“THE CRAWL” HAD turned into a growing nightly procession. Yolanda Perez mustered some troops from the Devon Womyn’s Collective. The collective’s president, Pythia Kamal, started coming by the fifth day. Kamal was a Fourth Wave feminist, believing in the use of modern technology and social tools to advance the cause. The Crawl was tailor-made for Fourth Wave feminism. Others who came didn’t go to Devon at all but heard about Lulu through the collective’s outreach. There were better than a hundred now, many carrying candles in silence.
Lulu never spoke, not a single word. Nor did she make eye contact or engage with anyone in any way. It lent the impression of a fugue state, a damaged soul. She just crawled and crawled, the iron ball scraping along behind her. The others let her lead, following slowly in her wake, a slow-motion parade. By the eighth day, Pythia realized that complete silence didn’t translate well on social channels so she started a chant. She would yell, “Crawl!” And the others would answer with “Peace!”
“Crawl!”
“Peace!”
Even though Lulu wasn’t talking, it was widely understood she was the victim in the Russell case. The clothes, the route, the timing … the message was there for anyone to decipher, and she was gaining considerable stature from her choice to protest symbolically. There was a power to it.
Part of the way down Mathers, a familiar voice cut through the chanting. “Lulu, what the fuck are you doing?”
It was Shelley. Lulu kept crawling, eyes focused on nothing.
“I had to see for myself. You know damn well this is bullshit. Do you hear me?”
Pythia Kamal quickly interceded. “How dare you. Lulu’s a survivor. We honor survivors on this campus!”
“Kiss my ass. No one is buying this, Lulu. And, not that I really care, but when your bullshit is exposed, you’re only going to make it harder for real victims to come forward. What about them?”
Several people stepped up and surrounded Shelley. “You need to leave. Now. This is a peaceful march,” said one male student, striding toward Shelley, chest thrust out.
“So these are your new friends, Lulu? Attractive lot you’ve hooked up with.” A few marchers hissed at that, which struck Shelley as pathetic.
Lulu still gave no indication she knew Shelley was there, which was hard, because she wanted to belt Shelley in the nose. But how could she? She was in a fugue state.
“All of you can piss off,” Shelley barked. With that, she turned and left.
Lulu’s followers had solved the problem of crossing Dudley each night. Once the light turned green, they made two lines across, forming a human channel. The light would always change when Lulu was about halfway, but traffic had effectively been blocked. Horns would blare, but not a single person would break rank until she was safely across. The honking also served notice to the nearby dorms in East Quad that the Crawl was close. Dozens would run downstairs to join the primal scream. Most were supporters, some just enjoyed a good scream.
Turning the corner into the quad, the crowd waiting in East Quad appeared twice as big as yesterday. Not sure what the appropriate reception was, some snapped, while others clapped, and they came to walk next to Lulu for the final few feet. Making it to the top of the steps, Lulu stood. She breathed heavily, her chest heaving with the effort. On her face was a thousand-mile stare, fixed on nothing and no one. The crowd quieted at this moment, as they had learned to do. Then Lulu threw back her arms, looked to the sky, and screamed. This deep and tortured scream went for as long as she could hold a single breath. The crowd stood, transfixed by this perfect distillation of distaff rage. When her voice finally trailed off, Lulu simply turned and entered Duffy. There was a pause, then the crowd answered with their own scream, throaty and maniacal, a single contrapuntal note.
We understand your pain.
When Lulu got up to her room, she was thankful Song wasn’t there. Song rarely got back from the library before eleven. Lulu removed the ball and chain from her ankle and stripped off her crawling clothes, donning a terry-cloth robe. Someone needs to teach those women how to dress, Lulu thought, flopping on her bed. All denim and flannel and unfortunate looking T-shirts with phrases like SMASHING THE PATRIARCHY IS MY CARDIO.
Lulu’s khakis were thoroughly frayed. This wasn’t an issue, of course. A ragamuffin appearance only reinforced her victim status. Her knees were in pretty sorry shape as well, even though she’d started taping them every day. Fortunately, she’d found a halfway decent day spa, and she slipped in there quietly every morning to get a massage and soak in one of their Jacuzzis. It was a few blocks from campus and pretty much off the beaten track. Her daily visits required missing several classes, but whatever.
Lulu giggled to herself thinking about what she’d overheard one marcher say, that she admired Lulu’s “purity of purpose.” What an idiot. But what was that phrase? Useful idiot?
The whole “suffering in silence” routine was playing out better than she could have imagined. Offered no specifics on which to grasp, her supporters were coming up with all sorts of progressive click bait on their own. One chick in the Daily said that Lulu’s silence was a “pregnant commentary on gender power imbalances.” Another marched with duct tape over her mouth in sympathy with Lulu’s silence. (It was a good visual on Snapchat but a dilemma for those who preferred to chant.)
In the beginning, Lulu had kept silent so she wouldn’t have to engage with these clowns. Now it was something more. Her silence was infused with meaning.
Perhaps the hardest thing, other than the toll this was taking on her body, was maintaining a tragic mien. Crawl. Peace. Crawl. Peace. Lulu did her best not to laugh when they started up with that. She was the one who thought that up. It was enormously frustrating that she couldn’t share what she was pulling off. God, she so wanted to tell someone.
It had been around day four she’d come up with the phrase Crawlpeace, using it as a Twitter hashtag. It was getting real traction. Lulu had never bothered with Twitter before, dismissing it as the realm of political nerds, but now she found it quite useful. Her Twitter bio simply read, “Student. Friend. Crawling for peace.” She diligently avoided specifics, instead throwing bumper-sticker memes into the ether and letting people think what they wanted. What she may or may not have meant by peace or anything else was left to the observer. Her last couple of tweets had been Unity = Disruption. #Crawlpeace and Change is the new normal. #Crawlpeace.
She boned up on progressive nomenclature, too, peppering her tweets with words like intersectionality, agency, and transmisogyny, all while really saying nothing at all. She let others create the narrative. This meant she was bulletproof, no matter how this played out. There was no story, nothing to defend. Let people project their own stupid issues. The nut jobs here have enough of them. Undergraduate culture was a petri dish of psychoses.
That she was, behind the scenes, falsely accusing someone had given her pause at the start. The feeling passed. Collateral damage was acceptable in every war, even if this was a war about which she didn’t particularly care.
She could have, though. Cared. If she were one of those strident fems, the butchy ones who were always angry about something, well, then collateral damage was easily justified for the greater cause. That she wasn’t a butchy fem and was merely playing the part seemed a minor detail.
This morning, when she’d checked her social media accounts at the spa, she had nine thousand followers on Instagram, up over a thousand from just the day before, and about five thousand on her new Twitter account. She’d decided to delete all the old frivolous social posts on Instagram, especially the duck faces. That was Lulu 1.0—Lulu 2.0 was a more serious affair.
Pulling out her phone now, she checked on the Reddit page someone had created about Crawlpeace. There were over seven hundred comments. Then she checked again on her usual socials—Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter … Holy shit. Sarah Silverman had retweeted her! Silverman had added, “So brave. Keep crawling, sister!” She even used the #Crawlpeace hashtag. Sarah Silverman had 12 million followers. Twelve freaking million. Silverman’s retweet had already been retweeted itself sixteen thousand times and had twenty-five thousand likes. Ho-ly shit!
Lulu fell back on her bed and squealed, kicking her legs at the air.
Fuck you, Shelley Kisner. You, too, Aubrey St. John.
Fuck all of you.