They never make it to the vigil. Rob is hauled into the waiting area outside the dean’s office, and after 19 minutes he is summoned inside and suspended for three days. Colleges are informed; he always afterwards believes he was rejected by Stanford because of the suspension.

Vivian waits the 19 minutes with Rob. Mrs. Engles (Dean of Girls) orders her to return to classes but Vivian harangues the woman about the true purpose of school. She maintains then and afterwards that most kids can educate themselves, through books and discourse, but that school is for socialization and civilization and the application of ethics. She speaks with eloquence and vehemence. Her cheeks flush and her eyes shine. Mrs. Engles rears back a little awed and retreats to her office. Rob is rapt with admiration.

Of the 312 seniors at the school, 214 try to protest the execution. 84 of those, Linda among them, simply cut school and drive to the vigil. 63 more make it off the campus before the cordon goes up. The remaining 67 are trapped in school, although Rob is sent home.

David goes back to class but Vivian doesn’t. She circulates from room to room of senior students, trying to enlist her classmates in a real movement to do the work to outlaw capital punishment entirely.

She stops in one doorway after another and makes a plea that loses some passion with each iteration. She appeals to her fellows and at the last class, the one at the northwest corner upstairs, she even begs a little. But no one offers to join her.

She’s wrought up and reactive. She orates hard but she can’t help noticing that the crowd energy has dissipated. The faces look empty. The eyes don’t meet hers.

She considers all the spirit she felt when she tried to get to the vigil. Reveling in the excitement, the rush of actually doing something, the extreme focus. Her friends were then invigorated; now she reads their embarrassment for her and their tepid reluctance to work.

Whatever inclination Vivian has to activism was mortified today. She concluded that people would rather be riled and excited than sweaty and laboring. Now she becomes more loyal to Rob and less smitten by David. She remembers David’s wry face in Rob’s car and she disdains his noncommittal style. She doesn’t know that David will become a psychologist or that Rob’s actions were driven by an impulse to rage rather than heroism.

Vivian will grow up to be a sardonic adult, assuming the worst about her species, laughing at human foibles. She will be uncomfortable in large groups and will seek gratification in sporadic kinky sex and the controlled consumption of controlled substances. She’ll be nearly sixty before she tries politics again and allows that people want to be better. Actually love to be taught. It’s just that people have a taste for high production values, Vivian will finally understand. Seldom moved unless entertained. Never entertained unless moved. Those are her best realizations, and they’ll take her almost forty years.