The Feminist Agenda of Jemima Kincaid

by Kate Hattemer

  “Are you waiting for someone?” said Jiyoon.

  “No. No. Why?”

  “Because you jump and look down the hallway every time the door opens.”

  The door opened. I didn’t jump, but I couldn’t help looking, and there he was.

  “Relax,” Jiyoon whispered, her voice curling in amusement. “It’s just Andy.”

  Just Andy. But should I say hi? Should I pretend I didn’t see him? Should I—

  “Morning, Kincaid.”

  “Oh! Hi, An—um, Monroe.”

  He loped down the hallway, reaching up to touch the exit sign as he turned the corner. I exhaled.

  “I take it I don’t need to ask who you put for the Last Chance Dance,” said Jiyoon.

  I slowly sank down. My legs sprawled all the way into the hallway, nearly tripping a group of freshmen. “Hey!” one yelled.

  “Senior privileges,” I told them. I tried to get comfortable. I obviously couldn’t move now that I’d defended my position, but I was essentially sitting on my neck.

  “You’re still into him?” she said.

  I was thinking about him so often that I’d basically ruined him, the way you ruin a song when you play it for weeks on repeat. “One could say I’m mildly into him,” I said.

  Now was my chance to tell her about everything: the Jeep, the kissing, the more. I still couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to.

  * * *

  —

  Because we always had to be as intense as possible, Chawton had a debate instead of candidate speeches. There were rules and time limits and rebuttal periods, but as with any debate, it all went to shit sometimes, and that was when it was most enjoyable.

  Marcela Vasquez, in a skirt suit and heels, strode onstage. “Good morning, students and faculty,” she said in her dulcet, competent tones. “As the president of the Chawton Political Union, I consider it a privilege to moderate the debate for Chawton School chairman. Here are your candidates. Mack Monroe!”

  The auditorium clapped and whooped while Paul, Monique, and I tapped our fingertips together. “You’re my boy, Mack!” yelled some rando, and Mack gave a flip wave. He looked as scruffy as usual. He was in dress code, but his back shirttail was out and his tie was knotted so loosely that you could tell his top button was undone. He wore boat shoes and a smirk.

  My stomach roiled.

  “And Jiyoon Kim!”

  She emerged from the wings. Of course clothes would matter for a girl. She’d hit the perfect note, professional but not try-hard, with slim black pants and a floaty shirt that reminded me of orange sherbet. The applause was substantial. No whooping, but it was solid and sustained. I found myself scratching away tears from the corners of my eyes.

  They shook hands. She gave him a polite smile. He barely made eye contact, his gaze already dismissing her, sliding to Marcela.

  “Each topic will be introduced by a question to which each candidate will have two minutes to reply,” said Marcela. “The candidate who speaks first will then have a one-minute rebuttal period, after which the time will be divided at my discretion.” Marcela is going to be either a news anchor or president, because her intellect is fearsome, plus she can walk in high heels and a pencil skirt, which you should film yourself doing if you think you can. She was popular, in a sense. She hung out in the Andy-Gennifer social stratum. In September, though, all those people were decorating the senior lounge, and they put up TV and movie characters labeled with seniors’ names. Marcela got Consuela, the Latina maid from Family Guy. Mr. Duffey made them take it down, but then it was all white kids up there. I don’t know. She said she didn’t mind.

  “Based on a coin flip, Mack will respond first,” she said. “The first topic is tradition versus innovation. As chairman, how would you seek to balance these two objectives?”

  Mack stood in a dickish, dick-out way. That was an obvious question at a school like Chawton, but he looked nonplussed, probably at all the polysyllabism. “Um, yeah,” he said. “Tradition is what we’re about here, but you gotta change too. Otherwise we wouldn’t even have computers.”

  “Profound,” whispered Paul.

  “But what I’m really about,” said Mack, “is a big Chawton tradition. Hype Club.”

  He got whoops. Chairman candidates always talked about Hype Club, a club for—of all the vastly moronic pastimes—going to sports games and yelling.

  “We gotta get more support,” he said. “Football, basketball, whatever. Our guys need you.” This must have rung a distant bell, maybe to the one time he’d paid attention in history class, because he pointed his finger at the audience and said, “Uncle Mack needs you!”

  More whooping. “Thirty seconds,” said Marcela.

  “Hype Club needs gear to rep the Angel Tigers. So we need money. But we have too many bake sales around here. You know what I’d have instead? Wait for it. Bacon sales.”

  The audience went wild. Not everyone, but enough of everyone to make me hate Chawton. How was Gennifer dating this slob?

  “Time,” said Marcela. “Jiyoon? The balance of tradition and innovation?”

  “Balance is the right word,” Jiyoon began. “The long history of Chawton is something we can all be proud of, but at the same time, we have to change as the world changes.”

  She seemed nervous. She was talking too fast.

  “As chairman, I’d keep tradition in mind, but I wouldn’t be afraid to innovate.”

  Kingsley Chabot, in the row ahead of me, yawned. The energy in the auditorium sagged like a cut clothesline. “I applaud the current Triumvirate,” said Jiyoon. “They’ve embraced the tradition of prom, but they’ve updated it with a new twist. That’s real balance.”

  Oh no. She was being boring. You couldn’t get elected to run Town Meetings all year if you were boring. I don’t know if it was seeing the two of them from a distance or what—the crystallization of all the stuff I’d been hearing?—but I could see the problem, suddenly. The problem was that Mack didn’t have anything to prove. People would think he was funny and cool just because he was a white guy. Not to mention a white guy who played sports and wasn’t into academics and was related to Andy. Whereas Jiyoon, she’d walked onstage with the weight of a story on her back. She didn’t have to prove she was funny; she had to prove girls were funny. She didn’t have to prove she was cool; she had to prove Asian kids were cool. It was like she had graffiti on her face that said Quiet, Smart, and Boring AF, and we in the audience were reading it, taking it as truth.

  No wonder she had worried her prep didn’t matter. How could it? In the face of that?

  “Take Hype Club,” said Jiyoon. “That’s a dead tradition. Dead.” She smacked her lectern. Mack, who’d been rolling his tie between his hands, jumped. “All Hype Club does is go to football and boys’ basketball. What about other sports? What about girls’ sports? What about dance team? Debate team? Art shows? Choir concerts?”

  Brilliant move. Talk about a silent majority. All the people who didn’t play football or basketball wanted hype too.

  “So when you say you want to revitalize Hype Club”—how generous, Ji; revitalize has three too many syllables for Mack—“what I’m hearing is, give more stuff to the same people who always get stuff.”

  “Time,” said Marcela, blinking.

  “Yesss,” I hissed. I loved it. Jiyoon on the offensive. It was risky, but she was probably right if she’d figured she had nothing to lose.

  Marcela started to tell Mack he had a one-minute rebuttal. He cut her off. “You try to get people to come to girls’ sports. Or, what’d you say, choir shows? Girls are great”—one of his stupid-ass friends gave a woot-woot, and Mack paused, flustered—“but there’s a reason everyone in America watches football but no one cares about female soccer.”

  Female soccer, lol. Like the match was laying eggs. Some g
uys were allergic to the word women. Jiyoon illegally cut in. “And what’s that reason?”

  “It’s—it’s just better. You want to watch athletes at the top of their game.”

  “Odd,” said Jiyoon. “The Chawton football team went two and ten last season, but G-Soc won the league and advanced to the state semifinal.”

  The raucous cheers of the girls’ soccer team drowned out Mack’s reply. Since when did Jiyoon know sports stats? Team nicknames? She had prepped.

  “It’s Mack’s turn to speak,” said Marcela, not quite successful in repressing her smile.

  “Okay,” said Mack. His neck and cheeks were all red. “Okay. The Hype Club does support everyone, because the football team is everyone. They’re playing for us all. That’s why people say, ‘We beat Potomac; we beat Sidwell.’ But even so, you’re a hypocrite.”

  Marcela winced. Given Mack’s Latin skills, I doubted he knew what ad hominem meant.

  “You say you want a Hype Club that supports everyone, but I say, what about a Triumvirate that represents everyone? We’ve already got Social Comm president for the girls, and the Mildred for the ner—for the smart people. So why…”

  Mack, I realized then, would have been angry even if Jiyoon had debated like a limp noodle. He had been angry long before she’d made him look stupid. He was angry because she was running. He was angry that she’d dared.

  “So why,” he said, “why should you get to run?”

  “Time,” Marcela said quietly. “Jiyoon?”

  The auditorium was dead still, but Jiyoon didn’t jump in right away. When she spoke, her voice was firm, and she addressed not Mack nor Marcela but us, the audience. “I get to run,” she said evenly, “for the same reason that any of you could run. Because I’m a student at Chawton.”

  She stopped long enough that I thought that might be it.

  “I think Mack touches on a larger point, though. About tradition and innovation. About whether we want things to be the way they used to be, or the way they should be. The way they could be.”

  She stared us down.

  “To me,” she said, “Chawton is a school where anyone can be chairman. Where anyone can be Social Comm president, for that matter. Chawton is a school where it doesn’t matter what you look like when it comes to people trusting you to represent them and think about them and make good decisions on their behalf. And that’s why I’m running. Because I believe we’re that school. Because I believe we can be that school. Because I love this school, and I want to work hard for it. I want to learn and grow and change, and I want Chawton to learn and grow and change too.”

  The applause started. It built. Paul and I stood, and Monique with us. Ms. Margolis. Mr. Peabody. Ashby, Greg, Zachary, Cilla—and it hit the tipping point, and it was everyone.

  Well, not everyone. But enough of everyone that I loved this school too.

  I waited for Jiyoon at the auditorium door. She came out after everyone else, looking as calm as she’d looked onstage.

  “OH MY GOD YOU WERE AMAZING!” I tackled her in a hug.

  “Let go of me,” she barked. “Now, Jem.”

  I set her down, and she gave me a bashful, proud smile. I had to throw my arms around her again.

  “You dork-ass,” she said. We both started giggling. “I can’t be seen like this,” she said. “I look too self-satisfied. Come to the bathroom.”

  The bathroom wasn’t empty. Hannah Garland started clapping, and Arden Lyme, at the mirror, said, “Thank you.”

  “She slayed, right?” I said.

  “Oh, stop,” said Jiyoon, disappearing into a stall.

  “How did it feel?” I asked.

  I didn’t get an answer. Jiyoon thinks it’s barbaric to talk while peeing. “I discharge stuff out of only one orifice at a time,” she’d told me once, and I’d said, “What about when you’re on your period?” and she’d said, “I guess you hadn’t noticed I’m silent for a week of every month.” “And very constipated,” I’d added, and she’d hit me with her Latin notebook.

  We were really good friends. That’s all I mean to say. Jiyoon and I had built a space for just the two of us, my favorite room in the house of my life, the sunroom with board games and a massive, misshapen begonia, and I resolved to remember that. Even if—

  Even if what, Jemima?

  She came out. “Tell me everything,” I said.

  “Not now,” she said, washing her hands.

  * * *

  —

  I went to art history. It was a class of mostly sophomores, and I always sat in the back. It felt like taking public transportation alone. I enjoyed both experiences.

  Ms. Ipswich twisted shut the shades. Today was Mondrian. It reminded me how late in the year it was. What had happened to September? Slides of cave paintings and the Venus of Willendorf. New shirtdresses, a new Triumvirate, the promise of senior year. Now the bottom of my backpack was gritty with pencil shavings and the torn edges of notebook paper, and my shirtdresses had begun to go the way of all flesh, sweat stains stiffening the armpits. I missed cave art. Art before the history of art intruded. “A self-conscious rebuttal of the past,” said Ms. Ipswich, gesturing toward Mondrian’s primary colors, his straight lines. I hated him.

  How was it already May? I would never be in high school again.

  I wished I’d run for chairman.

  Not this year, obviously. Last year. I hadn’t even considered it. Only boys ran for chairman. I’d been pretty sure I’d get the Mildred, so I figured I’d be on Triumvirate anyway.

  I wouldn’t have beaten Andy. Andy was invincible. Mack, though…

  I might have had a chance against Mack.

  Was I jealous? Jealous that Jiyoon was the one to shatter glass ceilings? Jealous that Jiyoon got clapped for when she walked into the bathroom?

  It was horrible and irrational and went against all my fine thoughts during the debate, and it was true. I was jealous. I set down my pencil. Ms. Ipswich’s lecture was no longer getting through to me. I hadn’t expected the jealousy, but the thing was, I hadn’t expected this outcome, either. I wouldn’t have been happy if she’d lost the debate. But I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  I’d been so sure the debate would go according to the unspoken rules of Chawton that I hadn’t even wondered how Jiyoon’s winning would affect me and Andy. Now I did. It would change things, wouldn’t it? My best friend embarrassing his brother in front of the whole school?

  Can I confess something?

  You know “bros before hos” or whatever the female version is? “Sisters before misters”? I felt like I didn’t have that impulse. Take, for instance, the teeming hotbed of epic romance more commonly known as the national Quiz Team championships: on the last night I’d told Jiyoon and Ashby and Monique and the other girls that I’d sneak out to 7-Eleven with them to buy soda and gummy worms so we could hang in a hotel room watching Key & Peele and stuffing our faces and playing Apples to Apples and dissecting the social dynamics of the week. It’d have been fun. But the second I had a chance to hide behind folding chairs with a guy I barely knew, well, I was gone.

  It was a choice born of desperation. How many chances with guys was I even going to get? Girls, on the other hand, were always around.

  * * *

  —

  I had to wait at school until Powderpuff practice at seven, and Ms. Edison let me hole up in her classroom. I texted my whereabouts to Jiyoon. “I’ve got fifteen minutes before the bus leaves,” Jiyoon said as she came in. She dramatically collapsed into a chair. “Wow. It has been a weird day.”

  “All the postdebate stuff?”

  “What I said before about plunging into the abyss—I didn’t realize that it would involve everyone staring at me too.”

  “Staring how?”

  “Like they’re seeing me for the first time. John Pul
lman actually said that in English. He was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were in this class!’ And the worst part was that I couldn’t even say, Uh, it’s May—you are daft. I want him to vote for me, so I had to smile and be like, ‘Yep!’ ”

  “John Pullman is daft,” I said. “He never remembers free-dress days.”

  “I kind of want to be anonymous again. But I’ve blown that forever.”

  “But that’s a good thing, right?” I said cautiously. “The debate went so well. You got a standing ovation. You might win!”

  “Meh, probably not. But yeah. It went well.” She ducked her head, but she couldn’t hide her delighted smile. “Don’t quote me on that.”

  “I’ll maintain your modest façade,” I promised, “even though I know how swollen your head’s gotten. God. I can’t believe you want to be anonymous. All this attention is totally wasted on you.”

  “Is that a tinge of jealousy I detect?” She was still smiling, which meant, I was pretty sure, that she hadn’t detected my actual tinge of jealousy. But it felt good to give voice to the feeling. It took away its force.

  “The only thing I’m worried about,” I said lightly, “is that Andy’s going to hate me now.”

  “I ended up next to him in the lunch line and he definitely ignored me on purpose,” said Jiyoon. “If I equal you and he equals Mack, then yeah, he hates you. It’s the transitive property of mortal enemydom.”

  It was like a punch to the gut. But Jiyoon had no idea. Which was my fault. I had pretended to her that this was just another of my silly crushes.

  If only I’d told her what was going on.

  “There goes my Last Chance Dance pick,” I said.

  “Because that relationship had so much promise,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Get a new crush, Dorcas. Someone who deserves you this time.”

  I thought I might start crying. Because Jiyoon was so nice, but also (mostly) because my chances with Andy were really and truly destroyed. I had to change the subject before she noticed. “I was sitting next to Paul at the debate,” I said. “Did he text you?”