I lean in for a hug and a peck on the cheek and as I head to my bedroom, I hear my mom turning on the television to unwind. After shutting my door, I slide under the covers and turn off my bedside lamp. The glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck on my ceiling light up like they’re saying hello. Sliding my headphones on, I think about my mom’s MISSPENT YOUTH shoe box. I scroll through my phone, looking for Riot Grrrl music, and play a song called “Rebel Girl” by a band named Bikini Kill.
It starts with this pounding drumbeat that’s so strong and angry that I think if I listen to it loud enough I might fly off the bed. Then the guitar kicks in.
But the best part is when the lead singer starts singing and her voice shoots out of her gut like a rocket launching.
That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood
She’s got the hottest trike in town
That girl she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah
Rebel girl, rebel girl
Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world
The music thuds and snarls and spits, and as I listen, it’s hard for me to imagine that the tired, ice-cream-eating, scrubs-wearing mom on the couch is the same mom from the MY MISSPENT YOUTH box. The same girl with the platinum-blond streak in her hair and tongue sticking out and dark eyes that aren’t afraid to fight back.
And I know that now she’s tired and exhausted and worried about paying all the bills. But there was a time when she listened to this music. When she raged and roared and rioted. When she wasn’t dutiful. There was a time when she lived out loud. And no one can take that away from her.
When the song ends I lie there for a moment in silence and then hit repeat, waiting once more for the drums to begin their attack.
CHAPTER THREE
The week continues like it always does. On Wednesday I go to school, and Mr. Davies doesn’t even check the stupid extra homework he made us do in the grammar book. Lucy Hernandez doesn’t raise her hand once all class. I go home and do my homework and text Claudia and listen to music and go to sleep. Thursday is pretty much the same routine. It’s been the same each year since middle school. Every fall starts with me thinking maybe this year something will be different—something will happen that will shake up my merry-go-round life. But I’m so used to the sameness of every year at East Rockport, I can’t even identify what I want that Something to be. I only know that by the end of September it’s obvious another school year is sitting in front of me like a long stretch of highway.
The only thing that makes today, Friday, feel at all unique is, of course, that the fate of the East Rockport High football team will be decided a few short hours after the final bell rings.
East Rockport is just a 3A town, so it’s not like the big cities or anything, but our football team is pretty good. And by that I mean when I was in the fifth grade we made it to the state championships but we lost, and people still talk about that day more than they talk about the fact that the one of the first astronauts to fly around in space was born right here in East Rockport. On Fridays in the fall, class feels like an excuse to legally require us to come to school so we can admire the football players’ lockers decorated with orange and white crepe paper streamers and attend the mandatory pep rally before lunch and participate in the call and response cheers and observe Mitchell Wilson and his crew walking down the hallways like the second comings of Tom Landry and Earl Campbell. And the fact that I even know who Tom Landry and Earl Campbell are should tell you I really have been born and bred in this state.
“So we’re driving out together tonight, right?” Claudia says as we file into the bleachers for the pep rally. “My mom said we could take her car. She’s staying home with Danny because he isn’t feeling good.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, plunking my rear end down on one of the top bleachers. I can hear the pep band’s horn section getting warmed up. I wince. It sounds like a pack of elephants mourning the loss of their leader or something. In the corner of the gym, the cheerleaders are finishing up their final stretches, dressed in uniforms the color of a Creamsicle.
Claudia and I aren’t big football fans, really, but we go to all the games, even the away games like the one tonight in Refugio. That’s what you do here. You go to the games. Even Meemaw and Grandpa wouldn’t miss one. Grandpa likes to use white shoe polish to write GO PIRATES! on the rear window of their car even if Meemaw always worries he won’t be able to drive safely because of it. Claudia and I always sit in the student section on game nights, but usually on the edge of it, like we do at the pep rallies. We split a box of super salty popcorn from the Booster Booth, and we clap our greasy hands along half-heartedly while Emma Johnson and the other cheerleaders lead us in cheers, their voices veering up and down like seesaws. “LET’S go PI-rates.”—clap, clap, clapclapclap—“LET’S go PI-rates.”—clap, clap, clapclapclap.
“Come on, let’s get this show on the road,” Claudia mutters, her eyes darting around to make sure none of the teachers patrolling the perimeter of the gym are watching us before she pulls out her phone to mess with it.
That’s when I happen to glance over my shoulder and see him. Two bleachers in back of us and maybe like five people over.
A new boy.
In my experience the new boy is always someone’s cousin who’s just moved here from Port Aransas or wherever, and he’s a total goober with an incredible talent for picking his nose in class when he thinks no one is looking. That’s the new boy. That’s been the new boy since the sixth grade.
Until right now. Because there’s nothing about New Boy that reads East Rockport. First of all, he’s wearing tight black jeans and a gray T-shirt and his long, dark hair is hanging in front of his eyes like he’s trying to hide behind it. He turns his head a little to scratch the back of his neck, and I can tell the hair on the back of his head is cut short, almost shaved. Boys in East Rockport don’t cut their hair like this. Boys in East Rockport have their mothers and their girlfriends cut their hair into neutral guy haircuts while they sit on stools in the middle of their kitchens. Boys in East Rockport go down to Randy’s Barbershop on Main Street and flip through Playboys from 2002 while they wait for Randy to charge fifteen dollars for the same terrible cut he’s been giving them since preschool. The one that makes their ears stick out for weeks.
New Boy must never go to Randy’s. Ever.
In addition to the super cool haircut, he’s got olive skin and full lips and dark eyes like two storm clouds. He’s watching the activity on the gym floor below him with confused interest, like the pep rally is part of some documentary on one of those strange tribes in the Amazon that has never had contact with modern civilization.
I nudge Claudia.
“Don’t look in, like, a super obvious way, but who is that guy a few rows behind us? He’s new, right?”
Claudia turns and glances, then flares her nose a little in disgust, like New Boy is a stain on her favorite shirt, which is so unfair considering how deeply unstainlike New Boy is.
“Him? Yeah, I know who he is.”