Sister Mischief

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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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

“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?”

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!”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“So let’s fucking discuss it.” Marcy licks her lips, gunning for a fight. “Let’s start a student group for hip-hop, a group to listen to it and talk about it. I wonder what they’ll do if we all refuse to sign the policy.”

“But a group like that’d never get approved by the administration. You saw the rules.” Rowie sounds skeptical.

“That’s totally the point,” I say. “We refuse to sign the policy and challenge it by applying to put a hip-hop group on the official roster of school-sanctioned student groups.”

“I’m not signing anything without a lawyer,” Tess says, sounding like her mom. “And if they deny the application, we’ll appeal and draw all kinds of attention to how unfair the policy is in the first place. How can they keep us from talking about why hip-hop is so complicated and offensive to some people and so effing bomb to all the awesome people?”

“They let the prayer group meet on campus. That’s offensive to some people,” Marcy says.

“You know what else this shithole doesn’t have?” I say. “A safe space. Of any kind. We don’t have a gay-straight alliance, or any group that deals with issues like that. All the shit Holyhill tries to sweep under the rug just stays there.”

“You’re totally right.” Marcy punches me for emphasis. “Even more to talk about. We should start, like, a queer hip-hop alliance.” The four of us bust out laughing, then trail off, thinking.

“Wouldn’t we need a gay to have a gay-straight alliance?” Rowie asks gently.

“Not necessarily,” I say quickly. “I mean, maybe we could have a gay — after we have an alliance.” Rowie nods understandingly, popping a dried apricot in her mouth.

Tess looks at us dubiously. “Let me get this straight. You guys are going to apply for school approval for a queer-friendly hip-hop student group?” A grin spreads like dawn over her face. “Damn. That’s bold.”

“Fucking right.” Marcy is grinning. “We can call it Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos. Code name: 4H.”

Tess steals one of my fries and chuckles. “I’m so down. You dames may be crazy, but that policy is a violation of justice in ten different ways.”

“So it’s on,” Marcy says. “None of us signs the policy. The dissenters shall be named 4H: Hip-Hop for Heteros and Homos. Oh, hell yes.”

The bell rings again, urging us into afternoon classes. Slouching, groaning, resisting, we get up to go. Marcy balls up her paper bag and shoots it into a trash barrel fifteen feet away without so much as a kiss of the rim. “Three points!” She pumps a fist in the air.

“Marcy, how long am I gonna have to hound you before you get a reusable lunchbox?” Paper lunch bags drive me crazy; it’s a hang-up of mine.

“I should get a lunchbox so I can have a gay little accessory like that?” Her face darkens. “Uh, I didn’t mean — like, not gay gay — you know.”

“Chill out, dude,” I say. “Gotta do a lot better than that to offend old Ezmeezy.”

I’ve never known an openly gay person in Holyhill, so I don’t have a lot of precedent to go on in terms of, like, coming out to the world. I don’t think I’d get beat up, but I can’t say for sure — I’m pretty sure if I were a gay dude, I’d get the shit kicked out of me. How does a person go about coming out, anyway? I already told my best friends and my dad. Am I supposed to go around doling out high fives, all “Hey, what up, I’m Esme the Wonder Gay?”

Besides, Holyhill is a giant public high school, the best in Minnesota, 99.9 percent SWASP, or at least it feels that way. There are about twenty-five people in our five-hundred-person class with 4.0 averages: Tess and Rowie are two, and Marcy has a 3.95 because last semester she got her band grade docked for the MashBaum mud swirly incident. My friends are kind of over the whole social scene — the Holyettes danceline and their revolting highlights, the hysteria over hockey, the shiny cars in the senior lot. I think we all try to get really good grades because we know that college will get us out of this sand trap of a suburb, which I sometimes call the Orange County (gross) of Minnesota. Everyone graduates from Holyhill, everyone goes to college, and everyone seems to be Christian.

The Christian thing is a tricky stick to dip, because the girls like MashBaum who wear the little gold and silver Tiffany’s crosses every day are the same girls we see wasted on Friday nights at Perkins, the only twenty-four-hour joint in town, eyeliner melted into dark half-moons under their eyes, hair backseat-ratted, tormenting poor Pearl, the weekend waitress. It gets to me sometimes, the way the moms complain when teachers assign too much homework on Wednesdays, when all the church youth groups meet, or get their knickers all in a twist about sex ed in health class and evolution in biology and gay teachers anywhere, or the way a lot of Holyhill moms don’t seem to have anything to do but Botox their overcooked faces, cling white-knuckled to their lame middle-management husbands, and make their kids go to church. Living in Holy Hell is like being under twenty-four-hour Jesus surveillance.

Rowie’s so good at chemistry it makes me want to vom. She’s a super Hindu model minority at math and science. I’m good enough to be in the advanced class, but I’m still pretty destined for the humanities. I don’t really like subjects where there’s only one right answer. Ambivalence is practically my middle name.

I slump at the phrase “lab work,” dragging my backpack behind me like a recalcitrant kindergartner.

“Is it more lab today? If we’re not blowing anything up, I’m so out,” I whine. I skip Chem a lot. Mr. Halverson is either too bored or too resentful of his job to protest my excuses — the nurse’s office, an emergency newspaper meeting. One time a forged note claiming a phony meeting with the superintendent. Another time, as soon as Halves the Calves (more cankles, really — terrible, terrible man cankles — mankles?) started talking scientific method, I just got up, pointed to my crotch, declared, “Rag. Major rag,” and walked out. That shit makes male teachers so uncomfortable that they let you go every time, especially if you’ve got the cojones to try it in a non-gym class. Totally catches them off guard, and you just slip out amid the stuttering and confusion.

“Unclear. Come on. Whenever you leave, I have to stay so you can copy my notes later,” Rowie says.

I consider her point, which is fair. Casting an arm around her shoulders, I walk toward the domain of Mankles. “Fine. But you owe me five bucks if he’s wearing mint-green again today.” Halverson has a seemingly infinite collection of orthopedic sneakers. White and black, obviously, but also — we have a running record in my notebook — mint-green, ecru, gray, red, brown, and navy.

As we walk to class, I see Jane Njaka packing up her bag. What I know about Jane is that she’s from Somalia, she commutes from Minneapolis, and she’s wicked smart — she always knows the answers in AP Chem, sometimes even before Rowie.

“Hey, Jane,” I call, waving at her. She turns around and looks a little surprised. “Do you know if it’s more lab today in Chem?”

“Oh, God, I hope not. Prakash Banerjee is my partner, and he makes me do everything while he plays with his funny little Magic cards.” Jane’s voice is lilted in a tone I find reassuring; its articulation sounds a little islandy, but with some desert too.

“Prakash is a Magic fiend,” Rowie says, giggling. “That kid is dork on a stick.”

“I know!” Jane says. “I thought I was the only one who noticed what a freak he is! Do you know he always keeps four GI Joes in his pocket?”

“Not five, not three.” She nods. “He takes them out and looks at them sometimes.”

“Wow. Always good to know there’s people out there who are even shittier at fitting in than you are,” Rowie says.

The third bell rings, and Rowie and I hustle to our lab-table-for-two. I elbow her in the ribs.

15. Stealth-text from Marcy: Dude, sorry about the gay lunchbox comment. Didn’t mean it.
Me to Marcy: Dude, stop hitting on me.
Marcy to me: I wish I knew how to quit you.

Mr. Halverson briskly claps his hands three times, which is his way of beginning class. He’s not a bad guy, I guess, but he’s one of those teachers who seem constantly disappointed. Maybe what Halves the Calves really wanted was to open his own cake shop or play pro cricket or, I don’t know, tickle the baby grand for shoppers in the Galleria. Maybe a lot of grown-ups are disappointed.

In his dejected drone, Halverson begins. “Sit down. We’re going to — well, we’re going to try to — go over the principles of valence electrons and atomic bonding. Valence electrons tell us how well or poorly atoms play with others. Write this down, please, you’ll need it for Thursday’s quiz. Or don’t. Fail the quiz. I don’t care. Valence electrons orbit the nucleus on the outermost electron shell of the atom. They determine how stable or reactive the atom is. A high number of valence electrons makes a stable atom, and a low number makes the atom likely to react, or bond, with other atoms.¹⁶

16. I have very few valence electrons, I scribble in my notebook. I think my nucleus is showing.

“While there are five primary types of atomic bonding,” Mankles continues blandly, “the two we’ll cover today are covalent and ionic bonding. In the covalent bond, a reactive atom, one with a small number of valence electrons, shares valence electrons with a nearby atom. In an ionic bond, a reactive atom steals valence electrons from another atom. This is caused by electrostatic attraction.”

I reach over and scribble in Rowie’s notebook.¹⁷ She muffles a giggle like a wind chime, and I feel distracted. Trying to get her laugh unstuck from my ringing ears, I decide it’s safe now to take out my book and read under the table. Rowie can teach me chemistry later, and better than Mankles will now. I’m rereading Anne Frank; I love her. When I was eight, I started a journal just so I could call her Kitty, and began it by cataloging the entire contents of our kitchen cupboards in an attempt to imitate Anne’s record of the annex’s food supply, but I had to stop when I found a dusty box of matzoh and burst into tears. It’s Mom’s copy of the diary I have. I don’t have much of hers, but there are still a ton of books she left behind in our house. I read the notes in the margins, or underlined passages, and I scrutinize them for evidence of her intent to abandon me, for a flight plan.

Her last letter, from almost a year ago, drops out of the back cover as I turn the page. She sends me a letter every birthday from a kibbutz she lives on in Israel. It’s virtually the only contact we have, a yearly reminder that we’re both still alive, even if we don’t really know each other. Pops didn’t understand, and I certainly didn’t understand, why she left — I guess she had some kind of breakdown. The letters I get from her are more like lists.

I tuck the letter away and return to the book. I’m at January 6, 1944. A Thursday. Anne’s been in hiding for about a year and a half. She’s writing about her mother, about her exasperation with her mother and her sister. She loves her father, like I do. She has a mother and a sister, but I don’t. She’s thinking about her body, like I am, and she’s embarrassed about it, which I guess I am, sometimes. Isn’t everyone? I’m just coming to the passage that made everyone snicker when we read it in eighth-grade Language Arts, the passage I remember best of Anne’s definitive edition, the restored version with all the sex and nasty observations her father once extracted, the passage that still rings like a bell inside my hollow places:

Unconsciously, I had these feelings even before I came here. Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me and which I’d never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend!

I close the diary and look at Anne’s picture on the front, at her grainy black bob, and in profile, I see the black wall of Rowie’s bob, its smooth surface disturbed by the rapid action of her pencil, her head bowed, unaware of me just on the other side, watching.