The fur coat's first march

Turn 30 of 51

seperate into 4 groups of 4 to target the 4 main parts of campus. you, a comrade with a shaved left side and dyed flamingo pink pompadour, another comrade with a stormy grey and ebony split dyed hair and one with a ultra violet mullet with shaved sides are assigned near the student center. the other groups get their assigment and you all leave at once with each of you holding the tent.

The Circle divides on the Halloran steps into four fours, and the leader reads the assignments off her phone like a quartermaster. You draw the student center, and with you go three comrades you've worked beside but never beside alone: one with a shaved left side and a flamingo-pink pompadour defiant as a rooster's comb, one with hair split down the middle into stormy grey and ebony, one with an ultraviolet mullet, shaved sides, black jeans and boots on all three. The other groups peel off toward the library, the quad's heart, and the athletics wing — the trustee's own monument, someone notes, which gets a flat laugh. Then you leave at once, four columns becoming four pairs of hands, and your group converges on the student center's forecourt where the voting tents stand.

The tents are bright, official, staffed by student-government volunteers in lanyards, with a banner strung between poles: VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. A queue has already formed between classes, and your four fan out along it the way the Circle flyered Okafor — one at the head, one mid-line, one at the tail, you moving the length of it. The pink-pompadour comrade opens students up with a question that isn't hostile: 'Voting's good. Do you know what you're voting on?' And then the flyers come out, the labor numbers, the tenure names, the trustee's circled surname at the bottom, and the queue becomes an audience.

You hand flyer after flyer into waiting hands, and most take them, and some read them standing right there in line. A volunteer in a lanyard watches, jaw tight, then walks over. 'This is a nonpartisan tent.'

'So are we,' the grey-and-ebony comrade says, flat. 'These are facts.'

The volunteer looks at the trustee's name on the page, then at the four of you, and doesn't call security. The ultraviolet mullet comrade taps your arm and nods down the line — a cluster of students at the tent's edge reading the flyer all the way through, one of them already typing your handle into her phone. The morning's work, wearing a new face: strangers, in daylight, taking what you hand them.

You keep moving down the queue, the tent's bright banner snapping overhead, the trustee's name going out into the campus one hand at a time.