California(27)

When Micah joined, the world had still only seen the pranks, the playful stuff. Dada called the Group an avant-garde theater troupe, and, at first, that was kind of true. They were famous for getting a thousand bicyclists to merge onto the 405 at rush hour. That had really f*cked with whatever traffic was still left on that ruin of a freeway, but only for an hour or so. A pocket of the Group was made up of dancers, actors, and artists, and they’d done a few big performances in the middle of open trials and city council meetings.

Right after he graduated from Plank, Micah told Frida that he was moving into a loft with other members. “The Group?” she’d repeated, and asked if he’d also gotten into acrobatics and fire-breathing when she wasn’t looking.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said.

“It just doesn’t seem like your thing,” she said.

Micah had shaken his head. “You don’t know anything about me.”

That had stung a little, and still did. If she knew anyone, it was her little brother.

When had that stopped being true?

Frida pulled her hands out of the creek water, and the cold iced up her fingers. She crab-walked to a patch of dirt and placed her palms flat on the ground until the groan of cold subsided.

The other, more serious branch of the Group had always been there, but it wasn’t until after Micah joined that it began to grow stronger. Or at least that’s when she noticed the shift, maybe because she started paying attention to their activities. Not long after Micah graduated from Plank, a few members of the Group had donned ski masks and hijacked a political fund-raising dinner. Those in attendance were said to be members of a nearby Community who wanted to close the roads surrounding their newly built compound. Someone from the Group ran a knife across a woman’s cheek, scarring her, and another had bashed a man’s head into one of the fake-orchid centerpieces. The Group had been protesting “corporate sponsorship of candidates,” according to the signs they showed to the camera. When Frida asked Micah about how it related to the bike prank, or to the juggling of doll heads, he shrugged and said he didn’t know a thing.

To Cal, it made sense that the Group appealed to Micah. “He’s interested in social justice, or so he says,” Cal remarked when she brought it up with him. “And he can also be dramatic, you know how he loves elaborate pranks.”

Once she and Toni had been running together for a few weeks, Frida got up the courage to ask her the same questions.

“That’s exactly what we discuss at our meetings,” Toni said. “Are we undermining ourselves with our funny stunts? Or are we working toward the same goal?”

“And what exactly is that goal?” Frida had asked. They were running faster now, and she could hardly get out the words.

“Total world domination, of course,” Toni said, and laughed. Then she said, “If people think we’re just a bunch of clowns, we can get away with a lot more. Why do you think those morons let us into that fund-raiser to begin with? They must’ve expected a f*cking flash mob.”

Micah was never in any of the Group’s filmed stunts—playful or otherwise. He claimed he wasn’t holding the camera, either. Frida had watched the clip of the fund-raiser stunt over and over, despite how hard it was to do so, just to make sure her brother wasn’t one of the masked offenders. He wasn’t; she was sure of it. Besides, he’d never lie to her.

At that, Frida imagined the creek laughing at her. You na?ve little idiot, it might say.

Frida dug her nails into the dirt—it felt strangely satisfying. It was a bad habit, and because of it, her nails were always filthy after doing the laundry. She stood up and returned to the creek’s edge. She held her breath as she pushed a dress under the cold water.

From the beginning, Frida had liked Toni, who kept her hair in a tight ponytail and wore weird shoes like a revolutionary war general’s: square and buckled. The night she met her, Toni and Micah had come over for tea made with mint from one of Cal’s gardens. Her brother had barely touched his mug when he told Frida to stop watching the fund-raiser video. It was months old by then. “I told you, I’m not in it,” he said. “I’m not an actor, nor am I a director.”

“But you are a ham,” Cal said.

“That’s true!” Toni had cried, which made Frida laugh. Her brother needed a woman to put him in his place.

“I don’t get what you’re after,” Cal said. “That poor fund-raising volunteer has a scar on her face. They said it got infected while healing. You know how hard it is to get antibiotics nowadays, and half the time they don’t even work.”

“The point is,” Micah said, “people are waking from their numb slumber.”

“It won’t be long until we do more,” Toni said, and Micah shot her a look.

“What does that mean?” Cal had asked. Frida remembered he suddenly looked very serious in their candlelit living room. They were sitting on big pillows on the floor, and the large chessboard they used as a table was between them, its brown and beige squares splattered with old wine.

Two weeks later, one of the gubernatorial candidates was kidnapped. After sixteen days, he was let go, naked except for a paper party hat, at the gate of the Community in Calabasas where he had thrown some rallies. He was unharmed, his campaign people said, but that could not be verified.