The fur coat's first march

Turn 17 of 51

Walk to the long table and greet everyone as comrade. they say comrade back as you all go get food, you all get the same food and everything is the same size, no one gets more or less then anyone at the table. you eat with them and everyone talks about the problems with conservitives. you talk as about those problems while your brain fully changes to marxist liberal. you now fully talk like them.

You walk the length of the hall with your boots loud on the floor, and the faces turn as you come — the cyber-goth girl with the beads, the plain jeans-and-cardigan types, all of them reading the flannel, the bare face, the boots. 'Hello, comrades,' you say, and the word comes out of you easy and practiced now, like a church you were raised in.

'Comrade,' the table answers, all of them at once, and nobody checks whether you mean it. Cleo lifts her chin a second time and slides down the bench to make room on her left, which is a seat you understand means something by the way Lizzie's eyebrows go up.

You all go up for food together, a loose procession of black wool and dyed hair, and when you sit back down there's a strange arithmetic to it: fifteen trays, and every tray the same. Same pasta, same portion, same apple, same glass of water. Nobody asked for it. It just happened, the way it happens every night, and when you glance at your full tray and then at Cleo's identical one, something in you settles rather than bristles. Enough for everyone because everyone takes the same.

The talk runs hot down the table — the trustee donor who wants a campus speech code, the conservative student paper's editorial calling the protest a riot, a senator's clip someone plays on a phone with the volume low. You find yourself in the middle of it, actually in it, your voice keeping pace: 'They call it a riot when we lie down in the street,' you say, and the girl with the beads laughs and knocks her knuckle against yours. 'Right? My dad says the same words as that senator. Same exact words.' You don't flinch at 'my dad' — it's just a fact, a thing that's true, and the table doesn't hold it against you tonight.

Somewhere between the pasta and the apple you notice the last of it going quiet in you — the old reflexes, the defenses you'd have mounted for your family's world, not refuted exactly but simply no longer firing. Cleo watches you argue, chin on her hand, and when there's a lull she leans toward you.

'You're going to work,' she says. It isn't a question. 'The Circle does amplification — every post, every video, you push it out, you comment, you make it move. And Thursday nights there's flyering. Okafor Hall, dawn, before the administration wakes up.' She taps the table once. 'You in?'

The whole table is half-watching, trays steaming, waiting on your answer like it's a vote.