I let myself wonder for a minute if that new boy, Seth, is going to the game. If his weird artist parents are taking him there as part of their research for some performance piece they’re doing on Small Town Texas Life. Maybe he’s already begged them to let him move back home to Austin. Maybe he never even existed at all and is just a figment of my imagination.
As dusk falls outside, I heat up a mini frozen pepperoni pizza and take it into my bedroom with me, balancing it on a paper towel. I love eating in bed. It feels so lazy and wrong and also so luxurious and awesome at the same time. After I carefully pick off and eat all the pieces of pepperoni but before I start in on the cheese, I find this documentary I watched once with my mom and start playing it on my laptop. It’s about Bikini Kill’s lead singer, the girl with the rocket-launching voice who sings that song about the rebel girl. I remember that when my mom and I watched the movie the first time, I glanced over at her during the closing credits. In the semi-darkness of our den, her face lit only by the flashing images on the television screen, I could see she was blinking away tears. But I could tell by the way she was smiling through her tears that she felt good and sad at the same time. Sometimes I wonder how old you have to be to feel really nostalgic. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to feel nostalgic for something you never actually got to experience yourself. I think that’s how I feel about the Riot Grrrls.
I finish the pizza, wipe off my greasy fingers and face, and pat the bed so Joan Jett will jump up and snuggle with me as I keep watching the movie. One of the things Kathleen Hanna—that’s the lead singer’s name—talks about in the documentary is the idea of the bedroom culture of girls. Every girl has some super secret world going on in her bedroom where she can make and create things, and Kathleen thought it would be cool if girls could share what was happening in their secret spaces with other girls. That’s what Riot Grrrl tried to do. They tried to make ways for girls to find each other. Girls who cared about the same things and fought the same fights and liked the same stuff. But since it was before the Internet, they did it with zines and bands and lyric sheets and shows and cassette tapes they sold for five dollars.
Sitting there in the semi-darkness of my own bedroom, watching Kathleen and the other Riot Grrrls on my laptop screen, I can’t stop thinking about my mom’s MY MISSPENT YOUTH box.About Wonder Woman taking out street harassers. About old Polaroids of girls with black lipstick who look like they are ready to take over the world with their attitudes. About neon-green flyers advertising a Riot Grrrl convention in Washington, D.C., and fund-raisers for rape crisis centers.
Audacious. That’s a fancy vocabulary workbook word that would earn me extra points on any of Mr. Davies’s stupid unit tests.
The Riot Grrrls didn’t care what people thought. They wanted to be seen and heard.
Because they were audacious.
I cuddle with Joan Jett on my bed while the documentary plays, and an idea that’s been building in the back of my brain begins to take shape. It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous, really. But I can’t stop thinking about it.
Up until I was in third grade, my mom smoked cigarettes. She tried to be sneaky about it when I was really little, but eventually she knew I got wise to her and would apologize to me every time she headed out to the back porch to smoke.
“Oh, Vivvy, I’m sorry,” she would tell me, sighing. “I’m really trying to quit, but it’s so hard.”
My third-grade brain came up with an idea. Alone in my room, I cut out a dozen slips of paper the size of my palm and wrote things on them in black Sharpie like SMOKING KILLS and SMOKING CAUSES CANCER and I DON’T WANT TO LOSE MY ONLY PARENT. Looking back, I cringe at that last one, but I was an earnest third grader, and I was going for the jugular. After decorating them with skulls and crossbones and a stick figure that was supposed to be me crying next to a tombstone that read R.I.P MOM, I commenced the final part of my secret mission. I hid the signs all over the house. Behind her deodorant in the medicine cabinet. In her underwear drawer. Folded into squares in the carton of eggs. I even tucked one into her pack of Camel Lights.
My mother found the first one (buried inside her box of Special K) and waved it at me during breakfast that morning.
“Vivian, was this you?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
“I don’t knooooooow,” I said, arching an eyebrow back. “It could be some anonymous anti-smoking person.” I loved playing some secret avenger. Even if in my heart I knew I wasn’t actually so secret.
My mother rolled her eyes at me, but something funny happened after she found all of the cards.
She stopped smoking. For good.
My mission had worked.
When the documentary is over, I give Joan Jett one last pet and go to my mom’s desk in the den for a few supplies. My body hums with excitement. I cross my fingers that our wonky printer that only works half the time will work tonight. And then I get the last item I need from my mother’s closet.
I spill out all of my mom’s old zines for the hundredth time and look at them with fresh eyes. I’m taking notes. Or, to be totally honest, I’m kind of stealing. But I don’t think the girls who made Girl Germs and Bikini Kill and Sneer would mind. In fact, they’d probably be happy about it.
I run one finger over the words of something called a Riot Grrrl Manifesto. I can’t remember ever reading it before. It’s in one of the Bikini Kill zines, and I wonder if Kathleen Hanna wrote it herself. I swallow up the words.
Because we don’t want to assimilate to someone else’s (boy) standards of what is or isn’t.
Because we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak
Because I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will, change the world for real.
I picture Lucy Hernandez’s stunned, hurt expression in class when Mitchell Wilson told her to make him a sandwich. I think about Jason Garza’s gross T-shirt and his swiveling, stupid hips. I imagine my life in East Rockport stretching out in front of me, a series of pep rallies and vanilla conversations in the cafeteria with dutiful girls I’ve known since kindergarten. I picture all the expected things that come after all that—go to college, end up with an okay guy and an okay job, and spend my Fridays in the fall at East Rockport High football games until I’m eighty years old.
I take a deep breath and uncap a black Sharpie. I need the right name to get started. My eyes glide over the well-worn covers of my mom’s zine collection. I pick up a copy of one called Snarla and hold it close to my face and shut my eyes and take a deep inhale, imagining I can smell the musty basements and warehouses where the Riot Grrrls used to play shows for three dollars. Imagining I can hear them singing out the lyrics they’ve so painstakingly copied onto the pages of their zines.
I won’t be your baby doll
I won’t be your pageant queen
Girl let’s dance in our bare feet
Let’s hold hands all night long
Go ahead and try us boy
We love to fight back!