The new buttons aligned with my musical tastes more than Melissa’s: a large patch with the Clash, a smaller one with Green Day’s Kerplunk!, and K Records and Bikini Kill buttons. Maybe Melissa had finally switched her allegiance from the Sex Pistols to the Clash, or listened to that Bikini Kill demo cassette I’d sent her over the summer from my mom’s house in Eugene, Oregon, after I got super lucky and found a copy in a local record store. But K Records seemed impossible, even if Kurt Cobain had made people slightly more aware of the tiny independent record label with his tattoo of their logo. Melissa had always said that Beat Happening was fey and twee, not to mention musically incompetent. I’d tried to point out that they were fey and twee in a punk rock way, but she wasn’t having it. I wondered what had made her change her opinion over the summer. Maybe she’d met a boy.
The backpack was just out of reach. I grabbed for it, before it floated away again in the Great Plaid Sea. Or before the two-minute warning bell rang for morning assembly, whichever came first.
I tugged down on her backpack. “Hey, Mel—”
The wearer of the backpack, a boy who was decidedly not Melissa, turned around and smiled at me. He wasn’t anyone I had ever seen before. He was tall and muscularly slender, with broad shoulders, almost stereotypically perfect in his proportions. His golden-brown, slightly messy hair flopped into his face. It should have made him look sloppy, but instead it drew attention to his eyes.
Oh, his eyes. Anyone could have brown eyes. Most people, statistically, did. But his eyes were a warm amber, rimmed with dark brown, like deep caramel surrounded by dark chocolate. I ignored the fact that my brain had gone straight to a food simile that reminded me of Rolos—like, I didn’t want to eat his eyeballs, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I squeaked.
How could I have ever mistaken him for Melissa, even in this crowd? I knew there was no way she’d ever admit to liking anything on K Records. At the start of last year, Melissa and I had been the only ones with buttons and patches of the alternative kind, until grunge became popular and suddenly weird was cool and we were almost popular—or at least Melissa was. I was more “the almost-popular girl’s nerdy friend.” But K Records was a step too far, and I didn’t know anyone aside from my summer friends in Eugene who even knew the label existed.
He was cute—far cuter than any of the boys at my school.
He had to be a transfer. At least I hoped he was—he couldn’t possibly be a freshman. That would be awful, because then I’d probably never see him again. It would be even worse if he was a senior. Then I would never see him, and he’d probably consider me beneath his attention.
The boy melted back into the crowd with another smile before I had a chance to ask him. The dread of the first day of school had now entirely disappeared from my thoughts, replaced with something fluttery and disorienting.
2
Melissa yanked me into the girls’ bathroom with a totally unnecessary level of force. We hadn’t had time to talk this morning—hello, Cute Boy distraction—but it wasn’t like we hadn’t hung out on Saturday to catch up on the events of the summer, which we’d spent half a continent apart.
For me, the summer had involved biking around and looking for cool record stores near my mom’s house in Eugene, drinking coffee, practicing cello, and ignoring Helen. Our mom was a classics professor at the University of Oregon, which meant that in theory, she should have had plenty of time to spend with us. And, most summers, she did, even if she often used that time to drive us to Mount St. Helens so we could better understand what volcanic damage looked like, after she spent a day boring us with Pliny the Younger’s letter about Pompeii. But this year, she’d needed every second of her summer off from teaching—or so she’d said—to finish the book she was writing about Catullus before she started her new job at New York University in the fall. It was a Big Deal, so Helen and I were mostly left to our own devices.
So I’d decided to use my summer to become a riot grrrl, and not just someone who read about them in Sassy magazine. Over the past year, I had amassed a small collection of handmade, photocopied zines like Riot Grrrl and Girl Germs, all ordered through the mail. I knew what the riot grrrl ideals were. Support girls around you. Don’t be jealous of other girls. Avoid competition with them. Being loud and crying in public were valid ways of being a girl. Being a girl didn’t mean being weak or bad. Claiming your sexuality, no matter what that meant to you, was a good thing. And the revolution was open to anyone.
That last one felt like a stretch to me because I never felt quite punk enough. And there were other barriers to entry, too. Writing about my life, or music, or whatever in a zine was great in theory, but what if no one wanted to read it?
Besides, photocopies cost money, unless you scammed Kinko’s, and again, I wasn’t punk enough to get away with that. After working at nonprofits for years, Dad was inclined to give me and Helen money solely for things classified as potentially useful for college applications, like music lessons for me and art classes for Helen. He had balked at Helen’s modeling classes, which our grandmother paid for, so I didn’t think I could get money for a zine from him—or from Grandma, for that matter, who would die if she knew I wanted money for anything associated with punk rock or feminism. Mom gave us a small allowance during the summer, but I preferred to spend it on new music rather than copies of a zine I thought no one would read.
Before the end of the summer, I’d had exactly one bit of riot grrrl success, which was tracking down Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now demo cassette—the one I’d immediately copied and sent to Melissa. Other than that, I’d chickened out of going to all-ages shows in people’s basements at least six times and spent too much time hoping I looked cool enough at the coffee shop for someone to talk with me. In the end, I got so desperate I took knitting lessons, where, weirdly enough, I finally met a group of girls who listened to the same music I did. They told me all about the legendary shows I’d missed out on the summer before, like the International Pop Underground festival, where Bikini Kill played and Bratmobile had their first show. I tried to live vicariously through their stories, but I left Eugene feeling like I had missed my only chance to be a riot grrrl.
Melissa’s summer in Baton Rouge had been far more intense. Instead of being a failed riot grrrl like me, she’d been a real activist. In direct violation of our Catholic school’s very pro-life policy, she’d volunteered as a clinic defender at the Delta Women’s Clinic, the only abortion clinic in town. Operation Rescue, a nationwide anti-abortion group, had selected Baton Rouge for its “Summer of Purpose,” a sequel to its huge protest in Kansas the year before.
Baton Rouge made a lot of sense—after Louisiana passed a super restrictive abortion law last year, Governor Roemer had vetoed it. But then the state legislature overrode the veto with a two-thirds majority, and now it was winding its way through the federal courts. Operation Rescue wanted to drum up local support for the abortion ban, and Baton Rouge was an easy target, since it wasn’t liberal like New Orleans. Even the local Planned Parenthood didn’t do abortions.