Something Red by Jennifer Gilmore

Author:Jennifer Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Protest

March 22, 1980

Benji thought of the soccer players’ plight as he watched them disappear into their dorms. So much really was at stake; the Olympics was about the world. And it was also personal; watching the games with his mother created an unrecognizable but radiating joy that circulated in his stomach. Now he remembered the girls spinning on the ice, weightless and bewitching, his mother close, cheering wildly when Dorothy Hamill performed her Hamill Camel perfectly. It had made Ben want to create a signature move on the soccer field, a reverse scissors perhaps, the ball rolling sideways across his body, that he thought he’d call a Rolled Gold, which he’d never got around to making unique enough to call his own. Then it hit him the way seeing his grandfather in that textbook at the beginning of the semester, the way seeing Rachel holding her little sign in front of Sherman, had. There are many ways to win: there is nothing more mine than this fight.

And Benji decided to take political action.

He walked over to Chapels Field. There, with most of the soccer players, the baseball and softball teams, basketball players, even the club teams, the rugby players and the touch footballers, girls who were once gymnasts, anyone who had ever loved a sport and who knew it could be elevated to art, anyone who knew what it was like to step onto a field, or a court or a balance beam, anyone who understood what it meant to use his or her body to be victorious, Benji made signs well into the evening. Everyone was banded together, working in the gloaming beneath that scattering of sunlight in the upper atmosphere illuminating the field just before dusk, and it felt then just as it had in high school on those nights they’d been able to continue practice before the lights clicked on and the lightning bugs and mosquitoes came out.

As Benji sat out at the makeshift tables filling in his hammer-and-sickles on red poster board with black ink, he thought of all the work he wasn’t doing, which in light of the Jersey shows made him want to put down his marker and go to the library to get some actual reading done.

Then it came to him. “Let’s have a rally, like a real rally, not just a bunch of us hanging around with signs!” he’d yelled into the crowd of athletes. And if it worked? An extra bonus that this could also satisfy his American Protest! class project.

Bent over their own signs, the kids next to him had flinched, startled by his outburst.

“We can have speakers and we can get athletes from all over Boston to come,” he’d said, a little softer. He’d looked out onto the field and was met with a dozen athletes sticking their fists in the air. “Yeah!” they screamed. “Ra-lee!”

Several kids started throwing around a football, and as a game of touch developed on the field, Benji and Number 8 and

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