“Did you know only ten percent of campus energy comes from clean fuels?” a student with many multicolored braids in her hair shouts at us. She’s wearing a long dress and sandals and has about a hundred woven bracelets on her wrists. “Would you like to sign our petition?” She thrusts a clipboard into my hands. She smells weird and I back up a little.

“You want our signatures?” Mercedes asks.

“We’re just kids,” I add.

“We need the young people,” the braid woman says. “Do you girls know that you’re our future?”

“I guess.”

“We’re petitioning for a second wind turbine and to mandate that fifty percent of energy used comes from the turbines. And we need all the signatures we can get.”

I don’t know what wind turbines and energy-use percentages mean, but we both sign the petition, adding our names under the completely illegible signatures of the college students who signed before me.

The crowd gets bigger, and now college students bump our elbows as they continue down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. As we watch from our spot in the grass, Mercedes says, “I saw a protest march from my mom’s office in San Francisco last year. She’s on the fourteenth floor, but even from up there you could see all the signs. ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘No Justice, No Peace.’ Stuff like that. It’s pretty great to see people standing up for what they believe in.”

“That’s so cool.” And then I admit, “Protests—well, crowds—makes me nervous. I get anxious sometimes.”

Mercedes just nods as if she already figured that out.

“When I go to college,” I say as the students turn into a river of people all heading in the same direction, “I’m definitely going to go to protests.”

“Mat,” she says, grinning. “We’re already at college. Why not start today?”

I try to protest against Mercedes’s idea of joining the protest. It’s one thing to imagine doing it when I’m older, and another to actually try it now. I don’t like yelling and I don’t like fighting. Mattie doesn’t like conflict, my mom always says.

That’s been the strangest part about living with stepbrothers—all their conflict. Even though they’re five years apart, it seems like they fight all the time. Kenny kicks Lucas under the dining room table. Lucas sticks out his tongue at Kenny in the back seat of my mom’s new minivan. They argue about playing chess with me—even though Lucas doesn’t even know how. They fight over the remote, an old basketball, even a fluffy blue blanket.

“Give it!” Kenny yelled at his brother the first night at the rented cabin in Minnesota when Bob made us watch a movie together. Moana. It was the only one that our whole brand-new family could agree on.

“You two need to share,” Bob said.