“Check me out!” Gus called. He’d come out of the changing booth wearing a pair of you-fit 5143s.

  Mandy turned bright red. Janna giggled.

  “You might want to set them a little looser,” Jimmy suggested. “And wear underwear.”

  “I am wearing underwear!” Gus said. “But it’s no-line!” As we shook our heads, he headed back into the booth, emerging next with a pair of cordlessuroy pants and a fuchsia top, followed by a retro concert shirt for a band called TV Dinner.

  Since Gus had actual-purchased a pair of no-label you-fit 5142s when they’d come out last month, it was easier than it normally would have been for him to let the sales guy take the 5143s away from him and instead donate them to a kid in a homeless center who had them on a wish list.

  “Hombre, that was a big donation,” he said as we walked out. “I can’t believe how much those jeans cost. But, hey, it’s Stein Day. I don’t mind giving a little more.”

  While Jimmy and the others headed to the bookstore, I sneaked next door to the lamp emporium. Jimmy didn’t exactly need a lamp—it’s not like he was living in total darkness or anything. But I was getting desperate. I went immediately to the back corner that held all the misfit lamps. Lava gurgled. Neon flamingos perched. They even had a few in the shape of legs.

  I sighed.

  This was too hard.

  The evil presents were looking better and better.

  * * *

  —

  When I got to the bookstore, I could immediately tell that something was wrong. Jimmy was watching something on his phone, and he looked like he’d just been told a pet had died.

  “What is it?” I said, rushing over.

  “It’s Kansas,” he replied. The way he said it, I just wanted to hold him tight. But I also knew from the way he said it that he wasn’t ready to be held. There was too much anger and disappointment and confusion to get out first before he could let himself give way a little.

  Our friends were around us now, pulling out their phones and loading up the news.

  * * *

  —

  “In a startlingly swift move, Governor Nicols of Kansas announced that he had confiscated all the voting machines in the state and would begin his own recount. He said he had reason to believe the reported results were false, and that he had ‘grave doubts’ that Stein would end up victorious. Such a reversal would change the outcome of yesterday’s election.”

  * * *

  —

  “How can he do that?” Mandy asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  Soon it became clear: The head of the Kansas Election Commission was one of the governor’s cronies, and both said they had “discovered” enough problems with voting sites and absentee ballots to declare a recount. Their goal: to disqualify enough Stein voters to swing the election.

  “You can bet they’re altering votes as we speak,” Jimmy said disgustedly. “Stein won fair and square, and they know it.”

  Hearing Stein’s voice, we tuned back in.

  * * *

  —

  “I want to assure all Americans that I will, in no uncertain terms, fight this partisan attack on a fair election. Every indication we have shows that our party won Kansas decisively and without any controversy. The truth must be heeded. The American people will not be deceived by wishful thinking and willful manipulation. We will not take this lying down.”

  * * *

  —

  We wandered around the ghost mall for a little while longer, checking our phones frequently for updates.

  “Should we head to the party?” I asked.

  There was a silence until Janna finally said what we were all thinking:

  “Are you sure there’s still going to be a party?”

  “Hello, yes!” Gus said, sounding shocked. “Last time I checked, Stein was elected to be the next President of the United S. of A. We’re gonna be popping some corks.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Mandy chimed.

  “Hallelujah!” Janna echoed, sounding a little less convinced but still hoping strong.

  Only Jimmy seemed fully doubtful, and I teetered in between him and the rest of them.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think we should go to the party,” he replied, smiling slightly. “It’s not the end of the world until it’s the end of the world.”

  seven

  We piled back into Gus’s car and drove over to Stein’s local headquarters. We’d done this so many times before—“going on a mission,” Jimmy liked to call it. Sometimes there’d be as many as eight people in Gus’s four-seater, making our way to volunteer in any way possible. From the moment we’d read on Stein’s site that a headquarters was being made for our area, we wanted to be a part of it. I was a little worried that they’d scoff at us, since we couldn’t even vote yet. I expected them to have us bring them coffee, clean out the trash, hang posters around town—things like that. But from the minute we arrived, we were made to feel like our contributions mattered, and that we were just as able to spread the word as people five times our age.

  Part of this was because of the mood Stein and Martinez brought to the campaign. And part of it was because of Virgil and Sara, who’d practically lived at the headquarters over the past few months and ran it as if it was their one big shot at changing the world for the better. Virgil was about my grandfather’s age, but there were moments when he’d leap down the stairs or slap you a five that felt like fifteen, and you’d wonder if he was really a twenty-year-old in a wizened disguise. Sara was a twenty-year-old, a drop-dead-then-come-back-to-life-gorgeous lesbian who’d taken a semester off from college to work full-time for the campaign. I’d had a nonsexual crush on her almost immediately; on the first day we came to the campaign, she wasn’t flustered when I got flustered about the prospect of talking to strangers. Instead of showing me to the door, she showed me to the kitchen, feeding me cookies from an honest-to-goodness cookie jar and explaining to me that our job wasn’t to argue voters into supporting Stein, it was to provide them with the information they needed to make the right choice. I figured I’d be okay providing information, and I also figured I’d be okay sitting in the kitchen with this generous college student, talking about books and music and the fourteen steps to alleviating the deficit that rich-people tax cuts had caused.

  The Stein/Martinez headquarters was located in a house on a suburban street in the town next to mine, just off Route 280. The couple who’d lived in it had moved to Florida, and instead of putting it on the market right away, they’d lent it to the campaign. As a result, going to work there was almost like heading over to a friend’s house to visit; after a few times, you started to get a sense of where things were, but there were still moments when it was confusing.

  We all used the side door to get in. This time, unpiling from Gus’s car, we could hear music blasting inside. Virgil’s wife, Flora, was the first person we saw, standing in the kitchen surrounded by bowls of guilt-free and guilt-plus snacks.

  “Hello there!” she said, then gave each of us big hugs. “Everyone’s in the living room. We’ve cleared the desks out so there can be some dancing and thrumping.”

  Gus was an ace thrumper, but I wasn’t sure this was the time or the place. Was it possible to thrump when Kansas was in play?

  Flora’s spirits seemed high enough. But when we got to the living room, it was clear that the people inside weren’t as certain of victory as the decorations were. A banner read Congratulations! on top of the big screen, but the muted newsreaders were miming a different story.

  “Hey, guys,” Mira called. Instinctively, I looked next to them for Keisha, but she wasn’t there.

  “Where’s your other half?” I asked.

  “Around. Helping out as usual,” Mira answered. “That girl never rests.”

  We tried to chat with some of the other volunteers, but the scroll on the screen kept distracting us. While most of us tried to go through the motions of a party, Virgil stood in the middle of the room, watching the news and saying, “This isn’t going to happen again. There’s no way we’re going to let this happen again.”

  I knew Virgil had been part of the movement to abolish the electoral college. The movement’s continual defeat was, as Stein liked to point out in his speeches, a watershed moment of self-interest triumphing over the national interest. In order for the amendment to pass, it needed to be ratified by the populations of at least a few of the smaller states that would have lost their unfair advantage. (Since every state has two senators, these small states automatically get two more votes in the electoral college than they should have received for a population their size, making it unfair.) Not a single small state had pledged to shift to the popular vote, no matter how many appeals were made. And there was no way to get around that, so the electoral college stayed, sticking us with more elections where the person who received the most votes didn’t necessarily win the Presidency. This was not democracy, but each time it happened, people just went along with it. Except people like Virgil. He was constantly telling us that there was a long tradition in America of righting the wrongs of the Founding Fathers, making people more equal when it came to voting. After the Fifteenth Amendment and the Nineteenth Amendment, the amendment for direct elections was the last hurdle for electoral equality in presidential elections.

  “One person, one vote—that’s the most basic concept there is,” he continued. “If you ask any American, he or she will say that’s absolutely the way it is. But it’s not right now. It’s one person in Rhode Island gets a bigger vote than one person in California. And if this entire vote rests on tens of thousands of votes in one state, even though Stein won by over five million in the whole country—well, I’ve been down that road. And this time I’m not leaving it up to the damn Supreme Court to vote for the people who brung ’em to the dance.”

  “Honey,” Flora said, putting her hand on his shoulder, “you’re being a real downer.”

  Virgil smiled. “I suppose you’re right. Shall we get jiggy with it?”

  All the members of my generation looked at one another blankly.

  “After all,” Virgil said, “who let the dogs out?”

  Dogs? I didn’t see any dogs.

  “Can’t touch this!”

  Inexplicably, he started to do this jump ’n’ thrump move that must’ve been real big when he was real small. Flora cranked up the music, and we all started to laugh and move.

  The party was saved.

  I loved dancing with Jimmy because it was one of the few things I knew that could make him look nervous. He’d grown up in a house where classical dominated. So when everyone started to thrump, it was like Jimmy felt like he was part of a different playlist. He went looking for the notes instead of letting them permeate.

  I led. I marauded my hands down his body, then flung myself around him. I could hear Mandy and Janna whooping to my left with Mira in the middle, and could see Virgil and Flora admiring us while they took things a beat or two slower.

  After a few songs of this, I needed a quick bathroom break. The downstairs bathroom was occupied, so I skipped up the stairs to where the bedrooms of the house used to be. I usually kept to the downstairs area, so I wasn’t as familiar with upstairs as I could have been. The first door I opened was a linen closet. The next was the executive office. I realized my mistake immediately and was quietly closing the door when I noticed two figures in the back of the room, silhouetted against the window shade by a streetlamp outside. Keisha and Sara. Which wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary—Keisha was one of Sara’s best volunteers—but when my eyes adjusted a little I could see that Sara’s hand was under Keisha’s shirt, and Keisha was leaning into it like a cat being petted, purring from the joy of it. They were so wrapped up in each other that they didn’t see me. Since I hadn’t turned the hallway light on, only a gray shade of dimness came into the room with me. I was so surprised, I nearly cried out. But luckily something deeper than surprise took hold of me, and I managed to leave the room without a sound, closing the door before I attracted any notice.

  Keisha and Sara? And with Mira right downstairs.

  I almost wanted to open the door again, to make sure what I’d seen was true. That it wasn’t just a trick of the light that caused Sara’s hand to rub against Keisha’s body that way. That it wasn’t Keisha at all, only some other girl who looked like her.

  But of course I didn’t open the door again. I stood in the hallway for too long, paralyzed by hundreds of thoughts that didn’t add up to a single understanding. Then I finally found my way to the bathroom. I turned on the light and stared at my reflection in the medicine-cabinet mirror. I looked messed up, shocked. Which was a very accurate reflection.

  Keisha and Mira, two years older than us, had always been the couple that Jimmy and I wanted to be. They seemed entirely at ease with their love, comfortable enough to argue without ever fighting. They believed they were meant to be together, and we all believed it, too. Because their happiness, their comfort, always spilled over to us. Their light was something we could all read by.

  “Keisha and Sara.” I said it out loud. As if someone would peek their head out from the shower and say, Don’t be ridiculous. But instead there was only the sound of my voice. And it rang true.

  Even my voice had seen.

  I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, because all the conclusions jumped straight to endings.

  I could go back in and confront them.

  No.

  I could go downstairs and tell Mira.

  No.

  I could forget it all.

  Not possible.

  I was so glad they hadn’t seen me. And I wished they had seen me, so it wouldn’t be up to me.

  I had no idea what to do.

  eight

  “Did you see Keisha up there?” Mira asked as soon as I got back downstairs.

  I could tell from their voice: They had no idea. There wasn’t a thread of suspicion in the question.

  “Know,” I said, understanding full well that it would come out as “no.” Lying to myself that I wasn’t entirely lying.

  They believed me, because they didn’t think they had any reason not to. I wanted to say, Go upstairs yourself, but at that moment I heard footsteps coming down.

  Sara.

  She had a big smile for me.

  “Welcome to the victory party, Duncan!” she said. There wasn’t a crack in her cheer, not a scruple out of place in her expression.

  “I’ve got to find Jimmy,” I replied. What I really meant was: I’ve got to get away from you right now.

  It must have shown. Even if Mira and Sara couldn’t see it, Jimmy could.

  “What’s going on?” he asked when I got to him.

  “Nothing,” I said. Then, when he didn’t look satisfied with that answer, I nodded toward the open screen and said, “Kansas.”

  The newsreader cut to a live news conference at the opponent’s headquarters.

  We turned up the volume.

  * * *

  —

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the good people of America, believers in democracy and defenders of freedom everywhere, I address you tonight because over the past twelve hours a good number of events have come to light in the state of Kansas that have given me clear and fair reason to believe that the election for the next President of the United States is not yet over. Because of this new and important information, I will not concede the election, and will call upon my opponent to refrain from declaring an end to this contest until all the American people, including the good and honest people of Kansas, have had their rightful say. Grave and serious doubts about the election have been raised, and when they are answered, I expect both the truth and the facts will show that I have won the state of Kansas, and thus the Presidency, a sacred office to which I pledge my undying devotion and loyalty. Whether it takes ten more hours, ten more days, or ten more weeks to determine the true and fair winner of this most important contest, I will remain strong and steadfast until that truth is revealed. May the great God shine on America, and may freedom ring forever and ever, amen.”

  * * *

  —

  “The man always uses twenty words when two will do!” Virgil burst out.

  The dancing had stopped now. We all watched as Stein took the podium at his own headquarters.

  “He doesn’t look that happy,” Jimmy mumbled to me.

  He was right. Stein looked like he’d been through a tornado, with pieces of his house still in his hair.

  “This can’t be good,” Janna murmured.

  As soon as Stein got to the microphone and the reporters quieted down, he went right to the point.

  * * *

  —

  “What is happening in Kansas is politics as usual, and it’s not good politics. We have won Kansas fair and square, and we are not going to be bullied or intimidated into losing a state that we won. The American people have spoken, and five million more of them voted for me than voted for my opponent. In Kansas, seventy-six thousand more of them voted for me than voted for my opponent. These are the facts, and we will let them guide us. We will not let rogue members of my opponent’s party throw the election. A democratic nation cannot tolerate that.”

  * * *

  —

  It was an amazing thing to watch: The more Stein spoke, the more the fire in him blazed. Even if he’d started out weary, each word seemed to energize him. It made me believe in him once more.