I sincerely hoped the Cute Boy wasn’t someone’s attempt to edge Sean off the football team.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m an ass.”
“Come on, Athena, I’m joking.” Sean peered at me over the comic. “I really have no idea who that guy is, or whether he even looks like a football player. And I promise, if you let me finish my comic and learn who this Spider-Man 2099 is, I’ll help you with your boy problems.”
I let him go back to his comic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to get his attention again until we eventually wandered over to my house so that Sean could grab a Coke from our fridge—his mom didn’t let him have soda, but my dad kept a healthy stock of it—and make fun of Helen, since he didn’t have any siblings of his own to pick on.
Until then, I had to find another way to occupy myself. I sorted through my homework, but since it was only the first week of school, I was done in about five minutes. I flipped through my copy of Sassy to check out the fall clothes, but I didn’t have much use for them, considering how little fall we experienced and how much time I spent in my school uniform.
Juliana Hatfield was on the cover, guitar in hand. I’d liked her album Hey Babe, but then she’d started talking about how most women weren’t good guitar players and that she wanted to be the exception, which had really irritated both Melissa and me. But she looked cool. I pulled my hair up into an approximation of a bob, wondering if short hair would look as good on me as it did on Juliana. It might work. I would ask Melissa for her opinion tomorrow at school, even though she sometimes made fun of me for reading Sassy. She’d tried to get me hooked on Ms., but it seemed like a magazine my mom would read. Actually, it was a magazine my mom read.
A knock on Sean’s door interrupted my reading. Helen leaned casually against the doorway, a giant red cherry slushee in her hand and a bored look on her face. She’d changed out of her school uniform into a belly shirt and short-shorts that made her legs look disproportionately long. A pair of round-framed John Lennon sunglasses sat on top of her blond hair. I don’t know who she was trying to impress, unless it was some random guy at the minimart—or maybe Sean, as remote as that possibility seemed to me.
“Shouldn’t you be at your house, wearing out a New Kids on the Block cassette on your Walkman?” Sean gave her a teasing smile, but she looked back at him with a world-weary expression.
I shook my head. “Nah. First of all, she’s moved on to more adult fare,” I told him, as if Helen wasn’t even there. “Pearl Jam was the flavor of the summer, and seems to be persisting into the school year, with some competition from the Lemonheads because she thinks Evan Dando is a-dor-able. And second, she doesn’t use headphones. She uses our stereo because she likes to torture me any chance she gets.”
“Veeerrry funny, losers,” Helen said, drawling her words. She was acting annoyingly cool, and I wasn’t sure if it was to irritate me or get Sean’s attention. Either way, she was definitely achieving the former, if not the latter. “Are you two nerds done playing Dungeons & Dragons?”
“That joke is so old,” I groaned. “You know comics are nothing like Dungeons & Dragons. What do you want anyway?” Helen often spent her afternoons in our shared bedroom, which was why I usually headed to Sean’s place after school when he wasn’t at football practice and I didn’t have cello lessons.
“Wow, you’re so friendly.” Sarcasm was Helen’s latest favorite thing. I reminded myself that I was trying to be nicer to her, but she knew exactly how to annoy me. “I need to tell you two things. First, Mom called. She’s in New York. She wants you to call her back.”
Our mom had just started her new job at NYU, which meant we would be spending future summer vacations and spring breaks in New York, instead of Eugene. She was supposed to call us tonight, not right after school, but it didn’t surprise me that she called early. She was never very good at keeping track of time.
“Okay. What’s the second thing?” I asked impatiently. If I wanted to catch Mom before she got lost in her stack of freshly moved Latin poetry books, I’d need to call her back soon.
Helen gave me a look of smug superiority. “Mrs. Bonnecaze wanted me to ask you to join the pro-life club. She said it was because you’re—quote, unquote—‘so sweet.’ I tried not to laugh in her face.”
“I already told her I wasn’t interested.” It was hard being one of approximately five pro-choice kids in a Catholic school, especially when you were otherwise a model student. Everyone just assumed that you’d want to be part of the pro-life club.
Last year, Helen and I had gotten into a huge fight at Sean’s house when she told me she was president of her middle school’s pro-life club. I’d initially thought Helen had joined the club for popularity’s sake, because it didn’t fit with our family’s values at all. Mom was as feminist and pro-choice as anyone could imagine. And while Dad was a Catholic and had gone to a Jesuit college, he mostly invested in the social justice side of Catholicism. We didn’t go to church on Sunday or anything.
Then, after I fought with her about it, I had to deal with her and Melissa continuing the argument. I’d sided with Melissa, of course, and Helen had refused to talk to me for a month. I occasionally tried subtle hints to change her mind—I tossed Sassy on her bed, with a dog-ear on an article on abortion. I periodically reminded her incessantly that Eddie Vedder, the singer of her favorite band, had written pro-choice on his arm in marker on MTV. She had taped that episode of Unplugged and watched it over and over, though she always fast-forwarded through that part.
“I know. I told her that,” Helen said, crossing her arms. “Besides, I figured you wouldn’t want to get involved with something that your best friend Melissa would disapprove of.”
“That’s—that’s so not true! I have my own opinions!” And those opinions were based in empathy, science, reason, feminist history, and a little bit of riot grrrl. I had to give credit to Mom for the feminist history part, but otherwise it was all me. I definitely wasn’t pro-choice just because Melissa was, and Helen’s accusation rankled me to no end.
“If you say so.” She slurped on the slushee dismissively, sucking up the last bits with that unmistakable, airy, loud-straw sound.
I sprang up from the floor and lunged toward Helen.
Sean grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back before I hauled off and smacked my sister. “Whoa, tiger! Why don’t you go next door and call your mom back?”
I was practically growling, but I nodded at him. Yes, I would go back to our house to call Mom.
“Do you want me to keep her here?” Sean said.
I nodded again, grabbed my backpack, and shot a death-ray look toward Helen.
“I’m not staying with him!” Helen said, her voice rising. “He might try to make me read comics or watch football.” The last word dripped with disgust. One of the few things Helen and I had in common was our disdain for football in a city where everyone rooted for the LSU Tigers.