Chapter Five

It was early afternoon, and the campus cafeteria was a bustle of activity. But Rei was oblivious to it all, sitting alone in one of the booths with her forehead against the floor to ceiling windows that took up the whole wall on one side of the cafeteria. She stared out at what was usually an outdoor seating area for students to enjoy their lunch in the open air but was now just a lumpy expanse of brilliant white. She anticipated a text from her mother at any moment, perhaps demanding that Rei come home at once for immediate transferal to an extended high school program, perhaps worse. But it hadn’t come yet.

“Hey.”

School, and specifically college, was the only thing that made Rei feel like an adult anymore, and it was a feeling she was clinging to desperately. She knew a few years ago when the first state enacted their own version of The Hayes Act that things were getting bad, but she never imagined she’d see that kind of legislation passed on a federal level. She never imagined she’d have her adulthood and maybe her entire future ripped away from her so officiously.

“Uhm, hello?”

When Rei was a kid, people still told young girls they could be anything they wanted when they grew up. Now, Rei’s options were dwindling even as she sat there.

“Hey, excuse me?”

Rei practically jumped out of her skin at the voice that suddenly cut through her thoughts and jarred her back to reality.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you, but you seemed kind of lost in thought there.”

Rei looked up at the girl talking to her. She wore black Doc Martens, black skinny jeans, and a ribbed black tank top under a too large flannel shirt. Sharp black eyeliner and matching lipstick made a strong contrast to her pale skin. Blue hair spilled out in curls from under a black beanie. The girl had a book tucked under one arm and was holding a lunch tray in her opposite hand. “Mind if I…?” The girl gestured to the bench across the booth from Rei.

“Uhm, yeah, sure, sorry,” Rei stumbled over her words as she tried to clear the wreckage of her crashed train of thought.

“You’re Rei, right?” The girl said as she sat down.

“Yeah, um, how…?” Wait, suddenly the girl’s face clicked in Rei’s memory. She remembered seeing her in all the meetings leading up to Wednesday night. No, that wasn’t right, she had been leading those meetings.

The girl smiled knowingly and nodded her head, recognizing the look of revelation on Rei’s face. “Yeah, mutual friends, you know?”

Rei nodded; she did know.

“Sorry if I scared you,” the girl repeated as she settled into her seat. “I just saw you over here by yourself and…well, there aren’t exactly a lot of empty seats,” she gestured towards the crowded cafeteria around them. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” Rei smiled weakly and shook her head. She was digging desperately through her memory to find this girl’s name, “I don’t mind at all.”

“Everything okay?” The girl popped a french fry into her mouth. “You seemed pretty deep in thought when I came up.”

“Yeah, I’m okay, just…a lot on my mind, you know?” It seemed rude to have to ask her name when she clearly knew Rei’s.

“Yeah? You doing okay after…last week?”

Rei noticed the girl’s fingernails were painted black as well as she watched the girl fumble to open a packet of BBQ sauce.

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, it’s okay I guess.”

The girl squirted out a puddle of BBQ sauce, dipped another fry in it, and crunched down on it.

“Sounds less than ideal, if you ask me. Wanna talk about it?”

Rei fidgeted in her seat. She knew she could trust this girl—she knew she could trust any girl that had been involved with Wednesday night—but it felt weird to unburden herself on someone who was still, for all intents and purposes, a stranger. She didn’t even know her name, for god’s sake. So, instead, she just shook her head and said nothing.

“Are you a freshman?” The girl asked after a few moments of awkward silence.

“Sophomore,” Rei corrected, “you?”

The blue-haired girl shrugged, “I don’t know anymore, I just keep taking classes, but this is my fourth year here.”

“You don’t want to transfer to a four-year university?”

The girl chuckled, “yeah, I mean, that would be ideal, but in this economy?” Both girls laughed at that, but there was an undercurrent of nervousness in both of their laughs. “Seriously though, I feel like I can do more good staying here, you know? Helping freshmen and sophomores…get involved, you know?”

“Have you been…involved for long?”

“Founding member,” her black lips stretched out in a proud smile. “Of course, we didn’t know how far things would go when we started, but…well, a lot has changed since I was a freshmen.”

“No kidding.”

Neither girl knew quite where to take the conversation from there, so an awkward silence slowly began to form. Rei turned her attention to the crowd filling the cafeteria. Just like her classroom demographic, what was pretty evenly split last year was now dominated by boys. Perhaps more importantly, there was very little inter-mingling. The boys in this school were all over eighteen, legal adults, whereas most of the girls were under twenty-eight, legal children. They occupied different worlds.

As Rei watched, Jennifer Duffy walked by the table Rei was sharing with the blue-haired girl. Rei wouldn’t exactly call Jennifer a friend, but they had done a group project together, so they weren’t exactly strangers either. Jennifer smiled behind her pacifier when she saw Rei and gave her a small wave before crinkling past them, her diaper sagging below the hemline of her pleated skirt.

“Ugh,” the blue-haired girl said when Jennifer was out of ear shot, “kill me if I ever become like that, okay?”

“I don’t know,” Rei shrugged, “she seems happy. Isn’t that what feminism is supposed to be about? Giving people the freedom to pursue the life that makes them happy?”

“Yeah, of course, but do you think she would have chosen that if she hadn’t been coerced by her parents and the media and all the other brainwashing, metaphorical and literal, out there? She’s happy because she doesn’t know better; she’s assimilated into the hegemonic order.”

Rei chewed on that for a moment. “Mom always tells me she just wants me to be happy,” Rei said, surprising herself with her sudden openness, “but she doesn’t seem to like…I don’t know, she says she wants me to happy, and I say school makes me happy, and she says, like, ‘no, not that way,’ ya know?”

The girl nodded sympathetically throughout Rei’s mini tirade. “Like she wants you to be happy but thinks she knows what will make you happy better than you do?”

“Yes, exactly!”

“I’ve talked to a lot of girls in that situation,” the girl said, dragging a fry through her BBQ puddle absently. “I think their mothers genuinely mean well most of the time. I think a lot of them are just afraid for us and, frankly, afraid to stand up for us. So, we have to stand up for ourselves and each other, and that’s what we are doing.”

Rei nodded, there was some sense to that. There was a lot of sense to that. “What about your parents?” Rei asked.

“Well, my father is a misogynistic piece of shit,” she replied with no small amount of disdain in her voice. “My mother left him a few years ago when all this started to happen and he made it clear he thought this whole movement was the best for everyone. If he had his way, I’d probably be sitting in one of those pre-schools for young adult girls right now, but, thankfully, Mom ditched his ass.”

“So, your mom doesn’t buy into any of this?”

“Nu uh,” the girl shook her head, “she’s pretty progressive; signed the emancipation paperwork and everything.”

“Oh, you’re emancipated?” Rei felt a pang of jealousy. Emancipation didn’t protect girls their age entirely from the new laws; it could be revoked by the state for various infractions and by your parents at any time for any reason. But it meant not needing parental permission to attend college; it meant getting some of your adult privileges back.

“Yeah, thankfully.” The girl wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and laid it gently over the remains of her lunch. “What about your parents? You said your mom isn’t happy about you being in college, but you’re here, so they can’t be that bad, right?”

“For now,” Rei responded sourly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I barely got my mom to agree to let me keep attending college after they passed The Hayes Act. Now, she wants me to think about going to one of those extended high school programs.”

The girl scoffed, “housewife classes.”

“Yes, exactly!”

“What about your dad?”

“Oh, he, uh, passed away.”

“Oh,” the girl seemed taken aback, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay; it happened when I was a kid. Cancer.”

“That sucks; I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, but it really is okay. I don’t know what he would have thought of all this, to be honest; maybe I’m lucky he’s not around.” It was not the first time Rei had considered what her father’s stance would have been on the events that had transpired since his death, but she was ten years old when he passed, she didn’t exactly know his political views.

“Well,” the girl replied after a beat, “at least your mom sounds pretty reasonable. I mean, housewife classes would suck for sure, but it could be worse.”

Rei thought back to Jennifer Duffy. “Yeah, I don’t think my mom would ever go that far, thankfully.”

“Well, look,” the girl said as she picked up her phone and checked the time, “I’ve gotta run to my next class, but it was really fun talking to you, Rei.”

“Yeah, you too, thanks for the company,” and Rei meant it. Her discussion with this girl hadn’t fixed anything, but it had distracted her from her impending doom and inexplicably made her feel better.

“We should do this again,” the girl said as she gathered up her stuff, “or…maybe you might want to text me?” It was the first time the girl had sounded anything less than 100% confident.

“Yeah? I, uh, think I’d like that,” Rei replied.

“Awesome,” the girl smiled and pulled out a binder and a purple pen from her bag, scribbled something on the corner of a piece of paper, tore it off, and passed it across the table to Rei. “Don’t be shy, okay?” And then she was rushing off.

Rei smiled as she watched the girl go, then looked down at this piece of paper. The girl’s ten-digit phone number was written out in impeccable handwriting. Underneath that was one word written in flowing cursive script: Riley.