Wide Awake

  “But the other things—”

  “That’s why it’s called ‘taking a stand’ instead of just ‘standing’—there are things trying to stop you from being there, so you have to fight for it. And I don’t mean getting into a fight. I mean simply getting there and holding your ground. Millions of us, Duncan. It’s going to be millions. Yeah, it won’t matter whether or not two of us are there. But how often do you have a chance to be a part of something so powerful?”

  The only thing clear to me was that nothing was going to be clear to me. I wasn’t going to feel like I should go. And I wasn’t going to feel like I should stay. Whichever choice I made, I would regret it. Whichever choice I didn’t make, I would regret it.

  We walked a little more and arrived at my front yard. Both of my parents were at work.

  “Give me an hour,” I said.

  “To get your stuff ready?”

  Jimmy’s relief was so obvious that I almost said yes.

  But instead I said, “No, to decide.”

  He looked at the ground. “Oh. Okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, really—it’s okay.”

  But I was sorry. To be disappointing him. To be disappointing myself.

  I hugged him and he hugged me back.

  “Go and decide,” he said. “Turn on the news. See what’s going on.”

  I promised him I would. But even in promising, and not deciding, I felt I was disappointing him again.

  I had no idea what this meant or what to do about it.

  I was glad he hadn’t brought up missing his birthday.

  thirteen

  The question became:

  What are you willing to do for something you believe in?

  I turned on the news. People were already starting to arrive in Kansas.

  Stein was there. Martinez was there. All the congresspeople and senators from their party were flying in for the rally.

  The governor again insisted the election had not been decided.

  Two more people came forward expressing doubts about the governor’s “investigation.”

  There was a woman from Topeka on the news begging people not to come.

  “We’re just not ready for this kind of thing,” she said.

  I realized if I wasn’t going to go, I had to call Virgil, Flora, Keisha, Mira, and Gus to tell them I wasn’t coming.

  I didn’t want to.

  I realized if I was going to go, I had to call at least one of my parents to say I was going.

  I didn’t want to.

  A half hour passed.

  I started to pack.

  Five minutes later, I stopped packing.

  I asked myself:

  What would you give to have Stein as President?

  Your weekend?

  Would you be willing to stand up to your parents?

  To people who hated you?

  I told myself:

  The answer to the last question is yes.

  Even if I didn’t believe I was the kind of person who could stand up to the people who hated me, I wanted to be the kind of person who would.

  I called my mother.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  There was a long pause on her end of the line. In the background, I could hear people talking and keyboarding.

  Finally she said, “I know.”

  Now it was my turn to pause. She continued, “I want your phone on at all times. I want the numbers of everyone else on that bus. I want you to stay out of trouble, do you understand me? If it looks like there’s going to be a riot or a fight or even just a rough spot, I want you to get out of there.” Then she started crying, just a little. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s not easy letting you go, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Be sure to pack at least two days’ extra underwear and socks.”

  “I already did.”

  “And take some food, just in case you get stuck.”

  “I already did.”

  “And keep some extra money—”

  “—in my toiletry kit. Check.”

  “I guess you have been paying attention, haven’t you?”

  “It’ll be okay,” I told her.

  “Go out there and save this election,” she said. “Then come right back home.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” That was all I needed to say. The rest—that she would talk to my father, that I would call her every night, that I would take care of myself and try to take care of my country—was all understood.

  “You show ’em, Dunc.”

  Before she hung up, she made sure to say she loved me, and I made sure to say I loved her back.

  Just before my promised hour was up, I called Jimmy to let him know I was coming. I think part of me was expecting a parade, or at least a firework or two in response. But all he said was, “Good,” and got off the line so he could finish packing. He said he’d see me at the bus.

  Janna’s mom drove Janna and me (and our bags) to Stein headquarters. The bus was outside waiting—clearly Gus had arrived early to decorate it, using the large magnetic words that had been in fashion for cars a few years ago to spell out some good slogans: THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE and HAVE FAITH and THIS LAND WAS MADE FOR YOU AND ME. Finally he had written KANSAS WILL NOT FALL, with the first word spelled out in individual letters.

  I looked to find Jimmy as soon as I got there, but Virgil told me he hadn’t shown up yet. So I waited, and was perhaps too relieved to see that when Jimmy arrived the first thing he did was look to find me. I ran over and hugged him close, a beat longer than our hugs usually lasted, an extra moment to encompass all the apologies I was feeling and all the doubts I feared he still had.

  We stored our suitcases in the bottom of the bus as Virgil explained that Sara had found us a house to stay in—the best friend of one of her roommates lived in Lawrence, twenty-one miles from the state capitol in Topeka. It was going to be crowded—there were sixteen of us—but sleeping on floors was the least of our worries at this point.

  The bus wasn’t full—Flora said it was possible we’d pick up more people along the way. Inside, it looked like any old kind of public transportation—the muted seats, the narrow aisle, the windows stained by years of dried rain. But once we were all on board, it felt like something extraordinary. Jimmy sat next to me and I felt like the world was starting to fall back into place, that we all had a purpose and we were all on the road to that purpose.

  Before we left, Virgil stood at the front of the bus and told us he wanted to say a few words.

  “I wish Stein was here right now to talk to you,” he began, “because that man has a way with words that I’ll never have. But since he’s busy at the moment, you all are left with me. I know you’ve stopped your lives on twenty-four hours’ notice to go on this journey. I have to tell you—I have no idea what’s going to happen, or what it’s going to be like. You’d think that a man of my age would have some idea. But honest to God, I can’t see which way this one’s going to go.

  “This is what I know: I know that Kansas came into existence in part because a number of people were willing to put their lives on the line to defeat slavery. I know that wasn’t easy and I know that in the end the right side prevailed. I know that a hundred years after that, a black girl named Linda Brown and her family fought their way through the courts so Linda could go to a school seven blocks from her home in Topeka—a school that until then had been for whites only. I know that her case went all the way to the Supreme Court and led to the abolition of school segregation in America. I know that more recently Kansas was the home to a lot of people who liked to use Jesus’s name to be unkind and uncivil to people unlike themselves. But I also know that there were always more people around who stood by Jesus’s message of love and kindness. It’s been a good forty years since I last went to Kansas, and I imagine it’s changed like this country’s changed—sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. I know that of all the great shifts that have occurred in A
merica—the freedom of the slaves, the rights of women, the equality of gays and lesbians—none has happened easily, and certainly none has happened instantly and without serious attacks and backlash. But the reason we have these things is because the fair-minded people who came before us would not give up. In my life, I have seen elections stolen—either outright or through the electoral college. I have seen wars fought for no real reason, and I have seen wars fought because there was no other way to get to peace. I have seen the rich get richer and I have seen the poor get poorer. I have seen facts get harder and harder to hide—and easier and easier to manipulate. I have been angry and I have been frustrated and I have been ecstatic and I have been proven right and wrong and back again. I have given up on some things, but I have refused to give up on most things. And I can honestly say that all of it—all of it—seems to have led me to where we are, here and now. I’m not saying we’re going to change everything. Heck, I don’t even know if we’re going to change anything. But there are moments—either in your own life or the life of the world around you—when an event looks you right in the eye and says: This is important. What are you going to do? And our answer—right here, right now—is that we are going to take a stand. We are not going to give up. We are not going to let things happen because we don’t want to get involved. We are going to intervene, because it’s our right—if not our duty—as citizens to intervene. Good doesn’t triumph because anybody tells it to. It triumphs when we push it and carry it and shout it and embrace it until it triumphs. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s why we’re going.”

  I had never seen Virgil speak so long and so forcefully before, and from the look on his face when he was done, I would’ve guessed that Virgil had never seen it, either. We all cheered after his final word and continued cheering when Clive closed the door and pulled the bus out onto the highway. Then, slowly, we settled into our seats. We started to get lost in our thoughts. We watched as the sky dimmed and the headlights turned on.

  Jimmy leaned against the window, staring out at the blur of cars and roadside. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, nor did I feel comfortable asking. I wanted us to be on this journey together, but in some small way it felt like we were each on our own journey. The best I could do was take mine on the same path as his. The best I could hope was to be by his side as we went along.

  I closed my eyes and felt us taken forward.

  PART TWO

  fourteen

  We were driving through the middle of the country in the middle of the night. I’d lost track of the place in the same way I’d lost track of the time—all I knew was that it was late, and we were on a highway, and I couldn’t sleep. Friday night and Saturday day had passed uneventfully as we drove deeper into America. Now it was Saturday night, and I’d almost grown used to the sound of the bus breathing its heat. Everyone else seemed to be asleep, their eyes closed and their screens in resting patterns. I felt a stirring next to me—Jimmy taking a look out of the window, watching all the nowhere-somewhere passing at a headlight pace.

  “You up?” I asked gently.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice lower with the weight of nighttime. “Just thinking.”

  “What about?” My own voice was a bare whisper, a pencil mark on the air.

  “I dunno. Just things.”

  He was still looking out the window, his face a shifting map of shadows. Over the past twenty-four hours, I’d been letting the rips between us heal slowly rather than try to fix them with too many stitches of apology. I relied on the quiet gestures, like now as I put my hand on his leg, just to touch some part of him.

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  Silence for a beat. A slight moan from somewhere behind us—dialogue with a bad dream, or the sound of a half-awake stretch. I was fully turned to him now, secretly glad he was awake so I didn’t have to take such empty distance alone.

  “I think we have to be realistic,” he said, measuring out his words as if he were using each one to fill the gap in a puzzle.

  “About winning this?” I asked.

  “No. About us.”

  Now he was looking at me head-on, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what he meant. I’d always hated the word realistic. Or, more truthfully, I’d always hated the way people used the word realistic—as if it were a limitation, as if reality was something that conformed so severely to likelihood that surprising things could never, ever happen. From what I’d seen, reality was much more complicated than that. Sometimes it was remarkably predictable, but a lot of the time it didn’t go the way anybody would expect. I didn’t believe in using probabilities to rule out possibilities.

  It wasn’t like Jimmy to put so much faith in realistic. I thought he knew how little sense reality made. Especially in terms of us.

  “Where is this coming from?” I asked now. “We don’t want to be realistic. Love isn’t realistic.”

  I could immediately see that it was a mistake to use the word love—it didn’t make Jimmy any more comfortable with the conversation. But I didn’t want to take it back, either, because that would mean something much worse.

  He put his hand on mine, so I could feel his palm on my skin and his leg underneath my own palm. The warmth there, so usual.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Really. I’m just talking about—I don’t know, the long term. I know you don’t like to talk about it or think about it…but I guess I can’t help it. I mean, we’re sixteen. I’m almost seventeen. We can’t act like this is going to be forever, right?”

  “But we can’t act like it’s not,” I insisted. “We can’t.”

  It’s not like I knew for sure that Jimmy and I were going to grow old together—that we were going to still be in love through college and after college and all the years beyond that. It’s not like I had our wedding planned and our children ready for their school pictures and the wallpaper for our bedroom picked out. But, sure, I had daydreams. I had hopes, even if I didn’t have certainty or even faith. I liked those daydreams. I saw no reason to tie them to an anchor.

  Jimmy didn’t argue with me. But he didn’t say anything to make it better, either, leaving me to be the one to continue.

  “Is this about what happened before we left?” I had to ask. “About me not coming? I told you I was sorry about that.”

  “That’s only part of it,” he said, the sadness so clear across his face, mingled with the lasting tiredness. “And before you ask, I can’t even say what the other parts are. I guess I’ve just been thinking—there are so many things that are bigger than us. There are so many people we haven’t met, so many places we’ve never been. I love you, and I love being with you, and I don’t want that to change. But I can’t ignore the fact that it might change. Right?”

  Did he really want me to tell him he was right? I could say, Yeah, let’s be realistic. Let’s start to wonder when it’s going to end. Let’s give in to the odds that we won’t be together ’til we die. Let’s allow ourselves to give up a little…and then watch as that giving up grows and grows and grows until we’ve given up altogether.

  I couldn’t tell him any of that. I would not be the one to lead us down that path.

  I leaned over to him, my elbow hitting the button for the reading light above us, sparking a small spotlit halo. Keeping the one hand between his two different touches, I moved my other hand to his cheek, then back to his hair. When I kissed him, I closed my eyes. He wasn’t ready for the kiss, but he received it. I pulled back before he could lose his linger.

  “That’s what I know,” I said, my voice still barely above a whisper, my eyes steady.

  He smiled a little. Shook his head at me. Thinking it was too simple, but not disputing it.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “Ever.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Another sound came from the back of the bus—this time a shhhh.

  Jimmy curved himself more into the chair, ready for sleep. I felt, though, that I couldn?
??t let him—not yet. I hoped to erase as much of this conversation as possible before he left me awake.

  “I don’t want to have to think about this,” I told him honestly.

  “I know,” he said, complete understanding in his voice. “I’m sorry I said it. Really, it isn’t anything. I’m just tired. I should never open my mouth after midnight.”

  “The only way to deal with the future is to make sure the present is okay.”

  He moved his hand from my hand, onto my thigh.

  “It is,” he said. “I promise. We’ll be okay.”

  He was closing his eyes now. Moving his hand over my thigh, under my shirt, up my skin.

  I closed my eyes. Felt him gliding there. Then resting, right on my side, holding me gently.

  His breathing slowed. I opened my eyes and studied his face, watched his chest rise and fall. I’d seen him like this so many times, at every shade of day or night. Napping, sleeping, breathing…I felt such tender fascination to see it. I could be his quiet watcher for as long as he was next to me.

  Suddenly there was a shout from the back of the bus.

  “WHAT THE—?”

  Jimmy opened his eyes, pulled back his hand, and we both turned at the same time. There, a few rows behind us, was Mira standing in the aisle, screaming at Keisha and Sara, who had somehow managed to sneak to the back of the bus together, a single blanket covering them both.

  “HOW COULD YOU?”

  Other people were stirring now.

  “I can explain,” Keisha said quietly, trying to establish a calmer tone.

  “Okay. Explain.”

  Sara decided to jump in. “We were just—”

  “I don’t want to hear a single word from you, bitch. I want to hear it from her.”

  But Keisha just started crying.