Scored

by Lauren McLaughlin

  Though Imani had never been interested in politics, it occurred to her now, as she pinged from one link to another in the no-holds-barred brawl of parental panic, that she’d been living in a bit of a bubble. Outside the confines of her own small concerns, a war of ideas was under way. After wading into those churning waters for a few hours, she was able to piece together the following answer to question 4:

  Since the introduction of the score, there has been a measurable decline in the following antisocial behaviors among children and teens: burglary and theft, drug use, unplanned pregnancy, truancy, vandalism, and drop-out rates. For the fittest teens, the score opens a pathway to higher education by providing a full scholarship to any state school. This benefits not only the recipients but also society as a whole, by enlarging the pool of candidates from which tomorrow’s leaders will come. Employers report benefiting from the score as a result of having an objective means of evaluating an applicant’s character, whereas in the past they could only make subjective judgments. Without the score, we would be living in an unstable aristocracy.

  Imani attached links from the American Journal of Psychology, Business Today, and Mr. Carol’s personal favorite, the New York Times. There was no shortage of counterevidence, and it intrigued her that, based on her research, she could have come up with a very different answer. But that wasn’t the deal. Besides, she knew Diego would have the counterevidence already in hand.

  Imani turned the paper over and wrote as neatly as possible:

  I’ve answered your questions to the best of my abilities, but, if you don’t mind my saying so, I found your line of inquiry obvious and not likely to lead to a compelling thesis.

  To justify my risk in working with you, could YOU please answer the following questions?

  1) Do you oppose all technological progress or just some? Be specific.

  2) In the absence of the score, how would you address teen crime, delinquency, drug use, pregnancy, and other antisocial behaviors?

  3) Do you believe the human psyche is knowable and changeable?

  4) Explain your hair. Seriously. What’s up with that?

  Diego wasn’t the only one who could assign homework.

  8. together

  AT FIRST, IMANI was too self-conscious about the note she was carrying to worry about all the whispering; in the halls of Somerton High, people were always whispering. The note was folded in quarters and jammed into the change pocket of her jeans, where, despite the implausibility, she could not resist wondering if the eyeballs would detect it. She felt clammy and wasn’t sure whether nervousness would make her redden or go pale. Neither option was acceptable. If she was going to undertake this secret collaboration with Diego Landis, she’d have to work on managing her emotions.

  The whispering grew more feverish as Imani neared her locker, and finally she noticed that much of it was directed at her. Eyes darted toward her, then away, then upward to the eyeballs.

  She was being discussed.

  There was only one explanation she could think of. The librarian must have ratted her out. She was someone’s grandmother, perhaps, and had mentioned it, maybe even innocently, over dinner. Imani could see the whole scene. Peas being passed while the librarian described an argument between Diego Landis, that unscored kid with the strange hair, and some mixed-race girl with caramel skin (Imani’s skin was always described by white people as caramel or cappuccino) and the most adorable freckles. That would be it. That would be the detail that would give her away. The librarian’s grandchild—a lowbie, no doubt—would tell his gang buddies, and, through the magic of exponential rumor dissemination, Imani’s secret collaboration with Diego would be a matter of public record within hours. Her score was ruined.

  Then she saw Cady and Parker.

  They stood at Cady’s locker, holding hands. The sight of them together, so brazen and unapologetic, stopped Imani short.

  That was what all the whispering was about. And the eyes darting toward and away from Imani were not condemning eyes, they were anticipatory. Everyone was waiting to see how Imani would react to Cady’s return, and to this open flouting of the divide between scored and unscored.

  As the late bell rang, Cady and Parker walked hand in hand across the hall to Cady’s homeroom. Parker leaned down, kissed Cady on the forehead, and walked away.

  Without even trying, Imani gave the eyeballs, and her fellow students, a flawless performance. She was as shocked as anyone at the audacity of her friend’s behavior. Not only were Cady and Parker not hiding their relationship, they seemed to be making a stand.

  By the end of first period, Imani had heard several versions of the same story: Cady and Parker had shown up at the gym for the dance on Friday night. They had danced with each other for three songs—one of them a slow song. There’d been no unfit behavior on the dance floor, the rumor mill was willing to concede, but Cady and Parker were definitely “together,” a state of affairs variously described as “full on,” “in your face,” and “balls to the wall” (the last one being the contribution of lowbies). They had made no attempt to speak to anyone, and no one spoke to them. Finally, they’d snuck out the back to make out (it was presumed) or to have sex by the Dumpsters. At some point, they’d taken a can of spray paint and written “Free the unscored” on the brick wall outside the gym. There were no witnesses, just one eyeball with a sight line to the wall. Only the software would know if they were truly guilty. And only Cady would pay if they were.

  In American history, Imani threw herself into Mr. Carol’s discussion of civil liberties, taking down both Logan and Rachel with well-sourced arguments, courtesy of the weekend’s descent into the link-riddled debate on WickedNews. She even engaged Diego a few times, agreeing once and disagreeing twice, without ever looking at him. When the bell rang, Imani left the note on her desk, then headed to the door, without looking back. Once out in the hall, Diego brushed past her, his knuckles grazing her forearm. She could see the edge of the note in his hand as he tucked it carefully but nonchalantly in the back pocket of his jeans.

  It was an audacious game they were playing. Imani knew the software was designed—or more accurately, had evolved—to peel away the hidden layers of the teenage mind. But it seemed too late to turn back now. The damage was done and her clock was ticking.

  9. the f word

  THE NEXT MORNING, Imani found the note in her locker, sitting on top of her calculus book. Diego must have slipped it through the vent. She slid it carefully into her front pocket, then rushed to the girls’ room.

  Being eyeball-free, the girls’ room was crammed with lowbies who went there to share secrets, spread rumors, and express foulmouthed outrage at being the subjects of secrets and rumors. Imani had never understood lowbies. For all their noise and backstabbing, few of them rose significantly. They’d slug it out over the line between 29 and 30, a doom zone she’d never contemplated. That was Cady’s zone now. Employment opportunities: nil. A lot of those girls would enlist. Some of them would get pregnant in order to qualify for welfare—and avoid having to enlist.

  Imani averted her eyes, locked herself into a stall, and unfolded Diego’s note. Above her own questions, Diego had written the following in his tiny handwriting:

  I have serious issues with your answers, which I’d like to discuss in person at some point. Until then, here are my answers to your questions:

  1) Do you oppose all technological progress or just some? Be specific.

  Answer: This question is beneath even you. Of course I don’t oppose all technological progress. I’ll keep the bicycle and the Internet, thanks. Also antibiotics, rocket technology, and the electric bass. You can keep Score Corp, WMD, and the automobile. Is that specific enough, or do you require a comprehensive list?

  Clearly, she’d hit a nerve.

  2) In the absence of the score, how would you address teen crime, delinquency, drug use, pregnancy, and other antisocial behaviors?

  Answer: I wouldn’t. Those things have always existed
, and why shouldn’t they? In a society as broken as ours, “antisocial” behavior is the only behavior worth defending.

  Imani laughed. Was Diego honestly endorsing teen pregnancy?

  3) Do you believe the human psyche is knowable and changeable?

  Answer: I believe the human psyche is only partially knowable. Any attempt to reduce it to a finite problem is doomed to failure. As for changeability, sure, people change all the time. But Score Corp isn’t just trying to change people, it’s trying to reengineer them into things it can control.

  Paranoid, Imani thought. And vague.

  4) Explain your hair. Seriously. What’s up with that?

  Answer: Fuck you.

  Imani gasped. The word was even more potent in written form, the F so aggressive in its rightward lean.

  Below this, in handwriting so small it was hard to imagine it came from a human hand, Diego had written:

  Incidentally, you passed my test (barely). So if you want to keep going, let’s meet someplace where we can actually talk. How about Rita Mae’s tonight at 7? There’s an eyeball-free route to it via the back alley behind the ice rink on Lake Road. Just exit through the back door by the vending machines.

  DL, the “permanently flawed” one

  That night, while washing the dishes with Isiah, Imani told her parents she was going to the library again to meet up with her gang. Her parents applauded her efforts toward her new “friends,” though her dad still thought it was a “damn shame” about Cady and looked forward to seeing her hanging around the marina again.

  “I hear she’s a vandal now,” Isiah said.

  They’d finished the dishes, and Isiah was standing with his back to the counter, arms folded across his chest, an errant soap bubble floating behind his head.

  Imani popped the bubble with her finger. “There were no witnesses,” she said.

  “There was an eyeball.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can’t request the footage.” She hung her damp dish towel neatly over a drawer handle.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  Imani shook her head at his ignorance. “Proprietary information,” she said. “Score Corp never turns over footage.”

  “What if there’s a murder?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They own it.”

  “So if there’s a murder, and it’s caught on camera, the cops can’t get, like, a court order or something?”

  “Well, this isn’t exactly murder, Isiah. It’s graffiti. And anyway, I doubt it was her.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not her style.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  Their father sat at the kitchen table sorting through the crumpled receipts he kept littered on the floor of his truck. “Everyone has a right to a defense, Isiah,” he said. “That’s the law.”

  Mrs. LeMonde came in, tapped her husband on the shoulder, and held a receipt in front of him.

  “Drill bit?” he guessed.

  Mrs. LeMonde sighed. She was the bookkeeper in the family. “Imani, don’t be out too late,” she said. Then she returned to the living room.

  “Your mother’s a genius with those numbers,” her father said.

  She had to be, Imani thought. There were fewer boats moored at the marina every year. But the bills only grew.

  The hockey rink was only ten minutes away by bicycle. Imani considered taking her skates for cover, but she didn’t want to raise suspicions with her parents. Besides, she figured if the software was smart enough to form an opinion about her presence at the rink, it was smart enough to know there was no free skate on Tuesday nights. Most likely, the footage of her riding to the ice rink would be discarded as insignificant. At least, that was what she hoped.

  Inside, the rink itself had limited coverage—about half of the ice and some of the stands. Ice bullies knew that if they wanted to inflict pain out of coverage, they had to do it on the side of the rink closest to the skate rental window.

  On the ice was an over-the-hill league, clashing and tangling to the chirp chirp of the referee’s whistle. Nobody watched in the stands. She walked quickly to the back, past the skate rental window, where the owner sharpened a blade with a ferocious screech. In the back, behind the parked Zamboni, was a stuffy room crammed with vending machines, including one ancient behemoth that dispensed watery cocoa into paper cups. When Imani was young, she would beg her parents for money after skating lessons just so she could watch that little cup drop down to receive the stream of cocoa. It seemed like magic. When she thought of it now, it seemed impossible that her parents had ever been able to afford skating lessons for both her and Isiah. Her dad must have bartered something big. Nowadays, to keep Isiah in hockey, he let the assistant coach trailer his boat for free.

  Outside, the wind was still, and the only sound was the buzz of some machine jutting from the back of the building. The cobbled alley, once a bridle path, curved into the distance, making it impossible to see all the way to the end. There were no eyeballs in view, so Imani set out for Rita Mae’s.

  The alley was bordered by woods on one side and, on the other, by derelict warehouses rumored to house no end of vagrants, rapists, deviants, and ghosts, depending on whom you asked. Imani didn’t believe those stories, but the place did have a haunted feel. Around a bend in the path, something dangled from a rotting telephone pole. But only when she was directly underneath it could she identify what it was: the remains of an eyeball, its innards torn free but still attached. Score Corp normally replaced damaged eyeballs, but this one looked as if it had been hanging there for months.

  Imani kept walking. The derelict warehouses were behind her now, leaving only woods on either side. Eventually, two male voices drifted toward her, their laughter battered by the wind shifting through the trees. When they came into view, Imani pegged them immediately as private school guys, possibly Corona Pointers. They wore expensive clothes, but sloppily, and had expensive longish haircuts, also worn sloppily. Imani put her head down to avoid eye contact, but a pause in their chatter indicated they’d noticed her.

  “Hey, clamdiggah,” one of them said, in the exaggerated accent of the working class. Imani didn’t cross paths with rich kids often, but she knew enough not to be surprised by the remark. Imani didn’t mind the label, but she wondered what it was about her appearance that gave her away.

  “Hey, are you black or white?” one of them asked. He was a white boy himself, tall and narrow with thin lips and cold eyes. His friend, also white, was short with red hair and freckles. They both stumbled slightly as they approached. They were drunk, and the kind of people her father loved to hate.

  “You scored?” the tall one asked. “ ’Cause we’re unscored, but shhh, we won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

  Imani wanted to run, but she didn’t want them to know she was afraid.

  “So what are you?” The freckled one stopped and waited for her. “Lowbie or highbie?”

  “Definitely a lowbie.” The tall one stopped too.

  “No, she looks uptight,” the freckled one replied.

  “What’s she doing here, then? Hey, are you black or white? Not that it matters or anything. I’m just curious.”

  They both stood waiting, expecting her to stop and chat with them.

  Imani walked by, noting the way their heads followed her.

  “Clamdiggah,” the tall one said. “I give her two chances.” He raised his voice to ensure she heard him. “One, she’s swinging around a pole in a few years. Two, land mine food.”

  The freckled one laughed with a tinge of embarrassment. “Man, that’s cold.”

  “She does have a sexy walk, though,” the tall one went on. “Hey, you know you have a sexy walk? And I’m okay with the race thing. Seriously. No? Still not interested? What about now?”

  Imani could feel their eyes on her as she willed herself to walk, not run, away from them. As the sound of their chuckling faded, a single thought cheered her: one day the score would be u
niversal. There would be eyeballs everywhere, even in that haunted pathway. You’d need a score to go to college, a score to get a job. Maybe you’d even need a score to go to high school. Privilege would be wiped out, and boys like that would get what they deserved.

  The path took Imani to Chester Road. Across the street, the sign for Rita Mae’s hung from a gnarled wooden pole, its swirly lettering draping a chipped red rose. It was the only building on the road—a shingled shack, barely larger than the ice-fishing houses people dragged onto the nearby lake. A warm glow emanated from within, along with the sweet pungent smell of a wood fire.

  Imani approached slowly, scanning the trees for eyeballs and finding none. Next to the entrance was a window, framed by heavy gold curtains. She peered through it, reluctant to enter. She could see Diego in the back by a wood-burning stove, reading a small paperback. None of his friends were there, just a handful of teenagers she didn’t recognize and some adults eating dinner or sipping pints of beer. They weren’t the kind of people her parents knew. They weren’t members of the bowling league or “retired” clammers. The teenagers looked more like those boys in the alley than like anyone she knew.

  Though Mr. Carol hadn’t mentioned Rita Mae’s by name, she knew that it was one of those places he’d described: a so-called safe zone, beyond the score’s reach. But safe was the last thing Imani felt. The encounter in the alley had depleted her courage. She doubted she could stride in there now, take a seat next to Diego Landis, and pretend she belonged there. She didn’t belong. She was a “clamdiggah.” And these people were not.

  Diego saw her through the window. He put his book on the table and waited for her to join him. Imani resented his calm, resented him for the disequilibrium of their states. All she could think was run.