Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,24

time he gets back to his desk he seems to have forgotten about me, thank God. Still, I spend the rest of the period slouched in my seat, aching to disappear. Chloe makes a beeline for me once the bell rings for the end of the period, grabbing my arm and steering me out into the hallway.

“Okay, did you seriously need to add picking a fight with Bex in front of the whole class to the list of dramatic things you did today?” she asks, joking, but also not really. “Do you have raging PMS or what?”

“Oh, come on.” I don’t tell her I dumped Jacob for basically saying that exact thing to me not three hours ago. “I wasn’t picking a fight,” I defend myself instead. “It just felt like—”

“Marin!”

I flinch. I cannot take one more person giving me shit today. But when I turn around it’s Ms. Klein, holding her water bottle in one hand and a slim white paperback in the other. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Um.” I look from her to Chloe and back again. “Sure,” I say, and follow Ms. Klein down the hall.

“I overheard your conversation with Mr. Beckett,” she tells me, and I grimace.

“I don’t know that I’d call that a conversation,” I admit. “I totally froze.”

Ms. Klein smiles. “It happens,” she says. “But it was a good impulse on your part—an all-white, all-male reading list is ridiculous. Next time you’ll have to be better prepared, that’s all. Here”—she holds out the book for my inspection—“this might be a good place to start.”

I look down at the title: Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay.

“You know,” she says, looking at me thoughtfully, “if you’re not happy with the way things are around here, you ought to do something about it.”

She heads down the hallway before I can ask her what she means exactly, then turns back to face me. “By the way,” she calls, “I really liked your piece.”

I read Bad Feminist in the library at lunchtime and in between classes and tucked into my bed late at night, and two mornings later I go to see Ms. Klein before the first-period bell rings. She’s sitting in the bio lab going over lesson plans, classical music playing softly on her phone beside her. Her shirtdress is a deep hunter green.

“Hi, Marin,” she says, smiling. “How’d it go with the book?”

“I think I have an idea,” I tell her, instead of answering. “But I need your help.”

Twelve

“I’m just warning you now, I don’t think anyone’s going to come,” I tell Ms. Klein two weeks later, perching nervously on the edge of a lab bench after the eighth-period bell. When I first had the idea for a feminist book club, the night after she gave me the Roxane Gay book, it seemed almost brilliant—what a great fuck you to Mr. DioGuardi’s ridiculous dress code and Bex’s sexist reading list, right? What a great fuck you to everything that’s been going on. I made fliers and agonized over our first book before finally deciding on The Handmaid’s Tale because that was what the library had the most copies of; I filed new-student-organization paperwork with Ms. Lynch in the admin suite.

Now that it’s the day of our first meeting though, I just feel like the host of a party nobody wants to come to: even Chloe begged off in favor of an extra shift at the restaurant, which probably shouldn’t have surprised me at this point but still sort of sucked. The fact that I couldn’t convince my own best friend that a feminist book club was a good idea doesn’t bode super well for its success.

Ms. Klein shrugs. “So then no one comes,” she says. “You and I can talk about the book ourselves.” She nods at the Dunkin’ Donuts box on the desk beside her. “And eat twenty-five Munchkins apiece.”

I laugh, which calms me down a little; I’m about to ask her if she’s read anything else by Margaret Atwood when a couple of nervous-looking freshmen I vaguely recognize as members of the jazz band sidle into the classroom. My heart leaps when I realize they’re both holding copies of the book.

“Hey,” the taller one says, a white girl with her blond hair in two Princess Leia buns, looking around with no small amount of trepidation. “Um, is this the book club?”

“Sure is,” Ms. Klein says. “Have a seat.”

It’s a little bit awkward, but to my surprise, a handful of other people trickle in