Chapter 121: Spreading Waves

Monday, May 2, 1983

I’d barely gotten out of my car, and hadn’t even opened the door for Jasmine, when Jess slammed into me.

“That ... was... amazing!” she said, hugging me.

“It was,” I said, hugging her.

“I’ll let you help your girlfriend,” she said, giggling.

I went around and helped Jas out. She immediately hugged Jess.

“It was amazing, wasn’t it?” Jas said.

“I never would’ve believed it. My powers wouldn’t have made that happen.”

“It took a team,” I said.

Angie and Paige got out, both exchanging hugs with Jess. Paige looked a trifle surprised about it, and not much really gets to Paige. Still ... Jess is Jessica Lively, after all, and that’s enough to get to many people.

We walked towards the building.

“Hey, Marshall!” I heard from somewhere to the left. The tone wasn’t friendly.

“Yeah?” I said, looking.

Something whizzed past my ear as I turned my head. It turned out to be a raw egg, which hit just behind us. Fortunately, none of the goop hit any of us.

“You’re going to hell for helping them, and you know they are,” the guy said. He stepped out, and I recognized ... well ... someone. He was a senior, but that’s about all I knew.

“I’d have to believe that helping friends is a mortal sin,” I said, “And that being lesbian is a mortal sin. Since I don’t...”

“It’s right there in the Bible, you moron!”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “Read those passages, then come talk to me when you actually know something.”

Glancing off to the side, I saw Ms. Chesney closing in from behind him. That gave me a little inward laugh. Paige made a noise that wasn’t quite so inward.

“I know more than you do,” he said.

“I think we’ll have to disagree.”

“Gentlemen! And ladies, of course!” Ms. Chesney said. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing, Ms. Chesney,” the other guy said.

I shrugged. “My ... friend ... here seemed to think that I needed some protein.”

I nodded towards the splattered egg.

“You’re throwing eggs at people, now, Peter?” Ms. Chesney said.

“I ... my hand slipped.”

“Really? And why were you bringing raw eggs to school?” she said.

Then she turned to look at us. “You can go on your way.”

“Thank you, Ms. Chesney,” I said. The girls echoed that, and we headed on in.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned the egg?” Paige said.

“She’d already seen it. That was a test. Besides, they’ll come after me either way,” I said.

“Sucks,” she said.

Jess shook her head. “He’s right. There’s a group that’s really pissed off. They thought they’d be able to rile everyone up, and they’re furious that we outmaneuvered them.”

“Not my fault that people like Lizzie,” I said.

Jess snorted. “It’s so your fault, and you know it! Not just you, but you more than anyone else, including Lizzie.”

“I do try to help.”

“We’re all lucky we’re on the same side,” Angie said.

Jess chuckled. “That we are. That we really are. This school would be a crater if we all started going after each other.”

“Never gonna happen,” Jas said. “I was the closest, and ... nah.”

Jess hugged Jas, warmly. “Silly. You weren’t close at all. Promise!”

“Aw,” Jas said, and hugged back.

From that point on, the day was mostly hugs and handshakes and high fives. Mostly.

The morning announcements opted for minimalism: ‘Memorial’s Senior Prom was held last Saturday and a good time was had by all. Congratulations to the Social Committee for a most memorable occasion.’ Principal Riggs had obviously decided to double down on the ‘it was a success, and nothing went wrong’ storyline. Good.

I had some very ... pointed ... notes shoved into my locker. Hell got a lot of mention. And burning. And Satan, who I guess supports lesbians, or something. And some Bible verse numbers, most of which I’m pretty sure didn’t say what the note-writer thought they said.

There were no more overt threats, but I was going to watch my back for a while at least. For a religion whose founder had made a point of saying ‘If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek too,’ there seemed to be a lot of people who found an excuse for violent action in their faith. Oh, Jesus wasn’t a pacifist — that’s also a misreading — but his version of action didn’t include beating up evildoers. Now, if Batman had started a major world religion...

It only took until between first and second period for Lizzie and Janet to find me. We all hugged, of course.

Lizzie said, “This is ridiculous!”

“Oh?” I said.

“We had a dozen reporters at my house yesterday. A dozen! Local and national NBC, CBS, and ABC, plus AP and UPI, plus stringers from Time, Newsweak, and Useless News, and — last, but definitely not least — a guy from the Wall Street Journal! It’s insane!”

I chuckled, partly because Lizzie had used the Debate names. We tended to say ‘Newsweak’ and ‘Useless News and Worthless Report.’ Compared to Time, they tended to not hold up so well, or at least we thought they didn’t.

Janet giggled. “I think it’s totally awesome, dude. If anyone should get their name in lights, it’s us.”

Under the bubbly exterior, I saw a little bit of worry there, though. Janet was playing her role, but...

“Any problems?”

“Nah. And we’re ready.”

“There were some things shoved into our lockers,” Lizzie said.

“Which you’ve had for years, love.”

“Worse. Much worse. Much worse,” Lizzie said, shaking her head.

“Police worse?” I said.

“What could they do? They’re not going to keep a patrol car on us or anything. We’ll manage. We are ready. I just ... I wish people could just...”

“Me, too,” I said. “Me, too. Just let people be.”

“You don’t make history by sitting quietly at the back of the bus,” Janet said. “A little noise is important, sometimes. Them being riled up means we did something.”

I nodded. “You did something big. How big, I don’t know. The Wall Street Journal?”

“The Wall Street Journal,” Lizzie said. “Nice guy. They’ll try to play to both sides, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “They’d have to.”

“Gotta run or we’re totally tardy,” Janet said. “Catch ya later!”

“Catch ya later,” I said. She was right. I had to scoot to make it to class.

Mel met us at lunch and tossed a copy of the Chronicle on the table.

“Did you see this?”

I shook my head. “We get evening.”

“Open.”

I just unfolded it and there, on the cover, just below the fold, was ‘High School Prom Draws Praise, Outrage.’

“Oh, my,” I said.

“You knew it was going to be there.”

“Not on the front page!”

“It gets better inside.”

I skimmed it. Quotes from Janet, from Lizzie, from Principal Riggs, from Cam and Barry (very much opposing views — Cam had to support it, of course). The article was continued on page seven. I flipped through to there, then stopped and stared.

In the center of the page, the pull quote read: ‘Everyone should be welcomed and respected, regardless of how they look, what they believe, or who they love.’

“Oh ... my,” I said.

Ang looked over my shoulders. “Cool pull quote ... wait! That’s yours!”

Paige looked. “Holy shit!”

From somewhere off to the side floated, “Language!”

“Sorry, Ms. Wolkowski,” Paige said.

“Don’t let it happen again.”

“What’s a ‘pull quote’?” Emily said.

“Those quotes you set off in bigger type like that. They’re ‘pulled’ from the story to catch your eye,” Angie said. “Something I learned in Debate. I forget people don’t know it.”

“That is so cool!” Emily said.

By then everyone was looking. “Seriously?” Mike said. “They picked your quote?”

Sarah grinned. “Sounds just like you, Steve.”

Connie gave me a hug. “And I know you really believe that, all the way down.”

I hugged her back. “Of course.”

“This is nuts,” Cal said. “Good, I mean. Really good. But ... Memorial? No one would ever have expected this.”

“No one would’ve expected Lizzie to win with a solid majority, or to become fairly popular, especially with the popular people,” I said. “That’s the hard part. Once you’ve done the impossible, the rest is a piece of cake.”

That got a solid laugh from everyone. It was pretty much true. The heavy lifting for this had been done over a year ago, and everything since then (Nationals, the dress code, and so forth) had just reinforced that Lizzie was a cool person. As they said (or will say?) in the 2020s, ‘Haters gonna hate,’ but mostly we didn’t have haters. We had the usual high school bullies and power games, but once someone was out of the cross-hairs and into the ‘safe’ category, that was it. Move on to another target.

Meanwhile, my words were sitting there as a pull quote in a newspaper. Not a big newspaper — not the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or even the Chicago Tribune — but a big-city major newspaper.

Who’d have thought it? This was one heck of a wave, now. Hopefully, we’d ride it well.

I pored over the Chronicle article during a couple of my classes. It wasn’t all feel-good stuff. Two Baptist ministers, one from a future megachurch, denounced the whole thing in no uncertain terms. One former Houston City Council candidate said that the city was turning into Sodom and we needed to repent now or face God’s wrath.

It was no surprise to me. I wondered if we might have moved up the ‘Straight Slate’ timetable from my first life. If so, would that be better, or would it be worse? Could they win? Winning would be ... bad. Not really bad, but it would set the wrong tone and set the city back instead of moving it forward.

Was the road to hell (or at least to heck) paved with good intentions? It looked like we might find out.

The Drama people were excited, of course, but that was nothing compared to Debate. I’d said before that Debate was a party, but this? This was something else. Two of us (three, counting me) were an actual bona fide news story.

Amit set things in motion when I came in. “Steve! I was just telling Janet and Lizzie that I added a Memorial Prom folder to my Extemp box!”

I chuckled. “Gonna say that you know us, if you get to talk about it?”

“Most certainly! When you’ve got it...”

We all chuckled. He didn’t complete the sentence, probably thankfully.

Meg said, “I’ve told you that you’re a special group of kids, but this was another level! I am so damn proud of you, Janet and Lizzie!”

She had tears in her eyes when she hugged them. I think it surprised both of them. I was, but then ... maybe I wasn’t, in a way. Maybe I knew what she felt.

“You’re both so special,” she said. “I’ve watched my Seniors, so many of them, go to Prom and have a great time and all that, and I spent so long thinking it was terribly unfair that you couldn’t have that. Then ... then you went and did it!”

“We did it,” Lizzie said, nodding to the room. “Everyone here, everyone who helped us all these years. I freely admit that I was a bitch sometimes, especially early on. I had my reasons, but ... anyway. None of you held that against me, and Janet made me see that it wasn’t helping, and...”

Janet nodded. “But I only made her see that because it wasn’t. A few more jerks and she’d have been right.”