Chapter 5

May 3rd, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Julie’s heart skipped a beat when the hall monitor told her to visit the DEO after lunch, giving her a note to skip third period. She took five minutes in the corridor to center her mind and discipline her emotions with a Qabalist mantra, putting on her best poker face.

Someone had taped a simple protest sign — “2 + 2 = 5” — on the door to the Coordinator’s office. A sudden paranoid impulse gripped Julie — she should tear down the “2 + 2” poster before going in; if she didn’t the Coordinator might assume she’s the one who put it there based on timing alone! Stop thinking like you’re a protagonist in an Orwell novel. Don’t turn on others out of fear. She’s a woke busybody, not the Stasi. PHB just had really terrible luck. Leave other people’s free speech alone.

So she just walked into the opulent, carpeted office just opposite the principal’s. “I’m here to see Ms. Dikscheide?”

The receptionist nodded. “Yes, yes, Julie Lambert, right? Please go on in.”

The Diversity Coordinator smiled warmly as she entered. Her name was Alison Dikscheide, but to Julie she was just the Coordinator. Her inner narrative did not accord the Coordinator a name. She was a ruthless functionary in a totalitarian bureaucracy, and Julie thought of her by title alone accordingly. It was an active act of mental dissent. Having gained so much power over others by embracing a coercive collectivist movement, she did not deserve the dignity of recognition as an individual.

She’d qualified for her position leading the DEO by her time spent as a community organizer, and she first became significant as a community organizer by the reputation she’d built up on the Internet making queer-centered, homoerotic Steven Universe fan art, writing essays about the subversive nature of fanwork and calling out instances of perceived bigotry in several different fandoms. In spite of the fan art, she claimed to be a ‘grey ace’ — that is, asexual. Maybe she’s only sexually attracted to really badly drawn cartoons. Julie didn’t learn this though some sinister investigation; it was all on the Coordinator’s official bio on the MWA website. Because people included that in their official bios these days.

Man, the world had gotten weird lately.

“Miss Lambert. Thank you so much for taking the time to see me. You’ve made quite an impression around campus recently.”

Julie nodded and smiled pleasantly, maintaining a carefully disciplined calm. “Thank you.”

“You’re Toshia’s friend, aren’t you?”

Fuck. Was this about that? The Coordinator had encouraged Toshia to run for prom queen, talking about all the barriers it had the potential to shatter. Toshia had asked Julie’s advice. She’d been honest — Toshia was pretty enough, but even discounting transphobia she rarely talked to anyone. Shy girls are not set up to run prom campaigns for obvious reasons. She’d get crushed — or get a condescending, rigged award. It would also open her to obvious vectors for emotional abuse, and Julie pointed that out. So Toshia didn’t run. It wasn’t about negating a rival — Toshia couldn’t rival her. The Coordinator would have an obvious motive to dislike Julie for giving that advice, however. It was a shame she knew about that — Julie wanted to avoid her notice.

“I’m casually acquainted with her. She’s nice.”

“That’s very good of you.”

There was something just ... cheap about how she put that. The Coordinator wasn’t looking at her sternly, though; her body language seemed to express sympathy and compassion. “I’m so sorry. This isn’t going to be a comfortable conversation; it may even be traumatic. But I want you to know you are in a supportive environment that celebrates both feminine power and healing. You understand that, right?”

“Yes, Miss Dikscheide.”

“Our office has uncovered evidence of a serious bias incident at MWA, which we are currently investigating. I don’t know how to tell you this, but you may have been victimized without being aware of it.”

Julie tried to look concerned. Oh, she thought. They’ve finally noticed Decepticon Bonnie’s constant and unsubtle slut-shaming? Maybe she said something outré enough that they had to take notice. I might need to weaken that curse-box. I don’t want to use the DEO against her, though — it’s a terror weapon in all but formal designation.

“Look,” the Coordinator said, her voice soft and nurturing. “I need you to listen to a recording that’s come into our possession. It concerns people speaking of you personally in a derogatory, misogynistic and demeaning fashion. I don’t know if you’ve heard any rumors, but I wanted the first person to bring it to your attention to be a sympathetic and feminist-centered voice. I’d be quite happy to leave the room while you listen...”

Thank you for telling me how I should feel about this before I even know what it is. “Thank you, Ma’am. That isn’t necessary.”

The Coordinator played a section of Dwight’s recording on her laptop. Julie prevented her from stopping midway through. “I ... I know I can’t begin to understand what you’re feeling right now...”

You’re right. You really can’t. You’re treating it like some kind of harassment, and I’m wondering how I can get that tape home with me so I can jill off imagining all those guys naked together, talking about me like that... It was a clever line, Julie had to ruefully admit — designed to coach her into feeling violated over something that wasn’t in reality all that malign. It was the culmination of all the subtle cues and carefully cultivated atmosphere of barely-controlled hysteria that had characterized the appointment so far. It disgusted Julie.

If you train the people you claim to champion to be snowflakes, she thought, it will come to rest on your conscience when they go outside and melt. But the DEO wouldn’t care. People’s lives melting would only be more grist for their outrage mills, and thus a vector through which to expand the membership of their populist movement. As they so often accused their enemies, the cruelty was the point. It profited them directly.

“If you need a recovery space, we have a healing room just next door with crayons and stuffed animals...”

Okay, now that’s just stupid! It’s self-parody now. But the Coordinator sounded perfectly serious. Don’t giggle. Don’t giggle. Giggling would be BAD. Julie didn’t giggle. She just looked polite and indifferent when she next spoke. “I ... this is a bit surreal. I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. I haven’t experienced any sexual harassment or abuse. The guys on that tape have been nothing but civil to me in person. The only thing they’ve done is talk about some sexual fantasies and dreams they had about me. It seems like they were unaware they were being recorded. If I may ask, how did you come by that recording?”

“It was given to us by a very brave whistleblower, whose anonymity we intend to protect with absolute diligence.”

“I see.” Fuck you, DB! Fuck you forever! What the fuck have you done?!

The Coordinator stood up and walked over to Julie. She actually had a nice body — the thought struck Julie as surreal, but still true. At just over thirty she was tall, athletic and very top-heavy — moreso than she may have preferred, honestly, given the image she tried to project. She had a short grey pencil skirt, fancy maroon blouse with an Arabesque pattern, an ornate African necklace and bare arms. It met the standards of business casual, albeit barely, while being sexual in that brassy, confrontational, third-wave-feminist way. She was no doubt eager for some man to say her dress was inappropriate, so she could roast him on Twitter for policing women’s sexuality — before she got back to her apparent day job of policing men’s sexuality.

Her hair was short, curly and dyed an unnaturally bright neon red — really, that more than anything ruined her sex appeal to Julie’s aesthetic sense. She could have been really attractive, if her personal fashion wasn’t more focused on screaming at the world than appealing to it. Julie noted the IWW “Wobblies” tattoo on one shoulder and the ‘Stevonnie’ tattoo on the other.

The Coordinator walked behind Julie and ran a hand through her hair. It was a gesture intended to convey support and empathy — and claim an unearned intimacy — but it felt skeevier than anything in the recording. “I don’t think you understand. This has the potential to be a teachable moment, a social moment. Your moment. You have an opportunity, here, to be a leader — and I know that is something that appeals to you. You can call out toxic masculinity and make the world safer for young women everywhere.”

Julie frowned. “And the boys?”

“If you agree to film a victim impact statement, and it’s sufficiently ... emotive, I can all but guarantee their expulsion. Furthermore, their names will be remembered — on social media and elsewhere — forever.”

Ok, reappraisal time. Maybe she actually IS the Stasi after all. The Coordinator continued speaking. “We’ve got a novel angle on this — we can, I think, fairly characterize what they’ve been doing as verbal deepfake pornography, and that has a good chance of catching media interest. I know it’s a difficult thing to do, but if you carry through with it, you will be remembered as a hero and a role model to young women everywhere! Isn’t that something that a girl like you would want?”

No. I have bigger dreams than being a carefully-managed mouthpiece for your creepy movement’s agitprop. But she had to word this diplomatically. “I do not see the offense in this that you apparently do.”

“You can’t deny that this toxic banter is rank with misogyny, objectification and rape culture.”

As she talked, Julie’s mind whirled, struggling to understand. The tape wasn’t offensive to her, but it was pretty weird. It was a bug in her system, she realized with a shiver. So stupid! Even with a jacked-up intelligence, she hadn’t wanted to see it. Intellect did not replace experience, and she was still only nineteen. The boost to male confidence, and the influence of Mercury — the Planetary Governor of Communication — in the spell also made the boys more confident in talking about their sexuality. They didn’t feel ashamed, so they broke with the typical social norms and talked about their dreams. And it was “toxic masculinity,” and now this ... this grass-roots surveillance state people like the Coordinator had built was gearing up to destroy their lives over it.

“You know,” Julie said, “an argument could be made that you’re participating in gendered oppression yourself, by stigmatizing the sexual dynamic around an upwardly mobile young woman.”

That was really stupid, Julie realized. She knew it as soon as she said it. She was a thinker. She engaged with ideas. She could even engage with inane, incoherent ideas if a situation called for it. But debate here was meaningless. Thinking the ideology mattered was a mistake. Groups like the DEO didn’t care about their purported ideology. They used ideological displays as scent-signals to attract populist support, but they didn’t actually follow the ideology in any principled way. It was just a tool. They cared about power, attention and influence. The tape sounded crass and sexist. It was an election year. The ideology could be fudged, to preserve movement momentum.

The Coordinator no longer held a nurturing pretense. She was angry. “That tape is textbook toxic masculinity! The world hardly needs more juvenile male fantasies, now, does it?”

I don’t know; I’ve sure found reasons to appreciate them recently! But that was not an appropriate answer. “It is not given to anyone but the dreamer and the fantasist to decide what dreams and fantasies the world does and does not need.”

“Bullshit,” the Coordinator snapped, now furious. “The world is choked with this putrid adolescent trash. We suffocate in it every day of our lives, blissfully unaware that we are being buried alive! It empowers white supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchy by drowning out marginalized voices. Male sexual fantasies are inherently expressions of subtextual violent intent against women, and they certainly don’t belong in a school! Clearing out this sort of retrograde cultural pollution is an act of liberation!”

Those are people’s dreams you’re talking about! Julie felt sick. She’d been right, back in the cafeteria. This was her fault, her narcissism. It was more than that, though.

Sex is powerful. Sex, even in dreams, creates bonds between people. Duke, Marvin, Amed, Donny and so many others ... she felt like she knew them. She was a voyeur, in a sense. She knew that, and had dismissed the immorality of it months ago. But she couldn’t dismiss the taste of them, the windows into the most intimate and unguarded part of their lives that she had peeked through. But the window looks both ways. Now, in exchange for the thrills and popularity, she was surprised at the visceral protectiveness and responsibility she felt toward them.

“Men and women are interconnected,” Julie pointed out. “If you try to tear all the male fantasies out of society, how many women’s dreams are you going to trample in the process?”

“Society is having a moment, sweetie. We’re moving to a more equitable and less outmoded gender dynamic. A bit of collateral here and there is to be expected. Women no longer have the time or patience to tolerate this kind of trash. Get on the train or get run over.”

“I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I will not be filing a bias report.”

The Coordinator glared furiously at Julie — but then her glare twisted into a malign little smile. “You’re not saying you did anything to elicit this behavior, are you Miss Lambert?”

Julie glanced at the Maoist-style big character poster directly behind the Coordinator’s head — “Slut Shaming Is Violence” in big black Copperplate Gothic letters — and wondered if it meant she could punch her in the face and cite self defense. Of course not. The rules are for us, not for them.

“I’m sorry,” Julie repeated. “I will not be filing a bias report. Nor will I answer questions about anything that does not pertain to bias incidents.”

A vein pulsed on the Coordinator’s head. She clearly wasn’t used to students being anything but deferential to her. Julie thought she was stumped — and then, in one swift instant, the Coordinator changed everything and thrust Julie’s whole reality into crisis.

“You know, we ... we tolerate this whole archaic prom court thing. We don’t have to. We can stop. Other schools have. As long as we do, though, anyone aspiring to that position would be well advised to help us in our mission to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive community here at MWA. Without that commitment, the whole concept seems pretty valueless, doesn’t it? I think that I can make that case fairly solidly to the prom committee, and they’ll see it from my perspective.”

There was a sudden lump in Julie’s throat. Her emotional control was breaking. The threat was legit. Everything she’d spent the whole last year working for was in danger. She was scared, and angry. The Coordinator saw that and pushed. “Just help us,” she said. “Silence is violence. Help us to help young women everywhere. Be a hero, not a collaborator, and your name will be etched in the annals of history...”

Prom is not like a job interview or the Olympics. If you botch an Olympic showing, you can train and train with all your will and desperation, and maybe — if you’re good — make a comeback some other year. If you want to pursue the prom court, you will only ever get one shot. Each human being has one and only one prom night in their lives. Once it’s fucked, it’s fucked. There’s no second chance, no do-over. Julie was by natural temperament a pragmatic thinker. She knew she was in a situation where, if everything was about her, there was a clear right and wrong answer. Eight months ago, the decision would not have been a hard one for her to make.

Sex changes people, though.

Transfixed in a moment of stark moral crisis, she reached out to her True Will — the innermost essence of her being, and the highest self-truth she could hold herself in accord to — for guidance, and was surprised when it answered her directly. This above all else: take accountability for your own actions. A victory without ethics is inherently Pyrrhic, while a defeat in virtue unbowed can be a crucible on the endless alchemical journey toward self-perfection.

“I’m sorry,” Julie snapped. “I’m not going to help you destroy young men’s lives to sate your own selfish desire for political theatre. If you want your twenty-second interview on The View so badly, find someone else to help you get it.”

Thirty seconds later, she was walking out of the Diversity and Equity Office, stone-faced and stoic, the stinging red handprint still visible on her face. At least she knew what she had said hit home.

Julie felt sick. Everything she’d worked for was melting, slipping through her fingers like sand. Her stomach churned. She had skipped fourth period. She snuck down a maintenance hallway and used a credit card to pick the lock to an unused classroom on the fourth floor. Mr. Deacon used to teach chemistry here. He’d died during the pandemic. Julie vomited in his waste basket, then sat in the center of the classroom and meditated, softly chanting to try and clear her mind. Khabs am Pekht. Konx om Pax. Light in extension. Khabs am Pekht... There was a nest of feral hamsters chittering at the back of the classroom, because of course there was. There was probably a nest of feral hamsters in every infrequently-used place at MWA now.

The Coordinator probably wouldn’t be able to speak to the prom committee today. Janet Virmire would be with Fifth Block on a field trip. There was a way she could still salvage this, Julie knew — both her own campaign and her dream-lovers’ futures. She couldn’t curse or mentally influence the Coordinator without a sympathetic link like DB’s hair or Harry’s ... tissue sample. She didn’t see how she could get one either. Doing anything suspicious around the Coordinator after their last meeting could get her in big, big trouble. But that wasn’t her plan.

She just had to kill the Coordinator. It would fix everything.

She could do that just by manipulating the physical world. She had in her purse a knotted cord that stored within it a solid ten seconds of 80 mph wind. She’d enchanted it as an emergency safety precaution after Chinese Bonnie mentioned her fear of floating with Rich Bonnie on the squad. If anything ever did go hideously wrong — like, say, a cheerleader getting pitched unexpectedly into the bleachers — she’d planned to use it to rescue them with a convenient if inexplicable updraft to catch them and drop them somewhere safe.

Realign the spell, concentrate ten seconds of kinetic energy into one, focus it on an area the size of a baseball ... yeah, you could blow someone’s head clean off with that. It’d take bloodwork to realign the spell, and she’d probably incur some level of spellburn, but she could endure the pain and heal. Would that look too overtly supernatural, though, and draw the attention of other Adepts? Bizarre, sure, but occult? She wasn’t sure.

There were other options, subtler options. Mundanes were so fragile — failed brake line, stopped heart, ruptured blood vessel in the brain. The Coordinator was a deeply angry woman — a heart attack or aneurysm was honestly credible. It was reckless — it would mean channeling raw entropy, and she’d never rehearsed the spells, having no plan to use them before now — but she felt sure she’d succeed if she chose to take the chance. There were more spiritual consequences there, of course. Think this through! This is literally life and death here! Choose wisely!

Mundanes had no way to investigate magick. There were no other Adepts in Bentonville, which meant she could get away with a lot. It would be like child’s play. It’s why she peered out a window inconspicuously open only an inch. She was like an untraceable mystic sniper — or she could be, at least.

There was just one problem with the plan: Julie wasn’t quite sure she wanted to own being a psychopath. She’d never taken a human life. Okay, sure; once, back when she was twelve, she’d killed a sapient being — but that had been a clear-cut case of defense of the innocent, and the victim wasn’t even corporeal let alone human. The Coordinator was loathsome, and was threatening to ruin people’s lives, but did that make it justified? No, it obviously wasn’t. One of the earliest ways Julie had mentally set herself apart from other Adepts was in deciding she was, she ought to be beholden to mundane law just like every other person on the planet.

Sure, the chances of her getting caught were infinitesimal, but she would always know, and she was wise enough to know that would change her. Who else, after the Coordinator? Would she get casual about it? She’d used a probability-working to get her parents to leave Boston to get out of an environment that encouraged exactly this kind of stunt. (She’d just wanted a small town; fate gave her parents job openings in a small town that was the birthplace and headquarters of the world’s largest retail chain. But it was well known fateworking never quite did exactly what the caster wanted, anyway. Regardless, she’d grown to like Bentonville.)

Another disconcerting thought came to her as well. I’ve mentally catalogued all the techniques the Coordinator has used to induce hysteria in the student body, assuming I was above them all ‘cause I can chant in Hebrew. I’ve been so arrogant. I have no idea how altered, how unbalanced, I actually may be right now by all her mundane brainwashing. I need more time to decompile my psyche — but the window of opportunity is here right now...

Julie wasn’t sure, after the fact, if she made an enlightened moral decision the way she had in the Coordinator’s office hours earlier — or if she just chickened out and couldn’t steel her nerve. Her True Will wasn’t going to answer two calls in one day, after all. Either way, she watched impotently as the Coordinator got in her sporty little EV and drove off, safe and sound.

May 6th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

The school didn’t even notify her she’d been pulled from the prom court ballot — but lots of students did. Ten months of intensive labor burnt up in an instant due to an arbitrary and capricious authority. In their ineptitude, they hoped it just wouldn’t be noticed or talked about. It was, of course, immediately, and the whole student body knew who was responsible. Julie didn’t even have to tell them. She didn’t do anything. Teachers awkwardly deferred questions about it.

Julie had a lot of options, if she really wanted to push things. She could start calling in favors from people that liked her — lots of people liked her — to protest the DEO meddling with the student council. She’d love to see them try to justify to their greater social movement why they had intervened in a prom court to decide which thin pretty middle class white girl would get the tiara. She could also skulk around trying to get something to use as a sympathetic link on the Coordinator. She could even angle her dream-walking more toward the faculty and take up information warfare, trying to seduce people in dreams who might have dirt on the DEO.

The problem was, all that shit was dumb. It was exactly the kind of scrub-stunts an immature brat with mystic power would pull, a Daddy’s Little Girl. As long as she was enrolled in MWA, the DEO had real power — not just to mess up her prom run, but to mess up her life, her career, her future. The optimal time to retaliate against them was obviously after graduation. She wouldn’t be in their sphere then, but they would always be in hers. But that meant reconciling herself to the loss of her dream — so that’s what she’d force herself to do. Down, girl. Real life is not a YA dystopia; you do not get to be the Mockingjay. That ‘inspiration’ shit doesn’t actually work. Know when it’s over — pick up the pieces and move on.