Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  Why was everything so complicated? Why couldn’t I have a normal, stress-free date at a football game like half the other people in the crowd? I snuck a look at Kyle’s perfect profile, his light brown hair falling in front of his face like an angelic skater boy, and sighed, loud and long.

  “What’s wrong?” Kyle asked, looking at me from the side. “You don’t seem super enthusiastic to be here.”

  “I’m really not into football.” I tried to tell the truth without getting bogged down in the details. “I usually only go because I’m friends with Sean. But I’m supposed to, you know, hand out these things.” I jiggled the backpack. “Or at least try to.”

  Kyle abruptly stopped walking. He looked at me with those amazing amber eyes, very seriously, for about two seconds before launching into a stream of disbelief. “You don’t love football? But you live in Baton Rouge! Tiger country! Are you sure you’re not a pod person?”

  “Nope. Not a pod person,” I said warily, fully expecting a lecture like I’d gotten from everyone else in my life. From Dad, who went to LSU for law school and rooted for them, even though they were in the middle of their worst year in history. From Melissa, who watched LSU games with her dad and who had an undying love for our school’s team, even when they sucked. Last year, she’d even cut the necklines and hems of the school booster club’s bulky Beefy-Ts, sewn in new, tightly fitted side seams, and turned them into a fashion statement, all because she cared about football. And then of course from Sean, who was, after all, the quarterback.

  Everyone wanted me to like football.

  “You know, we don’t have to stay here,” Kyle said, nodding toward the stadium. We’d stopped short of the entrance to the bleachers, and a few latecomers looked at us quizzically as they passed us on their way into the game.

  “You don’t like football, either?” I’d never met a boy who didn’t like football. It didn’t seem possible.

  “Not really,” he said, casually dismissing football with a shrug. “I kinda dig English football, which you play with your feet. I might go out for the ‘soccer’ team this spring.” He used air quotes on soccer, which made me happy. I’d never understood the use of the name football for a sport that was mostly about throwing and tackling.

  “Then why did you ask me to go to the game tonight?”

  “Well, I wanted to go with you,” he said, like it was the silliest question in the world. “And this seems to be the place that people go on dates. But if you don’t want to be here, who says we have to stay? Why don’t we go on an adventure instead?”

  “What’re you thinking?” I felt a twinge of guilt at the weight of the buttons and patches in my bag, but I pushed it out of my mind. I would have plenty of time to hand them out at school next week. Besides, Melissa had recruited a couple more juniors to help us, so I wasn’t essential to the operation. And no guy had ever asked me out on an adventure before.

  “I was thinking we could steal a golf cart and drive around the golf course.” His eyebrows went up and down with the suggestion.

  “What? Really?” I liked Kyle. A lot. But there was no way I was going to steal a golf cart from the country club where Melissa’s dad and our principal played every Sunday.

  “No, but that would be an adventure,” he said with a grin. “Why don’t we just go for a drive? I still don’t know where anything is in this town.”

  Driving around wasn’t exactly an adventure, but I considered for a minute that his suggestion might be code for “going somewhere to make out,” which honestly wouldn’t be that bad of an option compared to watching the football game.

  We headed back to his car and drove around for a while, aimlessly, listening to KLSU, the university’s distinctly weird radio station. Finally, Kyle smiled at me, turning away from the steering wheel for a moment. We had reached the corner of two main streets, neither of which led to anything other than boring strip malls and office parks.

  “Left or right?”

  “Right?” I said. “I guess. There’s not a lot out this way.”

  Kyle grinned. “I think I know what we can do for our adventure.”

  He turned off the main street into a gravel parking lot next to an unfinished, abandoned building near the campus of Jimmy Swaggart’s bible college, which the cooler public school kids from youth orchestra referred to as “The Building.” It had attained semi-legendary status after someone realized that security patrols almost never came by to check on it. The building was the most popular make-out spot around. It was also a haven for the kids who liked to smoke pot and the artsy types who wanted to practice their tagging.

  “We’re going to explore that building,” Kyle said. “C’mon, it’ll be fun. It’s really cool and decaying. We’ll be urban explorers.”

  The building loomed up in the darkness, a sense of foreboding oozing from its unfinished concrete frame. I tried not to look at the fungus-covered concrete or exposed steel beams, or the empty darkness of the glassless windows. It screamed “HORROR MOVIE DEATH TRAP” instead of “cool, romantic date.” And sure, this was my third date with Kyle, but I’d seen enough ABC Afterschool Specials and horror movies to know that you probably shouldn’t follow the hot guy into the abandoned building. Either the guy was going to do something terrible to you, or some creep in a mask would show up.

  Kyle grabbed a flashlight from the back of his car. He clicked it on and off, testing its battery power, and grabbed a few other items: a camera, a detachable flash, tripod, and a blanket. I let out a huge sigh of relief. Photography was a normal hobby, and somehow reassuring in both its illustration of creativity and its heavy equipment that could be used to fight off an attacker.

  As I followed Kyle through the broken chain-link fence, I heard nothing but the loud crunch of gravel under my feet. My heart pounded as we crept through the building. On the first floor, someone had left behind an ancient charcoal grill, but it looked like no one had used it in months. We entered the stairwell, which smelled of a mix of pee and chemicals and things I didn’t want to think about, and I started gagging slightly. I worried that my footfalls were going to echo throughout the building as we walked, but I told myself to calm down. I’d always wanted to know what was in this building, and now I was finding out.

  With every floor we walked up, I could see the suburban sprawl of the city starting to spread out beneath us through the unfinished walls of the upper floors. Finally, we stopped at the twelfth floor. Outside, streetlights created lines and winding paths and semicircles of cul-de-sacs. Clumps of trees interrupted the lighted patterns with spots of indistinct, inky darkness. The traffic on the highway produced a high-speed line of white and red lights.

  I sucked in my breath. Baton Rouge had never looked so amazing.

  “It’s nice, right?” Kyle had that goofy grin on his face again.

  “It’s beautiful!” I sighed.

  Kyle’s flashlight traced an interior wall of the twelfth floor, where graffiti bloomed across the concrete. Blocks of letters outlined in red merged into orange and then yellow in a three-dimensional rendering of someone’s tag. Next to it, someone had painted psychedelic three-dimensional images of tropical flowers in bright blues and yellows, something I had never seen in graffiti. On another wall, Tom and Jerry duked it out in black and white. In some places, vandals had scrawled simple tags over the more elaborate drawings, which made me sad and angry for the waste of work that the artists had put into the wall. Even though it was all graffiti, there was a difference between creating something beautiful amid the ugliness, and simple destruction for the sake of it.

  “Can you stand there?” Kyle asked. While I’d been gaping at the walls, he’d set up the camera on its tripod.

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I want to take your picture,” he said. “C’mon.”

  I didn’t really want him to take my picture right now—I was sweaty and gross
from climbing twelve flights in a building without air-conditioning—but I let Kyle position me in front of the camera anyway. From the angle of his tripod, I could tell that whatever picture he took would capture some of the suburban lights and some of the wall of psychedelic flowers. I felt ridiculous and self-conscious in front of the camera. Just when I thought I’d gotten over being awkward around Kyle.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Helen would know how to pose, and at this point, I think she might even offer me tips. But she was stuck at home, grounded—until the end of time, most likely.

  “Just look out the window,” he suggested. “Pretend that I’m not here.”

  That was impossible, especially since looking out the window meant he’d be shooting me in profile, which made me more nervous than anything. I hated the bump on my nose and the way my chin jutted out. My mother said those things gave me a “strong profile,” and riot grrrl preached body positivity, but somehow I could never extend that courtesy to my nose.

  Kyle set up the camera on a long timed exposure, so I held my pose for an excruciatingly long time. Then he moved me again. I felt like a doll, and I wondered if this, too, was something that Helen experienced when she modeled. I made a mental note to ask her tomorrow.

  “Okay, I’m going to do a few with the flash now,” he said. “It’ll be really cool with the contrast.”

  The light from the flash burst out, bouncing off the walls with a sudden, blinding brightness. I’d gotten used to the dim light of the electricity-less building, and I involuntarily squeezed my eyes shut in a ferocious blink.

  “Uh,” Kyle said. “Maybe not.”

  He adjusted the flash, bouncing it off other objects so that it wouldn’t flare so brightly in my face. After a few minutes, panic seized my chest.

  “Kyle,” I said hesitantly. “Do you think people can see that flash from the street?”

  Kyle’s eyes widened. We both rushed to the window. The street below was empty...except for a tiny set of headlights coming up the building’s access road. Shit.

  “Yeah, we should get out of here.” With a remarkable level of efficiency, Kyle popped the camera from the tripod shoe, collapsed the tripod, and tossed everything into his bag.

  I struggled to keep up with him as we headed down the stairs. It wasn’t like we heard alarms or footsteps, but we were twelve stories up and the building had only one exit. A thousand fears of getting caught swarmed in my head. We were in an abandoned building, trespassing, breaking the law, no “oh, gee, Officer” way around it.

  We rushed out of the building toward Kyle’s car. I gulped in the night air, much fresher than what had been in the building. Or, if not fresher, at least without the stench of pee. I’d been feeling out of breath for the last three floors, both because I was running so fast and because the stairwell smelled like a broken toilet.

  As we reached the car, I saw headlights in the distance creeping toward the building. I couldn’t tell if the car was coming toward us or simply using the street as a shortcut. Kyle motioned to me to get in. The driveway made a U-shape the whole way around the building, and we were parked in the back, so no one could see his car from the street. I crossed my fingers that we would have enough time to get to the street before the other car saw us. Kyle drove, slowly and without headlights, around the far side of the abandoned building, so that we were on opposite end from the other car, which was approaching from the front. Finally, Kyle sharply executed a turn onto the narrow road that led away from the building.

  I turned around as we picked up speed. Kyle’s driving had worked. I could see the other car’s headlights through the empty skeleton of the building, but without our lights on, it was doubtful the security guard—or whoever it was—could see us.

  About a half mile down the road, Kyle turned on the headlights and started laughing. I wasn’t sure if he’d been playing to my fears all along, or if he was as relieved as I was. I giggled, too.

  “That was great,” he said. “What was I thinking? A building that dark—a flash that bright...”

  “I didn’t think about it, either,” I admitted.

  “Until I blinded you.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a laugh. “I guess you’re right. Me and my squished-up face, blinking from the flash.”

  “Never complain about your beautiful face,” he said. “Especially when your giant blink made us both realize that we could get caught.”

  For the third time tonight, I felt my cheeks grow red, and it wasn’t just from running down twelve flights of stairs. He’d used the word beautiful in connection with my face.

  “But see?” he asked, grinning broadly. “Adventure. Definitely better than a football game.”

  20

  After an all too brief make-out session in the car, there was really only one thing we could do to follow up almost getting arrested at The Building—a trip to Denny’s.

  Actually, Denny’s was the only answer to any question about late-night activities. Where do you go after a football game? Denny’s. Where do you go after prom (not that I’d been yet)? Denny’s. Where do you go after a rare all-ages show at the Varsity? Denny’s. Where do you go after the movies? Denny’s. What’s the only place open after 10 p.m. that didn’t require an over-eighteen ID? Denny’s.

  Kyle held the door open for me as I walked into the brightly lit restaurant, which spread out in a series of plastic booths and shiny fake-wood tables. An elderly hostess with gray hair in tight roller curls led us into the main dining area, and I froze. The entire football team was spread out in one corner of the restaurant, sweaty and gross from their game. Judging by the general excitement emanating from them, it was clear that they’d won, and Sean was holding court in the middle. He smiled, telling a joke that I couldn’t hear, and everybody around him laughed.

  Trip was on one side of him, red-faced and giant. His messy blond hair stood out in all directions, like an artful punk hairdo someone would spend hours trying to achieve, but was likely the result of towel drying his hair after taking off his helmet.

  On the other side was Leah, nestled under Sean’s outstretched arm. She smiled at every one of his jokes, and almost, but not quite, flirted with the guys surrounding her. She had a way with boys, including Sean, that baffled me. The other guys were totally thrilled to have her attention, but Sean never seemed remotely bothered by it. Of course, they were his football friends, and if any of them ever tried anything with Leah, it would destroy the team. Plus, Leah Sullivan was not the type to be known as the girl who brought down the potential state champs of 1992. Still, it amazed me that Sean put up with all the flirting.

  My stomach tensed. I felt an absence in my heart that I hadn’t even known was there. Sean was supposed to be one of my closest friends, but I’d never been invited to any of these after-game hangouts. Leah and Aimee seemed to be the only girls in the group. Since they’d left the cheerleading squad, were the rest of the cheerleaders now banned? Or had they never been to one of these hangouts before, either?

  Kyle nudged my elbow. “Hey. Our table’s ready.” I was frozen in place beside him. He looked from me to the table of football players and back again. “Or...”

  “Or what?” I watched Leah laugh at something Sean said while my stomach turned into a rock quarry. She thought it was her job to ruin my friendship with Sean. She thought it was perfectly fine to destroy my sister.

  Helen had nearly run away from home, and half the school had ostracized her for an imaginary abortion because Leah felt a tiny bit threatened. Our So What? campaign hadn’t taken off, and so Leah was perfectly fine, going on with her life as though she’d done nothing wrong.

  Did I dare say something to her in front of everyone? Did “Double Dare Ya” come into play here, or would it be smarter to wait it out instead of shooting myself, not in the proverbial foot, but in the face?

  “Or we could go somewhere else?” Kyle’s
voice ended on an unsure note as he looked at the crowd of football players.

  “I—” I was about to agree with him.

  “Hey, Graves! What’s up?” Trip’s voice boomed from across the restaurant. He waved excitedly. “Come on! Bring your guy over! It’s a party!” Next to him, Sean shook his head subtly, but Trip didn’t see. He was too busy gesturing for me and Kyle to join them.

  I shrugged at Kyle. “I guess we’re going to have to say hi. At least.”

  We walked over to Trip, who continued to shout excitedly at me the whole time. “What a game, right? I mean, I have no idea what it looked like from up the stands, but, man, that last pass was like something out of a movie!” He grinned broadly at me. Trip’s enthusiasm almost made me want to like football and made me feel bad that we’d missed the game.

  Trip turned to Kyle. “What did you think, buddy?”

  “Uh...” Next to me, Kyle was caught in a huge lie. He glanced at Sean and Leah. Leah’s hand was brushing up against Sean’s face as she pulled him in for an ostentatious public display of affection. “Yeah, it was a great game,” he said, smiling back at Trip. “Awesome game.”

  I appreciated Kyle lying for both of us. I hadn’t seen as much of Trip this year because I wasn’t tutoring him anymore, but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him. Everything about Trip was so honest, from his earnest efforts with algebra to his unironic love of Wheel of Fortune—which, he explained to me, he’d watched with his grandma all the time when she’d lived with his parents after she broke her hip.

  I looked at the rest of the crowd of football players, spilling out of a corner booth across a few shoved-together tables. There was no room for us. Thank God.

  “Well, we’re going to go grab our table,” I said, trying to muster up some less awkward vibes. “Nice seeing ya, Trip.” I smiled at him and turned away.