“Like this,” he says, waving at me vaguely. “You write some weird article and start acting like a total psycho and . . . what? Turn into some crazy feminist?”
I laugh out loud at that, a mean hollow bark. “Some crazy— You know what, Jacob? Maybe that’s exactly what I’m turning into. And maybe you can go screw yourself.”
For a moment Jacob just stares at me, his mouth opening and closing. I’ve never said anything like that before—to him, or to anyone. I’m waiting for the surge of horror, but instead I just feel kind of powerful. Maybe I should tell people to screw themselves more often.
“Okay then,” he finally says, crumpling his sandwich wrapper up into a ball and chucking it into the bin at the front of the cafeteria. “See you never.”
“See you never,” I echo, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and heading to my first-period class.
Jacob’s reaction to my editorial is a pretty good litmus test for the rest of the morning, all told. Dean Shepherd makes a big show of cowering like he thinks I’m going to hit him. Hallie Weisbuck makes a Hillary Clinton joke.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Chloe says consolingly at the beginning of Bex’s class. “Honestly, this is the most people have talked about the Beacon since we started editing it.”
“Headlines don’t sell papes, Marin’s crazy editorials sell papes?” I ask, riffing on Newsies, which we used to watch all the time back in middle school. Then I frown. “Oh, also, I just broke up with Jacob.”
“Wait, what?” Chloe’s hands drop. “Why?”
“Because—” I break off. All of a sudden His casual sexism randomly started to bother me when he said he didn’t like my piece doesn’t feel like the banner cause it did this morning. “Because—”
Chloe shakes her head. “Marin, what is going on with you?”
“Okay,” Bex calls before I can answer, leaning against his desk up at the front of the room. “You guys ready to get started?”
I slink low in my chair as he goes over this week’s vocab unit, then assigns a response paper due the following week. “I’ve got a new reading list for you all to take a look at,” he says, passing out a stack of papers. “I want you guys to pick one of the short stories on this list, then write two to three pages on one of the literary techniques the author uses.”
It’s an easy assignment, the kind of thing I’ll be able to knock out in an hour or two, but as I scan the list of authors I find myself frowning: John Updike, Michael Chabon, John Cheever. Before I can quell the impulse, my hand is up in the air.
“Yep,” Bex says, nodding in my direction. “Uh, Marin.”
“I’m sorry, I just—” I look around a little nervously. Dean Shepherd already has a smirk on his face. “Shouldn’t there be some female authors on this list? Or authors who aren’t white?”
Bex looks surprised for a moment; he glances down at the list, like possibly he hadn’t noticed the omission. He tsks quietly, then looks back up at me. “Ooookay then, Marin,” he says brightly. “Not into the list, huh? What do you think I should add?”
“Oh—um.” I hesitate, my mind going completely, terrifyingly blank. In this moment I honestly couldn’t name a single short story if my life depended on it, let alone one written by somebody other than a dead white guy. “I guess I hadn’t really thought it through that far,” I admit finally.
“Well,” Bex says in that same cheerful voice—slightly plastic, I think now, more sarcasm than actual friendliness. It’s the first time all year he’s seemed anything less than 100 percent chill about an assignment—although I guess it’s also the first time I’ve complained. “Make sure you let us know if you come up with anything, yeah?”
The class kind of chuckles, and I nod miserably, feeling my whole body prickle with embarrassment. Chloe shoots me an incredulous look. God, why couldn’t I just have kept my mouth shut? It’s not like I wasn’t drawing enough attention to myself already.
Bex is turning back to the whiteboard when there’s a knock on the open door. I glance over, and there’s Ms. Klein in the doorway in her navy-blue shirtdress and her big round glasses, her dark hair in a tidy bun on top of her head.
“Mr. Beckett,” she says, gaze flicking from him to me and back again in a way that makes me wonder if she heard the whole exchange. “I’ve got your attendance forms from Ms. Lynch. I told her I’d drop them off.”
“Oh!” Bex nods, shooting her a megawatt smile. “Thank you.”
By the time he gets back to his desk he seems to have forgotten about me, thank God. Still, I spend the rest of the period slouched in my seat, aching to disappear. Chloe makes a beeline for me once the bell rings for the end of the period, grabbing my arm and steering me out into the hallway.
“Okay, did you seriously need to add picking a fight with Bex in front of the whole class to the list of dramatic things you did today?” she asks, joking, but also not really. “Do you have raging PMS or what?”
“Oh, come on.” I don’t tell her I dumped Jacob for basically saying that exact thing to me not three hours ago. “I wasn’t picking a fight,” I defend myself instead. “It just felt like—”
“Marin!”
I flinch. I cannot take one more person giving me shit today. But when I turn around it’s Ms. Klein, holding her water bottle in one hand and a slim white paperback in the other. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Um.” I look from her to Chloe and back again. “Sure,” I say, and follow Ms. Klein down the hall.
“I overheard your conversation with Mr. Beckett,” she tells me, and I grimace.
“I don’t know that I’d call that a conversation,” I admit. “I totally froze.”
Ms. Klein smiles. “It happens,” she says. “But it was a good impulse on your part—an all-white, all-male reading list is ridiculous. Next time you’ll have to be better prepared, that’s all. Here”—she holds out the book for my inspection—“this might be a good place to start.”
I look down at the title: Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay.
“You know,” she says, looking at me thoughtfully, “if you’re not happy with the way things are around here, you ought to do something about it.”
She heads down the hallway before I can ask her what she means exactly, then turns back to face me. “By the way,” she calls, “I really liked your piece.”
I read Bad Feminist in the library at lunchtime and in between classes and tucked into my bed late at night, and two mornings later I go to see Ms. Klein before the first-period bell rings. She’s sitting in the bio lab going over lesson plans, classical music playing softly on her phone beside her. Her shirtdress is a deep hunter green.
“Hi, Marin,” she says, smiling. “How’d it go with the book?”
“I think I have an idea,” I tell her, instead of answering. “But I need your help.”
Twelve
“I’m just warning you now, I don’t think anyone’s going to come,” I tell Ms. Klein two weeks later, perching nervously on the edge of a lab bench after the eighth-period bell. When I first had the idea for a feminist book club, the night after she gave me the Roxane Gay book, it seemed almost brilliant—what a great fuck you to Mr. DioGuardi’s ridiculous dress code and Bex’s sexist reading list, right? What a great fuck you to everything that’s been going on. I made fliers and agonized over our first book before finally deciding on The Handmaid’s Tale because that was what the library had the most copies of; I filed new-student-organization paperwork with Ms. Lynch in the admin suite.