Linked: Chapters 12–18

He’s an equal-opportunity moron with the disposition of a honey badger. Plus the whole town saw him whitewashing the curse words he painted on the parking lot of St. Basil’s, so it’s not like vandalism isn’t already in his bag of tricks.

Clayton Pouncey. He’s kind of an oddball. His dad is locally renowned as a jerk and a bigot, and there’s a rumor that his grandfather was involved with the KKK and the Night of a Thousand Flames.

Clayton Pouncey. He’s kind of an oddball. His dad is locally renowned as a jerk and a bigot, and there’s a rumor that his grandfather was involved with the KKK and the Night of a Thousand Flames.

Caroline doesn’t have a racist bone in her body, and she’s not a vandal, or any kind of evil person. But she’s always talking about how brain-dead our school is, and how we have zero spirit and never get involved the way other middle schools do. She practically lost her mind with happiness when the student council meeting got a decent turnout. Would she go so far as to paint swastikas just to rally the troops and get us all riled up to work on some project?

I’m expecting the usual art club squabbles—arguments over who’s a cutter and who’s a gluer, or whether it’s too clashy to put orange next to red.

Pouncey refuses to work unless he’s in charge of the guillotine, and he gets pretty obnoxious about it.

The sixth graders are determined to make more links than everybody else, so they skimp on the glue and their chain comes apart.

Dollops of glue land on colored paper, and fingers form loop after loop. Our chains grow faster and faster, until it seems as if we can churn out our six million in one day.

I’m fast asleep when the ping goes off. Delirious, I roll over and tap the screen. Yikes—5:53. I don’t have to even open my eyes for two more hours.

“Here’s the latest from Chokecherry, swastika capital of Colorado. News flash: This idyllic American small town, where you can smell the apple pie cooling on the windowsill, used to be a hotbed for the KKK! We’ve been threatened with a lawsuit, TokNation, by the chamber of commerce of Chokecherry, Colorado. Why? For telling the truth! For daring to mention the Night of a Thousand Flames, when the entire town was encircled by burning crosses.”

There are so many of us now that Caroline and Michael had to move production from the art room into the gym, and parts of the chain are draped over everything. You can barely see the climbing apparatus. We're already up over six thousand links.

“So long as you understand that,” Dad confirms. “Because six million is an impossible task.”
“The whole point,” I tell him seriously, “is so we can see how big a number six million really is.”
He goes kind of quiet digesting that.

I wish the six hundred Link Rowley worshippers in this school could see their Big Man on Campus practically groveling with gratitude.

So I get my lunch and sit down at a secluded cafeteria table with the most popular boy in the seventh grade.

The school halls echo with tales of his hilarious pranks, pulled off with the faithful Jordie and Pouncey at his side—the snowball-filled-with-peanut-butter caper; the salt-in-the-teachers’-room-coffee affair; the lard-in-the-parade-route incident.

Link is oblivious to this, still buried in his bar mitzvah.

We run through the cafeteria doors and join the throng around the famous vlogger.

Besides the claustrophobic rectangle of face he shows the online world, Adam Tok is compact and squat, with curly black hair and stick-out ears. He’s casually dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and, for some reason, authentic leather cowboy boots with gigantic heels that boost him up to merely short.

The principal’s face flames red. “I know exactly who you are, Mr. Tok, and you’re not welcome to come here and exploit our problems. This is the real world, not YouTube. You need a permit to film on school property. And if that’s your vehicle, I regret to inform you it’s illegally parked.”

Halfway through this speech, the blogger turns on his camera and swivels it toward Mr. Brademas. “Here’s Nicholas Brademas, principal of Swastika Middle School, trespassing on freedom of the press,” he narrates.

“Students,” Mr. Brademas addresses us. “Get inside the school. Immediately.”
A few kids start to straggle back to the building, but most of us just stand there, fascinated. The principal may be in charge, but ReelTok is a celebrity.

Ever since I was four, when I tried to organize my fellow preschoolers into going on strike for better cookies at snack time, I’ve had the same problem. Apathy.

I perch at the end of the empty chair, and Mr. Brademas gets right to the point. “I can’t commend you enough for what you’ve accomplished with the paper chain project. To reach sixty thousand links is impressive enough. To manage it so quickly is astounding. It makes it all the more difficult to have to bring it to a close.”

People call New York a cesspool, but New Yorkers would never knuckle under to intolerance and let some lowlife get away with drawing swastikas.

REELTOK: Yeah! Especially when you consider the adults we're talking about.
CAROLINE: Wait—what?
REELTOK: The mayor and his police force, who should be finding whoever's behind the swastikas instead of hassling an innocent blogger.

At some point, the school is going to have to throw it out, or recycle it, or something that makes it go away. But if Brademas and the teachers are planning to do that, they haven’t mentioned it to us kids yet. I think they’re afraid that if they try it, the cry of outrage is going to echo off the mountains. Caroline is passing around a petition to protect the links we’ve already got.

Kids are coming from all directions, stampeding through the hall, to investigate the source of the disturbance. Seeing the paper chain in danger galvanizes them into action.

Now Brademas is bright red. “The paper chain project is over. This is a school. We can’t sacrifice our gym indefinitely because a few people are disappointed.”

Every time Dad says bar mitzvah, he looks like he’s just taken a swig of vinegar. But I give him full credit. For the first time ever, he’s going through with something for my sake...or maybe because Mom told him he has to.

Eventually, Dad interjects gently, “I think that’s enough bar mitzvah talk for now. Link doesn’t want to hog the spotlight away from the paper chain or our world-famous dinosaur dig. Did you know there’s a major fossil discovery right outside Chokecherry?”

Michael stands at the door like a sentry, clipboard in hand, checking in all the new arrivals, faithfully keeping the count. Yesterday we passed four hundred thousand, but the number has to be even higher than that now.

The cavernous storage space is already half full with mounds of paper links. The expanse of bright colors is so gigantic that my eyes almost can’t process it in one sweep.

The reporter points to a catwalk just under the high ceiling. “Go up there and get a panoramic view,” she tells her cameraman. “We have to see just how huge all this is.”

The reporter points to a catwalk just under the high ceiling. “Go up there and get a panoramic view,” she tells her cameraman. “We have to see just how huge all this is.”

The man’s voice is reedy. “You’re going to want to take a look at this.”
We head up the metal staircase—the reporter, Michael, my father, and me.