“No,” I answer, maybe too quickly. “We didn’t. But Lucy decided to do this bake sale and just, like, adopt the name, I guess.”
Amaya slides the napkin out of Kiera’s hands and unwraps the lemon bars. She takes a bite out of one and smiles. “These are so good,” she says, her mouth full. Powdered sugar spills down her chin.
Kiera rolls her eyes at Amaya. “You cannot even wait until we get back to the table, can you?” Amaya shoots Kiera a look, but Lucy snorts at Kiera’s comment.
“Y’all planning on doing another one?” Kiera asks. “I mean, like another bake sale.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say. “I mean, you guys need new uniforms, right?”
Amaya nods vigorously, her mouth full of lemon bar.
Kiera nods, too. She opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “I guess I was wondering,” she starts, “if this club is … like … open to new members?”
“She means is it just white girls,” Amaya says, finishing her lemon bar.
I’m instantly uncomfortable and not sure how to answer, but Lucy doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, my dad’s Mexican,” she says, “so take that for what it’s worth.” Kiera grins a little when Lucy says that.
“I think everyone should be able to do this,” I say. “I mean, it’s for everyone. I don’t think whoever started Moxie wants, like, a leader. If a girl wants to hold another bake sale, or anything like that, she can just … do it.”
“And call it Moxie?” Kiera asks, arching an eyebrow.
“Sure, why not?” Lucy answers. A group of freshman boys collects around the table to buy what’s left of my Magic Squares, and Lucy turns to help them.
“Well, that’s cool,” Kiera says. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I say.
Kiera gives us a small wave, and she and Amaya make their way back to their table.
When the freshman boys leave the table, I whisper to Lucy, “That was kind of awkward.”
“What’s awkward is how this place is as fucked up when it comes to race as it is about anything else,” she tells me, flipping her fingers through the money envelope, doing a quick estimation of how much we’ve raised. “I mean, look at this cafeteria.” She motions at the tables in front of us. The Latina girls who speak mostly Spanish hang out together, and they don’t have much to do with the Latina girls like Claudia and Lucy who speak mostly English. And the black girls have their own cliques that I don’t fully get. And the few Asian kids and the biracial kids and the kids who don’t fit any particular box unless they play a certain sport or something go with whoever will take them. It’s messed up.
“At my old school, at least the teachers brought up racial issues in class sometimes,” Lucy continues.
I’m glad Claudia’s not around to hear Lucy tell us again how advanced life is in the big city. For the first time Lucy makes me feel a little prickly, too. We hardly ever talk about race stuff at East Rockport. Hell, we hardly ever talk about it at home either. The night we watched that documentary about Kathleen Hanna, my mom talked about how Riot Grrrl was mostly white girls, and she was sorry they weren’t as welcoming to other girls as they could have been. That it was one of the few regrets she had about the whole thing. But that was as far as she’d gone. East Rockport High isn’t just white girls, for sure. I glance over to where Kiera and Amaya are sitting. I think about how in this one way, maybe Moxie could be even better than the Riot Grrrls. Even stronger.
As the bell rings to end lunch, I help Lucy throw out the garbage from the sale.
“We made over a hundred dollars,” she tells me.
I frown. “I thought it would be more. That’s enough for, like, one uniform.”
“Okay, Miss Negative,” says Lucy. “We have to start somewhere.”
“I know,” I answer, my irritation fading a bit. “You’re right.” Lucy seems so sure of herself. So confident. Standing there in that moment, I can almost convince myself that she’s the one who started Moxie, not me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The few weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break are just, I don’t know, such an exercise in futility. No one wants to be at school, and that includes the teachers. It’s a three-week countdown until a precious, blessed break when we can sleep in, numb out on television, and forget about worksheets and grammar exercises and chemistry labs.
And as far as the girls are concerned, holiday vacation will be a break from the bump ’n’ grab.
The bump ’n’ grab started not long after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Just like “Make me a sandwich,” it started small at first. A few boys did it—boys like Mitchell and Jason and their buddies—and then it started to spread like a match to dry kindling, with so many boys playing along that making it down a hallway was like picking your way through a minefield.
The bump ’n’ grab is exactly what it sounds like. A boy bumps you in the hallway. Maybe quasi-gently with a hip. Maybe more forcefully like he’s enjoying himself a little too much.
When you stumble, there’s a grab. Sometimes you get goosed around the waist. Sometimes you get pinched on the butt. And as quickly as it starts, it’s over, and the boy is off down the hall, maybe squawking that he’s sorry. Maybe laughing at the top of his lungs.
The whole thing really gets you into the holiday spirit. Ha, ha, ha.
This morning, as I make my way to English, it happens to me. I can’t even get a sense of which guy does it, he’s so fast, but his fingers manage to make it just under my shirt, cold and rough on my waist.
I want to yell out, chase him down, scream out loud. But I’m frozen from the shock of it, standing so still that some kids behind me whine that I’m blocking the hallway.
My cheeks burning, I make my way into class. With just a few days left before break, Mr. Davies has decided to show the film version of Romeo and Juliet (even though we’ve never read the play, so go figure), and I collapse into my seat, thankful for the cool darkness of the classroom. Lucy leans toward me over her desk.
“You okay? Your face is all red.”
At the front of the classroom Mr. Davies seems appropriately checked out, so I lean in and in a quiet voice tell Lucy what happened. She listens, frowns, and then mutters, “Asshole!” a little too loudly. A few kids around us laugh.
“Shhh…,” I whisper. But in the same breath, I want to scream Asshole! out loud, too.
“I don’t get this,” Lucy argues. “Is it some kind of game?”
The sappy music from the Romeo and Juliet movie drones on. Several kids around us are nodding off, and Mr. Davies’s chin is resting on his chest. In a few minutes he’ll probably be audibly snoring. Considering permission granted, I explain to Lucy that the bump ’n’ grab is one of many games some of the boys at East Rockport like to play.
“Last year, they started this thing where they tried to take pictures up girls’ skirts and then posted them online,” I explain. “There was this whole point system to it, too.”
Lucy mock faints, collapsing into her desk. Then she sits back up again.
“I can’t wait for Friday. I need a vacation from this retrograde nightmare.”