Page 73 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Deven leans back in the plastic seat, folds his hands. His whole body relaxes.
“Okay,” he finally says. “I won’t. I’m sorry. But I’m curious—what exactly were you organizing people for? What policies were you asking them to support? What actions did you demand they take?”
“Well,” she says, “we were asking them to organize around issues in their neighborhoods. Or sign a peti- tion. Or get out to vote.”
“And were those the issues they claimed to care about?”
“Indirectly. They were in their best interests.”
“That’s not what I asked. Also, who told you what to tell them? And who taught you those ‘tactics’ that you claim I’m using, which you know so well?”
She hesitates, but realizes she has to answer. Has to be straight with him, as much as she doesn’t want to.
“My boss,” she mutters finally.
Deven grins and flashes those filed-down incisors as the air brakes hiss beneath him. The doors swing open. He rises wordlessly and slips off the train.
~
When she gets home Marissa scans the bookshelf in the closet of her childhood bedroom. She pulls out her high school yearbook from 2008, the year she graduated. She flips to the senior pages in the back. There’s Deven’s: no photos of him or his friends, just three photocopied ink pen drawings of a hammer and sickle and a blotchily reproduced image of some kind of altar covered in skulls
and pentagrams. Meanwhile, her own page is a too-busy collage of pixelated photos reproduced in black-and-white. Images of herself and every friend she thought she might want to remember. Julia, John, and Deven aren’t in any of them. Amber got into one photo, a group shot, but that might’ve been an accident.
Around the edges of her page she’d made a border out of various drawings snipped from her class note- books, going all the way back to freshman year. Most are just weird doodles: a tyrannosaurus in a hoop skirt, a garden gnome riding a turtle, a three-headed fish. In the bottom right corner, though, a city skyline rises from both sides of a river.
The doodles are the only aspect of her page that Ma- rissa’s still proud of. She’d wanted to fill the entire page with drawings, but ultimately felt pressured to include photos of as many of her friends as possible since they might also include photos of her on their pages. In the end, her one good idea had been relegat- ed to the margins. She examines the group photos in the center of the page, quizzes herself on the names of her friends, and remembers only some of them. She closes the yearbook and goes to bed.
~
Marissa ignores her alarm the next morning. She isn’t on the Bridge Line until close to 11. By the time she arrives at the office it’s almost 11:30.
She leaves half a dozen voicemails and decides to take a break. She leans back in her chair, rests her feet against the wall, and thinks about what to do with the remaining four hours of her shift. Later she might go hang out in the break room, or press the button for the uppermost floor on that elevator and see where it goes.
For now, though, she tucks her phone script under the keyboard to clear off some desk space and replaces it with a few blank sheets of paper she stole from the printer on her way in. She knows their shape by memory, now. Knows their curves and chromes, their makes and models, the gleam- ing gazes of each of the cars from the parking lot. Maybe she’ll tape this drawing to one of their wind- shields. Maybe she’ll tuck it between the slats of one of a bench on the Bridge Line platform. Maybe she’ll leave it for someone else to discover on the
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