“Are you getting these names down?” he barks, and Mr. Shelly nods as he scribbles furiously on his clipboard.
“Look, Principal Wilson,” Emma says, raising her voice, “you don’t get it. We won’t be quiet anymore!” It’s then that I remember she’s the head of the cheerleading squad and the perfect person for this moment. She turns to face the crowd and cups her hands to her mouth.
“We are Moxie!” she shouts, her voice deep and rich. “We are Moxie!”
In an instant we are following along, clapping our hands 1-2-3.
“We are Moxie! We are Moxie!”
My palms are slick with sweat from the April sunshine and nerves and joy, but I clap and I shout, and I don’t care that the principal is steps away. And I know right now that if I live to be a hundred, I’ll always remember this.
I clap harder. I shout louder.
Principal Wilson grabs his bullhorn and starts shouting directions. We shout back, drowning him out. Our voices are so loud. So big. So much.
So beautiful.
Principal Wilson scoots over to the side to confer with Mr. Shelly and the other administrators. He points and gestures with his hands, desperate-seeming, and we keep shouting. We keep clapping. Finally, he grabs his bullhorn and yells at the top of his lungs.
“School is canceled for the remainder of the day. We will be moving forward with expulsion procedures for all of you. Exit the campus now!”
At this we erupt in a roar. It feels like a victory. We’ve won even if Principal Wilson is trying to get us to think we’ve lost. I turn and look at Emma Johnson, a girl I’ve hardly spoken to in almost three years of high school. A girl I always thought I had nothing in common with.
But really, she’s a girl from East Rockport. Just like me.
“Thank you, Vivian,” she says. And she reaches out to hug me. I hug her back, hard, and Principal Wilson’s desperate orders to disperse become background noise. Honestly, I can barely hear him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We scatter from campus as Principal Wilson barks over and over into his bullhorn that school is canceled. I lose sight of Emma in the crush of people. I lose sight of Seth, too. But Claudia grabs my hand and leads me to her Tercel. As soon as we shut the car doors, she turns to me, her car keys still in her hand.
“You made those issues of Moxie?” she asks, her eyes wide, like she’s seeing me for the first time even though she’s known me practically since birth.
“Yeah,” I say, the giddiness and chaos and shock of the afternoon still zipping through me.
“Wow,” she says, turning to stare out the front windshield, watching girls heading home, some of them still chanting about Moxie, still clapping their hands.
“Please don’t be mad I didn’t tell you,” I say, gripped with worry that Claudia won’t understand. “I didn’t tell anyone. Well, Seth knows. But only because he caught me putting the zines in bathrooms. And I did tell Lucy yesterday. But that’s only because I felt bad that she was taking so much of the blame for everything.”
Claudia turns her gaze back at me. I stop babbling. “Were you worried that I wouldn’t get it?” she asks. “Is that why you didn’t tell me?” I can’t tell if she’s hurt or curious.
“Maybe a little,” I admit. “But also I thought the more people that knew about it, the riskier it was.”
Claudia nods. “I get it. And really, back when you put out that first issue … maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it. At all.”
“So you’re not mad?”
“No,” Claudia says, shaking her head. “Just … stunned. But also … sort of proud. No, not sort of. Really proud.” And she gives me the biggest, most glowing smile.
“Even though maybe I’ve just gotten us all suspended? And maybe expelled?”
Claudia rolls her eyes. “Did you see how many girls were out there today? More than half the girls in the school. Hundreds of us. I don’t care how good Mitchell can throw a football. His dumb daddy isn’t going to get to kick us all out of school.”
I burst out laughing. “Look at you and your tough talk,” I tease, but really I’m just so relieved. Relieved that the secret’s out, that Claudia understands, that she thinks we won’t get in trouble.
Claudia shrugs, full of false modesty. “Want to head to your house? You can help me figure out how to spin this to my parents.”
“Yeah, my mom’s at work. Let’s go.”
Not long after we’re camped out on my bed with sodas and our phones and Joan Jett curled up between us.
And that’s when we realize Lucy Hernandez has gone viral.
Using the girls’ pictures and videos from the walkout, Lucy has crafted a blog post not just about this afternoon but about everything that’s happened at East Rockport High School over the past year. Everything from the over-the-top expensive pep rallies to the bump ’n’ grab game to the crazy, arbitrary dress code checks. She tracks all of Moxie’s activities from the bathrobes to the stickers to the walkout. She even includes pictures of the zines I made. And then she shares the post on every social media outlet possible.
Not only that, she also sends it to all of these feminist blogs and websites she likes—blogs and websites run by cool girls in New York City and Los Angeles. Girls who seem like they exist in some other alternate universe that is nothing like East Rockport, Texas.
But they start to pick up Lucy’s story.
And they share and reblog and repost.
By dinnertime, Moxie isn’t an East Rockport phenomenon. It’s not even a Texas phenomenon. It’s spreading so fast it doesn’t feel real.
SMALL-TOWN TEXAS GIRLS STAND UP TO SEXIST PRINCIPAL [WITH VIDEO]
MOXIE GIRLS FIGHT BACK—AND TELL THEIR SEXIST PRINCIPAL WHERE TO SHOVE IT!
EAST ROCKPORT HIGH SCHOOL PUTS THE GRRRRRR INTO GRRRL POWER
“Damn,” says Claudia as she reads the latest headlines. By now we’ve eaten a frozen pizza and moved on to ice cream straight from the container.
“Claudia says ‘damn,’” I tell Lucy over the phone, taking a spoonful of chocolate. “And she’s smiling really big.”
“Tell her thanks,” Lucy says. “Can you believe this?”
“Given how this year has gone, I guess sort of yes and sort of no,” I say. “Are you still grounded?”
“Yeah,” says Lucy. “Thank God my parents didn’t take my phone away. It’s how I shared all of this.”
“What’s going to happen next?” Claudia asks out loud, scrolling through her phone.
“Claudia wants to know what’s going to happen next,” I ask Lucy.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “But I do hope all this attention means Principal Wilson and Mitchell don’t get away with what happened to Emma. Or to anyone else.”
“Lucy,” I say, smiling into my phone, “you’re a hero.”
“Oh, whatever,” she says. “You’re the one who started Moxie.”
“I started it, but we all did it,” I say.
“Okay, I admit it. I’m a hero,” she says. “But now I have to go help clean up the kitchen.”
“I can’t believe you’re sitting there in your room and your parents aren’t even aware that you’ve become a global phenomenon.”
“Maybe just an American one,” Lucy argues.