I smiled as the idea formed. Buttons. Nothing against them in the dress code, as long as they were on our backpacks and not on our actual uniforms.
“Melissa, do you have a button maker?” I asked.
Melissa snorted. “Do I have a button maker? Of course I have a button maker. Who do you think I am? I’m a political activist.” Helen winced at the words political activist, because we all knew it meant political activism she didn’t agree with. But Melissa kept going. “Plus, my mom was a Girl Scout troop leader until I quit last year. We have anything you want for any kind of arts and crafts project. Screens for printing! Puff paint! Fabric scraps! Plain white T-shirts! Lanyard string for friendship bracelets!” She emphatically counted each option out on her fingers. “What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t think we need friendship bracelets,” I said. This wasn’t middle school. “I was thinking more along the lines of guerilla campaign buttons. We can figure out what to put on them later. But people would see them. We’d have to make them ambiguous enough that the school wouldn’t realize what they’re about, but we could gradually add more, and then get people on Helen’s side, you know?”
Helen and her clique nodded in agreement. All their nodding would have annoyed me, except now, they were nodding at me—no, with me.
“I like the way you think, Graves,” Melissa said. She turned to Helen et al. “And it gives me some ideas. Four o’clock, my house. In the meantime, think of some slogans. Try to keep it simple. We’re going to war, and we need propaganda.”
18
Melissa had turned her room into a DIY command post by the time I got there with Helen, Sara, and Jennifer. She’d fanned out our supplies in a wide circle, with different staging areas for the various kinds of propaganda production.
In the corner near her desk, she’d covered the floor in a layer of newspaper and set up a screen-printing station, which waited for someone to cut the transparencies with an effective slogan. Beside the screen-printing frames, she placed a stack of fabric scraps, which would become patches for backpacks and wherever else we could get people to put them. Same thing with the button station on the opposite side of the room, near her fluffy pink satin-covered canopy bed. Melissa had apparently begged her mom for that princess bed when she was five, but now it stuck out in a room that otherwise screamed punk rock rebellion.
Melissa had stopped at a craft store on the way home to get more button supplies. From the looks of it, she planned to make about five hundred. I don’t know where she thought she would find that many people to wear them.
To complete the scene, she’d propped a large dry-erase board up against her vanity mirror. The board gave us our first task: find a slogan. Melissa leaned against the vanity as well, dry-erase marker in hand, dressed in military fatigues. She’d gotten them from one of the army surplus/hunting stores in town, and she wore them every time she did anything messy, like screen printing, making signs for protests, hair dyeing, or helping her dad outside. Paint covered the camo fatigues, but she looked the part of a general rallying her troops.
Except she didn’t have a slogan. None of us did. Everything we’d thought of sounded too preachy or too vague, or wouldn’t fit on a one-inch button. So the construction paper stayed in stacks by the button maker, and the fabric squares sat in their tidy pile by the screen-printing station. And every passing minute made me think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“This isn’t going to work,” Helen said. She sat on the floor, Jennifer and Sara flanking her. I was starting to be able to tell the two of them apart, an easier task now that they’d changed out of their school uniforms. Sara wore an oversize Pixies shirt. Black Francis’s head was bigger than she was. Jennifer, on the other hand, took fashion cues from Helen, from her black floral shirt with roses to her cutoff jeans to her black tights, down to her black platform Mary Janes.
Jennifer and Sara exchanged a worried glance. They probably didn’t feel any more comfortable than I did, and they certainly weren’t used to Melissa’s take-charge demeanor.
“Propaganda should be short and memorable, like Loose Lips Sink Ships, or Make Love, Not War,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “We should try to think of something that maybe rhymes, but isn’t cheesy. Or that plays off other slogans we already know.”
Helen and her friends looked at me like they’d never heard the expression Loose Lips Sink Ships. Okay, so it was old, and also, they weren’t in American history yet. And there was no telling if they’d even get that far in the course—judging by how far behind my class already was after one month, we would be lucky to get to the roaring twenties, let alone more modern history.
“Are there any slogans we liked that were too long, that maybe we could shorten?” Melissa searched the crossed-out phrases on the dry-erase board.
No one answered. My muse had left for a year’s vacation the moment I suggested the propaganda campaign. Saying “Eddie Vedder” again wasn’t going to work, either.
“I liked Forgiveness,” Jennifer said, looking toward Helen for approval. They’d been in the pro-life club together. It figured she would like the least direct slogan.
“That’s too vague,” Sara said, shaking her head. “No one would know we were talking about Helen.”
Plus, it was super preachy. Forgiveness? No one was going to put that on their backpack. I could imagine how it would go over with the cynical crowd, like everyone in the junior and senior classes. Or someone like Trip Wilson. He was nice enough, but I couldn’t see him or any of the other football players wearing something that said Forgiveness.
“And then they would think that I did it,” Helen said, crossing her arms.
She had a point. Forgiveness implied that Helen had done something wrong. Plus, if our campaign—at least, from Melissa’s perspective—was to say the punishment was wrong even if Helen had had an abortion, it didn’t help to be sanctimonious.
“God, so what if you did?” Sara exclaimed suddenly. “It doesn’t matter! It’s none of their business! And it seems jerkish that anyone is talking about it at all, like, no matter what, they’re in the wrong. Isn’t Roe v. Wade about privacy anyway?”
Everyone turned to stare at Sara. Melissa’s eyes were wide, and Helen’s glare could have turned Medusa to stone, instead of the other way around. Jennifer blinked hard, like she didn’t believe this was reality.
I was just as shocked as the rest of them. The speech could have come out of Melissa’s mouth, except she would have laced it with an extra creamy center of profanity and a sprinkling of disgust for Operation Rescue or President Bush. I wondered if there was more to Sara than I’d thought. But then again, maybe she was substituting Melissa as her new leader instead of Helen. Helen’s warning glower told me I wasn’t the only one who thought this.
“I don’t want anyone to think Helen did it,” she said, backing away from Roe v. Wade as fast as she could under Helen’s disapproving gaze. “It’s just that what’s wrong here is that people are talking about her at all. Like, they don’t really care if it is true or not, they’re just in for the gossip.”
“So what if I didn’t, either, right?” Helen’s glare transformed into a look of muted disappointment. “They just keep saying it. It almost doesn’t matter.”
Melissa wrote So What? on the dry-erase board in small neat print without adding to the argument. I was glad she didn’t, because she might have ruined the whole thing if she stepped between Helen and Sara. Or she might have ended up with a freshman follower.
“I think we need to work around this,” I said, pointing to the board. “So what if you did? But also, so what if you didn’t? The school is punishing you either way, right?”
Helen relaxed against Melissa’s bed. She no longer looked poised for a fight for her innocence, but I was starting to worry that she was giving up.
“I could get behind something like that,”
she said, looking at the floor. “I guess.”
“Write that down, Melissa,” I said. “How about ‘So what if she did?’ and ‘So what if she didn’t?’”
“Those are way too long,” Melissa said. “I like So What?, just by itself. It’s simple, yet defiant.”
Melissa would like the most punk rock version of the slogan, but I didn’t see Helen going along with anything that didn’t lead to clearing her name. Fighting abortion stigma by flipping the bird to it wasn’t on her agenda.
Helen shook her head violently, her blond hair whipping around her face, her eyes closed tight in a childish protest. She hadn’t made that expression since she was five and Mom told us she was moving out to go to grad school at Duke, but it made me a little less worried about her giving up.
“No,” she said. “No. It has to imply I didn’t do it. I get what you’re saying about ‘so what if I did do it.’ But I want people to at least think for a minute about why they believe the gossip in the first place.”
Helen had a point, and it was only fair to let Helen decide, since the rumors were about her.
Jennifer raised her hand like she was in class. She hadn’t said anything since liking Forgiveness. “Do we have to do just one?” she asked.
“No, there are no rules here.” I felt too much like a teacher calling on her, not just because she had her hand raised, but because she looked up at me with terrified eyes like I was going to yell at her. “And you don’t have to raise your hand.”
“Well, I think that ‘So what if she did?’ and ‘So what if she didn’t?’ could work as a pair,” Jennifer said. “So that both sides are represented.”
Helen looked at Melissa, whose leaning posture remained casual. Helen, though, looked anything but casual. Knowing my sister, she had major doubts about the potential success of our campaign, but her own attempts at regaining her reputation—not to mention her modeling escapade—had backfired. So she sat there listening for a lot longer than she normally would have.
“They aren’t that great, are they?” Helen asked, looking at the board like she could find a better slogan among the ones we’d already rejected.
“No, but they’re memorable,” Melissa said. “In that it’s pretty ballsy to say ‘So what?’ to anything at our school.”
With their twenty clubs each—well, before Helen got kicked out anyway—the three of them weren’t the type to say “So what?” to anything. But Helen nodded in agreement, and Jennifer and Sara followed as expected.
“Okay, so we’re going to do the pair of them,” Melissa said, underlining them both on the board. “Correct?”
“But what about the buttons?” Sara asked. “They’re kind of small. And it’s not like initials would work. They don’t spell anything. And they’re the same for both.”
The room let out a collective sigh. Just when we thought we’d had something.
I couldn’t let the momentum disappear.
“How about So What? on just the buttons?” I asked. “And the longer ones on the patches? Helen, would you be okay with that?”
“It’s not ideal,” Helen said with a sigh. “But I could live with it.”
Finally, we had our slogans, which nobody really loved. But we had them, so we got to work at the assembly stations. Melissa showed Jennifer and Helen how to cut out letters on the transparencies for screen printing on patches. Jennifer turned out to be a natural at creating hand-drawn fonts.
While Melissa worked with Jennifer and Helen, I taught Sara how to make buttons. I think we were stuck on the least messy duties for a reason—Melissa was also cleaning up a jar of paint that Sara had knocked over earlier, which no doubt made her skeptical about Sara’s potential for screen printing. But helping Melissa with all her various political projects in the past two years meant I could make buttons in my sleep, and even if Sara wasn’t a natural at it, I could fix any mistakes she made.
After demonstrating how to make buttons, I took Sara upstairs to Melissa’s dad’s home office, where we photocopied Jennifer’s tidy So What? on colored paper. We printed some with white letters on a black background, too. Those were my favorites. So stark. In your face. Perfect.
“How do they get the names for the homecoming court ballot?” Sara asked after we returned to Melissa’s room.
The question felt really out of the blue, but the way Sara asked it, I could tell she had an idea that she was holding back.
I didn’t seem like someone who would know, but, weirdly, I did. Last year, Melissa had been nominated and tried to withdraw her name because she thought the homecoming court was an exercise in sexism that encouraged girls to compete with each other for shallow reasons. But they wouldn’t let her withdraw, so she campaigned on behalf of the other girl, who ended up winning.
“The student council nominates them,” I said. “I don’t know how they decide who gets nominated, exactly. There were two girls each on the ballot for freshmen and sophomores, four for the juniors, and a massive eight seniors. After the election, one freshman, one sophomore, two juniors, and four girls from the senior class make up the homecoming court. No one knows which of the four seniors will be the homecoming queen until the homecoming game. And then they all wear their sashes and prance around like princesses at the dance.”
Sara pushed down the button maker with an angry whump.
“That’s a stupid process.” Sara’s tanned skin had grown red from effort. “Why let a dozen kids make decisions for the whole school?”
“Most people would agree with you.”
“It’s gross anyway, pitting girls against girls in a popularity contest,” she said. “And why aren’t there boys on our homecoming court? Don’t most other schools have a homecoming king, too?”
“I have no idea.” I was more interested in the quality control of our stack of buttons than the court’s gender imbalance. But she had a point. Our school treated the homecoming court like a beauty pageant.
“Is there any way to get someone’s name on the ballot for sure?” Sara asked, pushing down again with a great, heaving wham.
“Not unless you bribe the entire student council,” I said. “Where are you going with this?”
Sara blew her hair out of her face absentmindedly. She was growing her bangs out from the poufy style that everyone had stopped wearing last year, and they were at that awkward stage where they were too short to pull back, but long enough to be annoying. At least they made it easier to tell her apart from Jennifer.
“I was just thinking... Homecoming’s a big deal, right? What if we tried to do something there? You know, to help Helen?”
If we wanted to get our message out to a lot of people, homecoming could be the ideal place—if Helen was okay with that. Our school was less than a decade old, so we didn’t have that many alumni who theoretically made homecoming a real “homecoming.” But last year, because the football team was the best in the history of the school, it had become the central focus of the fall. The homecoming court had been featured in the newspaper alongside the winning team, and the dance had turned into a party celebrating that the team had enough victories to guarantee a spot in the district playoffs for the first time. This year, with the team undefeated so far, we’d have a huge crowd and lots of attention.
“That...seems like a great idea,” I said, as the realization that I’d grossly underestimated Sara dawned on me.
“Jennifer’s the freshman girl representative on student council,” she said. “I know we can’t get Helen on the ballot, but do you think we can try to stock the court with our friends? Then we can maybe do something with the slogans?”
I froze, scissors and paper in hand. The girl was a genius. If our propaganda didn’t catch on, we could figure out a way of getting our message across on the homecoming court. Somehow.
“Do you think Jennifer could do that?” I asked.
“I kno
w she seems quiet,” Sara said, shrugging. “But she’s a member of debate club. She’s surprisingly good at being persuasive.” She leaned in closer to me and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But we’re going to have to persuade Helen first.”
19
Kyle held my hand as we walked toward the football stadium at Greenlawn High, the public school where we had home games, gravel crunching under our feet. The feeling of my hand in his sent a frisson of excitement tingling up my arm. I was holding hands with a boy I liked, and every step brought us closer to a crowd of people, who—and I tried not to think like this, swear on my stack of Sassys—would see us as a couple.
A guy might make out with a girl and never call her again, or he might make out with her on a lot of occasions and never acknowledge it in public, or he might make out with her and tell his friends what a slut she was. But it meant something to go to a game together, to hold hands in public, to be recognized as a unit.
I felt like a bad feminist for caring that people saw I was on a date with a hot guy. It was absolutely antithetical to riot grrrl, where every zine told me I shouldn’t care about the kinds of double standards buzzing through my brain. Even aside from feeling my personal political inadequacies, though, a feeling of dread lurked under my happiness as we got closer to the bleachers. I might not be a perfect feminist, but I was feminist enough to be in touch with my feelings—and my feelings were that I absolutely did not want to go to this football game, despite what such a public date with Kyle meant to me.
Under normal circumstances, I only watched our team’s games to make sure Sean didn’t get hurt. But these weren’t normal circumstances—tonight was a series of land mines. Leah and Aimee would be there, cheering on Sean and spreading more lies. Sean would be in the spotlight because the team was doing well, and so I’d have a constant reminder that he was ignoring me. And I had a backpack full of buttons and patches that I should try to hand out, but I knew I would feel demoralized when only stoners and slackers who embraced So What? as their personal motto wanted them.
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