“Can I—”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Can we do anything to help?” I finally said.
“No,” she said flatly. “It’ll get better once my dad gets back.”
Jiyoon and I are best friends, and we supposedly talk about everything. But we don’t talk about money. We don’t talk about the fact that my dad is general counsel for a corporation you’ve heard of, and her dad is a construction worker. And my mom has stayed at home since Crispin was born, and her mom is a receptionist at a gastroenterologist’s office in Annandale. When Jiyoon and I met, back in elementary school, her mom cleaned houses. That’s how we met, to be honest. Her mom cleaned our house.
I’m not like some of the kids at school, going to Antigua for long weekends, getting a Maserati for sweet sixteen. But we have a big house in a pricey suburb; we have three newish cars. If I need—want—a haircut or cleats, I ask and get. When the school put on a dog-sledding trip to Maine, I went. Chawton costs as much as a private college. Jiyoon is on scholarship.
Nobody at Chawton talks about money.
“Seriously, Dorcas,” she told me. “Pretend I didn’t say anything. Everyone’s fine. Like, we’re getting fed. It’s just a little depressing.”
“Okay,” I said uncertainly. “But tell me if—”
“Will do. New subject.” She ripped the crooked wallpaper from the shoebox with perhaps more force than necessary. “Dotty and Dorcas do not tolerate shoddy workmanship!”
“We need a couch,” I said. “What would you say to papier-mâché getting involved?”
“Do you know me? I am always down for papier-mâché.”
I found some balloons and stirred up a batch of flour-water paste. A papier-mâché couch, however, was a more intricate project than I’d imagined. “This is going to look like a blob,” I said.
“Maybe Dotty and Dorcas want beanbag chairs instead of a couch,” said Jiyoon.
“Good call.”
I got the hair dryer to hasten the process. “So,” I said as I blasted the soggy beanbag chairs. The scent of lightly toasted flour filled the air. “About prom. It needs to be the best dance ever. I don’t know whether we need to up our game with the decor, or the theme, or—”
“None of that matters.”
“Of course it matters.”
“Nope.” She motioned down to the diorama. “Look at Dotty and Dorcas. Shitty crooked wallpaper, swampy-ass beanbag chairs, and they still love it, because they get to hang together. Prom’s like that. It’s who you’re there with.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re so right.” In the corner of my brain, the hazy outlines of an idea came into being. But ideas are skittish. You can’t show them the whites of your eyes. “I love it too,” I said, moving the hair dryer even closer. “Hanging together, just Dotty and Dorcas. Shitty wallpaper and all.”
Jiyoon sniffed. “Something’s burning,” she said. “You should turn that off. Now.”
It is a Chawton tradition (get used to that phrase) that Senior Triumvirate meets alone. As the school tells prospective parents, the level of autonomous responsibility allowed to Chawton’s student government is truly unique.
Translation: they give us a lot of tedious shit to do and they don’t have to sit through us figuring out how to do it.
“We need to get Powderpuff going,” said Gennifer after school on Monday. She usually ended up running our meetings because she was the only one who prepared beforehand.
“Powderpuff is the reason I wanted to be on Triumvirate,” said Andy, stretching his arms behind his head. “I can take charge of that.”
“Ugh, Powderpuff,” I said, even though I was distracted by the pleasant bulge of Andy’s biceps. He’d taken off his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He had nice forearms. Lean, tanned, golden-haired—
“I’ll assign the girls to teams,” said Andy.
“Don’t forget dealing with jerseys and fan gear,” said Gennifer, who is a walking to-do list. “And you have to organize the fund-raising competition, find faculty refs, appoint senior guys to coach—”
“I’m appointing myself,” said Andy.
“Fair,” I said sarcastically. I was ignored.
“And I’ll survey all the guys in our class to see which team they’re rooting for.”
“I hate Powderpuff,” I said.
“I thought you hated prom,” said Gennifer.
“I do.”
“Is there anything you don’t hate?”
“It’s all so…problematic.”
Powderpuff is the biggest event at Jamboree. The senior girls play football: the Angels vs. the Tigers, since our school mascot is the Angel Tiger. Everyone gets so into it. The guys all support one team or the other, cheering or literally cheerleading, and the alumni love it too because it’s a lifelong allegiance, which team you root for. There’s even a big secondary competition over whether the Angels or the Tigers get the most donations to the Chawton Annual Fund.
“You think it’s sexist?” said Andy.
I knew what I would write if I were doing an op-ed for the school paper. A mockery of female athleticism. A throwback to an era when the idea of girls on a football field was a hilarious reversal of gender roles. But I knew this, too: If you were going to call something out, you had to be like a chess player. You had to think a move ahead. It’s not a mockery, they’d say. The girls are serious about winning. There are practices, a playbook. It’s like any other sport.
I wasn’t satisfied but I didn’t know how I’d rebut the rebuttals, and so my pawns held fast and my queen mused, silent and still, behind her army.
“It’s the twenty-first century,” said Andy. “If it were sexist, someone would have gotten rid of it already.”
“So are you playing?” said Gennifer.
“Me?” I said.
“You play soccer,” said Andy. “You’d be good.”
“But it’s so…” I struggled for the right word. “Problematic,” I said again.
“Lighten up, Jemmy,” said Gennifer.
“As the newly appointed head coach of the Tigers,” Andy said, “I’m drafting you, Kincaid.”
He smiled at me and I felt a rush of warmth, a cozy and anticipatory stirring, like when you get home and you smell dinner before you open the door and that’s when you realize how hungry you are. Like there were good things in store. What if I let go and got excited for Powderpuff? What if I dropped the Jemima Kincaid, Angry Feminist thing for like three seconds and…and had a good time?