Those last lines are my favorite.
I can visualize the Riot Grrrls—my mother among them—walking the streets at night in their Doc Martens and their bad haircuts and their dark lipstick, ready to stand up for what they believed in. What they knew was right.
Angry. Untouchable. Unstoppable. And, if you were to use my grandmother’s words about my mom during last night’s dinner, full of moxie.
Suddenly, I’ve got it.
My tongue between my teeth, my mind focused, my hand steady, I make careful letters, already imagining what the end product will look like. I finish lettering the title and then at the last minute add the perfect motto. When I’m finished, I crack my neck—it’s a little sore from hunching over my creation so intently. And then I admire my work. I can feel the adrenaline pumping through me. I smile.
This is the most excited I’ve been about anything in ages.
*
With an hour left before my mom gets home from work, I take my finished pages and place them gingerly in my math folder, then slide the folder into my backpack. Before I lose my nerve entirely, I wheel my bicycle out of the garage and hop on, making my way toward downtown East Rockport.
Since it’s game night, the whole town is mostly a dead zone, with signs at the Dairy Queen and the Sonic that read CLOSED FOR THE GAME. The yellow glow of the streetlights illuminates the empty streets and parking lots. But U COPY IT is on the outskirts of the business district, and it’s one of the few places in East Rockport that’s always open until midnight. I coast past the Walgreens and the hair salon where my grandparents had to pay way too much money to fix my mom’s blue hair all those years ago.
It’s so quiet I feel like one of the last surviving citizens of a ghost town. The sticky autumn air smells like grease traps and gas stations, and if I take a deep breath I won’t catch even a sliver of the scent of the briny Gulf waters just a few blocks away. In East Rockport, it’s easy to forget you live by the ocean. Not that the Gulf of Mexico actually counts as the ocean. Last summer there was so much fecal matter floating in it, they shut the beaches down for two weeks. East Shitport is more like it.
Braking gently, I park my bike and walk into U COPY IT, my eyes taking a moment to adjust from nighttime darkness to the bright fluorescent shine of the inside of the copy shop. There are no customers and just one employee, a guy wearing a frayed red vest that I guess is supposed to be some sort of U COPY IT corporate regalia. Perching on a stool behind the register, he’s so busy reading a tattered paperback novel that he doesn’t even look up when I walk in. Taking my folder carefully out of my backpack, I approach the counter. The guy’s name tag reads FRANK.
“Uh, hi?” I say, and Frank looks up and blinks hard a few times, like he’s trying to process that I’m here. He has a little stubble under his chin and a mass of unkempt salt-and-pepper hair that sits like a bird’s nest on top of his head. He could be thirty or sixty, I’m not sure. But before he decides to speak to me, he carefully adjusts his frameless glasses and blinks three or four more times.
“Can I help you?” he says at last, setting down his copy of Carrie by Stephen King.
“Uh, I was wondering … if you could make me some copies?” I hate talking to people in stores, even if there’s no one else to hear me. I’m always afraid I’m going to sound stupid.
“Well, the store is U COPY IT, so I can help you do it,” Frank says dryly. But half a smile pops up on his face so I’m not too anxious.
Frank pulls out a small plastic counting device, walks me over to one of the machines, and slides the device into place. He shows me how it works and offers to observe as I do a practice run to make sure I do it right.
My cheeks heat up, but I pull my pages out of my bag and try to program the machine so it will copy double-sided, like Frank showed me.
“A lady boxer, huh?” Frank says, nodding his chin at the front cover.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Cool,” Frank says, ignoring how flustered I am. He makes sure my test copy turns out okay, even folding it in half so it’s all finished. When he hands it to me, it’s still warm as toast.
Holding it in my hand, my idea feels so real that all of a sudden I can’t decide whether I should scream with excitement or stop now.
“This looks good,” I manage.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Frank says.
Once he’s back at the counter, I busy myself making copies. I do a mental count of how many girls’ bathrooms I think there are at East Rockport High and punch in the number of copies I need. While the machine whirs, I check my phone for the tenth time. I have to make it home before my mom or she’ll never buy that I was so sick I decided to skip the game. It’s possible Mom would understand what I’m doing, but I can barely grasp the fact that I’m doing this, so I don’t know how I would even begin to explain it to her.
And anyway, there’s something delicious about it being my secret.
At last I pop out the counting device and head back to the counter to pay with some of my birthday money leftover from last month. Frank offers me another half smile before I walk out. And then, just as I step through the door, he calls out, “See ya, Moxie!”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking to me, and by the time I turn around to wave, his eyes are already buried deep in his book again.
*
I beat my mother home and slide the paper sack into my backpack—I’ll have to fold the rest of them over the weekend. That is, if I don’t lose my nerve.
I should listen to “Rebel Girl” on repeat tomorrow and Sunday so I don’t.
I pull my Runaways T-shirt over my head and brush my teeth, and as I turn out the lights and slide into bed, my mom’s car pulls into the driveway. Soon there’s a sliver of light shining across me, and I squint my eyes like I’ve been sleeping all this time and have just been taken by surprise.
“Viv?” My mom’s silhouette is peeking through the doorway, her voice a whisper. “You feeling better?”
“Yeah,” I answer back, hoping the kitchen doesn’t smell like pizza. I’m supposed to have a stomach bug, after all.
“Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“’Kay,” I whisper.
After my mom shuts the door, I slide deeper under the covers and feel my body buzz with anticipation when I think about the copies inside my backpack. No one else on the planet knows about them. Well, except Frank at U COPY IT. And anyway, he doesn’t know the next step of my plan.
Finally, after a few minutes, I sense myself drifting off and when sleep overtakes me, I dream about marching through U COPY IT with Frank, the two of us dressed in matching Runaways T-shirts, leaving copies of my creation on top of every Xerox machine.