Sister Mischief (35 page)

Rowie smiles at me as we bound together for the second chorus, one she wrote for me after my super emo rap at her house:

All four of us throw the 4H signal down with the detonation of the final beat: four fingers on the left hand, crossed by one on the right, pressed to the breast. We sashay off stage right, knowing that right now, no one,
no one
in the suburbs has swagger even remotely like us. We’re sweating and panting backstage like we’ve just sprinted a marathon, and I realize that this is the only part of the plan that we haven’t choreographed within an inch of its life — what the hell happens when we finish our song? I don’t think any of us expected that they’d actually let us finish. Contemplating this, we breathe in and breathe out once, twice, three times, before we hear the dumbfounded silence erupt into cheering.

I peek around the curtain with my mouth agape. The crowd is on its feet and hollering full tilt, cheering like teenage banshees as the teachers still marooned on stage left exchange what-now glances. Nordling returns to the podium, but a full minute passes before the screaming begins to dwindle, during which he’s left standing there looking like a puppet on strings, waving his hands, mouthing words that no one can hear. I notice that Mrs. DiCostanza and a few of the other teachers have bowed their heads together and seem to be scribbling something on a notepad.

“What the eff do we do now?” Rowie hisses.

“Let’s just see what homeboy does next,” replies Marcy, chewing her fingernails in anxious glee. “I don’t want to miss a second of this.”

“I must insist —” Nordling tries to interject, cut off by a few final whoops. “I must insist that all of you compose yourselves. Miss Rockett, Miss Rudra, Miss Crowther, and Miss Grinnell”— he points at us —“you will report directly to my office at the conclusion of this assembly.” This elicits a scattered, rising boo from the audience, lowing like cattle in disapproval. “As I stated before this disruption, violations of any policy outlined in Holyhill’s code of conduct will be met with serious consequences. Now, I’d like everyone, beginning with the senior class, to collect their things and return to afternoon class —”

Nordling gets cut off again — poor fool can’t even finish a sentence up in this glorious mess — but this time by Mrs. D., who hands him a sheet of paper and whispers something in his ear. He steps back, cupping a hand over the microphone, and they swap words for a hot second, then he throws up his hands and motions exasperatedly for her to take the podium. Mrs. D. reads from the paper in her hands.

“In light of the authentic intellectual curiosity evidenced by 4H’s application for school recognition, and by these young women’s unique and remarkable performance, the faculty of Holyhill High School moves to amend the policy prohibiting hip-hop music on school grounds”— a preemptive roar begins to spring from the crowd but is squashed by one withering glare from Mrs. D., that titan —“the faculty moves to amend this policy in order to permit hip-hop music and culture to be studied and discussed and urges the administration to guarantee that all future 4H meetings will receive the administration’s full support and commitment to safety.”

“YEAH!” Marcy lets loose, hooting and jumping up and down along with everyone else. “Mrs. D. speaks, mofos!”

The world is full of surprises like this, I suppose, but this madcap campaign has recruited the scrappiest mess of encouragement from unlikely places, and I guess that moves me, this showing of support from people it might have been easy to mistake for haters. It gives me a strange kind of faith in people, this jackpot we’ve struck after we laid our cards out on the table and let go our truth for the whole school to hear. I wonder if this is what everyone will remember about me now, five, ten years from now. It’s exactly the legacy I’ve always wanted.

“Please return to your classes,” Principal Nordling announces weakly. The teachers and administrators dispel into the audience, prodding everyone back to class and reality and the rest of this game-changing day. As he walks toward the exit, Nordling turns back to us and waggles a come-hither finger in our direction, reminding us that we’re not off the hook yet. Giggling, decompressing, coming down from the rush, we pick up the electronic pieces of our sonic revolution and start toward the office, racking up a few backslaps and props along the way.

“Yo, I didn’t know chicks could rap like that,” a scrawny sophomore tells us excitedly. “That was badass.” Some assorted other people we don’t know echo the kudos, and we try to conceal our bafflement as we make our way through the sea of people. Marcy’s walkie-talkie beeps.

“Mission accomplished,” Yusuf’s voice comes in. “That was some wicked-ass shit, Sister Mischief.”

“Over and out.” Marcy grins into the speaker. “B-girl signing off.”

Swiveling back to take one last mental picture of the scene, I see Pops near the exit opposite us; he gives me a smile and a 4H sign and retreats, chatting with Rooster and the KIND-11 team.
Everything I know about protesting,
I think proudly,
I learned from that man.

Our shoulders slump a little as we gear up to face the music, kind of literally, in the principal’s office. We all stop just short of the front desk, not ready to let go of the high. I turn to my girls.

“Look, whatever happens in there,” I declare, “we did ourselves proud today.”

“For real,” Tess echoes, nodding. “If they expel me, I’m glad it was for this.”

“For real,” Marcy agrees.

“For real,” Rowie completes the thought. Marcy and Tess start to slink in, but Rowie holds me back.

“Hey, Ez?” she says.

“MC Ro?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?” I ask, incredulous. “You did that shit on your own.”

“I know,” she says. “But I wouldn’t have done it without you.”

I feel myself blushing: after all this time, not so much time really, she still has this effect on me. Maybe she always will.

“No doubt,” I say. “Let’s get this over with.”

Hesitantly, Marcy knocks on Nordling’s office door. A strained “Come in” resounds from inside. We enter.

“Please sit down,” he says, kind of overly gracious. We do.

Tess speaks first: “Principal Nordling, we realize that our performance was disruptive to the assembly you had planned, and we’re prepared to accept the consequences for that. All we’d ask you to consider is that ours was a thoughtful and, we think, well-founded act of protest.”

He nods slowly, putting his fingers together in a little steeple over his mouth.

“That was quite a stunt you girls pulled,” he observes neutrally. “It was uniquely intrusive, completely inappropriate, and clearly premeditated.”

“Yes, sir. It was,” I agree.

“You threatened the authority of my position, and my credibility in maintaining order at this school.” He’s oddly calm, and it’s kind of creeping me out.

“Yes, sir, we did,” Marcy says. “But we ask you to take into account that our actions were in response to a hateful attack on us and our beliefs.”

“Yes, Miss Crowther, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” he responds with a little less patience. “And that, along with all four of your excellent academic standings, is the only reason why I’m not going to expel you.”

We let out a collective rush of relieved sighs.

“Thank you, Principal Nordling,” Tess begins to answer him.

“I’m not finished,” he says. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen here. The unrest your apparent displeasure with Holyhill’s policies has caused stops right now. There will be no more apparel campaigns, no more flyers, no more flirtation with the local media at my expense, and absolutely no more surprise performances.”

We nod skeptically, waiting to hear what else he’s got.

“If you immediately ratchet all of your antics down a notch, the agreement I’m prepared to make with you is as follows. You will all be suspended from school and all school activities for one week, including”— he looks at Marcy —“including band and drumline, and that suspension will appear on your permanent records.” We all pale a little but hold our poker faces. “However, in light of the surprising amount of support you managed to conjure from the faculty, I am also willing to reconsider my decision not to add 4H to Holyhill’s roster of recognized student groups, if you can promise me that your group will not in any way disturb the positive learning environment I’m trying to uphold here. Do we have a deal, ladies?”

The four of us look at one another, realizing that, all things considered, this is a pretty sweetheart deal. Three nods answer my questioning eyebrows. I stand up and stick out my hand.

“You’ve got a deal, sir,” I say. “I think you’ll find that our group will enrich, not disturb, Holyhill’s learning environment.”

He rises too, taking my hand. “I’m glad to hear that. In that case, young ladies, please return to your classrooms, and perhaps you can spend your week beginning tomorrow composing a mission statement for 4H that will convince me of your intent to honor our agreement.”

“No doubt, son.” Marcy holds out a fist for him to pound; he looks quizzically at it for a moment, then chuckles softly and taps his knuckles to hers.

Tonight, I’m on a midnight jaunt out to Lake Calhoun, my TC oasis, the sandy beaches where I once tore naked across the shore, sand now indistinguishable from snowdrifts. As I come at it from the Excelsior side, I see a litter of fishing huts still settled out on the lake, and a few trapped buoys protruding from the ice like birthday candles. After I chain my bike to a tree, the only sounds are cars passing and my feet miffing the snow. If anyone needed evidence to be convinced of my hard-wrought Midwesternness, here it is: I can bike in virtually any weather. The long winter’s only half-gone now, and everything is frozen solid despite the best efforts of climate change.

I got new headphones, a surprise from Pops. They cover my whole ears and make me feel like a magical cyborg, a girl robot wired into the root system of the music. I just feel like there’s so much work to do, so much time and so little all the same. And then other times I make myself remember,
Yes, I do have time.
Time to be seventeen, to catch up to everything sixteen ran out on, time to create and re-create myself and everything I create. Some things you do in high school don’t turn out as well as you’d planned — your first self-mixed drinks, believing that detagging yourself from incriminating Facebook pictures erases them, at-home hair color or any tattoo — but the truth is, some of the things you do at sixteen turn out better than you’d planned. Like growing older on the holy soil of Minnesota. Like girl rappers in Minneapolis.

We were at a family friend’s cabin in Wisconsin, I forget whose, for Mom’s last Thanksgiving, the winter she drove the Colt Vista out on the frozen lake.

“That ice is two feet deep!” she declared, persuading me out of my tryptophan coma after dinner. “We could drive a Mack truck out there and we’d be fine. Come on. Let’s have an adventure.”

I trotted after her even though I was scared, still protesting,
What if we fall in?
and
Would Pops be able to get to us in time?
I was an anxious kid, far topped by my mother in fearlessness. I remember her mouth stretching in delight, her white teeth glinting as we careened from the boat landing onto the lake and across the ice, her action-movie steering sending us in lunatic figure-eights that left the snow still scarified in the morning.

“Isn’t this fun? Don’t you feel
wild
?” she screamed, I think.

At first all I could do was clench the door handle and pray, but when she stopped the car and dragged me out in the middle of the frozen lake, I think I began to feel what she felt — a need to drive recklessly with no one around to see, to feel enormous or tiny in the face of something enormous, to be confronted with a carpet of stars and a raw night of possibility. They say that children who lose parents at an early age freeze developmentally at the age of that loss — that part of me will always be five years old and speeding in pigtails across the lake, hoping Mom and the ice car will come back to shore before spring. I spread out my blanket on the marbled frieze of Lake Calhoun, facing the Minneapolis skyline, and dig my boot heels into the snow, nestled in Pops’s parka, not at all cold.