All over the school, students messaged their most influential family members. They took to social media. This young generation, whose teachers and parents didn’t even like to make phone calls, who had much more convenient and fun and efficient means of communication, flooded corporate voice mails and government officials with calls. They called newspapers. They called CIS alumni and begged them to demand change from the school at the threat of stopping their donations. They hadn’t even been aware of the power of alumni donations in a concrete way until lock-in night, but now they suddenly had a perfectly clear grasp on the nuances of those dynamics, how money wielded influence even here. There were twenty-seven unmet demands left, and though some students sat back gleefully and waited for the doors to open whenever they would, most of them got caught up in the tide of emotions and activity.
They wished they’d known this earlier, had grasped it before Marisa’s leg snapped and it was too late to find out. They’d always had a chance to get out. Like this, their voices all raised together. They had a chance to attach themselves to the change Marisa had already brought about in the world. After all this time, almost all of them had, at some point or another—while waiting for time to pass, while distracting themselves from the fact that they were missing family movie night again, or missing the neighbor kids they babysat, missing mall hangouts with friends on the outside—read about the reefs. Now they dove in.
In three separate classrooms, students convinced their teachers to show the documentary Chasing Coral via the projector; not Marisa’s most ambitious or difficult goal, to have it shown to every student at CIS, but one the board had for some reason tabled until all the students could be in one place.
These students started to understand Marisa a little more, feeling dread claw at their chests that so many living things worldwide were dying and they hadn’t cared before. Very few could pay attention to something dying and not care. Now they knew.
Some had already cared, all this time, even before lock-in night, cared deeply and simply hadn’t known how to put it into action. Now they knew. Now they wanted it more desperately than they ever had, almost as desperately as Marisa herself.
Marisa’s leg had broken their complacency, Peejay’s email had burst their bubble, pleasant for some, unpleasant for others, that they would be inside CIS forever. They wanted to change the world. This was their chance.
5
10:33AM
By the time the high school’s brunch bell rang, a quick fifteen-minute break between second and third periods, three more demands were met.
The first was that CIS would convert their fleet of school buses to an electric model Marisa had read was already in use in Europe. This had been in the works from day one, since the company the school hired the fleet through had them available, but the change required the approval of wary adults, and the school board had hung on to hopes that maybe they could get away with meeting only some of the demands.
The second came when board president, Nigel Appuhamy, was seeking respite from the stressful yelling of another conference room meeting in the bathroom, scrolling through online videos. He happened across Ludovico’s compost tutorial, and quickly emerged from the bathroom, the lack of a flush or hand-washing giving away that he’d simply been in there hiding. “This is what composting is? Why don’t we already do that?”
The other board members shrugged and mumbled something about costs and insurance.
* * *
The third demand met, the one that spread true hope to Marisa and her cronies and the Protectors, to Omar and anyone who’d been won over to her cause, the achievement that spread a swell of pride and vicarious joy to Maya Klutzheisen and Michael Obonte and all the others who loved Marisa (who loved her still, after all this time, the love only stewing and intensifying the longer she held out), was one Marisa herself had never fully believed she would see come to fruition. At least, not because of her. She wasn’t even sure why she’d included the demand. It wasn’t school-specific, and it was arguably too ambitious to be met in a reasonable amount of time. It was really just to make her demand for Lokoloko Island seem relatively moderate. Malik and Lolo had both tried to talk her out of it, afraid that