Wide Awake Read Free Page B

think people really knew what he meant at first. Then he repeated it, motioning us up, and we understood: He wanted us all to leave.
    “The rest of you remain seated,” Mr. Davis warned, “or you will fail this class.”
    As if to prove his point, he loaded his grade book onto the class screen.
    “Who here wants a zero?” he asked.
    “Come on,” Jimmy said to us, shifting around to look everyone in the eye. Then he turned to Mr. Davis. “This is so classic. You’re threatened, so you threaten us. Well, not now. Not today.”
    Mira, Keisha, and a few other kids stood up. I quickly joined them.
    But more of the class stayed seated.
    “What can he do to you?” Jimmy asked. “We’re going to go right now to the principal and tell him exactly what he just said. You can’t just attack students. You can’t use your power to instill fear like that.”
    Mr. Davis wasn’t even looking in Jimmy’s direction anymore, treating him like he’d already left. “You will fail this class,” he repeated to the rest of us. “Your GPA will be lower. Colleges will want you less. I will not write you a single recommendation.”
    “You’re going to be fired,” Jimmy said, his voice even, not gloating.
    Mr. Davis nearly smiled. “No, Mr. Jones—
you’re
going to be expelled. If one single person leaves this room with you, I will personally see to it that you’re expelled.”
    I wanted to stop it. I wanted to go back a few minutes and convince Jimmy to cut class. I didn’t want any of this to be happening. I was standing, but now it felt awkward. Something had to happen one way or the other.
    “Let’s go,” Jimmy said to us again. “You can’t just sit there.”
    “Will you just leave already?” one of the guys in the back of the room—Satch, a good friend of Jesse Marin’s—shouted out. A few kids tittered in response.
    “Fine,” Jimmy said, picking up his things and heading for the door. I picked up my things, too.
    “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr. Weiss,” Mr. Davis said. He no longer looked horrified. He looked pleased.
    Jimmy was out the door. I followed. So did Mira, Keisha, and seven other students.
    Thirteen kids remained in the class.
    “So what now?” Mira asked when we were all in the hall.
    “The principal’s,” Jimmy said. I moved next to him, trying to figure out if he felt as shaken as I did.
    When I put my hand on his shoulder, he stiffened.
    “Are you okay?” I asked quietly.
    “You just sat there,” he murmured, anger and disappointment in his voice. “You just sat there and didn’t say a thing.”
    Then he walked forward, leaving my hand—me—behind.
    “What are we doing?” a girl named Gretchen asked.
    “The right thing,” I answered, a beat too late.

four
    “The personal is political,” Jimmy said to me one of the first nights I sneaked over to his house, “and the political is personal. We vote every time we make a choice. We vote with our lives.”
    I pulled closer to him under the blanket, ran my hand down his bare chest. Voting.

    “Mr. Davis should not have said those things,” Principal Cotter said to us now. “But you shouldn’t have walked out of class, either.”

    “Bastard,
” Jimmy said when we left Principal Cotter’s office, with an assurance that Mr. Davis would be called to account for his actions, and that we wouldn’t be failed or expelled.

    “I’m sorry,” I said when the next bell rang and everyone else had gone to their next classes.

    “Today is a part of what America was meant to be,
” President-elect Stein said over our phones’ open news channels. “
Justice. Equality. Democracy. We know what we have to do…and we will do it.”

    “I know you are,” Jimmy said. “I know.”

    “This is just the beginning,
” Stein told us. And I realized that, yes, he was right. I had started the day thinking it was the ending. But really it was the beginning.

    “I can’t believe it,” Jimmy told me during second period.