Watch Us Rise(24)

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” I say, smiling a little too wide. “How did you . . . how did you hear about it?”

“Jasmine told me all about it this morning,” James says, looking right at me. I have no idea what Jasmine said to James, and now I am wondering if she went full out. “She showed me the post, and in my second class, pretty much everybody was talking about it, and when half the basketball team’s talking about a blog post from some new club, then you know it’s making its rounds,” he says.

“Half the basketball team? Really?” I ask, and look around the lunchroom. It’s not as if everyone is looking at their phones, but there’s something about the intimate conversations and the huddles in small groups that makes me think this post has some staying power, or at least has pushed the conversation in some intriguing ways.

“You wanna sit?” Isaac asks James. I stare in his direction and can’t believe he asked James to sit with us.

James looks around the cafeteria for a minute, then back at us. “Sure.” He puts his tray down and slides his basketball to balance between his feet. He lets his book bag fall to the side between Isaac and him, and he’s sitting right next to me. Our arms would be touching if I’d stop being such a weirdo and start eating, but instead, I take a couple gulps of my iced tea and just sit. His tray has two burgers and a taco resting on top of each one. He starts to devour them.

“You wanna take a breath?” I ask, watching him in wonder.

“What? I’m hungry,” he says, laughing. “I gotta get my energy up for our run this afternoon. I was thinking we could just run down to the Chipped Cup and get a doughnut today. We could get there and back easy.”

“You two are going out this afternoon?” Isaac asks, looking at me like I’ve left something out of the story. “I didn’t know you two were . . .”

“Gym class. We’re running partners until the end of the month,” I say, realizing that I’m already kind of sad that the month will end.

“For Halloween, we should run up and down 181st and get candy at all the stores. That’d be so cool,” James says, polishing off his first burger.

“So for gym class everybody just gets to run around the city and do whatever they want?” Isaac asks. “Uh, why did I take gym in the tenth grade? All we did was play volleyball and do burpees. This sounds way better.”

“Yeah, well, we’re really supposed to stick to a specific route, but we have it down to a science, so as long as we go twenty minutes in one direction, we can get back in time. The other day we caught the M4 down to Jackie Robinson Park to get on the swings and check out the empty pool and then raced the bus back.” I start laughing, thinking about James fake crying behind me, complaining about his ankle and limping along. “We’ve been pushing the limit each week.”

It’s true. Every time we get outside, we come up with a new plan and some new way of seeing the city. And we talk. We talk about when we were little, we tell stories, talk about the things we wanna do when we graduate. Somehow we never run out of things to say. I think that’s the reason I like him the most.

“And I also get schooled on about a hundred issues that are important to women today,” James says, smiling at me. “What do you always say? Down with the . . . down with the . . .”

“Patriarchy,” I finish, punching him in his ridiculously muscular arm. Oh, his arms, another reason I like him.

“Down with the patriarchy. That’s what you say, right?” James looks at Isaac. “The patriarchy is a system where men have all the power. And we’re a big part of the problem,” he adds, showing off.

“Oh, I know all about the patriarchy,” Isaac says. “And yeah, man, we’re definitely part of the problem.”

“Yes, I am so glad you two are seeing the ways of the world. Now if I could just convince everyone else, we’d be all good.”

“Well, get to it,” James says. “What’s the plan for your next post? You were all fired up about all those magazines we saw a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh yeah, it’s coming. Watch out for it. And I’m also writing a piece about the princess industrial complex,” I say, starting to feel comfortable and finally eating my food like a normal person.

“The what?”

“The princess industrial complex. The way the media convinces us that we should dress and act like royalty so we can get popular, get the guy, have a true love story, and on and on. It’s a setup.”

“Yeah, well, my mom is obsessed with the princess industrial complex. I think it worked on her, because she loves all that kinda stuff, so I guess I never thought it was that big of a deal,” James says.

“Oh, it’s totally a big deal,” Isaac says, shaking his head.

“I guess for me, it was just a way of telling me how to dress, how long to wear my hair, the kind of things I should say and do. It’s this whole idea that if you are a certain type of girl, you will always win, you know what I mean? And it starts when girls are as little as two and three years old,” I say.

“No way,” James says, finishing his last bite of burger, wiping his mouth, and looking around the cafeteria. I’m not sure what, or who, he’s looking for, but I keep on, trying to make my point.

“Yes! My little cousin is five years old, and she thinks that girls should wear dresses, her favorite color is pink, and she told her mom she wants to grow her hair long like Rapunzel so she can swing from it,” I say, looking straight at James now.