Val shrugged. “Sure. You have money?”
“Yes.”
“You know the rules?”
“No cola, no sulfites, no fun. Check.” Sophie finished with an eye roll that Val knew she’d been working on for some time, but Val was satisfied.
She looked to Mr. Clary, who nodded. “Your wife gave me the rundown the first time Sophie came over.”
Sophie slumped at that news, and Val’s heart went out to her. She wished her daughter could visit friends without parental intervention. Someday soon they’d have to let go and trust her; not yet.
“See you later, Soph.”
She watched Sophie’s body language in her rearview mirror, the way she straightened up again as her mother drove away. No matter how much she wanted to be the good guy in the scenario, it looked like she was cast in the role of suffocating parent.
Or maybe it wasn’t about her. Maybe that something else she’d seen in Sophie’s eyes wasn’t about her mother. The more she thought about it, the more she realized it was likely that Sophie wasn’t just excited about a meal away from prying parental eyes: she wanted to talk about what she had just taken part in. Val had just watched her daughter transform into an activist, and she was still concerned about French fries.
CHAPTER THIRTY
SOPHIE
Sophie attended three more Saturday rallies with Gabe and his father before the school year ended. They all went more or less the same. Mr. Clary spoke, sometimes followed by others, mostly people who had decided not to get Pilots or not to let their kids; a few claimed to have seen Pilots go wrong. The second group made her think of David and Julie: her mom had never complained, but she’d heard David mention noise. One of these people said his kid had committed suicide, but he didn’t know why.
Some speakers were even scientists or doctors. “Look at all the mental health diagnoses that begin in puberty and young adulthood,” one said. “Should we be putting this additional stress on underdeveloped brains?”
That one scared her, too. She understood. She wasn’t allowed to have a Pilot—even if she wanted one, which she didn’t—because the company didn’t recommend them for people with certain disorders. What happened to people who got Pilots and then got diagnosed?
She and Gabe watched from near the fence. She learned a lot watching Mr. Clary and the way he organized things. She would never have realized that something so chaotic-looking was actually carefully orchestrated, with every speaker chosen for maximum impact. Nobody got the mic until he vetted them.
“He learned that one the hard way,” Gabe confided. “At the end of the first rally he did an open-mic thing to let anyone who wanted have a chance to speak. One lady stood to talk about her son’s Pilot, but started talking about his drug problem instead, and then we kinda realized she had a drug problem, too. She went on for twenty minutes before Dad got the megaphone away from her.”
Sophie considered. “How come he let me speak my first time?”
“I told him you’d be great; I had a good feeling about you.”
Mr. Clary seemed to like her. He’d trusted her to speak, even if it was only a few words, and he’d given her the mic a few more times since then. Sometimes, when he spoke, he pointed at her and Gabe and called them “The Future of the Movement.” She liked that part. He followed it with: “But I hope this movement doesn’t need a future. I hope Pilots are a fad, and the fad ends, and these young people get to go on to the adult lives they deserve, adult lives where they are not second-class citizens.” She practiced his timing and phrasing in her mirror at home, booming some words and stretching others out.
One night, eating baked chicken with the Clarys, she worked up the nerve to ask the question that had been bothering her. Mr. Clary was talking about upcoming rallies, about speakers and schedules. Gabe argued with him about whether a guy who had spoken the week before was worth having back.
Sophie loved to listen to them argue, loved the way Mr. Clary treated Gabe like an adult with an opinion worth considering. It reminded her of her own family, back when David was around and their dinners were loud and boisterous, though she knew that memory probably wore rose-colored glasses. If she thought about it too hard, she started remembering people laughing at her, not with her. She was always the youngest, always left out of conversations.
“Is anybody listening?” She surprised herself with the question. Both Clarys paused in their conversation, a rare lull.
“To you?” Gabe asked. “We are now.”
“No. To the protests. I mean, I think everything that’s being said is really important, but isn’t it being said to the wrong people? The ones who come are the ones who believe you already. It’s the same faces every time. It’s a good crowd, and I love being around people who don’t have Pilots, but . . . what if everybody else just thinks we’re crazy? How is anything ever going to change?”
Mr. Clary gave her a long, thoughtful look. Sophie felt her face flush. Ice clunked in the freezer, but she willed herself not to look away or get distracted.
“You’re not wrong, Sophie,” he said at last. “We’re preaching to the choir, and maybe we’re protesting too often, and maybe nobody’s listening anymore. How do you propose we fix the situation?”
Nobody had ever asked her that question before. She loved her parents, but she couldn’t think of one time when they’d ever asked her to solve a problem outside of homework.
She bit her lip, thinking. “We need to show them we’re worth listening to, but I don’t know how we show that. Maybe we’re in the wrong place. We’re not going to get them to stop making Pilots, so why are we protesting at
