Survival Of The Fittest

((Zara Mohammad pregame START))

It felt wrong to be putting up posters.

Zara usually liked the process. She liked the feeling of holding a stack of warm copies, fresh from the printer. She liked how it felt to slap a freshly-inked printout against the wall, press it flat with the palm of her hand and adjust it just a touch this way and a touch that way, until its edges matched the rails of the bulletin board with razor-straight precision. She even liked the feeling of pushing little gold thumbtacks until they punched through the paper and into the cork beneath. She always made a game out of seeing if she could get the head of the tack flush to the paper without dimpling it; she almost always succeeded. That kind of thing mattered. Dimples looked amateurish, and they reflected badly on the content; if your posters looked lousy, then your event would probably be lousy too.

It was hard to say whether Zara had directly learned this, or whether she'd picked it up by sheer instinct. Her dādā Syed had owned a print shop, and had had his sons sorting movable type before they could read; all of his offspring had ink in their veins.

But for the past couple of weeks, ever since her eighteenth birthday, she'd been dimpling. Creasing, even. And what worse: she'd started not to care. In another few days, she'd probably find herself abandoning the gold thumbtacks for multicolored push pins - unsorted, in random color combinations. Little polka dots of anarchy, stabbed into the paper hard enough to leave Grand-Canyon creases. Dādā Syed would fall down dead at the very idea.

The truth was, it was hard to care about little things right now. Not since her birthday, when she'd gotten up early and proudly shown her ID to the voting officials before casting her first-ever vote for Marisa D'Cruz. Not since she'd stayed up into the wee hours with terrible generic birthday cake churnining her stomach as she watched swing states topple like dominos. How was she supposed to care about page margins and font sizes when several million people had effectively decided that her humanity was a small price to pay for cheaper eggs? How was she supposed to care about any of the things that student council had planned for the year? Hey kids, your parents put a dementia patient in charge of the nuclear codes, but buckle up for safety!

Today, it was Bullying Awareness. It was redundant, for two reasons. The first was that they'd already done Bullying Awareness Month back in October. Under the circumstances, it bore repeating. This time around they'd added the numbers for several suicide hotlines. According to the Associated Press, the Rainbow Youth Project alone had received twice as many calls during election week as they usually got in a month. The second reason was that everybody was already good and aware of bullying - especially the bullies themselves. They were glad for the extra attention, if the replies on X (the Misinform Your Way to a Shadow Presidency App) were any guide, and very eager to get started.

Zara grimaced and pushed another thumbtack in - using her pointer finger, in a display of wild abandon. No, she didn't feel like putting up posters. No, she didn't feel like being aware. Awareness hurt right now. Zara had hotly debated deleting her X and Meta profiles to reduce her stress, but then she'd have had to explain her sudden absence to Aunty Maryam and she wouldn't get the updates on how Sadaf was doing at university ("put a space in my name, cousin, because I'm sad AF") that her mother kept asking after, and her stress level would ultimately remain the same.

So, no, she didn't care about the posters. But she put them up anyway. Zara wanted to be Student Council President, because it was one of those titles that looked good on applications. Presidents (with one glaring exception) commanded respect and broadcast dignity. And if you wanted to be Student Council President, people had to be able to envision you in the role. That generally meant you had to be seen doing student council work, which was why she'd chosen to put up posters outside the auditorium at precisely this moment, when the hallway flow was at its zenith. Vibes were votes. What better way to look presidential than to be here, pushing thumbtacks and raising Bullying Awareness awareness? She made sure to smile at everybody who made even fleeting eye contact, but in a serious way. After all, bullying was a serious issue, so long as international trade relationships and nuclear missiles weren't involved.

The poster, only slightly dimpled, was affixed. Zara turned, smiled soberly at a passing cheerleader. She raised her eyebrows, as if to silently communicate, "Bullies. They're the worst, am I right? Vote Zara! Cute skirt, by the way."

Then she moved a few feet to the left, squared up to the next billboard, and started the whole process anew.

Head and shoulders above many of her peers, the shock of white-blonde hair above a near-omnipresent displeased scowl would've been hard not to see.

[An unusually tall girl walked past, on her way from somewhere else.]

Heather's eyes met Zara's for a moment. She'd been curious who it was sticking up posters, and she'd been thoroughly unsurprised to see the local busybody behind it. Zara gave her professional smile, Heather responded with a derisive scoff. One didn't need to see the tattoo underneath her jacket to guess why. Bullying awareness? Days after inaugurating the Bully in Chief? Was that supposed to be some kind of sarcastic joke? If she'd seen it in another context she might even have laughed at the comedic timing, but the clear sincerity just made Heather sad. Yeah. The tiniest of band-aids on the problem, that'd fix things. Canvassing for the most irrelevant poltiical appointment known to man, and for what, extra juice to go into real politics or law, and try to explain frantically from the sidelines that a dog isn't allowed to play basketball while Air Canon dunks on her over and over?

God, to think she'd let the harm reduction argument convince her to participate in the charade that was the last election, as if she could possibly change anything about the one-party state besides giving it another crumb of legitimacy by engaging. The memory of it was infuriating. Humiliating.

"Yeah, good luck with that."

Oh. She said that out loud.

What a shame.

Ah, Heather Klein. Her surname was ironic, if you knew a little German.

Zara's smile left her eyes when Heather scoffed, but fortified itself on her lips; the waspish follow-up comment bounced right off without making a dent.

"Heather Klein!" she said, chipperly. Zara liked to be on a full-name basis with people. It made them feel like she remembered them, which, depending on who you were and what you'd done, could be a charming compliment or a thinly-veiled threat. In Heather's case, it was probably a bit of both.

"Not a fan of bullying awareness?"

Parry, riposte. Zara was sharp. Heather at least had to respect that much about her. Liberals did tend to be good at rhetoric after all, it was a necessary skill to make up for the yawning void of principles that genuine impassioned argument might otherwise emerge from.

"I'm already very aware of it. Don't you watch the news?"

Bob, weave. Physical sparring was of course Heather's preferred style, but she could trade barbs too. Blue check bootlicks weren't usually as smart as Zara, but you take your practice where you can get it.

"Really, good luck. I'm sure this time it'll work."

Ah. There it was.

Zara's smile briefly became genuine. She liked people like Heather, all bristling with righteous indignation. The Heathers of the world liked to point at a mess and say "Isn't this disgusting?", as though their obligation to fix the problem ended at simply noticing its existence and registering disapproval. Then for an encore they'd stand around criticizing the way others tried to clean it up.

Zara liked how much people like Heather hated people like her. It meant she was doing things right.

"It's not just awareness," she said, breezily answering a question Heather hadn't asked. "We're working with community partners, making counselors available for people who need them, developing confidential reporting initiatives so students can safely raise concerns. We're never going to stop bullying from happening. But we're going to make sure that when it does happen, students know they have somewhere to go."

Heather’s eyebrows quirked up, a smirk playing around her lips. Zara came to play. Quick on her toes and rolling with the punches like a pro.

“Oh that’s a great stump speech D’Cruz, you practice that in the mirror this morning?”

Typical technique she’d seen on the news a million times, pivot directly to the canned talking points, dismiss anything that isn’t on-message. Why respond to the gesture towards Canon if it couldn’t be recycled for the counter? Slip that one, hit back.

So for her counter? Borrow the enemy’s weapon. A random encounter like this was no place to start talking about structural solutions, and Zara would have no trouble turning back any criticism of merely treating symptoms, accusing Heather of not caring about those. That was the problem with debating from a radical position, status quo enjoyers would never entertain the idea that their position also needed to be justified rather than merely assumed. So what to do? Smugly determine that the discussion is over and claim the last word. Let Zara call after her or not, didn’t matter.

“Well, keep up the valuable work!”

Heather shot the shorter girl a single finger-gun, and carried on towards her next class.

[Heather, peace out.]

Zara responded with dual finger guns of her own as Heather walked off. "I will! And you keep on... well, I'm sure you're doing something."

A beat later, she added, "Remember, vote Mohammad!"

She kept the smile up until she'd turned back to the billboard, then she let it wither.

There was a thud from the wall next to Zara as a body fell against it, taking up the position of a relaxed lean, vape pen between its lips, furtively hidden behind hands like a piece of contraband in a POW camp. Which, given they were inside a school building, it technically was. But Charlie Girl was enjoying the drama of the whole presentation, her eyes gleamed with barely concealed amusement at the exchange she had been watching like it was a particularly exciting scene from Planet Earth.

"Talk about having long toes." She said to Zara with a sly smile as she gently exhaled a cloud of vape smoke beneath her hand, waving it away as she coughed lightly.

It wasn't that she cared.

She didn't.

But there was something funny to her about watching someone getting on with their day only to decide that wasn't going to fly with you. It wasn't as if the encounter would cause any change in how Zara or Heather viewed the world. If anything it would only reinforce their existing beliefs. Truth be told, Charlie Girl probably preferred Heather to Zara, but Heather had walked off, so she wasn't available for comment. Instead, it was the girl who dreamed of being President. At least that was what Charlie Girl had heard about her. She had never actually verified that particular piece of information, because frankly she would have needed to ask more of her fellow classmates to verify it and they weren't good sources, seeing as they were both biased and prone to falsehoods. Charlie Girl certainly wasn't going to ask Zara directly about it either, she had more tact than that. Heather at least didn't want to be President—as far as Charlie Girl was aware—which meant she was more trustworthy than Zara. But Heather had her own problems, namely her entire attitude and demeanour, which she had once again displayed to anyone who had been paying attention. Something Charlie Girl couldn't confirm was limited to just her, the art of listening in while pretending you weren't doing so was a key skill high schoolers developed over their many years.

A quick check that the coast was clear led to another discrete hit of the vape.

"How many of these are you putting up?" She asked, as she tilted her head down and exhaled a cloud of strawberry-smelling mist in the direction of the floor.

Marcipan: Alright, so apparently it takes like 5 hours to drive down to Mexicali, so if we do this we may as well make a trip out of it. Any suggestions on where we can drop by on the way?

((Marcy Valerio continued from Touch of Crate))

Marcy glanced up from her phone, almost stopping in her tracks when she saw Zara of all people... Smiling at her? Huh?

Zara then raised her eyebrows. Marcy raised a singular brow in response, glancing past at the poster Zara was setting up. Bullying Awareness month? Wasn't that back in October? Okay, whatever. Message received, bullies exist.

Which reminded her, she oughta see what Beelybubs was up to that weekend.

In any case, she walked past and swiftly returned her attention to her phone.

Marcipan: Oh, you know where I've never been? Hoover Dam! Maybe we can check that out or something whilst we're at it?

((Marcy Valerio continued elsewhere...))