Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  “I don’t think it’s a cry for anything other than help with some malicious girls spreading lies about her.” Waves of anger vibrated through me, and my grip on the arms of my chair was the only thing preventing my hands from balling into fists. “And if you think Helen’s hiding something, go right ahead. Frankly, I’d be withdrawn, too, if the whole school was whispering lies about me.” I looked the guidance counselor straight in the eye. “You might want to look at yourself, Mrs. Turner, because if you’re willing to treat an innocent student this way, it might just be that you don’t want to bother with the real problems at this school.”

  Mrs. Turner’s mousy round eyes opened wide. I think she’d expected me to crack under the gentle pressure of shaming Helen, not to tell her how to do her job. She took what felt like an hour to reply, letting my words fully rebound off the walls.

  “Now, Athena,” she said, rocking back in her executive’s chair. “I know you believe your sister is the victim of idle gossip, but we’ve already heard from two other students who are concerned about your sister. And they say she confessed to them about her indiscretion this summer.”

  Leah and Aimee. It had to be. I couldn’t believe that they had gone so far as to talk with Mrs. Turner. Spreading rumors among the student body was one thing, but whispering them to one of our guidance counselors took things to a whole different level.

  “I bet they did, and I can guess exactly who they were. Why are you so determined to believe the worst of Helen?” I demanded, shaking my head in disgust. “You haven’t even questioned whether Leah or Aimee might have made it up, or if this supposed affair was even geographically possible. We were at our mom’s house all summer. Really.”

  Mrs. Turner rested her chin on her interlocking fingers. She looked more and more like a rodent, maybe a squirrel eating a nut. Her ersatz concern never left her face, but something I’d said interested her.

  “I can’t tell you who brought the information to me,” she said too calmly. “But I do take it very seriously.”

  “I just told you who brought the information to you. I already know.” I sat back in the chair and crossed my arms, seething.

  “As you know,” she continued, gesturing to the student handbook on her desk. “It’s our school’s policy to support life at all times. Should anything come to light supporting the veracity of these assertions, Helen will be expelled. Because there’s no proven evidence about your sister so far, I doubt Mr. Richard and Sister Catherine will take any action. However, for her sake, we will be banning her from participating in clubs for now, and we are communicating to the student council president that her name be disqualified from the upcoming homecoming court ballot. After all, if this is mere gossip, as you say, it will do her no good to subject her to that level of scrutiny.”

  Mrs. Turner smiled sweetly at me.

  I didn’t know Helen was in consideration for the homecoming court ballot, not that it surprised me. But the dance was a month away, so blocking her now seemed more like punishment for what she hadn’t done than protecting her from what had been done to her.

  I gripped the wooden arms of my chair again, afraid that if I let go, I would punch Mrs. Turner in the teeth.

  “You need to go back to class. You wouldn’t want to miss any more religious teachings,” Mrs. Turner said. She wrote out a pink slip for me to return to class. “Perhaps you can help guide your sister back to the correct path that Mrs. Bonnecaze is kind enough to present to you.”

  I yanked the slip from her hand and let the door slam behind me on my way out of the guidance office.

  Religious teachings. Mrs. Turner probably missed a few.

  17

  I seethed through the rest of religion class. Through Mrs. Bonnecaze ending the period by leading us in a prayer for the federal appeals court to uphold Louisiana’s abortion ban and save the unborn, which she’d never done before and suddenly seemed like it had extra meaning. Then through Mrs. Breaux showing us a video of Galileo’s gravity experiment at the Tower of Pisa in physics class. Through her rewinding it, and showing it again, because that was her thing she did when she didn’t want to teach from the book and the video was too short.

  Everything Mrs. Turner had said made me want to punch her, or whatever easy target was in close proximity. I should have been able to convince her that Helen hadn’t had an abortion. I should have been more direct about how wrong she was. I should have said something as I left.

  My anger kept on burning all the way up until lunch. I stomped angrily through the cafeteria, my lunch bag a crumpled mess in my hand. I was supposed to meet Melissa for another brainstorming session, but I didn’t see how I could be productive around other people in this state. I was glad that Kyle had a photography club meeting during lunch today. I didn’t want him to think that I was mad at him.

  It was finally cool enough to sit outside for lunch, and after my encounter with Mrs. Turner, I was in no mood to socialize or deal with the inevitable situation of someone trying to ask what was wrong. My plan was to sit in the school’s outdoor amphitheater, where we were allowed to eat on sunny days—and where I hopefully wouldn’t be bothered.

  Melissa, unfortunately, wasn’t willing to leave me alone.

  “Athena, wait up!” she called after me, struggling to keep up while carrying her tray of industrial pizza.

  I pushed ahead through the double doors that led to the amphitheater and marched up the concrete steps. It was more crowded out here than I’d expected, but it was the usual crowd of theater kids and a couple clusters of band kids. They were the kind of people who were either enmeshed in their own drama or too nice to care about yours. I climbed past everyone, all the way up to the top step, where I sat forcefully, anger making my hands tremble.

  “What’s going on?” Melissa asked, wheezing out a few harried breaths. She dropped down next to me, her backpack sliding down one arm as she struggled to keep the tray balanced with the other.

  I shook my head. Tears sprang to my eyes, and my voice shook. “This school. I’ve had it. Mrs. Turner believes Leah and Aimee’s version of events, and now Helen’s being punished for no reason. And I’m done.”

  I wasn’t articulating what had happened with Mrs. Turner very well, but Melissa caught the rage wafting off me. She didn’t make a joke or say something political and snarky. She waited for me to tell her what happened.

  “You know, I wanted to believe this school wasn’t run by hypocrites and assholes,” I said. “But no, Mrs. Turner has somehow decided Helen can’t be on the homecoming court, even though it’s supposed to be a student-designated event, because she believes that Helen had an abortion. It’s not fair.” I sounded like a five-year-old, but I couldn’t stop my frustration from coming out in an angry stream. “Can you believe that? And she’s making it even worse—Helen can’t do any extracurricular activities at all. Who would do that? And how can she—she’s just a guidance counselor! She shouldn’t have the authority to do that, but she’s probably talking to all the teachers right now to make sure it happens.”

  Melissa sighed. “I hear you.” Using her hand as a visor to shield her eyes from the blinding sun, she squinted at the far corner of the amphitheater. “Is that your sister and her entourage over there?”

  Sure enough, Helen, Sara, and Jennifer sat in a little huddle by the amphitheater’s far column, nearly disappearing into its shadows. They’d picked a much more secluded spot than Melissa and I had, which meant they’d gotten here much earlier. Knowing Helen, she’d already planned her hiding spot by the end of her own talk with Mrs. Turner.

  “C’mon,” Melissa said, grabbing her tray with one hand and pushing herself up from the ground with the other. “We’re going to help Helen. We’re the smartest girls in school. If we put our minds together with your sister’s freaky social skills, we can come up with something. It’ll make you feel better. It’ll make her feel better. Hell, I think
it’ll even make me feel better.”

  Helen’s eyebrows first went up in surprise when she saw Melissa and me. Then her eyes narrowed in an ungenerous squint, and I shrank back from the power of her daggers. It was clear she blamed me for this morning’s events.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, her voice sour and defensive.

  “We’ve come to extend our help,” Melissa said, gesturing like a dignitary entering into parley with a foreign delegation.

  “You’ve done enough damage, Athena, don’t you think?” Helen said to me, not looking at Melissa.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding her gaze. “I never thought Dad would drag you to Mrs. Turner’s office. Maybe to Mr. Richard’s office, but not Mrs. Turner. Anyway, Mrs. Turner told me Leah and Aimee had already visited her, so it was bound to happen at some point even without my telling Dad.”

  Helen looked at Sara and Jennifer, who nodded like bobbleheads in a moving truck, and then back to me. She motioned for Melissa and me to sit down.

  “Damn it,” she said, her shoulders falling. “We were right. So what’s the plan?”

  “To get complete and utter revenge on Aimee and Leah,” Melissa said imperiously. “And to restore Helen’s honor.”

  “Can you cut the medieval crap?” If this was going to work, Melissa needed to take things seriously. I gave her a look, and she seemed to get it.

  “Right,” she said, backing off. “We need to be smart about this.”

  “What’s the plan?” Helen repeated. She looked suspiciously from me to Melissa over her cheese sandwich. “Everything you’ve done so far hasn’t worked. It’s just made everything worse, and you’ve done it all behind my back. So I need to know what you’re going to do next.”

  I didn’t have a plan, but Melissa’s face lit up.

  “We need to think like PR people.” Melissa gestured at Helen excitedly with her cafeteria French bread pizza. “All of us.”

  She turned from Helen to Sara, Jennifer, and me. I guess we were “all of us.” The way she said it made me uncomfortable, like she and Helen were the leaders of a rebellion, and Jennifer, Sara, and I were mere foot soldiers. Or possibly minions. At any rate, not on equal footing. I couldn’t imagine it made Jennifer and Sara happy, either.

  “We have certain advantages,” Melissa continued, looking at each of us in turn. “We have a fair amount of talent, and a large network of friends, if we act together. There are as many people who want to see Leah and Aimee get taken down as there are people who believe them.”

  I didn’t like the way this was going. After all the riot grrrl zines I’d been reading, I didn’t want our focus to be on taking Leah and Aimee down—even though a big part of me did want to take them down. But that wasn’t the way to win.

  I interrupted Melissa before she could go on a rant. “I don’t want to take them down.”

  “What? Why not?” Helen asked, throwing up her arms like she couldn’t believe what I was saying. Part of me couldn’t believe what I was saying, either.

  “I don’t want to be like them,” I said, shaking my head. “They suck, I know. But do we want to be just like them? Like, is this about something, or is it just more bitchiness back and forth? We need to make sure that we’re fixing things, not just turning into mirror versions of them.”

  Melissa looked at Helen, who looked at Sara, who looked at Jennifer, who looked at me in a round-robin of looks. I wasn’t sure if they agreed with me, or if they were just humoring me. But they were at least listening.

  “Fair enough. That might be a better strategy,” Melissa said. She was probably disappointed in my decision not to, say, go light Leah’s locker on fire. “Helen?”

  Helen nodded, which cued Jennifer and Sara to do the same. They looked a little scared of me and Melissa, though.

  “As long as people stop thinking I’m a super slut who had an abortion, I don’t care,” Helen said, more than a little flippant. I cringed, knowing exactly what was going to come next.

  “Ugh!” Melissa slammed her hand down on her lunch tray so hard that her plate jumped. “How many times do I have to think this in my head before I explode? It doesn’t matter. So what if you did? It shouldn’t matter if you did sleep with Drew Lambert or whoever, or if you had an abortion. There’s nothing to be ashamed about!”

  Helen sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then a defiant look filled her eyes, and she squared her shoulders.

  “Melissa, I’m pro-life,” she said firmly. “That hasn’t changed.” She looked at me. “No matter how many magazine articles you throw at me.”

  I didn’t throw it at you, I stopped myself from saying.

  Melissa took a deep breath. We had to find some common ground, or this wasn’t going to work. Helen couldn’t fix her problems alone, or with just my help. But Melissa had a lot less patience than I did, and Jennifer and Sara were unknown quantities. We all hated Leah and Aimee, yes, but that was the entire basis of our alliance.

  We were super screwed.

  “I’m not trying to change your opinion,” Melissa said. “But if you knew Jennifer or Sara had had an abortion, you’d forgive them, right?”

  “But they wouldn’t,” Helen said, shaking her head. “They’re both in the abstinence club.”

  They both nodded, this time Jennifer enthusiastically, Sara, a little less so. Sometimes, I wished Helen would be a little less stubborn. I wished she and Melissa had something in common.

  And then, the perfect thought hit me.

  “Eddie Vedder,” I said, remembering a cutout of a certain grunge babe plastered in Melissa’s locker last year.

  “What?” Helen and Melissa turned to me.

  “Ed-die Ved-der,” I said, more slowly this time. “You both love him. Melissa, don’t lie. I know you still have those pinups of him. Helen, you know he wrote in Spin about his girlfriend getting an abortion. I know you didn’t read it before you ran off this weekend, but I left the article on your bed this morning. And you can be mad at me about that if you want.” She opened her mouth to protest, but I kept going. “But you listen to his music all the time. You have to have some connection to what he’s saying.”

  I had her in a corner. It was practically the only thing she played on our stereo, to the point that I had placed a moratorium on listening to Pearl Jam in our room. I would never be able to talk to a guy named Jeremy again without wondering if he had been a violently aggressive child.

  Helen scowled at me. She hated when I was right.

  “I guess so,” she said slowly. “But liking what he says in some things doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly be pro-choice.”

  “Here’s the deal, though. You can be pro-life and still respect that other people, like Melissa and me, are pro-choice.” I glanced around the group. Jennifer looked scared, but Sara was nodding. Melissa was about to jump in, so I shook my head at her and turned back to Helen. “You don’t have to be pro-choice to think Mrs. Turner—and the rest of the school—is wrong,” I continued. “They’re punishing you for something you didn’t do, and for something that shouldn’t be their business. Besides, what kind of message does that send to the guys? They just get off scot-free?”

  Three months ago, Helen would have led the charge against a girl who supposedly had an abortion. Now I could see her weighing the fairness of it all in her mind. Finally, she shrugged.

  “Well, no one’s going to let Drew Lambert on the homecoming ballot, ever,” Helen said. “He’s a guy. And if guys were allowed on the homecoming court, he’d be too ugly.”

  She’d sailed right past the point into the shallow waters of appearance and reputation, without considering how or why her own reputation landed on those same shoals. For her, this was about the fact that she didn’t do it, not a question about the fairness of punishing someone who’d had an abortion.

  “That’s true,” Melissa said. Her ca
lm tone surprised me. I’d thought she was about to turn this into one of her political soapbox rants, but she sounded like she was following my lead for once. “But think more about Athena’s point. What kind of message can we send, to counter it?”

  She looked at me, expecting me to support her with some miracle words. I didn’t have them. I had managed to get Helen to stay for a few more seconds, but I didn’t have a lot of hope that we could find neutral political ground. Not now, and maybe not ever with this topic.

  “Eddie Vedder,” Jennifer said, repeating what I’d just said. Her face turned red as we turned and looked at her. She slammed her hand against her mouth. After realizing we weren’t going to stop looking at her, she removed her hand and sighed. “He wrote pro-choice on his arm on Unplugged. It’s a message.”

  “But I’m not pro-choice!” Helen howled, her face red. Sara shrank back into the column’s shadows, like she was trying to get out of range of Helen’s voice.

  “You don’t have to be,” Sara said in a calm voice that wallpapered over the giant fissure in our political opinions. “But we can do something like that. Like those girls in Sassy. I think they’re called riot grrrls? Write on things. Maybe not our arms, but on things.”

  The girl was good at moderating what she said to make it sound less threatening. She had to be, if she’d managed to stay in Helen’s inner circle for this long. But she was onto something—if we could agree on a message.

  “That’s...a really good idea,” Melissa said. She took out her composition notebook, flipped it to an empty page, and clicked the pen in her hand. We were about to get down to business.

  Writing on things at school, like walls and lockers, seemed like a bad idea to me. The idea of visibility, though, I could work with. A tiny plan started to gather in my head, like productive storm clouds.

  The last few times I’d tried to think fast had been a disaster—witness my first lunch with Kyle. But he’d had the Clash patch, and Bikini Kill and Clinton/Gore buttons on his backpack, so I knew what kind of person he was, and where he stood on things. I’d been wrong about his interest in Bikini Kill, but the rest told me something.