* * *
Celeste Rollins was the only one looking at him with raised eyebrows. Peejay knew this girl; he’d been part of her welcoming committee, and had noticed her around school all year long, carrying herself as if she assumed others were judging her constantly. Despite his current concerns, despite knowing very little about this girl, he tried to assure her somehow with a single smile, amid all this. The way Hamish would.
At first, Celeste returned the smile. However, a smile between basically strangers was difficult to interpret, even if its intended purpose was mere reassurance. After a moment, it made Celeste wonder if she was misunderstanding, being weird in some other way. Was Peejay setting his sights on her next? Had she done something wrong? She averted her eyes, hugging her arms closer to her.
Peejay sighed, then knelt down to face Malik. “Where is your leader?” he asked in a calm voice, then laughed at his phrasing. “Marisa, was it?”
“Marisa.” He was already forgetting Peejay yelling at him. This was the longest he’d spent in Peejay’s presence, and he understood now why Peejay never seemed to be alone, why his parties were always crowded, why it seemed like whenever he entered a room people turned toward him. Some people were simply magnetic. If he weren’t chained to the door, Malik might follow him out when he left.
“She’s downstairs in the main entrance.”
“She’ll be the one in the chains, I assume?”
Malik beamed at the fact that Peejay was joking around with him. He nodded. Then, as if absolving Malik, Peejay touched him on the shoulder and left the room.
“Scene!” Kenji called out.
* * *
The keys had tasted, mysteriously, like salt water, like the accidental splashes that worked their way into your mouth when you surfaced to clean your mask. Marisa was glad for it, glad for the reminder of what had moved her to do this.
There was a moment of pause, an uncertainty to the air, people unsure of how they were expected to react. Then a murmur began, which quickly turned into a roar. Marisa had anticipated what happened next. She braced herself with a deep breath, tensing her muscles to resist getting turned into a rag doll beaten down by their frustration. People swarmed around her, trying to open the doors. It was exactly like she imagined it would be, but a part of her was still scared. Not for her safety, but for the chains. Would they hold? Would they keep her plan intact, in the face of all these desperate students?
They had so much they wanted to do on the other side. And even if all they wanted was inside the building, even if they had already feasted on food truck offerings, they were curious if Marisa was for real. The doors jolted back and forth from behind her, too. Most of the people on the other side hadn’t heard her speech and were simply confused about the lack of flow in and out of the building. Lock-in night had never been about constriction before. Quite the opposite.
Junior Dov Nudel grabbed at Marisa’s chains and gave them a few yanks. Though it pinched her skin and ground against her hip bones, nothing came loose and the doors didn’t budge. Marisa smiled at Dov, who muttered something in Hebrew, then stalked away to do something useful with his time while someone else dealt with this.
Then Jordi Marcos, loser of the Partyer in Chief elections, stood in front of the doors with his brow furrowed. He looked at Marisa, surrounded by his peers, and the first thing he felt was...what? He couldn’t tell. Curiosity? Sympathy? Maybe, bubbling under the surface. But then he remembered his dad watching news footage of protestors in France linking arms across a highway. He couldn’t remember what their cause had been, what their demands were, just what his dad had said into the darkened living room. “If I were there, I’d drive right through them.” And that, to Jordi, felt like it applied here. He pushed his way through the crowd until he was right in front of Marisa, and he attempted to break his way through.
* * *
One after another, students came by to try another place to yank, to unravel the chains in some way Marisa had not foreseen, each of them failing to so much as add an inch of slack to the chains. Some ran off looking for tools, though Marisa was not worried about them finding any. Faculty wanted to try, too, but they resisted, each looking toward their department chairs, if they were present (not all the staff attended, though there was certainly room for more chaperones. Each year an unlucky handful were called away on other adult responsibilities—childcare, a significant other arguing to take advantage of the three-day weekend in order to travel, a poorly timed visitor—all proof that adulthood was a constant double-edged sword), who looked toward the vice principal, who looked for Master Declan, who was currently awaiting his turn in the karaoke room.
* * *
Finally, Ms. Duli stepped up to Marisa. “You’re not going to back down, are you?”
Marisa shook her head. Despite herself, she looked for a sign of approval on Ms. Duli’s face. From the start of the year’s AP European History class, they’d butted heads many times, the way people who are strong in the same way are wont to do.
Ms. Duli sighed deeply, the exasperated breath of a teacher who knew she’d have to stay at school longer than she had planned. “Okay,” she said simply. “I’ll go find the boss.”
She walked away, and Marisa found herself wishing for...what, exactly? She wasn’t certain. Approval, sure. She was only human. Or perhaps she just wanted feedback. For obvious reasons, Marisa had not shown her speech or list of demands to anyone but her cronies. Eli helped with some of the phrasing, and Malik shared some good insight about plastic straws being valuable for people with disabilities, but other than these small (and important, sure) details, Marisa’s plan had not yet been assessed. Not by anyone other than herself, and though she’d complained often about Ms. Duli’s hard-ass grading ideals, she found herself wanting to know Ms. Duli’s thoughts. She wanted someone to scream their approval, even though she assured herself that she did not need it.
But her teacher was now crossing the foyer toward the stairs, looking down at her cell phone as she marched.
Moments later, Peejay Singh appeared in front of Marisa. The crowd had parted to let him through. She hadn’t had much direct interaction with Peejay before, hadn’t had a class with him, or sat next to him in the cafeteria or anything. She knew the school revolved around him and, despite herself, felt pulled in his direction, too. By his charisma, sure, but how he wielded it, too: benevolently. She’d been slightly sad to know she’d be denying herself his party.
Now he eyed her intensely, hands at his hips. She’d left her arms free, so she mimicked his pose and tilted her chin upward.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, not raising his voice at all, but definitely giving it an edge.
Marisa exhaled. “I knew I should have plugged into the PA system. Hold on.” She reached into her duffel bag and unfurled a poster where she’d written her list of thirty demands and a brief mission statement for exactly this reason. Then she pulled out a roll of Scotch tape and started to maneuver herself around the chain as best as she could to tape the poster to the door behind her. She put it up close to the hinges, which, like with every door at CIS, faced the inside of the school so they could not be tampered with from the outside.