#AP LIT has done things to me y'all

[originaldetectivesheep]

A Life of Riley Part 1 - The Problem With Grinckles ch 6

Chapter 5

VI

I leaned back and hit Send; the formatting on my Differential Equations homework had finally turned out all correct the third time I'd printed it, so I could send the PDF over to my professor and be done for the day.  Two hours of math and then another two and a half hours beating LaTeX with a rock to do up all the formulas so they looked like something, but I was done all my math for the weekend before five on Saturday. I was golden; plenty of time to eat dinner, see what was good on my groups, then hit up someone's party or go down to the bars on Sperry Street and try to hook up.  I still had a couple microwaves problems that needed tightening up, but I could handle those tomorrow; tonight was tonight, and tonight was all mine.

As I logged out of the lab terminal and stood up, I saw Sajitha waving at me through the glass out in the corridor.  I waved back, unconcerned, but she was still there in the same place after I made my way out, dropping the test prints into the recycling bucket.  "Hey, Saj," I said by way of trying to figure out what was going on, "what's up? Are you looking for me for something?"

She shook her head, still falling in next to me as I walked down the hall.  "Kind of," she said, "but not really.  Are you going over to the lab?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't have anything to do over there tonight.  I was just going to go grab dinner, probably at the Zussman caf, and see where it was going off tonight.  You?"

"The caf? Under Zussman?  Are you into the shredded green-bean sludge they put on everything or something?  Don't you live like just the other side of the parking lot behind the ChemE lab barn?  Why the caf when it's that close to go home?  Did you just forget to buy food or something?"

"No, I am kinda running low," I said, "but you don't have to eat the green-bean casserole slurry they give you if you don't want to, and actually mostly I'm trying to avoid this chick Laura from the complex; if I go home and do some ramen she'll be sniffing around to 'pregame' with her friends, and then we'll end up getting blasted and hook up while they go out.  Normally I wouldn't mind, but I'm feeling good and I actually want to do something tonight, not just get drunk watching TV and have bad vodka sex.  I mean, it's been a good day, and I got a feeling it's going to be a good night – how about I bag the caf, and we go down and tear it up at the Scottsdale till we score or get kicked out?"

"I want to go out," she said, stepping up right in next to me, "but I have something that I have to finish drawing out for Riley – some kind of stupid STOVL wing part – and I was hoping that you were going that way so I could ask you to walk me across the quad; there's some weird protest there tonight and I've been hearing bad things about it."

"Some kind of wack protest?" I said, turning to look her over critically.  "Bad shit?  What the hell is it?  The Black Bloc? Frog nazis?  And you want me to walk you over?  Saj, you'd be beating them up for me. Why not text Remy?"

Sajitha rolled her eyes and sighed a mighty sigh.  "First, Remy has a meet against Tech this weekend, so he's in Grabau Green getting kicked in the face.  And second, even if he was around, I wouldn't want to encourage him."  I wisely refrained from commenting about how she knew a hell of a lot about his schedule, for a dude that she didn't want to encourage interest in.  "And I know I can take care of myself; it's just for insurance.  I don't think it's frog nazis, but if it is, I want to just go to the lab, and not to jail because I shoved some CompEng incel weeaboo's tiki torch so far up his ass it knocked his teeth out.  They won't start if I'm not alone."

I nodded.  "Okay, okay.  I get you, and it's not that far out of the way.  No problem." I stuck my hands in my pockets, maybe unconsciously imitating Remy's fighter's strut.  "And if there's really a protest that's going to turn bad, I'm kind of curious about it – I don't think I've ever seen a riot in real life."

Sajitha shuddered.  "Yeah, that's a good thing.  You really don't want to, trust me.  But this one, it's probably not going to be a real riot, people throwing bricks at the cops shooting rubber bullets and stuff.  It's not that kind of protest – not political, no counterprotest at least that I've heard about, just talk that it would get taken over for a prank."  I could tell she was shaken up about the possibility of a riot, because she didn't even glare at me as I held the door open ahead of her.

"A prank?" I asked.  "Who the hell takes over a protest as a prank?  What the heck kind of protest even lets itself in for something like that?  Are you sure you're getting accurate information?"

Sajitha took a deep breath as we left the library path onto the main road over towards the engineering quad.  "A protest put up by amateurs who don't know how to read people who pretend to offer help. Listen, I haven't told a lot of people about this, but back freshman year I rushed one of the desi sororities for like thirty seconds, just so that I could show my parents that it wasn't ever going to happen, and I still talk to a couple of the girls who did make it in. Someone working in the admin office like Tuesday saw an application for a protest from some Anti-Grinckle Askari thing that didn't exist two weeks ago, Comic Sans and formal, non-native English, and they approved it as a joke – and told their frat buddies, who told all their other frat buddies, and now it's like all around the frats that they're going to show up and take over this protest, and with everyone drunk off their ass after that football game, if it even happens it's not going to go well.  It's probably not going to go Nazi, but how do you even tell these days – and I spend too much time around the AP lab to not just keep thinking about how much worse things could get than my worst-case scenario."

I was thinking.  "Grinckles again – and askari, that's Swahili, for like 'soldier' or 'army'.  He might have gotten other people to help him, but this smells like Wilson; he told us he was going to get rid of the grinckles his way, and that we should stay out of the way, but if he's getting taken for a ride by a bunch of frat bros, I'd want to get him out of there, get him back to his senses before he gets blamed for their shit and expelled or something.  Those white-cap wastoids can just have Daddy write another full-freight check to Tech or some other school if they get kicked out, but if Wilson loses his scholarship here, that's the end: no degree, no medical boards, and he has to go back to his village and, no lie no racism, live in a house made out of mud and sticks.  Seriously; I've seen his pictures from home. We haven't spoken since that thing two weeks ago, but no way I'm going to let that happen to him."

Sajitha nodded, sticking close as we came up on the quad.  "I know.  I hope it's not – but if it is, then I guess we've got to; do you think I should maybe ping Riley and see if we can't get the rest of the lab to help?"

I turned in place; there was the start of a crowd ahead – thank god no tiki torches, and the haircuts weren't quite shitty enough for a high Nazi turnout – and I had to get this straightened out before we got any closer, up where more people might hear us.  "Not now – not right now and not except as a last resort, if everything goes completely to shit and we can't do anything.  You call for help from the lab, and Riley's going to roll up here with that cannon again, and half the dislocator rigged up as an area-denial energy weapon, and things are just going to get worse.  If we can just put a bag over Wilson's head and kick a couple bros in the stomach and get away like that, we'll do it that way, the easy and sane way, and not make this dumb rally a case for the FBI."  Sajitha nodded her agreement, and I turned back, to start leading us through the crowd of white dudes in khakis and polo shirts towards where we'd be able to do something for Wilson if he was mixed up in this.

There sure did seem to be a lot of white people here, a lot more than you got around the engineering quad generally, or at any protest that wasn't going to start heiling at you.  And while they still didn't look like Nazis, they didn't smell like the safe kind of white protestors; alcohol and meathead body spray, not patchouli oil and weed.  This was a "protest" of mostly frat bros, drunk up to their eyeballs, in it for the lulz – and you had to be real dumb to give Wilson more than a snowball's chance in this kind of crowd, especially if the cops flipped out and shit got real. There was some kind of stage set up on the steps of Dittmarsch Hall, some kind of PA set up there, and I sidled through towards it, trying to make out what was going on and also not knock over anyone's beer and start a riot before we could figure out what the hell was supposed to be happening.

There was a scree and a hiss and a squelch from the speakers up front; some idiot not knowing how to microphone, and then the confirmation for everyone who hadn't done A/V crap in high school:  "Yo dudes, y'all ready to get LIT? Are you ready to fight tha power?  Ready or not, comin' straight atcha – himself, the generalissimo, El commandante, HNIC of the AGA – come on and give it up!  Stand up, set up, get up for the Fearless – uuuurp – Leader, Eddy Wannafunzi!"  I could see the speaker gesturing now, gesturing at someone over at the side of the steps who probably was justifiably nervous about following that brain-dead, peripherally racist attempt at a hype intro.  "Get up!  Get up!  Make some noise!  Fuck the cops!"  The bros around us burst out cheering and wooting, and whoever it was hanging about getting introduced up front decided that was good enough and started to come out, the streetlights glinting off a galaxy of medals on a crazy costume-shop uniform with the brushes on the shoulders, a peaked cap so high it looked like it had been cut right out of a political cartoon.

"Good," Sajitha murmured, pressed into my back.  "It's not Wilson up there – it's not him; it's another name and there's no way he'd lose all his self-respect and go outside in a uniform like that.  Can we go now?  This rally's going to get real stupid if that's how it starts, and someone's going to get hurt."

"No," I said, craning around to see past some idiot in a white baseball hat from a pro lacrosse team, "no, that's definitely Wilson.  The name is super fake and I don't know where he got the uniform from, but that's definitely his glasses.  Go ahead and text Riley – this is about to officially get so bad that the Applied Physics lab can't make it worse."  As if on cue, a megaphone crackled to life, and Wilson's voice gruddered out over the assembled throng – crumpled up and distorted and maybe he was trying to put on a different accent, but Wilson always and all the same.

"Comrades!" he shouted, "Comrades – comrades one and all!  We are the same – we want the same thing!  We will stop the invasion – we will stop the violation against nature!  We will act – we will act united – we will act united right now!  We will kill them – we will kill all of them – we will kill all the red fish!  We can't stop – we can't even leave one alive.  Now!  Up!  Commit yourselves!  Swear it!  Hate!  Hate!  Kill!"

"Man, it's a good thing he's got his fist closed, holding it up like that, or I'd think we were really in bizarro world," I said, shoving some drunk bro out of the way so Sajitha could nudge past.  "I give it about fifteen seconds until someone yells a racial slur and the police come in with clubs – no idea how he's still talking up there."  The crowd was roiling around us, yelling incoherently at the challenge lines, occasionally making sense, but a bad kind of sense: "Yeah!  Kill!  Fuck!  Get'em!  Fuck the cops!  Revenge!" Wilson was talking about grinckles up on the stage, in a way that would whip up his audience before they realized that he was talking about fish, but down here, nobody was hearing anything about fish at all.

"Yeah! Hell yeah!  That's it!  Fight the power!"  The hype man, whoever he was, was back, and Wilson was looking confused that he was getting upstaged, that his anti-grinckle rally was getting co-opted into an anti-something else rally.  "You heard the man – you heard the man – we got to get'em – we got to get the reds!  The fish are the end of the wedge – the fish are the tip of the iceberg; you know what we need to do.  We got to get all the ching chong fish, get all the ching chong cops, get all of them, we show them who's boss!  Fight the power!  Fuck the cops!  Get the chingchongs!"  I almost stopped for a moment as the crowd exploded – the cops must be charging from some side or another, the explicit race riot incitement the last straw – trying to figure out just how and why in the hell this had suddenly turned into a riot against Asians, and then Sajitha shoved me forward.

"RIOT!!!" someone bellowed too close, and the crowd turned into a moshpit, and I was getting rammed forward like the prow of an icebreaker, Sajitha's shoulder in my back.  Dudes were punching other dudes, going flying past and above and around us, randoms screaming, and it was all I could do to defend myself.  "I hope you like your riot now," she said, still shoving, "because this is going to feel like makeouts from a starstuck freshman next to what's going to happen in a moment.  Please, help shove, so we can get to your stupid, stupid friend before they open up with tear gas."  "GAS GAS GAS!" someone screamed, either because they heard her wrong or because someone had actually gotten a whiff of pepper spray, and the riot turned into a stampede.

With more of the bros running and fewer of them fighting us, it got easier to push forward, enough to get close enough to see Wilson arguing with his hype man – close enough to see him catch a slap on the ear that unbalanced him and pitched him a nasty fall down the stairs.  I forgot Sajitha, forgot the butthole who'd just punched him in the head, and dove over to make sure he was all right – still breathing, no blood like a fracture, but his eyes were rolled back like he was concussed.  "Wilson!  Wilson!  Say something!"

"Mic DROOOOOP!" yelled the hype man from a few steps up, following it up by dropping the hot mic into a scrultching cacophony of electronic noise as it bashed itself off the steps towards me.  "You got tha powaaa!  You got to get up! You got to kill all tha dam ching-chong!"  The shithead was wearing Wilson's idiot cap and doing an accent that was probably trying to be Nigerian based on a racist comedian who'd only ever heard it second-hand, and was the shit goddamn last absolute thing we needed.  He lowered the megaphone, wavering as he looked us over, staring up and down Sajitha's figure; "Hey, baby," he said, super-obviously drunk, "what up?  You wanna slammalama-ding-dong?"  He swung his hips and leered, oblivious to the full-scale riot raging around us.

"Oh yeah," Sajitha said, slipping her right hand into her handbag, "I definitely wanna smash." She took a step forward, wiggling her shoulders to distract him, and then punched him so hard with the brass knuckles around her right fist that I saw a shower of teeth and maybe jawbone chips go flying the other way.  The hype man went down in a heap, and there was no sign of anyone stupid or brave or interested enough to avenge him anywhere close.

"How is he?"  Sajitha dropped down beside me as I tried to cradle Wilson's head, keep his feet elevated, so that at least he wouldn't get any worse and it would be obvious, if the cops broke through here, that he was a victim and not a perp.

"He's hurt bad," I said, "he went down the stairs bad and I guess he hit his head – I dunno if he's conscious yet.  Where's the help? Where's the lab?  Shit, I'd be glad to see them roll up with that goddamned cannon again, things are so bad."

"Riley's sending Carolína to get us with the truck," Sajitha answered, ripping the more obvious medals off Wilson's uniform in case someone had made him as an Idi Amin cosplayer.  "I didn't hear anything about a cannon, but you never know." Behind us, there was a squeal of tires, the roar of an engine, and then the shouts and screams of a bunch of panicked frat bros as Carolína's beat-up black Bronco skidded sideways through them to come to a stop at the foot of the stairs.  I didn't think you even could drift a Ford Bronco – that must have been something that they worked on when they put the engine back on its mounts after the cannon thing.

The passenger door popped open as if from a kick, but it wasn't Carolína hunched up so she could barely see over the wheel in the driver's seat – that was Yuping's black brush, tall and rigid way up near the roof.  The plan had changed since Sajitha got her text, obviously, but he was still a friend and we had to get while the getting was good.  I threw Wilson's arm over my shoulders to carry him over to the truck, and Sajitha rushed ahead to open the rear door and get us all bundled in.

The crowd was starting to close up around us by the time she closed the passenger door behind her and Yuping put the Bronco in gear again – a few of them maybe noticing that he was one of the ones they were supposed to hate.  "So what happened?  Is Carolína okay?"  Sajitha didn't look that concerned, but if the plan was changed now, there might be other changes later.

"She okay," Yuping said, "Riley just change driver last minute. 'Colombian learn drive too nice,' Riley say, 'because consequences. But Chinese don't take prisoner.'"  Yuping set the shifter, left hand holding the wheel in hard, then stomped on the gas, scattering frat bros like leaves before the whirlwind.  It wasn't strictly accurate – Yuping hadn't been one of those princelings immune to the laws back in China, but then again I was pretty sure that Colombians didn't actually settle every traffic argument with gunplay either – but if it got him to move like this it was good enough.  Protestors and cops alike jumped out of our way as he gunned the engine, accelerating over the footpaths to go and find a road; if he was going to drive like this, we didn't need the autocannon to get away.

Yuping parked by the loading dock behind the building that housed the AP lab after a bunch of twists and turns and ducks to make sure we'd shed all the cops, and I handed off Wilson's incriminating uniform jacket to Sajitha to throw in a dumpster while Yuping and I carried him up the stairs.  Up in the lab, Carolína had hugs and ajiaco and aguardiente for everyone and enough cardboard and spare cushions on the floor to let Wilson rest easy; Riley, by contrast, was completely occupied torch-cutting something and barely looked up as we came in.

"I don't get it, though," I said, after we'd gotten him comfortable; Wilson was stirring a little, but  it was better to let him come back to himself on his own terms, with as much chicken-potato stew and sugarcane whiskey as that would involve.  "I mean, what the shit?  Who the hell is mad about Asians in this day and age?  I mean, shit, 'ching-chong', who even says that?"

"It was kind of a bad day for them, you know," Carolína said, like she was taking part in a different conversation.  "If they didn't have Roosevelt Kang in their fantasy, it was very bad – he went off, he threw four touchdowns and ran in a fifth on a naked bootleg very late, like he was rubbing it in."

I blinked, because I wasn't sure what Wisconsin's half-Korean quarterback had to do with anything.  "Okay, yeah, that's a good day for Kang, and if the dude you were playing started him, then yeah, you got killed, but there was a lot of bros there – they couldn't all have been playing against him this week."  Sajitha and Carolína and Yuping all stared at me after that, and even Riley turned around, torch laid aside.

"Leo, we played Wisconsin today," Sajitha said at last, slowly like she couldn't believe someone was this dumb.  "At home.  We lost 45-nothing.  Roosevelt Kang squatted down and teabagged the entire campus, or at least all the people who care too much about football. Do you get it now?"  I started to get it – angry drunks who'd just gotten humiliated in their own stadium; white people, mostly, who'd seen some Asian-looking dude go yard on them at football.  It was easier to understand, but that didn't make the riot any less stupid.

"All right," I said, "I kind of get it – I can understand it, but I can't excuse it.  And shit, Wilson, what were you thinking?  I can't excuse that, getting up in front of a bunch of drunk, short-fuse white people and talking like that.  You hang around with me too much, man – you forget how like nearly all the other white people around here are."  I felt kind bad about rolling it downhill onto Wilson, blinking on the cushion pile with Carolína holding a bag of peas to the lump on his head, but he was conscious again and it really did go down to him: he didn't have to have this rally, but he did it, and one way or another everything went from there.

"I had to," he said, his voice soft and rounded at the edges, like he was half-dreaming, half-there.  "I had to – if you don't get them screaming, they just sit and scratch.  And I have to get them screaming – you didn't see, I didn't send you profile after it finished.  This 'grinckle', this thing – didn't it come from here?  This lab? The genetics is all wrong – it's all wrong backwards, it's so wrong that if I took a different course last semester, more genetic cladistics, I maybe might say it's not a fish.  What the hell?  Who makes a fish that's not a fish, then puts it on campus to walk by crutches pond to pond?  Nobody – but when it happens – only Applied Physics."

"Wilson, I – yeah, I kind of get where you're coming from.  But – why? What the hell's that supposed to get anybody?"

He shook his head, wincing from the bruise.  "I don't know.  I don't think, maybe, I can ever find out.  But there's no why – nobody else can, so when it happens, it's Applied Physics must have."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Riley said from the corner, "but just so you know, the grinckles aren't our fish.  I've got my hands full with enough crap as it is – we're not gene-printing random new fish to get Yuping more likes.  Speaking of," – and Riley changed the subject, exactly like Riley always changed the subject, and like always this was a change for the worse that we'd all have been better off if it didn't have to happen – "Leo, don't you live in Muttonbird Terraces?"

I blinked again, afraid of what was about to come next.  "Yes. Yeah, I do.  Why?"

"You're trending local."  I immediately grabbed up my phone and punched in on the tag; everyone around me was doing the same.  Lol fire at Muttonbird – lol fratboys burning down Muttonbird – i'm live right now yall gotta see this cops shooting at houses on fire at Muttonbird – lol Muttonbird such poors many molotov.  I slumped forward.  Perfect.  The idiot frats had gotten run off the eng quad and now they were burning down my home development and fighting the cops in the ruins.  The phone buzzed, and someone was livestreaming: a cop car was rolled over, on fire against a backdrop of low-rises on fire, white-hatted assholes jumping around, shaking up and throwing beer cans like grenades, as my entire neighborhood went up in smoke.  I looked up, and I had become the lab's pity sink; even Wilson, a glass of aguardiente under his nose to sniff himself awake, was looking at me like I was a street dog begging for pats.

"Well, yeah, you're not going to be able to go home for a while after that – if there's even anywhere to go back to."  Riley cut to the chase like usual, standing up, hands on hips.  "But you're a friend of the lab, and there's always a place here for you, same as for your friend if he wants to hide out here till the heat goes down.  Sit tight for a second; I'll send Yuping out to go grab some extra cardboard, and I'll kick clear a place under the lathe in a minute or two."   Riley nodded approvingly at me, and nobody else in the lab thought there was anything wrong with it.  Excellent.  What an awesome Saturday night.  I'd made some mistakes today, but this was the dead-ass all end: a nice promising weekend with the homework all done turning into one of my best friends mauled in a riot, my place burned down, and me ending up living sleeping on the floor in the friggin Applied Physics lab was all anyone ought to need to convince themselves that no matter how bad they thought their worst-case scenario was, it could always get worse.  A lot worse.  A whole lot worse, if Riley and this crazy lab somehow happened to get involved.

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