The Fight for Midnight by Dan Solomon

Author:Dan Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Coming of Age / Social Themes / Activism & Social Justice / Historical / United States / 21st Century
Publisher: North Star Editions
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

6:01 pm

Well, shit.

I pause outside the gallery, feeling like a total jerk. Couldn’t I have just kept my mouth shut and supported her in this thing that she obviously knows more about than I do? Couldn’t I have just been there for her?

But I guess not. I don’t know why, but thinking about Jesse in there got me thinking about Shireen in her orange shirt downstairs and how this is all too important to too many people to just join a side because the girl I like is on it.

It’s loud outside the gallery, like the minutes before a school assembly when no one has shushed us yet. Cassie and I were talking in stage whispers inside, but if we’d been out here, we’d have been shouting in each other’s ears.

The line to get inside the gallery is long—longer even than it was this morning. It’s still going to take a while before Cassie’s spare seat finds a new occupant, though, if the unofficial rule that oranges sit with oranges and blues sit with blues holds—almost all of the people waiting to get in are wearing orange. I hope that the bluest of blue people comes in and sits next to her, and that Cassie and Marsha and their new Smurfy pal all get to celebrate whatever the Texas Senate does together. I just can’t sit with them while they do it.

I don’t know where I’m going now, but I’m not going home, not after all of that. I wind my way down the line like I’m swimming upstream. When I get to the elevators, I join three orangeshirts who are already standing outside the doors.

“Come on, come on, come on,” a guy with spiky hair and a UT football jersey says as he taps his foot impatiently.

“They’re not going to kill the filibuster before you get to the auditorium,” his friend, a woman with black bangs and a vintage orange dress, says.

“This is so messed up,” he says as the light dings and the doors open. I get in with them, glad to be reminded about the auditorium.

The elevator stops at the ground floor of the rotunda, before the subbasements. It’s really loud now. I peek my head out of the elevator to take a look.

However crowded the place seemed earlier, I’m starting to get a sense of what a really crowded room is like—it’s like being at a concert or something, where you can’t even walk without bumping into somebody. I look at my watch and realize that it’s after six o’clock. This must be the after-work crowd—and most of them are orange. In fact, it seems like the size of the crowd has doubled, and everybody who showed up is wearing orange. The blues were outnumbered before, but this is bonkers.

We get to the subbasement where the auditorium is, and I bounce out of the elevator, weaving through people on my way. The hall outside the auditorium is crowded, too, but at least it still feels like a functional hallway.

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