We walked fast. I tripped over the cracks on the pathway. Nia was on the phone with the lawyer. I thought about Aisha, who I didn’t know, being yanked from her dorm, handcuffed, like the girl at Tufts who screamed on the street as people in baseball caps crowded her. The campus blurred past as we walked. I didn’t know where we were going or whether I was supposed to be coming, but neither Nia nor the girl said anything. They were both on their phones. Then Nia paused on the walkway. She slipped a hand into her hair, staring at the sky, bewildered.
My hand found her shoulder. I’d never thought much about her size, but I felt how small she was then, how easily she could be abducted,crushed. “It won’t end like this,” I said. She seemed to believe me, which made me believe me, even though I had no idea where that came from.
We turned into the library, hurrying down a series of steps, speeding down a carpeted hallway. My heartbeat had slowed, but now I was sweating, aware of a needling urge to bite my nails. I did what Milan said and thought of all the bacteria on them, my hands in a ball.
Black cargo pants said, “BSU wants to do something and the pro-democracy group on campus. Can we pull together an encampment by tonight? I still have tents from last year.”
“It’s too fast,” Nia said. “There’s supposed to be a heat wave this week. We can’t have people passing out because we didn’t plan.”
Even I understood that wasn’t happening tonight—it was already late afternoon—but the girl kept pushing it.
Nia paused in the hallway to rub her cheek. “I just… I don’t know if an encampment is the most effective approach. Everyone’s going to be gone for the summer in a few days so who’s the audience? One school erecting an encampment won’t get any attention after last spring. It feels like we need to do something else. We need to make a point. We need to make news.”
Commencement weekend began that Friday. The ceremony was moved indoors to Heathrow Hall because of the heat wave. It’s where the university president’s office was.
“I don’t know how this would work,” I said, buzzing with anticipation, “but what if we took over Heathrow ahead of the ceremony?”
Chapter 70
The three of us walked into a stuffy classroom, one of the old ones from the 1960s not included in the recent sweeping library renovations. Several people were sitting around a wooden table, talking animatedly or hyper-fixated on their phones. The heads of different student groups. The atmosphere was taut, electric but also full of fear, or at least I was full of fear. I was estranged from the goings-on: I was not an activist, was involved in zero organizations on campus. The only person I recognized was the actress. I was surprised to see her there.
Nia locked the door behind her, then turned toward the group. “Cat thinks we should do a lock-in at Heathrow Hall like Columbia’s Hamilton. Thoughts? We need to decide what we’re going to do, if we’re going to do anything, by this evening.”
Someone said, “Who the fuck is Cat?”
“To be clear,” Baggy cargo pants said, “this would be an escalation from our other protests this year.”
“But what did they do when we peacefully protested?” Nia snapped. “They put us on probation. Escalation is the answer.”
Those last words made my heart thump, like a slogan you’d hear decades later in a documentary, when victory felt inevitable in the sheen of hindsight. I held on to that feeling.
There was a knock on the door, three quick taps, some sort of code. Nia unlocked it. Tristan walked in. They kissed quickly. He sat across the table from me, averting his eyes. My heart raced faster like it was trying to make it across a finish line. The last message I sent to him, less than an hour ago, was me ending things: The timing couldn’t have been worse.
He didn’t appear to be thinking about that though. He said, “Georgetown is game to join you guys. But we need to let them know what we’re doing soon. Either way we should probably prepare for the worst.”
“Like expulsion?” I said.
He briefly met my eyes, then looked down at his phone. “Yeah. Or worse.”
Nia searched the room, an alertness about her gaze. “So, do we want to do the lock-in or the encampment or nothing?”
“I think we could pull together the lock-in quicker,” Tristan said, “but it’s a bigger risk. It’s breaking and entering. And we’d need all the supplies because we’d basically be barricaded inside. We could probably last only three days, tops.”
I said, “But all we really need to do is make it through commencement weekend, right?”
“Or until they meet our demands, which could take weeks. Let’s vote on it,” Baggy cargo pants said. “We don’t have a quorum here but it is what it is. All in favor of an encampment?”
She raised her hand along with the actress.
“All in favor of doing nothing?”
No one raised their hand. That left seven of us in favor of the building takeover.
Nia said, “Looks like we’re breaking and entering. Everyone keep your phones close. We’ll blast the plans early Friday morning. Don’t let it leak before then or we’re done. We’ll meet on campus after midnight the night before. Once we get our messaging together, tell every soul you know.”
I gripped my thighs to stop myself from shaking. I understood something big was happening, and I was responsible for it.
Chapter 71
