Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  Dad looked at me and sighed. Then he frowned and bit his lip, a habit both Helen and I had inherited.

  “I know it’s easy to think that I couldn’t have done anything,” he said. “But you should have come to me.”

  I shrugged because any answer I could give him would be rude. He was saying what a good father was supposed to say. But what Dad didn’t understand was that getting the school involved wouldn’t end things. Leah would deny everything, and people would still whisper about Helen. And chances were Leah would find some way to make things even worse.

  “Why don’t you go down and put some coffee on?” Dad gave me a half smile of encouragement, since I must have looked as sullen as I felt. “I’m going to call your mother. She deserves to know that we’ve solved part of the mystery.”

  “Are you going to tell her about the abortion stuff?” I asked, worried. “I think it would be better if Helen told her.”

  Dad shook his head. “Sorry, but the time’s long since past when Helen should have said something.”

  The smug adult wannabe in me knew he was right. But it didn’t seem fair that Helen hadn’t gotten to tell either Dad or Mom what she was going through, because I had ratted her out. She might not forgive me for that. I wasn’t sure I could forgive myself, either.

  I went down to the kitchen to put the coffee on, made some toast with butter and cinnamon sugar, and tried to read the newspaper. When Dad finally came back to the kitchen after his second call to Mom, he quizzed me for a while about all the modeling agencies in New York that Helen had her eyes on. But my knowledge base was like Lake Pontchartrain—wide and shallow—so it took about two minutes. After that, we mostly waited for her to get home.

  Part of me worried Helen would take the agent’s card and head straight to New York on a bus after her audition. Dad probably felt the same way. He hadn’t showered or changed out of his pajama pants and T-shirt, and every few minutes, he looked nervously at the clock on the microwave. He stayed on the front page of the newspaper so long that I had to ask him for it when I finished everything else. He hadn’t read a single word.

  When I finally heard Helen’s key in the lock, I looked at Dad, half expecting him to tell me to go upstairs. Instead, he motioned for me to sit down in the living room. I sank into the couch and tried to look natural, but the overstuffed chenille didn’t really lend itself to anything but slouchy TV watching.

  Unaware that Dad and I had been waiting for her for two hours, Helen bounded down the hall and into the room, punching the air with excitement. She had no reason to expect us to be home. On a normal Saturday, Dad would have been at the office, and I would have been at Melissa’s or Sean’s, or upstairs reading and listening to music.

  When she saw Dad, she froze and her eyes widened. When she saw me, she narrowed them. By sitting next to Dad on the couch, I had unforgivably crossed over to the side of parental authority.

  Dad cleared his throat and gestured for her to sit. Helen flopped into the oversize armchair that matched the couch. She tried to casually swing her legs over its arm and failed. She was too tall, and her legs hung over the edge and her back curved uncomfortably. She had to hold on to the back of the chair so she wouldn’t slide off and ended up looking ridiculous instead of nonchalant.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Dad sighed for the fortieth time this morning, and I suspected that any chance he would go easy on her had just vanished.

  “Helen, I know you went to New Orleans,” he said. “But before discovering that, I had no idea where you were. We spent the entire morning thinking you and Sara had been kidnapped or run away.”

  The innocent, inquisitive, wide-eyed gaze on Helen’s face faded, replaced with an ashen, bunched-up look. She sat up from her casual slung position to an alert, straight-backed posture, but said nothing. She was smart not to.

  “I finally got ahold of Mrs. Brouillette and heard that you were at a casting call with some other girls,” he said. “I didn’t give you permission to go. You didn’t even tell me about it, in fact.”

  Helen looked at Dad, her face expressionless. She might have been weighing what she should say, or she might have been planning what she would do. Now that she had broken a really serious rule, she might have more reason to run to New York.

  “On the other hand, I hear you got a callback from an agency,” Dad continued. “And from what Athena tells me, it’s a pretty big one.”

  Helen’s blue eyes flashed with the slightest flicker of hope. Her fingers tightened around the arms of the chair. Dad could, at any point, snuff out that tiny flame.

  “This puts me in a very bad position,” he said. “If I punish you, you miss out on a good opportunity. If I let you go to New York, I’m rewarding inconsiderate, rude, and immature behavior.”

  Helen shrank back into the cushions. Dad had never been so angry with her, at least as long as I could remember.

  “My question to you, before I decide on anything, is why did you do this?” he asked.

  The answer would determine Helen’s punishment. He could ground her for a year, or he could revoke modeling classes or the New York trip or anything else. But I knew something Helen didn’t. Dad already knew about the rumors. Knowing him, though, he wanted to hear it from her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Dad waited for Helen to say something more substantial, but his hands relaxed for the first time today. I think he was weighing whether to bring “disappointment” out from his arsenal. That would be the surest way to maximize Helen’s guilt. It certainly worked on me.

  “It’s pretty clear that you weren’t thinking, and that’s not like you,” he said, shaking his head. “Why didn’t you ask for my permission to go? You had every opportunity to, but you didn’t.”

  Helen looked at her hands, which was an improvement over her looking at me like it was my fault she’d been caught. I could understand his question because he probably would have let her go. But maybe probably wasn’t enough for Helen.

  “I didn’t think you’d let me,” she said quietly. “You hate my modeling. You wouldn’t let me do it at all if Grandma wasn’t paying for it. And if I’d asked you, and you’d said no, I would have missed my chance. I wouldn’t have been able to sneak out. You’d have kept me on lockdown the whole weekend.”

  Dad shook his head, but I had to agree with Helen. If he didn’t want her to go to a modeling call he knew about, there was no way she would have been allowed to spend last night at Sara’s.

  “Putting aside what I think of your modeling class, I’m disappointed in you.” There it was, the big word that neither of us could stand. It was hard for me to watch Helen as she shifted in the chair. I could tell she was struggling not to cry. “You didn’t know if I’d say yes, so you decided to preemptively sneak out?” he said. “That’s not the kind of behavior I expect from you. What were you going to tell me about the callback?”

  Helen shrugged. “I was going to say a scout came to our modeling class.”

  “And you expected me to believe that?”

  Red crept up Helen’s neck to her cheeks as she realized how silly the notion sounded. Dad frequently voiced his opinion that her class was mostly made up of kids whose parents had delusions of grandeur about the opportunities modeling school might bring their precious babies. He had a point about that, but Helen stood out among them. Still, it would have been hard to believe that a scout would show up there to discover her.

  “Is there something you need to tell me about school?” Dad asked.

  Helen shot me a quick look of hurt betrayal that hit me right in the chest. I wasn’t happy with myself, either, but what other option did we have? Everything else we’d tried hadn’t worked.

  “What about school?” she asked, shifting on the chenille chair, a little squirm that told me she was thinking about lying. “
Things are—” She stopped, seeming unable to bring herself to say the word fine, because they weren’t. “Actually...things are... Things aren’t fine at all.”

  She paused for a second. I hoped she wouldn’t cry. Helen’s crying in the mall had left me feeling helpless, and I’d felt helpless since then. So far, I’d been needed this morning, and it kept me from thinking about Sean or Leah or anyone else. I wanted to keep it that way.

  Helen didn’t cry, though. She just sank back against the chair in defeat.

  “Athena told you?” she asked. She looked at me, but she didn’t seem mad. Not like earlier anyway.

  “Yes,” he said. Dad looked defeated, too. “Can you please tell me why you didn’t come to me when you started having trouble?”

  Helen shrugged. Maybe she was relieved not to have to tell him the rumors herself. I wouldn’t want to tell him if people had been saying that I was having sex with a racist freak and then had an abortion. There was always a small chance he would believe some tiny seed of the stories. I couldn’t handle that, and I doubted Helen could, either.

  “It was too embarrassing,” she said. “And I didn’t think you could do anything. Leah and Aimee are unbeatable.”

  Dad sighed. I’d never heard him sigh as much as this morning. I thought he was about to give up on parenting.

  “We’re going to talk with your principal,” he said. Helen opened her mouth, but he put up his hand firmly. “Don’t argue. Monday morning, I’m calling him.”

  Helen looked to me with pleading eyes. We both knew talking with Principal Richard would be disastrous.

  “As for modeling,” he added, “I have to discuss that with your mother. But for now, you are grounded. That means no more modeling sleepovers, no parties, nothing. If you want to go anywhere after school, you have to go with your sister or with me. Otherwise, you’ll be here, doing your homework.”

  Helen’s shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly. She knew better than to complain. Being grounded sucked, but it wouldn’t be forever, and there was still a chance she’d get to attend the callback. And as for Principal Richard, well... I hoped things wouldn’t turn out as badly as we both feared.

  16

  Mrs. Bonnecaze read a passage from the Bible in her slight Southern drawl. I wasn’t paying attention. She could have been reading from the Kama Sutra and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I knew that right then, Dad and Helen were in the principal’s office. Or maybe they had shuttled Helen into the guidance counselor’s office by now, where Mrs. Turner or Mr. Roget would grill her about the rumors. Of course, they would say things about how important it was to let an adult know as soon as possible when someone spread gossip or acted like a bully, but they wouldn’t actually do anything to help. With those two, the burden of proof lay squarely on the victim, like last year with Melissa’s Suicidal Tendencies patch.

  “Please send Athena Graves to the guidance office. Mrs. Turner needs to see her,” a secretary announced over the classroom intercom.

  Twenty-two pairs of eyes swiveled to look at me as I stood up from my desk. No one liked being called to the guidance office, unless you were a senior and they had good news about scholarships. I wondered if anyone had seen Dad marching Helen, unwilling and miserable, into the principal’s office this morning.

  I grabbed my books. I might not return before my next class. Mrs. Turner tended to keep students in her office until she got the information she wanted, and it was almost never about the kind of things a guidance counselor should focus on. If you went in for scholarship advice, she might ask what boys you were dating. If you had a crisis at home, she would pry and push, testing multiple angles until you revealed every detail about your life and the lives of everyone around you. All of this was supposed to help, but it usually felt like an interrogation.

  My walk through the empty hallways brought echoes with every step. I didn’t know why they would ask me to go to the office. I didn’t have anything to do with Leah and Aimee’s lies. But I supposed they had to ask me about them, since I was Helen’s sister.

  When I pushed open the door to the main guidance office, I was relieved to see that no one else was inside. I didn’t really feel like making small talk with other students who might also be waiting for our school’s form of “guidance.”

  Finally, Mrs. Turner, wearing a flowing purple blouse, emerged from her back office and smiled at me, her black eyebrows pulled together in an expression of concern above her button-round dark eyes. She rushed to my side and pulled me in for a hug. I almost leaped out of her way, but I didn’t have time, so I stood there passively instead, my arms pinned down by her embrace.

  “Athena, I am so sorry to hear what’s going on with your sister!” Mrs. Turner exclaimed, loud enough for the entire office to hear, which thankfully only meant the department secretary.

  “Thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say, because I didn’t trust her hugs or her voiced concern. I’d heard too many stories of how people had told her things in confidence and she’d somehow betrayed them under the guise of “helping.”

  Mrs. Turner led me into her office and motioned for me to sit down in the supposedly comfortable chair across from her desk. Its itchy orange upholstery and awkward wooden armrests never offered anything but restless irritation. I think she bought the chair so that anyone sitting in it would confess to their wrongdoings sooner, like a spotlight in a prison cell. Even Sister Catherine, the dean of discipline, didn’t have such an uncomfortable chair in her office.

  Mrs. Turner flexed back on her own chair, a bonded leather thing that could have graced the office of a high-powered CEO. She sighed heavily, paused, and sighed again, her face never letting go of that look of heightened concern.

  “Now, Athena, I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re in here.”

  I would guess it’s because my dad forced my sister to talk about the crap she’s been facing since school started last month, but that’s just me. I thought of a few other snarky responses, too, none of which I could possibly say aloud, and instead listened to her reasons.

  “Your father has some concerns about your sister’s well-being.” She looked at me with a very serious expression. “She’s much more withdrawn than when school started. According to Mrs. Bonnecaze, she’s dropped out of the pro-life club, even though she was the leader of her middle school club and had been so excited to join.”

  “She didn’t drop out,” I said, ready to fight for Helen. “She got kicked out. Angelle said—”

  Mrs. Turner put up her hand, and I shut up. “I think we know that our most reliable source in this situation is Mrs. Bonnecaze, and she said Helen quit. I’m going to take her word for it.”

  Even if Helen had “quit,” it was only after Angelle had strong-armed her, after everyone had told her how embarrassing it was for them to have her in the club. “But—”

  “That’s enough, Athena.” Mrs. Turner pursed her lips at me. “I am not here to argue with you. I’m here because I am worried about your sister. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, trying to show that I, too, was concerned about Helen. I didn’t quite buy Mrs. Turner’s “worry,” but arguing with her clearly wasn’t going to work. And Mrs. Turner required visible signs as “evidence” of caring, like head bobbing and extreme frowns, and ahs and mmm-hmms, that I had to remind myself to perform.

  “Now, Athena, people have been telling me things about your sister,” she said. “And your father seems to think these reports stem from the malicious intentions of another student. I know this is a very difficult thing to ask of you, and please forgive me, but is there any truth—any truth at all—in what people are saying? It will help Helen so much if you can be honest with us.”

  I started to frown for real. That “seems to think” didn’t sound like Mrs. Turner believed my dad, and neither did her suggestion of my helping Helen by “being honest.” She thought I knew somethin
g, and, much worse, she definitely believed the gossip—not Dad, and certainly not Helen.

  “You’re joking, right?” I dug my fingers into the arms of the chair, trying to contain my anger. “Helen’s fourteen. She’s home every afternoon after school. Mrs. Estelle—Mrs. Mitchell, Sean’s mom—makes sure we’re home every day. And there’s no way she could have been seeing Drew Lambert last summer. We both spent the whole summer with our mom in Oregon.”

  Mrs. Turner looked at me with an unwavering frown, her forehead a tier of wrinkles and her small lips pursed together. Finally, she took in a deep breath.

  “Now, Athena, I know you want to protect your sister, but I’m concerned about what these behaviors she’s been exhibiting say to me,” Mrs. Turner said. “Her skirts are quite short. And she has a lot of male admirers. Isn’t it possible she went too far with one of them?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Helen’s skirts weren’t short; she was tall. My sister was being called a slut because she had giraffe legs and Dad wasn’t on top of back-to-school shopping. And she’d only worn my spare skirts for maybe a week until her special order came in! I searched Mrs. Turner’s face, trying to find a glimmer of genuine concern in her almost-black eyes.

  “I know you don’t want to think it,” she continued. “But her behavior is consistent with someone who is feeling a tremendous amount of regret. The withdrawal from activities, the acting out. Your father told me about her desperate attempt at running away. Can’t you see this is a cry for help?”

  I took a deep breath, held it, and counted back from ten. I never, ever said anything snotty back to a teacher, or a guidance counselor, for that matter. But none of them had ever said anything as upsetting as Mrs. Turner just had. I asked myself what any member of Bikini Kill would do in these circumstances. I tried to channel their ability to stand up to authority—“You. Do. Have. Rights!” was as good a reminder as any.