At that, Frida imagined the creek laughing at her. You na?ve little idiot, it might say.
Frida dug her nails into the dirt—it felt strangely satisfying. It was a bad habit, and because of it, her nails were always filthy after doing the laundry. She stood up and returned to the creek’s edge. She held her breath as she pushed a dress under the cold water.
From the beginning, Frida had liked Toni, who kept her hair in a tight ponytail and wore weird shoes like a revolutionary war general’s: square and buckled. The night she met her, Toni and Micah had come over for tea made with mint from one of Cal’s gardens. Her brother had barely touched his mug when he told Frida to stop watching the fund-raiser video. It was months old by then. “I told you, I’m not in it,” he said. “I’m not an actor, nor am I a director.”
“But you are a ham,” Cal said.
“That’s true!” Toni had cried, which made Frida laugh. Her brother needed a woman to put him in his place.
“I don’t get what you’re after,” Cal said. “That poor fund-raising volunteer has a scar on her face. They said it got infected while healing. You know how hard it is to get antibiotics nowadays, and half the time they don’t even work.”
“The point is,” Micah said, “people are waking from their numb slumber.”
“It won’t be long until we do more,” Toni said, and Micah shot her a look.
“What does that mean?” Cal had asked. Frida remembered he suddenly looked very serious in their candlelit living room. They were sitting on big pillows on the floor, and the large chessboard they used as a table was between them, its brown and beige squares splattered with old wine.
Two weeks later, one of the gubernatorial candidates was kidnapped. After sixteen days, he was let go, naked except for a paper party hat, at the gate of the Community in Calabasas where he had thrown some rallies. He was unharmed, his campaign people said, but that could not be verified.
The Calabasas Community wasn’t its own city, not yet, but it had exploited a loophole: it ran its own schools, funded its own police force and firefighters, and anyone hired to protect and work within its borders either had to be related by blood to one of its residents or pass a rigorous application process. But nobody knew how to apply because the details weren’t on its website. Calabasas was apparently pouring money into alternative energies; it’d be the first carbon-neutral and energy-independent Community in California, which would make it even more attractive to prospective residents who were sick of blackouts and high energy bills.
The politicians understood that these were the constituents who mattered. Hardly anyone outside the Communities voted anymore. It didn’t seem to make a difference. Some people were waiting for the Communities to become their own sovereign states. It was only a matter of time, people said. Micah hated to hear this. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion, he said. They could fight it.
Cal had simply thrown himself into his gardening projects. He argued that if the rich forsook them, the country might be better off. “Maybe I’ll run for office,” he said, holding up a basket of onions. “I’ll run on a vegetable platform.”
He was joking, but Frida thought what Cal was doing made sense. He taught people how to grow their own food. This was necessary. After all, his expertise had kept them alive.
Cal would never let them go hungry, Frida thought now. He’d gotten them this far.
She lifted the dress out of the creek, and was surprised by how heavy the water had made it. Laying the dress across a rock, she grabbed Cal’s pants, faded and dirty at the knees and still cuffed at the hems. Such a sweet sight, his clothing, wrinkled and wet, removed from his body. Even when things got difficult between them, doing Cal’s laundry made Frida feel a love so tender she could weep.
The Group never took responsibility for that first kidnapping. It was obvious they were behind the stunt, though, and for an entire month Frida and her family didn’t hear from Micah. Her parents had no idea what was going on, but they were too busy struggling with Dada’s diminishing career and the cost of living to worry too much about him. Besides, he’d never been great at keeping in touch with them; and when he did swing by, he’d bring liquor and a crate of potatoes, and they’d be delighted, tripping over themselves with gratitude.
“They probably think he’s doing summer stock,” Cal joked.
Four weeks into Micah’s disappearance, Frida had walked to the east side for answers. She didn’t dare drive; the lines at the gas station were long, and it would’ve taken a week’s worth of wages to pay for the trip. Besides, she didn’t want Cal to know what she was up to. To this day, she’d kept it a secret.