by Laura Goode
Part I
Prologue: Holy Hell, Evening
Chapter One: Spoonbridge and Cherry
Chapter Two: 3 Non-SWASPs
Chapter Three: Let’s Get Free
Chapter Four: Fruit
Part II
Chapter Five: The Undies Club
Chapter Six: Girl Rappers in Minneapolis
Chapter Seven: Wicked Delicious
Chapter Eight: The Goats, or Who Is Esme?
Chapter Nine: Halloween 2
Chapter Ten: The Critical Mass
Part III
Chapter Eleven: Mixed Histories, or Don’t Call Me That
Chapter Twelve: Give Yourself Away
Chapter Thirteen: She Can’t Get Down
Chapter Fourteen: B-Girls Will Be Girls
Chapter Fifteen: Doorbells and Corners
Chapter Sixteen: Hellzapoppin’ Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos
Epilogue: Live at Holyhill: The Sister Mischief EP
Mad Props
I guess I’m here because I wanted to be sure.
Breaking news: it’s Friday night. The Holyhill Fighting Loons won the first game of the fall against Rosemount a few hours ago, not that I could see much of it from the meadow behind the concession stand, where a few of us straggled together after halftime to pass around a few beers, not really enough to get everyone drunk.
“Do you feel anything?” I lean over to Marcy.
“Shut up,” she says, then finishes her Leinenkugel, crushes the can in her hand, and goes back to making out with this wrestler who looks kind of like a hammerhead shark.
“She’s not driving, right?” Tess grimaces at Marcy, who’s peeled the polyester jacket off her marching band uniform and is wearing just the green trousers and her ubiquitous men’s undershirt. Marcy’s rank lieutenant of the Holyhill High School drumline. She makes all the freshmen call her Captain.
“Eh.” I reach for another swig from someone. “She’s not actually drunk. And also probably not going anywhere for a while.”
“I can hear you,” Marcy growls, coming up for air.
I hear another beer crack open behind me. Charlie Knutsen is shyly offering me a can. Speaking frankly, Charlie’s wanted to punk my junk since sixth grade, when he caught a glimpse of me in my training bra as the girls’ locker room door was closing. Now we’re juniors. He’s patient — I’ll give him that.
I take it. “Thanks.”
“No sweat. There was more in Anders’s car.”
“Does he know you took it?” Charlie shakes his head, smirking.
Over in the parking lot, most of the football team has arrived and is pumping one of the predictable Biggie songs —“Juicy” or “Big Poppa”— and dancing like morons.
“Jesus,” I mutter to Charlie. “Check out the white man’s overbite parade over there.” He cringes.
“Uh-oh,” he says. “Mary Ashley’s trying to booty-dance again. This can’t end well.”
Sure enough, I look back at the crowd around someone’s bass-thumping Chevy pickup, and Mary Ashley Baumgarten, super-Lutheran teen queen of Holy Hell and Tess’s ex-BFF, is jerking her skinny flat ass around to the beat.
“Tessie.” I jerk my head toward MashBaum and take another sip as I watch the scene unfold. The guys are clearly drunker than Mary Ashley realizes, and her feeble dancing attempts slow as they get bolder in grinding on her. Mary Ashley is obviously starting to freak out. Suddenly, Ryan Hoffstadt, who’s pretty much your standard-issue ass-hat, crashes face-forward into Mary Ashley’s B-cups and kind of deliberately dumps Captain Morgan and Coke all over her white sweater. Mary Ashley lets out a feral scream, shoving Ryan into the Chevy.
“Aw, jeepers.” Tess takes off after Mary Ashley, followed by Anders.
“Let’s bounce,” Marcy says, getting up, pitching her beer can into the Dumpster fifteen feet away, and summoning Shark-Neck. “MashBaum’ll totally call the cops on them, and next thing we know, her dad’ll be campaigning for the state senate on an anti-tailgating platform. You drive.” With a wave, she disappears into the Shark’s car. I’m stranded; Marcy drives me everywhere.
“No, that’s okay — don’t worry about me,” I call after her. “Dick.”
In a matter of seconds, it’s just me and Charlie Knutsen.
“Fuck,” I say.
“What?” he asks.
“They were my ride,” I tell him.
“Oh. Well. I mean.” Charlie clears his throat like a douche. “I could give you a ride. If you wanted.”
Maybe Charlie Knutsen’s all right, I think, taking a sip, and a few more sips. Maybe then I’d know for sure. God knows this night isn’t going anywhere else.
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”
This parking lot, another one, is a vigil of streetlights, too bright, making us conspicuous. My head is shoved against the window of Charlie’s Camry’s backseat, the manual window handle jutting into the back of my neck, and I can see two dogs copulating in the shadows on the other side of the empty lot. The thing about Holyhill (I’m partial to Holy Hell) is that the night I’m having, if I play it right, could be big shit on Monday morning. Some people grow up places where things happen, where you get discovered in diners or whisked off to far-flung cities with glamorous frienemies, but here I guess we don’t have the weather for it or something.
Despite the fact that I’m regarding the whole situation as an experiment, I can say that, regardless of the chain of events leading up to it, Chuckles is pretty psyched to be crammed in the back of this Camry with me. He’s worked his hands under my shirt, groping my stomach, and is steadily moving north as he sucks on my neck.
“Give me a hickey and I’ll end you,” I growl, wrenching his leechy mouth off my neck with a pop.
“Sorry.” He actually looks sorry. “Sorry, Esme. Did it hurt?”
“I mean, it didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t exactly awesome. I don’t know. Try something else,” I order him. He obediently begins a tentative nibble along the ridge of my earlobe. Slightly better — I guess.
I wonder if Dad’s already eaten the leftover bacon from this morning. I begin to get sick of Kings of Leon on the iPod plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. I look out the window.1 Out of nowhere, a woman in a lilac terrycloth tracksuit runs screaming toward the still-coupling dogs. She’s got the crazy in her eyes as she pulls the unwilling retriever off with some difficulty. I guffaw. Terrycloth’s head snaps up. Shit, the front windows are open. The painfully camel-toed figure in question is Darlene Grinnell, Tess’s mom, and one half of the doggie couple is Stinker, Tess’s puggle. Catching full view of what’s going on, she turns to us with an accusatory finger, but no sound comes out of her mouth; it just opens and closes like a guppy’s.
1. Scribbled in notebook (SiN) later that night: I’ve spent my whole life trying to be more than one / Like I could up and make the earth revolve the sun / Don’t get how that wanting make a girl feel invisible / Divisible: is it, though? / I wanna get physical / With an unfuckwittable / Visible mistress who / Got girl guts and sinew / Dark eyes or blue, I don’t care who / Let’s screw through curfews / Tell me who soon / Wanna get with you, boo.
Almost hysterically, she makes a thrusting, splay-fingered phone gesture at her ear, mouthing, I’m calling your father, young lady. I shrug, wishing I could see Pops’s face during that call, and she snatches Stinker’s leash and flounces indignantly off. Chuckles, like a wiener, lets out a sigh of relief.
“Whew. That was close,” he says, miming a wipe of his brow.
“What was she going to do? Sic her postcoital dog on us?”
Chuck lets out a nervous snicker. “You don’t have to be, like, mean. Or whatever,” he says, losing his nerve.
“This is so pointless. Can
you take me home?” I say, folding my arms across my chest.2
2. Tess: Why did my mom just txt me demanding your dad’s phone #? Where r u?
“Come on, Ez. It’s real early. Stay a little longer. We just got here.” He massages my scalp. It feels okay. I guess.
“Fine,” I say. “Take off your pants.”
“What?”
“Take off your pants and let’s get on with it.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m counting to three and then I’m changing my mind. One.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” He fumbles first with his belt, then his zipper. His hands are shaking. He succeeds in removing his jeans, which are far too tight and make him look like some sort of Hot Topic refugee. His boxers are speckled with cacti. I try to remember which underpants I have on under my homemade wrap skirt; I think it’s the Superman briefs I’ve been getting in the little-boys section at Target for most of my life. I hoist up my skirt but don’t take off my hoodie or my boots.
“Knutsen! You’ve got a boner!” I exclaim.
He blushes. “Uh. I know.”
I poke it curiously through his boxers with one finger. It swerves like a sailboat boom, disturbing the cacti-patterned sail, then swings back at me. I am not at all sure about this thing. I take a deep breath and wriggle out of my Supermanderpants. I nod toward the cacti.
“Off.”
He obeys. I don’t get a good look at it, but I also don’t try too hard. He fishes a condom out of his wallet as I look out the window, half hoping to catch more canine entertainment. I hear a snap.
“Ow.”
“Shit, Knutsen, did you break it?”
“What, the condom?”
“No, your dick.”
I hear an unsticking sound, then he puts both hands in my hair. “Think I got it.”
“Think isn’t fucking good enough, Knutsen. Did you get it?”
“I got it.” He looks terrified.
“Okay.” This is what girls dream about?3
3. SiN later: He was a cramped Camry backseat and an indie rock blare / It was hard to believe I was supposed to be scared.
“Okay.”
“So.” Again, I’m getting impatient. “Just do it already.”
He looks down, then at me. I feel a pushing. The pushing gets harder. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s bigger than a tampon. Not a lot bigger. He retreats, then pushes again, harder. Then it starts to hurt. I wait for it to stop hurting, closing my eyes. This is stupid, I think. Nothing about it feels right. Not because I don’t love Charlie Knutsen and his bony hipster bod, which I totally don’t, and not because I mildly boozed myself into it, even though I sort of did. Charlie Knutsen is meat and I want fruit. I’d known it all along. He keeps grunting and jerking. I close my eyes. My mind drifts further.
My girlfriend Rowie — it’s funny how girls talk about their girlfriends without batting an eyelash, but you’d never hear a straight boy mention a boyfriend; anyway, I mean Rowie’s my friend and she’s a girl, but she’s not my girlfriend, not like that — and I share a passion for Value Village, this kind of janky Goodwill-type thrift store on the way to the airport. We’re there at least twice a month, and earlier this summer we were panning for gold in the old ladies’ castoffs.
“Ugly-cute, or just ugly?” Rowie asked, holding up a kind of outrageous orange minidress.
I squinted, considering. “Cute. If they had that dress in purple, red, and yellow, we could be the Fanta girls for Halloween.”
“Marcy’d throw a conniption,” Rowie said, dismissing me.
I held up a pair of acid-washed jeans. “They’re too short, but good cutoff candidates, maybe?”
“Mmmm,” she said as she examined them. “Could be. I’m gonna try this bad girl on.” She trotted off to the dressing room. I was pawing through the bathing suits, debating whether buying secondhand swimwear is gross or not, when my eye caught Rowie’s bare feet bopping under the dressing-room curtain. The curtain had a handwritten sign safety-pinned to it: WOMEN. I heard Rowie rapping the lyrics to Roxanne Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge” as she changed, her shorts dropping over her feet. I was transfixed for a moment, knowing she didn’t know anyone was paying attention.
“Whew-eee, this article is tight!” she called out to me. “I think I gotta go commando to make this one work.” I heard her wiggling and rapping for a moment more, then I saw her step out of her underpants. I felt suddenly pervy for looking and turned my back to her, returning to the bathing suits, which were all gross. A woman in a green dress was perusing the sweater vests across the aisle from me. When she turned, she looked so much like my mother that I took a step forward, but it passed quickly, the interrupted recognition, the way it always does.
My thoughts return to the present — Chuckles, the Camry. Charlie’s still moving on top of me and his moans have grown stronger. It’s stopped hurting, mostly, but more than anything it just feels like some kind of intrusion. I watch the way his face contorts in the fluorescent yellow of the streetlight above his car, the way his pale ass moves below his ironic 1999 Saint Stephen’s Church Johnny Appleseed Festival T-shirt, which he hasn’t gotten around to taking off. I start to sweat under my skirt and my hoodie. I wonder why it’s taking him longer than sixty seconds to come — wait, could it be possible that I’m the only virgin in this Camry? No way.
Before I can ponder the question further, the flash of headlights glints off the rearview mirror.
“Crap. Chuckles. Car.” We turn to see who it is. The headlights blind me for a second, and then I see the dreaded lettering on the side of the sedan as it pulls toward us: HOLYHILL POLICE. Jesus, this night. Why don’t they have anything better to do? Not even, say, a postgame tailgating party to break up? Misery, thy name is Holy Hell.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.” Charlie falls on the floor in the struggle to get his pants back on. I can’t find my underpants. I pull my skirt down and hope the cops don’t see them before I do. It’s cosmically clear that this night was not meant to be.
“I bet that dog-walking trollop called the cops on us.”
“What if they smell the beer?” He sounds kind of panicky.
“Oh, calm down. They’re not going to.” I lunge for my purse and dig for those little minty breath strips that burn the roof of your mouth.
“Jesus, Esme. What if they call my parents?”
“Lighten up, Knutsen. Just play it cool.” One of the cops — it looks like there are two — is getting out of the car. He walks slowly, like he’s trying to show us his nonchalant, absolute authority. Sergeant Jackass taps on the window, shining the flashlight in our eyes. I roll the window down.
“Officer. Haahhrya, sir?” In Minnesota, “How are you” is one drawled word: Haaahhhrryaa.
“Everything okay in there tonight, miss?” He searches my face.
“Oh, real good, thanks a lot. And how’s your night going?” I flash him a smile. I hear my phone get another text.4
4. Marcy: Did u walk home, or did u get a ride from/on Chuckles? Story?? PS Sorry I ditched.
“You kids been drinking tonight?”
“No, sir.” Knutsen and I shake our heads back and forth in unison.
“So I’m sure there’s no beer cans stashed under those seats.”
“No, sir.” Thank God we unloaded them in the concession Dumpster.
“So what are you kids doing in there?”
Before I can come up with something, Chuckles, the genius, replies, “Talking, sir.” His voice cracks on the “sir.” I stifle another giggle. Knutsen flushes crimson.
The cop keeps looking at me. I look back.
“I’m going to need your license and registration.”
I waggle a thumb at Chuck. “His car.”
“Ah,” he says, smirking. “Hard to tell when everyone’s in the backseat. License and registration, son.”
Charlie pulls his license out of his wallet. “I, um, don’t know where the registration is.”
Th
e cop shakes his head, more in a pitying than an angry way. “Just stay where you are.”
He returns to the squad car. Knutsen and I sit in hangdog silence for a minute. He looks as though he’s trying to say something.
“Chuckles, what is it?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I just wanted to say —”
“What?”
“I think you’re beautiful. You don’t look like the other girls. I mean, in a good way. You look real.”
I’m dumbstruck. What do I say to that?
“Um. Thanks.”
“That was nice,” he continues. “I mean, before the cops — it was sort of — nice.”
“God, Knutsen, you are so emo.” I can’t let him like me. Fortunately, the cop’s on his way back. He leans into the window.
“All right, boys and girls. Well, Mr. Knutsen, since you don’t seem to have any offenses on your driving record, I’m going to let you off this time with a warning. I’m not gonna give you a ticket, which I could, or call your parents, which I think I might enjoy. Do you know why?”
Chuck, aware that he’s hanging on the edge of reprieve, shakes his head violently.
“Because I like you, Mr. Knutsen. I like that you’re an organ donor. And goddamn it, I like you for managing to get this good-looking girl into the back of your car. But son, I want you to drop this honey off and then go straight home. Curfew’s in fifteen —” Officer Friendly’s walkie-talkie explodes in a crackle of voices and numbers. He turns away from us.
“Eleven-sixty-five, copy. You bet. We’re right near there.” He turns back. “Look, I got a noise complaint on a Friday night fish fry. Don’t let me catch you”— he coughs —“talking around here again.”
Charlie looks like he’s about to piss himself in relief. “Thank you, Officer. Thank you so much.” The cop swaggers, a little bowlegged, back to his squad car, still shaking his head.
Knutsen and I scramble up to the front seat, and he starts the car.
