The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik

post by the bathroom and stood by the gym door, waiting for my cue. From my vantage point, I could see a section of bleachers, filled with the laughing, jostling students who would soon become either my hecklers or my supporters. I saw Mr. Brietmayer sitting on a chair on the stage, palming the sides of his Brylcreemed hair. He sat with his legs spread wide apart, the fabric of his brown suit pants stretched tight across his thighs, and I wondered if a guy who sat like that—as if to remind everyone not to worry, his testosterone level was still up there even if he didn’t throw a pigskin ball around anymore—would take a sympathetic view toward matters of free speech when practiced by his students.
    “What’s the matter—wouldn’t they let you in?”
    I spun around, as if in the vortex of a hot wind.
    “Kristi!” I said with the same guilty surprise a kid says, “Mom!” when caught with his hand in whatever cookie jar he wasn’t supposed to have his hand in.
    With the big bass drum strapped around her, Kristi stood there, hands on hips, shaking her head.
    “Shouldn’t you go in there?” I asked.
    “Shouldn’t you?”
    We stood looking at each other for a moment, me trying too hard to look as if I had every right to be standing in the hallway and she looking as if I did not.
    “Don’t tell me,” she said, slowly swinging one mallet back and forth, “you’re with those antiwar dorks.”
    “Antiwar dorks?” I said, my face flushing.
    “Listen, Joe,” she said impatiently. “People care about the war, but they don’t care about the war in a pep rally. Don’t let those saps play you for a sucker.”
    I was about to ask her which Jimmy Cagney movie playing on the late show she’d stolen that line from, but a whistle blew and suddenly she was off, banging on her drum as the band started playing the school song.
    The thunder of more than two thousand pairs of feet stomping the bleachers rose to my ears, and then I watched as Ole Bull’s football team burst through the main doors.
    A roar went up and the team, escorted by the frantically jumping cheerleaders and Kristi’s driving beat, ran around the gym, their faces grim, their fists held clenched to their sides, as if their business was as serious as gladiators facing a pride of lions.
    The roar and the school song both got louder. I saw Leonard Doerr rush out to join the team, and then I saw Jim Klatz shove him aside.
    Jim Klatz was a tackle who had a full scholarship to Nebraska, and if All-Around Nerd was a prize given, Leonard Doerr would win by a wide margin; these facts were givens. Still, you didn’t have to see Leonard’s apologetic shrug to know this sort of thing happened to him all the time. Never mind that he was dressed head to toe in school colors; never mind that he took meticulous play-by-play notes of every game the Bulls played; never mind that he was the student manager of the team, for Christ’s sake.
    Even though I wasn’t the most gung-ho participant in this protest, that Kristi thought it was a bad idea had made me want to do it, had made me want to show her that, unlike the rest of the world, my reason for being wasn’t to serve her. But seeing the ultimate football groupie getting shoved by the ultimate football player made me tired and made the pointlessness of an antiwar protest in the midst of a pep rally seem like a big bottle of NyQuil. To stop the fatigue, I turned around and walked down the hallway and, checking to make sure no one was around to witness my illegal act, I took the little hammer out of its box and broke the glass of the fire alarm with it.
    In the minuscule pause between the noise and the recognition of what the noise meant, I raced into the john, only to emerge seconds later in the crowd that filled the hallway.
             
    “We could do the sit-in here,” said Darva later that afternoon as we watched the Polar Bears score their third touchdown of the game.
    “Not much point to a sit-in