The Latte Rebellion by Sarah Jamila Stevenson

emails, and wait for the cash to roll in.” I squeezed her shoulder, then let go.
    She looked back up at me and smiled weakly. “I wouldn’t say no to extra cash, that’s for sure.”
    “Just you wait,” I told her. “Colleges will be throwing money at you. Literally, they’ll be showering you with fistfuls of cash. You won’t know what to do with it all. You’ll have to start the Carey Wong Trust Fund for the Caffeine-Deprived.”
    “I’m totally on board with this,” Miranda said, grinning.
    “Golly, thanks, guys,” Carey said, flicking a stray breadcrumb at me. She sounded a little more like herself again.
    “Back on the topic of the Latte Rebellion,” Miranda said. “If you ever want me to draw anything else for you, like cartoons of Agent Alpha and Captain Charlie, let me know. It’d be fun.” She crumpled up her lunch bag and aimed it at the nearest trash can.
    “You mean like a comic strip?” Carey looked at Miranda curiously. Miranda was one of the cartoonists for the school paper.
    “Yeah, like The Latte Rebellion Chronicles or something. It’d be way better than doing those caricatures of the football team like I’m supposed to for next month’s Herald .” She rolled her eyes.
    “That would be killer,” Carey said. “We could put them on the website.”
    “Or make propaganda leaflets,” I added. “Drop them all over campus.”
    “Yeah,” Miranda said. “Something like that. Hey, have you thought about holding meetings? I bet people would come.” Miranda was part South American—Ecuadorian, I thought—so I wasn’t surprised she was a Sympathizer, but this was a totally new idea. We’d never talked about having meetings. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
    “We’re not really a club,” I said, exchanging a glance with Carey.
    “Not yet,” Miranda said. “But it would be really easy to create one. I bet Mr. Rosenquist would agree to be the teacher advisor. I can ask him if you want.”
    “I guess.” I rolled up my Velcro lunch bag and stuffed it into my backpack. “We can think about it, anyway.”
    “You should. I’d totally help you set it up.” Carey and I grinned, but Miranda didn’t. “I’m serious—the Latte Rebellion is a great idea. There’s an African American Association and an Asian American Club and a Chicano Club. There isn’t really anything for people who are just … brown. Biracial. Multi-ethnic. Whatever you want to call it.”
    “Unless we take over the Key Club through sheer numbers alone. Bring it down from the inside,” Carey said in an exaggerated whisper.
    We all laughed. But Miranda had got me thinking. What if we did start a club? It would be yet another all-important line-item for our applications—“started discussion group,” maybe, or “spearheaded establishment of extracurricular organization”—not to mention a major plus for any leadership scholarships.
    It would be especially great for Carey. It was her dream to go to Berkeley or Stanford, and if she got a leadership scholarship … then she’d definitely be able to go. No question about it. And maybe I’d be there at Berkeley, too, or right down the road at Robbins College.
    The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. No matter what Carey said about time commitments, I had to convince her to do this. It would be worth the negligible extra time it would take to get a group organized—I mean, what did we really need to do? Arrange a time and place, submit a charter to whoever was in charge of these things at our school, and get approval, that was all. And the payoff would be so worth it.
    It would be stupid not to do it.
    The following April:
Ashmont Unified School District Board Room
    At the sight of Exhibit A.3—the description of our “terrorist group”—murmuring broke out all over the room, including on the dais where the panel sat. While the disciplinary hearing officer called on Principal Philips and Vice Principal Malone to recap the events that led