The day after the presidential election I went into my teenage daughter’s new high school to volunteer at the front desk. The duties of the Berkeley High front-desk volunteer sound boring—basically they just want you to eyeball the incredible range of humanity that turns up at the front door and decide if it is safe to buzz it in, plus answer the incoming phone calls. But the school has about 3,200 kids in it, from every imaginable circumstance: homeless kids, disabled kids, kids whose parents are legally barred from seeing them, and a surprising number of kids whose parents sneaked into the United States illegally. It draws from every major religion and every tax bracket. At the end of the school year some of its graduates go off to Harvard or Stanford, but others stay home and join gangs. The school may be yet another liberal bubble, but a lot of American life finds its way into it.

The morning after the election about half of the school just up and walked out. They marched to a plaza big enough to serve as an outdoor amphitheater at the nearby University of California campus; there they rose, one after another, and spoke of their fears and sorrow. They did this peacefully and respectfully, and with apparent sincerity—if they had just been looking for an excuse to cut classes they did an excellent job of disguising their motive. The kids who weren’t white seemed genuinely disturbed about having a president cheered by white supremacists. The kids whose parents had sneaked into this country wept openly as they spoke about having a president who sounded as if he’d actually take pleasure in rounding them up. The girls seemed genuinely upset about having a president who bragged about committing sexual assault.

And so on. After giving 60 or so short speeches the students returned to school, as peacefully as they had left it. By the time my afternoon shift at the front desk began, most of them were back in their classrooms. The only sign that anything unusual had happened was the phone, which was ringing off the hook. The first call I fielded was from a Washington Post reporter looking for someone to interview, but most came from Trump supporters, from as far away as South Carolina, who had seen cable-news reports of the walkout at a California high school. They were livid. A few screamed and cursed. A few said they were going to find ways to cut the school’s funding. All sounded personally offended.

My first instinct was to hide and pretend I had nothing to do with the school or these crazy kids. I explained to the Trump supporters that I was just a new parent volunteer trying to make sure I didn’t transfer the call intended for the football coach to the drama teacher, or buzz a psychopathic killer into the school. I pleaded with them to understand that the school’s administration had nothing to do with the walkout—that the kids had organ­ized it the night before, without any prompting from adults, and there had really been no way of stopping them. A flash flood of worry and grief had sought a channel in the streets, and the school’s only involvement was to send some grown-ups along to make sure the streets remained safe. But the Trump supporters didn’t want to hear any of that. Actually, they didn’t want to hear anything. They wanted to rant—at anyone. In the end I just answered the phone with a robotic answering-machine voice: You have reached Berkeley High. If you would like to leave a message for the principal, press 1. If you would like to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, press 2. If you would like directions to the Golden Gate Bridge, press 3 … until the caller either hung up, or figured out my game and started hollering.