but they’d be damned if they weren’t going to show these rich people they had some power.
Arthur Pierce now was led away by an officer, a boy, really, not all that much older than Kenji. Asher followed with his umbrella, and the officer shoving him along allowed himself to act a little more forcefully with the assistant. The crowd got pushed back, grudgingly creating space for the police to do whatever it was that would free their children.
“But what is the girl planning!” Guillem Kim’s mother shouted from the back. Others, like Arthur Pierce, had fallen into their own bouts of tragic daydreams. Granted, many of them had been living them constantly, ever since lock-in night. Celeste’s parents and Marisa’s and Omar’s, everyone but Peejay’s, who were too deep in a real tragedy to get lost imagining a new one.
To the rest, though, this latest bout of daydreams felt more immediate somehow, more likely. They couldn’t help but ask themselves what could they do? How could they get their kids out? What demands could they meet?
8
12:45PM
Anais Duli stood at five feet two inches, which offered her few advantages in a crowd, save for the ability to remain out of sight. She was standing in the room where Kenji held the megaphone and was turning to Peejay to consult about what to do now that his father had fallen silent. The boy looked stricken by the silence, but that wasn’t necessarily what stuck out to Ms. Duli.
She’d been flirting with the thought all week, and now it landed. Look at these kids coming together. Look at them shout for good. Marisa wanted to save the world, not harm it. Why was she doing anything but helping them?
Ms. Duli remembered her teenage self, remembered how quickly her soul could become inflamed with passion, how urgent her need to save the world could be, to fight for justice. She would see a video about some far-off unfathomable tragedy and look for flights to travel to the famine/disaster/violence-stricken region so she could lend a hand. For months when she was seventeen, she thought about how she would get home from school and lay out her plans to her parents about how they should take in a family of refugees in their spare bedroom. Hell, two whole families, one in her room, one in the spare bedroom. Anais herself would sleep on the floor if it could help ease some of the indefatigable, insurmountable pain in the world. She would let everyone use the bathroom before her, even.
But then she’d get home or hover over the “purchase ticket” button and the fire would sniff out, deprived of oxygen as soon as it tried to really flare up. Years of this. Of thinking she’d do something big for the world, and never doing it. It was a muscle that had lost its strength, weakened by apathy.
As an adult, she gave to charities and signed petitions. Hell, she was a teacher, shaping young minds. Her courses were designed to make sure her students thought about what it meant to have empathy, to instill some sense of civic duty and compassion in their young brains. She highlighted all the times in history when human beings had failed to keep these tenets in mind. Her students came away better, more aware people, many of them privileged in a way that meant their awareness, appropriately directed, could have a truly far-reaching impact.
But Ms. Duli, if she were being honest with herself, had always wanted to do something big, something dramatic. She’d looked at Marisa skeptically, because, as good as her cause was on paper, Ms. Duli hadn’t quite been able to wrap her mind around the fact that Marisa had achieved what Ms. Duli herself had failed to: taking that bold step to realizing her aspirations. And perhaps that meant Marisa was impulsive, dangerous somehow. At least, that’s what she’d thought in the days before.
Now, though, Ms. Duli realized she still had a chance to join in, to make her teenage self proud. She crossed the foyer toward Marisa. She’d done this so many times in the past week no one really paid much attention, busy as they were trying to find a window through which to shout at their parents.
* * *
Marisa, left alone while others acted out her desires, raised an eyebrow at Ms. Duli. “What does the board have for me now?” She groaned. “Some draft of a demand that’s not actually giving me what I ask