Wide Awake by David Levithan Read Free Book Online Page B

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 beautiful college student, talking about books and music and the fourteen steps to alleviating the deficit that had caused (and was made even worse by) the Greater Depression.
    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, saying to install whatever connections and portals were needed. 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 her 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 many years ago. The amendment’s 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 have passed, 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 deserve population-wise, making it unfair.) Not a single small state decided 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.
    “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. It’s
one person in Rhode Island gets a bigger vote than one person in California.
And if this entire vote rests on a thousand people in one state, even though