I take a deep breath. I grit my teeth. I keep going.
The first floor goes smoothly. Not another soul to be found. But as I venture out of the foreign language wing, my heart thrumming, I make a quick right turn and run right into someone. It’s a hard hit, enough that I shout and drop the rest of the Moxie copies. Honestly, it’s like something out of a bad rom com.
My yelp of surprise still ringing in my ears, I step back and find my eyes resting on Seth Acosta.
“Hey,” he says. And I can’t really decide what should be declared my cause of death—being caught delivering Moxie or running into Seth Acosta in the hallway before the sun is even up. Combine the two, and it’s possible I’m already dead and this is my weird version of the afterlife.
“Let me help you,” Seth says, and he crouches down, his tight black jeans straining around his knobby guy knees, as I stand there, stunned. I watch as he picks up all the copies of my secret teen lady revolution zine.
I can’t move.
Seth’s coal-black eyes scan the front of Moxie, and then he stands up and stares.
“Are you, like, passing these out?”
I swallow. My cheeks are warm. I peer to my left and my right.
“Yes,” I say. What else is there to say?
He flips through a copy, then stares back at me, his face serious. His voice drops down a notch or two.
“Did you … make these?”
I take a breath. The pause has given me away already, I know it. So I stand there, quiet.
“You did, yeah?” he asks very quietly. The way he delivers that yeah—all soft and yummy and reassuring at the same time. I find myself nodding, transfixed.
“Yeah, I did,” I say, my voice a whisper. “But don’t tell anyone, okay?”
Seth stares at me for a moment, then nods slowly, and I stand there, still in shock. It’s not Claudia or Meg or Sara or even a teacher or administrator who finds me out, but this strange boy. I can’t really believe it.
“Hey, maybe you can give me some? I’ll put them in the boys’ bathrooms.”
I guess I’m not so out of it, because I laugh out loud.
“Seriously, the boys here don’t care about this. I promise.” I stare at my shoes. “I mean, except maybe for you.”
Seth hands the stack of Moxies to me. “Yeah, I definitely don’t want to mess with your plans or anything. I mean, maybe you just want this for the girls.”
I hold the zines close to my chest in case someone appears. Then I force myself to speak.
“I guess I do want it for the girls.” I pause. “But even though you’re a guy, you obviously saw the first issue, right?”
Seth pops up one eyebrow. “Yeah, how’d you know?”
“I saw your hands that day,” I answer, aware that I’m actually stringing words and sentences together and not passing out. “You marked them with hearts and stars.”
“I did,” Seth acknowledges. “I found a copy in the hallway. I guess someone dropped it. To be honest, I thought it was pretty kick-ass.”
Pretty kick-ass. Does that mean he thinks I’m pretty kick-ass? My chest feels like exploding. I decide that Seth Acosta deciding I’m kick-ass is even better than him thinking I’m pretty. Definitely better.
“I mean, I can see why you’d want this to be a lady thing,” Seth says, dragging his hand through his hair. “You’re preaching Bibles full of truth.” He glances around, his eyes wide and his voice a whisper, then pronounces, “This school is fucked up.”
I grin, glad to hear the words out loud. “It pretty much is,” I say. “It must be so different from Austin.”
Seth nods, then frowns just a little. “How’d you know I was from Austin?”
“Oh,” I stammer, “my friend Claudia? I think your family rents your place from her parents? She may have mentioned something about it?” Maybe if I make everything sound like a question, I won’t appear to be a total stalker.
Seth just nods again. “My parents moved down here to work on their art or whatever. Like, a change of perspective.” He shrugs and rolls his eyes a little.
“Like, they wanted the perspective of a suffocating small town?” I manage. Seth laughs, and my chest explodes again, only this time I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to rebuild it.
“I guess,” Seth says. “Anyway, we live here now.” He says this definitively. With resignation. But then he grins again, and it’s quiet and awkward for a moment, and I hug Moxie to myself even harder. The last thing I said was witty, and if I say anything else, I might mess this all up. Whatever this is.
“Hey, you should probably get going if you want to pass the rest of these out,” Seth says. “I have to go find my Spanish teacher. It’s why I’m here so early. I need to make up a test.”
I nod, then feel the need to reassure myself.
“Just … I mean … you won’t tell anyone about this, right?”
“I really won’t,” Seth says, nodding hard. “But can I at least have an issue?”
I slide a copy out of my pile and hand it to him. Our thumbs touch as I pass Moxie off. My heart slides out of place for a second.
“Okay, I gotta go,” Seth says.
“Yeah, and I have to hurry,” I answer, and before I know it he’s off down the hallway, and I’m slipping in and out of girls’ bathrooms, dropping off stacks of Moxie, my chest thumping and my mind racing, a Riot Grrrl soundtrack pounding through me as I move.
*
My phone buzzes next to me. I roll over onto my stomach, push aside my history homework until it falls off my bed, then glance at the screen.
So you think you’re going to do it? The moxie thing next Tuesday?
It’s Lucy. We only recently started texting. Not as often as me and Claudia text each other, of course, but often enough. Lucy’s texts never start with a hey or a what’s up. She always dives right in, like she doesn’t care about small talk. Sometimes after what feels like a few minutes of texting I glance at the time and find an entire hour has passed as we trade thoughts on everything from messed-up stuff at East Rockport to our families and even to me admitting I think Seth Acosta is cute. It’s easy to spill stuff to Lucy in my texts. Like I’ve known her for a lot longer than just a couple months.
But talking about Moxie makes me anxious because it’s such a big secret. I feel the weight of it with every text I send.
Are you gonna do it? I answer back. I need her to say yes.
Hellz yes, Lucy writes back. I think it’s so brilliant
In the safety of my own bedroom, I allow myself a big grin.
If you will then I will … I just need to find my bathrobe
They have cheap ones at the Walmart in case you can’t
I chew on my thumbnail and count up the number of girls who were taken out of my classes today for dress code violations. Five. Principal Wilson and his friends aren’t letting up. Today I saw a freshman girl in an enormous, shame-on-you dirty jersey crying in one of the second-floor bathrooms, and when I tried to console her, she just shook her head and ran past me out the door.
I’ll find my bathrobe or get one, I text back. I watch Lucy’s text bubble, wondering what her response will be.