The Campaign

by Leila Sales

  “I’m sorry if I’ve let you down by not being a good enough candidate. But I want to make sure you know that none of you let me down. You did the exact opposite. You have given me so much hope for the future.”

  I wished I could pause time right then. I could see my life unrolling before me like a road with no turnoffs. Tonight, Janet would lose. Tomorrow, all my classmates would go back to not spending time with me, not relying on me, not including me. Next year, art class would go away. I would always remember that there had been this brief period of time when I was important and valuable, when people wanted to hear what I thought. A brief period of time when I could do things right. But that time was almost over.

  Enjoy it right now, I told myself, because it’s never coming back.

  Then Holly cried, “Look!”

  She was pointing at the big screen behind Janet. The seventh precinct had just come in, and it was reporting 650 votes for Janet and only 358 for Lucinda.

  Lucinda’s lead had been cut down to 500 votes.

  She was still winning. But not by much.

  When the next precinct came in with 610 for Janet and 347 for Lucinda, the room started buzzing. And when the one after that gave Janet 599 votes and Lucinda 269, there was a collective gasp.

  By the time half the precincts were reporting, Janet’s total vote count had surpassed Lucinda’s.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?” My Friend Daniel asked, frantically shoveling candy from my bowl into his mouth.

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  Janet’s eyes were so wide I thought they might pop out of her head. I crawled through the rest of the kids to stand next to her and hold her hand.

  When the next precinct reported, Janet’s total was 150 votes higher than Lucinda’s. With the one after that, it was back down to only fifty more. Then it was back up to 130 more. Then 200. Then 240.

  “With all thirty-two precincts reporting,” the newscaster said, “the final vote counts are 12,474 for Janet Teneman and 12,101 for Lucinda Burghart.”

  The room erupted.

  “Does that mean we win?”

  “Is it over? Can I look?”

  “I can’t hear what they’re saying!”

  Janet’s phone began to ring. I let go of her hand so she could fumble it out of her pocket.

  “Everyone shut up!” Dahlina hollered. “Janet has a call!”

  We all shut up.

  “What was that? What happened?” we all cried.

  Janet looked dazed as she slid her phone back into her pocket. “That was Lucinda Burghart,” she said. “She was calling to concede.” And Janet started to laugh. “We won, guys. We won! I’m going to be mayor!”

  CHAPTER 29

  We celebrated late into the night.

  It was over. We had won.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  Tomorrow I would go to school, and I’d see Mr. Xian, and he would still have a job. Mrs. Cheng would, too. Lucas would still have band, and Chloe would still have Fishsticks, and Dahlina could star in every single play from now until high school graduation.

  And I would still have art.

  And that was all I’d ever wanted. But somehow, it didn’t feel like enough anymore.

  I’d always felt like I needed only one place where I belonged, and that was art class. It didn’t matter that in every other part of my life I was awkward and confused and wrong, because when I was doing art, I was just right.

  But for ten weeks now, I’d had this other place where I belonged. It was here, on Janet’s campaign.

  I was so grateful that we’d won—I honestly was—and I didn’t want to have any bad feelings at all. Not tonight, when we had so much to celebrate. But I sort of wished that instead of winning the election, the campaign could have just gone on forever.

  My Friend Daniel felt the exact opposite. “I am so happy that this election is over!” he hollered. “Now I can finally stop spending so much time on it!”

  “I can actually focus on The Lion King,” Dahlina said. “We only have four weeks until the show goes up, and I’m not even off book yet because I’ve been so busy with the campaign!”

  “I’ll finally have time to start my a cappella quartet!” said Deke.

  Everyone had lives they were eager to restart. Everyone except me. We’d been a team for a while. And now everyone would go their separate ways, and I would go nowhere.

  I never would have imagined this before, but it turned out I really liked being part of a team.

  So I cleared my throat and did something I’d never done before. I said, “Can I help?”

  Here’s what I thought was going to happen:

  But here’s what actually happened:

  “Okay,” I said, and I started to smile. “I’d like that.”

  “They’ll all be lucky to have you,” Janet told me. “Just don’t get too busy with all those extracurricular activities, okay? I still need you!”

  “For what?” I asked. “The campaign’s over, Janet. You’re going to be in charge now. You don’t need any more help!”

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “People who are in charge need the most help! You’re going to be one of my chief advisors, Maddie. I mean, assuming you’re up for it. I couldn’t have done any of this without you, and I don’t want to start now!”

  I gave her a big grin. “I’m up for it,” I said.

  The campaign was over, it was true. But somehow, I felt like we were just beginning.

  EPILOGUE

  “How do I look?” Dad asked as we got out of the car at the Lansdowne Hotel. He fussed with his tie while Mom gave the car keys to the valet.

  “Very handsome,” Mom said, giving him a kiss. It was January now, two and a half months after the election, and it was dark and snowing lightly. I could see my breath in the air.

  “You know,” Dad said to me, “this is the very same suit that I was wearing the day I asked your mom to marry me.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “You weren’t wearing a suit when you asked me to marry you,” Mom said drily as she ushered us into the hotel lobby. I was wearing shoes with a little bit of a heel, so I had to climb the stairs carefully and hold up the hem of my dress so I wouldn’t trip.

  “Is that so?” Dad looked puzzled. “Huh. I could’ve sworn I was wearing this.” He patted the pockets as though searching for proof.

  The receptionist greeted us with a smile. “I’m going to guess from your outfits that you’re here for the mayor’s inaugural ball,” she said.

  “We are,” I confirmed.

  “Tickets?” she said. Mom reached for her fanny pack to get them out, then remembered that for once she wasn’t wearing a fanny pack because I’d told her that it didn’t go with her floor-length gown.

  The receptionist checked us off her list. There was a man in a tuxedo standing in front of the doors to the ballroom, and I thought maybe he would tell me I couldn’t come in, like that guard at the debate. But instead he opened the doors for us, and I stepped into Janet’s party.

  My Friend Daniel and his parents were already there, and they came up to us and started chatting. “I want my bar mitzvah party to be exactly like this,” Daniel told me. “Except with a magician. Janet should’ve hired a magician.”

  Daniel was the only person at the party not dressed in a fancy outfit. He was wearing a T-shirt and his Yellow Team bandana instead. He basically hadn’t taken it off since they had finally won a match. Michaela and I had gone to cheer them on.

  I think he was glad we went to his match to support him. That’s what friends do, after all.

  And tonight, everybody was here to support Janet at her inaugural ball. I saw Mr. Xian and Mr. Okereke and the principal and Mayor Peñate and the debate moderator and the editor of the Lawrenceville Gazette and Janet’s parents.

  The only person who hadn’t come was Lucinda Burghart, even though Janet had invited her. Janet said she wanted to be the mayor for all of
Lawrenceville, not just the people who’d voted for her, especially because the race had been so close. And that meant working with Lucinda to make sure that her supporters felt heard and represented, too. But apparently Lucinda didn’t want to be here tonight. I thought she was a sore loser. She should be used to losing by now, really. After all, she had lost the Olympics.

  I spied the rest of the kids over by the food table, loading up on cheese cubes and mini brownies. “Can I go hang out with my friends?” I asked my parents, and they followed me over to the refreshments.

  “We are all so fancy!” Dahlina shrieked when she saw me.

  And we did all look nice. But the real star of the show was Janet. She was glowing. When she got up on stage, every eye in the room followed her.

  The cheers were deafening. I clapped so hard my hands hurt.

  “Thank you!” Janet said. “I am so happy to be here tonight. Did you all notice that it’s snowing out? How amazing is that? I cannot imagine better weather for the day I take office! I hope that every day that I’m mayor, Lawrenceville gets weather that’s as perfect as today’s.”

  After a bit more of that, Janet finally moved away from the weather and started talking about her plans for when she was mayor and thanking people—the voters, her parents, all the kids who trick-or-treated for her.

  “I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for one person in particular,” Janet told the crowd of hundreds. “And that’s Maddie Polansky. Maddie, are you out there? Can you wave?”

  “She’s right here!” Dahlina, Adrianne, and Holly shouted. They all pointed at me as I blushed bright red and gave a little wave. Everyone clapped.

  “If you ever doubt that one kid can make a difference,” Janet said, “talk to Maddie, and she’ll prove you wrong.”

  I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “You know what?” Mom said, like she was realizing this for the very first time. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yes, you. You really did all of this. You didn’t just read about it and think about it and talk about it; you went out there and did it. None of us would be here right now if it weren’t for you, Maddie.”

  “Well,” I said, “other people helped.”

  “I wonder if I could ever do something like this,” Mom mused.

  I grinned. “I bet you could,” I told her. “If you want, I could even teach you.”

  “You know what just occurred to me?” Dad said, “When Janet starts being mayor tomorrow, she probably won’t have much time to babysit for you anymore.”

  “That just occurred to you?” I asked in disbelief.

  A man I sort of recognized came up to me then, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake.

  “How do you feel?” Chris asked me, gesturing around the room.

  “So proud,” I said.

  “There’s nothing like your first win,” Chris said. “Every win is special—every race is special, and every candidate is special, whether they win or lose. They all matter. But the first one is like nothing else.”

  “My first win?” I repeated. “What makes you think there will be a second?” I still wanted to be a professional cartoonist, after all. And maybe design graphic T-shirts, too. I don’t know. I’m twelve. There’s still time for me to do anything.

  Chris grinned at me. “For those of us who care about what happens in the world around us, our work is never done. Remember, there’s an election every year. And there are campaigns for civic causes that never stop. You won this race, but there are plenty more that need your energy and dedication. Tonight, you bask in your victory. Tomorrow, you change the world. What do you think?”

  I looked around the ballroom—at my parents, my friends, my teachers, my ex-babysitter and now mayor. At the balloons and the chandeliers and the cake. At the joy and the anticipation for all the good we could do. And I smiled.

  “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow, let’s change the world.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like Maddie, I got involved in my first political campaign when I was twelve years old. I volunteered on the campaign for a politician named David Cohen, who was running to be mayor of Newton, Massachusetts. He won, and while I definitely didn’t play anywhere near as major a role in his campaign as Maddie did in Janet’s, I loved being part of it and feeling like my small actions were contributing to a greater cause I believed in.

  What I learned then, and wanted to get across with Maddie’s story, is that government affects basically everything about how all of us lead our lives. It affects whether our parks are maintained, whether our drinking water is clean, whether our stoplights function, whether our neighborhoods are safe. Every day, we interact with government in so many ways that we don’t even think about. Journalist Christopher Hooks phrased it like this in an essay for the website Medium: “That’s what politics is—the way we distribute pain. It’s not a sport or a fraternity or a game. It’s how we determine who gets medication and who dies young, who learns in a class of twenty kids and who learns in a class of thirty, whose school has a counselor that’s trained to look for signs of sexual abuse and whose doesn’t.”

  Because politics affects all of us almost all of the time, we should all understand the basics of how it works. As Mr. Valdez explains to Maddie, American democracy depends on a system of checks and balances. There are three branches of government:

  The legislative branch writes and votes on laws. On the national level, this is the House of Representatives and the Senate, which together form the Congress. In Lawrenceville, this is the city council.

  The judicial branch interprets how those laws are applied and decides whether those laws are constitutional. This branch is made up of judges, and the highest-ranking part is the Supreme Court.

  The executive branch administers and enforces those laws. On the national level, the leader of this branch is the president. On the state level, it’s the governor. In Lawrenceville, it’s the mayor.

  Each of these branches keeps one another in check, so no one person or part of the government can get too much power. When all power is consolidated in one person, it’s called a dictatorship.

  The ultimate check on governmental power is the people. Citizens of a democracy get to vote for their governmental representatives, and if we don’t like what they’re doing, we can vote them out, protest their actions, or even run against them. Members of the government know that they could lose their jobs if enough people don’t approve of what they’re doing, so they have an incentive to listen to the people and try to give them what they want. Basically, we as a country are the employers of the lawmakers, and if they’re doing a bad job, we can fire them.

  The media play a big role in helping the people exercise our governmental oversight. The internet, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV keep us informed about what our elected officials are doing. That’s how we find out if our representatives are doing something we don’t like. It’s also how we find out if they are doing things that we like, which is how we know to support them in their campaigns.

  If you want to make a difference in politics like Maddie and her friends, here are some things you can do:

  COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS. Tell them what matters to you and what actions you want them to take. Like Maddie, you can go to a town hall, or you can show up at their offices to tell them in person. Or you can call, write letters, or send email.

  JOIN ADVOCACY GROUPS. If there’s a particular issue you care about—the environment, smoking, gun control, school uniforms, or anything else—there is most likely an advocacy group that is working to make a difference in that realm, and they are usually looking for volunteers to help with their efforts. One way to find advocacy groups is through Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org/). Social networks like Facebook and Meetup (www.meetup.com/find/movements/) can show you groups that are near you. And of course, asking other people who are politically involved to recommend groups is the best way to get personalize
d ideas.

  FORM A CLUB AT SCHOOL. If you care about an issue that doesn’t already have a group at your school, start one yourself! Talk to a faculty member about starting a new student organization, invite friends to join, and use school-approved media (school newspapers, bulletin boards, assemblies, etc.) to spread the news about what you’re working on.

  TALK TO OTHER PEOPLE. Studies show that you’re most likely to read a specific book or watch a specific movie if your friends recommend it to you. The same is true with politics. The number-one way to get other people to care about an issue that is important to you is to talk to them about it. This can mean talking one-on-one with friends, and it can also mean things like writing letters to the editor of the newspaper to reach a wider audience.

  VOLUNTEER FOR A VOTING RIGHTS NONPROFIT. Nonpartisan groups like Rock the Vote (www.rockthevote.org/), When We All Vote (www.whenweallvote.org/), and the League of Women Voters (www.lwv.org/) work year-round to register voters and promote civic engagement. They need volunteers to help spread the message that people can (and should!) get involved in politics.

  VOLUNTEER FOR A POLITICAL CANDIDATE. Even though presidential (and most mayoral) elections are held only every four years, every single fall brings a new election where other important offices are filled. Look at who’s on the ballot for the next election—you can find lists at websites like Vote411 (www.vote411.org/)—find out which candidates best represent your views, and sign up to volunteer. Like Maddie and her friends, you can do voter ID or get out the vote calls, block-walk, write postcards, hold signs, gather signatures, or all sorts of other things. You don’t need to do anything you’re not comfortable with—there are tons of different volunteer opportunities, so whatever your skills and interests are, there should be something you can do to help a campaign.

  The government has an impact on pretty much everything, but all of us have an impact on that government. Now, my question for you is: what sort of impact are you going to have?