“Hell of a surprise.” Shirelle side-eyed him.
I surprised myself: “What if we pretend it’s something else, like a party at someone’s parents’ house. Everyone’ll come out with their stuff offline, because they won’t want to get busted for underage drinking and that, and then we’ll bring ’em to the party. We just invite the ones who we trust to keep their mouths shut.” Shirelle was about to jump in and say something, but I held my hand up. “No, wait. It could work. Thing is, what if there was a party at someone’s house, and we just diverted some people from it, caught ’em before they arrived, got ’em ready, drove ’em away. We could say it was someone else’s party, not us, no one would know who was organizing it so no one could snitch on us afterwards—”
Shirelle had the biggest smile right then, and she made twinkle-fingers at me, which meant I agree and Hell yeah and when I was done, she said, “Who do we get to have a party?”
* * *
That was both harder and easier than it sounded. Easier, because there were only three kids whose parents were out of town that night. Harder, because those kids sucked. Two were Junior Chamber of Commerce and couldn’t be trusted. One was Ale Martinez, who, it turned out, Shirelle had been keeping tabs on the whole time he’d been AWOL from school, messaging with him late at night when I was in bed and shut off to keep from waking up my nosy sister.
“Ale says his dad’s going to be in Mexico that weekend, visiting his mom.” Ale’s dad was a US citizen, and so was Ale, but his mom had been undocumented and got deported when he was little. Shirelle had on that defiant face of hers, daring me to make a big deal out of the fact that she and Ale had been sneaking around.
“Will he have a party?”
She rolled her eyes. “He always has a party, every single time his dad goes south. Him and all his candybilly friends, headphone parties so the neighbors don’t phone it in. They even make beerium.”
I made a face, then pictured Alejandro and his buddies and their lame-ass girlfriends in a huge cuddle-puddle, sloppy drunk on beerium and giggling like babies.
Ew.
“So ask him.”
Shirelle’s expression was pure animal-in-a-trap. “Can’t you do it?”
I just gave her a look.
“Shit,” she said, with feeling.
The way she said, “Hi, Ale,” when she got him on the phone was the most surprising thing of all. She practically sang the words. Listening to her end of the conversation made me wonder whether I knew her at all. She even giggled at one point. Love is blind. And stupid. Really, really stupid.
When she was done, she put the phone in her pocket. “All set.”
“You going to say anything?”
“About what?”
“About that. Ale Martinez, Shirelle.”
She snorted. “OK, so I like him. Who cares? It’s not like I don’t know he’s a fool.” She tapped her temple. “But, you know.” She tapped her heart. “Doesn’t mean I’m not in control. I only take him in small sips. Keeps him tolerable.”
“If you say so.”
Like I said, it’s a good thing I’m immune to Shirelle’s looks.
* * *
It was a good thing we weren’t trying to keep Ale’s party secret. There were a lot of kids at Burbank High who remembered him as that fun dude who used to throw those amazing parties before he disappeared, and the news that he was still alive and still throwing them went around like wildfire. So it was only up to Shirelle and me to put the word out to the ones who weren’t idiots that we were going to meet in Stough Canyon to pregame, then arrange to meet them there after as they puffed up the hill on their bikes or on foot.
There were supposed to be twenty-three of them, and they arrived in ones and twos and a foursome driven by someone’s cool older sister and then five more in an Uber, which was d-u-m dumb because everyone knew that Uber logged everything and were hella snitches, roll over for the cops without a warrant, not that warrants were hard to come by.
They came with flasks and six-packs and vapes, and they found up by following the blaze marks we chalked high up on the trees with glow-in-the-dark chalk sticks, giggling and stumbling through the night with the lights from their airplane-mode phones bobbing toward us. We made ’em turn off and bag their phones using the pouches we’d got off Antoine, who’d got ’em from the Wobblies.
At fifteen people, we were way too noisy, and no amount of shushing would keep it down. We’d get spotted soon. But there were supposed to be twenty-three—twenty-three people we knew and liked and trusted, though maybe not to show up in time. Didn’t want to go without them.
“Should we split into two?” I asked Shirelle, counting up again for the thirtieth time. Maybe they’d phoned us to say they’d be late, but of course, our phones were off and bagged.
Shirelle spit on the ground. She looked pale in the moonlight. “Don’t want to get caught on my own, and don’t want to turn on my phone to figure out where you got to. We got one problem with those fools late and missing, don’t need two problems with not knowing where we are.”
I looked at her, eyes so wide you could see white all around the pupils, neck tense. I realized how scared she was, and that made me scared. Because there was a damned good reason to be scared: we were risking serious consequences, jail time even, to throw a party. The knowledge of that went from something in my head to something in my guts in a second and left me feeling like I’d been punched. I wobbled. Why the actual fuck was I doing this?
“Why are we doing this, Shirelle?”
She went from scared to furious so fast it scared me twice, and it wasn’t the normal Shirelle eyeball poison, this was real, uncontrolled anger that made me take a step back. “We’re doing it because it was important to you,” she hissed, so intense that other people turned to watch us. She forced herself to calm down and bent her head toward me. “You tell me, Lenae. Why are we doing this?”
Maybe it was the jolt of new, immediate fear that I got when her fury welled up that got me past my future, theoretical fear of jail and let me get back to my thoughts, because now I could access them. “Because we’re all so sure there’s no way to escape, that we’re all going to be done to, not doing. Shirelle, I’m graduating high school this year and as far as anyone can tell, there’s no reason for me to even exist once I finish. My mom would miss me and so would Teesha, but Shirelle, no one needs them to exist, either. We are spare humans. Don’t you remember economics class? The lower the pay is, the worse the work, the more unemployed people they need to make the people with those terrible jobs feel like they can’t afford to quit them. The most use the zottas have for either of us is to be miserable and downpressed so bad that everyone else works double-hard so they don’t have to join us!”
Shirelle cocked her head. “You sound like a Wobbly.”
“Do I?” I replayed what I’d said. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Wobblies but I’d read some of the pamphlets they left in the toilets, the darknet rants you had to click through to use their proxies. “I guess I do. Well, who cares? They’re right. We knew they were right all along, Shirelle, but while we were in school we could pretend that it didn’t matter, that we had a purpose, to go to classes and grind for grades, but now class is over and the bell’s gonna ring and then what?”
“So you want to have a Communist party.” It wasn’t a question and it was supposed to be sarcastic. I puffed up.
“Yeah, damn right I do. Least we’re doing something! The whole system only works because we let it work, don’t do anything to stop it from working.”
She spit again. “It works because ‘doing something’ usually means going to jail. Girl, you’re supposed to be smart. Be smart. It’s not too late for all of us to go to the party tonight. Some of Ale’s friends are cute. I’ll introduce you.”
I remembered that it had been me who’d had doubts, had went to Shirelle for reassurance. Instead, I’d got this—rage and fear. Neither of us was sure about this. And it was too
late. The stragglers were coming through the woods. It was time to tell them all that we were going somewhere else tonight, somewhere that all of had bullshitted about wanting to go to since freshman year. A chance to make the world do something for us for a change, instead of to us.
“We’re going, Shirelle. You and me. And them. It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to get away with it clean. We’re going to have the most amazing senior year in the history of Burbank High. You believe in me?”
“Lenae, I don’t believe in you. But I like you and I trust you.” She grinned, suddenly. “I got your back. Let’s do this.”
* * *
We told them they could go home if they didn’t want to risk coming to the Communist party, but we told them that after we told them that they were the only kids in the whole school we trusted enough to invite to it, and made sure they all knew that if they backed out, there’d be no hard feelings—and no chance to change their mind later tonight when they were at a corny party with a bunch of kids instead of making glorious revolution.
Every one of them said they’d come.
I’d found an all-ages show in Encino that night, two miles from Steelbridge, Antoine’s old job. We got piled into Ubers heading for the club, chatting about inconsequentialities for the in-car cameras and mics, and every one of us paid cover for the club, making sure to use traceable payment systems that would alibi us as having gone in for the night. Then we all met in the back alley, letting ourselves out of the fire-doors in ones and twos. I did a head-count to make sure we were all there, squashed together in a spot out of view of the one remaining camera back there (I’d taken out the other one the day before, wearing a hoodie and gloves, sliding along the wall so that I was out of its range until I was reaching up to smear it with some old crank-case oil).
We hugged the wall until we were back out into the side streets. All our phones were off and bagged, and everyone had maps that used back streets without cameras to get to Steelbridge. We strung out in groups of two to five, at least half a block between us, so no one would see a big group of kids Walking While Brown and call in the cops.
We regrouped at the head of the industrial road that led down to Steelbridge, lined with shuttered factories, empty and silent except for distant railway thunder.
“All right,” I said, “last call. Turn around now, or it’ll be too late.” Of course, no one was going to walk away with everyone else watching. After an awkward moment, I smiled at them all and said, “All right, you’re in.” There was chuckling and murmuring and back slapping and I led them to the back door of Steelbridge, where Antoine said we could expect to find a way in. I tried not to show how nervous I was. My hands shook as I reached for the door, then I remembered and reached into my pocket and got my gloves. “Glove up.” I turned around and watched them all do it, because if any of them left prints behind, they could lead to me. We were all in this together.
I put my earbuds on the factory network and got the music tuned in, kicking in the pass-through so I’d still hear conversation around me. It was fast, crazy salsa from Russia, thunder-beats and hard rapping over big horns and drums. We all nodded in time as we passed through the door. The lights swirled in amazing patterns, projection-mapped onto the huge masses of the factory floor, turning them into stone or wood or water or smoke as the beamers hanging down from the ceiling played over them. There were at least a hundred people already there, the giant building’s far edges lost in shadows.
* * *
I spotted a keg and headed for it, threading through some weirdly dressed dancers who were dancing even weirder, though not badly at all. Like their dance-moves were from another timeline. I would have stopped to admire them if I hadn’t seen Antoine by the keg, and if he hadn’t seen me and beckoned.
Up close, he looked like he was about to throw his head back and start speaking in tongues, that churchy look of someone right on the edge of something too big to contain in a single human body.
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it like a drowning man. “Lenae! It’s happening!”
“It really is, Antoine. What about the machines?”
He used his free hand to gesture at them, the men and women working on them. “Just getting started. We hit some snags with the power-meters, didn’t want them to snitch us out, but—” He gestured at the dancers. “We got some skilled assistance.”
I looked at the dancers again. They were … weird in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone dressed quite like them before, printer clothes that crinkled and rustled like the thermal blankets the homeless people used, cut in boxy lines like a child’s drawing, right down to the thick piping that ran around the edges like crayon lines. It looked a little like the stuff you saw refugees wearing in the videos where they washed up on a beach—or bobbed in the sea, or crowded against a fence in a camp somewhere. But they were also party clothes, definitely, sparkly and bright, and I’d never heard of party-cut refugee wear. Or had I?
I stood up on my toes and whispered in his ear, one word: “Walkaways?”
He nodded and I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. I’d seen documentaries about them, and sometimes you heard about them in the news. Terrorists, thieves, pirates. People who’d walked away from it all, living in the forgotten and empty places, recycling toxic waste and their own tailings into weird funhouse versions of civilization, like horror-movie sets. If Wobblies were exciting radicals, walkaways were orcs and ghouls.
The dancers seemed a lot scarier all of a sudden. I knew that walkaways got mentioned in the same breaths as Communist Parties, but I always figured that that was a scare-story. I thought Communist Parties were about wearing fake beards that hung off of fake glasses, not rotting civilization from within.
What’s more, I’d brought all my friends along for this. If the cops got word of the walkaways here, there’d be no mercy. Just being in the same building as them could land us all in prison for a long, long time. No wonder Detective No-Name had such a hard-on to figure out what was going on. He wasn’t trying to stop a party, he was trying to catch terrorists.
“Antoine—”
I could tell he’d seen the expression on my face and had an idea of what was going through my head. He put a hand on my shoulder and steered me into a private room to one side of the factory floor, some kind of supply closet with high shelves under ancient fluorescent tube lights, the shelves bare and showing the dusty outlines of the stuff that had been piled on them when Steelbridge had still been running as a real factory.
“I know what you’re going to say.” He had beer on his breath. Was he drunk? How drunk?
“Walkaways? Antoine, when the cops find out—”
“Cops aren’t going to find out, Lenae, that’s the point. Who do you think knows how to fool the power-meters? They got their own internet, running it off drones and blimps; they hacked the meters to think they were still talking to LADWP. Not only that, they also got the mills and the rollers, hell, all the machines, got ’em unlocked from the manufacturers so they’ll even turn on. That’s all walkaway shit, no one here could do it.”
“So what you’re saying is that you knew all along they’d be here.”
He made a pained face and I knew I’d caught him. “Yeah, I knew it. You shoulda known it too. Who do you think started the Communist Parties? Who do you think makes ’em possible? Hell, Lenae, what do you think the point of them is?”
That shut me up. An hour before, I’d been dedicated to making something happen in the world instead of letting the world happen to me. I’d been willing to risk everything to prove that I had a place here. What was the point of Communist Parties? To push back, to write 50-foot-tall graffiti in the form of stolen machines and furniture and cars and vehicles. Shopping carts for homeless people. But walkaways?
“We get caught in the same place as those dudes, it’s going to be a terrorism bust, you know that.”
“Those dudes are the reason we’re not going to
get caught. They’re the real deal, the resistance, you know? They’re out there all the time, keeping low and getting away with it every day. They’re good people to know.”
A thing I’ve noticed about Shirelle and her family is that they can always find the bright side, even when they really have to dig for it. My family was a lot better at worrying about the downside. Which was why, even though I was the one who wanted to have a Communist party, she was the one who ended up making it happen.
I tried to look at it like Shirelle would, like Antoine would. I had brought thirty kids to a Communist party where there was free beer, dangerous and amazing machines, and walkaways. I was going to be a living legend (assuming none of them ratted me out) (shut up, Lenae).
“OK, Antoine, OK. But if we all end up getting rendered to Tajikistan, I’m gonna blame you.”
“I’ll slip you a hacksaw.”
He was still a handsome fool. “Get me a beer, fool.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
Shirelle’s side-eye when Antoine and I got out of the closet could have cut steel. I crossed my eyes at her and stuck out my tongue, and got Antoine to fill me a second red cup for her. I handed it to her and clicked cups. As we drank, the software that was DJing kicked into a song we both loved, but a mix neither of us had ever heard, and Shirelle started to bop her head a little, and then I did it too and then we drank up and hit the floor, and a space opened for us as we started to dance for real. I’m a good dancer, and Shirelle is a great dancer (I got good by paying attention to her) and the other partygoers paid us the highest compliment: they danced, too.
For a while, it was just like any party: dancing, grinning faces, the crazy lights—now the software was picking out people and projection-mapping them, turning them into shimmering fish-creatures or stone statues or red-skinned devils. The walkaways’ crazy party clothes made an especially great canvas for the painted light, and when one of them got lit up, the rest of us formed a circle around them while they busted their best moves, trying to see if they could outpace the lightning-fast reflexes of the projection-mapping program.