Wide Awake (6 page)

“In a startlingly swift move, Governor Roberts of Kansas announced that the votes in his state needed to be tallied again, and that he had ‘grave doubts’ that Stein would end up victorious. Such a reversal would change the outcome of yesterday’s election.”

“How can he do that?” Mandy asked.

Soon it became clear: The head of the Kansas Election Commission was one of the governor’s cronies, and both had “discovered” enough problems with voting sites and absentee ballots to declare a recount. Their goal: to disqualify more than a thousand Stein voters in order to swing the election.

“You can bet they’re altering votes as we speak,” Jimmy said disgustedly. “Stein won fair and square, and they know it.”

Hearing Stein’s voice, we tuned back in.

“I want to assure all Americans that I will, in no uncertain terms, fight this partisan attack on a fair election. Every indication we have shows that our party won Kansas decisively and without any controversy. The truth must be heeded. The American people will not be deceived by wishful thinking and willful manipulation. We will not take this lying down.”

We wandered around the non-shopping mall for a little while longer, checking the open channels frequently for updates. We’d hit the wall, non-shoppingwise; we’d pretty much spent all that we were going to spend, and the temptation to actually buy things was starting to grow.

“Should we head to the party?” I asked.

There was a silence until Janna finally said what we were all thinking:

“Are you sure there’s still going to be a party?”

“Hello, yes!” Gus said, sounding shocked. “Last time I checked, Stein was elected to be the next President of the United S. of A. We’re gonna be popping some corks.”

“That’s the spirit!” Mandy chimed.

“Hallelujah!” Janna echoed, sounding a little less convinced but still hoping strong.

Only Jimmy seemed fully doubtful, and I teetered in between him and the rest of them.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think we should check it out,” he replied, smiling slightly. “It’s not the end of the world until it’s the end of the world.”

seven

We piled back into Gus’s Eco and drove over to Stein’s local headquarters. We’d done this so many times before—“going on a mission,” Jimmy liked to call it. Sometimes there’d be as many as eight people in Gus’s four-seater, making our way to volunteer in any way possible. From the moment we’d read on Stein’s site that a headquarters was being made for our area, we wanted to be a part of it. I was a little worried that they’d scoff at us, since we couldn’t even vote yet. I expected them to have us bring them coffee, clean out the trash, and hang posters over town—that’s about it. But from the minute we arrived, we were made to feel like our contributions mattered, and that we were just as able to spread the word as people five times our age.

Part of this was because of the mood Stein and Martinez brought to the campaign. And part of it was because of Virgil and Sara, who’d practically lived at the headquarters over the past few months and ran it as if it was their one big shot at changing the world for the better. Virgil was about my grandfather’s age, but there were moments when he’d leap down the stairs or slap you a five that felt like fifteen, and you’d wonder if he was really a twenty-year-old in a wizened disguise. Sara
was
a twenty-year-old, a drop-dead-then-come-back-to-life-gorgeous lesbian who’d taken a semester off from college to work full-time for the campaign. I’d had a nonsexual crush on her almost immediately; on the first day we came to the campaign, she wasn’t flustered when I got flustered about the prospect of talking to strangers. Instead of showing me to the door, she showed me to the kitchen, feeding me cookies from an honest-to-goodness cookie jar and explaining to me that our job wasn’t to argue voters into supporting Stein, it was to provide them with the information they needed to make the right choice. I figured I’d be okay providing information, and I also figured I’d be okay sitting in the kitchen with this beautiful college student, talking about books and music and the fourteen steps to alleviating the deficit that had caused (and was made even worse by) the Greater Depression.

The Stein/Martinez headquarters was located in a house on a suburban street in the town next to mine, just off Route 280. The couple who’d lived in it had moved to Florida, and instead of putting it on the market right away, they’d lent it to the campaign, saying to install whatever connections and portals were needed. As a result, going to work there was almost like heading over to a friend’s house to visit; after a few times, you started to get a sense of where things were, but there were still moments when it was confusing.

We all used the side door to get in. This time, unpiling from Gus’s car, we could hear music blasting inside. Virgil’s wife, Flora, was the first person we saw, standing in the kitchen surrounded by bowls of guilt-free and guilt-plus snacks.

“Hello there!” she said, then gave each of us big hugs. “Everyone’s in the living room. We’ve cleared the desks out so there can be some dancing and thrumping.”

Gus was an ace thrumper, but I wasn’t sure this was the time or the place. Was it possible to thrump when Kansas was in play?

Flora’s spirits seemed high enough. But when we got to the living room, it was clear that the people inside weren’t as certain of victory as the decorations were. A banner read
CONGRATULATIONS
! on top of the big screen, but the muted newsreaders were miming a different story.

“Hey, guys,” Mira called. Instinctively, I looked next to her for Keisha, but she wasn’t there.

“Where’s your other half?” I asked.

“Around. Helping out as usual,” Mira answered. “That girl never rests.”

We tried to chat with some of the other volunteers, but the scroll on the screen kept distracting us. While most of us tried to go through the motions of a party, Virgil stood in the middle of the room, watching the news and saying, “This isn’t going to happen again. There’s no way we’re going to let this happen again.”

I knew Virgil had been part of the movement to abolish the electoral college many years ago. The amendment’s defeat was, as Stein liked to point out in his speeches, a watershed moment of self-interest triumphing over the national interest. In order for the amendment to have passed, it needed to be ratified by the populations of at least a few of the smaller states that would have lost their unfair advantage. (Since every state has two senators, these small states automatically get two more votes in the electoral college than they deserve population-wise, making it unfair.) Not a single small state decided to shift to the popular vote, no matter how many appeals were made. And there was no way to get around that, so the electoral college stayed, sticking us with more elections where the person who received the most votes didn’t necessarily win the Presidency. This was not democracy, but each time it happened, people just went along with it. Except people like Virgil.

“One person, one vote—that’s the most basic concept there is,” he continued. “If you ask any American, he or she will say that’s absolutely the way it is. But it’s not. It’s
one person in Rhode Island gets a bigger vote than one person in California.
And if this entire vote rests on a thousand people in one state, even though Stein won by over half a million in the whole country—well, I’ve been down that road. And this time I’m not leaving it up to the damn Supreme Court to vote for the people who brung ’em to the dance.”

“Honey,” Flora said, putting her hand on his shoulder, “you’re being a real downer.”

Virgil smiled. “I suppose you’re right. Shall we get jiggy with it?”

All the members of my generation looked at one another blankly.

“After all,” Virgil said, “who let the dogs out?”

Dogs? I didn’t see any dogs.

“Can’t touch this!”

Then, inexplicably, he started to do this jump ’n’ thrump move that must’ve been real big when he was real small. Flora cranked up the song, and we all started to laugh and scat.

The party was saved.

Nobody turned off the screen, but we kept it muted, so the newsreader could look out at us and only see dancing, as if we knew something that he didn’t for a change.

I loved dancing with Jimmy because it was one of the few things I knew that could make him look nervous. He’d grown up in a house where classic-classical dominated—his parents weren’t even into neo-classical because they didn’t like the added beats. So when everyone started to thrump, it was like Jimmy felt like he was part of a different playlist. He went looking for the beats instead of letting them permeate.

I led. I jazzed my hands down his body, then flung myself around him. I could hear Mandy and Janna whooping to my left and could see Virgil and Flora admiring us while they took things a beat or two slower.

After a few songs of this, I needed a quick bathroom break. The downstairs bathroom was occupied, so I skipped up the stairs to where the bedrooms of the house used to be. I usually kept to the downstairs area, so I wasn’t as familiar with upstairs as I could have been. The first door I opened was a linen closet. The next was the executive office. I realized my mistake immediately and was quietly closing the door when I noticed two figures in the back of the room, silhouetted against the window shade by a streetlamp outside. Keisha and Sara. Which wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary—Keisha was one of Sara’s best volunteers—but when my eyes adjusted a little I could see that Sara’s hand was under Keisha’s shirt, and Keisha was leaning into it like a cat being petted, purring from the joy of it. They were so wrapped up in each other that they didn’t see me. Since I hadn’t turned the hallway light on, only a gray shade of dimness came into the room with me. I was so surprised, I nearly cried out. But luckily something deeper than surprise took hold of me, and I managed to leave the room without a sound, closing the door before I attracted any notice.

Keisha and Sara?
And with Mira right downstairs.

I almost wanted to open the door again, to make sure what I’d seen was true. That it wasn’t just a trick of the light that caused Sara’s hand to rub against Keisha’s body that way. That it wasn’t Keisha at all, only some other girl who looked like her.

But of course I didn’t open the door again. I stood in the hallway for too long, paralyzed by hundreds of thoughts that didn’t add up to a single understanding. Then I finally found my way to the bathroom. I turned on the light and stared at my reflection in the medicine-cabinet mirror. I looked messed up, shocked. Which was a very accurate reflection.

Keisha and Mira had always been the couple that Jimmy and I wanted to be. They seemed entirely at ease with their love, comfortable enough to argue without ever fighting. They believed they were meant to be together, and we all believed it, too. Because their happiness, their comfort, always spilled over to us. Their light was something we could all read by.

“Keisha and Sara.” I said it out loud. As if someone would peek his head out from the shower and say,
Don’t be ridiculous.
But instead there was only the sound of my voice. And it rang true.

Even my voice had seen.

I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, because all the conclusions jumped straight to endings.

I could go back in and confront them.

No.

I could go downstairs and tell Mira.

No.

I could forget it all.

Not possible.

I was so glad they hadn’t seen me. And I wished they had seen me, so it wouldn’t be up to me.

I had no idea what to do.