“What are you doing?” Yasmín asks.
“Nothing, I’m just . . .” My phone chimes.
Melissa: Well . . . I stepped in it.
Ellen: sadface
Melissa: Ugh. Whateverrrrrrr. I kind of see their point, but I still think they’re wrong. Which is basically the internet summed into one sentence.
Melissa: Not even worth it.
Melissa: I’m officially taking a Facebook break. Gotta go babysit anyway. Later.
I send back the most sympathetic gif I can find (a kitten offering a hug) and try to follow Melissa’s advice by exiting Facebook. The angry comments still rattle around in my brain. I leave Yasmín alone to watch Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl punch monsters while I head upstairs to better concentrate on the flame war in my palm. Karey and the original poster, Nico, and a few others try to shut down the anger, but enough comments spiral into insults and curse words. Ladies, gentlemen, people of all genders, I present The Internet.
“Ellen!” Connie’s voice is too loud as she shouts from the kitchen, “Laundry!”
I don’t move. I’m reading the cheerleading article again, even the comments, because the righteous anger I feel is less complicated than the in-group fighting.
“Ellen!” Connie calls again. “The dryer is finished!”
“Can you just—?” I tear myself away from the comment thread, spin away from my desk, and stomp downstairs. I know, sort of, that it’s not Connie I’m mad at, but when I see her standing in the kitchen pointing helplessly at the dryer, I almost explode. “Can you give me five seconds? I was doing something.”
I carry the dry clothes into the living room and dump them onto the couch for sorting and folding. Yasmín, smart enough to sense a storm, shuts off her cartoons and makes a dash for her room.
Connie joins me in front of the laundry pile, tugging out a towel and cracking it like a whip before folding it with quick, combative motions. “I’m asking for a little bit of help,” she says, her voice dangerously neutral.
“I know I know I know.” I say it with one breath, hoping to stop this fight before it starts. “It’s not— I was looking at some things that annoyed me. Don’t worry about it.”
I stare at the laundry—at Dad’s frayed Star Trek T-shirt and Yasmín’s pink-ribboned socks and all the miscellaneous-sized breast cancer shirts—and wait for Connie to fold two more towels before finally reaching into the pile.
I make a line of Yasmín’s skirts, too fluffy to get folded. Connie moves behind me and rolls them into neat little tubes. “Something wrong?” she asks.
I wish she wouldn’t ask. I wish I didn’t give her an opening to ask. There was a time when we did conversations like this, but now I’m afraid anything I say will be used as proof that I’m not keeping peace in the house.
I start a stack of my shirts. Connie stares at me.
“It’s just . . . the world is crappy,” I finally say. “People are crappy.”
Connie looks like she’s trying to hide a smile, which in my current state of irritation might as well be a lit match to my puddle of gasoline.
“What?” I demand.
“You’re seventeen,” she says with a shrug. “It improves, trust me.”
I don’t want to talk, don’t care if Connie understands, but the words spill out of my mouth anyway: “I’m not talking about”—my hands fumble over Connie’s yoga pants, and I let them fall back into the pile—“about some shallow high school drama. I’m talking about . . . injustice.”
Connie’s infuriating smile does not shrink. “Oh,” she says, “I’m sure that improves, too.”
I want to wipe the smirk off her face. “No, it doesn’t! I’m talking about a society that demeans women and glorifies some macho hypermasculine ideal bullshit and . . . and fosters sexual assault! The world is fucked up! It’s not just going to improve by accident!”
At each curse word (three, counting “sexual”), Connie’s eyes flicker to the doorways to make sure Yasmín isn’t lurking in earshot. She finishes folding one of her camisoles, lays it gently on top of her pile of sleepwear, and then sits down on the couch right in the middle of the folded and unfolded laundry.
“Okay,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”
After a few seconds, I sit, too, and try not to get completely distracted by the surprise of Connie listening to me.
“It’s just, like,” I say (eloquently), “this thing with this article from the feminist quidditch group—it’s a thing; don’t ask—and basically a football coach said some sexist stuff about cheerleaders and how they deserve to get harassed.”
“Well, that sounds like a terrible coach,” Connie says, but there’s a question mark hidden in the tilt of her head. She doesn’t understand why it bothers me, and I don’t know how to explain if it doesn’t bother her.
“It’s just that I can’t believe he could just say that, you know? Like, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I know things are bad. But still, I just feel—”
“Bad how?” Connie interrupts. “I think we’re a lot better off now than we were in the past, don’t you? Feminism certainly didn’t lose.”
“Well, no, it’s not . . .” I shake my head, trying to get Connie’s statement to settle into something that makes sense. “It’s not really a matter of losing. Or of winning. It’s kind of, you know, ongoing. There’s still a lot of work to do.”
“There’s work to do,” Connie agrees. “But you don’t do it by finding every little excuse to be angry. If those cheerleaders spend less time complaining and more time studying, they can become that coach’s boss someday and deal with him.”
“I mean, you shouldn’t need multiple graduate degrees and a lifetime of rising through the ranks of academia just to escape rape culture.”
Connie frowns, and her eyes flick side to side. “What are you talking about? ‘Rape culture’? That doesn’t sound like something you need to be worrying about.”
“But it is!” I stand up, a pointless gesture for a pointless conversation. “That’s what all of this is. It’s something I have to worry about because I’m going to college and I can’t drink or go out alone or wear shorts or—or be a freaking cheerleader without someone deciding that I deserve punishment and—”
“I didn’t know you wanted to be a cheerleader,” Connie says.