In a Flash (5 page)

“Showtime.”

We left Julia up on the balcony of the neighboring building. It overlooked where we were going to be—a nice vantage point to tape the event.

We hit the street. Traffic was rushing by— cars on the road and people on the sidewalk.
It was very busy and very public. That gave it more potential—for good or bad. More people could take part, more people could watch and more people might get mad.

“I hope this works. Nothing would be worse than nobody coming.”

“Nobody coming wouldn't be the worst,” Oswald said.

“What would?”

“Having only a few people come. If nobody shows, we can just walk away.”

I shook my head. “I'm not walking away if there's only me and you.”

“There'll be more than just us. I've seen a couple of familiar faces,” he said.

“That's good...I guess.”

“And if it does crash and burn, you have Julia up there filming it. You know she'll never let you forget about it.”

“I know.”

“Why did you invite her anyway?” Oswald asked.

I shook my head. “I'm not sure. I guess I'm just trying to include her because she's our friend.”

“That's right.
Friend
. Keep it that way.”

I cringed slightly but didn't answer. Did he know more than I thought he knew?

I looked down at my watch. Two minutes. We walked right to the spot underneath the big red sign—the neon sign that showed that this building was owned by a gigantic tobacco company. There were a half dozen men and women outside the main doors, smoking. At least they believed in what they were selling. I didn't know whether that meant they had integrity or were just really stupid.

On the sidewalk, men in suits and ties carrying briefcases, and women in business outfits with purses over their shoulders, raced by in both directions, shoulder to shoulder. Oswald and I formed two rocks in the stream, and we were repeatedly bumped as people tried to get by us.

Around us were dozens of kids—our age or a few years older—who weren't going anywhere. They were all trying to act casual and not look at each other. They wouldn't have to wait long.

The alarm on my watch started to beep. It was time.

I brought my fingers up to my lips and put the invisible cigarette into my mouth. I took in a big puff of imaginary smoke. I looked around. There were thirty—no, forty or fifty— people all doing the same. We formed a big dam in the middle of the river of commuters, trying to get by as we continued to “smoke.”

Then Oswald's watch started to beep. We dropped our invisible cigarettes to the ground and stomped them out. After Oswald and I started to cough, people all around us started to cough and hack. It was an incredible noise.

I caught the look in the eyes of those trying to rush by us. Some looked worried, as if we had some virus they might catch.

My watch went off a second time, and I fell to the concrete. In the split second of my fall, I saw other people collapse all around me.

I couldn't move—I was “dead”—a victim of smoking. But I tried to look at the scene with one partially opened eye. I couldn't see the people on the ground, but I could see the circle of people standing, mouths open,
staring down at us. It was a big circle, so there must have been a lot of dead people lying on the sidewalk.

I closed my eye and tried to picture the circle growing, as more and more people who were trying to get home were blocked and backed up. It would have been so cool to see the whole thing as it was happening. Julia would have a great angle, so we'd be able to see it when we watched the tape.

I'd expected there to be a lot of noise, but it seemed remarkably quiet. The only sounds were those of the passing cars. I had to fight the urge to sit up and look around. The ground was starting to feel cold, and I was starting to get nervous. It had to be longer than a minute by now, for sure. Had Oswald's watch gone wrong, or had it gone off and I hadn't heard it and everybody else had left already? I opened one eye. There were still bodies all around me, including Oswald.

The alarm sounded—the second one from Oswald's watch—and I jumped to my feet. Everybody else got to theirs at the same instant. We broke through the circle and
started to melt into the crowd. It was easy because now that the dam had been broken, the whole crowd started to surge forward.

I realized that half of the mob was moving in our direction. There wasn't much choice. The six lanes of traffic hemmed us in on one side and the building hemmed us in on the other, so there were only the two ways to go.

We'd gone only a half dozen steps when I was startled by the sight of two uniformed police officers coming toward us. They were moving quickly, and they looked very serious.

“Just keep walking,” I hissed. “Don't look at them, eyes straight forward.”

We shifted off to the side, as did the rest of the crowd, allowing the two officers to steam on past us.

“Nothing to it,” I said as we continued to walk.

We hit the stairs and headed toward Julia and the video. I couldn't wait to see both of them.

I opened my book to the right page. I had to at least look like I was following along as the teacher kept babbling on.

I knew this stuff pretty well. Actually I had almost a ninety in history so I knew this stuff
really
well. It was just that I had other things on my mind right now. The only history that really interested me was more recent—yesterday.

Oswald and I had been up till almost two in the morning going over the digital tape.
We'd watched it a half dozen times. It was more than good. It was nothing short of great.

I'd paused the tape so we could count the bodies on the ground. It was hard to tell in some places where one body stopped and the next started, but we'd done a rough count and got at least thirty people on the ground and four times as many in the circle that had surrounded us.

It was just like I'd imagined, the crowd getting bigger and bigger as we blocked traffic. There were hundreds of them.

I couldn't help but wonder if any of the people in the crowd had figured out what we were doing: showing how smoking cigarettes led to death. It was a flash mob, but it was a flash mob with meaning.

Julia had done a great job on the camera. Shockingly she'd done what I'd asked, so the big, red, neon, tobacco company sign was the start and the end of the event. Just before she shifted back to the sign, she'd kept focused on the spot where the “die-in” had taken place. It showed those two police
officers we'd passed and two others coming from the other direction. They'd met in the middle, almost exactly where we'd been lying down. Thirty seconds longer and we would have looked up to see them standing over us. Timing was everything. I'd made a mental note to make sure that future flash mobs that I organized never went on for very long.

The whole thing had been such a success, even Julia had been impressed. Well, maybe impressed wasn't quite the right word. She'd said that it wasn't
completely
stupid. For her that was practically a compliment.

The bell rang, signaling the end of the morning and the start of lunch. I wanted lunch.

The hall was crowded. Everybody rushed to get to lunch. Well, not everybody. Lots of people were just standing around talking, getting in my way.

I passed by the office and looked through the glass windows. Just then Mr. Roberts' door flew open and Julia came out. She looked angry. No, not angry—enraged.
I wanted to duck or hide or get out of her way, but she'd already seen me.

She stomped over, bumping into a girl on her way.

“That
man
makes me
so
angry,” she snorted.

“Mr. Roberts?”

“Who else do you think I'd be talking about?”

I shrugged. “Lots of people make you angry.”

“Didn't I warn you about him?” she asked.

“Well, you—”

“Didn't I tell you he'd take away phones and iPods and hats?”

“You did say—”

“Do you know what he's doing now?”

I didn't answer. No point in being interrupted, or was I interrupting her rant?

“Don't you want to know?” she demanded.

“Oh, am I allowed to talk now? So what did he do now?”

“He's canceling the school dances.”

“We have school dances?”

“Of course we have school—”

She stopped midsentence, realizing that I was chirping her. I knew we had dances. I had just never gone to one and neither had she.

“He didn't consult with anybody. Not staff, not students and not student council.”

I was going to say, not the student
president
, but that would have been pretty obvious.

“He must have had a reason,” I said.

“For not consulting anyone, or for canceling the dances?” she asked.

“Maybe both, but probably the dance part. Did he say why he was doing it?”

“He said something about students not being responsible...bad behavior, alcohol and fights.”

“Weren't a bunch of students suspended for drinking, fighting and vandalizing cars after the last dance?”

“Well, yes, but those are not excuses to cancel the dance.”

“Sounds like some pretty good excuses.”

“Whose side are you on anyway?” she demanded.

“I didn't think I was on a side.”

“Well, you
should
be. This is important.”

“Yeah right,” I said sarcastically. “High school dances rank right up there with world hunger, war, poverty, child abuse and—”

“You don't understand,” she said as if she was talking to a five-year-old.

“When did dances become so important to you?” I asked.

“It's not the dance. It's the
principle
of the thing.”

“The principle or the principal?”

“What?” she snapped. “What are you talking about?”

“The principle, like what you believe in, or the principal, like Mr. Roberts?”

She didn't answer.

“He's just trying to get some control.”

“I don't call it control. I call it controlling. Do you even know how many people he's
suspended in the three weeks since he took over?”

“How many?”

“Over forty.”

“Some of the people who were suspended should have been suspended. Did you like kids hassling other students in the halls? Do you think there should be fights in the cafeteria? Did you like the gang down by the bridge? Do you really think there
should
be drinking and fighting at school dances?”

“I guess that answers the question about whose side you're on.”

“I'm just saying that some of the things he's done have made the school better... safer...calmer.”

“You don't understand.”

There was that tone again.

“Some things are worth fighting for,” she said.

“And school dances are one of those things?”

“Not being told what we can and cannot do is one of them,” she argued.

“It's a school. Most of what happens here is about being told what to do. This isn't a democracy.”

She let out a little scream, and I startled as people walking by all turned and stared.

“Now you're quoting him. That's just sick. Is he your hero?”

“Now you're just being stupid.”

Although he
had
been like a hero out there on the bridge that first day. All he needed was a cape to go along with the baseball bat. What was wrong with him taking care of business?

“I'm not going to stand for it,” Julia said.

“And what exactly does that mean?”

“I'm going to...going to...I don't really know.”

I almost laughed but thought better of it.

“Do you have any ideas?” she asked.

Now I did laugh. “Me? What makes you think I want to get involved in any of this?”

“Because you're my friend. Besides, wasn't I right there when you organized the boycott of Frankie's Fast—”

She stopped mid-sentence, and a smile started to form on her face, getting bigger and more smug-looking.

“That's it,” she said. “I'm going to do what you did with Frankie's.”

“You're going to organize a boycott of a dance that isn't happening?”

“Don't be stupid. I'm going to organize a boycott of school.”

I double-clicked on the MSN icon, and the screen opened up. I started to enter my password, typing in the first three letters of my dog Shadow's name, before I remembered that that wasn't my password anymore.

I'd read that pet names were the first thing people tried when they wanted to get into your e-mail, so I figured I should change it. Yeah, like my Hotmail account was important enough for somebody to
try to hack into. Whole groups of spies, terrorists and international criminals were trying to find out who I was talking to.

Regardless I had changed it to something nobody would ever guess. I typed it in:
J–u–l–i–a
. I figured nobody would ever figure that one out. I certainly hoped that Julia or Oswald would never know.

I hit Enter and scrolled down to my contact list. Julia wasn't online, but Oswald was.

hey Oz
, I typed.

what u doing?
he replied.

homework. u?

nm

That was code for nothing much.

has j been on line?
I asked.

nope...you seen her Facebook event?

she created an event?
I asked.

she's doing a school boycott event,
he replied.

I'd hoped that she'd just forget about that whole idea. Although, knowing Julia the way I did, I didn't think that was too likely.

she also wrote about Roberts in the event description
, Oz wrote.