“Yeah,” says Seth.
I snake my fingers through his. His palms are sweaty. I don’t care. Every follicle on my scalp perks up as our hands touch. My heart speeds up. I glance at him and smile, and he smiles back.
“I’m sorry if I acted like a dumb ass,” Seth blurts out.
I smile. “You’re not a dumb ass,” I say.
“I shouldn’t have doubted what the flyer said. I should have tried to understand better what Moxie was all about.”
“Well,” I say, “I shouldn’t have expected you to be perfect.”
“Nobody is,” says Seth. “Especially not me. But I promise that from now on I’m going to try to listen better about the stuff I can’t totally understand because I’m a guy.”
“See, there you go,” I whisper, our eyes meeting. “You say you’re not perfect, but that answer makes me think you’re pretty close.”
We are millimeters apart now. I can smell his boyness. I can count the three freckles on his right cheek. I reach out with the hand that’s not holding his and touch them. Then I lean up and kiss them, too.
“Your mom’s in the back bedroom,” Seth says, his voice husky, his dark eyes glancing over my head for a moment.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay what?” Seth says.
“Okay then we’ll have to kiss very quietly,” I tell him.
“Like super stealth quiet?” he asks, leaning into me. My cheeks warm up, and my body thuds with anticipation.
“Like super intense, extra level stealth quiet,” I answer. Or rather, I try to answer. Because by the third or fourth word Seth is kissing me, and I’m kissing him, and all I can hope is that my mother stays in her bedroom for a while, because from the way Seth’s kisses make me feel, I don’t know how we’re ever going to stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The last day of school is always a half day, so the last class of my junior year of high school is English with Mr. Davies, who has announced this week to extremely little fanfare that this will be his final year at East Rockport High School. He’s told us that he’s retiring to spend more time fishing.
I didn’t realize they allow fishing at Hunter’s Pub, which is where everyone in town knows Mr. Davies hangs out. But anyway.
So due to his impending retirement, Mr. Davies is spending these last hours packing up a few boxes and letting us talk and count the minutes to summer break. Lucy, Seth, and I have pushed our desks into a loose circle.
“God, how much longer?” Lucy announces as she doodles hearts and stars all over her hands with a blue ballpoint. “Hey, Viv,” she says, holding her hand up, “take you back?”
I grin a little and so does Seth.
“Yeah, it does,” I say. “I still remember how excited I was when I saw your hands that day.”
“What about me?” asks Seth, wounded.
“Oh, she flipped out about you doing it, trust me,” Lucy chimes in, and Seth cracks up and I roll my eyes.
The intercom crackles to life and Mr. Henriquez’s voice comes through the speaker. We half listen as he reminds us about cleaning out our lockers and leaving the school in a timely and orderly manner at the final bell.
“I want to close by thanking you once again for welcoming me to East Rockport High during these last few weeks of school, and I look forward to leading our school community in the fall,” he says. “Now go on and have a safe and productive summer!”
Amid a few sarcastic whoops and forced applause from our classmates, Lucy asks whether we think he’s really coming back.
“At the very least, Wilson won’t be back,” Seth says. “We know that much.”
After all the news coverage and Moxie becoming an Internet sensation, not to mention Principal Wilson’s actual attempt to expel more than half the girls in the school, it didn’t take long for the school board to get involved. Two weeks later, the fair citizens of East Rockport discovered the principal of their fine high school had spent the past few years funneling funds into pet projects like the football program and away from things like updated chemistry lab materials and sports equipment for girls’ teams. Some deal was struck and the details were kept hush-hush, and all we knew was that by mid-May Principal Wilson and Mitchell Wilson were both long gone. Mitchell deserved to have charges to be pressed against him, but they were never investigated, which pissed us all off. Overnight, the Wilson house was emptied out and a FOR SALE sign sprouted up in the front yard. The morning my mom walked into my bedroom reading the news that Principal Wilson was being replaced, I jumped up off the bed with such excitement I actually fell off. I didn’t care. I just laughed.
Of course, there had been the grumblings in school and around town about how the events probably ensured a losing football season this fall. But it was easy to ignore them with so many girls on Moxie’s side. And when Meemaw and Grandpa told me they were proud of me, I considered it an especially hard-won victory.
Mr. Shelly quit, too, along with a few other administrators who’d been close to Principal Wilson. And then Mr. Henriquez, the principal of one of the middle schools, was brought in to finish the year. So far he seemed okay. No dress code checks at least.
“Just five more minutes,” Lucy says, eyeing the clock. She caps her pen and shoves it in her backpack. “I have to go home right after school and finish boxing up my room.” Lucy’s mom and dad have finally found a place of their own, and Lucy is already planning a Moxie sleepover for the following weekend. She was sure to invite Kiera and Amaya, too, and Marisela and Jane and a few other girls. Lucy said she wanted to strategize for next year. Even if Mr. Henriquez turned out to be as okay as he seemed, she said, it was important to be prepared. “I mean, the patriarchy is more than one guy, right?” Lucy informed us at lunch. Claudia agreed and offered to bring lemon bars to the sleepover.
As the classroom clock ticks down the final moments, I glance at Emma Johnson sitting in her desk reading a paperback novel. Since the walkout, in many ways she’s still been Emma Johnson. Still gorgeous. Still perfectly groomed and organized and high achieving. The MOXIE she wrote down her forearm in Sharpie eventually faded, and she kept quiet for the last few weeks of the year. But I noticed that not long after the walkout she wasn’t eating with the cheerleaders as often, sometimes choosing to sit on the outskirts of some other group. After the accusations against Mitchell were swept under the rug, she seemed to distance herself even more.
When Emma saw me in the hallways or in class, she would look me in the eyes. Smile. We’d even said hi once when we ran into each other in the bathroom. But after that heady, explosive moment on the front steps of East Rockport High, we’d retreated to our own camps, not really talking to each other much again.