I realized I had no Latinx friends in this world. The word didn’t even exist here. Then I pinged on a memory: how an eerily identical President Trump had triumphantly claimed that decades of our closed-door policy had kept COVID out of the US. Until nearly a million Americans died, while the rest of the continent stayed clean. Turns out our closed-door policy kept the virus in, not out. My grandpa Duncan died of it in this world. The racist one. But before then, he must have thrived in this place, like yeast in fresh dough.

Shaking off the memory, I glanced over to the bathrooms, my thoughts going back to Katie. She’d come out, and now Layton was there, talking to her earnestly. I didn’t need to hear the conversation to know the gist of it. Layton was wearing Katie down with an apology. Finally she accepted it, and they left together with his arm around her. Maybe Layton actually believed that his apology was from the bottom of his heart, but when you’re the type of guy who treats girls the way Layton does, how deep can your heart really go? It doesn’t take much to reach the bottom of it.

The only good thing about Layton’s momentary remorse was that he’d be good to Katie for the rest of the day, maybe even the whole weekend. It would give me time to figure out what to do about it—because now I realized that Angela, wherever she was, was right. I couldn’t just sit and watch.

“First time in the Alt?” Paul asked.

“The what?”

“You know—the alternative dining area.”

“Oh, right. Yeah,” I told him, “but I think I might make it a regular thing, you know?”

“Good for you!” said his mom. “Someone from a family as prominent as yours sitting in the alternative section will be a statement. Really ruffle some feathers!”

“Just trying to be a decent person,” I said.

“Doesn’t your school have a de-seg club?” his mom asked. “You should join.”

I turned to Paul. “Are you in it?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said, a little sheepish about it, “but I’ll join if you do.”

And so I agreed to join the desegregation club. I didn’t know what a bunch of white kids in a white school could do against a hurricane of people not giving a shit, but if the choice was either that or do nothing, I’d rather scream into the storm.