Emma must sense me looking at her because she meets my eyes. I blush slightly, but Emma raises her hand a little in a brief hello and smiles. Something inside tugs at me.
Then, with only seconds left, a few students start a countdown. “10 … 9 … 8 … 7…” and soon the room is erupting in cheers.
“Want to go eat somewhere?” Seth asks, getting up from his desk.
“I think I want to go talk to Emma,” I say. “Okay?”
“Yeah,” says Seth. “Let’s hang out tonight maybe?”
“Definitely,” I say with a smile, and after giving me a quick kiss, Seth offers to drop Lucy off at her house. I scoot between the desks and hurry out the classroom door to catch up with Emma. When I call her name, she turns to look at me.
“Hey, Vivian,” she says. Some guy pushes past her in the crowded hallway, jostling up against her shoulder. She frowns and presses herself against the wall.
“Lately, I’m not sure if that’s on purpose or by accident,” Emma says. “There’s a certain faction that’s pretty pissed about what I did.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I say. I ignore the part of me that finds it odd to be talking to a girl I once considered so elite that I imagined her locker to be lined in gold. “You okay?”
Emma’s cornflower-blue eyes peer up at the ceiling for a moment, then back at me. Her eyes are glassy. She blinks and one fat tear escapes. She catches it with a perfectly manicured finger.
“I’ve been better,” she says. “I mean, I’m not falling apart or anything. But I’ve been better, too, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean.”
The squeaks of shoes on cracked linoleum floors, the slams of locker doors, the shrieks and shouts of teenagers finally acquiring freedom after months of imprisonment—the noises surround us as we stand there, looking at each other.
“I have to head to my locker, do you?” Emma asks.
“No, I cleaned mine out already,” I tell her. “But I’ll come with you if you want.”
“Okay,” she says, her lips parting into a smile. “Thanks.”
Emma’s locker is mostly empty, but she has a neat stack of pastel-colored spirals and loose papers on the top shelf. She pulls a mirror with a pink frame off the inside of the locker door and places it on top of the stack, then takes everything out. My eyes spy the first issue of Moxie.
“Hey,” I say. “I recognize that.”
“Yeah,” says Emma, “I have them all.”
My face must read incredulous because Emma says, “I was curious. I was too chicken to admit it at first since my crowd wasn’t really into it.”
“So you didn’t want to speak to all of us at that assembly after the bathrobe thing?”
Emma wrinkles her nose. “No, I didn’t. But Principal Wilson sort of bullied me into it, I guess. Just like he’d bullied me into running for vice president instead of president of student council the year before.”
“Wait, are you kidding me?” I ask. But Emma shakes her head no, then tells me how Principal Wilson told her having a boy as head of student council would give the council more authority overall.
“He said vice president was perfect for a female leader,” says Emma. “And I didn’t want to cause trouble, so I did what he said.” Then a tiny smile works its way onto her face. “I did something else, though,” she adds.
“What?” I ask.
“I was the one who put the Moxie stickers on his truck.”
She grins wide, revealing her model-perfect teeth. My own mouth drops open in shock.
“You seriously did?”
“I really did!” she says, giggling. “And the asshole never found out either.”
Witnessing Emma Johnson curse reminds me of the one time I overheard Meemaw say shit. (She’d dropped an entire Stouffer’s chicken enchiladas dish on the floor and it had spilled everywhere.) It’s equal parts weird and hilarious and awesome.
Emma closes her locker. The hallways have cleared out by now, and we start heading down the mostly empty main hallway toward the front doors. It’s the same hallway we marched down side by side, weeks ago during the walkout. I remember Emma and me walking together, tears flowing down her face, my heart pounding, something really happening.
“You got plans for the summer?” I ask.
“I’m lifeguarding at the pool again,” says Emma as we walk. “And working on my college essays. What about you?”
I shrug. “Not sure, really. I might help out at the urgent care center where my mom is a nurse. They need someone to work in their records room. It’s a little extra money anyway.”
“And you’ll spend time with your boyfriend, yeah?” Emma asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” I say, grinning. It’s easy to talk to Emma Johnson, I realize. She’s just a nice girl who goes to my high school. That’s probably all she’s ever been.
We finally reach the main doors of East Rockport High, and my skin gets goose bumps like it can still sense the energy of the walkout all these weeks later. Like the energy has been caught in the school’s atmosphere. Like Kathleen Hanna and the Riot Grrrls said, it’s an energy that is a revolutionary soul force made by girls for girls.
I hope like hell it’s here to stay.
I push on the heavy door, and Emma and I head out. “Hey,” I say, shielding my eyes from the Texas sun, “next weekend my friend Lucy is having a sleepover at her house.” We’re standing on the front steps now. Emma slides a pair of fancy sunglasses out of her purse and slips them on.
“Lucy’s the new girl who put everything online, right?” Emma asks.
“Yeah.”
“I like Lucy,” says Emma, grinning.
“She likes you,” I say. “Anyway, we were wondering if maybe you want to come? There’s going to be some other girls there, too. Girls who were involved in Moxie this year. We’re going to, like, figure out a way to keep things going next year. I mean, even though Wilson’s gone…”
“Oh, yeah,” says Emma, nodding like I don’t even need to finish the sentence. “Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to do.”
“So you’d be into it? Coming to the sleepover?”
“You want me there?” Emma says. “Even though I’m, like, head cheerleader?” And the way she asks it—the way her voice is full of longing and doubt and just a touch of self-deprecation—is all I need to predict that Emma Johnson and I are going to become good friends.
“Totally we want you there,” I say. “Moxie is for every girl. Cheerleaders, too.”
“Okay, cool,” says Emma. “That would be really cool. Actually, to be totally honest, I have some ideas if you want them.”
“You mean Moxie ideas?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Emma, her cheeks reddening. “But whatever. You can hear them at the sleepover. Or never. I mean, well, when I was planning the walkout, I made, this, like, Excel spreadsheet with some basic plans.”
Of course she did. She is Emma Johnson after all.
“I would love to see this spreadsheet,” I tell her, grinning.
“Yeah?”
“I really would,” I say.