Sister Mischief (12 page)

“Maybe we should, like, go out on a date sometime,” I say cautiously.

“Where the hell would we go?” She snorts.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Anywhere you want. Or, I guess, anywhere we could bike to.”

“But I like being here.”

“Why?”

“Because here I can do this,” she says, kissing my ear. “And this.” She slips my bra strap off my shoulder. “And this.”

Sometimes we pass out for a few hours out of sheer exhaustion, wrapped in each other’s arms under the pile of blankets. I wake up into another blue night and watch her sleep, studying her face. I don’t know how to explain it: I
recognize
her, I see her sameness with me. Rowie and me, we rhyme.
²⁴

24. SiN:
When the black-eyed girl blushes / It twists me in thrushes / All flustered and hushing / The lushness of lusting / What a rush, wanna touch / Her luscious erupting / Her flush gets me gushing / we’re hushing, she’s blushing, I’m busting on crushing.


I brush my fingertips across the smooth convexity of her forehead; in her sleep she winces, swats my hand away, a refusal.

“What day is today?” she whispers, pulling awake.

“I don’t know,” I murmur into her hair. I roll closer to her. I extend my leg, bending it over hers. Her hand rests on my thigh. She extends her other leg across mine; our legs twin boomerangs, interhooked, splayed like two clocks’ hands. I wrap my extended leg around her back, pulling her in, belly to belly, where we remain for a minute, finally seeing the whites of each other’s eyes. It’s like, I’ve always known this world was mine, but then Rowie came along and found the door, and stood there until I heard her breathing on the other side,
²⁵
until I opened it and let her all in, let myself all spilling out on a sleepless black-haired girl. She rises to her knees and lifts herself over me, forcing me onto my back as the hand behind me acquiesces. Both of her hands are spanning my waist, holding her up as she regards me sleepily from above.

25. SiN:
I hear you. / I hear you. / I hear you.


“Do you ever get that feeling like you’ll never have enough time?” I ask.

“Every day,” she answers.

I nod. “That’s how I feel when I’m with you.”

“You too. I mean, me too,” she says, leaning down to kiss me. My heart begins to thunder as I cross my ankles behind her back.

“Tessie! Hustle!” Marcy yells with her head out the Jimmy window, leaning on the horn. We see Darlene’s vexed face poke between the living-room curtains. She puts a bony finger to her lips; Marcy relents on the horn.

“Where is she? We still have to get Rowie and be at the LocoMotive by nine,” I say.

“Do you think the stick up Darlene’s ass is actually from a tree, or do you think she had it specially hand-carved?” Marcy says.

“You’re a little harsh on Darlene,” I say. “So she’s a Botox queen. She’s not, like, evil.”

“Yo, my first memory of that woman is her refusing to take us to the grocery store before Tess had makeup on after we slept over that one time. We were, like, twelve.”

“I know,” I say. “That was when we found the TrimSpa in her bathroom and tried it. We were up all night. No wonder we looked like shit in the morning.”

“She’s just ugly to me. I mean, you definitely freak her out, but you’re still parent-friendlier than me. Try showing up to dinner at Darlene’s in a men’s undershirt and a Twins hat,” Marcy says. “Watch the feathers fly.”

“God, how’d you get to be such a little butch?” I say. “Has anyone else noticed I’m surrounded by pseudo-queers? My dad builds fairy houses. My best friend dresses like Fiddy Cent.”

“Maybe we’re all queer, you know?” Marcy asks.

“What does that mean?” I ask, cracking up.

“Just means that ain’t none of us ever gonna fit in, so I do what the fuck I want. Sexuality spectrum!” Marcy gives a fist pump.

Just then, Tess finally bursts out of her house, tripping like a vixen in vicious heely boots. Ignoring Darlene in the doorway, we hang out the windows and catcall like heathens.

“
Daaaaammmnnn,
girl.” I reach over and slap Tess’s legginged ass as she climbs in the back. “This is, like, some Debbie Harry shizz.” Tess’s wearing a red minidress with gold polka dots, shiny black leggings, and the skank heels. Tess is the kind of beautiful that makes you wonder if that much beautiful ever gets in her way.

“Naw, dude.” She grins. “This is, like, some Con-Tessa shizz.”

We’re on our way to play at the LocoMotive, a grungy little Minneapolis club with an open-mike night. And come to think of it, we’re all kinda pimped out to the teeth for our first real thing: Marcy’s added chains and brass knuckles to her standard beater-and-jeans ensemble, and I could swear she’s actually put a product in her hair, and I’m combining my hand-painted Timbs and leggings with a big leopard print Value Village T-shirt.

“Check out this mix I made,” Tess says as Marcy pulls out of the Grinnells’ cul-de-sac of a driveway. She plugs her iPod into Marcy’s tape deck converter, and Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick, Push” begins to blare from the speakers.

“Dude, I know you, like,
love
him, but Lupe Fiasco is pretty much just Kanye’s douchebag bromance of the moment,” Marcy whines.

“Yeah, well, Kanye was just Jay-Z’s douchebag bromance of the moment once. At least he isn’t hating on the ladies all the time,” Tess says.

“Eff Lupe Fiasco. Get an earful of this and tell me he still dampens your panties.” Marcy pulls a Parliament out of her man purse and switches in her iPod, putting on K’naan’s “Kicked Pushed.”

“I’m throwing your iPod out the window if you light that in front of me,” Tess shoots back. “It’s bad enough I’m still trying to get my sister to quit.”

Marcy lets go an irritated sigh. “Fine. Change the song and I’ll lose the stoge.”

Tess switches the iPods back and bites her lip, grinning, in the moment before the song changes. We hear the opening saxophone riff to Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” and let loose a collective holler; it’s an old favorite. Marcy cranks the volume as we roll down Iroquois Lane.

“Bitch is so
fierce,
” I breathe reverently.

“I’ve never been sure how I feel about
bitch,
” Tess says. “Don’t you ever feel weird using the language that hip-hop uses to describe women?”

“Oh, here we go,” Marcy says. “Teenage Feminism 101. Next are you gonna tell me I shouldn’t watch porn because it’s sexist?”

“You watch porn?” Tess asks, visibly taken aback. “Where do you get it?”

“Please,” Marcy says dismissively as she pulls into Rowie’s driveway. “You can’t grow up in a house with four men and a computer and not know how to find porn.”

“I wish I could say I didn’t know anything about porn chez Crowther,” I say. “But Tessie, I think the language hip-hop uses to describe women is really messed up, but don’t you think that if enough women rappers break through, it’s something we can reclaim? I just think hip-hop is a medium that, like, encourages conflict over language. I mean, don’t you think our whole Council of Mischief bidness of sex-positivity is about being a part of that kind of debate?”

“Yes,” Tess says, nodding. “And I agree with most of what you’re saying. I’m just wondering if taking part in the debate by using words that are sexually violent toward women is the right way to do it.”

“Huh,” I say. “I hadn’t thought about words like
bitch
as being violent, but they are when you think about it. They’re meant to wound.”

“Well,” Marcy says with a shrug, “the thing about words is you can’t really question what they mean without saying them out loud.”

“I mean, if you really have a problem with
bitch,
which I can totally get with, there are so many other words to use,” I add. “
Girlfriends, GFs, homegirls, homeslices, ladyfriends, sisters, soul sisters, mamas, your posse, coven, fam bam, band of rabble-rousers, hooligans, troublemakers, bluestockings, alpha femmes.
No reason to stay limited to
bitches and hos.
”

“Yo, where the eff is Ro?” Marcy says, and we all realize we’ve been sitting in her driveway spewing nerd talk for ten minutes and she hasn’t come out of her house. “Should I honk?”

“I wouldn’t,” Tess says. “You know how her parents are old-school. Maybe hit her cell?”

“I’m on it,” I say.
²⁶

26. Text to Rowie:
babygirl, we’re outside. everything cool?


Just then, Rowie bursts out of her house at full clip, rocking a purple pleather jacket and thick gold heart hoops, looking distractingly hot in skinny black jeans. She throws herself into the car and I notice her favorite green feather in her hair.
²⁷

27. SiN:
Is she an eggplant today? A plum?


“Drive,” she commands Marcy, bouncing jaggedly in her seat.

“Is — is everything okay?” I ask.

She shakes her head maniacally back and forth for a moment, bouncing in her seat, then slaps the window hard, palm open.

“I’m just so
over it
with them,” she explodes. “My dad is such a
fucking
FOB sometimes.”

“What happened?” Tess places a tentative hand on Rowie’s shoulder as Marcy rolls out.

“Nothing. It’s nothing. He just thinks I’m an American hussy whenever I wear something that doesn’t scream
virgin.
But he never just comes out and says it. He barely ever says anything, and when he does, it’s always just lame euphemisms, always
not having my priorities straight.
”

“I think you’re a hot hot mess,” I offer, trying for a smile.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Marcy says, “I got an earful from Coach Bob after Nordling asked him if he knew about 4H. Bob was pretty pissed I didn’t tell him.”

“Did you get in trouble?” I ask.

“Naw.” Marcy grins. “He hates Nordling. Once I told him what we were about, he just sort of grunted and lumbered off to watch
Cops.
”

“Look, can you guys just fight about Kanye for a minute or something?” Rowie says. “I need to get my head somewhere else.” She doesn’t look at me.

“Kanye’s a tool,” Marcy says.

“Kanye’s awesome,” Tess says. “But Marcy, Jay-Z is, like, the artist at which we meet in the middle.”

“Doesn’t get much more mainstream than Hov,” Marcy says with a smirk.

“Jesus, Rowie, why do you encourage them?” I say, making the universal choking sign.

“This is the part where Tess avoids the Kanye discussion by talking about Jay-Z’s relationship to moral authority,” Marcy says, yawning.

“Jay-Z is the Martin Luther of latter-day hip-hop,” Tess says. “Do you hear that anti-Catholic sentiment in ‘Lucifer’? It’s like his ninety-five theses.”

“Why you gotta hate on my people?” Marcy asks. “Goddamn Protestants.”

Rowie smiles weakly. “I don’t know why I find this so reassuring, but I do.”

A note on style: Marcy’s into mostly coastal nineties hip-hop, the classics, the foundation-layers for our generation and our collaboration: Public Enemy and dead prez, Tupac, Snoop, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Biggie, the Wu-Tang, and Arrested Development. There are others — De La Soul, Les Nubians, A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, KRS-One, and Boogie Down Productions — and all these are the early cornerstones; from them, her taste progresses outward and/or underground, into the Dilated Peoples, the Soulquarians, Gang Starr, Main Flow, Classified, the Last Emperor, Immortal Technique, the Individuals, CunninLynguists, Common Market, K’naan, more. We’re also fervent upholders of the local — Slug and Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Har Mar Superstar, not to mention, you know,
Prince
— tradition of Minneapolitan reppers, which includes white rappers.
²⁸

28. SiN:
We had to start by understanding where we came from.