We Went Broke at Midnight | ✔

19 | you might be poor

❝Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with.❞

19 || you might be poor

time || night

I smell something burning.

Like kerosene mixed in with charcoal.

Oh right, someone started a bonfire. Even though it's warm out, the night breeze is making everyone feel slightly cold.

Everything's getting a bit out of hand; people screaming their lungs off, threats of calling the police being thrown our way, and the rowdiness one would expect from a crowd of revolutionaries. What started off as a little protest turned into something more.

I'm not as scared as I'd felt in the beginning.

Hearing the loud voices protesting, sends a warm feeling up my spine. One of exhilaration, importance, safety, courage, and fierceness. Everyone's together as a family wanting to show these big bad wolves of Havendust who we really are.

It's kind of as if everyone's leaning on each other.

In a different setting you'd think we all are a couple of concert attendees standing in a mosh pit feeling the soul of whatever music's coming from within the stage. But this is different. Way different.

Instead, we're the music coming from within the stage. We want to be heard and we're not going to stop until we are.

Everyone's close to everyone. Each person's arm wrapped around one another's shoulder as if we've known each other forever. Mary, the girl with the pink hair, is standing beside me while Brolin's on the other side of me. He looks to be much into the protest as well. His brown eyes filled with the glow of the lights burning in front of him is enough to convince me.

I feel cozy.

This isn't me basking in a midst of chaos and confusion. This is me, Karen Nicole Rice, finally being part of something that holds promise.

"Are the cops comin'?" I ask Mary, who merely shrugs. I don't ask this in a paranoid way, more objectively than anything. The police usually show up to these sort of things, right? "Who knows," she says with a roll of her brown eyes. "At this point we're not doing anything bad. We're on public property. We're not hurting anybody."

She has a point. Standing in the middle of the road that splits between the working class neighborhood and the city isn't loitering.

Eventually I go along with everyone who's chanting lyrics from a song that goes something like: All you wanna do is *shoot! shoot! shoot!* and take our money! and some other lyrics that follow.

We keep shouting these words until the police cruisers start coming. And a black SUV comes rolling in with them. When the SUV stops, an old-skinny man wearing a business suit gets out along with two able-bodied men who I'm guessing are his bodyguards. At first the old man tries to address us protesters in this informative and charismatic fashion, but stops when he sees that he's not getting through to us.

"We want our money!" someone shouts.

That's when everything goes crazy.

Things quickly unfold.

The crowd is now spread out.