Sister Mischief (4 page)

“
They’re
the posers?” Tess asks incredulously. “We’re the suburban white girls trying to be rappers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rowie says pointedly.

“Well, yeah,” Tess says. “Sorry.”

“The possibility of our being posers, or people thinking we are, doesn’t make MashBaum a better person than she is,” I say. “That girl’s a straight-up gay-hater.”

“Which is why we should stop talking about her. Spot me,” Marcy orders me as she reaches into her purse for a Parliament. She and MashBaum are old nemeses, and it still causes some friction. The car swerves.

Tess screams. “Are you effing crazy? Keep your mother-loving eyes on the road! You’re going to get us pulled over!” Tess always tries not to swear. After a while, you start to find it endearing.

“Dude, can you chill out?” Marcy says. “We’re fine.”

“Marcy, that’s gross,” Tess whines as Marcy lights up, coughing for effect. “You’re bringing me back to Ada chain-smoking while she drove me to grade school. I have to sing.”

“If you don’t look at the road sooner or later,
I’m
calling the cops,” Rowie says.

“Dude, I’ve got the five-oh karmically taken care of this week. Lightning ain’t gonna strike twice,” I say with confidence.

“Did you get busted for something?” Rowie asks.

“Like, something to do with the fact that my mother is swearing she saw you in Charlie Knutsen’s car last night?” Tess asks.

“
Shut up.
Is that true? Is
that
why you never texted me?” Marcy says.

“Jesus, this is all getting so teen rom-com. So maybe I got busted by Darlene and then by the cops during my first tour of a boy’s backseat. Do I have to, like, get my period and cry next?” I say.

“I heard the cops broke up the parking lot party later, too,” Marcy says. “Holyhill sucks so hard.”

“Can I just come out and ask the obvious question here?” Tess asks more insistently. “What were you and your Superman panties doing in the back of a car with a male
Homo sapien
?”

“Key word there being
homo,
” Marcy adds, snickering. I blush, exactly one second before I start hating myself for blushing.

“Charlie Knutsen? Surprising.” Rowie regards me with curiosity, then bursts into laughter.

“Did you —?” Tess asks, knowing that sentence finishes itself. I feel myself go from pink to maroon.

“You so did! Look at her! You went to the bone zone with Chuckles!” Marcy crows.

“Oh, my God, I barely did,” I say. “It was so gross.”

“You dirty little hooligan, you’re going straight on us,” Marcy hoots, dissolving into yuks.

Rowie reaches up and ruffles my hair. “So why’d you decide to make Chuckles’s day, anyway?”

“I don’t know, man. I just wanted to be sure, or something.” I pause. “I mean, my pops’s been through enough raising me on his own already. The least I could do was check for sure before I told him once and for all that he completely failed at raising me normal.”

“Queer little word,
normal,
” Rowie says, smiling at me.

Tess starts to make a sound, then stops. I turn around.

“What?”

“You know what I’m going to say.”

“Tess.”

“I’m just saying that
maybe
it’s
possible
that you’re sixteen and you just weren’t ready.”

“Okay, let’s take a ride on the real-talk express. Is this a Christian thing?”

“Of course, but not in the way you —”

“Tess, I want to know. Do you think it’s a sin to be gay?”

She shakes her head emphatically. “Absolutely not. Don’t make me into something I’m not. I think you’re perfect the way God made you.”

“Then what’s your problem?” Marcy and Rowie have grown uncomfortably silent.

“Homeslice, I don’t
have
a problem. I love who you are and
I
can’t tell you who to love with your body, mind, or otherwise, and any Christian who does isn’t hearing or practicing Christ’s message of unconditional love. It’s not that I don’t think you should have gay sex. I just don’t think anyone is really ready to have sex before they’re married.”

“What’s sex?” I ask. “Is it sex if you use your mouth, or your hands, or are we just talking ugly-bumping here? And how am I supposed to get married?”

“You know what sex is better than I do.” Tess sounds exasperated. “You had it.”

“Because what you do with Anders Ostergaard every weekend isn’t sex,” I say. Tess looks stung.

“Ez, lay off,” Marcy intervenes.

Rowie says something too quiet to hear.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I said, Did you like it?” Rowie repeats. “When you did it, did you like it?”

I pause, not because I have to think about it, but because sometimes Rowie has this way of cutting through the bullshit. I shake my head.

“That dick was nasty, dude.”

Tess throws up her hands. “They’re ucking fugly! It’s a totally normal first-time reaction to seeing one.” She pauses. “Or so I hear.”

From under her breath, I hear Rowie quietly ask, “What the fuck is normal, anyway?”

Rowie always hangs back a little from the rest of us somehow. The Rudras — Drs. Raj and Priya, Rohini, and Lakshmi — moved to Holyhill from St. Paul around the time Marcy and I were cackling over beheaded Barbies buried in my backyard, but we didn’t really get to be friends with Rowie until last year, when her family moved again into a house down the street from Tess. Tess’s dad and Rowie’s mom are doctors at the same hospital. I guess Rowie wanted something to make her sound or feel less foreign
⁹
— I can’t blame her, Holyhill is a shit place to be a non-Anglo
¹⁰
— and so she shed
Rohini
and became
Rowie
to most, including us. The nickname suits her in a quirky, buoyant way, so I keep the fact that I think
Rohini
is a beautiful name to myself, but it puzzled me when she picked it as her MC tag, a stage name. We’re a good fit as MCs-in-arms, partners in lyrical crime: she writes choruses and hooks; I write verses.

9. On Rowie’s wall:
Rowie sometimes has better words for things than what they’re actually called. One time we were in Marcy’s car and it started raining, and she told us to turn on the windshield vipers.


10. SiN later that night:
There’s something about people of color in an all-white place. I don’t know — it’s like once you start noticing how complicated it is, you can’t stop noticing. Maybe some people can. It’s a white thing to say, I guess.


Rowie’s one of those people who doesn’t speak much unless she really has something to say. She’s beautiful; I like looking at her. There’s a strangeness about her that feels familiar. And most of the time she dresses in living colors: eggplant plum, Florida orange, chlorophyll green. Today she’s wearing a red felt dress with white polka dots and a green-feathered headband capping her hair. Somehow she makes her strawberry look hip and not like she’s an extra in the third-grade play.

“Yeah, man,” I agree, studying her. “Eff normal.”

Marcy pulls off the highway and we snake through downtown Minneapolis. I’m in love with its small-city seediness, its throngs of hipsters outside First Ave., its skyways suspended like arteries, the light emanating from the Basilica and the highway’s swoop past
Spoonbridge and Cherry.
This is my real home, I think, and not the sterile minivan parade of Holyhill. We pull into the parking lot, where the light rail sits jacketed like a hornet in yellow and black. It’s Saturday night and we came to drop bombs. We buy four tickets and get on the train.

“Guys, seriously, I don’t know if I can do this,” says Rowie, looking a little pale. I plunge a hand into my bag and pull out my trusty Nalgene. I believe in hydration.

“Drink some water and sit down while we warm up,” I say, handing her the bottle and stroking her hair.

Rowie has the shiniest hair ever, thick and lustrous in her vampy bob. Marcy is pulling our portable beatbox out of her backpack, a hot-pink heart-shaped set of iPod speakers, and cueing up our newest track. Tess sits a few feet away, practicing her breathing exercises. She looks like she’s practicing Lamaze, but homegirl can
sing,
so I don’t say anything. Rowie, still swigging my water, looks slightly better, but she’s clearly fighting to duck the monkey on her back.

It’s about seven thirty and there are only a handful of people in our car: a couple of worn-out-looking construction workers, a Hmong woman toting three children, one of whom can’t keep her eyes off Marcy’s magic pink sound machine, a black girl who looks a year or two younger than us, two camera-loaded Japanese tourists clearly on their way to the Mall of America.

“Ladies. It’s time,” I declare.

We are four points strong and near to bursting. Each one of us glances around the circle, waiting to see who’ll light the fuse. I like to think I’m reliable for tasks like this.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” I howl like a WWF announcer. “Twin Cities commuters! We do NOT apologize for the interruption. You are in for the best light rail ride of your life. Me and my sisters are four mud-slinging, bomb-dropping, clam-jamming bringers of mischief, about to spit some rhymes like you’ve never heard.”

I trip on a purse strap loose on the floor and tumble forward, eliciting a few snickers.

“So, uh, ladies and gentlemen,” the Ferocious in me continues, rising and brushing myself off, “hold on to your hosiery, because we’re about to load you up with a fat dose of wickedness, whimsy, thievery, sensation, charm, and general ruckus-making. Without further ado, here now, making our Twin Cities public transportation debut, is Sister Mischief with our soon-to-be hit single ‘Gynocracy.’”

I lope back to the ladies, who are still exchanging bewildered looks. Marcy raises her eyebrows at us. Swallowing the anxious mass of bile rising in my throat, I nod.

“Let’s do it,” I say. “Count it off, SheStorm.” Marcy does. She fumbles with the speakers, but they won’t turn on. Frustrated, she smacks them with the butt of her hand. The loop loaded on the magic pinks coughs and begins, a sample we lifted from 9th Wonder’s “No Comparison,” and Marcy begins to beatbox over it a measure later, picking up the slack. Tess leans into her opening vocals, belting in that rangy voice that makes the church ladies twitch in their seats:

I grab Rowie’s hand for a moment, squeezing it for courage. She gives me a tight deer-in-headlights smile. The first verse is mine.

Rowie leaps into the transition with both hips and both shoulders, rushing it half a beat, but recovering after a little stutter.

My vision is cloudy with exhilaration, but I can make out the Hmong woman clapping politely and her little girl jumping up and down in delight as Rowie continues. Small victories: no one throws anything, and no one boos. One of the workers is alternately fiddling with his iPod volume and scowling at us, but the other one bobbles his head and smiles. One of the MegaMall-bound Japanese tourists raises his camera to his eye and snaps a souvenir photo of us, and I imagine what he will see when he flips through his vacation back home in his bedroom, or telling stories to his buddies at work, saying something like
And we were going through the city on our way to the biggest mall, and there they were, three whitegirls and a desigirl rapping on the train. No, I don’t know why. They were Americans; it could be anything.