Frida remembered Toni’s remarkable ability to run and talk simultaneously. She was short and muscular, a woman who might have had a childhood in gymnastics if she hadn’t had such fucked-up parents and a grandmother who worried too much to let her do anything extracurricular. Toni wasn’t even sure where her parents lived. Maybe they were in a cult in Boulder or off somewhere in Mexico. She’d been raised by her Nana outside Seattle. Toni loved her grandmother, but it was obvious she resented her for being so strict, instead of placing the blame on her parents, where it belonged. At seventeen she had run away from home. Micah was convinced that Toni’s grandmother lived in a Community now; she’d told him her Nana had money. “Face it, Toni,” Micah liked to say, “you’re tony.” Toni didn’t appreciate Micah’s joke and what it implied: that she could return to that life of comfort and denial at any moment. That she might. That she was merely slumming.
Before she fell into a friendship with Toni, Frida didn’t know all that much about the Group; her brother would occasionally divulge a tidbit here and there, but that was it. Like everyone else, Frida remembered the Group for being responsible for a few pranks, which they posted online immediately afterward or streamed live. The Group may have been founded by disgruntled students who wanted to rid the world of corruption, but that didn’t mean they knew how to get the public on their side; in those first few years, it was only the playful element that became visible to outsiders, making the Group’s organized outrage hard to interpret. “Think of it as two different branches of the same tree” was how Toni put it. “The drama club dorks on one, and the more socially minded theorists on the other. How we ended up on the same tree is kind of puzzling. But then again, both branches want to disturb the status quo, make people pay attention. It’s just a question of how to do that.” She paused. “The performance art folks were helpful in getting our name out there, and they have some ideas we can still use, but they’re so na?ve, not to mention unfocused. The truth is, the Group is growing up, getting more serious.” She paused again. “To use the tree metaphor again: the artsy branch will eventually break off.”
When Micah joined, the world had still only seen the pranks, the playful stuff. Dada called the Group an avant-garde theater troupe, and, at first, that was kind of true. They were famous for getting a thousand bicyclists to merge onto the 405 at rush hour. That had really fucked with whatever traffic was still left on that ruin of a freeway, but only for an hour or so. A pocket of the Group was made up of dancers, actors, and artists, and they’d done a few big performances in the middle of open trials and city council meetings.
Right after he graduated from Plank, Micah told Frida that he was moving into a loft with other members. “The Group?” she’d repeated, and asked if he’d also gotten into acrobatics and fire-breathing when she wasn’t looking.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said.
“It just doesn’t seem like your thing,” she said.
Micah had shaken his head. “You don’t know anything about me.”
That had stung a little, and still did. If she knew anyone, it was her little brother.
When had that stopped being true?
Frida pulled her hands out of the creek water, and the cold iced up her fingers. She crab-walked to a patch of dirt and placed her palms flat on the ground until the groan of cold subsided.
The other, more serious branch of the Group had always been there, but it wasn’t until after Micah joined that it began to grow stronger. Or at least that’s when she noticed the shift, maybe because she started paying attention to their activities. Not long after Micah graduated from Plank, a few members of the Group had donned ski masks and hijacked a political fund-raising dinner. Those in attendance were said to be members of a nearby Community who wanted to close the roads surrounding their newly built compound. Someone from the Group ran a knife across a woman’s cheek, scarring her, and another had bashed a man’s head into one of the fake-orchid centerpieces. The Group had been protesting “corporate sponsorship of candidates,” according to the signs they showed to the camera. When Frida asked Micah about how it related to the bike prank, or to the juggling of doll heads, he shrugged and said he didn’t know a thing.
To Cal, it made sense that the Group appealed to Micah. “He’s interested in social justice, or so he says,” Cal remarked when she brought it up with him. “And he can also be dramatic, you know how he loves elaborate pranks.”
Once she and Toni had been running together for a few weeks, Frida got up the courage to ask her the same questions.
“That’s exactly what we discuss at our meetings,” Toni said. “Are we undermining ourselves with our funny stunts? Or are we working toward the same goal?”
“And what exactly is that goal?” Frida had asked. They were running faster now, and she could hardly get out the words.
“Total world domination, of course,” Toni said, and laughed. Then she said, “If people think we’re just a bunch of clowns, we can get away with a lot more. Why do you think those morons let us into that fund-raiser to begin with? They must’ve expected a fucking flash mob.”
Micah was never in any of the Group’s filmed stunts—playful or otherwise. He claimed he wasn’t holding the camera, either. Frida had watched the clip of the fund-raiser stunt over and over, despite how hard it was to do so, just to make sure her brother wasn’t one of the masked offenders. He wasn’t; she was sure of it. Besides, he’d never lie to her.