A Motion to Panic

Priscilla Boateng found out the arts program was getting cut the same way she found out about everything important: from a flyer that was technically not allowed to exist. The school had a rule. No flyers in the cafeteria. The rule existed because of an incident involving the chess club, a glitter bomb, and a substitute teacher's retirement, and like all the best rules at our school it was named after the disaster that caused it. This was the Glitter Rule. The Glitter Rule said the cafeteria was a flyer-free zone, a place of peace, where you could eat your rectangle of pizza without being recruited. So when Priscilla saw a flyer taped to the napkin dispenser, she knew two things instantly. One: somebody was breaking the Glitter Rule. Two: it had to be serious, because nobody broke the Glitter Rule for fun anymore, not since the chess club. The flyer said: COMMUNITY INPUT MEETING — PROPOSED BUDGET REALIGNMENT. And under that, in the small print where schools always hide the knife, it said the board was considering "the consolidation of non-core enrichment offerings," which Priscilla, who had been in every play since sixth grade, translated immediately and correctly. They were cutting the arts. She stood there with her tray, the pizza going soft, and felt the specific cold drop that you feel when a thing you assumed was permanent turns out to be a thing somebody could just decide to end. The drama room. The black-box theater with the one chair that squeaked. Mr. Adesina, who directed every show and called everyone "darling" regardless of gender, age, or whether he was actually mad at them. Priscilla had basically grown up in that black-box theater. That is not an exaggeration she would let you talk her out of. Her actual house was fine — her actual house had her parents and her annoying brother and a fridge — but the theater was where she had become a person. It was where she'd learned that she had a voice that carried, that she could make a room of three hundred bored students go quiet by changing nothing but how she breathed. It was where she had first been told, by Mr. Adesina, in front of everyone, that she had "it," and where she had spent two years since trying to figure out what "it" was so she could make sure she never put it down somewhere and lost it. You do not get to be the kind of kid that has "it" if there is no room in which to have it. Cut the program and you do not just cut a class. You cut the floor out from under every kid in this school who had quietly decided that the theater was the one place they were allowed to be loud. "Priss." Her best friend Tobias slid into the seat across from her, already eating. "You're doing the face. The face means a meeting. I'm not authorizing a meeting, I have a quiz." "They're cutting the program." She turned the flyer around so he could see. "All of it. Theater. Band. The kiln. Tobias, the kiln." To his credit, Tobias stopped eating. He read the flyer twice, the way you read something hoping the words will rearrange. They didn't. Words don't. "Okay," he said. "Okay. So we go to the meeting. We do the thing where everyone signs a paper and a parent cries." "The paper-and-crying thing doesn't work. They did the paper-and-crying thing for the late buses and we still don't have late buses." Priscilla pushed her tray away. Her brain had started doing the thing it did before every opening night, the cold-and-fast thing, where it stopped panicking and started planning, which felt almost exactly like panicking but with a direction. "The board doesn't listen to a paper. The board listens to one person. You know who the board listens to." "The principal." "After the principal." Tobias's eyes narrowed. He had known Priscilla since they were six. He could feel a bad idea coming the way farmers feel weather. "Priss." "The student body president sits in on board meetings. With a vote. A small vote, a baby vote, but a vote, and a microphone, and a chair at the table where they decide things." She was talking fast now, the flyer crushed in one hand. "Elections are in three weeks. Nobody good is running. It's wide open." "Priss. You are a theater kid. You have never wanted to be president of anything. You once turned down being captain of the team you were already on." "That was different. That was kickball." She stood up, leaving the soft pizza, leaving the whole concept of lunch. "Tobias. If we want a seat at the table, somebody has to go get the seat. I'm going to run for president." And Tobias looked up at his best friend, with an expression she would not fully understand the weight of until much later — a complicated expression, with something unhappy folded inside it — and said, quietly, "Yeah. Funny. Me too. I signed up this morning."