A Girl Called Shameless. Laura Steven

away from the agitated expression of three seconds ago. “Do sex dolls have regional accents?” She says it with the exact inflection of “Is the Pope a Catholic?” as though phrasing a rhetorical question, except in this instance, there is no clear answer.

       6.04 p.m.

      Just as we’re packing up after a successful afternoon of shooting, Meg wheels over to me, tinfoil choker round her neck and giant grin spreading from ear to ear. I look up from the lens I’m trying to force into the wrong case and return the smile. This was her acting debut and judging by the look on her face she’s hooked.

      “Izzy!” she exclaims, breathless with excitement. “This was so, so fun. Thank you so much for letting me be in a sketch!” Her makeup still looks flawless; pillar-box red is so her color.

      “Dude, you’re so welcome,” I say. “You were awesome. Like, was this really the first time you’ve ever acted? Or are you actually in a world-famous improv troupe and just wanted to hustle us?” I mean it too. Meg’s got a natural knack for nuance and didn’t overact at any point, which a lot of beginners do. I’m totally writing her a bigger part in the next sketch. With Ajita’s blessing of course.

      Speaking of the devil, Ajita re-enters the room from the top of the stairs, clutching half a dozen cans of soda awkwardly to her chest. She tiptoes down the stairs one at a time, like she’s sneaking downstairs for a midnight snack and trying not to wake her parents, and looks more terrified of dropping the soda cans than if they were live grenades. Reaching the middle of the room five decades later, she lays most of them down on the sofa like newborn infants, then tosses one to me. I catch it and hand it to Meg, then catch the subsequent can she hurls my way. We both crack them open simultaneously with an aggressive puh-tsshhhhh, i.e. the most satisfying sound in the world. [With the possible exception of bubble wrap and/or sexual moans. Not that the two are in any way related. Or, you know, they might be. I don’t know your fetishes.]

      Ajita taps the lid of her own can with purple-painted nails. “What’re you guys talking about? My impeccable camera skills? Which, BTW, are literally of an Emmy standard at this point.”

      “Something like that,” I say.

      “Are we really just going to skip over Ajita saying BTW out loud?” Meg snorts, shooting Ajita a playful look. “We all know how inaccurate her spoken text slang can be.”

      I freeze for a second. Will this rub Ajita the wrong way? I mean, she didn’t even seem to want Meg here in the first place. But I need not have worried.

      “Whatever,” Ajita says, swigging her grape soda. “I still maintain that LMAO should be pronounced luh-mao, like a dish at a Chinese restaurant. Yes, good evening, waiter, I’ll have the pork luh-mao with a side of egg-fried rice, please. That kind of thing.”

      Meg giggles so hard her shoulders start to shake, and Ajita looks extremely pleased with herself, licking grape soda off her lips with her freakishly long tongue, which has the potential to look seductive and yet actually just looks like a slippery pink snake is climbing out of her mouth and ravishing her face.

Tuesday 3 January

       8.25 a.m.

      Waiting for Ajita at our usual halfway-to-school meeting point is borderline life-threatening, on account of the fact it’s colder than the dark side of the moon. I don’t even know if the dark side of the moon is particularly cold, but I’ve always got standoffish vibes from the moon in general, so let’s just assume its temperature is appropriately frosty.

      When she eventually arrives, Ajita is all wrapped up in that Rory-Gilmore-meets-Paddington-Bear duffel coat of hers. Without even saying hello, she greets me with an eloquent, “What the fuck is even the point of it being this fucking cold if it’s not going to fucking snow?”

      “Who knows?” I reply. “I have a feeling the moon is to blame.”

      She thrusts a paper cup of coffee into my mittened hand. I smile gratefully and take a sip of scalding peppermint mocha. Because really, is it even winter if you don’t add obnoxious flavorings to your favorite caffeiney beverage?

      She readjusts her wooly hat and takes a swig from her own cup as we start dragging our heels in the direction of Edgewood. “Dude, if I haven’t said it before, your beef with the moon is not normal.”

      “Yes, Ajita, you have said it before. And I feel like, as a vegetarian, you shouldn’t take beef’s name in vain. By the way, did you know the plural of beef is ‘beeves’? I learned that in the thesaurus Betty got me.”

      At this point Ajita’s phone buzzes, and she smiles as she reads a text. And if I didn’t know any better, I could swear she’s tilting the screen away from me so I can’t see who she’s texting. I pray to the peanut butter cup gods that it’s not Carlie, the wannabe Victoria’s Secret model she crushed on last semester. For one thing, the girl voluntarily ate salads of her own free will, which is how I immediately knew she was an ax murderer in disguise. For another, she bitched about Ajita behind her back, and I ended up pouring cold tomato soup over her perfectly groomed head in the middle of the cafeteria. So there’s that.

      Ajita and I chatter our usual nonsense for a quarter of a mile or so, but I can tell she’s feeling a little weird too. So I decide to vocalize my own apprehensions. [How thesaurusy is that sentence?]

      “Hey. It’s kinda weird how we graduate from high school this year, right?” I say nonchalantly, staring at my feet. My thrift-store Doc Martens – dark red with black laces – are hella scuffed round the edges.

      “Right,” she agrees. “And that this is the last time we’ll ever meet up after winter break to remark on the passage of time.”

      School is weird. For so many years it feels infinite, like you’ll never be anything other than a high-schooler. It’s so intrinsic to your identity, and while you can imagine what you might do beyond it, it mostly feels like it’ll never happen. And then senior year hits, and suddenly everything you do is the last. The last first day back after summer. The last New Year’s Eve as a schoolkid. And, someday pretty soon, the last peppermint mocha on the walk to Edgewood. It’s exhilarating, but also terrifying. Because school is all we’ve ever known.

      I decide Ajita will not appreciate my lyrical ruminations on the circle of life, so instead I just say, “So. What bitchy things are we going to do today?”

      Since we started the Bitches Bite Back website a couple months ago, word has slowly started to spread about what we’re doing. Which is shouting, mainly. Shouting about all the things that make us angry, and inspiring other teenage girls to do the same. A whole bunch of shouting. As well as a roster of feminist sketches, we now have a handful of weekly contributors, who write articles and personal essays on an all manner of feminist topics, and our daily hits are now in the high hundreds rather than the low, well, zeroes. We’re actually heading to Martha’s Diner tonight to have an informal meeting about the tech side of things, which Meg is way savvier about than Ajita and me, who mainly project-manage the shouting. [Is that an official job title? Project Manager (Shouting Division)? It should be.]

       10.26 a.m.

      There’s one reason I am happy to be back in school: Carson Manning.

      Even though we’ve been texting and video-calling a ton, we haven’t seen each other in person at all over the holidays. He’s been working like a madman, doing extra shifts at the pizza place to help his mom cover Christmas expenses. His mom’s douchebag of a partner left them in the lurch a few months back, and since Carson is the oldest the onus has fallen on him to pick up the slack and bring in some extra income.

      From what I can gather his mom would love to go to work and provide for the kids, but since there are so many of them, the cost of childcare would far outweigh whatever she earned salary-wise. A common catch-22.

      So