by Rae Mariz
What was that supposed to mean? I noticed he was heading in my direction and started to feel irrationally nervous. By the time I finally made the decision to leave, it was too late.
He stopped in front of me, blocking my escape. He was wearing a climbing harness strapped over his clothes, which Ari said was a really grab accessory for Urban Climbers right now.
I looked up into his dark eyes, not saying a word. This was probably stupid, but I was holding my breath. I wanted to know if this total stranger thought I was in or out. I wanted to know what he saw when he looked at me.
“So?” I asked, ready for whatever he was going to say.
His eyes flicked down to my rubber-face-man wristband. He nodded twice, almost smiling.
“Yeah, you’re in,” he said quietly, leaning in close. His voice shook me like an intouch® vibration.
Then he walked on. I watched him go.
“What did he say to you?” Mikey said from behind, startling me. He was still sweaty from the skate park, his board tucked under his arm.
“Nothing,” I mumbled. It was kind of embarrassing how special it made me feel that I’d made the cut for…whatever it was he was recruiting people for.
“Hey,” Mikey said, shoving my shoulder playfully. “Did you hear the championship War Game’s on for next Sunday?”
I shook my head. “Who’s playing?”
“Save the Princess versus Meat Hammer.”
I gagged. “Meat Hammer sounds so gross. Couldn’t they think of a better team name? Was One-Eyed Flesh Spear taken?”
“Yeah, well. I told Swift I’d be there. He’s playing wingman for Meat Hammer. And this is the game to see which team goes on to the league championship.”
The War Gamers had been fighting for Team Player status for the last two years. Now that simulated interactive computer war games had a national tournament, they were starting to get credit. The players formed four-man (or -woman) platoons and were supposed to use communication, strategy, and wicked sniper skills to defeat the enemy.
There was this whole big debate over whether war games were too violent to be in the curriculum, but the administrators concluded that it was no more detrimental than football, so whatever. To cover collective ass, players were required to take empathy exams and psychological tests every so often to make sure that no one was getting vred and losing touch with reality.
“Wait, so Save the Princess could have a shot at going national?” I asked. Save the Princess was the only all-girl team in school. There were a few teams with the token female player, but it was predominantly a boys’ club…thus the popularity of names like Meat Hammer and, I don’t know, Man Muscle.
“Yeah, the girlies are taking names, kicking ass. You wanna join up? I hear they’re recruiting for next season.”
“Yeah, right.”
Mikey grinned evilly. “I forgot. You can barely handle single-player games. How many friends do you have on Network now, anyway?”
“Shut up.” I said, shoving him hard. But he was right, I wasn’t much of a Team Player, not really into organized sports at all.
I wasn’t a total social retard, I just liked keeping my friendships close and manageable. And I actually loved playing with other people despite what my Network status said. The compositions Mikey and Ari and I worked on together were so, so different than what I’d do by myself, and if I got to choose, I’d pick collaborating with them every time. I liked that indefinable thing that happened between people. The connection.
My intouch® buzzed in my pocket. I looked at it.
aria: is devastated that no one’s helping her choose.
I thumbed a reply immediately.
kidzero: deciding what to play at rehearsals? @ARI
Ari was our official analog instrument specialist. Her parents had given her lessons for every possible classical instrument when she was playing Level 8–12. Piano, flute, violin. She could probably single-handedly play parts for an entire geek orchestra, but she would rather be in an Idol band winning votes and fame. It was starting to become obvious, of the painful sort, that we didn’t have the same ambitions when it came to the band.
aria: please. i’m serious. come to 4, beeotch @KID
“It’s Ari,” I said, putting it back into my pocket. “She’s having a crisis of decision.”
“Sweet Google, that girl’s been getting on my twitchy last nerve.”
I shrugged. “She’s cliqued now, that’s all.”
“Yeah, OK. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be such a show.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Yes, it fills me with teen angst.”
We both laughed in that wincing sort of way you have to when the truth hurts. I didn’t mind that Ari was so involved with the Craftsters, I just wished she wasn’t always a no-show for our band practices. I told Mikey I’d let him know if I could book some Studio time and went to see what the little drama queen wanted.
4 CLIQUED
Ari had practically supernovaed when she got cliqued a few months ago.
All last season, Ari, me, and some other clique-hopefuls would go to the Sweatshop to orbit around the tight group of Craftsters. Ari did everything she could to impress Rocket, the unofficial leader of the Craftsters. Some of the girls, like Tesla Toyer, had some really inspiring projects, but I knew I didn’t really fit in with their style. I tried to be a part of the scene only because it was important to Ari.
I mostly just sat to the side, gluing beads to random things—a Poke cola® can, a mic stand, a mannequin head—until, after hours and hours of mind-numbing work, they looked exactly the same, except glittery. The other girls admired them with that false-high tone of voice. “Ooh, that’s…um, quirky.” But it was clear that they thought my projects required a lot more insanity than skill.
They wanted someone cooler, someone with a hunger for underground fashion, someone with crazy resourceful style.
They wanted Ari.
I stood outside the Sweatshop and swiped my card at the door on the fourth floor where punk-vogue mannequins posed in the windows, and instinctively tried to fix my hair before the little light turned green. Unlike some of the other doors in the Game, this one didn’t need any prerequisites to get in. It was an open workshop that just logged the hours spent inside. The time spent was divided by completed projects and input into some complicated algorithm in the Game system, which translated it all to “skill” on your record. I learned the most from open workshop studies. I preferred my activities more hands-on than on-screen.
Still, I think they probably should’ve had some kind of requirement for getting inside the Sweatshop, like superhuman self-confidence or Kevlar-tough skin. It could get vicious in there.
The Sweatshop was a weird war zone for the fashion extremist cliques. It was where the Craftsters and the Fashion Fascists held their effed-up turf wars and backstab-bing beauty contests. They had catfights over who copied whose trends. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two cliques just by looking. OK, the price tags on the Fashion Fascists’ straight-from-the-runway looks were insane compared to thrift-inspired finds of the Craftsters’ DIY dynamic, but they had a lot more in common with one another than they had with unfashionably normal people…like me.
Girls usually traveled in packs, armed with perfect hair and makeup, bulletproof smiles, and fully color-coordinated outfits. Their whole identities based on whether they claimed craft or couture.
I was entering the battle zone defenseless.
Some Fashion Fascists started mad-dogging me direct when I stepped in. Like I needed their dirty looks to know my sloppy boywear and unruly, liver-colored hair weren’t scoring any points with the judges. Quelly must’ve texted something to the others, because their intouches® buzzed like hornets and they pointed at my pants and laughed.
I had a bright orange shoelace with one end tied to my belt loop and the other tied to my keycards or whatever. It k
ept things that were supposed to be in my pocket in my pocket, because any little thing that could get lost, I would lose.
I hurried over to where the Craftsters and their entourage were gathered. They had taken control of the airwaves and were deejaying their own anthems and choreographing routines to the songs. It was probably why the Fascists looked so pissy. They couldn’t play their Runway Rhythms or Trendy Pop. But honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference since the Craftsters were spinning Parody Pop at full volume.
I didn’t really get the Parody Pop music trend. If the Craftsters were dissatisfied with the mainstream music selection, why didn’t they play something that sounded completely different? Sometimes I wondered if the Fashion Fascists were right when they claimed that the Craftsters were just unbranded knockoffs. Ari would drop-kick me so hard if she heard me say that, though.
I squeezed past some Craftster-wannabes who were writing up some kind of manifesto for Access to Accessories. I glanced at one of their photo-reproed flyers. They were calling for action to reclaim the symbol of the handbag back from high-priced designers. I raised my fist in sarcastic solidarity and wondered when the “purse-inal” became political.
Tesla waved me over to where she sat cross-legged at a table with Ari. Tesla had been a Craftster almost since she started the Game. She had that kind of effortless self-confidence people who are naturally talented seem to have. Her blond hair was twisted up into little knots all over her head, held in place with industrial-looking bolts. If she had been less attractive, people would call her weird, but since she was practically gorgeous, everyone talked about her unique style.
“Hey, Kid,” Tesla said, looking up from her project.
Ari sat clicking in her notebook®. She didn’t look up.
“Hey, Tess,” I said, sitting beside Ari. “What’s going on with your flipstreams? I heard they were banned. That’s…can the administrators even do that?”
“I don’t know!” she said, more excited than concerned. “But you can buy tickets to watch the fight. You know I’m going to challenge their choice.”
Honestly though, I wasn’t surprised that the administrators had a problem with her flipstream goggles. She got the idea for them from the Making Sense area sponsored mostly by pharmaceutical companies on the third floor. She saw something about psychologists who developed a way to study the brain’s response to inverted stimulus. They had people wear these glasses that flipped their vision, then made them do a bunch of tests to find out how long it took the brain to learn how to function in an upside-down world.
Tesla thought it was a cool idea but that the glasses were ugly, so she designed these sleek, streamlined strap-on shades, and they became this total grab item at school because they looked hot and completely glitched your mind. And if you had them on for too long, then you got flipped twice as hard when you took them off, because your brain needed to relearn the world again. So kids were like stumbling drunk through the passages waiting for their brains to flip back.
I was also not surprised that Tesla was all revved-up to take on the administrators. She loved a challenge, any kind of challenge. That was what made her such a mad-scientist inventor and ruthless War Game soldier.
“Mikey told me Save the Princess is playing this weekend,” I said, seeing a message on my intouch® from him saying he was going to meet Swift in the Arcade. “He said it’ll be…big. Huge. Like championship life-defining. You nervous?”
“Tesla’s never nervous!” Kasi Mohindra shouted from over by the stereo. She was Save the Princess’s wing-woman. “Tesla is a stone-cold killah.”
Tesla smiled. “We’ll be ready. Elle has us practicing nonstop until we can blast enemy faces off in our sleep. She’s an amazing team captain.”
“Good game,” I said, smiling. “That’s cool.” I looked at Ari. “You going to go?”
Ari wasn’t listening; she was distracted by a more high-priority concern. “What’s more flattering to my skin tone, lilac or sea foam?”
“Um…,” I said, not knowing how to respond.
Ari launched into this monologue about a girl she spied outside of Blinded by Science. Apparently, this girl had some really grab contact lenses that made her eyes the color of gold.
“She looked so amazing! Like Palmer Phillips!” Ari went on.
I thought for a second about the color of little Lexie Phillips’s eyes. Was it genetics or a family-pack of those fake-eye contacts that made her eyes the exact same shade as her brother’s?
Rocket sighed. “Everything about Palmer is pure gold.” She pulled out her intouch®, probably to text her affections.
Ari was still talking: “And she was telling me about all the different colors they have, and that I can get them prescription, and where to get them, and I want them. Now help me think of a way to get my mom to buy them for me.”
“I like your eyes,” I said. They were a pretty hazelnut color.
Ari looked at me, offended. “Poo brown? Are you kidding me? Come on, think! You need to HELP ME. What if I lost my contacts like I lost my glasses? That would work again, right?”
“Uh, why don’t you just ask your mom? She gives you anything you want anyway,” I mumbled. Ari’s mom was so cool—she understood the direct correlation between getting new shit and getting popularity points. Not like my mom, who’d totally be like, WTF? No.
“I know, she’s so lame,” Ari said, rolling her eyes. “I mean, put up a fight, woman! How am I going to hone my powers of persuasion if she gives in so easily?”
The other Craftsters laughed. The topic was re: moms ruining our lives and not re: anything I might want to talk about.
I didn’t even know why Ari was stressing about eye color. Her light brown hair was cut chin-length, with bangs grown to be fashionably too long. They fell just below her eyes, hiding them from everybody.
So I sat there, depping about not being heard, while Ari comparison-shopped lilac vs. sea foam. “I swear you guys want to see me fail,” Ari said, pulling out her intouch®. “I’m gonna ask Jaye. If I were branded, this would so not be an issue.”
She was probably right. If Ari were branded, she’d only have to mention she was interested, and she would just get it. Anything she wanted. I mean, look at Rocket. Only branded three weeks and already stitching PROPERTY OF PALMER PHILLIPS on her underwear. That was a joke, by the way. None of the Craftsters thought it was funny when I told it to them, either.
Ari curled over her intouch® to text her advisor, and I opened up my notebook® to see if there were any Network announcements.
“Hey, that’s crafty,” Rocket said, grabbing my wrist. “Did you make it?”
“Sort of,” I said and briefly mentioned the scene in the Pit. The bore-core dummy’s belly flop into the uncaring crowd below.
“Huh, I hadn’t heard about that,” Rocket said, pulling her long dark hair back into an effortlessly sophisticated twist. “Anyone else see it?”
“Yeah! I was totally there! I saw the whole thing!” Ari answered enthusiastically.
“Oh,” Rocket said. “Well, what did the sweater look like? I want to knit one. It’s going to be so cult.”
Ari tried to describe the sweater, the scratchy-looking drab-green wool, the puke-colored elbow patches. I just kept on seeing the silhouettes moving up on the fifth floor. My stomach clenched again when I remembered the sight of the falling body.
“Hold on, maybe someone posted images. Let me use your notebook®, Kid. I don’t want to clear my eyewear searches.”
Ari swiveled my notebook® over to her before I could answer and started to do a search.
“What did the sign say?” Ari asked.
“‘Choose your suicide,’” I mumbled, moving in behind Ari to see the screen.
“OK.”
She did a product search for Choose your suicide.
“Ew.”
“Gross,” Ari announced so everyone would come look. “That is so not right.”
The search pulled up a
lot of unpleasant snuff images, crime scene photos, and charts showing the comparative effectiveness of various methods of doing the deed, but no relevant hits.
Everyone huddled to look at the screen now. Avery used her wide hip to bump Tesla out of the way.
“Hey, that’s pretty cheap,” Avery said, pointing to an advertisement on the screen.
“You’re so sick.” Kasi laughed.
“What? I’m just saying that’s a really good deal on razor blades and sleeping pills.”
“Uh, can we focus here?” Ari said, clearing the search, obviously enjoying the attention.
“Try ‘Unidentified,’” I said, remembering the first part of the sign.
She typed in Unidentified.
And a video came up.
A close-up of an inflated red balloon face filled the screen. We were seeing the dummy victim before the fall. The soundtrack was soft and haunting, an almost familiar melody. The simple zombie-bored expression, drawn in black Sharpie on the inflated balloon, stared out from the screen.
When the camera zoomed out, you could see the dummy propped up against the railing where I saw it drop, just outside of the Arcade on the fifth floor. The dummy stood there alone, in its green sweater and ill-fitting pants, looking down into the Pit.
The music-box tones changed into screeching white noise, with a heavy rhythmic thump. A kind of chest bone–rattling adrenal bass bumping, an oddly authentic representation of how I felt actually being there.
Once again, the body fell. Super–slow motion and over the noise music, a voice:
“We are the Unidentified. The Unidentified refuses to be typecast, target-marketed, corporate-identified, defined.”
The body had reached the ground by now; the picture cut to another angle as the balloon burst in real time. Someone in the crowd had been filming.
“Your identity is reduced with every choice you fake, with every secret they take…They make an offer and you buy it. Things you are told are freedoms in fact limit your choices. You hold a razor blade to your soul. You choose your suicide.”
The camera panned across the crowd looking at the body. On the screen, I saw myself. I saw my not-so-well-disguised panic, how I turned away from the body, and looked at Ari.