The fur coat's first march

Turn 6 of 51

Head out and walk to the courthouse steps to meet everyone. you leave your hair down as you arrive there and see everyone with posters about blm waiting for you. they greet you with a comrade. you say hello back as Cleo gives you a poster to hold. you sit with them until you see a bunch of people that look like the girls marching and yelling with posters. Cleo says its time and they join.

The campus is empty at this hour, your breath showing, the buckled boots loud on the brick. You keep your hair down and your hands in your jacket pockets, and with every block the buildings get smaller and the streets get older, until the courthouse rises ahead of you with its stone steps and its flag going limp in the cold.

They're there already. All fifteen, clustered at the bottom of the steps like a flock that landed, posters stacked against knees and backpacks — black letters on white foam board, BLACK LIVES MATTER in hands of every size, some of them painted, some stenciled, one still wet enough to shine. The septum-ring girl spots you first and says nothing, just watches you cross the last twenty feet like a referee waiting for a foul.

"Comrade Marissa," Cleo says, and the word travels down the line — "comrade" — offered back to you in fifteen different voices, some warm, some flat, one clearly sarcastic. "Hello," you say back, and it comes out clumsy, but it comes out.

Cleo peels a poster off the stack and pushes it against your chest.

"Hold it like you mean it. Straight arms, high. You're a visibility unit now." The board is lighter than you expected, the letters hand-painted, the paint bumpy under your fingers. You hold it. Your arms find the height.

You sit on the cold steps with them while the sky lightens, passing a thermos down the row, and that's when you see them coming — a river of people rounding the corner, hundreds, posters bobbing above heads, drums somewhere in the middle of it, and the chanting already audible before you can make out words. A lot of them look like the girls beside you: dyed hair, patched jackets, boots, mouth open around the same syllables. A country within the country, marching.

Cleo stands. "That's us," she says, and the whole row comes up off the steps at once. "Circle, on me. Banner pair front, Marissa with the posters. Comrades — we stay all day." She looks at you once, a beat too long, and then the fifteen of you pour down off the courthouse steps into the stream, and the chant swallows you before you've decided anything.