I text back:i'll be there. bringing cookies.
Keely:of course you are.
Saturday is bright and warm and I take the bus downtown with a container of Grandma Eloise's cookies and my second-best sneakers and a feeling in my chest like carbonation, like all the small bubbles of everything good in my life right now are hitting the surface at the same time.
Keely is already at City Hall when I arrive. She's standing on the bottom step with a handmade sign that says NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL in letters so big you could read them from a helicopter. She's wearing a tank top and shorts and she's got sunscreen on her nose and she looks like a person who woke up this morning ready to yell about something that matters, which is Keely's default state.
"ZOE!" She sees me and screams my name across thirty feet of sidewalk. "Get up here! Mia's saving us a spot by the speaker stage!"
I get up there. The crowd is building, maybe three hundred people, filling the steps and the plaza in front of City Hall with signs and flags and strollers and dogs and the specific energy of people who got up early on a Saturday to stand in the sun for something they believe in. There are tables along the far side: community organizations, legal aid, voter registration, a food truck selling empanadas.
Mia is where Keely said she'd be, near the speaker stage, with Jake, who is tall and quiet and holding Mia's extra sign with the careful posture of a man who was told to hold this sign and is holding this sign and not getting in the way. Jordan arrives next, with her sign from last time, slightly crumpled. Raquelle brings up the rear with a tube of SPF 50 and a fanny pack.
"Sunscreen," Raquelle announces, holding up the tube. "Nobody's getting a rash today."
We sunscreen. We position. The speakers start at eleven and they're good: a city councilwoman, a community organizer, a high school student whose parents came from Guatemala and who speaks with a clarity that makes three hundred people go quiet and listen. She talks about her mother working double shifts and her father learning English at night and her little brother being afraid to go to school, and the crowd is still, absorbing, and I think about the lot where Scorched Ordinance plays and how Cal talks between songs about the neighborhood and how this is the same thing. People standing together because standing alone doesn't change anything.
Keely is filming on her phone. Mia has tears on her face. Jordan is holding her sign so high her arms are shaking.Raquelle is watching the high school student with an expression I've never seen on her, which is fury and love in equal measure.
The march starts at noon. We walk. Three hundred people through downtown, signs up, voices up, the chant building from the front and rolling backward through the crowd like a wave. I walk between Keely and Jordan and I chant and my voice is one voice in three hundred and that's enough. One voice in three hundred is exactly enough.
We loop past the federal building. More speeches. A woman from a legal aid organization talks about the families she works with, the cases, the children, and her voice is steady and professional and underneath it is the same thing that was underneath Cal's screaming: anger that comes from caring about the place you're angry about.
After the speeches, the crowd loosens. People drift toward the tables, the food truck, the small clusters of conversation that form when the formal part ends and the informal part begins. Keely is trying to get all five of us into a selfie and failing because Raquelle keeps blinking and Jake doesn't understand angles.
"Jake. Jake. Tilt your head. No, the other way. Jake."
"I'm tilting."
"You're leaning. There's a difference."
I drift toward the tables while Keely solves the Jake problem. The organizations have set up displays: pamphlets, signup sheets, stickers, information about legal rights and community resources. I stop at a table for a tenant advocacy group and sign up for their mailing list because tenant rights is something Teague cares about and if Teague cares about it then I want to understand it.
The next table has a woman selling patches.
She's set up on a folding table with a cloth spread over it, and on the cloth are rows of embroidered patches in every color: rainbows, fists, flags, slogans, symbols. They're handmade, each one slightly different, the stitching tight and deliberate. There's a cardboard sign that says HANDMADE PATCHES, $5 EACH, ALL PROCEEDS TO THE CAUSE.
I stop.
The patches are beautiful. They're small, two or three inches, the right size for a jacket. I look at them and I think about Teague's jacket, the patches on the leather, each one placed and fraying and real. BLM. Trans rights. Kids over guns. Eat the rich. No more billionaires. Each one a position. Each one a thing she cares about stitched to a thing she wears.
"Take your time," the woman says. She's older, maybe sixties, with reading glasses and nimble fingers. "I make them all myself. The thread's from the garment district."
I look through the rows. There's one that catches me. It's small, rectangular, royal blue with white embroidery. The text reads: NO BORDERS ON COMPASSION.
I pick it up. The stitching is clean and tight and the blue is deep and the words are right. They sound like something Teague would say if Teague said things like this out loud, which she doesn't, because Teague says things like this with patches and playlists and the way she lets people into her bar and feeds them and plays them music and doesn't ask where they're from.
"This one," I say.
"Good choice." The woman takes my five dollars. "For you?"
"For my girlfriend."
She smiles. "Lucky girlfriend."
Shrugging, I keep looking, seeing if there are any others I want. "I'm the lucky one."
I put the patch in my bag. I keep looking. There's a second one that catches me: small, round, pink embroidery on black. A fist holding a flower. No text. Just the image. A fist and a flower.
