Speak

My first line of dialogue at today’s protest on Monument Campus would have been incomprehensible screaming, I think. If you were to look at the crowd here from some sort of panoramic view, you’d have seen a shy woman, dressed in a three-piece business suit and skinny stilettos, walking toward The Monumental, a core government building with high security. That wasn’t me, but if you were to shift your focus a little to the left—that’s it, right there—you’d have seen a gathering of what appeared to be a bunch of angry, intolerant, sign-holding, early-to-mid-thirties punk rockers. I was one of them.

I protested. I protested anything I detested. And part of it was how I was raised. As a young girl, I was taught to stand up for myself, and I was taught to always let my voice be heard. Now that we were in such trying times, I thought, what better way to let my voice be heard than to join a band of anarchists who spent their free time protesting, right? On any given weekend, we’d pile into Skinny Dave’s rusty, silver minivan that had been meant for touring, had he ever joined a successful band, and we’d make the hour-long trip to The Monumental or any of the adjoining buildings on the government campus. We’d have signs prepared with whatever our message was, usually some catchy, creative thing Melissa made up because she always had a way with fucking words, or whatever.

Now, before you judge me—because I can already feel your judgy eyes on me—let me say this. We were never violent. We never hurt anyone. We never disturbed the peace. Okay? Okay.

Sometimes, others would join us, and together, we’d form one big group. Most of the time, it was just the seven of us: me, Melissa who’s fucking good with words, Skinny Dave, Short Dave, Matt who hates the beltway, Bethann who can’t control her language (not that I’m judging; I can’t either), and Brian who doesn’t have anything interesting about him, really—we just call him Brian.

Melissa was the brains behind our protestation operation, if you will. She attended law school, and she knew all that shit lawyers know, like how to avoid lawsuits and getting arrested under such circumstances as we’d so often place ourselves. Skinny Dave wasn’t the brightest crayon in the toolshed, but he was a super safe driver. We relied on him for transportation and scheduling pick-ups and drop-offs. He also had an impeccable sense of direction, and he’d gotten us out of many binding traffic jams that would have otherwise made us late for a very important self-proclaimed appointment at The Monumental.

Short Dave was an artist by trade and a magnificent painter. If someone were to ask him to paint their house or even their miserable white picket fuckin’ fence, he’d do it for a nickel, he’d tell them. That was because painting was his passion, and that’s what prompted him to take up being our sign designer. Matt hated the beltway, the traffic, the congestion of the looming, bustling city that enveloped Monument Campus, and pretty much anything else that gave him even the slightest bit of self-inflicted anxiety. But that came in handy because Matt was anxious for all of us when some of us were entirely too brave.

Bethann loved to cuss, and she loved being loud. She was the loudest of us, although I’d say I was probably an extra cunty contender. Bethann thought the only way to let your voice be heard was to scream and shout, and I guess I could understand her perspective. In her free time, she was always sipping hot tea with organic, ethically sourced, free-range, cage-free honey (or whatever other fucking monikers there are) because her throat was always so damn sore from the screaming and shouting, I guess. Brian was a tag-along. He’d often join us if he had “nothing better to do that day” or if his “plans suddenly got canceled”, when in actuality, we were pretty sure he never had anything better to do, nor did he ever have any plans. He was an okay guy, as far as we were concerned, and while he was the last to join our group, he was a great addition because he was dependable.

If I were going to talk about myself, I wouldn’t do it here. I’d let an opinion be formulated of me and about me—of my intellect, my wit, my audacity, my annoyingly loud fucking opinions, my whereabouts, whatever—all on its own. I wouldn’t try to influence it. So, let that be known.

I referred to us all as anarchists, but maybe that was a stupid take. Maybe we were more like this: people who think there really is no sense in claiming to be one way or another, on one side or the other, when there really isn’t a definitive, concrete “side” in existence. Everything that exists, when you really look at the big picture, is just a spectrum of gray area, and yet people seem to think there’s a tipping point that leans you more toward one side or the other of a scale that makes no sense to begin with.

With that being said, if that scale did make sense to begin with, and if there weren’t so much gray area, I’d say the bunch of us fell somewhere in the center of it all. But he would argue.

He would definitely argue, and maybe I’ll elaborate on who I’m referring to in just a moment. See, in his mind, we’re all left or right, black or white. There is no gray area in his world. In fact, one could argue that every miserable fuck who goes into the apparently historic architecture of The Monumental and comes back out, at the end of the day, thinks that way. We’d target our signs toward whomever we thought might see them on a given day. Different people would pass through that building on different days and at different times. I’d see him the most, so at our most recent official meeting (a hangout with fast food or vegan and copious amounts of beer and liquor with Bad Brains bumping in the background) in preparation for our current protest, I had suggested that we target our message toward him.

Of all fucking people.

Thomas John Radley the second.

A junior after his father before him, also a government official.

I thought about calling him Junior sometimes, just to piss him off.

Thomas, or Junior, if you will, has held a pretty prominent position at The Monumental for a few years now. It wasn’t until just recently that he started to surface in the news more often, not that any of us watched the news. We had other ways of getting our information. Now, Thomas John Radley the fucking second was known for something. He was known for being well-liked, and he was a surprising exception in that he was well-liked by people all over the spectrum. The spectrum didn’t matter much to us because we believed in all that gray area, but considering that most people don’t believe in the aforementioned gray area, it was a big deal to be pretty well-liked by everyone if you worked at The Monumental or in any government position at all. Because he was well-liked, our little group believed that he could be swayed. If there was anyone we could get through to, it had to be him, we thought.

One of the things that made Thomas Junior so abrasive, at least in my humble yet totally accurate opinion, was that he had this unfaltering ability to fucking ignore us. It seemed like everyone else who passed by at least looked at us, glancing briefly at our signage or our faces. Not Thomas. No way. Every day we were there, he’d walk by like it was nothing—like we were nothing. And not only that, but he had this way about him, this way he would walk. He was incredibly confident. Most of the population would probably make the argument that it made sense for him to be so confident, rightfully, because he was so fucking attractive. But I wouldn’t say that, nor did I just say that. I’m only drawing a conclusion about what others might say.

For being an older gentleman, he was attractive. I didn’t know how old he was for the longest time, but Skinny Dave had looked it up a few weeks ago because it came up in conversation. See, Bethann had said that it looked like Thomas Junior had aged a lot in the last five years or so, to the point that she wasn’t sure whether he was in his forties, fifties, or sixties, but Bethann was notorious for not being able to guess ages with any degree of accuracy. At that point, Skinny Dave looked it up, and sure enough, ol’ Junior is fifty-five. Any person attracted to men, though, would agree that Junior was a good-lookin’ fifty-five, for sure. He dressed in the nicest suits, all tailored perfectly. He filled those suits, and that’s the best way to say it. He had silver hair, styled short and neat, and these blue eyes that popped in every public photo taken of him. Conventionally attractive is my point here. And conventionally good at ignoring peaceful protestors.

There was a particularly large group of us today, more than just the seven of us. Some people from this other, much larger group called The Change Alliance had joined us, and they formed a sort of U-shape around us, almost like they were protecting us without really meaning to. I stood in front, holding my sign high and proud. It was just about the end of the day on campus, and a few stragglers followed Thomas out of the building. Someone from The Change Alliance, some newbie, had a box of Snap N Pops, which I’d not seen since I was a kid. We were all unaware until the guy took a handful of the little white wrappers from his pocket and pitched them at the feet of the woman who walked in front of Thomas. She jumped, some of the crowd scattered, and that immediately sent the line of security in front of the stone steps into sheer frenzy.

They approached the crowd, weapons drawn, and the people from The Change Alliance were yelling and trying to protect one of their own, even though he was a newbie. Maybe they’d taken pity on him since he didn’t know any better. He should have known better than to throw Snap N Pops at a fucking government official on government property, but hey, maybe he had shit for brain cells.

Our group stayed inside the U-shape and stayed calm as could be, aside from Bethann, who started yelling profanities at some of the guards. They ignored her because she wasn’t raising her arms the way The Change Alliance protestors seemed to be. I stayed put until Thomas—fucking Junior himself—walked over and got involved.

“You guys need to break it up,” he said, addressing the seven of us who were holding still in the center of the chaos. “You need to get out of here.”

That thing that was supposed to have been my first line of dialogue in this situation, the first thing I’d ever say to Thomas John Radley the second? Yeah, it actually wasn’t incomprehensible screaming.

“What are you going to do about it, you sexist fucking prick?”

Not my proudest moment. What did I even mean? What was he going to do about what? Why did I call him sexist? Why’d I call him a fucking prick? Why, why, why? I was almost laughing internally, inside my head, as I tried to question and explain to myself that there had to be some kind of reason for me to say something like that. While something chemically triggered in my brain the wrong way, while my default wiring somehow got all twisted and tangled up inside, my arms lunged forward on command, like I had no control over them.

He reached up and grabbed my wrists.

I was dying to know what would happen next.