Chapter 40. Frances, the Academic
Frances, the Academic
PRESENT DAY
“Franny, take my hand!”
Frances Vogel seized Melissa’s outstretched fingers, laughing as the taller girl yanked her through the crowd to where the other members of their cohort waited, right behind a blockade that protected the stage.
Franny had never been to a protest before, and now here she was in front of the gleaming white obelisk of city hall, in the beating heart of a rally that had turned out to be so much bigger than she’d expected.
She pushed her wire-frame glasses up her nose, thankful she hadn’t been vain and tried to wear her contacts, because all the kicked-up grit from the streets surely would’ve made her eyes irritated and bloodshot.
She’d walked around soaking up every detail: the hilarious outfits, the chanting and singing, the joyous people linking arms, the crowd that stretched so far, she’d seen in aerial photos on Instagram that they blanketed most of Downtown.
NBC4 was estimating more than seventy thousand people had shown up.
Seventy thousand. Franny was a historian-in-training. She knew the implications of a number that big.
Beside her, Melissa waved her handmade sign, which read NO REPEATS OF HISTORY: KEEP DEMAGOGUES OUT OF THE OVAL!
Franny and her friends had designed their signs together last night, using paint markers she’d splurged on for the occasion, and then they’d had a sleepover at her apartment, treating the rally like she used to treat childhood birthday parties.
At dawn they’d lathered on sunscreen, packed their water bottles and little sheets of paper titled “Know Your Rights” the ACLU had handed out on campus, and taken the bus to Downtown.
When they discovered they were some of the first to arrive, they couldn’t stop laughing.
How typical for five academic researchers to try so hard, wanting A-pluses on their first rally.
“Look, it’s Luca!” Melissa jumped and thrust her finger at the stage as Luca Clearwater strode across it in her signature sharp suit. City hall loomed directly behind her, as if the face of the government itself were watching.
Franny joined the thousands chanting Luca’s name.
Electric anticipation sizzled in the air, making her giddy.
She and her cohort, all first-year PhD students at UCLA, were obsessed with Luca.
She was a badass, a role model—a woman only a little older than them who spoke truth to power in ways Franny hoped to do with her own work.
The number of videos she and her friends had exchanged of Luca taking down one wannabe despot after another was extraordinary, so when they heard she was planning a rally, attending was a given.
“My god. Look at you, Los Angeles!” Luca’s image was magnified across each of the huge screens set up throughout Downtown, a hundred Lucas on a hundred stages.
She had to pause to wait for the shouting to die down.
“The news is saying over seventy thousand of you are standing here right now. Can you believe that? I’d say we’re showing the democratic tradition is alive and well in America, don’t you think? ”
Melissa turned to Franny and gripped her arm, eyes luminous with excitement.
As students of history, they understood the power of watching it unfold.
Franny had loved the subject since she was a girl—and growing up with two professor parents, there’d been no question that she’d follow in their footsteps.
Over the course of the next six years, Franny would earn her PhD and try her luck in the job market, even though her own professors had warned that academia was dying, academics slowly going extinct, and the odds of any of the grad students in their cohort becoming anything more than an adjunct—a glorified gig worker—were terrifyingly low.
But Franny had always been a dreamer. Even if she never experienced the joy of steady health care, she longed to publish books that would shape other people’s thinking as much as her favorite history books had shaped hers.
Luca paced the stage, listing reasons voters should reject Knox for president, and unexpected tears filled Franny’s eyes. Yes, she wanted to shout back. No more authoritarians. Remind the world we already know how that story goes!
That was the problem with history these days: Other people Franny’s age didn’t seem to care.
Actually, it was bigger than that—they didn’t seem to even acknowledge that thousands of years of human history predated them, that the world they’d emerged into came with several millennia of backstory.
Like every grad student worth her salt, Franny had read the great theorist of postmodern life, Fredric Jameson, who argued that the twenty-first century could be defined by its obsession with the current, the present, the new; and with that obsession came a tragic disregard for the past. To Franny, the popularity of politicians like Gabriel Knox was proof of that.
Amelia, another friend in her cohort, took one look at Franny’s shining eyes and started cackling. “Look at Franny,” she yelled. “She’s actually crying! Scout Sage hasn’t even come onstage yet!”
Franny wiped her eyes and laughed along with her friends. “What can I say? I love a strong woman behind a microphone.”
Melissa slung an arm over her shoulder. “Wait until you turn in your paper on Scout and the future of celebrity-led movements. Dooney and Carver are going to shit their little tweed pants.”
Franny squeezed her friend’s hand, hoping she was right.
She specialized in the history of pop culture, a niche academic discipline that treated gossip and internet discourse as seriously as any other texts.
She’d faced stiff opposition to her work from the more traditional professors in their department, but none more than Dr. Dooney and Dr. Carver, both sixty-year-old World War I scholars who didn’t think popular culture was worth rigorous study.
A lot of what Franny studied were the ways women talked to each other on casual, unregulated channels, the rhetoric they used, the symbols—so her older professors’ resistance felt a bit sexist and a lot shortsighted.
Just look at how many people were here today, wearing bootleg Our Ladies of the Dark T-shirts and whispering about Scout Sage.
Women whispering to other women held power.
Franny couldn’t wait to get home and write about it.
“The final message I want to send to Gabriel Knox and his cronies,” Luca yelled into the mic, “is don’t think—”
An earth-shattering explosion shook the earth under Franny’s feet, the sound hitting her with a primal roar like a rushing tsunami, the vibrations shaking her off her feet, and a split second later she was thrown back against the metal barricade.
Franny lay dazed on the ground, blinking up at the clouds. Her ears were ringing. She thought about sitting up. Patting down her body. But her hands seemed like they belonged to a person far away, who had only the vaguest relationship to her.
And then her hearing came back—and with it came the screams.
“Get up, Franny!” Melissa crouched in front of her, seizing her shoulders. Far away, in the distance, smoke was rising from the top of a skyscraper. The entire world was soot and screaming. Franny didn’t understand.
“Get up,” Melissa shouted. “We need to run!”