Turn 31 · The fur coat's first march

Keep flyering the queue and talk with the students reading the flyer all the way through. split hair comrade in converse and the faded t-shirt, mullet comrade in the emo lug boots and camisole top, shaved side comrade in the emo lug boots and flannel do the same as you. this goes on the rest of the day as lunch is skipped by all 16 of you. its doesnt matter tho. at 6, you all pick the tent up.

You work the queue as it renews itself all day, class letting out in waves, students streaming toward the tents between periods. You've traded toward the rotation paper's own logic — you're in Converse and mesh, and beside you the grey-and-ebony comrade wears Converse and the faded logo shirt, the ultraviolet mullet comrade wears the emo lug boots with the camisole, the pink pompadour wears the emo lug boots with the flannel. you all wear the same skinny black jeans. Four interpretations of one paper, one silhouette between you. The flyer goes out and the talk goes with it. The students who read it all the way through are the ones you stop for: a girl in a puffer jacket who didn't know the athletics wing had a donor's name on the deed; a boy who says his residence hall's RA was pushed out last spring and asks twice whether Okafor's case is documented; three friends from the business school who argue with you for ten minutes and leave with three flyers anyway. Each conversation ends the same way, you flat, they shaken or convinced or at least holding the page. Noon comes and goes. The volunteers order pizza to the tent table and eat it working, and the smell crosses the queue, and nobody in the four of you moves. Lunch is skipped — all sixteen of you, across the whole campus, a fast observed without announcement. It doesn't matter, and you register that it doesn't matter the way you register the portion, the emptiness a fact agreed on by everyone at once, the work worth more than the meal. The afternoon queue thins with the light. You run the line to its tail and back so many times the pavement's crack pattern maps itself under your Converse, and the pink-pompadour comrade keeps opening students with her one question, and the mullet comrade keeps spotting the ones who read to the end. By six the queue is gone and the volunteers are breaking down the tents, and you and your three comrades pick the tent up with them — unasked, all four hands to the canvas. The lanyard volunteer watches you fold her banner and doesn't say thank you or anything else. The banner comes down last: VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT, folded into a bin. The tent collapses into its bag in under a minute, and the forecourt is bare, and the flyers are all gone from your satchel. The other three groups converge from their corners of campus as the four tents come down, and the Circle is sixteen again in the dusk, and the leader counts you with a glance and turns toward Halloran. Somewhere in the day's arithmetic a girl typed your handle into her phone. You walk back with the column, hungry and not minding, the trustee's name distributed across four parts of campus in two hundred hands.