No, really.
I felt even better as they all swarmed out and made a semicircle around me, Bungrin, Nate, and Jenny. Better yet, their guns were out, but they weren’t pointed at us. They were pointed at Bungrin.
One of the security guys nodded at old Ted. “Mr. Bungrin, could you please put down the gun?”
Bungrin’s perfect smile burst on his face. He held the gun out by the handle and one of the guards grabbed it. “About time you got here,” he said, then he nodded toward us. “They broke in, attacked me in my office, and tried to steal company secrets.”
“That’s a lie!” Nate screamed.
Bungrin ignored him. “Anthony, take Mr. Beale back to his room and hand the other two over to the police. I will be pressing charges.”
Tony shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Bungrin’s eyes narrowed. “Who paid you to think?”
“I know it’s not in my contract, Mr. Bungrin, but you can call it an added benefit,” Tony said. “The cops are on their way, and they’re coming to arrest you.”
All of a sudden Bungrin’s game face got all twisted, like he was ordering himself to keep smiling, but the message kept getting lost on the way to his brain because it was getting mixed in with all kinds of totally unwanted feelings, like smugness, disgust, and confusion.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“We saw the whole thing, heard your confession,” Tony said.
“Confession? What do you…” He looked around. “That’s not possible. There are no security cameras up here,” he said.
That’s when Jenny, who I’d thought had just been all quiet and scared all this time, quietly cleared her throat. I heard her, but no one else did, so she said, “ahem” as loud as she could. Everyone turned around.
She held up Nate’s laptop and pointed to the little button-sized Webcam on top. “There’s one camera, and a mike, right here. Nate left the security window open, so I sent the feed there, to my dad, to the local press, and directly onto the Web where it’s already being enjoyed by”—she checked the screen—“eighty-two viewers!”
If the whole scene wasn’t enough like the movies for you, just then the sound of police sirens filled the air. Bungrin’s face, right on cue, went all white and blank like he finally knew he was toast, like he finally knew it was really over.
I walked right up to Jenny, amazed, and said, “You are so cool!”
“Yes,” she said with a little smile. “I am.”
17
POSTTRUTH
There’s this comedian from the 1950s, Lenny Bruce, who said that satire equals tragedy plus time, meaning if you wait long enough, even the saddest thing will seem funny. So, I don’t know, maybe in thirty years these past few weeks of my life, during which I met my first girlfriend, almost got arrested, got mercury poisoning, and got shot at, will all be a major laugh riot.
But if that’s really true, wouldn’t stuff like World War II or Shakespeare’s King Lear be absolutely hysterical by now?
Around a week or so later, I was lying in bed, having this dream about what it’d be like when I got out of NECorp and finally got my forty million dollars. I was buying everything I could see, games, DVDs, books, cars, until, sometime after I got the jet pack, I ran out of things I wanted.
This made me all philanthropic and I started hiring scientists to cure diseases, which of course they hadn’t done before only because no one paid them enough. This act of great benevolence made me terribly famous. There was major gratitude from all sorts of hot girls whose lives had been saved courtesy of my great big pile of money.
Just as I was running out of cash, people everywhere, all across the globe, stopped believing in money. It became totally worthless, and everyone started singing “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles. It’s this really cool song about how you can’t do anything impossible, because once you do it, it’s not impossible anymore.
The song, of course, turned out to be the tune my new iPod alarm was playing. By the time I shook the dream and realized I was neither free nor did I own a jet pack, I remembered I had an appointment with the new CEO, to “discuss my future.”
I had no idea what that meant.
After school, though, I planned to meet up with Jenny, Nate, and Caitlin and see Hell Is Calling, a cool new action movie involving a series of interdimensional vortices created by a demon-possessed cell-phone ringtone. It was our first big night out after all the excitement, and I wanted to look decent, so I put on some new jeans before heading to the cafeteria.
It was early, so there was no line between me and Ben. You’d think it would feel great having him back, but it was awkward. Oh, his first day he did tell me that I’d done great, but once he was back in the grind, I think he was feeling trapped.
Trapped at NECorp. Now there’s a feeling I can certainly empathize with.
I wanted to make him feel better, and I was still thinking about my dream, so as I took my eggs, bacon, and home fries, I said, “You know, when I get my money, you can totally blow this joint.”
“And work for you?” he said. He got this look on his face, not angry, but kind of hurt. I realized maybe it was embarrassing for him to be rescued from his mundane life by some dumb kid who’d be rich by accident. I also noticed we weren’t standing eye to eye anymore. I’d shot up maybe an inch in the last few weeks. I was taller than he was.
Maybe that hurt, too.
I shook my head. “I was thinking we’d be partners, set up some kind of business. You already do a better job running this place than the guys in charge.”
He twisted his head and looked at me some more. “We could open a diner?”
“A chain. It’s a crime to keep home fries like these a secret.”
He smiled. There was this trace of bitterness to it, but it was still a smile. He shook his head, then smiled again, this time right at me, without the bitter part.
“Thanks, Jaiden,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I headed off to find a table. Nancy was by herself, typing away. As I passed, still typing with one hand, she raised the other to wave at me. I waved back, but knew better than to join her when she was busy. She was promoted to SVP and had been happily working her head off ever since.
I sat down, thinking about how so few people loved their jobs and so many more hated them. To be fair, I knew miserable executives and happy cleaning people, but the executives were miserable on their yachts and the cleaning people were happy despite not having health insurance. I like to think, though, that a sick maniac like Bungrin would be miserable no matter where he was and no matter how much money he did or didn’t have.
It was still utterly cool to think about how he was arrested that night. Despite his high-paid lawyers, Bungrin totally wound up with his evil ass in jail. Mostly it was thanks to Jenny and this really nice shot she got of old Ted waving his gun around and agreeing with her that he’d lied to everyone about the mercury levels.
That clip was number one on YouTube for six freaking weeks. Heh-heh.
NECorp was forced into ultra-apology mode. LiteSpring was shut down, the deal to buy JenCare canceled. Eric Tate was rehired and put in charge of remediating the water, with NECorp footing the bill. They had to. Power of the press. Power of the people.
It couldn’t have gone better, except maybe for one thing. A replacement for Bungrin had to be found quickly, and, after hours of intense, behind-closed-doors arguing, there was only one person the board could agree on.
After breakfast, I swiped my personal key card through the security slot, waited for the wobbly elevator door to open, and headed to the top floor. The fake stream was flowing again through the waiting room, and a cheerful Cheryl Diego ushered me in. She asked if I wanted a soda or something, then disappeared behind those huge double doors.
The first thing I noticed was that some of the carpet had been removed, probably so it wouldn’t get moldy, but the water wall was still working fine. The guy standing
in front of it, Desmond Hammond III, seemed likewise no worse for wear.
You just can’t keep a good crazy person down.
He didn’t say hello, he just nodded toward his water wall. “You know, Jaiden, for the first time in ages, I spent two days at home. It’s a big place. Lots of rooms, and a huge lake out back. I spent some time by that lake, looking at the surface of the water, thinking how different it was from my water wall here. It had twigs in it, and all sorts of other junk, just floating around willy-nilly. Quite honestly, I didn’t care for it one bit.”
His face got all serious, and he turned to me. “I wouldn’t be back if it wasn’t for you, and I want you to know I am so sorry about what happened.”
“I know,” I said.
“You do realize we’re not all like Ted Bungrin, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “Oh, sure. Of course not.”
Some of you, after all, don’t have guns.
“Things will be different, I promise. We’ll take our hit on LiteSpring but we’ll survive. We always do. We’re part of the fabric of the world economy, a hand in everything. NECorp, even if its name changes, can’t ever really die. And we’ll just keep growing. Sooner or later, we’ll even have a stake in that lake behind my house. I’m not certain how it will happen, but it will.”
He smiled and turned back to his wall. “I have a story for you, to explain why I called you here today. There was this factory in Japan where production declined, below quota. While trying to figure out why, one of the foremen thought perhaps the light was too dim for the workers, so he had brighter bulbs installed. Productivity shot up, but after awhile, it dropped off again. Suspecting the light had something to do with it, he reinstalled the dimmer bulbs, expecting productivity to go down even further. To his surprise, productivity shot up, then dropped off again. So, he just started switching the bulbs every two weeks, first dimmer, then brighter. Finally, productivity stayed up. Do you know what that taught him?”
That people are strange? I thought, but I said, “No. What?”
“That people respond when they think someone’s paying attention, that someone cares. Which brings us to you. You’re what, fourteen now?”
“Yes sir.”
“Four years and you’ll be off to college, pretty much a man, on your own.”
“I guess.”
“There’s been a lot of talk lately that NECorp hasn’t done right by you, that maybe a corporation isn’t the right structure in which to nurture a human being. As a result, there’s been serious discussion that you might be better off in a more traditional family.”
He stuck his finger into the flowing water of the wall, making an upside-down V, just like Bungrin had. “Much as I’ve always thought of you as a son, one of the things I realized as I stared at that filthy lake during my two days of unemployment, is that I’m really not your father, and maybe you should have one. So, the choice is yours. We can place you with a family, not in Idaho, but near Deever, so you can finish your education in familiar surroundings.”
I was floored.
There it was, an offer to end my long, weird association with NECorp, to lead something remotely resembling a normal life. I was about to say yes, but Mr. Hammond wasn’t finished yet.
“I’d also like you to consider staying. It really is only for a little while, and you’ll be surprised how quickly it passes. If you left, it would be our loss. You humanize us, Jaiden, in wonderfully unpredictable ways. If it hadn’t been for you, we might still be run by Ted Bungrin.”
That was heavy. I still wanted out, but I thought it would be rude to just jump on the offer, so I said, “Can I think about it?”
“Of course. I’m glad it’s a question. It means you do think of us as a family in some ways. That’s a feeling I want to promote in everyone here, make us feel we’re in it together. I even have a few ideas on how to accomplish that. Care to hear one?”
“Umm … okay.”
He smiled. “Another idea from Japan. Some of their corporations have their highest-paid employee, the CEO for instance, receive as a salary no more than one thousand times that of the lowest-paid employee. All the salaries rise, or fall, together. Every single worker reaps the benefits of the company’s success and shares in its loss. Brilliant idea, really. It made the place more of a family.”
“And you want NECorp to do that?” I asked, a little excited by the idea.
He grinned. “Oh, no, no, no. That would be ridiculously expensive. I think we should just tell everyone that. Unofficially, of course, so we wouldn’t be liable.”
I had no idea where to begin telling him what was wrong with that.
Mr. Hammond just stuck his finger back in the water and smiled.
That’s how I left him, looking at the pumped water cascading over the carved NECorp logo, and giggling.
I wondered if Desmond Hammond III fell in a forest and no one was there to hear him, if he’d make a sound.
Still, I had to remind myself there was worse out there.
School was still a little weird, but at least I didn’t have Tony following me around. He was busy doing the talk-show circuit, explaining how he’d saved us all from Bun-grin and how he hoped to play himself in the film.
The excitement concerning my true identity had blown over. I still got some stares in the hall, but these days, it was more about people asking me to do things, like go to their birthday party, or star in the student production of a play called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I was interested, until I found out you had to sing.
Jenny and I were given an extra week for our bio project. Even though we met every day after school, we never seemed to manage to work on it, because now, we were what they call an item. They say first relationships don’t last more than a few months, but I think you do some special bonding when you get shot at with someone, and I’ve got this feeling that no matter what, Jenny and I will always be close.
Speaking of bonding, that night, after I picked up Jenny, we went to Nate’s to meet for the movie, and I saw where he lived for the first time ever—a “normal” home. It was this nice big colonial, much messier but not so different from the corporate house I borrowed a billion years ago. And here’s the thing: As he led us into his room, Jenny and I had to look at each other. There were all these corporate logos everywhere—on sneakers, T-shirts, pants, posters, half-full drinking glasses. Everywhere.
It made me realize that maybe I wasn’t so different after all, that one way or another maybe everyone was being raised by corporations. Maybe someday kids will ask each other what company they’re with more often than which country they’re from. Corporations are just unavoidable. I mean, think about how big they are. A decade or so ago, when McDonald’s and Burger King switched from styrofoam packaging to biodegradable paper, there was a measurable drop in the number of landfills worldwide. When they switched to a healthier oil? I bet there was a measurable increase in the average life expectancy of U.S. citizens.
Now, thank heaven for the Hulk and Gandhi, but that’s power.
So I figured I might as well stay at NECorp.
Maybe because I was used to it, maybe because I didn’t really want to break in a new family that would be looking at me cross-eyed anyway because of the money I’d have one day. I think Bungrin was right about one thing: anytime you bring something into the world, it gets dirty, so being normal couldn’t really be as cool as I thought.
Maybe there is no normal.
Aside from that, stopping the mercury pollution, even though it was a drop in the bucket of a big bad world, made me feel like I’d actually done something important.
So I sort of made my peace with NECorp.
Which brings me to something Shakespeare wrote. He’s been on my mind since we started reading him in Mr. Banyon’s English class. There’s this quote from one of his plays I really like. I didn’t get it from the one we read, but while I was working on a paper I found this whole Web site of famous Shakespeare quotes. I
think that’s his best stuff, really, the quotes. His plots are kind of boring. Anyway, there was this one I really like:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
I like the idea that you just change and keep changing, even after you die, like there’s no one finally judging you, or some lasting final end to the whole thing.
So, you don’t ever really love Big Brother, you don’t ever commit suicide.
You just change. And eventually, even Big Brother will change.
Speaking of change, when I do get that forty million? I’m going to ask for it in pennies. I doubt that’s actually an option, but I’m going to ask just the same.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The ever-witty Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, once defined a corporation as an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Not being a corporation myself, the responsibility here is mine, and while that’s a fact that brings pride, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention those whose able assistance likewise made Teen, Inc. possible.
So, many thanks to my agent, Diane Bartoli of the Artists Literary Guild, for her terrific advocacy and wonderful professionalism, and to my editor, Mary Gruetzke, for acquiring the title, for her skillful edits and suggestions, for putting me in touch with fellow writer Corrine Demas upon my move to Amherst, and for generally being a delight to work with throughout the process.
My life as a writer has seldom been blessed with an evenly paced flow of assignments, and it so happened that many, many due dates coincided with that of Teen, Inc., so an extra-special thanks to sister-in-law extraordinaire Sheila Kinney for reviewing the entire book in its rough form and more than adequately compensating for my sloppy typing.
Lastly, a familiar debt of gratitude to my pals at the Who Wants Cake crit group (Dan Braun, Nick Kaufmann, Sarah Langan, K. Z. Perry, and Lee Thomas), who reviewed the first few chapters of Jaiden’s plight in nascent form and encouraged me to go on—with an extra shout-out to Nick for reading some later chapters that were bugging me. Hi, Nick!
Teen, Inc. Page 17