by Rae Mariz
“You make a very unconvincing argument,” I teased. “Since when do you not want to eat Javajacks?”
“Was I talking about Javajacks? Javajacks don’t count.” He swiped his card to release a coin token and dropped it in the slot. A box of the stuff slid down retro Hot Wheels® tracks, bounced on a trampoline, and fell through a basketball hoop. “Eating these are even better than the hype.” He poured a handful in his mouth. “But I still need to get real food,” he said, his words muffled by chocolate and caffeine crunches.
We logged out of the DIY Depot and took the escalator down to Culture Shock. While passing the third floor Pure Science rooms, I saw Eva Bloom and Palmer Phillips leaving Cosmonova together. The nature documentaries they showed on the domed screen of Cosmonova were nothing compared to the nature shows that went on in the seats. Kids usually just went there to make out.
“What was Rocket’s boyfriend doing with Eva Bloom in Cosmonova?” I asked, but it was almost a rhetorical question. Everyone knew.
Mikey laughed and mimed a gesture that could be interpreted as eating a burrito. Except it wasn’t.
“Quit being obscene,” I snapped at him. I was about to intouch® Ari with the news of potential cheat-code evidence, but I didn’t.
I didn’t want to start a big rumor riot, but I hoped for Rocket’s sake that Palmer and Eva both just had an unad-vertised interest in images from the Hubble space telescope.
Down in Culture Shock, I waited in line with Mikey. He spent the whole time telling dirty jokes about Team Player sponsors.
I wanted to tell him, Hey, guess what? I’m getting branded. Implausible, right? But I couldn’t really come up with a way to say it that didn’t sound like a betrayal.
“Hey, where’re you going?” he asked when I started to walk away before the punchline, which probably was something about “getting branded in the locker room.”
“I’m not in the mood for Mexican. I’m going to get a slice of pizza.”
At the Little Italy counter, I pointed and mumbled, “Pepperoni, grazie.” Then I went to find Mikey again, determined now to just get it said. But I got distracted.
“Look, it’s them,” I said, nudging him after he had finished insulting the Culture Shock staff in Spanish. Some of the staff looked annoyed, but others were impressed with his pronunciation and verb tense agreement.
“¿Quiénes?” he asked, picking up his burrito and Poke® cola and looking around.
I tried to be sly and point out Sophia and the guy I assumed was Elijah sitting at a table. “The Unidentified.”
Mikey laughed at me. “Them? That’s who you’ve got on your naughty list?” He started walking over to them.
“What’re you doing?” I hissed, but followed after him.
“Hey, is it OK if we sit here?” Mikey said, already taking a seat beside Elijah and unwrapping his burrito. I stood there kind of awkwardly while Sophia looked me over.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” I blurted out. “All the nosy questions, or whatever. I…” I didn’t know how to finish my sentence.
“Yeah, it’s true,” Mikey said with his mouth full. “She’s got some kind of condition. We’ve been to doctors, but there’s nothing they can do.” He took another bite. “She’s beyond help.”
“Shut up,” I mumbled, and quickly took a seat. The acne-cheeked Elijah kept watching me, but I didn’t trust myself to make eye contact.
I sort of stared at Sophia’s plate while she ate her pizza. She pulled it apart like a buzzard—a hypersystematic, obsessive-compulsive buzzard. She piled the pepperoni into a wobbling tower, peeled off the cheese layer and folded it into a pile, careful to first scrape off the sauce into a glob to the side of her now-naked crust.
“I know you from somewhere,” Mikey said looking at Elijah. “You race, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But…you’re not a Team Player?”
“No. I’m not.” He reached over to take one of Mikey’s nacho chips. “The last one to the finish line doesn’t generally get a logo, the glory, or name-recognition.” He licked the salt from his fingers and held out his hand. “I’m Elijah.”
Mikey glanced at me, then took Elijah’s hand in the awkwardly formal gesture. Elijah held on a little too long.
“Don’t,” Sophia warned, not looking up from her plate.
“I’m just being friendly,” he said, leaning back in his chair now.
Elijah didn’t seem to notice the elaborate ritual taking place on Sophia’s plate. He was probably used to it. But I had to ask, “Why are you skinning your pizza?”
“I like to deconstruct my food into its composite parts when possible. There’s an elemental purity to the act, and the essences of the ingredients are better appreciated separately.”
“Oh.” I watched her cut a small piece off her cheese heap and nibble it carefully.
“How do you eat soup?” Mikey asked.
“She hates soup.” Elijah seemed amused.
“I don’t hate it,” Sophia said defensively. “I just don’t trust it. I mean, what’s it trying to hide?”
I took a bite of my pizza in the traditional way, weirded out that we were sitting here casually eating with suspected members of the Unidentified. And that they were just normal kids. Well, maybe not exactly normal. I eyeballed Sophia’s dissected pizza slice, and listened to Elijah involve Mikey in a discussion about learning more through failure than success.
Then out of the buzz and chatter of conversation in Culture Shock, I heard one voice rise above others. A girl’s voice, sharp: “What are you doing here, Cayenne? I thought you transferred to another site. Did you miss us too much?”
It was Quelly Atkins, terror general of the Fashion Fascists.
The sound of female laughter could be chilling. Anyone who thought girl-giggling was harmless, charming, and pink was way misguided. I pressed Record on my intouch® to capture the uniquely primate sound.
Cayenne was standing in line, trying to ignore the shrill voices.
“Those harpies,” Elijah muttered.
“What?” Sophia said, taking a bite of her naked pizza crust and surveying the scene.
Quelly projected her voice so everyone could hear. “I heard you’ve been throwing yourself at Palmer again. Carving love notes to him and stuff. That’s so psychotic.” Quelly took another step closer and hissed something I couldn’t hear.
Sophia got to her feet with a speed I didn’t think she had in her. I watched, amazed, as Sophia used her bulk to clear a path right to the Fashion Fascists. She grabbed Quelly Atkins’s arm and spun her around.
Quelly looked shocked that someone touched her. I was pretty surprised too. The Fashion Fascists always looked airbrushed and unreal, an illusion you would pass right through if you got too close.
“Don’t touch me, freak!” Quelly shrieked.
“Believe me, I already regret it. I’ll need to sanitize my hands with antibacterial wipes so they don’t smell like jealousy-sweat and Chanel knockoff all day.”
Quelly stood there with her mouth open, unable to say a word. The other foot soldiers took up the fight.
“You pushy cow, we weren’t talking to you,” the little blond one said.
“Yeah, what’s your problem? Are you premenstrual? You look really bloated,” Ashleah Carter said, pinching the roll of flesh around Sophia’s middle.
They continued on like that for, like, ever. Making fun of Sophia’s elaborately shaved eyebrows and dull-gray metal braces. And Sophia just stood there and took it, not even blinking at their mosquito buzzing and blood sucking.
Elijah had disappeared to help Cayenne leave the scene while the Fashion Fascists’ attention was on bigger things.
Protecht security finally swooped in to break it up. Quelly turned on the charm, laughing and saying they were only playing. I don’t think they bought it, but Sophia shrugged and headed back to our table.
She sat back down and popped a single slice of pepperoni in her mouth,
and looked around Culture Shock, humming.
Mikey and I were staring at her, astonished.
“Ho shit,” Mikey said.
I nodded. “I’ve never seen anyone get in the way of the Fascists like that before.”
Sophia just shrugged. “Well, if you deconstruct Quelly Atkins into her composite elements, she’s not much more than equal parts jealousy and insecurity, acrylic fingernails, and a chemical composition of peroxide and amino compounds to get that dye-bottle red hair. See? Not so scary.”
“Yeah, but you’re pretty scary,” I mumbled. “I’d hate for you to deconstruct me. What did Cayenne do to get the Fascist wrath like that?”
Sophia stuck her finger in her pizza sauce and licked it. “Cayenne has her secrets, and her reasons for keeping them.”
Up in the Studio, I couldn’t hear the music the way I usually did. Listening for what was missing and not what was there.
“So who’s this Murdoch guy Mr. Levy is always talking about?” Mikey asked, messing around with some amplifier cords. “Hey, are you OK?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know.”
“Well, that pretty much covers the spectrum of human emotion, then.”
My lip twitched into a not-quite smile. “Listen to this.”
I had copied over the laughter recordings I’d been collecting on my intouch® and saved the file as Last Laugh. Laughter was…acoustically extreme. The sounds people made jumped around in pitch, and effortlessly hit high notes far beyond opera singer range. I wanted to rearrange the tones into a melody.
I’d been listening to these laugh tracks, but there was nothing funny about them. Especially the final track, the one I’d just recorded in Culture Shock. It gave me chills.
“What does it sound like Quelly said to her?” I passed the headphones to Mikey.
He listened. Then he backed up the sequence and listened again.
“‘Don’t deny. You know you wanted it’?” Mikey said, tossing the headphones back to me. “I don’t know. These headphones are substandard.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the control board. “Why do you think she came back? Cayenne?”
“What?”
“Ari said she didn’t know why the Fascists dropped her—”
“You could fill a fifteen-terabyte disc with what Ari doesn’t know.”
“Hey, that’s my best friend you’re talking about,” I snapped back.
Mikey put his hands up defensively. “Yeah, well, maybe she should act like it sometime.”
The practice session pretty much sucked after that. We logged out early from the Studio. It was almost closing time anyway. Ari buzzed, wanting to know if I needed a ride home.
kidzero: it’s ok. my mom’s picking me up. @ARI
I couldn’t tell her I was getting branded over the intouch®. And I didn’t want to admit it, but after what she said to me when I told her about Jeremy checking out my page, I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me without proof. Maybe Mikey was right. I shouldn’t be afraid of telling my best friend something important, right?
After this meeting with the administrators, she’d know the whole story soon enough.
17 TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Winterson met Mom at the entrance and gave her a temporary ID to enter the Game after all the players had logged out. There were a bunch of security measures in place that made sure adults couldn’t get into the Game sites. Even though it was inconvenient, these precautions comforted Mom.
“Did you have a hard time getting off work?” I asked her. “Sorry for the trouble.”
I could tell that Mom had fixed her hair and makeup for the meeting. She didn’t look like herself. She looked happy. “Don’t be silly,” she told me, attempting to fix my hair. “I’ve been hoping to get a call like this for a long time.” She hugged me around the shoulders. Whispered that she was “so proud” before pulling away.
Seriously, who was this woman?
“It’s so nice and quiet in here,” Mom said as Winterson led us through the empty Pit.
I rolled my eyes, but I guess very few adults ever really saw the Game in action, in all its overstimulating glory of interaction.
“You must be very proud of Katey, Ms. Dade,” Winterson said, swiping her card at the entrance to headquarters.
“Please call me Claire.”
Winterson took us past the reception desk, down a hall toward the administrators’ office. I had never been back here before. The halls had windowed walls, some of the blinds were drawn, but in some you could see offices. There were logos of different sponsors on each of the doors. Some of the cool hunters were packing up to go home, but a lot of them were still at their desks reviewing video footage and talking on phones.
The Game was super kid-centric, marketed as a place where we could devise our own schedules and do things at our own pace. Sometimes you could go a whole day and see only three adults. It was weird to think that there was a whole business working here behind the scenes that we never saw.
Winterson pressed a buzzer and waited for a click before she pushed open the door.
“Dr. Grant? Mrs. Bond?” Winterson said, hovering in the foyer. “Katey Dade and her mother are here to discuss terms and conditions.”
“Dear Google, that makes this whole ordeal sound overly ceremonious,” Mrs. Bond said with a breezy laugh, welcoming us in. “This is a cause for celebration.”
She extended a hand to me, and waved away my advisor. “Good game, Katey,” she said. Then she greeted my mom with a friendly “Vivyan. It’s a pleasure.”
I’d only seen the administrators at Newbie Orientation in the first week of Level 13-17. Mrs. Vivyan Bond looked exactly the same as she did on screen. She had no problems playing up the Bond-girl references bloggers were always geeking about. Her eyebrows were precision-plucked to give her a constant expression of amused indifference.
“Dr. Grant is sitting with your potential sponsors in the other room, Katey. They’re excited to meet you.”
Sponsors, plural? I looked over at my mom. She seemed as newbie-shook about this whole thing as I was.
We were led to a conference room. My potential sponsors—a retired cop-looking man and a young woman with a fairybelle haircut—were hunched over the glass-topped conference table. They were peering down through the glass, watching images projected from below. Dr. Grant shut off the video stream quickly when he saw my mom and me approaching, but I saw they’d been watching the Unidentified video. I’d seen it so many times, I knew every second of it.
“Here they are,” Dr. Grant said, clapping his hands twice like two exclamation points. “Please, have a seat. Both of you.”
He arranged it so that Mom sat beside the retired-cop guy, and I had a seat by the pixie-faced cool hunter.
“Hi, Kid,” she said cheerfully as I tried to get comfortable in the strangely designed armchair. “I’m Anica Lass from Trendsetters clothing.”
Trendsetters clothing wanted to brand me? I looked down at what I was wearing. I had on a T-shirt that Mikey had doodled on when he was bored in Lecture Hall last year. There were drawings of little birds pooping on my shoulder. This was not exactly the Trendsetters “look.”
“Kidzero,” the older man barked at me after introducing himself to my mom. I jumped and leaned around Anica to look at him. “Harrison,” he said reaching out his hand. “Site security supervisor for Protecht Securities.” He had a burly, grandpa-ish quality…but he held my hand a bit too long. I wondered if it was a psychological tactic to make me feel uncomfortable, because if it was, it worked.
Anica was on her feet, introducing herself to my mom and admiring the cut of Mom’s skirt. “Very flattering,” she said, smiling like a cheerleader who volunteered at an animal shelter.
“This is such an exciting occasion,” Mrs. Bond announced after we had settled back in our seats. “Matching our players up with appropriate sponsors is one of the most rewarding parts of our duties as administrators.”
The adminis
trators went on to explain the school’s history of partnership and cooperation with approved sponsors, and outlined the benefits of having a company invested in a child’s education. She cited studies of players performing better and getting higher scores. “So you see there is tangible value in the partnership, not simply increased social capital.” I was kind of drifting off, but mostly because it was obvious they were speaking to my mom and not me.
Then the brand representatives did their spiel. Again, more for my mom’s benefit than for mine. Although Anica did look at me when she described the new Trendsetters wardrobe I’d be supplied with if I agreed to sign.
“Isn’t that wonderful, Kiddie?” Mom beamed at me, before turning her attention back to Anica. “I’ve always wanted her to wear nicer clothes. It’s just hard to budget it in and keep the credits balanced.”
I focused all my undeveloped powers of mind-control on Anica, pleading with her not to mention the purchases I’d made with Ari.
“I completely understand,” Anica assured her. Though it was hard to imagine how she could. In the big ocean of life experiences, my mom was drowning. And maybe I was wrong, but it didn’t look like Anica ever even got her hair wet.
Anica just winked at me while mom scrolled through the latest spring collection. They huddled together, picking out clothes they thought I would look “adorable” in.
Mom smiled. “It’s all the things I’d always wished I could give you, Kiddie.”
Anica put her hand on Mom’s shoulder. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore, Claire. You’ve done so, so much for your daughter, this is something we can take care of for the both of you.” She looked at me. “I promise you, Kid. Things are going to get a lot easier for you now. For both of you.”
Relief glittered in mom’s eye.