain a mystery.

  One solution to this would be to tell him something about myself, in hopes of getting him to share more. But I didn’t have any international travels under my belt—thanks, Mom—and the big things in my life were things I wanted to escape from today: Helen and the abortion gossip, and Leah and Sean.

  I chewed on my lip for a second, trying to figure out if I should try to dig deeper or ignore it all in favor of playing music. I justified to myself that playing music was, in fact, a good way to get to know someone.

  “Anyway, what song do you want to jam on?” Kyle asked, noticing my indecision.

  The word jam made me cringe inwardly, and I found myself involuntarily wrinkling my nose. Unless it was a specific reference to the Jam, who, coincidentally enough, played Rickenbackers, I wanted nothing to do with it.

  “What, don’t think I can play?” Kyle asked. He leaned close to me as if the question had been a challenge. The deep caramel of his eyes and every dark eyelash stared back at me. I almost couldn’t breathe.

  I hiccuped a nervous laugh. “No, it’s the word jam,” I said quietly, feeling the heat emanating off him—or maybe my own temperature was rising. Either way.

  “Too much like Phish?”

  “I was going to say the Grateful Dead, but yeah.”

  “So, what did one sober Grateful Dead fan say to the other?”

  “Umm, I have no idea. I didn’t know there were any.”

  “This music sucks.” He looked at me with his face slanted away, trying to maintain some element of coolness. A half-wicked smile spread across his face.

  I laughed. It was a groan-worthy joke, but he looked so cute telling it. Damn it. I couldn’t think about how hot he was without losing track of everything else that should be in my head.

  “So, what do you want to play?” he asked. “Do you know ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?”

  A sarcastic “Who doesn’t?” popped into my head, and if it had been anyone else, I would have said it out loud. But Kyle’s stint in Brussels probably prevented him from understanding what a big deal Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had been in the US. Melissa got so annoyed with Nirvana’s popularity that she’d trashed her copies of their records. Before that, she and I had arranged the band’s songs for violin and cello, but neither of us could get through a song without laughing.

  “Ah, the hit of the year.” I nodded. “Let’s do this.”

  Kyle crashed through the abrasive opening chords, his golden-brown hair flopping into his eyes. He screwed his eyes up tightly when he played, and I was so busy watching his facial contortions and flailing hair that I nearly missed my entrance. I recovered barely in time, entering with the solid eighth notes of the song, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

  The song’s simple bass line started to bore me. Maybe not bore, exactly, but I couldn’t focus on it. Without noticing I was doing it, I started playing the alternate bass line I’d made up for my band with Melissa, a swooping counterpoint to the vocal melody that twisted and turned but still held down the rhythm. It wasn’t that hard—it was still eighth notes—but it had a lot more fill-ins in the melody.

  Kyle stopped the song after the first chorus. I kept playing my contrapuntal line for a few seconds, lost in the simple rhythm of the song.

  “You’re really good,” Kyle said.

  I held my breath. I hoped he wouldn’t add “for a girl.” The last time I’d played with a guy—one of Melissa’s endless parade of boyfriends—he’d said that, and I felt a smoldering flame of humiliation fester in my chest. But the phrase never arrived, and Kyle just kept staring at me in amazement.

  “How long have you been playing?” he asked.

  “About a year, but it’s not hard,” I said, shrugging. “It’s an easy song.”

  Kyle raised his eyebrows. I didn’t notice the expression of surprise and disbelief so much as how warm his amber-brown eyes seemed.

  “You weren’t playing the bass line, though,” he said. “You came up with something that sounded like Bach’s invention on a theme by Nirvana.”

  A mess of embarrassment dropped on my head. I had gotten caught in the one lie I’d told him. I hadn’t told him I’d played anything else before picking up the bass. I’d acted like a dumb girl, and I never did that.

  “Yeah, I play the cello,” I said. “Lots of Bach there.” And, over the summers, I took counterpoint lessons. And theory. But I didn’t want to seem like I was bragging. Besides, my bass line wasn’t that complicated. Certainly not Bach level.

  “Wow,” he said. I wished his eyebrows would return to a normal position on his face. I was worried they’d freeze in that position.

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “No, you’re like a musical genius or something.”

  I looked down at the bass, with its perfectly smooth black finish. It suddenly felt like my own personal, very expensive albatross. I knew what that sentence meant. Once a guy put me in the smart-girl category, he didn’t see me as a girl anymore. The next thing I knew, he’d start asking me if Melissa or Helen were single.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  I avoided his gaze. No sense in staring deeply into them now anyway, even if those eyes were so deep and brown. “It’s the g-word,” I said. I slouched backward, feeling the weight of the Rickenbacker pulling me down. Albatross.

  “You’re mad that I’m calling you a genius?” he asked. His eyebrows finally mig
rated down to their normal position, but now his face was all scrunched up with concern.

  “No, not mad exactly,” I said. “It’s just that anytime anyone uses the word, they kind of stop hanging out with me.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” he said. “I seem to recall Melissa calling you a genius the first time I met you.”

  “That’s different,” I said, trying to look him in the face and failing miserably.

  “Athena, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I think it’s hot that you’re a genius.”

  I jerked my head up to look at him. Boys didn’t say that. Before I could process what was happening, he was right in front of me. I felt his hand lift my chin, and I instinctively closed my eyes.

  I was about to have my first kiss, with the Cute Boy. I couldn’t process that, either, but somehow, it was happening.

  Krrrngggccchhhnnnggg. Neither of us had noticed that we still had guitars around our necks, and the two instruments scraped together with a loud burst of amplified metal on metal.

  Kyle popped the strap from the end of his guitar with an efficient motion and grabbed the neck of the Rickenbacker, helping me lift it over my head. Cupping his hands around my face, he pulled me in for a kiss, hard and awkward, and then another that was hard but not awkward, and then another that wasn’t either hard or awkward, but soft and warm and perfect. I thought of my favorite Catullus poem and The Princess Bride and every girl group song I heard on the oldies station, and still nothing compared to that moment. My entire body felt like it was on fire.

  We stumbled over to the rec room’s aging leather couch. I felt completely out of control, but, maybe for the first time in my life, I truly didn’t care.

  12

  The digital clock on my bedside table blinked 4:10 at me, a glowing red reminder that Sean was late for our usual Wednesday comic book excursion to Steve’s Cards & Comics.

  Steve’s occupied a storefront in an aging strip mall close to the edge of the wrong side of town. Every week, our comic book experience was pretty much the same routine: I’d buy one or two things, usually something like Love and Rockets, while Sean got his “pull” of the eight to ten comics he’d preordered. He would double-check that everything made it into his pile while I’d browse the indie comics sequestered in one tiny corner of the store, looking for any new trades that might be worthwhile, and then flip through the back issues that lined the walls in plywood bins.

  Wednesday comic shopping was the only guaranteed time we’d spend together during football season, between his practices and my youth orchestra and chamber music rehearsals. So Sean’s lateness rubbed at my nerves, but not because I thought anything had happened to him on his way home from practice. Instead, I was worried because if, for some reason, I didn’t see him today, I’d likely end up waiting a whole extra week before I’d have another chance to talk to him about Leah and Helen.

  For the past two days, Melissa and I had brainstormed every chance we got—on the phone on Labor Day, at lunch, at school orchestra practice, in carefully coded notes passed in the hall, but not in Mrs. Breaux’s class. We’d come up with nothing. Meanwhile, I’d started hearing whispering in the hallways. Yesterday, Jackie Rodriguez stopped talking as soon as I walked into the girls’ locker room to change for gym. Half the class surrounded her with shocked faces leering at my arrival, none of them bothering to play it off.

  And so, without a real plan, I decided I was going to talk with Sean about it. Only the longer he took to get home, the longer I had to think about how bad of an idea that was, and the more likely I became to chicken out. My mouth started to go cotton dry with worry.

  I threw myself on my bed. I was a terrible sister, and kind of a lousy feminist. I’d spent yesterday afternoon at a boy’s house, making out, not thinking about anything other than being at a boy’s house and making out. When I got home at seven, Helen had shot me a look so fierce I nearly disappeared in a pile of ash. Today, at least, her after-school modeling class meant I didn’t have to deal with her impatient judgment.

  I looked over at the photocopied Bikini Kill flyer I’d pinned to the corkboard over my desk to remind me of their official debut vinyl EP release next month, which I’d already mail ordered from Kill Rock Stars. What would Kathleen Hanna do? She wouldn’t sit around, getting steadily more nervous about talking to her friend. Or Tobi Vail? She had a shriek like Yoko Ono’s. I couldn’t imagine Tobi letting injustices slide by.

  I needed some inspiration. I turned to the Bikini Kill demo cassette that had lived in the tape deck of the stereo I shared with Helen since we got back from Eugene, fast-forwarding and rewinding it until I could get to the exact starting place of the song I wanted to hear. I felt chills as the record started.

  “We’re Bikini Kill, and we want revolution girl-style now!”

  It was always the same with “Double Dare Ya.” It was like hearing it for the first time, every time, chills included. Kathi’s bass thudding in time, Billy’s guitar picking up the descending pattern, with Tobi’s propulsive drumming driving the whole thing forward. Kathleen’s vocals on top, all lungs and power, beckoning whoever was listening with an energetic “Hey, girlfriend!” and a laundry list of the most awesome dares. Not playground dares, but feminist dares—to stand up for my rights to be who and what I wanted.

  It felt like it was directed at me. Well, not just me. I wasn’t that obsessive. I was tethered to reality. But a girl like me anyway.

  A girl who wasn’t Kathleen or Tobi or Kathi. Or Billy, but he was a guy. Or, for that matter, a girl who wasn’t Melissa. The kind of girl who needed to be dared. Who needed to be reminded that she could stand up for her rights, stand up for something. That she had rights in the first place. That she didn’t have to be boring and good and smart and all the things that I was. Or even if she was boring and good and smart, she could still make a difference.

  It was my anthem. Other girls might find solace in Heavens to Betsy’s “My Secret,” or identify with the pain that Kathleen sang about in “Feels Blind,” or revel in the seedy but fun underbelly of “Carnival,” but “Double Dare Ya” was for me.

  I’d always wondered why Melissa didn’t get into Bikini Kill, other than she thought their music was overly simple, but now I got it. She did stuff of her own volition. She was political to the point of self-righteousness, and she didn’t need anyone to dare her, let alone double dare her.

  But maybe that wasn’t true, either. Even Melissa was dragging her feet on the Helen thing.

  But that—the Helen thing—was something I needed to be double dared to do. I couldn’t let it fester and explode. I wasn’t ready to confront Leah, but I could talk to Sean. Not about my rights, exactly—he wasn’t a sexist jerk or anything like that—but I would need to get him on my side to stop Leah’s rumors before they took on a life of their own.

  The song took about two minutes, and then, like a true punk song, it was over. I considered rewinding it so I could infuse my entire being with double-dared-ness, but then the doorbell finally rang.

  I grabbed my purse and darted down the stairs so we could leave right away, before I lost my courage. When I opened the door, Sean stood slouched against the door frame, car keys in hand.

  “Hey! What’s the rush?” he asked as I grabbed his arm and dragged him to his car.

  “You’re late!” I said, trying to sound normal. Anxiety propelled me forward. Excuses floated up inside me, like cowardly ghosts: You shouldn’t talk with him about Leah. You’ll sound accusatory. He’ll say it’s because you two don’t like each other.

  “I’m not that—Athena, slow down!” He trotted up next to me as I got in the passenger side of his car, a used Volvo that Mrs. Estelle had bought for him because it was built like a tank.

  Until this year, Sean’s mom had driven us over to Steve’s every week, so that we could keep up with the latest releases. But Sean had gotten his driver�
�s license as soon as he turned fifteen at the beginning of the summer. Like my dad, who thought sixteen was a more magically appropriate age for a driver’s license, Mrs. Estelle had been against the idea, but Sean’s dad had taken him to the DMV on one of his visits to Baton Rouge, because he loved to be the good cop to Mrs. Estelle’s bad cop. Since Mrs. Estelle couldn’t exactly undo the driver’s license, she’d put embarrassing restrictions on Sean’s driving instead—namely, he wasn’t allowed to drive after dark, which meant Leah did most of their driving on dates.

  Fortunately, our weekly trips to Steve’s had made Mrs. Estelle’s list of approved driving destinations, and because of that, there was no better time for me to have this conversation with Sean without fear of interruption.

  “Sorry!” I tried to calm myself down, but some primal part of me kept planting the thought that the sooner we got in the car, the sooner I could ask him about Leah. But that same part of my brain wouldn’t let me ask him on the lawn, because it feared that he’d clam up and demand that I go back inside, and then I would never get anywhere, literally or figuratively.

  “Why are you acting so weird?” He squinted at me through the aviator sunglasses Leah had given him for his birthday.

  “I don’t know.” Melissa is right. You shouldn’t ask him anything, the voices of doubt said.

  “Okay, weirdo,” he said, falling into silence as he concentrated on driving. Baton Rouge had developed into a massive suburban sprawl of strip mall after strip mall, most of which were accessed by tiny service roads that provided another terrifying layer of traffic.

  “Um, hey, can I talk with you about something?” I mumbled, looking out the window. So much for my riot grrrl courage.