Home > Rebel Girls

Rebel Girls
Author: Elizabeth Keenan

1


   At my school, the only place with any freedom from the dress code was your backpack. You could put almost anything on it, as long as it didn’t contain swear words, advertise a band the guidance counselors had arbitrarily decided wasn’t acceptable, or endorse a controversial political message. Last year, my best friend Melissa had tested those limits with a Suicidal Tendencies patch and a Planned Parenthood button. She got sent home for Planned Parenthood, which obviously violated our Catholic school’s pro-life policies, but Mrs. Turner, the guidance counselor, also expressed concern to her parents that Melissa might be calling out for help with depression. It wasn’t until she brought in a Suicidal Tendencies cassette to prove the band existed that Mrs. Turner dropped the issue.

   In order to avoid Melissa’s predicament, my assemblage had to negotiate the shoals of being acceptable to authorities while signaling cool, not poseur. It was an almost-impossible task.

   I dumped the contents of my jewelry box onto my bed in a heap of one-inch band buttons, costume jewelry, and concert ticket stubs. I looked from the pile to my new backpack and back again, trying to figure out what belonged. My pins and patches needed to say, I am Athena Graves. I’m cool and mysterious, not just some sophomore nerd who got bumped up into senior-level math and science classes. I have good taste in music, and I am not a phony Holden Caulfield would hate.

   Right now, the bright red backpack said the opposite, silent and mocking and terribly, terribly new, like I’d sat down the night before school started and carefully selected everything, instead of forging an organically coherent collection of awesome buttons. And though I was sitting down and picking out buttons the night before school started, I didn’t want anyone to know that.

   The pile of pins on my bed also felt inadequate for the task of broadcasting a relatively cool persona. I had exactly three acceptable choices: the Clash, classic, and my favorite band; Pixies, loud-soft-awesome; and Duran Duran, an unexpected, somewhat irony-driven choice. Otherwise, the buttons didn’t feel right. Prince and Madonna hung out with the B-52s, Depeche Mode, and U2 in the unfortunately middle school pile. Sure, they might have been cool in sixth grade, or even in eighth, but now they made me look like I’d held on to them for too long—or, worse, like I’d raided the free pin bucket at the used record store.

   The rest were just so mainstream. Nirvana was great last year, but now everyone liked them. Ditto with Pearl Jam. Putting a Pearl Jam button on my backpack now would be like wearing a flannel shirt in August here in Louisiana—nothing but evidence of jumping someone else’s train. And speaking of jumping someone else’s train...the Cure were out, too, because “Friday I’m in Love” had birthed a whole new generation of black-clad trend followers.

   I didn’t have anything delightfully obscure or truly cutting-edge because Baton Rouge record shops didn’t have such things, and my mail order of cool buttons and patches from the Burning Airlines catalog hadn’t shown up yet. The Blur button Melissa had given me had an awesome font, but I didn’t actually listen to them, so it would be weird and fake to put it on my backpack. There was nothing worse than someone asking you about your button or patch and having no explanation for why it was there other than “I thought it looked cool.” But if you could pull that statement off without flinching, you’d definitely be cool—an arbiter of good graphic design instead of musical taste, but cool.

   There was no way I was that cool.

   My sister, Helen, twirled into our room, a bouncy ball of exuberance dressed in our school uniform. Last year, the gray, black, and red plaid skirt she was wearing had been mine, and would be again in about a week. But our dad had recently started his new job as a corporate attorney after years of working for nonprofits, and he’d forgotten about our back-to-school shopping until the very last Saturday before school started. Unfortunately for Helen, the store that sold our school’s uniform was out of tall-girl sizes, so she was borrowing one of my spares until her special order arrived.

   On me, the skirt had hit an extra awful spot just below my knee and turned my calves into tree trunks. On Helen, it was the primary ingredient in an instant sexy Catholic schoolgirl formula, evidence of what seven inches of extra height will do for a girl.

   She pranced in front of me. “Hey, Athena, how do I look?”

   Like jailbait, I wanted to say, and might’ve said as recently as last week. But I stopped myself with a reminder that it wasn’t Helen’s fault that she got all the height in our family, and I was stuck at a measly five foot three.

   “It’s a little...short,” I said as diplomatically as possible.

   “You’re a little short,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. She turned back to our full-length mirror and fussed with the white Oxford shirt that completed our uniform, pulling it out so it bunched against the skirt’s waistband, creating a giant-shirt-tiny-waist juxtaposition. She struck a pose that mimicked Claudia Schiffer on the cover of the Vogue magazine sitting on her bed. The special fall fashion edition seemed to be about 90 percent ads and was so huge it was currently making a significant indentation on Helen’s fluffy comforter.

   “I didn’t mean it as an insult.” I shrugged an apology at her reflection. She looked back at me with a quick glance of her wide-set blue eyes, then went back to making serious faces at herself in the mirror. “Last year, half the girls in my homeroom got sent to Sister Catherine’s office in the first week for skirts that were too short for the dress code. So you might want to have Dad write a note about your skirt being on order.”

   She turned to look at me, her face wrinkled up in annoyance. “You’re such a goody-good.” Her eyes lit up when she saw the band buttons on my bed. “Hey, can I have that Pearl Jam button?”

   Her hand hovered in the air, ready to snatch it from the pile.

   I eyed her suspiciously. It wasn’t that Helen didn’t like Pearl Jam—she had a crush on the band’s singer, Eddie Vedder, that teetered on obsession—but there was no way she’d wear the pin in public, let alone put it on her backpack. It just wasn’t her. She was too organized for the casually arranged, haphazardly cool collection I was aiming for. She had already labeled her new school binders—all black, red, and white, our school colors—with the titles of her classes, complete with classroom number and teacher’s name, in her neat handwriting with a silver paint pen. Even her interest in fashion was methodical, with her magazines, books, and scrapbooks full of clippings carefully lined up on her bookshelf.

   “Why do you want it?” I edged the Pearl Jam button closer to my jewelry box.

   “You don’t like them anymore,” she said. “And I do. God, you don’t have to be so mean.”

   I wasn’t being mean, just guarded. Helen was always taking things from me when I was done with them, sometimes before. And like the uniform skirt, it usually looked better on her than it did on me. I almost always felt like the prototype version of the Graves sisters’ operating system, with everything that was average about me physically turning into something unfairly exquisite with Helen. It wasn’t just her height, either—she got the cheekbones of my dreams; a version of my nose without the bump I’d acquired in a fall from a playground balance beam; and straight, wheat-blond hair that defied the Louisiana humidity, unlike my own dirty-blond waves, now dyed a fiery red, which turned frizzy approximately 363 days of the year. Our eyes were the only feature where we were about on an even playing ground, in that they were essentially the same size and shape. In terms of their color, I sometimes thought I’d eked out a small victory in that my eyes were a more interesting blue green to her blue ones.

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