The Boyfriend Candidate by Ashley Winstead

Author:Ashley Winstead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2023-03-09T19:13:22+00:00

21

If I’m Going Down, You’re Coming with Me

If I had my way, I would simply crawl into a cave and never give a speech again. But since Logan had signed me up to speak at the teachers union march, here I was, sweating on yet another stage. Thank God for Muriel Lopez, the one-woman hype machine. She’d brought her whole family to the march—husband, kids, cousins, even her tiny dog, clutched to her husband’s chest. A whole army of Lopez supporters in the audience. While Gia and her husband had arrived dressed sensibly in blue-and-white TEA sweaters, Muriel and her family had gone for drama: makeup, glitter, a banner, the whole nine yards. Buried under about twelve feet of scarves, Muriel wore an official licensed Logan Arthur for Governor T-shirt, and the rest of her family wore unofficial, unlicensed Muriel Lopez for President T-shirts. Every time I hit a pause in my speech, they cheered me like I was Oprah giving away free cars. It was thanks to them that I was getting through this.

“Let’s acknowledge the truth,” I said, eyes tracking over the crowd. People filled Eleventh Street, stretching as far as the eye could see under the cloudless late-September sky, holding signs that said Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, Texas and Teachers Deserve a Living Wage. The campaign and the TEA had done a hell of a job organizing. The campaign had set up what Nora called a “publicity gauntlet” the week before the march to hype it. I had to ask Principal Zimmerman for permission to miss school so Logan and I could do back-to-back interviews about our education plan. In the mornings, we hit radio shows, drinking coffee with velvet-voiced emcees; in the afternoons, we sat down with newspaper journalists, who paused their fervent Twitter scrolling to ask us questions; and in the evenings, we smiled for the cameras with preening TV anchors.

It was a whirlwind that would have dizzied me if not for my own anchors: Logan, who was a grounding presence next to me in every interview; Nora and Cary, who dutifully hung in the wings, clutching phones and Starbucks cups; and Nigel, who drove us around town while reciting the day’s forecast. By gauntlet day five, when Nora checked to see how I was doing, I told her the five of us had started to feel like an eccentric little family. She’d nodded knowingly and told me what I was describing was called proximity bonding, commonly experienced by kidnapping victims. Then she’d laughed at the look on my face and assured me that we were, in fact, a family.

Now here I was, delivering the speech I’d spent all week hyping. (No pressure.) “Politicians have ignored educators for years,” I told the crowd. “They’ve taken away retirement benefits, cut workforce numbers, and let salaries flatline.” The crowd roared its agreement, and I silently thanked the speechwriter on Logan’s team who’d convinced me to go with flatline. Drama seemed to be a winner.

“Most

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