Sister Mischief (14 page)

“Mimi, you little scamp, how the hell did you even know about this?” Rowie demands. “And how did you get here?”

“Anders thought he was supposed to pick Tess up, and he came over to see if she was at our house when she wasn’t at hers,” Lakshmi replies, smiling all Cheshirey. “We made him take us.”

“They blackmailed me,” Anders says. “They told me if I didn’t take them, they’d tell Darlene I bought them Bacardi. I basically got hijacked.”

“You little dirtbags. Sorry, man.” Rowie shoves Lakshmi, but not too hard.

The girls giggle hysterically and traipse off to text someone else for a ride home. For some reason, the fact that Anders brought Lakshmi and her powder puffs here kind of makes me like him more. Then he and Tess start to make out in the corner as his entourage goes out to scam beer from the SuperAmerica across the street, and I go back to thinking he’s a tool.

“That was very fucking cool,” Jane says, appearing at my right elbow. “I didn’t even know you rapped until Tess told me today. This is my brother, Yusuf. He wants to be a producer. He thought you guys were really hot.”

Yusuf doesn’t even pause to blush. “Yo, that shit was
heavy,
girl!” he says, fist-pounding me and Marcy. “You all could be huge. We should record a demo.”

“That’d be pretty tight,” Marcy says. “You got a couple hundred an hour for studio space?”

“Hell, no! You gotta have money to make money,” Yusuf says, shrugging. “This is America, right?”

“No doubt,” Marcy says. Rowie and I nod.

“You should let us know when your next gig is,” Jane says. “We could help you record it and get it distributed in the TC.”

“Whoa, for real? That’s really cool of you,” Rowie replies. “Man, we hadn’t even thought ahead that far.”

“Do you have the equipment to do that?” I ask, picturing the album artwork to
Sister Mischief: Live at the LocoMotive.

“We’ve got access to the parts; it’s just a matter of putting them all together. With enough extension cords and duct tape, I think we could pull if off no problem,” Yusuf tells me.

“What grade are you in?” Marcy asks as she dismantles the turntables she and Rowie built by miscegenating two of Luke’s old EP players, part of Rooster’s boom box, and some soundboard schwag from Marcy’s summer stint in tech theater. She’s got a good four inches on Yusuf, and she’s eyeing him.

“I’m a senior.” He reaches over and helps Marcy situate her bulky backpack into a carrying position. She lets him. “I go to Holyhill part-time, but I’m doing most of my classes at the U of M this semester.”

“We’re only eleven months apart,” Jane says. “We’re Irish twins.”

“That’s the funniest shit I’ve heard all day,” Rowie says.

“So, you Holyhill hos gonna turn my sister into a cake-eater?” Yusuf grins wickedly at Marcy, baiting her.

“Yo, maybe I’m gonna eat your
ass,
” Marcy blurts in an aborted attempt at a comeback. She blushes the color of borscht. Rowie, Jane, and I start laughing so hard that Tess takes her tongue out of Anders’s inner ear and turns around to see what’s so funny. Yusuf looks puzzled.

“Yo, Njakas.” I grasp for an opportunity to save Marcy from dropping through a self-willed trapdoor. “So, I can explain more later, but do you think you guys would ever want to be a part of a queer hip-hop alliance at Holyhill?”

“A what?” Jane looks intrigued, but almost as confused as her Irish twin. Marcy and Rowie laugh at me as we pack up the last of our shit and begin to clear out of the LocoMotive. “Is that what you were talking about up there? Do schools have those?”

“I’m getting a ride with Anders,” Tess says as she passes us, clutching his hand. “You wanna come?”

“Naw, we’re going with Marce.”
³⁰

30. Text from Rowie:
Bike over after she drops you off?


“Remember,” Tess instructs me, boring straight into each of our eyes, “that you are the finest girl rappers in Minneapolis, and that we’ll all remember tonight forever.”
³¹

31. Me to Rowie:
Wouldn’t it be easier to just ask her to drop me at your place?


I shake my head. Tess should be a preacher. “G’night, homeslice.”

I toss her a peck on the cheek. Tess, Anders, Chuckles, et cetera, and their triumphant case of MGD pile into a Suburban with a McCain/Palin ’08 bumper sticker. I turn back to Jane.

“Listen, what I’m saying is — yo, do you want to just get together after school sometime, blast some beats, and piss off a whole lot of tightasses without really trying?”

Jane cracks up, clapping in delight. “Absolutely yes. Drive safe, now, y’hear?”
³²
She fakes a Minnesota accent as she gets into the car, failing endearingly. Yusuf gives us a silent peace sign as he cranks the bass.

32. Rowie back:
Wouldn’t she wonder why she wasn’t invited? and my parents might not be asleep yet.


We throw our tin-man sound system back into the Jimmy and roll out, not saying much,
³³
hungover from the high. Watching the Soo Line recede, I feel warm, united with my sisters in this music we make together, in something greater than ourselves; I feel a rising again and think that if this is what gets Tess to church every Sunday, this fantastic crush of creation and communion, then maybe faith hasn’t totally run out on me yet. And on the way home, from the backseat, on the door side of the car, which Marcy can’t see, Rowie reaches over and holds my hand.
³⁴

33. Me back:
It just seems kind of overly complicated, but i guess.


34. Rowie, last:
Everything is complicated. just come over.


Rowie smiles at me in Precalculus today, lifting her nose in the direction of my phone. I rummage stealthily through my backpack, defying the Holyhill classroom cell moratorium.
³⁵
I smile, twisting my hair around a finger as I feel her eyes on me, and hold my phone under the table.
³⁶
She clicks furiously,
³⁷
her boatneck collar dancing with the drop-off of her shoulder, and I feel myself waffling on my promise
³⁸
to myself to catch up on homework, to catch up on sleep, to finish the new song I’ve been toying with. She goes back to taking notes. I watch her in silhouette, her serene glance, the alluring length of her neck. I stop looking; looking wears something on the outside that we’re still keeping under wraps.

35. Text from Rowie:
Come over tonight?


36. Me to Rowie:
Girl, i haven’t slept in days. it’s only wednesday. won’t your mom be home?


37. Rowie to me:
If u come around 11 she’ll be out cold


38. Me to Rowie:
You are persuasive, aren’t you?


I pull out the book I’m reading, Diane di Prima’s
Memoirs of a Beatnik.
It’s another of Mom’s copies, a poet’s bildungsroman, and it’s chock-full of sex: sex with women; sex with men; graphic, endless sex. It’s weird to think about your mother reading a book with this much sex in it. I wonder if she ever would have told me anything about sex, if that’s something moms do. I see her a lot — my mom, that is. I mean, I don’t
actually
see her, but I
think
I do at least once a week and I write her letters.
³⁹
I used to wake up in night sweats from dreams that she disappeared, or that I’d found her; I’d wake up and feel bereft, in that tender place between sleep and waking, feeling like I’d just lost her again, and then find her really gone, years-ago gone, and then it would harden, the anger, and I’d try to make myself stop wanting her back. It’s been too long without her to keep believing her itemized fragments will ever cohere into a mother, the way you see mothers on TV, like other people’s mothers.

39. SiN:
1. Johanna Page Rockett. Mom. 2. I will never send you these letters. You do not deserve them. 3. I had sex. With a girl named Rowie. What do you think of that? 4. Where are you? What the fuck are you doing? 5. Rowie’s mom always asks me how I am.
6.
Pops is a better cook than you ever were. Even though I don’t remember if you ever actually cooked or not. Pops is a really good cook. 7. I don’t miss you.


“Ez?” Rowie pokes me with her mechanical pencil. I look up to see the rest of the class filing out; somehow I missed the sound of the bell.

“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head. “Yeah.”

“Gotta scoot, toots,” she says with a smile. “We got trouble to make.”

We scurry out and make our way toward the west exit, on our way across the track to the warming house. The October sunshine is orange, all glow and shadow, the air tonic with possibility. In a few months — weeks, really, by now — they’ll flood the track for hockey, hence the warming house.

“It feels so wicked delicious to bust out of school during the day,” Rowie says, rumbling down the hill, breaking into a run with arms outstretched. “‘I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable; I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world’!”

“Did you just make that up?” I ask.

“No, it’s Whitman,” she says. “My mom loves Walt Whitman. She made Mimi and me memorize him when we first got here.”

“Your mom kind of blows my mind. Hey, technically we’re leaving school grounds,” I say. I sprint across the track to the campus boundary, the bleachers on the far side of the track, straddling an imaginary border. “Come and kiss me. It’s legal here.”

“Stop,” she says, loitering, shuffling her feet in the brown dirt of the track.

“Come
on,
” I say. “There’s no one coming. We can just duck behind that tree real quick. I thought you were not a bit tamed.” I run back and grab her hand. She smiles bashfully and gives me a quick closed-mouth kiss, giggling. I grab her by the waist and plant a real one on her.

She takes a step back. It rankles me.

“You always go too far. Why do you have to shove us in everyone’s face?” she says forcefully. “I said I didn’t want to.”

“Whoa,” I say. “You didn’t say that, actually. And what the hell do you mean, shove us in everyone’s face? I haven’t even told
Marcy
about us.”

“I just mean — what was with announcing to the whole LocoMotive that we were, like, a queer hip-hop alliance or whatever? Don’t you think that’s going to make people ask questions?”

“Isn’t that what we are? And aren’t we trying to make people ask questions about the language hip-hop uses to describe women and gay people?”

“Yeah, but”— she looks exasperatedly away —“it’s just getting kind of complicated to answer why we’re so interested in it.”

I pause. “No kidding?” I examine her, not sure what to make of that.

“Whatever. Let’s go inside.” She slinks into the warming house without looking at me.

I follow her inside, where Marcy is tinkering with electronics with a boy whose back I don’t immediately recognize. When they turn to greet us, I see it’s Yusuf Njaka, Jane’s brother.

“’Sup,” I say, fist-pounding them both. “What you got going here?”

“Check this shit out,” Marcy says. “Yusuf brought us these old turntables. They’re pretty broke-ass, but if we combine them with some new parts, we can rewire them any way we want, which is pretty dope. We were talking about how to make them portable.”

“Sick,” Rowie says.

Yusuf flashes a blindingly white, toothy grin. “I remembered she was the drumline girl everyone’s always telling crazy stories about, and it made me wonder if we could load turntables onto one of those over-the-shoulder harnesses they use for drums in marching band.”

“Word.” I nod. I can’t help but notice that Marcy hasn’t had too many sneak-arounds with athletes lately.
⁴⁰

40. Text to Marcy:
Yo, are you gonna get with Yusuf or what?? He’s like your match made in technological musical heaven.