Love, Coffee, and Revolution

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

one month earlier

berkeley, california, usa

The first step to becoming alive was realizing I was dead.

“Did you remember the wings?” Cody asked.

“I thought you were bringing the wings.”

Irritation crossed his face as he rooted through the trunk. “What about the talons?”

“Nope.”

“Dammit, Dee. How are we going to be Vultures of Capitalism without wings and talons?”

It was a good question. A better question is why we were going to be Vultures of Capitalism in the first place. Cody and I were in Berkeley to protest capitalism, which I was down for. It was the predator cosplay I was questioning. But Cody was giving me a very stern look.

“Well, why don’t we go back and get them?” I asked.

“Because then we’ll miss the protest.” And it will be all your fault. He didn’t actually say the last part. But he was thinking it.

I was accustomed to guilt, deserved or not. I was also accustomed to discomfort. I had been uncomfortable my whole life; with my parents, my hair, my teeth. Things were different at age twenty-one. Now I was uncomfortable with my mind.

“The protest is already starting,” he said, radiating displeasure. I tried not to own his feelings, like they advise in #selfhelptok, but it didn’t work. I closed the trunk with a thud, and we started toward the small group on the corner.

“Is that Starbucks?” he asked, noticing the disposable coffee cup in my hand. His face turned an even whiter shade of white.

“No! Of course not. I just reused the cup.”

“Why do you have a Starbucks cup in the first place?” he asked, as if it were a handgun.

“They had them at the Teamsters picket last week in Contra Costa. I thought if I was going to take a disposable cup, I should at least reuse it.”

Horror washed over his face. “We can’t be seen with that.”

“But I haven’t finished my coffee.”

“We. Cannot. Be. Seen. With that. ”

“Fine.”

I couldn’t deny that Starbucks was a megacorporation, but most of their coffee was actually ethically sourced.

Still, it wasn’t worth the fight. I went back to the car, took one last sip, and put it in the cupholder.

Then we joined our friends, many of whom were decked out in talons and wings.

They had signs like Boycott Oil, Housing Justice for All, and Team Orca.

If you’re thinking the protest could’ve used some specificity, you’d be right.

All the causes were important, and on a deeper level related to each other, but it was hard to see what protesting them together in wing-and-talon gear was going to accomplish.

Marlowe, a young woman in ragged jeans and impressive fairy wings, addressed the group with a bullhorn.

The bullhorn was a bit much—there were only thirty of us.

“Okay,” she said, awkwardly gripping it with her talons.

“Those of you willing to get arrested, block the street.” She fumbled the bullhorn.

It crashed to the ground, giving off a horrid screech.

She carefully plucked it back up. “We’re going to march up the on-ramp to the 580. ”

“Isn’t that a little dangerous?” asked Rory, the girl next to me. “I mean, I don’t want to get hit on the freeway.” I nodded at her; fair point.

“Those of you unwilling to get arrested, protest on the corner,” said Marlowe. “You will serve as witnesses when the cops arrest the rest of us. Don’t forget to record it. For history. ”

Cody, chest puffed out, stepped into the street, ready to charge the freeway.

“Wait,” I said, grabbing his elbow. “We can’t get arrested today.”

“Come on, Dee. Put your body where your words are.” He looked at my picket sign: Eat the Rich.

“We have to drive down to my parents after the protest. I can’t miss Thanksgiving.”

“Why? So we can celebrate the genocide of native people?”

I didn’t know how to reply. Yes, Thanksgiving had a problematic origin. But it was also a tradition that brought your family together. Maybe in his dysfunctional Wasp family you could miss holidays, but in my dysfunctional Jewish family, not showing up was on par with familial abandonment.

Cody stared at me. “I thought you were committed to the fight.”

But which fight?

“Of course I’m committed,” I said. “But what will getting arrested today actually accomplish? This is a really small protest. There isn’t a unified message. There isn’t even any press here.”

“That’s not the point. Little actions build into movements.”

Maybe that was true. But maybe it was also true that Cody just wanted to get arrested so he could post it on TikTok.

“I can’t do it today,” I said. “I’m sorry. If you want to get arrested, that’s fine, but I’m still going to LA this afternoon. I need to be with my family.”

“Fine,” he said, peeved, stepping back onto the corner.

So we grimly chanted, “Capitalism, no thanks! We’ll burn your evil banks,” while our comrades marched toward the freeway.

They didn’t even get to the on-ramp before the cops showed up.

And much to Cody’s chagrin, the cops didn’t arrest anybody.

They just closed the on-ramp with orange traffic cones.

* * *

But Cody wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily.

A lifetime of heteronormative cis male white privilege, family money, and an Aries placement had made him very obstinate.

Or maybe it’s because we were prelaw seniors at UC Berkeley, and if you’re prelaw, you’re probably at least a little bit of a jerk.

I didn’t think he was a jerk when I met him at a bicycle street-takeover in the summer.

I thought he was brilliant and decisive and committed to justice.

Those things were still true. They just didn’t add up to being a great boyfriend.

“God, I hate this freeway,” he said as he hit the steering wheel of his silver BMW coupe. We were bumper-to-bumper on the 580 East—just a few miles past the on-ramp we had failed to occupy—heading to LA. “Driving on a holiday weekend was a huge mistake.”

Perhaps it was. I was already regretting it. But I had a lot of regrets. Like the mounting debt I was accruing to get a BA, so I could go to law school and accrue... more debt!

“Next time we’re flying,” he said.

Sure, why not, add it to the pile. I’ll never pay it off anyway.

“You know, it’s not too late to turn back. We could tell your parents there was just too much traffic. That way we won’t miss the Black Friday protests.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m dreading it as much as you, but I have to go home.”

“If you dread seeing them so much, why do you visit them so often?”

How to explain the dynamics of my close-knit family? That we loved each other so much that boundaries ceased to exist? That there was, in fact, such a thing as too much love?

“I don’t dread seeing them,” I said. “I dread seeing them all at once. When I go there, it’s like I’m the new panda at the zoo.”

“How?”

“They hyperfocus on me—Have I been eating enough? Sleeping? Did I know that highly successful people get at least seven hours of sleep a night, but not more than nine?”

“Tell them the questions make you uncomfortable.”

I laughed. How naive of him. “They care about me. They want to know how I’m doing. It’s just... a lot of pressure. They expect a lot out of me.”

“You need to separate their expectations from your own.” That was ironic coming from Cody, who was constantly pushing his expectations onto me. “Like, if you don’t want to apply to law school, don’t apply to law school. I’m not. I told my parents last week that they couldn’t buy my complicity.”

“They did buy you this car.” He grimaced. The car embarrassed Cody because money embarrassed Cody. Just not enough to give it up.

“Can you change the playlist?” he said irritably.

“You know I can’t stand sad-lady guitar songs.

” That was another thing. He liked EDM. I liked music.

It all added to a gnawing feeling that things weren’t going to work out between us.

While I respected his passion and commitment, sometimes I wished he could be a little less black-and-white about things.

But maybe I was projecting; I had that problem, too.

We got into Van Nuys sometime after two a.m. and conked out. The next morning we had two waking minutes alone before my mother knocked on my door. Had she been listening in the hallway to hear when we woke up?

“Could you come out here for a second, Dee?” Her voice whistled through the space under the door. I put on a robe and joined her in the hallway. She looked incredible, as always. Fitted dress, glossy nails, hair freshly blown out.

“We’ve got a lot to do this morning,” she said. She looked me up and down. “Your hair isn’t done.”

“I just got up.” I smoothed my unruly brown hair down. My mom’s hair was always perfect. Everything about her appearance was refined. My appearance was what I would call natural .

“Did you forget your tweezers?” She was staring at my eyebrows. “You can borrow mine. I know the big eyebrow look is all the rage with your generation, but they don’t do your face justice. You could be so beautiful.”

Could be. I didn’t mind that she was perfect. I just didn’t understand why she couldn’t let me be... not.

“You know, your eyebrows look fantastic,” I said.

Her expression brightened and her tone softened.

“Thanks, honey. I just had them done.” She unconsciously patted them.

“The rest of the family will be here in an hour. Please get dressed. And wear something nicer than your ‘good jeans.’” She hustled off to fluff the living room couch pillows, surely for the fourth time this morning.