Sister Mischief (5 page)

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-minute 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.”

“WTF?” Rowie asks in disbelief. “That shit is unconstitional.”

“They think there are gangs in Holyhill? West Side!” Marcy laughs, throwing an upside-down finger W.

“Let me see that,” I demand, grabbing the handbook from Marcy. “Where is this coming from? Like, what suddenly inspired them to outlaw the hip-hop nation?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Marcy says, slapping her forehead in jest. “There’s been a large and dangerous —
influx
— into the community.” She jerks her head toward Jane Njaka, a Somalian girl in a few of our classes, who’s working on calculus and poking at something in Tupperware across the commons. Jane’s sitting alone.

Rowie nods, aping concern. “Them coloreds, they’re taking over the neighborhood.”

“And the White House!” I holler, proudly exposing my Obama button.

“Yo, I meant to tell you, I have this hook that’s like
We wanna cause some drama like Barack Obama,
” Rowie tells me.

“Sick!” I say. “I love it. Let’s work on it this weekend.”

“OMG, do you think this policy is because of Friday night?” Tess asks. “When Mary Ashley got clowned on by those drunk guys? It would be just effing like her to get her dad to make the administration write some wack policy because she was pissed her shirt got ruined. Plus Herb Baumgarten’s superconservative: I heard his education platform would actually make it illegal to teach evolution in Minnesota.”

“No way,” Rowie says. “Do the Baumgartens seriously have that much clout here?”

“I forgot his name was Herb,” I say. “Ha. Ha, ha.”

“Oh, mos def,” Marcy says. “They almost got me expelled. But why hip-hop?”

“Why not?” Tess says. “Her dad’s running for the state senate; he probably needs an issue. And people like that just like to feel powerful. This isn’t the first sagging-pants policy I’ve read about. I saw an article about some kid in California who actually got arrested and held overnight because his pants were hanging off his butt.”

“Held overnight? For real?” Marcy says. “I guess I can kiss ever fitting in here good-bye.”

“Were you holding your breath?” Rowie asks drily.

I throw a fry at Marcy. “Fuck here.”

“I’m sick of Holyhill’s shit,” Marcy says. “I mean, how can they confiscate, like, the most important musical movement of the last fifty years?”

“I’m not signing anything,” I say. “And I don’t see how they can make me.”

“For real,” says Rowie. “I mean, what if we wanted to learn from hip-hop? Like — what if we wanted to discuss it, or study it in an academic setting?”

“Isn’t that sort of against what hip-hop’s about?” Tess suggests. “I mean, do you really think Tupac would’ve wanted to be hauled into the classroom by a bunch of kids in the suburbs?”

“Isn’t that something to discuss in and of itself?” I say.