Like We Care (17 page)

Joel’s laugh made Mr. Kolak grin shyly.

The news crew stirred as the front door of the Happy Snack opened and Daljit Singh emerged. It was dumpster time.

Fueled by the cameras, the crowd of teens began hooting derisively and lobbing pennies at Daljit, who put this chore off to later and later in the day, hoping he could do his job unassailed. Word was making it back to the parking lot that merchants at other markets around town were experiencing the same thing—kids sticking their heads into stores just long enough to chuck some pennies, then laughing and running off without making a purchase. It was becoming the Thing to Do.

“You know, he’s just trying to earn a living,” Frank said with more than a bit of empathy for the little man trying to run the gauntlet from trash can to trash can, his tiny wife waiting nervously inside.

“Yeah, selling crap nobody needs.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Frank soothed. “I just think you need to figure out who your beef is really with. If it’s the companies that make and market that crap, then maybe Mr. Happy Snack over there is just caught in the crossfire.”

“Hey, towelhead!” Joel and Frank turned. A thick-necked senior, a genuine punk whom Frank had never seen in an actual classroom, whipped a fistful of pennies at Daljit. Really hard.

“Go back to Vietnam!”

Frank winced. Joel did, too. His teacher looked to him with disapproval.

“It’s not. . . We’re not about that,” Joel said quickly. He didn’t know a whole lot about black people, but he knew racism was a problem.

Frank spoke directly. “You can’t control everything that’s going on here, Joel. But you made yourself a leader, and these kids look to you for direction. If you see something going on here you don’t approve of, you have it in you to change it.”

Joel gulped. “Okay.”

Frank smiled, not meaning to make too much of the events. He sat down beside Joel on the hood of his car and reflexively produced a pack of cigarettes. He shook out the last one as Joel eyed it hungrily.

Frank thought the look was merely the face of a student catching his teacher doing something taboo. He bridled a bit, but lit up anyway.

“What can I say? It’s a bad, bad habit. Don’t ever start.”

“Yeah, well. . .”

Frank could tell by Joel’s guilty look it was too late for that. He shook his head with a tolerant frown, but was actually, genuinely disappointed.

“Joel. . . You’re an athlete!”

“I know! I was never that heavy into smoking. And now I don’t do it at all.” He waved defensively to the throng. “Pretty much nobody does. Today, anyway.”

Frank looked darkly to Daljit as he heaved his bags into the dumpster. “But he’d sell them to you, even though you’re underage?”

“Shit, yeah,” Joel said, then blushing when he remembered he was conversing with a teacher. “Sorry. I mean, every couple months, cops show up and make some noise, and then for like a week we have to go back to copping them off our parents or finding a machine that’ll sell to us. But we know we can come back eventually. He’ll sell you beer, too, if you look old enough. But the people that run this stupid town never seem all that concerned about any of it.”

Frank looked to his shoes. He’d known for years what was going on in this store, and had never done anything about it, either. To fill the silence, he took a drag.

Joel continued to watch the cigarette intently. The longing remained.

Frank finally got it. In sympathy, he snuffed out the perfectly good smoke and crushed the empty pack in his fist.

Joel nodded toward the store, more than a little envious. “This is
our
thing. Guess there’s nothing keeping you from going in there and buying yourself a fresh pack.”

Frank watched Daljit scurry back into the store in another shower of pennies. Frank’s compassion for him was fleeting. His curiosity as to why the town never moved to slap him down was stoked.

“Nah.” He took the balled-up cigarette pack and lofted it expertly into a trash can more than ten feet away. He was 44-years-old—this was precisely the eighth time in his entire life he had sunk such a shot. In college, when his black friends mercilessly ridiculed his lack of grace, he used to practice alone in his dorm room.

“It’s time I quit, too,” he said.

“All right!” Joel reached into his jacket pocket, offering up a sheet of nicotine gum. “Here, I bought some at the grocery store on the way over.”

Frank declined with a wizened shake of the head.

“So then
they
win.”

Joel, uncomprehending: “Huh?”

“Cigarette sales go down, but nicotine gum sales go up. Every time you and your friends buy this stuff, a computer sends word to the store’s distribution warehouse: There’s a run on nicotine gum, send more. Word goes from the warehouse to the production plant: We’re running out of nicotine gum.
Make
more. Word finally gets back to all those rich old men you guys got a bug up your butt about. They’re all clearing more space in the bank vault because now they see there’s money to be made off your withdrawal from the addiction they left you with.

“Next thing you know, you’re picking up the new issue of
Maxim
, and there’s a big color ad with ScroatM or whichever idiot they’ve been able to buy off, saying ‘Don’t buy
their
nicotine gum, buy our nicotine gum. We’re the
happenin’
nicotine gum! Fork over the cash, punk.’”

Joel’s head spun. He knew where this was going.

“You look close enough,” Frank continued, now on a roll, “you’ll probably see that the cigarette companies and the nicotine gum companies are owned by the same conglomeration. You guys hit them on the cigarette side, but they just make it up somewhere else.”

He laid a sympathetic nod on Joel. “If you guys are really gonna do this, you gotta understand what you’re up against.”

Joel looked at the sheet of gum—eight cleanly-crafted squares of relief, laid out in a futuristic-looking containment module of foil and plastic. It was no accident that these things were packaged so as to engage a simple mind.

It all just sucked.

“Dude. . .” he moaned.

He took the brand new pack of gum and painfully stuffed it into the trash can. He had barely withdrawn his arm before a cold-turkeying sophomore tried to pluck the gum back out.

Joel laid a menacing glare on him. “Forget about it.”

He grabbed the sophomore’s half-gallon-sized slushy—contraband, after all—and poured it in on top of the gum in order to render it garbage.

The kid seemed to almost weep, then went back to rocking gently, waiting for his turn on a lone cigarette being passed among his friends as if they were soldiers in a foxhole. The image was pathetic.

Joel returned to Frank, who could’ve hugged this kid if not for fear of a molestation suit.

“You’re going to be fine.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Joel reached through the open window of his car and dipped his hand into the box of provisions. He hesitated, kicked himself, then withdrew his hand with a cigarette between his fingers.

“Joel!” Frank cried, half in mock alarm at the kid’s genial audaciousness.

“I know, I know,” he pleaded. “I’m down to like none. This is my first one of the day, swear to God.”

Not at all thwarted by his teacher’s disapproval, Joel sparked it up and took a deep, milk-every-moment drag. He hated himself for this, but it was beyond his control.

“You know,” Frank said, “I’m supposed to take that away from you. You shouldn’t be doing this.”

Joel waved to the parking lot throng. “I shouldn’t be doing any of this. But it’s kinda sweet.”

Frank had to concede that.

Next thing he knew, Joel was offering him a drag. The teacher stopped, checked to see if anyone was paying attention, then shrugged and took a brief, clandestine hit. It was kind of exciting.

The pair sat side by side on Joel’s hood and watched the milling crowd. A genuine party mood was in the air. Kids with video cameras darted about to record it all.

A stringy Oriental kid—a sophomore, Joel believed—ignored the razzing and elbowed his way into the store, like a fallen woman breaching an abortion clinic protest. He flipped off his classmates as he disappeared inside.

“Kid’s got no respect,” Joel said sadly.

Frank shrugged. “This is hard. You’re gonna see more and more of that the longer this goes on.”

“Yeah. Then we’ll be done,” Joel sighed wistfully. “But, you know, we do have a point.”

T
odd saw her first, emerging from an expensive-looking van, a three-man video crew trailing behind her. This was obviously not the local news. The local news did not pack lightweight, state-of-the-art gear like this. The local news was, without fail, staffed by young, pasty geek types with freshly minted communications degrees and aspirations of becoming the next Spielberg.

This group, from the van, were scruffed up and dressed down meticulously. They had all the right piercings, all the right casual-at-a-cost clothing. They looked like they could have their own show on the WB.

And the girl, she was. . . She was. . .

“Hi. I’m Annie McCullough with R
²
Rev, in New York.”

Giggling, Todd realized as he giggled, was probably not the way to go here. “W-what?”

“R
²
Rev? New York? You do have cable here, don’t you?”

“Yeah. And maps. So we’ve heard of R
²
Rev
and
New York.”

When you’re thrown off a bridge, you can merely fall, or you can flap your arms while falling, just so someone might say you at least went down with panache. Todd, when talking to girls, especially cute girls (and this was easily the cutest he’d ever found himself addressing), learned long ago that if he was going to strike out,
someone
was going to be entertained—even if it always ended up just being him.

Annie smiled at his shy sarcasm. She could instantly spot a kid who, whether he realized it or not, defied the stereotypes. And this one could help her.

“My crew and I are traveling the country, documenting events and opinions that matter to our viewers. Someone at the school paper at Longfellow High told us what you guys were up to here, so we made a detour to check it out.”

Carlos was already panning his camera across the crowd. This was a relatively light turnout—school was in session and a lot of prep work was going on for quarter exams—but mercifully those on hand were a telegenic bunch, ably conveying a caricatured tableau of fussy teenage rabble.

When the boycott had made it a full week and Channel Twelve sent a crew out a second time to commemorate the occasion, Todd had had the foresight to supply a few signs to enhance the visuals. He used crude penmanship and blunt sloganeering in order to fairly portray the mindset of the crowd (“We’re Not 4 Sale!”), then slipped the signs to the scrawniest freshmen. He knew that elder classmen, always looking for an advantage that would get them on TV, would wrench them away from the weaklings and brandish them obnoxiously. Before long, everyone would have to have one.

Soon, the more creative students showed up with proclamations of their own. On Tuesday, the slogan emerged. It was, Todd immediately recognized, exquisite:

“We’re not buying this shit!”

It was rude. It was funny. It was dead-on apt. It could not appear on air because of the profanity, but by the time Todd scrawled it out on a couple dozen more signs and flung them to the protesters, it could not be ignored. News channels and photographers would have to digitally smear the “shit,” giving the campaign an outlaw sheen.

This was a pirate operation, an up-your-ass show of teenage disrespect.

The pose was fed masterfully.

By the end of the day that Tuesday, “We’re not buying this shit!” was spray-painted on Daljit Singh’s dumpster. The next morning, it was scratched dementedly across a T-shirt.

Todd, who knew things, got on the internet and learned how to trademark a phrase.

“What exactly is going on here?” Annie asked doubtfully.

She had expected more of a scene. She was from the Midwest and knew that a gangly knot of actual American teenagers was often not a pretty picture. But what she had been told was an “uprising” turned out to be just thirty or so blandly rebellious kids loitering in a strip mall parking lot.

Todd watched her watching the crowd. She was not dolled up. She had just spent six hours stuck in a van with her three intellectually retarded crewmen and their daily flatulence showdown. She stank of stale cigarettes and morning mouth.

But. . . “My god,” Todd gawked to himself.

My god. . .

“Umm. We’re taking a stand against the corporations that use manipulation and addiction to make themselves rich off of us. They need us to keep buying, so we’re not, just to see what happens.”

He was sounding like a dick! He was sounding like Frank Guiden in ninth grade Public Speaking class, right before he pissed his pants and his family had to send him off to a special school. All of a sudden, there’s a camera crew from New York and this babe from R
²
Rev asking him questions and his input was important AND HE WAS SOUNDING LIKE A DICK!!!

Where the hell was Joel?

He begged off. “I’m really not—”

She’d stopped listening. Todd had said enough. The simplicity of it made Annie smile, almost in awe.

“Corporate disobedience,” she marveled.

She watched two skanked-out freshmen girls getting harassed for emerging from the store with cigarettes. The girls reveled in the derision— it had become popular among the freaks to score points of their own by boycotting the boycott, not letting preppy jack-offs like Joel Kasten dictate their delinquency—but the anger of the crowd was raw and legit.

Here were teenagers taking sides, taking positions, on an issue— unabashed youth-targeted consumerism—which had heretofore flourished promiscuously by the sheer grace of the target market’s apathy.

This was something.

And yet. . .
corporate disobedience?

“Well. . .” Todd recoiled at the loftiness of the phrase, but then realized with a start that that was exactly what they had here. “Yeah.”