by Laura Goode
“Then what’s your problem?” Marcy and Rowie have grown uncomfortably silent.
“Homeslice, I don’t have a problem. I love who you are and I can’t tell you who to love with your body, mind, or otherwise, and any Christian who does isn’t hearing or practicing Christ’s message of unconditional love. It’s not that I don’t think you should have gay sex. I just don’t think anyone is really ready to have sex before they’re married.”
“What’s sex?” I ask. “Is it sex if you use your mouth, or your hands, or are we just talking ugly-bumping here? And how am I supposed to get married?”
“You know what sex is better than I do.” Tess sounds exasperated. “You had it.”
“Because what you do with Anders Ostergaard every weekend isn’t sex,” I say. Tess looks stung.
“Ez, lay off,” Marcy intervenes.
Rowie says something too quiet to hear.
“What did you say?” I ask.
“I said, Did you like it?” Rowie repeats. “When you did it, did you like it?”
I pause, not because I have to think about it, but because sometimes Rowie has this way of cutting through the bullshit. I shake my head.
“That dick was nasty, dude.”
Tess throws up her hands. “They’re ucking fugly! It’s a totally normal first-time reaction to seeing one.” She pauses. “Or so I hear.”
From under her breath, I hear Rowie quietly ask, “What the fuck is normal, anyway?”
Rowie always hangs back a little from the rest of us somehow. The Rudras — Drs. Raj and Priya, Rohini, and Lakshmi — moved to Holyhill from St. Paul around the time Marcy and I were cackling over beheaded Barbies buried in my backyard, but we didn’t really get to be friends with Rowie until last year, when her family moved again into a house down the street from Tess. Tess’s dad and Rowie’s mom are doctors at the same hospital. I guess Rowie wanted something to make her sound or feel less foreign9 — I can’t blame her, Holyhill is a shit place to be a non-Anglo10 — and so she shed Rohini and became Rowie to most, including us. The nickname suits her in a quirky, buoyant way, so I keep the fact that I think Rohini is a beautiful name to myself, but it puzzled me when she picked it as her MC tag, a stage name. We’re a good fit as MCs-in-arms, partners in lyrical crime: she writes choruses and hooks; I write verses.
9. On Rowie’s wall: Rowie sometimes has better words for things than what they’re actually called. One time we were in Marcy’s car and it started raining, and she told us to turn on the windshield vipers.
10. SiN later that night: There’s something about people of color in an all-white place. I don’t know — it’s like once you start noticing how complicated it is, you can’t stop noticing. Maybe some people can. It’s a white thing to say, I guess.
Rowie’s one of those people who doesn’t speak much unless she really has something to say. She’s beautiful; I like looking at her. There’s a strangeness about her that feels familiar. And most of the time she dresses in living colors: eggplant plum, Florida orange, chlorophyll green. Today she’s wearing a red felt dress with white polka dots and a green-feathered headband capping her hair. Somehow she makes her strawberry look hip and not like she’s an extra in the third-grade play.
“Yeah, man,” I agree, studying her. “Eff normal.”
Marcy pulls off the highway and we snake through downtown Minneapolis. I’m in love with its small-city seediness, its throngs of hipsters outside First Ave., its skyways suspended like arteries, the light emanating from the Basilica and the highway’s swoop past Spoonbridge and Cherry. This is my real home, I think, and not the sterile minivan parade of Holyhill. We pull into the parking lot, where the light rail sits jacketed like a hornet in yellow and black. It’s Saturday night and we came to drop bombs. We buy four tickets and get on the train.
“Guys, seriously, I don’t know if I can do this,” says Rowie, looking a little pale. I plunge a hand into my bag and pull out my trusty Nalgene. I believe in hydration.
“Drink some water and sit down while we warm up,” I say, handing her the bottle and stroking her hair.
Rowie has the shiniest hair ever, thick and lustrous in her vampy bob. Marcy is pulling our portable beatbox out of her backpack, a hot-pink heart-shaped set of iPod speakers, and cueing up our newest track. Tess sits a few feet away, practicing her breathing exercises. She looks like she’s practicing Lamaze, but homegirl can sing, so I don’t say anything. Rowie, still swigging my water, looks slightly better, but she’s clearly fighting to duck the monkey on her back.
It’s about seven thirty and there are only a handful of people in our car: a couple of worn-out-looking construction workers, a Hmong woman toting three children, one of whom can’t keep her eyes off Marcy’s magic pink sound machine, a black girl who looks a year or two younger than us, two camera-loaded Japanese tourists clearly on their way to the Mall of America.
“Ladies. It’s time,” I declare.
We are four points strong and near to bursting. Each one of us glances around the circle, waiting to see who’ll light the fuse. I like to think I’m reliable for tasks like this.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” I howl like a WWF announcer. “Twin Cities commuters! We do NOT apologize for the interruption. You are in for the best light rail ride of your life. Me and my sisters are four mud-slinging, bomb-dropping, clam-jamming bringers of mischief, about to spit some rhymes like you’ve never heard.”
I trip on a purse strap loose on the floor and tumble forward, eliciting a few snickers.
“So, uh, ladies and gentlemen,” the Ferocious in me continues, rising and brushing myself off, “hold on to your hosiery, because we’re about to load you up with a fat dose of wickedness, whimsy, thievery, sensation, charm, and general ruckus-making. Without further ado, here now, making our Twin Cities public transportation debut, is Sister Mischief with our soon-to-be hit single ‘Gynocracy.’”
I lope back to the ladies, who are still exchanging bewildered looks. Marcy raises her eyebrows at us. Swallowing the anxious mass of bile rising in my throat, I nod.
“Let’s do it,” I say. “Count it off, SheStorm.” Marcy does. She fumbles with the speakers, but they won’t turn on. Frustrated, she smacks them with the butt of her hand. The loop loaded on the magic pinks coughs and begins, a sample we lifted from 9th Wonder’s “No Comparison,” and Marcy begins to beatbox over it a measure later, picking up the slack. Tess leans into her opening vocals, belting in that rangy voice that makes the church ladies twitch in their seats:
“I got sisters on one side and mischief on the other
Saying that we better recognize our foremothers
We got a positive psychology of peace and camaraderie
So get with positivity or you best not be botherin’ me.”
I grab Rowie’s hand for a moment, squeezing it for courage. She gives me a tight deer-in-headlights smile. The first verse is mine.
“We’re done with sex hypocrisy
up in this here gynocracy
So what’s with dudes up in my grill
I’m all get over it, get real
I see you there, you think you fly,
You think you’re stealthy, smooth and sly
Frontin’ like girls who say they’re bi
Just to entertain some guys
So step up, bro, and recognize
That I’m rolling deep to ride
On with my girls, and tell you why
We’re over it with paradigms
The gaze we play ain’t for your eyes
My conscious sisters realize
I got to roll with Tess and Ro
And DJ SheStorm got my vote
We’re out to throw some pro-ho flow
Sex-positivize your language, yo.”
Rowie leaps into the transition with both hips and both shoulders, rushing it half a beat, but recovering after a little stutter.
“So listen close, we’ll spell it slow
I take attitude and add tempo
My girls is high and you too low
So Lawdy, Joe
Already tole you so
Y’all best find some solo hos and go . . .”
My vision is cloudy with exhilaration, but I can make out the Hmong woman clapping politely and her little girl jumping up and down in delight as Rowie continues. Small victories: no one throws anything, and no one boos. One of the workers is alternately fiddling with his iPod volume and scowling at us, but the other one bobbles his head and smiles. One of the MegaMall-bound Japanese tourists raises his camera to his eye and snaps a souvenir photo of us, and I imagine what he will see when he flips through his vacation back home in his bedroom, or telling stories to his buddies at work, saying something like And we were going through the city on our way to the biggest mall, and there they were, three whitegirls and a desigirl rapping on the train. No, I don’t know why. They were Americans; it could be anything.
It’s lunchtime, and we’re parked in the commons. I don’t know why they call it the commons when it’s nothing but a big hallway. There’s nothing common about it; it is, at best, reluctantly shared. Little pockets of people are scattered throughout: the weird, formerly homeschooled Christians near the horny debate kids, all eating baby carrots; the theater and lit magazine kids spreading barbecue sauce on someone’s math homework, glaring at the popular Christians; Anders Ostergaard, Tess’s douchey sometimes-boyfriend, and his hockey harem, all pretending to ignore her, and finally us, the alienated smartgirls who couldn’t find a group to belong to.
They say that only ten percent of the population is naturally blond and blue-eyed, but in Minnesota, it’s more like sixty percent. You can find members of the diaspora in Holyhill, I guess, if you squint. Making an unscientific count around the commons, I spot a handful of Asian kids — Jisoo Kim, Iris Hong, Rowie, Prakash Banerjee, a few others — a couple of them adopted, a couple more with engineer or doctor parents who had enough degrees to get visas and came here to work for Honeywell or 3M, the U of M or the Mayo Clinic. There’s even fewer black kids, most of whom seem kind of marooned in Holyhill’s ABS program, which, like, recruits smart kids from the inner city or whatever and ships them out to the suburbs, where the property taxes are higher and the public high schools are better. They all sit together at lunch. I think they live together in a chaperoned program house on the outskirts of town, and ABS actually stands for A Better Shot. There are these de facto boundaries that no one talks about, and I feel weird about them, and I think other people must too.
“Well, as I live and breathe, it’s Dykes with Mikes!” Mary Ashley Baumgarten taunts as she saunters by in her SWASP sweatshirt, earning a round of cheap laughs from the hockey dudes and her cake-makeuped lunch gaggle. Every year the senior girls make sweatshirts with some kind of taboo acronym beginning with “SW” for “Senior Women.” This year, its SWASP, and apparently it stands for “Senior Women Always Say Please” or some stupid shit. But we know it stands for the model Holy Hell student: Straight White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. “I heard about your little girl group, bless your hearts.”
“Hey, Marcy, your boxers are showing!” Anders calls.11
11. Text from Rowie: Why does Tess suck face with that ass-clown every weekend?
“Yeah, Marcy,” Mary Ashley croons viciously. “Didn’t you see the new policy?” She throws a packet of paper at us. “It says the administration doesn’t want to see your lesbo man undies either.”
“Mary Ashley, I can see two-thirds of your butt and three-quarters of your thong,” Tess slings back. “You better hitch up your skinnies or we dykes might get the wrong idea.”
Mary Ashley glowers as she hikes up her jeans. “Tess, can you please just ditch the freak flock and come sit with us? We’re talking about the Save Unborn Lives event and you haven’t been around in forever. You even missed choir practice last week. We had the auditions for next month’s Sunday solo.”
“I don’t need another episode like last month. Just lay off, Mary Ashley.” Tess throws up her hands. Tess always used to get the Sunday solos at their church because she has this kind of voice that can’t just sink into the curtain of a chorus: this bold, rangy, obscene voice, a voice that stirs something in you, the kind of voice you might say might make you believe. Except last month, Tess was apparently so stirring in her rendition of “Amazing Grace” that it made the church moms kind of uncomfortable, and they complained to the pastor that it was too edgy, by which they really meant too sexy. Tessie was heartbroken. She just sang it how she felt it. It’s not her fault she knows how to let music have its way with her.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Maybe you guys can perform at our Save Unborn Lives fund-raiser. Oh, I forgot — they’re all just a bunch of feminist lesbian vegetarian baby killers,” Mary Ashley hurls back.12
12. Text from Rowie: i hate her. i hate her so much.
Tess jumps to her feet, seriously pissed now.
I grab her arm. “Don’t waste your breath.”
“Where’d she get vegetarian?” Marcy laughs, taking a bite of her cafeteria cheeseburger.
I turn to face Mary Ashley and the band of boneheads. “Look, your ignorance is ruining my lunch. Tess doesn’t want to hang out with you anymore. Deal.”
“You also ain’t much at parking-lot dance partying,” Marcy says.
“You can’t mess around with me,” Mary Ashley sputters, the right side of her face puckering slightly. “Don’t you know who my family is here? My dad’s going to be a state senator. I don’t need to sit here and take this just because you’re, like, angry athlete girls.”
“I don’t play any sports,” I say. “I guess I’m just angry.”
“Yeah?” Mary Ashley says levelly. “I heard you got a workout in the back of Charlie Knutsen’s car. And Marcy — well, everyone knows Marcy’s in great shape too.”13
13. Text from Rowie: I’m going to poison her diet coke.
“Mary Ashley, if you’re going to insult my friends, at least don’t be a dumbass while you’re doing it.” Whoa. Tess said ass. “Is she a lesbian or a slut?”
“I call trash trash. You can call it what you want,” MashBaum spits.
Marcy rises to her feet, glowering, and lets out a faint growl. “You hungry for mud, dollface?” According to varying accounts, during a marching band practice last year, Mary Ashley, who’s one of the flag girls, called Marcy either Captain Tranny or Fat and Manny. Marcy retaliated by stopping drumline practice to give her a mud swirly on the football field. A mud swirly is just like a regular swirly, except Marcy actually ran in a circle with Mary Ashley’s feet in her hands, wheelbarrow-style, to swirl her face in the mud. Some people say the drumline started marking time with Marcy’s revolutions.
Mary Ashley stands up in Marcy’s face like she’s actually about to step to her. Marcy, my beautiful six-footer, has probably seven inches and forty pounds on Mary Ashley. “I should have gotten you expelled when I had the chance,” Mary Ashley says to her. “And Tess, honestly, what’s with these freaks you hang out with now? Like, you were suddenly just dying to spend all your time with a psycho dyke from hell and her freaky loser friends?”
Rage rises in my throat like mercury in a thermometer. It’s not fair that they pick on Marcy for a secret she isn’t keeping. It makes me feel guilty, makes me wonder what Mary Ashley would do if I just told her the truth right now.14
14. SiN before bed that night: I’m learning the urge to blurt my hurt / Emerging to burn the cold hard out / Just wanna be the free me, get on the she on she in me / Gotta be real easy, curly-haired Esmeezy / Learning never to say please, just being real out loud.
“Bitch, you better —” I begin to gutter up a loogie to spit in Mary Ashley’s eye, but Tess steps in front of me just in time.
“Back off, Mary Ashley.” Tess’s voice is low, boiling. “I’m sorry you’re mad at me, but you are so not allowed to talk to my friends like that.”
The bell cracks the mounting tension, signaling the five-mi
nute warning before the dreaded return to afternoon classes. Mary Ashley’s big green eyes are smoldering with rage. “Catch you later, traitor,” she says to Tess. Flanked by her IQ vacuum, she huffs off.
I’m struggling to get my temperature back down. “Tess, how could you have hung out with those assholes?”
She looks at a loss. “I’m so sorry. She’s not always that bad. It’s just — she’s been like this since I told her I couldn’t go to her house in Door County this summer, when the four of us went camping in the Boundary Waters. I’m going to tell our pastor what she said. She’ll get in trouble. Don’t worry.”
Marcy shakes her head. “Great. Backup from the church.” She takes out her drumsticks and tattoos restlessly, looking down at the concrete floor.
Rowie, who’s been silent and seething in the fetal position through this whole exchange, finally rises. She hates confrontation. “Bitch!”
We look at her in surprise.
“MashBaum is the one going to hell,” Rowie heaves. “If there even is a hell. Who the hell does she think she is?”
“Whatever, she’s so not worth getting worked up about,” Marcy says. “Shake it off. She’s just a mean girl with a Christ complex. No offense, Tessie.”
“Yo, have you guys seen this?” Tess asks, picking up the packet Mary Ashley tossed at us.
“No, what is it?” I ask, popping a cold French fry into my mouth. I have a weakness for French fries, especially in times of crisis.
“It’s apparently a copy of Holyhill’s new code of conduct. ‘Holyhill High School cannot condone violence in any form, nor can it condone any material known to incite violence. In this interest, loud, violent, heavily rhythmic music such as ‘rap’ will be prohibited on campus or at school events. Additionally, any apparel or other materials associated with this violence-inducing culture, such as pants sagging below the underwear line, gang apparel, or promotional artist material, will also be prohibited and punishable by suspension.’” Tessie expectorates the words as she reads aloud. “And get this. They’re making everyone sign it.”
