The Inside of Out (16 page)

From what I could glimpse over my classmates' heads, the crowd of angry protesters seemed to have quadrupled in the past few hours. No wonder Madison looked so smug. My heart was sinking when I heard Mr. Beckett, the history teacher, let out a whoop.

“Counter-protesters! Students?” He spun around to take my hand in both of his. “We're watching history unfold. Right here. Today!”

I swallowed a snort, but as the others shifted to give me a better view, I started to suspect that his enthusiasm wasn't all that overblown. The Free Speech Zone now spilled across the street and down the block. Closest to us, one group was holding up their “God hates you and loves us” signs, and yes, there were more now, but a larger group stood facing them, shouting in much more effective rhythm—and waving the biggest rainbow banner I'd ever seen.

As a siren sounded and two more police cars pulled into the parking lot, the speakers in the classroom beeped for an announcement.

“Students.”
It was Principal Zimmer. He sounded exhausted.
“Ninth period will proceed as scheduled, hubbub outside notwithstanding. I know it might be tempting, but we're going to ask you not to talk to reporters as you leave school grounds. Thanks for your cooperation.”

I felt everyone's eyes on me as we returned to our seats.

“Okay.” Mr. Beckett sat on his desk, slumping with disappointment. “Let's talk about the Industrial Revolution.”

At 4:05 p.m., the final bell had already rung, but I couldn't bring myself to leave the building. The mob outside was bigger than ever, and through an open doorway, I could see at least half a dozen news teams milling around the border of the Free Speech Zone, interviewing protesters. When the first waves of students walked out, reporters swarmed them, scanning the doorway, searching. For me.

A whistle sounded from behind me, and I turned to see QB at the end of the hall, making some sort of secret football signal that I assumed translated to “Onward!”

When I reached him, he huddle-whispered, “Do you have a ride home?”

“My mom.” Probably floating somewhere in that sea of protesters.

“Good.” He guided me through cracked glass doors into the athletic wing. “Tell her to meet us on the corner of Miller and West.”

As I hurriedly texted her, QB ducked into the boys' locker room, reemerging with a football helmet under one arm. When we reached the door that led to the football field, he stuck it on my head. It bobbled back and forth.

“Better than nothing, right?”

“Right.” I knocked on the top of it. “Thank you.”

“One more thing.” QB shrugged out of his hunting jacket and wrapped it around me. To my surprise, it smelled sweet, like wood smoke. Like a fireside, in a cabin in the woods, cozy and . . . huh.

A guy as good-looking as QB should probably have brought
to mind visions of the two of us nestling for warmth. But the most I could picture was he and I playing Chinese checkers or having a thumb-battle for the last s'more. Which actually wasn't that unpleasant a daydream. I'd always wondered what it would be like to have a sibling.

He grabbed my hand and led me across the field toward Miller Street in a too-quick jog. It was a good thing I was disguised, because if any reporters saw us right now, hand in hand, they might get the wrong idea. Again.

“Hey, Chris?” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “If anybody asks, reporters or whoever—
I'm gay,
okay?”

His face registered confusion for a full three count. Then he slapped his leg. “I
knew
it!”

I bit back a clarification. Why was this such a confusing concept for people?

“So . . .” He held out a hand to help me across the dead hedges and onto a block of modest one-story houses, where the Veggiemobile was dutifully idling. Then he removed the helmet from my head, spun it on one finger, and tucked it back under his arm. “We've got an away game, so I've gotta take off, but—you doing anything next Friday?”

Back to gay and he was
still
hitting on me. The boy didn't get it. But hey, he had just heroically orchestrated my escape from a school under siege.

I handed him back his hunting jacket with a smile. “See you at the game.”

The second I got home, my cell phone rang—and my heart started racing.

Hannah. Oh my God, how could I have forgotten her?

“Are you okay?” I asked, racing to my bedroom.

“Yeah.” She huffed. “I mean, I'm home. But it wasn't good, Daisy. The reporters completely ignored the police barricade. I could barely get into my car.”

“Oh, no!” I clicked my computer to life. “But the counter-protests—amazing, right? They're all here for you!”

“They're here for you, Daisy. They have your face on posters.”

“What?”
That called for immediate googling.

“The only question the reporters had for me was how long we'd been
dating
. I tried saying what you told me, that it was a personal matter, but it didn't work at all! There are reporters outside my house right now. I'm looking at them.”

“You should call the cops? Maybe?”

“We have.” She sighed. “Are you okay? Did you manage to get past them?”

“Yeah, I snuck away. And they don't know where I live.” I felt guilt-itchy, admitting it. “All quiet on the Daisy front.”

“Oh. That's good. That's . . . a relief.”

She didn't sound relieved. And she fell silent for so long that I started to get worried.

“Hannah?”

“This is not how I thought this would go.” Her voice was a pinprick all of a sudden.

“How what would go?”

The line echoed with her silence. Then she said:

“My
dad
called me, Daisy.”

She was crying.

“Two years and he called me because he read my name on the
Internet. That is not right. That is not what's supposed to—”

“Your dad?” I clung to the phone. “Oh my God, when? Did you talk to him? How was it?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters, Han. It's your father, it's important!”

“You don't get to decide what's important
.
”

Hannah didn't raise her voice, not a decibel, but something in the sharp measure of her tone stopped me cold. Like so many of her words lately, these sounded rehearsed—like she'd been thinking them and thinking them and finally had a chance to say them out loud.

I held on to my desk with my free hand, fighting the sensation of falling.

“I don't want to talk about my dad right now, Daisy, I just . . .” I heard her sniff hard, and then a thump, feet on wood. She must have been sitting tucked up in her window seat. “I don't want this. I never wanted this, to . . . to be talked about. In Austria? What the hell! And for that to be the reason he calls me? To have
this
be all that anybody can say about me?”

It took me too long to grapple for a response. Long enough for her to say:

“I need a break.”

Tears sprung up, stinging and wrong. I forced my eyes wide so they wouldn't fall. “From all the attention? I get that.”

“Do you?” She let out a weak laugh.

“Of course!” I spoke quickly, brightly. “And I'll stop, I'll step away from all of this if you want, join Chess. Just tell me what—”

“You can't, Daisy. It's too
late
. This isn't the opera, this is something that actually matters to people. You should have thought about that before . . .” She drew a breath. “I'm gonna go.”

“Hannah?”

“Talk to you later,” she said, and hung up without any clarification of how much later that later would be.

After staring blankly at my computer for a full minute, I realized that what I was looking at was a blue-and-white graphic of my own face, the word “PRIDE” printed beneath it in red. This was the poster. I clicked the screen off, extinguishing the image. Then I swiped my cheeks dry so forcefully it hurt.

Of course she was upset. Whatever had gone on during that phone call with her father must have been agonizing. And the protesters—she'd woken up this morning and gotten ready for school, only to be ambushed by people who had shown up to tell her they hated her. It was no wonder that, looking at the crowds that had sprung up overnight like mushrooms, Hannah just saw menace.

But she was right, it was too late for me to back down. Too cowardly. Soon our own troops, those hundreds of thousands of supporters online, would mobilize and overpower the detractors, and Hannah would realize how much the world cared. And she'd see how much
I
cared too—more than all of those supporters put together, more than a school full of friends, more than a distant father, more than enough. She'd see.

I just had to work harder.

“How many now?”

“Our side or theirs? Ooh!” Jack shook the conference room blinds in his excitement. “Another bus!”

Kyle peeked past me. “
‘College of'
something? On that guy's sweatshirt?”

“Our side,” I crowed, doing a quick guesstimate of the teeming masses across the street. “That makes two fifty for us, a hundred for them.
Lame
.”

“Hmmm.” Sophie pointed at the young bus riders, now hoisting cheerfully hateful posters as they joined the crowd nearest the school. “College of the Redeemer. Church group.”

Jack's face went pale. He turned from the window with a pinched smile. “I'm just glad Reverend Tom hasn't shown up. He'd probably expect me to picket with him.”

“Whoa.” Kyle's eyes darted upward. “Sorry. Was that a helicopter?”

“Yes!” I laughed. “Because the only way to get all of our
supporters in a picture is to photograph them
from the air
. What
what
?”

I offered Jack a high five. He left me hanging.

“Oh, look!” Sophie tapped on the window. “Another church bus . . . going the other way.”

Jack and I bumped heads leaning in. Sure enough, the small white bus branded “James Island Unity Church” had just veered a hard left past the protesters to park near the lot. When the doors opened, the brightly dressed congregants spilled straight into the counter-crowd. I held my breath as their conservatively suited leader hoisted his sign.

“God Loves ALL of His Children,” it read. Above it was a bright rainbow banner.

Jack's mouth had fallen open.

“You should go talk to them,” I said, nudging his foot with mine. “See what their deal is.”

Jack scowled to hide the dawning hope in his eyes. “Maybe. I don't know. If they're still there when we're done.”

“Can we get started?” Raina clapped her notepads into a neat stack on the table. We ignored her.

Sean burst through the door wearing a red jacket with spangly epaulettes. “They're rehearsing ‘Wells Fargo Wagon,' what did I miss?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Raina huffed.

“Awesome!” Sean clapped, hurrying past her to the windows.

Kyle pointed. “Daisy, is that your mom?”

I leaned over his shoulder, spotting a woman at the front of
the crowd wearing an oversized rainbow T-shirt and a wide straw hat with the word “PROUD” perched on it like the Hollywood sign.

I shut the blinds with a thwap. “You know, we should really get this meeting going.”

“Social media,” Raina started, before we'd even sat down. “Jack?”

“Awesomesaucesomeness,” he said, perking up. “Close to half a million shares on Facebook, and that is
not an exaggeration
. Some traction on other sites, but we'll need to keep the buzz going.”

Raina nodded. “Makes sense. Where do we stand on that?”

Everyone seemed to be looking at me. “Sorry?”

“Interviews.” Raina tapped the table with her pen. “Which ones have you set up?”

“I . . . thought we were going to decide on a plan for that . . . collectively?”

Which was why I'd allowed my voicemail box to fill up and had officially become too overwhelmed to check my email as of ten a.m. Saturday. An intrepid college reporter was one thing. But the
Guardian
? The
LA Times
? Even the local news team—“
We've got Charleston on our radar!”
—seemed hopelessly intimidating at this point.

“So. None. Is what you're telling us.” Raina put her head in her hands.

Before I could make up something encouraging, Sophie inched out of her chair, one hand raised. “You guys? We need to talk about the land.”

The look on her face was the opposite of reassuring. We
were holding our breath, waiting to for her to go on, when a soft knock sounded on the door and Principal Zimmer's bald head poked in.

Raina scooped up her legal pads and leaned against them casually, shielding them from view.

“How's it going, guys?” he asked, to which everybody mumbled “Okay,” which probably happened every time he tried to talk to students.

He glanced behind himself, shut the door, and took a seat at the table next to a very uncomfortable Kyle.

“I want you to know that I
appreciate
what you're doing here,” Principal Zimmer said, his voice so low we had to crane our heads to hear him. “I've got some information that, in all good conscience, I felt I needed to pass along. The school board's trying to find ways to shut you down.”

“Shocking,” I muttered, and Raina shot me a
shut up
look.

“They're going to issue an injunction preventing you from using the school's name in your communications.”

Raina leaned forward. “Can they do that?”

“I'm not a legal expert. But you might want to find somebody who is.”

We all looked to Raina. She cleared her throat. “My dad's a maritime lawyer. Not exactly up on copyright issues. But yeah, I'll ask.”

“There's more.” Principal Zimmer's voice got even quieter. “They're working on the landowner. Trying to keep him from selling to the Community Farmers Association.”

“I'm confused,” I said, glancing at Sophie. “I thought that was as good as done.”

She flushed. “That's what I was about to tell you guys. The owner's now saying he doesn't want to get caught up in anything political. He'll only sell to the farm if they promise not to let us use the land for homecoming.”

The room seemed to sink as the news hit each of us in turn. Then Sean slapped the table.

“Idea.” His eyes were gleaming. We all leaned in. “Let's get an
even better
venue.”

He beamed around at us, apparently expecting us to clap.

“Brilliant,” Jack said.

Raina smiled tightly at the principal. “Thanks for letting us know. We'll figure it out.”

Principal Zimmer rose, seeming to understand, and put his finger to his lips. “I was never here. But if I learn anything else, I'll . . .
not
drop in again!”

He snorted at his own joke, stifled it, and left the room.

A silence fell over the table. Then Jack said what we were all thinking.

“Gay.”

“Gotta be, right?” Sean glanced back at the closed door. “He came to every single performance of
Footloose
last year. Even the dress rehearsal. Just sayin'.”

“Wait, are you guys talking about the principal?” Kyle glanced around the table. “I have absolutely no gaydar.”

“You will,” Jack said sagely, Yoda to Kyle's Luke, and we all laughed.

All but one of us. Raina stood from the table, clearing her throat.

“We've got
twenty-six days
left. Less than a month.”

The smiles fell dead from our faces.

Sophie shook her head. “I honestly don't know how we're going to handle this land situation. My mom and Daisy's are trying their best, but—maybe we should just let them drop out. I don't want them to lose their farm because of us.”

I goggled at her altruism. Sophie was a much better daughter than me.

“I wasn't a hundred percent on that field, anyway. I'm not exactly the Bonnaroo type.” Sean snorted. “So—what's our backup location?”

Wait. Why was everybody looking at me again?

“Party at my house. I'll provide the Fresca!” Nobody laughed, so I forced my face serious. “Yeah, no, we need to make this land deal happen. Maybe we should go talk to the owner ourselves—help him see our point of view?”

“I don't know.” Kyle shook his head. “What if he's homophobic, or whatever? What if he's on the same side as—” He gestured vaguely past the blinds, and we all knew that he wasn't talking about the busloads of supporters who'd shown up.

“If we can't appeal to his sense of basic human decency,” I said, “then we'll have to appeal to his wallet.”

Everybody seemed to think that was a viable answer, so I scribbled it on my wrist, along with an arrow and a note: “Figure out what this means.”

Sunlight attacked me as I emerged from the dim athletic wing onto the football field. A couple of field hockey players spilled out behind me and I jumped like they were assassins.
So this was what “on edge” felt like. I wondered what exactly I was on the edge of.

It wasn't just homecoming—the increased improbability of it, the fact that it still seemed to be my catastrophe to organize. I'd left Hannah alone all weekend, knowing she needed some space. Mom had driven me to school, the new normal. And when I'd walked into bio, I'd kept to myself, allowing Hannah to make the first move.

She didn't. She sat in her new seat in the back and barely looked my way.

I wondered how she'd gotten into the building this morning—and how she would get out now. Did she know a way to avoid the reporters and protesters, like I did? Just as I was scrabbling for my phone to text her about the athletic wing, she came outside through the door behind me and I dropped it on the ground.

While I was rising, she was passing.
I'm going to stop her,
I thought.
I'm going to say something.

But then she glanced back so casually it hurt, and said, “Hey, Daisy,” and kept walking and that was that.

There's this sound an ice cream truck makes when it's driving away. The song warps, becomes flat, the instant it passes. That's what Hannah sounded like. It was the same old “Hey, Daisy,” but I knew from the music that there was no chasing it down today. So I stood still and stared at her back as it vanished into the parking lot.

My phone rang, snapping me back.

Adam (Reporter)
.

I felt a stupid frisson of excitement, even though I knew he
was just calling for an update, wanting to know how
swimmingly
all of our plans were going. How
on
top
of everything I was. What an
inspiration
we all were, planning this massive event with vendors in place, a hospitality company donating tents and stages, and oh! Right!
No location whatsoever!

Raina wanted me to give interviews? Here went nothing.

I answered, marching off the field, but before I could even say hello, Adam started scolding me.

“Your voicemail is full. You need to clear it out, Daisy, people are trying to reach you.”

“People?” I rounded the corner outside Starbucks and stopped, hands in my hair, trying some deep breathing so I wouldn't sound panicked on the phone.

“Yeah.” He paused. “Are you all right?”

“Fine! Why?”

“Because you appear to be hyperventilating.”

I turned and sure enough, Adam was waving from the Starbucks window, a concerned line etched between his eyebrows. He held up his pastry bag and mimed breathing into it.

Good idea.
I veered through the glass doors, sat with a thud at Adam's table, and gazed out at the cloudy sky, the din in my brain growing louder by the second. He peered over his ceramic mug at me.

“Let me get you something,” he said, standing up. “And let's talk? Off the record.”

I think I said “Okay,” but it's possible I just thought it.

A few tables over, two girls in their twenties were whispering to each other with subtle gestures in my direction.
Their expressions were friendly. They probably thought I was somebody who could accomplish something. Idiots.

“There's a guy from a PR firm in DC who called me a few times,” Adam said, handing me a fancy cookie and a blackberry soda, somehow remembering the same two items I'd gotten last time he saw me here. “I gave him your number, but he said he couldn't leave a message, so he wanted me to let you know that he's flying down here tomorrow. He wants to work with you guys to help publicize the event. Pro bono.”

I stared at him, my mind cycling between Latin, Spanish, and French. “I'm really hoping that means ‘free.'”

Adam nodded, that sudden, bright smile electrifying his face. “He's going to call you tomorrow morning to set up a meeting. This is a huge win, Daisy. I suggest you answer the phone.”

“So he's some sort of big shot?” I wasn't sure if that made me feel more or less nervous.

“Let's put it this way—every time he called me, a woman started the call by saying, ‘Please hold for Mr. Montgomery.'”

“Classy.”

“Extremely.” Adam grinned and my heart stuttered. “And now that I've passed along this vital information that could make all your dreams come true, I can go back to maintaining a journalistic distance from my subject.”

“Sounds great. So when are you teaching me to drive?”

“This weekend,” he answered, and I coughed on my soda in surprise. I'd thought he was just offering to be nice, one of those things you suggest and hope nobody takes you up on,
like, you know, paying for his computer. But Adam seemed genuine.