My excitement from before revealed itself as a bizarre manifestation of my anxiety. I pushed open one of the big mahogany doors. It whined loudly under my hand. I jumped at the sound even though it was just what an old door sounded like.
We’d taken only a few steps down the hallway when we saw two students in black masks arguing with a security guard on the staircase. “You need to go, all right?” one of them said. “You’ll be locked in if you don’t leave. You need to go home.”
The security guard, angry at being directed, shoved the student. The student shoved back while the other student tried to intervene.
I touched Edgar’s elbow, instinctively. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “They’ve got it.” Almost on cue, the guard stormed down the steps and out the door.
“You must take over buildings a lot,” I said.
Edgar shrugged. “Nah, but I did watch a movie about it once.”
Voices floated from down the hallway. We followed them until we reached the grand hall: rows of foldable chairs, silver bleachers, a large stage. The walls were dark wood broken up by a string of big arched windows. The ceiling was a cream barrel roof with elaborate moldings. The ancient architecture made what we were doing feel even more illicit, and my excitement returned, its long legs crawling up my neck.
About thirty people sat on the bleachers making posters, including Ryen and the actress. I didn’t understand why Ryen was there until the actress giggled at something he said, her hand covering her mouth. It infuriated me, the sight of them. Had I ever been that brazen? Nia and Tristan came through the doors then, carrying grocery bags. Instead of food inside, there were ropes, chains, a hammer, and a drill. I had no clue what all that was for. I waited for Tristan to acknowledge me, but he acted like I was a corpse he was calmly sidestepping on the sidewalk.
Throwing up a lazy wave, Nia said to me and Edgar, “They’re making signs to hang out the windows if you want to join them.” I was insulted that she and Tristan got to lug around hammers for some secret mission while I was being relegated to arts and crafts. Yes, I liked arts and crafts, but I could also do things with a rope.
Edgar and I sat on the cold bleachers. I’d never taken over a building before, but it seemed like drawing bubble letters on construction paper wasn’t a big part of it. I thought people would be running frantically around, circles of sweat under their armpits, spitting into bullhorns, police sirens approaching in the distance, windows crashing in with government bats. The activity was more hushed. People went in and out of the room with an air of stern efficiency, more like running a machine than sparking a revolution.
I drew “DEATH>>>CONCESSION!” on a banner in purple block letters, then snapped a photo to send to Anwar. I hadn’t heard from him in weeks. I knew the violence had worsened in the West Bank. But there was no more room in my heart for worry, so I only hoped.
By 1 a.m. there were over seventy people in the hall. When I looked through the window, more than a hundred people were gathered outside: flashes of checkered kaffiyehs, baseball caps with hoods pulled over them. Word was traveling fast through our network. The press would file their stories in a couple hours to run early in the morning. Despite seeing reporters outside, it just then hit me that we were going to make the news. I swelled with a renewed sense of significance, holding my bubble-letter sign.
Nia climbed onto the stage with a bullhorn. Her voice shot straight through the chatter, clear and deep. I stared at her shimmering pink mouth, recalling how I’d found it with mine before she pulled away, erasing me with her wrist.
“HEY. Everyone!”—pounding her fist against the wall to win their attention, voices dropping off one by one—“Thank you all for being here. A special shout-out to our Georgetown, GW, and Howard family. I went to HU, by the way!” She thrust her hand in the air,HU,YOU KNOW. “What we’re doing is courageous, but it’s also risky. Your presence proves your commitment to a free America, a free Palestine, to universities that don’t bend the knee to an undemocratic government, and a campus that doesn’t aid Israel in its genocide. It shows a dedication to the teachers who put their necks on the line for us and who are being punished, the students here on visa who have more to lose than most of us. I know everyone’s tired. But they need us to be tired. Democracy dies in darkness. We’re seeing it also dies in broad daylight.”
She took a long pause. I saw then she was shaking, saw the dark rings around her eyes. She didn’t look afraid but possessed.
“Some have volunteered to do night watch so the rest of us can sleep. We have food, water, and first aid kits in that back corner. We have allies who are graciously surrounding the building.” She gestured to the protestors outside the window.
“In a minute, Liana will talk to us about our rights and what to do if the cops turn up—essentially, we’re not resisting arrest. She’ll also run through what to do if things turn violent. Then I suggest you get whatever sleep you can because the lock-in will be made public early in the morning. I’m hopping on the phone to negotiate with the school at nine a.m., to demand they do everything possible to win Aisha’s swift release from detention, reinstate the jobs of the fired teachers, revive the DEI office, and end federal oversight over the school. Prepare to be here through commencement weekend. If you have any questions, those of us wearing black shirts can answer them!”
Someone asked, “What are we gonna do for the graduation? They’re gonna kick us out.”
“The plan is to stay until they either agree to our terms or forcibly remove us. Now that we have a solid number of people inside, we need volunteers to barricade the doors and windows.”
My hand went up to volunteer at the same time Tristan’s did. He put his hand down, but it was too late. While three other groups were tackling the South, North, and West building corridors, myself, Ryen, the actress, and Tristan went to barricade the East entrances.
The four of us shoved desks and chairs against a row of doors that led to the faculty parking lot. The ground floor was aesthetically nothing like the grand hall: pewter and damp, reeking of mothballs, a cozy ugliness like a suburban basement in 1980 Nowhere, America. It was also boiling. Tristan kept lifting the hem of his hoodie to wipe the sweat from his forehead, flashing his hard stomach. I was ignoring him with the same intensity with which he was ignoring me, but this made it difficult.
As we checked the sturdiness of our barricade, the flirtatious murmurs between Ryen and the actress agitated me. Ryen assumed, I guessed, that if I hadn’t said anything to Milan yet I probably wouldn’t. It made me sick: how he played with the actress’s hair, talking in her ear. I texted Milan, asking if she knew Ryen was here, knowing she’d be up watchingTemptation Islandor something equally terrible. Meanwhile Tristan was acting like we were competing on some televised challenge show calledBarricade That!carrying three chairs on his arm.
Eventually, Ryen and the actress disappeared, leaving me alone with Tristan. Tristan popped on blue latex gloves, headed toward the stairwell. He tossed me a pair. “Put these on.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all night.
A thrill surged in me when we approached the front entrance on the main floor, the one Edgar and I came through a few hours ago, and heard protestors singing outside. The moment opened like a mouth. When I entered it, I was watching us from the future, hearing the newscast version of the night on the radio, sitting around a kitchen table, telling the kids I wasn’t going to have, “Mommy was there.” I hadn’t thought about what we were doing as an act of creation until then.
Tristan had paused to listen to the singing but then handed me one of the hammers. “We’re smashing the glass squares so we can lock the door from the outside.”
“Wait, what?”
He brought his hammer’s nose down on the frosted window. It shattered with an icy shriek that reminded me of hail falling on concrete.I’d never destroyed property before. Absurdly, it seemed a step too far even though I knew this was a small act to confront a much greater, sinister one. I hesitated, the hammer heavy in my hand.
Tristan said, “I’ll do it.” I ignored him and drove the hammer through the window, crashing the metal head against the glass. It was beautiful, the transparent shards raining at our feet. I surprised myself by kicking the door with my boot, imagining every fuck-ass authority figure who failed us, who forced every generation back to this place where we had to become animals to win the right to be human. I was so angry at that damn door, I was going to chop it down like a rotting tree.
Tristan grabbed me with a startled look, the most emotion he’d offer me all night. “Hey, chill, okay. It’s broken.”
I’d splintered part of the door, a piece of wood hanging from it. I breathed in, out. I hadn’t breathed, it felt, in days. My body slackened. I was dizzy, high and overcaffeinated. It took me a moment to understand I was experiencing euphoria.
