Excerpt: Napalm Sticks to Kids

Chapter One

Raised on Twinkies and white guilt, Tomas Buttermore is your typical left-coast, blue-state college kid. Thomas has a penchant for ironic t-shirts, indy music, geeky tech gadgets and square, black-framed glasses the Army would be embarrassed to hand out to soldiers. Like most kids hi age, he’s a little dumpy around the edges and has never had to work hard for anything in his whole life. To date, his greatest challenge and success in life was standing first in line to get the new iphone and blog a review before the rest of the world could wake up and get theirs.

To be fair, it isn’t that Thomas lacks brains or ability, he’s just never had to actually work hard for anything in his life. Thomas, a trust fund kid, has had a pretty easy life. His high school grades were good enough to get him a premiere education at Barkley University, but the money was what clenched the deal.

Now in his third year of college, Thomas has done enough to get by, but still hasn’t found what he wants to do with his life. He’s already drifted in and out of three majors, most recently settling on humanities. He hasn’t found a passion there, but then again, he’s never really found a passion anywhere in life—little does Thomas know that all that will change for him tonight.

Tonight, Thomas and his friends from university are attending a speech by Presidential candidate Achmed Muhammad Hussein. Hussein is an up and comer in the country’s politics and many expect that his message of hope and change will carry him all the way to the White House.

There is a real energy among Thomas and his friends, along with most of their demographic, about this Presidential candidate. Voicing support for Hussein fills them with some sort of civic accomplishment, even if they don’t manage to roll out of bed and get to the polls before they close on Election Day.

On this night, Hussein made a typical speech, filled with words he had uttered for the last two years across the country, on different college campuses and in different communities. The audience cheered in the right places and the mood was electric. The crowd, Thomas included seemed to feed off the energy.

As Hussein exited the stage, he walked through the crowd; shaking hands with constituents as politicians are want to do. It just so happened that Thomas and his friends were standing right along the exit way of the candidate.

As Hussein worked his way through the crowd, he reached out and grabbed Thomas’ hand, looked him in the eye and said, “With hope, We can bring about change in the world. We, you and I are the agents of change.”

Thomas was unaware that Hussein repeated this over and over again to members of the crowd as he exited the building on this night, and every other appearance he had made. For Thomas, the interaction had been far more personal.

When Hussein grabbed his hand, Thomas had felt an energy rush through him, unlike anything he had ever felt before. It was something greater than the thrill of opening the box on his new iphone and mocking those in line behind him. If he had to put it to words, he might describe the feeling as something similar to the vibration of a Wii controller in his hand for the first time, but it was something far more powerful. Some, had they been in Thomas’ shoes might describe the feeling as one akin to a religious experience, but Thomas had never had a religious experience, and even if he had, he would never admit to it—he’d lose far too much cred.

As Thomas stood there holding Hussein’s hand and looking him in the eye, he felt empowered, like he had never been before. He knew his life would never be the same. As Hussein released his hand and walked away, Thomas stared at him for a moment, then his knees buckled and everything went black.