The Latte Rebellion (14 page)

I opened my mouth to reassure her, but Tattoo Boy beat me to it.

“No worries, babe,” he said. “If you need to step back a little, you do what you need to do.”

“Whoa, whoa,
whoa
.” I put down my can of cola. “It’s not like this is a full-time job here.” I exchanged a meaningful glance with Carey. “We’re trying to figure out how to keep it under control.”

“Unless you
want
it to be out of control,” Miranda said. I looked up at her in surprise.

“What I mean is, you want the ideas to spread around as much as possible, and we’ve done that,” Miranda said earnestly. “Knowledge is power, right? It’s all pretty cool. I take it as a compliment that people want to copy us.”

“
I’m
just glad nobody knows who we are,” Carey said, glaring down at her empty coffee cup.

“There
is
a certain power, a mystery, in anonymity,” Leonard agreed. “It’s almost as though the Rebellion has grown more powerful
because
its leaders remain anonymous and claim only the credit for founding the movement.”

I resisted the urge to mimic his pompous blathering.

“You say, ‘grown more powerful’; I say, ‘ballooned out of control,’ ” Carey muttered. I looked up at her and smiled worriedly. I was freaked by how pessimistic she sounded.

By the end of the night, we decided that Leonard, Darla, and the other U-NorCal students would take over the key speaking roles for the Rebellion more or less permanently. Maria McNally would stay in charge of the informal meetings at our school. I would still work on the rally, making a last appearance as Agent Alpha in order to introduce the guest speaker, a UC Berkeley professor. We’d take enough money out of the T-shirt account to cover our travel plans, and the rest would be kept under tight control, for legitimate Rebellion activities only: the rally speaker’s honorarium, for instance. What I’d do after that, I wasn’t sure.

But as we went back to our physics homework, worksheets dutifully lined up in front of us, I kept shifting in my seat, jiggling my legs, tapping my foot. I was having trouble keeping still—not because of caffeine, for once, but because I felt a tiny, inexorable stirring of anticipation about what might happen next. Call me crazy.

Over the next few days, though, I was lulled into a sense of … if not security, then relative calm. I didn’t have another meeting with the rally planning committee until next week, and my parents had finally let up enough to stop answering my phone for me. Which was good: the real bright spot of the week was talking to Thad again. This time,
he
called
me.

There were a few minutes of awkward small talk again, while I cringed and tried not to sound like the humongous dork that I am, but then I took a deep breath and finally told him a little about myself … and, very vaguely, about the Rebellion.

“So, w—they’re putting on this rally over in your neck of the woods pretty soon,” I said ultra-casually. “I thought I might go. Oh, and I heard there’s a poetry slam, in case your friend is interested.”

“Oh yeah,” Thad said. “Greg told me about that. One of my professors is the guest speaker, so if I go I might get extra credit. But I was going to go anyway. You’ll be there?” He sounded hopeful. “I don’t want to be stuck all bored at a table while Greg is doing his thing.”

“Sure. I, uh, might be a little late,” I added, remembering that I was supposed to make an Agent Alpha cameo.

“No worries,” he said. There was a pause, and I fidgeted uncomfortably on my bed, wondering what to say.

“So … I didn’t have a chance to tell you, but Carey and I were planning to visit London after we graduate. We have this whole vacation plan and everything.”

“Oh man,” Thad said enviously. “I wish I could go with you guys. I’d love to go check out the clinic in East London and see what they’re doing in person.”

“Yeah?” My stomach felt fluttery and nervous.

“You’ll have a great time,” Thad said. “I wish I’d been able to travel after high school. I probably would have realized a little sooner what I wanted to do with my life.”

“I’m not expecting
that
to happen,” I said. “But it’ll be a nice change of pace. Plus I’ve always wanted to go to a real pub.”

“You should! You should live it up—go dancing, or clubbing, or whatever it is you like to do.” He chuckled. “So what
is
it you like to do, besides going to social justice meetings and poetry slams?”

I laughed, then told him just enough to be intriguingly mysterious. Not enough to hint at my secret identity. I hoped.

I also learned a few things about Thad. His favorite food was sushi, but he didn’t eat any terrestrial mammals. He loved comedy movies, the dumber the better. He had two younger sisters, who still lived with his parents in Utah. When they were little they’d lived in a small town where being mixed-race was unusual, so they got stared at a lot.

“I can totally relate,” I said.

“I bet you can.” I could hear the smile in his voice, and it really made me anxious to see him again. But after that phone call, it was back to the boot camp routine for me: get up, go to school, come home, study, eat dinner, study some more, go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I started to count the days until school let out, and until Spring Break. Not that I’d be doing anything interesting. No Florida beaches; the closest approximation for Carey and me would be driving into San Francisco to Ocean Beach and freezing our butts off by a bonfire with the popular kids, sharing toasted marshmallows with Roger and Kaelyn. Ha. Not likely.

The weird part was, we were popular too, now, in a way. Not that people knew who we were exactly, but they knew we were involved with the Latte Rebellion. A few kids at school, like David Castro, had seen us putting up posters and slipping flyers into lockers. But the majority of people had no idea we were the instigators, and we had no intention of telling them.

Three days before the rally, right after the final planning meeting, I called Carey to fill her in on the details and double-check on our plan for the evening.

“I forgot to tell you, we’ve got the Berkeley Poetry Slam champion emceeing our poetry slam—you can’t tell me that isn’t cool. And the guest speaker wrote
Uncut, Undried: The Complexity of Race in America
.”

“You haven’t even read it,” Carey accused me, correctly. “What do you care? And don’t you have a makeup history test to study for?”

“It’s the day before, genius.” I frowned and switched the phone to my other ear. “Anyway, aren’t you coming? You said you’d watch me make my introductory remarks.”

There was an uncomfortable silence at the other end of the phone line. I couldn’t even hear Carey breathing for a second, and then I heard her let out a long sigh.

“Asha, I don’t think I’m going to make it. I have soccer practice again.”

“What are you talking about? We were going to leave the rally before the poetry slam and have dinner in San Francisco. That was the plan.”

“Yeah … but, listen. I think I’m going to have to back out of all this.” Her voice sounded funny—pinched and small.

“What do you mean ‘all this’? The rally? That’s okay—the planning’s already done.” I didn’t like the sound of what Carey had just said. A horrible sinking feeling crawled through my stomach.

“Not just the rally, Ash. I mean all of it. I’m still behind on homework, my parents are going on a business trip for a week and I have to watch my brothers, and then after that I have to work extra shifts at Book Planet if I want to make up the income I’ll lose while my parents are away … This is just a really tough time for me.”

I could hear the longing in her voice—she couldn’t wait to quit this. I thought back over everything she’d said over the past months, all her worries about what was going to happen, all her doubts and misgivings, and suddenly it seemed all too clear.

“You’ve wanted to back out for a long time, haven’t you?” I accused her. But I didn’t have to ask, because a sick certainty had settled into my chest. And now even Leonard’s enthusiasm for the Rebellion wasn’t enough to keep her involved anymore. She’d made up her mind.

“No, I—”

“You’ve just been waiting for the chance to quit! I can’t believe you.” I was fuming, almost incoherent. I paced angrily across my bedroom, kicking a stray green sandal under the bed in the process. “After everything we did, all our plans—and the rally’s in two days! This isn’t fair,” I said loudly. I knew I was being dramatic, but I didn’t care. She was deserting me.

I felt like I’d been kicked.

“Hey, who’s not being fair? I worked hard on that website,” she retorted. “I put just as much into this as you did. And we got what we wanted! What more do you want from me?”

“What do I
want
from you? It’s not about that.” I was stunned. “You know that as well as I do. Anyway, you’re the one who said people should care about this kind of thing. And now they do! We’re finally accomplishing what we talked about.”

“Asha, this isn’t what I signed up for. I don’t know what you thought we were planning when we first talked about it, but … I just don’t
know
.”

“What does it matter what we first planned? I thought we were doing something worthwhile,” I said. In a quieter voice, I added, “I thought we were having fun.”

There was a long silence. I felt tears running down my face and dripping over the phone receiver. Finally Carey spoke.

“Well, it hasn’t been that fun for me.”

What do you mean, it hasn’t been fun?
I wanted to yell at her.
This was one of the most outrageous things we’ve ever done. Didn’t we laugh our butts off making up the manifesto? Didn’t you meet Leonard because of the Rebellion? And what about all the people who come to our meetings, who believe in the Rebellion and want us to succeed? How can you
mean
anything you just said?

Instead, I just took a deep, shaky breath and hung up the phone.

The following April:
Ashmont Unified School District Board Room

“Ms. Jamison,” the disciplinary hearing officer said loudly, startling me out of my depressing visions of finishing out the school year at St. Elizabeth’s—or worse, at continuation school. “In light of what Ms. Levin has just shared with us, I need to ask you to clarify a few of the facts here.” He sounded tired and croakier than ever.

I sat up straight on the hard wooden chair. This could be it for me. What I said right now might be the deciding factor, and all I could think about was whether my dad might insist on pulling me out of school anyway. I couldn’t focus; I cleaned my glasses but it didn’t help. And now the hearing officer was already talking and I’d missed the first part of what he’d said.

“… honestly expect us to believe that you didn’t have any idea you were engaging in a potentially inflammatory activity?” He peered at me over the top of his spectacles. I swallowed past a lump in my throat.

“We—I didn’t
know
,” I said, lamely. The hearing panel uniformly glared at me, and I started to get a little annoyed. “We thought it would be fun. We didn’t think it would get so out of hand. I mean, we’re high school kids, not scheming counterrevolutionaries.” I glared back at them, one by one. “We’re honor students. Soccer players. Aspiring artists. We started a business, and we tried to start a legitimate campus club. When we were thwarted, we took our club off campus. Then somebody—
not us
—decided to take our ideas a little too far. And then … well, you know what happened next. You know who was responsible for that, too.”

“I am aware of the other individuals involved, but we’re talking about you, Ms. Jamison, and
your
role in the situation, particularly the events of April 18th.”

I could feel my dad’s eyes boring into the side of my head, and I gritted my teeth before continuing. I hadn’t expected to be put on the spot right away. I was supposed to get a closing statement, a real chance to get my side of the story out. Not … this.

“Maybe I should have realized that some people might take our ideas the wrong way,” I said finally. “But I don’t have a say over what other people think, just like I don’t have a say over what they do. I can only take responsibility for what
I’ve
done.” I felt like I’d just said the cheesiest teen-movie line in the world, but the sad truth was that I really meant it. And because of that, everything about the situation suddenly seemed absurd, far away, like it was happening to someone else. Some of the tension dribbled out of me. I looked steadily back at the hearing officer, no longer quite so terrified.

Then I glanced at my dad and his unreadable expression, and the nervousness crept in again. His face was carefully blank. I had no idea what that meant for me.

“Interesting food for thought,” the hearing officer said dryly. “On that note, I’d like to call a brief recess. There is a water cooler in the outside hallway, and restrooms are located around the corner. All panel members and witnesses should return in fifteen minutes.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead as the room exploded into noise. Half of the hearing panel got up and quickly exited the room through a back door. I wished I could escape, too, but my mother put her hand on my shoulder as if reading my mind.