The First Motion
We win by forty votes. I want to say I felt something enormous at the moment they announced it, but the truth is I was eating an orange in the cafeteria when the results came out, because they emailed them instead of reading them at assembly, and I saw the email on my phone while I was trying to separate a slice of orange from its stringy white thing, and I choked. I actually choked. Simone thumped me on the back. The lunch lady across the room hollered at me to slow down, which I appreciated.
Forty votes. In a grade of three hundred and ten, with turnout at about sixty percent, forty votes feels both like a landslide and like nothing. We got two hundred and twelve. Jayla's friend, a boy named Duncan who had run a perfectly nice campaign about school spirit, got a hundred and seventy-two. The second ninth-grade seat went to a girl named Priya Chowdhury, whom I do not know well but who wrote on her poster *I will show up*, which is, I think, the correct campaign promise.
The first real meeting of the Student Representative Council is on the second Thursday of October, in the library after school. I've been in that library a hundred times. Today the chairs are arranged in a wide circle around the central table, and Mr. Hawes is already there, reading, and Vice-Principal Boyer is already there, standing by the wall like he is waiting for us to do something wrong.
Mr. Boyer is a