Claudia earns a best friend medal and a million free chocolate cupcakes for the patience she gives me during the pre-lunch pep rally, when we tuck ourselves up at the top of the bleachers and I start whispering about Seth Acosta’s hands.
“Okay, but why are you whispering?” Claudia shouts. “It’s loud as hell in here, and anyway, he’s nowhere to be found.” The school band is warming up again, playing the same five or six rah-rah songs they play over and over at the football games, and Claudia is right—we can’t see Seth anywhere in the school gym. “No one is going to hear you freaking out over Mister Magic Hands,” Claudia continues. Her eyebrows fly up. “Okay, now I get why you’re so into him. Magic hands.” She cracks up at her own words.
I blush in spite of myself. “God, Claudia.”
“Oh, like it’s not like that with you and him?” she asks, incredulous. “Like it’s totally not about sex? You’re just into him for his mind, right?”
“Enough,” I manage, burying my head between my knees so she’ll stop. The truth is, Seth’s hearts and stars did make him one hundred times hotter to me. All through class as Mr. Davies had droned on, I’d watched Seth’s temporarily tattooed hands taking careful notes, pausing every so often to scratch the back of his neck or quietly tap his fingers on the side of his desk. I’d cringed every time I’d heard Mitchell or one of his friends open his big mouth, worried Seth was going to become the butt of a joke. But nothing like that happened. Seth has done such a good job of sliding himself into the margins of East Rockport by rarely talking or doing anything extremely good or extremely bad that even though he doesn’t look like most of the other students, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one noticing his every move.
“Hey, can I sit here?”
I pop up to see Lucy Hernandez standing a few feet away, balancing herself on a bleacher. Something about her standing up in front of us makes me realize Lucy is a big girl. Tall—even taller than me, which is saying something—with big hips, big eyes, big, full red lips. Even her dark hair is big, falling over her shoulders in curly tsunamis. At first I kind of want her to go away because I just want to talk to Claudia about Seth. Then I feel like a shithead for thinking that.
“Sure, you can sit here,” I say. There’s no need to scoot down to make room. Claudia and I are in the real nosebleed section of the gym, with Sara and Kaitlyn and the other girls we normally hang out with several rows ahead of us.
“Thanks,” Lucy says, sitting down next to me so I’m in the middle.
“Hey, I’m Claudia,” Claudia says, shouting her name over my lap. “You’re Lucy, yeah?”
Lucy nods and smiles and tucks her knees up under her chin.
“So you’re into that newsletter thing like Viv, huh?” Claudia asks, pointing at Lucy’s hands. On the gym floor, the East Rockport cheerleaders are doing their thing, led by Emma Johnson, as usual. The dance music piped in through the speaker system thuds as Emma and the other girls shimmy and shake in their spotless uniforms. Their moves are so precise, so perfect. The cheerleaders have these legendary three-hours-a-day practices all summer long, and I guess it pays off in the end.
“You mean Moxie?” Lucy asks, answering Claudia’s question and holding up her hands. “Yeah, I thought it was cool. It reminded me of this club I was in at my old school in Houston.”
“Is that where you moved here from?” I ask.
Lucy says yes and, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the noise of the pep rally, tells us how her dad lost his job in June, so she and her parents and her little brother moved in with her grandmother in East Rockport. Her dad recently found a job as head of maintenance at Autumn Leaves, the town’s only nursing home, so now they’re here to stay.
“At my old school I was vice president of this club called GRIT,” Lucy tells us. “It stood for Girls Respecting and Inspiring Themselves. It was, like, a feminist club.”
“And people actually went to meetings?” I ask. I try to imagine a club like that at East Rockport and my brain turns cloudy with confusion.
“Yeah, totally,” Lucy says. “We even had a couple of guy members. We did fund-raisers for the local women’s shelter and talked about stuff that we were concerned about. I was hoping there would be a club like that here. So I could meet other feminists, you know?” The way she says the word feminists so casually, so easily, sort of blows my mind. Claudia nods and smiles politely, but her eyebrows jump a bit.
I’ve heard my mom use the word feminist when she talks to old friends on the phone. (“I mean, honestly, Jane, as a feminist that movie just pissed me off.”) Riot Grrrls were into feminism, obviously, but up until this moment in the gym I didn’t think of them as feminists so much as super cool girls who took no shit.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a club like GRIT here,” Claudia says. “Wait, correction. I know we’ve never had a club like that here.”
Lucy nods, her face wistful. Then she turns to me and asks, “Did you see that guy in our English class who had his hands marked?” I feel my cheeks heat up just a bit, but Claudia keeps her lips sealed, her eyes focused on the pep rally. I know she won’t ever say anything about my crush on Seth in front of Lucy.
“Yeah,” I answer. “I think he’s new, too. Like you. I thought it was kind of cool.”
“It was,” Lucy says. “But I’m surprised he didn’t get his ass kicked.”
“Maybe none of the guys noticed,” I respond. “They were all too busy thinking about this.” I float my hand out in front of my face in the general direction of the pep rally. Principal Wilson is giving his usual come-to-Jesus speech about supporting our boys and blah, blah, blah. The football players start walking out in their team jerseys, and the students in the first few rows roar so loud my ears hurt. I glance around at the other students in the back rows. A girl I don’t know is slumped in a bleacher alone, totally asleep. A few skinny, pimply boys are grouped in a clump, staring blankly down at the gym floor.
“Do you guys actually go to these games?” Lucy asks, her brow furrowed.
“Usually,” shrugs Claudia. “But Viv bailed on me for the last one.”
“I wasn’t feeling good,” I remind her. “But yeah,” I continue, answering Lucy’s question, “there just isn’t much else to do around here. So we go.”
Lucy’s eyebrows furrow deeper as she thinks, I’m sure, of the one movie theater in town and the one twenty-four-hour Sonic Drive-In and the one main drag. None of those things are things that are any fun by yourself.