Rebel Girls

by Elizabeth Keenan

  Sean lowered himself down again and leaned back on his elbows. He looked up at the sky, searching for answers—or, more likely, avoiding my eyes.

  “I don’t know where to start,” he said.

  “Me, neither,” I said. “But I’m starving, and I don’t want to go back inside. Apparently, the Gang of Five have some terrible idea about me being on the homecoming court, and Helen’s far too excited about the prospect of dressing me up like her own personal Barbie.”

  I left out the part about Mrs. Turner for the moment. It was too hard to explain in one sentence. Without that added layer of drama, though, the whole thing sounded ridiculous, like I was angry at Helen for transferring her homecoming energies to me. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk with Sean about more serious things like Mrs. Turner’s blackmail, or, even touchier, the garbage pile of Kyle and Leah. But maybe if we talked about the dumb things first, we could eventually get around to the things that mattered.

  “I’ve missed a lot, haven’t I?” Sean asked. “It’s weird to see you get along with your sister. You and her, together at last, in the Gang of Five.”

  “She’s gotten better,” I said brightly. “But not so much that I don’t want to kill her on a regular basis.”

  Sean laughed. For a second, I felt a glimmer of how easily we’d interacted in the past, and then it was gone, replaced by that lumpy-throat feeling. I wanted things back to normal so much, but I didn’t know quite how to get there. It felt like trying to pull a train back to the right tracks, but having no way to switch it over.

  “Well, there’s this pizza.” He struggled to sound enthusiastic. “And, if you need me to, I’ll go with you to the homecoming dance. It’ll give Helen and Melissa something to talk about.”

  He didn’t say anything about Leah or Kyle, though we both knew they would be there, too. But if he wanted to avoid that topic for now, I could handle it. I was hungry and tired of how many times I’d skipped lunch or dinner over the past few weeks. Every time someone wanted to talk about something serious, it just had to be over a meal, sending my stomach into knots only an experienced sailor could untangle.

  “Who knows?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Maybe Helen will finally confess her true love for you.”

  Two months ago, my remark would have passed in a second. Now, it seemed to echo in all the wrong ways.

  “Then at least somebody would.” He cleared his throat and looked at the ground. Not that it mattered in the darkness. Dad had forgotten to replace the floodlight at the back door for months, like a lot of other maintenance that had slid since he’d started his new job. Estelle’s mosquito zapper gave off the only light, an eerie blue glow in the darkness. I was silently thankful for that missing floodlight, though, which at least took away one awkward hurdle. If he was crying, I couldn’t see it, and he didn’t need to be embarrassed.

  “I think Leah really loved you at some point, you know,” I told him. “As much as she could love anyone but herself anyway.”

  Hardly a ringing endorsement. Sean snorted. He looked down at the grass again and let out a huge sigh.

  “Leah,” he said. “Yeah. I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Sorry.” So much for saying the right thing.

  “It’s okay. You know, you were right about her all along. And I got mad at you for being right about her, instead of seeing her for the opportunistic bitch she is.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I didn’t know how else to reply. I was so used to having to curb my words about Leah around Sean. It felt like a trap. If they got back together, anything I said now would echo for months.

  “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, she always had her faults—”

  I held back a rude, rueful laugh, because I wasn’t the type to say “I told you so.”

  “—but she had her good qualities, too. She always believed in me, even when no one else did. I mean, I know you believed in me, but your knowledge of football is...” He held up his fingers about a quarter inch apart, which was fair enough.

  “What changed with you two?” I asked, both because I cared about how Sean felt and also because I wanted some insight—any insight—into why Leah might have decided to go after Kyle, even though Sean was clearly a far more faithful boyfriend than Kyle. That jerk.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I keep going over and over it in my mind, analyzing it like it’s a series of plays. If I’d paid attention to this, if I hadn’t ignored that. I don’t want to absolve myself of anything, but...” He shrugged. “I can’t think of anything I did. All I can think of are the things in her life that changed, and that maybe they were too much for her. She’s living with her dad now, and since we’re not dating anymore, I can finally say this about him—he’s a racist dick.”

  The words pretty much exploded out of his mouth. Sean never talked with me about the racist things people said about or to him, and I was never sure if that was due to some flaw in our friendship—because he thought I wouldn’t understand—or if he just didn’t like to talk about them in general because ignoring them made them seem less terrible.

  “Do you think that had anything to do with how she’s acting?” I kept my question as vague as possible because I didn’t want Sean to close off how he felt from me. Again.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the only thing, but I do think it probably got a lot harder for her to hear a litany of bad things about me from her dad when her mom wasn’t around. Plus, she was super pissed at her mom for what she did to her dad, so if she’s siding with her dad on that one...”

  “Then every awful thing he says about you becomes more reasonable to her,” I finished the thought.

  “Exactly. You know, she always said you were jealous because you didn’t have a boyfriend,” he said, looking up again at the cloudy sky. “I think it’s pretty hilarious that as soon as you got one, she turned jealous and had to steal him.”

  Had Kyle been my boyfriend? We’d been out on a bunch of dates, but we’d never had any kind of conversation cementing things. In retrospect, it seemed almost like Kyle had intentionally kept things ambiguous—just like it now seemed a little fishy that we’d never made it inside the football stadium for the game, and we didn’t go to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me because he’d conveniently remembered that he didn’t have a fake ID once we’d spotted people from school. And he somehow never had time to eat lunch with me at school, even before the Gang of Five stuff really got going. Besides, if he’d asked me, I could’ve taken a break from that to eat with him.

  I wondered if Aimee and Leah had been working on him the entire time—or if he had been working her the entire time, keeping his options open. If that was the case, then I’d never really stood a chance. He was probably making out with Leah right now in the boy-music room at his house—or maybe she was in his bedroom by now, on his bed with the plaid comforter. I tried to block the images from my mind, but I knew that the same ones probably floated through Sean’s mind, too, except with Leah’s bedroom filling in the details.

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend.” It was my turn to look awkwardly at the grass, as though it held some answers to our problems. But it didn’t. It was just grass.

  “Oh, come on,” he scoffed. “For weeks, he was all you would talk about. You were unbearable. Don’t act like you didn’t like him.”

  I had. But that wasn’t the point. It didn’t matter how much I’d liked him. All that mattered was he didn’t like me enough, at least not enough to believe in me over Leah. He had that much in common with Sean, actually.

  “I did like him.” I left the rest of my thoughts out of the conversation.

  “Hey, you know, let’s not talk about them,” Sean said, nudging me with his elbow. “Cold pizza is fine and all, but it’s so much better when it’s hot.”

  “And we’re not locked outside this time,” I said,
finally opening the box and grabbing a slice. “Like when the door closed behind us that time we snuck out to pay the pizza guy when we were twelve because we didn’t want to eat the leftovers my dad reheated for us.”

  “Not unless Helen gets some ideas,” he said, taking a piece of pizza for himself. “You should have seen the look she gave me when she opened the door.”

  “I still say she loves you.” This time, Sean laughed.

  It took about three hours for us to circle back around to talking about Leah and Kyle, and I couldn’t stop crying long enough to get the story out coherently. When I finally got to the part about what Aimee had said in the library, he tried to make me laugh. Even though all I managed was a small sardonic wheeze of air barely related to a laugh, it was a start. And then I asked him for advice about Helen, and it wasn’t exactly like the old days, but in a good way. Instead of cracking jokes about her, he told me I had to be honest and deal with Mrs. Turner’s blackmail thing.

  By the end of the night, I felt a hint of our old closeness coming back, a weight lifted now that I’d have someone else to talk with in case this whole homecoming thing failed miserably.

  Afterward, I crept up the stairs to my room, not wanting to wake Dad. I hoped Helen was still up, though, because my Sean-induced courage would wane if I waited until morning.

  The bedroom light leaked out from under our door, and I exhaled. She was awake. At least I could have our uncomfortable, impossible conversation now, instead of sometime tomorrow after school.

  When I opened the door, Helen bolted up in bed, her copy of Vogue sliding off the comforter next to her.

  “So are you going to forgive Sean?” she asked eagerly.

  “That’s a little direct,” I said, without thinking of how it would come out. Old habits died hard, and part of me wasn’t yet used to Helen caring what was going on in my life. “I mean, it’s fine. Sorry. It was a long, weird conversation. I think it’s going to be okay, but...”

  I crashed onto my bed. You never knew about these things. Maybe he’d get a new girlfriend in two months and he’d disappear again. Or maybe things weren’t ever going to be the same anymore, since we weren’t in the same classes, didn’t run in the same circles, and hanging out at each other’s houses after school every once in a while didn’t feel like a real friendship.

  “It’s going to be fine.” Helen leaned forward on her elbow and yawned. It was nearly midnight, and we had to get up at six for school.

  “That’s a change from earlier,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You practically chased him out of the house.”

  “Yeah, but that was before I eavesdropped on you guys for an hour. Or two.”

  I choked out a laugh. That was the Helen I knew. But somehow, I didn’t mind it so much. At least I didn’t have to condense a three-hour conversation into a five-minute summary for her.

  “Just how long did you listen?”

  “Long enough to know why you freaked out at dinner,” she said, punctuating the sentence with an angry harrumph. “And to know we’ve got to step up because I am not letting Mrs. Turner kick me out of school. But don’t worry—we can do it.”

  “But she said—”

  “What? That I’m guilty in some way? That no one’s going to vote for you? That she has any power over us? Because, you know, that’s not true.” Helen’s voice was getting louder, and for a minute I worried Dad would walk across the hall and yell at us, mistaking our conversation for one of our many arguments.

  “No, I—maybe? I know she’s not right about you, but maybe she’s right that no one would vote for me—” Helen opened her mouth to protest, but I continued, “If none of this had happened, I would never have been nominated to the court, and you know it. But I don’t think that’s true now. I do think that a lot of people would vote for me. But Cady’s also on our team, and it might be better to campaign for her, like what Melissa did last year, than to make me into the ideal candidate. It kills two birds with one stone, you know? Mrs. Turner won’t know that Cady’s on our side—she’s too self-involved for that—but it’ll take the heat off us.”

  What I said sounded a lot smarter and more logical than what I’d planned to say, which was that I didn’t think most people would vote for me regardless. As much as Helen wanted to think our campaign was about rumors and not a political stance, at least half the people who were into it had joined us because it was vaguely rebellious. We couldn’t count on that lasting if people had to stand up for something real, though.

  Helen frowned. “You might be right. And that would work. But I don’t like that you think Mrs. Turner is right about you losing just because you’re not me. That’s bullshit.”

  She was totally wrong. I would never have been nominated under normal circumstances. But I was suddenly okay with that, and even if I won—which was incredibly unlikely—I’d be okay. I wasn’t some second-best Graves sister who stood in for the pretty one. Our mom’s obscure-ish Greek names for us didn’t have to mean anything—I didn’t have to be the smart one, and she didn’t have to be the pretty one. I hadn’t been a second choice because she’d been forbidden from being nominated—I had been the first choice for helping my sister.

  And the best way to do that was to help Cady win.

  30

  I pushed my way through the crowd at the front of the school, like every morning. Staying up late the night before talking with Sean was good, but it was going to be a long time until we were truly best friends again.

  Staying up even later to talk with Helen after meant I’d only gotten about three hours of sleep. Now I faced the morning’s classes with a groggy discombobulation that no amount of coffee could improve. I hadn’t done my homework, either.

  “Hey, Red! You’re famous!”

  Oh, Wisteria. She was so sweet and cheerful, but why wouldn’t she use my name? I leaned against a row of beige lockers to let others pass while I waited for her to catch up. In her school uniform, she still looked every bit a member of the Gothtastic Four: florid eyeliner, black lipstick, and, most recently, the bleach-blondest roots with the dyed-blackest ends—like Terri Nunn of Berlin, if her roots were only about two inches long.

  “What are you talking about?” Yesterday’s news that I’d made the ballot for the homecoming court didn’t qualify me as “famous” by any stretch of the imagination. She wasn’t saying it in a bad way, though, so that meant Leah and Aimee hadn’t struck again. They’d been surprisingly blasé at the announcement yesterday.

  “No, look.” She pushed a flyer into my hands.

  Whatever, I thought through my haze of tired. Melissa was probably trying to expand the So What? campaign to highlight our mutual nominations for homecoming court, or else she’d picked up on the fact that I was ignoring her and wanted to make it right. Or maybe Helen, Jennifer, and Sara did something to support me.

  I looked down at the photo on the flyer, and my stomach lurched when I realized that this wasn’t the work of any of my friends. So much for not campaigning.

  It wasn’t exactly a flyer, at least not a cheaply photocopied one with crappy contrast. Someone had taken their time with these—it was printed on expensive paper, and the image was a high-quality reproduction from a laser printer. I immediately recognized it as one of the photos Kyle took that night of the football game. I’d thought that I must have looked tired and sweaty and gross in all those pictures, but this one had turned out surprisingly well. The photo had been carefully cropped down to my face and the night background, so the lovely but incriminating graffiti disappeared. My face was turned in three-quarter profile, with the city lights behind me, and I was halfway smiling at something.

  I looked cool and mysterious and almost beautiful. I never looked like that in real life—did I?

  The text below read Athena Graves for Homecoming Court. Nothing else. No carefully crafted slogan, no mention of the Gang of Five. Nothing but
me looking far better than I did on a daily basis.

  “Red, they’re everywhere,” Wisteria said. “I have no idea how, either. There aren’t half as many for anyone else. Someone really likes you. And you look fantastic. I want whoever took those photos to do my album cover. They’re, like, super punk rock.”

  Photos, plural? There were more? At least Wisteria assumed someone else had done it, because it would seem super egotistical if I’d done this myself. As I walked through the halls, my face looked back at me—half smiling, posted on lockers; fully smiling, three-quarter angle, on corkboards; in profile, on the concrete columns. Wisteria was right. My face dominated the campaign space, so much that I had a hard time finding a picture of Cady or Sara or Leah. And they were the best photos I’d ever seen of myself.

  Had Kyle done all this? These were his photos, but I didn’t really think that he was committed to doing me any favors. For all I knew, Melissa could have strong-armed him into giving up his negatives. After all, she knew about our adventure to The Building, photos included, and she had a hookup at Kinko’s. It wasn’t unbelievable that she’d do that to—or, in her mind, for—me. Besides, Kyle hadn’t said a word to me since I’d confronted him in the hallway last week. I pretended to adore calculus and that I was in love with my physics book whenever he walked by my desk now. In physics yesterday, he’d hesitated near me for the slightest fraction of a second, and I’d held my breath, waiting to see if he would do something. Apologize, hand me a note, tell me to go to hell. But he hadn’t said anything.

  Now I had to rethink everything. Wisteria wasn’t rocking the hyperbole. She was serious about how many copies of the photos lined the walls. It seemed like far too many for Kyle to have done himself, and not like something he’d do so soon after choosing Leah over me. Yes, him feeling this degree of regret and guilt over what he’d done would give me a lot of satisfaction, but life rarely worked that way. It seemed much more likely to me that Melissa was somehow behind this. But even if Kyle hadn’t created and put them up himself, he’d done something of a good deed in my direction by supplying the photos.