I handed the pin to her anyway. At the end of the day, that pin deserved to find a home with someone who loved Pearl Jam, and that wasn’t me.
“Thanks!” Helen pinned it to her shirt and flipped her hair over her shoulder. It was the least punk rock gesture ever.
“You can’t wear it like that at school.” I cringed at my rule-following urges. I might want to look punk rock and be a riot grrrl, but my instinctive aversion for getting into trouble kept tripping me up. “Violates the dress code.”
“I know,” she said, shrugging. “I wasn’t planning to wear it to school. Or maybe I will. It might be nice to break some rules.”
“Oh, really?” I asked. “You? Breaking the rules?” Helen never broke the rules. She might gently massage them into a form more suitable to her tastes, but she never broke them, exactly.
“Oh, come on,” she said, facing me with crossed arms. “You know that the dress code is stupid. It’s designed to destroy any sense of fashion.”
She was right, but I didn’t see how pins figured into the equation. And then I noticed the fashion book on Helen’s bed was flipped open to a spotlight on Vivienne Westwood and punk fashion of the 1970s. It figured that something I viewed as a carefully cultivated expression of my innermost self would be just another fashion statement to my sister.
“You really think this skirt is too short?” Helen asked, turning back to her reflection. She tugged the skirt down around her thighs, trying to make it reach regulation length.
“Probably, but it’s too late to do anything now.” I shouldn’t have said anything. “And it really doesn’t matter, honestly. Half the cheerleaders hem theirs shorter than that anyway.”
“Like Leah?” Helen narrowed her eyes. Leah Sullivan was my friend Sean Mitchell’s girlfriend, and stereotypically enough, captain of the cheerleading squad to his quarterback. While the rest of the cheerleaders were pretty nice and friendly, Leah was at best distantly cordial to me, and at worst a serious impediment to my commitment to the riot grrrl revolution’s feminist message of not trashing other girls.
“Yeah, like Leah.” I sighed.
“I’m okay, then,” she said. “No way could I look like more of a slut than she does.”
“That’s a gross word,” I said, looking up at Helen to let her know I meant it. “And also, because she’s been dating Sean for almost a year, not true. But that’s beside the point.”
Helen threw herself back on her bed with a more dramatic flair than required.
“I don’t understand what he sees in her!” Exasperation strangled her voice.
“Me, neither.” I didn’t say what I thought Sean saw in her, which was a cute girl who would make out with him on a regular basis. My opinion flunked any kind of feminist test, though I’d often tried—and failed—to find something worthwhile in her personality, for Sean’s sake. “But why do you care?”
“I don’t,” she said, too quick and defensive for me not to notice. “I mean, he’s your friend, but she’s terrible. She’s...” Helen paused for a second, trying to come up with a concrete reason to dislike Leah, who, as far as I knew, hadn’t given much thought to Helen. “She’s not nice to Mrs. Estelle. So it’s hard not to hate her, just on principle.”
“Fair enough.” Being rude to Sean’s mom, Estelle, was something that Helen and I would never, ever consider doing, especially after how well she’d taken care of us when our parents were getting divorced. I’d never actually seen Leah being rude to her, but it certainly wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
I looked back at my bed with a frown. The pile of buttons just wasn’t right. There was nothing to telegraph to the world that I wasn’t some weirdo obsessed with music from ten years ago. I’d thought the eighties buttons were hilarious when I bought them, but now that I had them in front of me, they seemed so not cool.
I didn’t want my backpack to be a cheesy joke. The collection needed to be perfect, but everything rubbed the wrong way, awkward and staged instead of cool and mysterious.
I scooped the pins back into my jewelry box. Better to say nothing at all on my backpack than to say the wrong thing.
* * *
St. Ann’s Regional Diocesan Catholic High School spread out as long as its name, low to the ground in beige-painted concrete stucco. Our school was a vaguely brutalist monstrosity, especially compared to some of the other schools in town. Baton Rouge High and St. Ursula’s looked like Hollywood sets for the ideal arts school and a snobby wood-paneled private school, respectively.
But St. Ann’s was hastily built about ten years ago to deal with the overflow of kids from Baton Rouge’s oil-industry-based population boom. The stretched-out single-story building gave the impression that it would soon sink back into the swamp that made most of the campus’s forty acres unusable. We no longer had a football field, since it had flooded last spring and was now referred to as a “seasonal pond.” This year’s home games were going to be at Greenlawn, a public school nearby.
Helen bounced off to find her friends Sara and Jennifer, who were probably as excited to be starting school as she was, but more scared. I looked around for Sean and Melissa, but couldn’t find them in the crush of bodies moving toward the glass double doors at the front of the school. With seven hundred students, the everyday task of getting through the front doors was more like a mosh pit at a hardcore show than an orderly exercise in school attendance.
“Athena! Over here!” Melissa was shouting from somewhere near the entrance. Since Melissa was a junior and I was an ambiguously scheduled sophomore, we only had two classes together this year, so the five minutes before morning assembly were crucial in our social life. Otherwise, we’d be stuck with passing notes in physics and calculus or just hanging out at lunch.
Melissa and I first met in orchestra camp the summer after I was in seventh grade. I’d been super into Depeche Mode at the time, and the day I wore one of their band T-shirts, Melissa bounded over and asked me to join her minor-key synth-pop band. Our musical tastes have changed since then, but we were always halfway into the process of starting a band that never truly materialized.
I struggled to spot Melissa’s army surplus backpack in the crowd. Finally, there it was, bobbing along in the opposite direction I’d expected. I swam through the sea of plaid toward that backpack. Melissa must have added a patch and a few buttons to it last night—she’d said she was going to at some point—but I was surprised she’d taken the time for backpack arts and crafts the night before school started. I would have expected her to be too busy organizing her binders by each class’s estimated output of effort, then bleaching her roots so she could apply a fresh round of hair dye, most likely purple.