Seizing the Day

Chapter Six: Rallying the Troops

JACK KELLY

"A newspaper about... Bullying?"

The girl across from him smiled cheekily, her grey eyes brimming with amusement, "I never took you for the hippie type, Kelly."

It was, as ever, a quiet day in the library, which made it ideal for a meeting like this. The other tables, littered among the nooks of the bookcases, and in the central walkway of the room remained empty, their chairs scattered as though someone had recently run a herd of cattle through the building without anybody taking notice.

Considering the amount of noise the Institute generally produced, it wasn't an entirely impossible thought.

"Against bullying," Jack grumbled defensively, "And it ain't a hippie movement! Just...Well-"

"Peace and goodwill to all," Whisper finished for him, her smirk growing in size as she daringly leaned back in her chair, causing the two front legs of the seat to hover in the air. Her battered white skater-shoes came to rest sloppily on the table between them as she did so, snapping her bubblegum in expertise.

Following the impromptu meeting they'd had after the assembly, the slightly-larger newspaper crew had begun considering what their best course of action would be going forward. The plan had been to ask around and find more volunteers for actually helping with the article, and Katherine had been the one to suggest trying the Bronx first, as they were, out of all the boroughs, the most laid back.

Jack didn't know Whisper well. Sure, they had a few classes together, on account of being in the same grade and all, but that didn't mean much. The institute was massive, and it was rare for students to make friends outside of their own boroughs. Even Race and Mush, both of them amiable, social sorts, mostly stuck with their boys, not bothering to make friends with anyone who wasn't Manhattan.

To belong somewhere was the key to surviving the Institute. It was a sad state of affairs, but true- if you had a borough, you had a place to sit at lunch, and a corner of the classroom where you could always find a seat with somebody you knew. If you were lucky, you might even have some friends. It was the loners who had the most grief with the bullies- kids who were easy to single out, who didn't have anyone at their back, who had nobody keeping an eye on them to make sure they made it to class or home. Granted, as prior events had concluded, this by no means meant that if you were part of a group, you were completely safe either. But there was a sense of tightknit belonging that came with the title 'Manhattan' or 'Bronx' or 'Brooklyn', or any of the many others, and the students tended to wear them like armour.

In reality, there were only five true boroughs in New York: Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. They'd all grown up hearing about them, had the names practically engraved in their memory from the time they were born. The fact was, nobody cared. There were dozens of boroughs in the Institute beyond the original five. Neighbourhoods like Harlem and Midtown, while within the Manhattan border, identified themselves as separate entities. Flushing considered itself independent from Queens.

All in all, there were almost too many divisions to count, some groups named after single streets in their neighbourhood, and counting upwards of only five or six kids, others closer to forty and more. Manhattan itself had been carved up no different than a pie until most of its larger neighbourhoods had become their own boroughs, Race and Jack only representing a small number of the kids from the district. Brooklyn, on the other hand, held a surprisingly small community of members, despite being mostly unified, but they had a lot of drifters. As far as numbers went, they had maybe twenty permanent bodies at the most, but their lunch tables were always full, sixty students, seventy. Blink had called the flighty students Spot's 'birdies' once; kids that hung around Brooklyn, but didn't want to commit to the rough group, choosing instead to 'fly away' whenever things got heated.