by Rachel Cohn
How could they lose Very to a so-called technology problem? Which wasn’t even a real problem? Preposterous.
And yet. A tear ran down Lavinia’s face, bisecting a drop of snot falling from her allergy nasal drip. The earnest worry of that snot-tear caused Very to at least entertain the notion they were presenting her. The sight was just so pathetic. Maybe Lavinia wasn’t one hundred percent a traitor. Maybe she was genuinely worried.
Very allowed, “So let’s say, hypothetically, that I have this ‘technology’ problem, which isn’t even a real problem, but since you’re so gung-ho on the idea I’ll go along with it, just to humor you. So I have this ‘problem.’” Gawd, they’d incited her to gesture finger quotes around “technology” and “problem.” What kind of friends were these people, anyway? “What do you propose I do about it?”
Dreabbie said, “For one thing, in consultation with the dean’s office, it’s been decided that your iPhone should be confiscated for the time being. We can’t force you to surrender it, of course, but we’re hoping you’ll do so voluntarily, for your own good. Agreeing to this measure will look good for you when your housing case comes up for review soon. If you give your phone to me, you will be allowed to check in with me twice a day to listen to your messages. In the interim, you may use the land line in your room if you need to make calls.”
“What if I need to call long distance?” Very spat. “The room line is only good for local numbers.”
Jean-Wayne fished a crumpled phone card printed in Spanish from his pocket and handed it to Very. “We got this for you at a bodega by Morningside Park. The most muy excelente rates we could find. You can kick it old school. If you need to talk to anyone long distance, particularly in El Salvador, you can use the land line and talk for a very long time with this card.”
“Not helping,” Lavinia muttered to him. She nodded toward Bryan, who approached them with a backpack and handed it over to her. Lavinia fished out a ginormous laptop from the backpack. “I got this from my parents’ basement. It’s a really old computer with no Internet connection. You can use it to write your papers and stuff, but without all the online distraction.”
“You’re joking,” Very said. “That’s, like, the size of a toddler.” She lifted the relic. “It’s heavier than one, too.”
Bryan said, “We’ve gone ahead and removed your own laptop from your room. For the time being.”
WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!?!?
It was like Bryan had taken a saw and brutally carved a limb from Very’s body, completely indifferent to the blood and cartilage splattering onto all of them, while Very sat passively on the couch, shocked and too pained to even acknowledge the horrendous crime.
Jean-Wayne said softly, “I know it’s totally not cool to do that. It’s only because we care about you so much.”
Lavinia said, “We want you to come back to school next year. We can choose a suite together when we’re sophomores. That’d be awesome, right?”
Dreabbie added, “Your friends are doing this because they care. We all care.”
At this point, the shock of the assault was so great that Very would have agreed to anything just to get out of the suffocating room.
“I’ll try,” Very said.
To herself she added, I’ll try to make it through these last few weeks of the semester and then fuck you all and this place and everything about it. I’m going to find El Virus and never come back.
CHAPTER 12
Hello Hello Hello, Is There Anybody in There?
That Richard Chamberlain had been onto something. Appeasement could maybe possibly work.
Wait a minute. Neville Chamberlain had been the appeasement dude. Richard Chamberlain was the gay priest? Or had that been Richard Simmons?
Whatever. Neville Chamberlain. Was the World War II appeasement dude. Very was sure of it.
And she’d figured this out without a Google query!
Very was, indeed, kickin’ it old school in the natural world. One whole comfortably numb week in April, without the constant techno blast surging through her bloodstream, and she was accomplishing things. At the behest of Dean Dean, she’d rewritten that Lit Hum paper, actually reading the texts instead of merely Googling relevant passages. She hadn’t skipped a class since the electronic purge, which meant she also hadn’t sent or answered an IM or a meme, which meant she’d somewhat absorbed the lectures she’d been supposed to be listening to all along. (That Econ shit … Whoa. Important.) She’d also completed two shifts at the Morningside Avenue Food Co-op, and was now the proud owner of two bushels of organic, fiber-rich Empire apples that could substitute for the nutrient-poor, credit-card-delivery meals Very couldn’t afford for at least a week. Best of all, her joystick-induced carpal tunnel syndrome had eased, the chronic tension in her hand happily giving over to pain-free textbook-page flipping rather than video-game playing.
The music thing was kind of killing her, and she was going to find where Lavinia had hidden her emergency spare iPod even if she had to do a body search on the girl, but, Very had to admit, this taking away of her gadgets, this allowing her treasonous friends to think they were helping her, wasn’t entirely a bad idea. For the time being.
Clean for a week now, Very felt an epic shift occurring in her body chemistry, rather like the sudden temporal rift that happened from long-distance airplane travel, from falling asleep on takeoff and then landing to awake in a completely different environment. The intervention was a joke, Very reminded herself, but she could prove to the world, and to herself, that SHE COULD DO IT.
SHE COULD DO IT by pretending the whole experience was a virtual science experiment she was being forced to act out in the Real World.
Very missed her gadgets, surely, but the emotional weight of them might indeed have been a burden. With no laptop or phone on which to scan for messages from El Virus (now MIA for almost a month, which was like a quarter century in online romance time) and without the immediate means through which to send or answer a meme or play a video game, Very had to acknowledge she felt suddenly free, like that delicious feeling of going to a foreign country and not speaking the language or knowing the customs but randomly setting out into the culture to see what would happen. Could acclimation happen?
Well, no, acclimation couldn’t really happen. Very would get her stuff back eventually, and the sooner the better. And the sooner she appeared to have relaxed into it, the better the traitors would determine her mental well-being to be, and return her fucking stuff to her already. Appeasement was just that: appeasement. Everyone knew it didn’t last. (Sorry, Neville.)
For now, Very would play the game. She only had to survive a few more weeks, until classes ended in early May. While most of her classmates had internships and far-flung adventures lined up for their summer breaks, Very had yet to figure out a plan, having decided long ago that El Virus would appear just as final exams concluded to whisk her away for a summer of frolic and fun. So this No Techno experiment might help and not hinder the reality check Very’s summer planning needed, since Real World El Virus was apparently nowhere on the horizon.
Very had refused to speak to Lavinia in the first couple days after the intervention. But the silent treatment had quickly grown old, and boring, too, with no online adventures or music to distract Very in their room. All it had taken was one batch of microwaved Chewy Chips Ahoy! that Lavinia had brought in just for Very, and Very fell out of Mad and into Yum with her Chum in an instant. Very wished she had higher standards for holding a grudge, but, at least where Lavinia was concerned, she didn’t, apparently.
For pragmatism’s sake, Lavinia put Very on a thirty-minutes-per-day Internet allowance regimen specifically for the purpose of researching a summer job and abode. The addendum to that allowance, however, was that the research would be done on Lavinia’s laptop, by Lavinia. Which meant Lavinia had to do the thinking for Very, which Very minded not at all. Bonus all around.
“So which is it?” Lavinia said, tapping away. “We�
��ve only got three weeks of school left before finals, and you need to figure this out already. Do you want to spend the summer in New Haven and find a job there, or try to stay in Manhattan? It’s possible to sublet graduate student apartments over the summer. But pricey.”
Very, sitting next to Lavinia on Lavinia’s bed, dropped her head onto Lavinia’s shoulder. “Why can’t I just live with you?” she asked.
Lavinia said, “A summer in Vermont would be so exciting for you, I’m sure.”
“Better than a summer in New Haven,” Very whined.
“You’d want to be a camp counselor to a bunch of tyrannical tween girls with me?”
“No,” Very said. Hang out with Lavinia all summer—sure, why not? Work, at a job—no way, ick[dot]yuck[dot]horrible. Very wondered why she couldn’t be the offspring of independently wealthy people and do, like, nothing all summer, but in a really posh apartment paid for by someone else, and with an unlimited food-delivery line of credit? (Also, as always, the optimal situation would include cable and other assorted hookups on someone else’s dollah.)
Lavinia pointed to some Web site hits on her laptop. “Look, I’ve found a few job possibilities for you in New Haven. Just temp stuff, but good leads. Do you have a résumé prepared?”
Very had to incite Lavinia to stop dropping that douchey “ré-sumé” word already. Her head still relaxed on Lavinia’s shoulder, Very moved her arm from behind Lavinia’s back to Lavinia’s behind. She then slipped her hand underneath her roommate’s shirt. Her hand was barely an inch up the warm, soft skin of Lavinia’s back before Lavinia jumped off the bed.
“Don’t think you can molest me to find your spare iPod,” Lavinia said. “I know your tricks.”
How was it that Lavinia knew Very’s every predatory thought?
“Please,” Very pleaded. “I just want my music. Where’s the spare ‘Pod? You know my primary music library is on my spare and not on the iPhone. Please. Don’t make me beg. Or I’ll have to tickle the location out of you.”
Lavinia rolled her eyes. “I’m not ticklish.”
“That’s not what your crew girlfriend told me.”
Lavinia would not rise to the bait. “Sorry. No ‘Pod for you. I will not be your enabler.” Lavinia took her CD case from her desk and handed it to Very. “If you want to listen to music, here’s my collection. You can listen to it on my Internet-less and radio-less CD player.”
“But …,” Very sputtered. “Your music sucks.” Lavinia’s taste was so predictably college-radio alternative music. Absolutely not. Unacceptable. Too earnest. Very needed her groovefire.
“Deal with it,” Lavinia said. “Hum to yourself if you need a tune.”
Very singsonged, “Please let Very have her iPod, darlingest, most beautiful Lavinia.”
“Will not enable you will not enable you will not enable you,” Lavinia said. She retrieved her laptop from her bed, away from nearness to Very. “Stop this nonsense already. I’m going out.”
“Where?” Very said. Lavinia had better not say …
“Study break with some friends from crew.”
That.
Very hated Lavinia’s crew friends. They were all like Lavinia, so smart and sporty and together, without being super special like Lavinia. They had names like Amanda and … a few more Jennifers, Very was pretty sure. She’d only met, like, five of them, but she’d hated them on sight for diverting Lavinia’s attention. She hated Lavinia having fun without her. True, Very socialized plenty without need of Lavinia, but that didn’t mean Lavinia should also be so entitled.
Very said, “You mean you guys will be meeting in some Amanda’s room and pretend to study but really watch her collection of The L Word episodes?”
“Queer as Folk,” Lavinia retorted.
Very loved it when Lavinia played back. “How butch of you.”
Lavinia pointed at the dinosaur computer that Very had been relegated to. “Stop dodging the subject. I’m assuming you have no résumé. Prepare one. I expect you to have a rough draft finished by the time I get back tonight.”
Very shrugged, indifferent.
Lavinia softened. “Okay. You’re killing me with that sad face. One song when I get home. I’ll give you one song.”
“We’ll have a spontaneous dance party?” Very asked, brightening.
“One song. Dance party. If your résumé is drafted by the time I get back. Affirmative.”
“Spice Girls?” Very said.
“Pussycat Dolls!” Lavinia called out as she left the room.
“Poseurs,” Very muttered.
Dreabbie stood in the doorway Lavinia had just abandoned, holding Very’s iPhone. “Are you ready for your ten-minute-allowance message check?” Dreabbie asked.
Was she!
Very snatched the phone from Dreabbie’s hand and popped open her messages.
And there it was, at last.
Contact.
From El Virus.
His message said: Find me, dearest. Monsignor needs rescuing.
Catch him if she could.
She would.
CHAPTER 13
April Showers Bring … Full-on Freaks
She was a LeFreak who was a freak magnet.
Very would never have imagined Jean-Wayne Chang was this much of a freak, however.
Dy-no-mite!
First, he wore deep-sea-green eyeliner. No big, right? Right. Lots of guys wore eyeliner. But. Jean-Wayne only wore eyeliner when going online to engage in a certain fetish involving fishes that Very might normally have dismissed as cool-but-not-her-thing, but that, in this case, she’d embrace wholeheartedly.
She had to, because J.-W. was the master leading her back to her domain.
Meaning, second, J.-W. was a source, a hustler, a kingpin, within his secret world.
His secret world consisted of a posse of engineering-major dudes who also wore green eyeliner but who couldn’t trace their inner lids with the same suave flair that Jean-Wayne pulled off. The posse met for after-midnight rituals in a basement cove in the East Asian Library, where they immersed themselves in all-night marathons playing a hypnotic, postmodern Dungeons & Dragons–esque game called Dream with the Fishes. It was a cult game, played online between various teams around the world, an elite who could join only by invitation. The Columbia team’s gaming station was in an unused, unmarked room, which one could enter only by pressing a thumb into an unseen finger-scan machine behind a peeling hallway wall. The room was set up with an enormous plasma screen that took up the length of one of the room’s four walls. Chairs that looked hijacked from the first-class section of an airliner were set up with video consoles attached to the arms. The chairs were assembled in neat rows for prime viewing position opposite the wall screen.
If she hadn’t known better, Very might have guessed the room was decorated in tribute to the bridge on any given Enterprise/Battlestar Galactica starship. (She would never suggest to the guys that their decorating scheme was so space-age-crossover derivative, however. She valued her own life too much.) She also might have guessed that Jean-Wayne had allowed her secret entry into the cove because what the group needed most was not necessarily a token girl, but a sixties-era stewardess figure who could bring them cocktails while they gamed, and whose Fresh-woman Ten-, er, Fifteen-induced cleavage could offer them up the fantasy of mile-high (or mile-low, in their case) adventures while they cavorted/hunted/massacred/algae’d their way through their oceanic underworld game.
Very’s instinct had been right that Jean-Wayne was the weak link in her friends’ stand against her technology habit. She’d found him straightaway after reading the first message from El Virus. She’d gone to his and Bryan’s room. She was actually looking for Bryan, knowing he was the one really holding the grudge, ergo, he must be the one who’d hidden her laptop. And she needed her baby back. NOW. No more games. No more appeasement. She couldn’t go online on any of the university computer terminals because they required a university log-on—and Dean Dean
had arranged for Very’s unsupervised online privileges to be turned off until she could be approved for good-behavior repatriation by Dreabbie. Lavinia took her laptop with her at all times now, so as not to tempt Very, and sure, Very could ask any number of fellow students if she could use their laptops, but she wanted to think she had her situation under control. She hadn’t stooped so low as to beg others for Internet time or to go to some Internet kiosk—How ghetto. She wasn’t that cheap or far gone. Not yet, anyway. She would stoop so low as to sneak into Bryan and Jean-Wayne’s room, however, and she would damn well find her own machine therein even if she had to uncover untold amounts of dirty socks and porn in their room in order to do so.
When Very got her machine back, her first playlist would be called “Gimme Back My Machine, Bitches,” and it would shuffle songs by Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Cat Power, The Smiths, Eminem, Kanye, Janis, and Erykah Badu, and she might throw in “Jenifa” by De La Soul for Lavinia, depending on how angry she felt at the moment of compiling the musical diary entry.
There turned out to be no need to sneak into Bryan and Jean-Wayne’s room. The boys’ door was open when Very arrived. Jean-Wayne was inside the room, applying eyeliner in the mirror.
“Where’s Bryan?” Very asked him, standing in the doorway.
“Dunno where he went,” Jean-Wayne said. “He’s out with a girl.”
“Shut up.”
“Not a real date. Just someone Debbie thought she could set him up with.”
“Ew.”
“Kinda.”
Very stepped inside the room and sat down on Bryan’s bed. Best just to get right to it. “I want my laptop back,” Very demanded of Jean-Wayne. “Do you know where he’s hidden it?”
“No.”
“But it is Bryan who has hidden it. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to give me the speech about not enabling me?”