by Rae Mariz
Ari was standing outside one of the storefronts, waiting for us to get there. I waved and her eyes practically ballooned out of her head when she saw us walking with Jeremy.
“Hi, Swift,” she said like a sigh.
“Hey,” he said quickly, then looked over her head, trying to get a better view at the crowd inside. “See you guys.” Swift glanced back over his shoulder at Mikey and me as he slipped inside.
Ari squeezed my arm excitedly and mouthed, He’s so prize.
“Ready to go in?” I asked, reaching back and grabbing Mikey’s hand too.
The swipe card log-in had been disabled, so no record was being kept of who was here. A semifamous newbie with a particular preteen style was holding open the door.
“Hey, I know you,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Do you?” she said icily.
I thought carefully for a minute. She was Lexie Phillips. I knew that, but I guess I didn’t really know her.
I shrugged. “Right. My mistake.”
Lexie took a step back, opening the door wider so the three of us could file in.
There were more kids packed in here than in regularly scheduled, administration-approved workshops. I wondered what we would be learning, and who would be teaching.
We never really got a chance to find out. The lights dimmed a bit and a voice boomed out, distorted through some speakers. “Hey, everyone. Thanks for coming.”
Mikey and I exchanged a glance. Illegal Arts Workshops usually weren’t so…theatrical. Past IAWs involved a Tinkerer teaching people how to build paint guns or Gear-heads meeting to organize street races. But they all just used the Prime Real Estate classroom as a meeting place, they didn’t set up all these smoke and mirrors.
“If everyone could open their notebooks®, we can begin.” The teacher voice walked us through the ways to find and use anonymous proxies to get to sites blocked from Archive without a record being kept of our viewing habits. He also helped us install profile trackers to see who visited our pages. Ari looked at me smugly, like she was so far ahead of the illicit trend.
“This will flip the lights on in the dark room on the other side of the two-way mirror. Put the audience in the spotlight.” Even though the voice was protectively distorted, the cadence and word choice gave him away. It was the voiceover from the Unidentified video, I was sure of it.
I looked around to see who else was in attendance. As usual, hardly any branded kids showed up. They knew that if their names weren’t on the guest list, then it wasn’t an event worth going to.
Swift was there, of course. But he was a Crackhead. His sponsors knew he was a “bad boy” when they branded him. It was probably why they did.
Then I saw her. Cayenne Lewis. She was talking to that bore-core girl with the exclamation-point eyebrows who I’d seen in the Pit the day of the dummy drop, and another guy with acne-scarred cheeks wearing a baseball cap.
The voice was talking about how privacy was something adults didn’t think teenagers had a right to, but I couldn’t concentrate.
I glanced back across the room to see that Cayenne—
She was looking right at me.
She didn’t even look away when I caught her staring, which was the accepted social norm.
So we were locked in an absurd staring contest. I thought of the cameras on the fifth floor, posed in a spy vs. spy stare-down. Then I cracked. I smiled and, strictly following the unwritten rules, lost the staring contest.
Cayenne sort of frowned at me, then turned back to her friends. The girl with the exclamation-point eyebrows had left, and I scanned the crowd to see where she’d gone. I caught a glimpse of her bulky gray sweater heading for the exit, and I had an irrational urge to follow her.
I grabbed my bag and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Mikey asked.
“Um. To the bathroom? Girl stuff,” I lied.
Mikey turned back to his screen and looked uncomfortable. “OK, have fun.”
“The sponsors put out samples of Time of Your Life® teen tampons at the fourth-floor bathroom,” Ari said helpfully. “It’s the kind Verity Clark uses.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said, heading for the door. I wondered how desperate a girl needed to be to allow herself to get branded by a company that makes feminine hygiene products.
11 NETWORK
I pushed my way to the exit and gave Lexie Phillips a lame wave as I passed. I saw the bore-core girl wander toward the escalators, her ankle-length black skirt swishing with each step.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure why I was stalking this girl. I just had this feeling. Her being in the Pit during the dummy drop, and hanging out with Cayenne Lewis—a girl I saw practically etching evidence into a desk…Something was up, right?
I followed her down to the second floor. She stopped outside of Chez Chess café and banged on the window. I was surprised to see Tycho Williams appear by the exit and swipe his card at the door. Then he rummaged around with something and swiped a second time before stepping out into the hall. He handed the girl one of the cards he had swiped with and they stood and chatted for a while.
Tycho Williams was a legend. It felt stupid, but I was a bit starstruck. He was an amazing street dancer and had his own style that the sponsors snapped up and called “Prep-Hop.” Tycho had been wearing thick dark-framed glasses, baggy khaki pants, oversized sneakers, and really tight argyle sweaters long before all the nationwide fashion outlets were selling “the look” off the rack. But I’d heard him doing some mixing in the Studio, and his beats made me a fangirl.
I moved closer to hear what they were saying.
“They almost done?” he asked.
She nodded.
He checked his intouch®. “I need to make an appearance at the VIP Lounge,” he said, pointing a loaded finger-gun to his head and pulling the trigger. “Can you watch the door?”
The girl held out her hands and Tycho passed her a bunch of what looked like Game ID cards.
“We’ll coordinate later,” he said, taking a few strides toward the escalator. She swiped her card and went into Chez Chess café.
I swiped and followed after her. Stepping in, I was hit with the bass rattle of Wu Tang Clan: “Rraw, I’ma give it t’ya, with no trivia…” They always played classic music in there.
The black-and-white-checked tile floors gleamed. Each table was filled with two people sitting directly across from each other, staring intensely at the board, sipping coffee. Some tables had a few people hanging around them, watching the games unfold.
The bore-core girl was at the counter explaining to the barista that she wanted her espresso shot, steamed milk, and butterscotch syrup all in separate cups.
The woman behind the counter rolled her eyes and started brewing the beverage.
“You don’t think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?” I asked.
She turned around to look at me. Her eyes were much softer up close, they kind of danced subtly.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the individual parts for what they are,” she said, gathering the three small cups.
“You’re friends with Lexie Phillips, right?” I blurted out, hoping to get her to admit how the parts added up.
The guarded look came back. “Lexie has a lot of friends.”
“But Cayenne Lewis doesn’t have that many. Not anymore. You know her, too, right? And Tycho Williams. You have a lot of popular friends, but I don’t know your name.”
“It’s none of your business,” she said, then turned and carried her tiny glasses to a seat by the door.
I smiled. It was like a challenge, and I was determined to find out how Miss None-of-Your-Business fit in with the rest. I found a free table and moved the pieces out from opening position to make room for my notebook®. I logged on to the Network main page.
I started by searching for Lexie Phillips’s profile page. And the girl was right, Lexie did have a lot of friends. She was ranked in the Top 50 most pop
ular for our school site, which was pretty impressive if she’d only been playing Level 13-17 for a few months. Still, her inflated status was good for me because it meant she had a popularity plug-in that made her page viewable by all. I didn’t need to be a “friend” to view her schedule or content. People in the Top 50 were so popular that privacy was a status no longer available to them. I scrolled through Lexie’s list of friends, but there were so many. There was no way I was going to find bore-core girl’s name on that list.
I scanned through the other parts of Lexie’s profile. She kept a weird page. None of the interests she listed made sense. She said she was into the history of plumbing through the ages, tracking weather patterns, and practicing echo-location. Under her Content Accomplishments she said she was proud of her ability to bench-press 208 pounds. Her Hopes and Dreams included one day discovering a species of tiny frog that had moth wings, and trampolining on cumulous clouds.
I lol’d. She had filled her entire profile page with an overload of nonsense information, never once mentioning her Save the Princess team score, or who her best friend was, or anything real. I wondered if she felt the same way about those things as I did about my music, or if she just liked effing with people. Still, I had to admit, I kind of secretly wished she actually was a sonar-navigating, cloud-bouncing meteorologist with antlike strength.
I looked at her sidebar.
“I knew it,” I said to myself.
Her RIGHT NOW status said she was here in Chez Chess café. I texted Mikey.
kidzero: a breakthrough. is IAW done? @MIKEY
mikes: almost. you ok? @KID
kidzero: yeah. can you see lexie phillips? @MIKEY
mikes: who? @KID
kidzero: nvm. @MIKEY
I did a profile search for Cayenne Lewis while I waited to see who would show up to claim their IDs. I would probably only get to see her limited public profile, but you never knew. She had been branded once, so she might have a popularity plug-in too.
Cayenne’s page was private, but if the profile statistics were accurate, then no one could see her page.
It said she had zero friend connections.
That didn’t make sense. I was a nobody, and even I had a few friends. Besides, I’d seen her hanging out with people…people’s identities I’d hoped to find out through her friend list, actually.
I stared at the round, empty zero by her name, and the message Cayenne Lewis has no friends.
But I didn’t feel sorry for her. I knew that couldn’t be true. I just…I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t admit that she had friends.
My friends list on my Network page was pretty pathetic. The only friend connections I really cared about were Ari and Mikey, and Jeremy. Oh, and Tesla’s updates were always really entertaining, even though I didn’t consider her a supertight friend.
The other maybe five or six links were people I didn’t even really know. They were just some random kids in the Game who at one point popped up on my user page with the message “so-and-so wants to be your friend” and I clicked the “uh…ok.” option just to be nice. We weren’t exactly having sleepovers or anything.
But I could click to their pages if I wanted, subscribe to their streams and read their daily entries, see where they were currently logged in, and view their private profiles. I clicked Ari’s out of habit.
I read yesterday’s post, the one she was sure a cool hunter was interested in. It was about kickboxing and her flirty-and-tough look. She went into a lot of detail about her pink training gloves that she embroidered with Hello Kitty faces with bruises and black eyes, and how she came up with the “kick-ass ballerina” look by wrapping her bare legs with satin ribbons. She posted a lot of photos of herself play-kicking the camera and winking. She really knew how to play the game.
There was a knock on the Chez Chess café window and I saw the bore-core girl try to shoo away the boy with the baseball cap waiting for her outside. She glanced over to my table and I wiggled my fingers in an innocent wave.
I clicked back to the Network main page with the ranking of everyone in the school. Palmer Phillips, Eva Bloom, and Abercrombie Fletcher were at the top of the list, as always. The ranking only takes into account how many friends someone reports having.
Then I had an idea.
I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the status list, looking for Cayenne’s name.
And there it was. But she wasn’t the only one in our Level 13-17 site who reported having zero friends. There were two other names on the bottom of the list. I could have been way wrong about this, but I suspected that I was looking at the names of the Unidentified.
I studied the names on my notebook® screen:
Elijah Carmichael
Sophia Carvalho
Cayenne Lewis
People friend one another all the time just to make it look like they rank. A person needed to make an active effort to have zero friends.
I copied the names and added Lexie and Tycho to the list. Lexie Phillips wasn’t on the zero-friends list, but she had a Chez Chess alibi. Tycho Williams, too. That was probably Elijah at the window, and Sophia sulking across the room.
But I was still missing him. The Illegal Arts instructor, the voice of the Unidentified. Who was he?
I felt someone standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. I closed my notebook® and turned around. Jeremy Swift was standing there, holding two cups of coffee.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” He held up a cup. “I was just getting an espresso injection and I saw you. You want?”
“Oh, yeah. Thanks.”
I took a sip. It was hot and milky, and perfectly sweet, just how I liked it.
“I read how you took your coffee on your profile,” he admitted. I nearly choked on the warm beverage. Jeremy Swift had been checking out my profile page? I didn’t know whether to be flattered or embarrassed.
“What did you think of the IAW?” I coughed out, trying to change the subject.
He smiled cryptically. “Oh. I thought it was very informative.”
I laughed nervously to fill the awkward silence. “So, um,” I began. “Were you just lurking or…?”
“I wasn’t lurking,” he began, kind of defensively. Then full of his high-score confidence again, continued, “Actually, I wanted to ask you…Elle told me you had a cache of hours saved up. Any chance I could trade with you? Credit or something?”
I felt kind of stupid. Jeremy didn’t search my profile because he was interested in me; he was interested in how many online hours I had.
“So,” he said when I didn’t answer. “Is there anything I can help you with?” He leaned in close. “Favors for favors?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I squeaked out, a parade of make-out session images flashed in my mind. I shook them away.
“What’re you working on?” he asked, blowing on his coffee.
“Nothing. I was just waiting for someone.” I glanced at the table by the door, but saw that she was gone. Sophia. I blew it. She probably knew I was up to something with all my questions.
“You still looking for the people who made that film?”
I nodded cautiously.
“Why?” he said. The trickiest of all questions.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Don’t you think it’s interesting?”
“Dangerous, more like.”
Dangerous for who? I wanted to ask. But I played with my intouch® instead, while I tried to decide how much I wanted to involve Swift in my search.
toy321: re: flipstream. crybaby pharme-sponsors urged admin for the ban.
#spons: blink-of-an-eye tech testing stations installed in the arcade. focus your brain for score!
mikes: studio time? @KID
“I should go. I’ve got Studio time reserved.”
“Wait.” He grabbed my wrist, but let go quickly. I could still feel the warm, dry sensation where he touched me. I almost wanted to look to see if it made a mark. “What are you doing tomorr
ow? You want to do something?”
Swift wanted to “do something” with me?
“Maybe we can make a trade?” he said. “A little time for a little time?”
He meant my online hours again.
“Sure,” I said getting up. “Thanks for the coffee.”
He started saying, “Yeah, and about that…”
Then: “I mean, no problem.”
12 GUILT BY ASSOCIATION
“Where’s Ari?” I asked Mikey when I got to the Studio.
“Guess,” he said.
I checked my intouch® and saw that Ari’s last update was from the Sweatshop.
aria: added evil studs and grommets to ballet slippers. now i can grand jeté yr ass.
I called her out.
kidzero: we’re waiting for you in the studio. you’re coming, yeah? please please @ARI
Mikey sat behind the drum kit tossing his drumstick and dropping it. Repeatedly.
“She won’t come,” he said.
“She will.”
Toss. Drop.
“You okay?” he asked me.
I wasn’t. I didn’t like this cloudy feeling of uncertainty in my gut. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered. “Look what I found.” I pulled out my notebook® and showed him the list.
“What’s that?” he said, moving closer to read the words on my screen.
“Names of the people who were involved in the dummy drop stunt. I think.”
Mikey read through the names.
“Tycho Williams? Yeah, right,” he said skeptically. “How did you find these?”
I tried to explain the connections, the coincidences, and the clues that I used to compile the list. When I said it aloud to Mikey it didn’t sound as convincing as in my head.
“Who else did you show this to?” he asked.
“No one. Why?”
Mikey shrugged. “What if people thought I was a point-grubbing, hyperambitious brand-gawker just because I was in a band with Ari?”