Moxie: Chapters 6–11

I’m making sure a carton of eggs isn’t placed too precariously in the backseat when I hear a male voice behind me.

“Oh, Delobe was a moderate, really,” my mom answers, an absentminded grin on her face.

The heady, dizzy state I was in when I created Moxie disappears, like I’d biked down to U COPY IT in the middle of a dream.

“It only proves you’re super idealistic, just like I thought,” she says.

“Oh, like it’s not like that with you and him?” she asks, incredulous.

“We even had a couple of guy members. We did fund-raisers for the local women’s shelter and talked about stuff that we were concerned about. I was hoping there would be a club like that here. So I could meet other feminists, you know?” The way she says the word feminists so casually, so easily, sort of blows my mind.

Lucy nods, her face wistful.

“I think that game was, like, culture shock.”
Claudia rolls toward me. “Yeah, she hasn’t been indoctrinated since birth.”

“No, no, I get it,” Claudia says, and I know she wants this conversation to end. “I mean, I think you can call it humanism or equalism or peopleism or whatever.”

“Before I forget, I have that Faulkner novel I was telling you about. I mean, if you were serious about wanting to borrow it.” I guess he’s trying to wow her with his intellectual prowess, but my mom just thanks him in that high, tinkly voice and says, “We’ll see if this is the one that gets me to change my mind about his work.”

As I walk toward the main building shrouded in my sour mood, I hear a “hey” very clearly directed at me.

Oh, you didn’t scare me. Just rendered me mute.

He bends over and fumbles through a few binders and notebooks, finally pulling out a slim green assignment book. His actions are so weirdly pedestrian and normal that I find myself relaxing a little bit.

I’m grateful she doesn’t seem to notice how worked up I am so I don’t have to explain my stupid social faux pas with Seth.

“The administration gets all excited about the dress code every once in a while.”
“It seems totally arbitrary,” Lucy says, but I don’t get to answer her because the bell rings, and Seth Acosta walks in.

The boys in the back hoot a little as Emma Johnson saunters over to Mr. Davies and hands him a pink slip of paper.

Just then we spot Sara coming toward us, dressed in an ugly-as-sin East Rockport gym shirt that’s way too big. Grass and dirt stains as old as the school are embedded into the orange fabric.

She just sits there, her chin in her hands, her eyes scanning the cafeteria and all the East Rockport cliques, resting on the girls who are dressed in bright orange gym shirts like Sara.

Sara and the other girls start chatting about mostly benign stuff like how hard the math quiz was and would the deejay at the Fall Fling be better than the deejay at the Homecoming dance and so on.

“You may have noticed we’ve put an emphasis on dress code this week, and we hope y’all will adhere to the rules and regulations detailed in the student handbook about modesty and proper dress.”

Marisela’s act of insurrection—however tiny—sets something off inside of me.

That little fire that was lit when I made the first issue of Moxie feels like it’s getting stoked again.

I turn back into the bathroom and spit loudly into the sink, then linger there wondering if the noise will wake my mom out of her post-date stupor.

But as I venture out of the foreign language wing, my heart thrumming, I make a quick right turn and run right into someone.

“You did, yeah?” he asks very quietly. The way he delivers that yeah—all soft and yummy and reassuring at the same time. I find myself nodding, transfixed.

But even without the weekly pep rallies and the pre-game frenzy, I know Mitchell and his friends will reign over East Rockport High well into winter and spring.

“Well, good luck,” he says, and he walks off suddenly, loping down the hallway.

My vision of every girl at East Rockport High showing up in a bathrobe and full of indignation fades from my mind.

Emma is gorgeous and demure and all these other things I’m not, but she’s never been anything but nice to people.

During lunch in the cafeteria, my friends and I talk about how many girls have bathrobes on but Claudia doesn’t say much. She just sips her Diet Coke and listens, her face still as Lucy prattles on about all the girls she knows who came to school wearing one.