Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(82)

“Annie?”

“It wasn’t anything.” I was emphatic. “I was waiting for you.”

He stopped walking and looked at me. “You’re lying. You’re awfully good at it, but you forget—I know what you look like when you’re being deceitful.”

What did I look like when I was lying? I’d have to ask him sometime. “I’m not lying, Win. It’s only an idea I had, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” I said. “While I was waiting for you, I thought I’d run a couple parts of it by your dad because it has a legal component to it.”

“Well, he certainly owes you the free advice.” He took my arm again, and we resumed walking. At some point, we got to talking about our plans for what was left of the weekend.

“Win,” I asked, “would you mind if we went to a legalize-cacao rally some time?”

“Sure … But why would you want to do that?”

“Mainly curiosity, I suppose. Maybe I’d like to see what it’s like on the other side.”

Win nodded. “Does this have anything to do with what you were talking to my dad about?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I admitted.

When I got home, I found out the next Cacao Now meeting was Thursday night.

The tough part was that I didn’t want to be recognized. I wanted to check it out without making a spectacle of myself. Noriko lent us wigs and dispensed makeup advice. I had a stick-straight blond wig and red lips. (I had abandoned my mustache in Mexico, of course, not that I would have wanted to unveil my mustachioed look in front of Win.) Win wore dreadlocks and a mesh cap, a modified version of what he’d worn to visit me at Liberty.

Win and I took the bus downtown to the abandoned library building where the meeting was being held.

We were a little bit late so we slipped in at the back.

About one hundred people were there. Standing behind a lectern in the front of the hall was Sylvio Freeman, who was in the middle of introducing a speaker. “Dr. Elizabeth Bergeron will speak about the health benefits of cacao.”

Dr. Bergeron was a pale, skinny woman with a high-pitched voice. She wore a long tie-dyed skirt down to her ankles. “I am a doctor,” she began. “And it is from this perspective that I will speak tonight.” Her lecture dealt with many of the same things Theo had said to me in Chiapas. I looked at Win to see if he was bored. He didn’t seem to be.

“So why,” she concluded, “if there is so much enrichment to be found in natural cacao, should it be illegal? Our government allows the sale of plenty of things that are completely toxic. We should be using common sense and not money to determine what we consume.”

The Cacao Now people did not overly impress me. They were disorganized, and their main plans seemed to involve standing outside government buildings and passing out leaflets.

On the way back uptown, Win started talking about next year. “I’ve been thinking I want to do premed,” he said.

“Premed?” I’d never heard anything about that before. “What about your band? You’re so talented!”

“Annie, I hate to tell you this, but I’m only okay.” He looked at me shyly. “The band still doesn’t have a name and, had you been around, you’d know that we’ve barely played this year. At first, because I was hurt, and then I just wasn’t all that interested. And, well, a lot of guys who have bands in high school would be better off not making a life of it. I’m into other things, too, you know. I’d never want to do what my dad does, but I would like to help people. That doctor at the rally. I was watching her and thinking how great it would be to do that.”

“Do what exactly?”

“Help people be less ignorant about their health, I guess.” He paused. “Plus, if I do stay with you, medical skills would probably come in pretty handy. Everyone’s always getting hurt when you’re around.”

“If…”

While the bus was stopped at a traffic light, I studied Win out of the corner of my eye. The streetlights lit up different parts of his face than I was used to seeing.

From two rows behind us, Daisy Gogol, who’d been trailing us the whole night, chimed in. “I thought I was going to be a singer, but I’m so glad I know Krav Maga.”

“Thanks for the support, Daisy,” Win said. “What should the pro-cacao people do instead?” he asked me.

“I know that they think too small. They need lawyers. And money, lots of it. Standing in front of a courthouse with dirty hair and pamphlets isn’t going to do anything. They need ads. They need to convince the public that they deserve chocolate and that there was never anything wrong with it to begin with.”

“Anya, you know I support you, but aren’t there bigger problems in the world than chocolate?” Win asked me.

“I’m not sure, Win. Just because something is a small problem doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. Small injustices conceal larger ones.”

“Is that something your father used to say?”

No, I told him. It was my own wisdom, and something I had learned through experience.

*   *   *

Sunday after church, I went to talk to Fats at the Pool. His stomach was distended and his eyes were red. I worried that he might have been poisoned. “You feeling all right?” I asked.