[Fiction] Pure Radical
Pure Radical is available to download in full here (free). Below is a brief description of the novella and an excerpt.
Teri, a passionate teacher, is thunder on Twitter. So, she is flattered but not exactly surprised to be invited to a year-long retreat for the most radical voices on Twitter to build the utopian society of their dreams. After all, what could go wrong when 100 of the purest and loudest visionaries on the Internet live together in a harsh wilderness with only a bonfire, their increasingly surprising Twitter followers, and no possibility of leaving to bind them together?
Chapter 1
Teri was thunder on Twitter. For a 24-year-old San Francisco middle school math teacher who’d been voted “Most likely to die in the apocalypse” in high school, she was surprisingly electric with her tweets. Whenever the haters came after the city’s teachers, Teri was there to clap back—hard. Of course, Teri, who looked like a cross between a deer and Katy Perry’s awkward love child with an unnamed math professor, made it a point to keep it positive at school, for the kids—and because, yeah, she sometimes wondered if she’d gone too far? But in truth, she was done with the entitled parents who treated schools like they were private jet companies that owed them free flights and a bag of personalized nuts (she was particularly pleased with that turn of phrase when the tweet got 100 retweets); even if she would die of discomfort saying this to anyone’s face. The way teachers had been treated during the early years of the pandemic had radicalized her, and Twitter was there for her during her loneliest hours.
She’d sent this tweet off from her egg account after an especially bad parent-teacher Zoom in the fall of her third year of teaching.
Teacher Teri @RadicalMathTeachgrr
So tired of yt parents who want schools to be achievement processing plants that turn their little gods into single-serving slices of plastic American cheese! Exhausted, y’all, and no one cares. # reimagineeducation #listentoteachers
She imagined the look on the face of a particularly irksome PTA mom as she hit post.
Then she felt bad and took her dog out for a walk, politely navigating the streets of the west side of San Francisco until the guilt wore off.
It didn’t take long. The tweet got her 394 likes, including an organic cheese collective and one of the leaders of the local political clubs she admired. So what if 50 people had blocked her and 74 had muted her, including a famous tech CEO and two writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, she reasoned as she carried Janice, her geriatric dog, home? The dog had sat down and refused to move two minutes into the walk. The Chronicle was a moderate shill, as everyone knew—or, at least, she did now after some quick online research in a shady grove in Golden Gate Park when her guilt got the best of her. Teri went to bed that night in her lonely two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment, increasingly resolved to take comfort in the fact that she had just as many fans as trolls these days.
Thankfully, during the dark winter of that year, when even Janice had growled at the idea of going outside, Teri had one follower in particular who she felt like really saw her and the liberation journey she was on. Teri had dashed off a rage post about her classroom still not having a proper HEPA air filter.
“The humanity!” That had been one of @CosmicRadical’s first responses to her tweets. Teri had laughed and paused to appreciate the deep insight of that comment. It was so rare.
Soon after, on a long December night when Teri had ordered an extra amount of booze with her nightly Door Dash, added a side profile picture, and gone a little dark live-tweeting a contentious Board of Education vote on banning PTA fundraisers, Cosmic Radical quote-tweeted her entire thread. His comment: “Those PTA parents wouldn’t know radical if it bit them in the solar plexus, right @RadicalMathTeachgrr?!”
Teri laughed again, and then wept into her cheap wine bottle; the vote failed. It had been just what she needed to hear. What no one else knew was that night, in addition to all the school district horrors, was also the third anniversary of the death of her father from the second wave of the virus. He’d been forced back into school while Teri sat mutely by, and then he’d died. Hers had been a tragic life. Her mother had died when she was a kid, in the boiling heat of a suburban Chicago summer.
Cosmic Radical. What a strange name.
Teri fingered her wine bottle and put it down in favor of digging into her laptop browser. Was it a yoga studio? A wellness center? Maybe a math thing? She did love fellow numbers geeks. It was no doubt what made her such an amazing teacher; well, and her dad’s influence.
Much to Teri’s delight, a basic Google search revealed that the Pure Radical Foundation was a non-profit “investing in the grassroots, marginalized people-power movements in the Bay Area.” Their funding appeared to come entirely from a small nothing of a company that sold some sort of space microscope. Teri loved sci-fi and actual science (she’d been a comic book geek growing up), so she felt mollified, and more than a little fan girl. She raised her bottle in salute and then felt embarrassed. Later that night, a very drunk Teri swapped in a glam shot of her in her best going-out mask and got a little reckless.
Teacher Teri @RadicalMathTeachgrr
Honest question to my fellow educators, y’all. If someone from your district’s Central Office literally dropped dead at work, would anyone notice? #reimagineeducation #listentoteachers
Teri almost spit out her drink when Cosmic Radical’s comments and likes pinged on her laptop not too long after.
Cosmic Radical @CosmicRadical
@RadicalMathTeachgrr Why wait to find out? 👀
“You and the other teachers never should have died, Dad, and I’m not afraid to say it anymore,” she’d whispered over the snores of Janice, and drunk the rest of the bottle, blissfully unashamed of her smile at long last.
Continue reading by downloading the full novella here (free).