Sister Mischief (8 page)

18. Text from Rowie:
I just got an original-release LP of CunninLynguists’ Will Rap for Food. When are you coming over?
Me to Rowie:
Omfg, that’s like seeing a unicorn. On our way in 10.


Blowing on my piano-key fingernails, I attempt to shove on my emerald-green boots without using my hands, no easy feat considering the boots are eighteen inches tall. I hook my bag over my elbow crook, turn off the TV, and clump out to the kitchen.

Per usual, Dad is pushing food on Marcy.

“Seriously, Luke, I
just
ate,” she protests weakly.

“Little girl, you haven’t tasted egg salad like this in your life. Did you know curry powder makes everything better?” Dad’s going through a curry phase. Coconut curry, various veggies in curry sauce, now curried egg salad.

“I gotta admit, the egg salad is pretty tricked out,” I chime in. “But I contest the allegation that curry powder makes
everything
better.”

“Cite your evidence!” Dad cries, actually shocked.

“Uh, last Sunday’s maca-curry-and-cheese? Not meant to be, Pops.”

Bob guffaws. “Luke cooks like a girl.” This sends Marcy and me into peals of laughter.

He laughs. “Okay, okay, I’ll chalk that one up to my overzealous palate. But for real, just try one bite of this.” He spoons a lump of today’s special into Marcy’s mouth, and her eyebrows shoot up.

“
Damn,
that’s tasty.” Marcy coughs. “Nice work, Rockett man.”

“Ez, you want some? Skinny girl, you’re wasting away.”

“Dad, we had dinner like half an hour ago. Marcy and I really gotta bolt. Bob, didja bring
Forrest Gump
?”

He bashfully produces the DVD from under his coat, along with a six-pack, a bag of corn chips, and a can of Frito-Lay nacho cheese dip. Bob Crowther wears John Deere hats unironically. “Now, how’d you know it’d be that and not
Platoon
this time?”

I grin. “Lucky guess.”

Pops throws his hands up in mock exasperation. “What do you expect the man to say? We old men are creatures of habit. Bob likes war movies. I love by feeding. Go. Get out of here. Consider your welcome overstayed.”

I remember my hobo feet. “Wait, Pops, can you lace me up? My nails are wet.”

Dad shakes his head a little, chuckling, and kneels down to work on my magnificent shitkickers.

“Luke, I gotta bail on Sunday night,” Bob says as Pops laces.

“Why?” Pops looks crestfallen. “We haven’t, um, been bowling in months.”

“You know you guys sound a lot gayer when you come up with euphemisms for playing blackjack at Mystic Lake, right?” I say.

“Seriously,” Marcy says. “The jig is up. No one can come home from bowling smelling that much like Kool cigarettes and despair.”

“Well,” Bob says, “I suppose you were bound to figure it out.”

“Why can’t you go?” Marcy asks. “You don’t have practice on Sunday nights.”

“Maybe I should ask you,” Bob says. “You got any idea why Ross Nordling wants a meet with me first thing Monday morning?”

“Nope.” Marcy suddenly appears engrossed in cracking open the dip can.

“Mary Marcella, are you sure?” Bob asks sternly. Marcy
hates
her full name.

“You bet,” Marcy says. Pops and I exchange a look in which I try to convey
I’ll tell you later.

“Did I buy you these?” Pops interjects. “They’re kinda nutty.”

“You mean they’re kinda
beautiful
? No, you didn’t buy them. I got them for ten bucks at Value Village with Rowie. Can you believe someone left these homeless?”

Marcy, Bob, and Dad exchange a look, then nod in unison.

“I’m breaking up with all of you. Later, Pops. Love you no shit. Later, Bob.”

“Love you no shit. Where are you going? Do you have your phone?”

“Just over to Rowie’s, and yes.
Bye.
”

I toss Dad a quick peck on the cheek, followed by an identical peck from Marcy. Marcy kisses my dad, but not her own. Just as we’re about to walk out the front door, the doorbell rings. Surprised, I turn back to the kitchen.

“Hey, Pops, you expecting someone?” Is Dad dating behind my back? That hasn’t happened in a while, not since Marcy and I scared away his last girlfriend, Felicia, by stealing a sign from the Holyhill Veterinary Clinic that read
BUFFALO MEAT FOR SALE
and putting it on her front lawn. Sign stealing is one of Marcy’s and my favorite pastimes. Truth be told, I still feel kind of bad about Felicia. There wasn’t anything overtly wrong with her except that she smelled like cottage cheese.

“Nope,” he calls back. “See who it is.”

I open the door to find none other than the despicable Mary Ashley Baumgarten, along with another girl who looks like her freshman doppelgänger. Why can’t I ever get away from this girl?

“What in God’s name are you doing at my house?” I ask MashBaum.

She pretends to gawk. “This is your house?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes. And this is my door.” I begin to close it, but Mary Ashley thrusts a foot in and comes back with a syrupy smile.

“Go ahead.” She nudges her mini-MashBaum.

“I’m canvassing today because the Holyhill Teens for Christ are selling poinsettias to support our Preserve Unborn Lives initiative,” the girl starts.

“Who’s the clone?” I ask.

“This is Kristina, my freshman buddy. She’s learning how to canvass for Christ.” MashBaum wraps an arm around her minion. “Right, Stina?”

“Perhaps you’d like to know that the first poinsettia is seventeen ninety-five, and each additional plant is just fifteen ninety-five,” Kristina rattles off, looking eagerly back at Mary Ashley for approval. “We guarantee delivery by December first, and for today only, we have a special offer of five plants for eighty-nine ninety-nine.”

“Oh, spare me,” I groan.

“That’s a total rip-off,” Marcy mutters. “If you buy one plant at seventeen ninety-five and then four at fifteen ninety-five, the total is only eighty-one seventy-five.”

Mary Ashley’s face twists, and she says, more for Kristina’s benefit than ours, “Look, it’s never too late for you girls to come to Bible study sometime, and just own up to your sins and learn about Jesus, and hear about everything we’re doing to save the unborn. Everyone is welcome. Teenage pregnancy is a big problem in Holyhill —”

Marcy cackles. “You should know, right, Mary Ashley?”

“We meet Wednesday afternoons, third lunch . . .” I can hear Kristina’s waning voice as I slam the door in her face.

“Unbelievable,” I say.

“Now we have to wait for her to leave before we can,” whines Marcy, watching through the window as Mary Ashley and Kristina cross the street.

“Like hell we do. Let’s run her over,” I say, opening the door and walking out.

Marcy follows. “Not worth the mess they’d make on the driveway. We should seriously call the ACLU on that Bible group. Bob’s always said pinko lawyers love that church-and-state shit.”

“Maybe,” I say, hopping into the passenger side of the Jimmy. “But don’t you think legal’s more flexible when you’re rich?”

“Shit is fucked.”

“For real.”

Marcy starts the car and I stick my tongue out between two fingers at Mary Ashley as we pull out. Dead prez’s
lets get free
blasts from the CD hookup. Marcy’s been heavy into hip-hop for as long as I can remember, and it was her endless lyrical parroting and beatboxing that got the rest of us rhyming in the first place.

“You’re good with words,” Marcy said to me about a year ago. She’d figured out how to break songs down for their parts on her computer. “You say things right. Can you make them rhyme?”

I wrote and I wrote, and it rhymed, but I couldn’t make it sit in a song shape. I just wrote lyrics like a highway without any exit ramps.

“I was thinking about Rapunzel,” Rowie said out of the blue one day. “I think I wrote a hook about Rapunzel.”

“Yeah?” I said, intrigued. “Lay it on us.” Rowie was so nervous as she read from her notebook that her voice shook.

“That’s it,” Marcy marveled. “Thank God you came along. Miss Poet Laureate over here can’t write a chorus to save her own ass.” Then when Tess started hanging around, Sister Mischief was born.

People think it’s weird, I know — four suburban teenage girls, three white, one brown, making this kind of music. Maybe some people think a white girl from Minnesota doesn’t have any right to rhyme. But how am I supposed to keep from rhyming? To me, hip-hop is a reflection of your surroundings, and an instrument of change. And if that’s true, it can’t belong only to black people, or to white people, or to brown or green or blue people. Within a medium of subversion, I like to think that all subversive people are, or should be, welcome, because busting rhythm and poetry loose is the only way anyone with hip-hop pumping in their veins can feel free. We’re getting free. So fuck anyone who thinks we shouldn’t rap. If we’re being really honest with ourselves here, we rap exactly because a lot of people think we shouldn’t.

“Hey,” Marcy says.
¹⁹
“Where you at, Ferocious?”

19. Text from Tess:
On my way to R’s now, but I gotta hit choir practice for a while tonight or MA’s gonna call a Lutheran jihad on my a
**.


I smile. “Just thinking.”

“Wanna find a new sign to bring Rowie?”

“No doubt, ladyfriend.”

Marcy pulls off the highway and we hunt for targets. I point out a generic handwritten
GARAGE SALE THURSDAY
sign and shrug; she shakes her head.

“We need something more ironic. Something with a little more smack to it.”

“What does that sign say?” Marcy asks, pointing at a sign on Mary Ashley’s mammoth yard.

“Oh, my God, we would have to be seriously stealthy to make off with that.” The lawn sign reads
Herb for Holyhill: Herb Baumgarten for State Senator.

Marcy cackles. “Herb for Holyhill! That shit is ours.”

“Can you believe he’s actually running?” I say. “We’re basically doing Holyhill a nicey by sabotaging him.”

“I still can’t believe he’s running as a Republican with ‘Herb for Holyhill’ as his campaign slogan. Let me pull through the side street — it’ll get us closer.” She hangs a left and kills the lights. “I’m going to roll slowly by the edge of the lawn, and you dash out and grab it from your side, drive-by–style.”

“Someone should confiscate your DVDs of
The Wire,
but I’m on it.” We roll by the yard and I bolt across the lawn, twisting my ankle a little as I pivot back, sign in hand. The sprint leaves me panting when I jump back in the Jimmy and toss the booty in the back as Marcy peels out, cackling wildly. Marcy and me, we take care of business.

Rowie and Tess live at the end of a long cul-de-sac near the fire station, in houses facing each other from about a block’s distance. The Baumgartens live on the next street over, which lends a literal quality to Mary Ashley’s acting like we invaded her territory. Anyway, what I love most about Rowie’s house, apart from the old treehouse in the backyard, is the smell. It’s sweet and spicy and totally unlike the smell of any other house I know; I love that it’s full of scents unfamiliar to me. Before I knew Rowie’s family, I’d never really eaten Indian food, except for a samosa here and there, but Dr. Priya Rudra is a force to be reckoned with, in the kitchen as well as the ER. It took me a few tries to brave the Rudra chutney gauntlet without weeping from the heat, but that shit is legit. Marcy parks on the street, and we walk up to the embossed-copper door.

Dr. Rudra — well, one of them — Rowie’s dad — answers. “Ah! Friends! Rohini is expecting you. Do you want some chicken?” As the only non-veg member of the Rudra family, Raj Rudra is always trying to recruit companions in carnivoraciousness.

“You have no idea how full we are,” Marcy answers. “Esme’s dad just pushed me over my limit.”

“Maybe later,” I add. “Thanks a bunch, though. Is Rowi — Rohini down in her room?”

“Yes. Please go ahead.” He steps aside softly down the hall. “You girls have a nice time writing your rap rhymes.” He sends us off with a glance at the Herb sign ill-concealed behind Marcy’s back.

Just then, the other Dr. Rudra, Rowie’s mom, appears. Her face lights up when she sees Marcy and me.

“Girls! I’m so glad I caught you. Oh, I loathe that man.” She points to
HERB FOR HOLYHILL
. “He wants to destroy science education in Minnesota.” She laughs at the shocked looks on our faces. “My mother always says that American medical school turned me into a crazy radical. I say, what’s radical about dispersing information? Please, don’t get me started. How is your writing going?”