Chapter Text
“First day of school tomorrow,” Mycroft said carefully from across the tiny kitchen table. It wasn’t all that late, just a bit past ten, and the windows were open to let the last of the summer air filter into the cramped apartment. Across the way, their neighbor had his radio on and the soft notes of “Oh Girl” drifted in with the wind.
Sherlock shivered in her tank top and glanced up from her Chinese takeout container. Normally Mycroft wasn’t home yet, was still scraping in a few extra overtime hours, but tonight he’d even picked up the food himself and carried it home in oily paper bags.
“You have everything you need?” he checked, his chopsticks lying still inside his chicken and broccoli. Sherlock rolled her eyes and then immediately wished she hadn’t; their moldy, crumbling ceilings always put her on edge. “Knapsack, papers-“
“Yes,” she said jut to shut him up. Her knapsack from last year was sitting in her tiny room, not remotely packed for tomorrow.
“Need me to wake you up any particular time?” Mycroft asked, returning to his meal. Her own carton sat nearly untouched before her, barely picked at, while her brother’s gaped with only a few pieces left. Two years ago she would have made a joke but those had stopped being funny once they’d moved out here. Now, Mycroft nearly two stones lighter and still dropping, Sherlock didn’t begrudge him any calories.
Sherlock shook her head, glancing down at her hands. Her cuticles were chewed to the quick, nervous pedestrian habit, and they nauseated her too. Their bloody lives nauseated her. “I’m going in early,” she said. “It seemed to work best in avoiding the assailants last year.”
Mycroft shifted uncomfortably. “Sherlock, if those girls bother you again, tell me and I’ll-“
“You’ll what?” she taunted, spine tense. “Report them to the administration? Ask for a meeting with the principal with you as my legal guardian?”
It was a low blow and they both knew it. Mycroft looked so guilty that for a brief flash, Sherlock regretted her words. But then she watched her brother put his guards back up, mask sliding into place and she remembered why they didn’t eat dinner together very often. “Sherlock-“
“No, forget it,” she sighed, standing up. She tugged down her vest from where it had ridden up on her stomach and pushed her untouched carton towards Mycroft with more gentleness than she’d shown all evening. “Thank you for eating with me. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Sherlock,” Mycroft murmured wearily, the air of a man fully aware of his failures and powerless to fix them. The Chi-Lites were crooning I've got to get away from here while Sherlock watched her brother push his hair back from his forehead and rub at his eyes. Every inch of her knew that this version of her brother, this defeated, subservient, small version of her power-hungry brother was entirely her fault but she pushed it down as best she could and wandered off to bed. It never did her much good to dwell on it.
Bushwick Public High School was disgusting all year round but, for the first day, they always made some sort of effort scrubbing at the front steps and moving the drug dealers at least two feet off the property. Cars of all sorts were pulling up to the front and students streamed in from the direction of the train, laughing and yelling for each other through the crowd.
Sherlock tugged self-consciously at her skirt. She’d overslept and had made the mistake of grabbing whatever clothes Mycroft threw at her so now she was in a checkered skirt and a top too green for her liking instead of her preferred jeans. Mycroft always liked to see her dressed more “feminine” and what did she care? After all it was just transport. Nothing that happened to this body was really ever in her control anyway.
Someone pushed at her as she shouldered her way inside and she didn’t turn around to see who it was. It didn’t matter. Barely anyone in the school knew who she was and those who did didn’t like her very much. All she needed right now was just to put some books in a locker, grab her schedule from the office and get the hell out of these hallways.
As usual her mind was working miles ahead of her, cataloging. Nancy Washington had gotten a bob, which was a pretty good indicator that by Wednesday another twenty girls would have one too. Jeremy Ricks had gotten a girl pregnant over the summer, wouldn’t fatherhood be fun for a jock, and was thinking about quitting the football team. The lockers were a brand new painted teal and somehow in the hour since the doors had opened there were already fliers up on the wall.
Sherlock wandered over to the bulletin board to take a look at them. Welcome back, school play, lunch announcements, science club, all the usuals. And then, right in the middle in bright purple, a giant sign announcing the very first meeting of the Young Feminists Club Tuesday night. Sherlock smirked. A feminists club? Who needed something as ridiculous as that? She didn’t know much about the movement, had only given the march that June a cursory glance in the paper, but she knew enough to recognize a bunch of shrill girls yelling at a system that would never change. Who, in their right mind, would join a feminist’s club?
“Hey!” a voice chirped out by her ear and Sherlock whirled around, arms raised protectively, right before they landed on Joan Watson’s chest. “Checking out the sign, are you?”
Sherlock blinked at the girl in front of her, snatching her hands back before they could do any damage. Joan's blonde hair was pulled back tightly from her face and she’d cut the sleeves off a t-shirt, jeans rolled up at the bottom. In short, she was every bit as beautiful as she’d been the whole of last year- well, whatever Sherlock had been able to see of her from two rows behind her in Chemistry.
“You should come!” Joan grinned and Sherlock remembered suddenly that they were talking about a sign. She was having an actual conversation with Joan Watson. Granted, she hadn’t said anything yet but when she did, it’d be memorable. “We’re meeting tomorrow after school in room 408. I’m Joan, by the way,” she said, offering her left hand for a shake.
“I know,” Sherlock blurted out unthinking, just staring at the hand. “We had chemistry together last year.”
“Oh fuck,” Joan cried, biting her lip, and Sherlock swallowed a giggle at the curse. “Sorry. I’m such a spaz. Last year was a bit rough for me and, fuck it, I’m sorry,” she said, scrubbing a hand through her hair. “I swear I’m usually good with names-“
“It’s Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes,” she filled in, finally reaching out to shake Joan’s hand.
“Sherlock, got it,” Joan nodded before breaking out in a smile. “Oh yeah I totally remember you. You’re the kid who figured out that Mr. Rockland was sleeping with Janet and then told everyone right in the middle of class, yeah?”
“I mean, it was pretty obvious-“ Sherlock started before Joan cut her off with pure enthusiasm.
“Then you should definitely come to our meeting! That was some really good patriarchal bullshit takedown! Janet was totally stuck. Will I see you there?”
Who even talked like that? Who said words like ‘patriarchal takedown’ in an actual sentence? This whole enterprise was a hilarious disaster poised to explode and yet here Sherlock was, nodded before she could stop herself, like a regular idiot .
Joan only grinned wider. “Ace! I’ll see you there, Sherlock!” she called as she ran down the hall to catch up with a group of girls in jean jackets who thumped her on the back and started laughing together about something as they made their way down the hall. Dykes her brain whispered, supplying the title everyone else in the school applied to them, and Sherlock realized just who made and joined feminists clubs. Lesbians.
And you, she reminded herself in a stunned sort of voice. You just joined a feminist club.
The rest of the day went by in something of a haze with her brain alternating between tracks of Joan Watson spoke to me and Fuck, she tricked me into agreeing to go to a feminist meeting.
It wasn’t even like she liked Watson. She wasn’t a dyke or anything like that. Joan was just…cool. She was bad. She listened to The New York Dolls and Suicide and hung out with the girls who skipped school and spray-painted slogans on the brick wall outside. And yet, she was a total paper shaker. She turned her homework in on time and tutored some of the eight graders and she never once pushed anyone in the halls.
Joan Watson was, in short, an enigma. A puzzle that did pleasant things to her heart-rate. The only person that could get her to stay after school and listen to a bunch of angry lesbians rage against a deaf system.
Mycroft wasn’t home when Sherlock walked into the apartment and she hadn’t expected him to be. Their three room apartment always felt largest in these few hours alone and she used them carefully. First she did her homework. She’d never done it back when she’d been at boarding school, back when they hadn’t lived here, but now the need to stay out of the principle’s office overrode the insane boredom that came with basic math.
At eight, she cooked up some noodles with cheese, ate a little more than a fourth, and set the rest aside in a plastic tin in the fridge for when Mycroft came home. She lit matchboxes on fire from nine to eleven just to see which kind of cardboard burned faster, and crawled into bed at twelve so she could avoid her brother when he came in at twelve thirty, sweaty and exhausted, to check on her.
He’d always done this, even when they lived back in the house she still mentally called ‘home.’ Back before he’d gone away to university and everything had fallen apart, he’d always come in to check on her before going to sleep himself.
When she’d been four, it had been a great game. She’d let Mummy tuck her in and stroke at her hair a bit but never let herself fall asleep until Mycroft came in. Then, like clockwork, she’d turn to him with big wide eyes and whisper can’t sleep, Mikey until the eleven-year old came in to tell a story at the edge of her bed. When she was eleven, Mycroft rarely ever found her sleeping, instead playing with test tubes and fires or reading some tome or another, and she’d greet him with a Get out, you idiot!
Now, at sixteen, she feigned sleep when he opened her door, both of them knowing she wasn’t fooling anyone, but Mycroft only sighed, whispered a soft ‘good-night’ and closed the door behind him. Something in Sherlock felt loose and unbolted so she rattled around in her night table for a sleeping pill and swallowed it dry before turning over and trying for good dreams.
Tuesday class could not have gone by fast enough before Sherlock found herself putting her books away at four and glancing down the emptying hallways. She could just leave. Joan probably talked to a million people yesterday about the meeting. There was nothing stopping her from going home right now.
Except, what was she going to do at home? Burn more matchboxes? Cook more pasta like the good housewife she was slowly becoming? The meeting could, at the very least, make for interesting people watching. If nothing else, it was a half-decent distraction from her own descent into madness. So, with a final slam of her locker, she made her way up to the fourth floor.
She heard the meeting before she saw it, the door of 408 open and florescent light pouring out into the hall. The room was a jumble of noise, a madhouse of girls- and one or two boys- all sitting on top and around desks and talking with each other. Sherlock recognized a few of the school dykes in their collared shirts neatly pressed over flaired jeans, but there were many more she couldn’t place so easily- girls in checkered skirts and short dressed with headbands and some people were perched on the window smoking out of it.
She was just about to turn around and leave when a voice boomed out from the front of the room and everyone turned to see Joan Watson on the teacher’s desk. Her hair was out, a blonde nest around her face, and her blue eyes caught Sherlock’s by the door and she beamed.
“Hi everyone!” she called out. “Welcome to our very first Young Feminist’s meeting!”
The room let out a giant cheer and Sherlock felt herself carried away with it, pushed deeper into the room as she clung onto her biology textbook for dear life. Joan was a live wire, her black boots digging into the wood, and she couldn’t look away.
“So um, as a lot of you know, this June a bunch of us marched on Washington for Title IX-“ Joan started before she was cut off again by an enormous cheer. Sherlock felt her head swimming. How did all of them know what that meant?
“Right,” Joan laughed. “So yeah, like me, Marcie, Kelsie and like a bunch of other people marched on Washington for Title IX and fuck yeah, it passed,” another wild cheer. “But while we were there, we met these really bomb women from like Greenwich village who have this massive feminist’s club at their school. So we figured, we oughta start one too.
“We’re starting this club for a lot of reasons. Mostly, because we need to. Because no one stands up for women in this country. Because if we do not protect ourselves, there is no one else who will. Because we are sick of being treated like children only to have our rights and decisions ripped from our own hands.”
The crowd, it seemed, was willing to cheer at anything Joan said. Sherlock could hardly blame them, despite the fact that Joan's speech seemed more like of a mess of quotes than anything grandly penned. She’d barely taken her eyes off the blonde the whole time, her arms just a mess of gooseflesh. But Joan wasn’t done.
“A lot of you read what Sally Kempton said last year. It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. It’s hard to stop thinking of ourselves the way men wants us to. But we’re better than this. How good does a female athlete have to be before we just call her an athlete? How good does a woman have to be before she gets the same rights as anybody else? We all in the school get stuck taking Home Ec while the boys gets physics. We get shuttled off to be teachers and mothers while they get to be doctors, lawyers, engineers. We deserve better. And the only way we’ll get better is by working together.
“Gloria Steinem-“
“Amen!” someone called out from the back and Joan grinned.
“Gloria said, at the National Women’s Political Caucus just last year, ‘This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution.’ And the revolution starts with us. Yeah, we start small. We have a few marches, vandalize some messed up posters. But we do it loudly. We show these boys they don’t run this school. That we are every bit as smart and as capable as they are. And we start now!”
The room erupted. Joan was standing there with a wild hyena of a grin while the girls in the room hooted and banged on their desks. Sherlock could only stare.
Yes, it didn’t make any sense that she had to take sewing for two years. Yes, she’d had to claw her way into chemistry and bio. Yes it wasn’t fair but what was? Life wasn’t fair- not for her and not for anyone. It wasn’t something you could change. It just was.
“Right so,” Joan was still talking when Sherlock tuned back in, “we were thinking the club could like organize and do marches with other groups. But maybe we could also run events here? We could do sit ins and put up fliers-
“- and fuck up the man!” someone yelled out and everyone laughed. Joan giggled and nodded.
“Yeah, that too. Fuck the man,” she agreed. “Right now though Marcie and I have something big we wanna do. So Title IX, which just passed, guaranteed complete and total educational equality, including athletics. We wanna get Bushwick to start a women’s soccer team.”
There was a murmur through the crowd at this and Sherlock, who had never given a thought to sports in her entire life, found herself suddenly on edge about the whole enterprise.
“So,” Joan called out. “Who’s on board?”
There was a beat before a few girls at the front roared, “Fucking A!” and the room echoed it.
“Right!” Joan roared back. “Okay let’s get to organizing. So we’ll need to make a petition-“
As the room mobilized and started talking, with Kelsie writing a bullet-point plan out on the board, Sherlock found herself suddenly adrift. Nothing about that had been what she’d thought it’d be. Back in ninth grade, back when she’d still been in private boarding school, her French teacher Ms. Balistrade had told the class pointedly that feminists were just angry lesbians who wants to be men.
They’d been sitting there, fourteen year old girls in their pressed uniform skirts dutifully faced forward, when Lauren Hillcot had expressed anger at the film they were meant to be watching. How was this educational, she ranted, watching a movie about an abused woman who stays with her husband? How was it okay to sit here and learn from a scared women with a black eye?
Sherlock’s hand had immediately gone to her own thigh where she was hiding a kidney-shaped bruise of her own beneath her starched skirt but no one had noticed. Everyone was riveted to the site of Ms. Balistrade ordering Lauren to the principle before turning to the class and saying This is not how we fix things in this country, girls. Men are not the problem. Yes there are a few bad apples but shall we overthrow a system that has protected us for hundreds of years based on the ravings of a few unmentionables? We have our place, our roles, just as men have theirs. Why would any woman want so badly to be a man?
But this wasn’t that at all. No one here wanted to be men. They just wanted things to be fair. And what on earth was wrong with that?
A warm hand on her arm pulled her out her thoughts and Sherlock found herself turning back from the doorway she’d been escaping through and facing Joan head on. The shorter girl was still a bit flushed from her speech and still grinning madly.
“You came!” she laughed. “I was so sure you wouldn’t. So, what’d you think?”
Sherlock blinked at her. Behind Joan, girls were clumped into groups, planning out flyer ideas and thinking up petitions. But this was not her life. She didn’t make waves. She didn’t fight anyone. She kept her goddamn mouth shut no matter how fucking unfair it was.
“I need to go,” she nearly barked and, in an instant, she’d wrenched her arm out from Joan’s hand and was halfway out the building before the blonde could even shout “wait- Sherlock!”