Scored

by Lauren McLaughlin

  Diego didn’t dismount right away. He took in the surroundings first, hidden behind the visor of his black helmet. “So you have your own boat,” he said finally. “Fancy.”

  Imani stepped out and dragged the boat sideways onto the beach. “Get in.”

  Diego stowed his helmet in his trunk, then climbed into Imani’s boat and sat on the rear bench, right by the motor. Imani looked at him, confused, but he stared back innocently.

  “Uh, I think I’ll drive,” Imani said.

  “Oh, sorry.” Diego shifted to the middle bench.

  “Have you ever been on a boat?” Imani asked, making no effort to keep the condescension out of her tone.

  “Once or twice,” he said, refusing to acknowledge her condescension. “You’re not going to drown me, are you?” He grinned broadly.

  Imani absorbed his smile but remained neutral. “We’ll see.” She pushed the boat off the sand and jumped gracefully into position at the motor, a move she had perfected.

  “Impressive,” Diego said with a trace of sarcasm.

  Imani didn’t respond.

  She took it slow through the inlet that led from the Wentworths’ beach. Then, once in the river, she sped up and carved into a hard bend. Diego clung to the bench, and Imani noticed with satisfaction that his knuckles were white. What a land monkey, she thought.

  As the boat emerged from the river into the turbulent channel, Diego twisted around to face her, his hands never leaving the bench. “Where are you taking me?”

  Imani pointed to a low sandy mound ahead and to the left of them.

  “Is that Chauncey Beach?” he shouted over the motor.

  “Back side!” Imani shouted back. “Hold on.” She sped up and headed straight for the beach, observing with pleasure the tension that rose through Diego’s body as they accelerated. When his shoulders reached his ears, she cut the motor and let momentum and an incoming wave carry them toward the shore.

  Diego’s body relaxed gradually, and he turned to face her, his expression accusing.

  “Safe and sound,” she said.

  “You’re fucking nuts.”

  “You need a thesaurus.”

  When they hit sand, Imani gestured for Diego to get out, then watched in amusement as he angled his long legs over the bow with a little jump to avoid getting his boots wet. He was taller and leaner in his slim black jeans than she’d previously noticed. He looked out of place on the beach. Imani hopped out onto the damp sand and dragged the boat about eight feet from the waterline.

  “Is it safe?” he asked.

  Imani glanced around the empty beach. “From what? Clams?”

  “From the tide, of course.”

  “I know the tides.” Imani dropped the rope, then headed off down the shoreline.

  Diego caught up with her, and they walked in silence for a while, with seagulls swooping and cawing overhead. The birds seemed unusually noisy, as if registering their suspicion of this stranger in black who clearly didn’t belong there. Diego Landis belonged inside, Imani thought, with a book in his hands and a smug expression on his face. He belonged at Rita Mae’s.

  After a hundred yards, they came to a bend, around which was a clear view of the Atlantic. Imani stopped and stared into the infinite blue, feeling, as always, the pull of the tides. Her sneakers sank gently into the pale sand.

  Diego stopped a few feet away and stared outward too, though whether that expanse of blue meant anything to him, Imani couldn’t tell. The wind blew his hair straight across his face, forcing him to tuck it tightly behind his ears. After a few seconds, the wind won anyway. Imani dug out the rubber band she usually kept for Cady and held it out to him, but he shook his head.

  “So where do we start?” he asked.

  “I think you had some issues with my answers?” Imani sat in the cool dry sand, facing the water.

  “Yes, I did, actually.” He sat and pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Whereas the unscored must merely accept what they are and muddle through life permanently flawed,” he read, “the scored receive monthly feedback from an impartial and highly intelligent source, which empowers us to change.”

  “Wait.” Imani looked at the neatly typed page. “You retyped all my answers?”

  “No. Just the stupid ones,” he said. “What makes you think the unscored can’t change? Just because we don’t have a software program judging us? We have parents. We get grades. We are equipped with brains. Remember those? We can figure out our flaws on our own if we want to.”

  “But where’s your incentive to change?” Imani asked.

  “Maybe some of us don’t want to change,” he said.

  “Then I guess you go through life permanently flawed, like I said.”

  “Unlike you,” he said. “Who get to—hold on—” He read from the piece of paper again. “Achieve the contentedness of constant self-improvement.” He looked at Imani directly. “Jesus, are you even aware of how creepy that sounds?”

  Imani had merely written out one of Score Corp’s well-known slogans. “What’s creepy about it?” she asked.

  “For starters, the fact that it sounds like doublespeak?”

  “What’s doublespeak?”

  He laughed sharply. “Unbelievable!” he said. “They introduce this massive mind control program; then they remove all references to mind control from the curriculum. 1984 used to be required reading. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah, I’ve read that,” Imani said, even though it wasn’t true.

  “So you do know what doublespeak is, then,” he challenged.

  She was beginning to feel outmatched but didn’t want him to know that. “I’ve heard of it,” she said.

  “Right. So don’t you think it’s weird that we’re living in Orwell’s nightmare and we don’t even read his book anymore?”

  Imani knew she couldn’t compete with Diego on the subject of a book she’d never read, so she tried to put the matter to rest. “Who cares about some stupid book?” she said. “All I know is I’m not living in anyone’s nightmare.”

  “Yes, you are,” Diego said. “The only thing Orwell got wrong was the bad guy. It’s not the government. It’s a corporation. A business, i.e., people making money. A lot of money. Do you even know about the history of Score Corp? Do you know about the controversy surrounding Sherry Potter’s disappearance? Do you know about the lost interview?”

  “Do you want me to answer any of these questions? Or are you just talking to yourself? Because if you’d rather talk to yourself, I’ll go get my clam fork.”

  “Your clam fork?” Diego leaned forward and laughed. “What are you, a clamdigger?” His laughter expanded for a few seconds, then stopped suddenly like a choked motor. “Oh,” he said.

  Imani could see the dots connecting for him: She has a boat, he was thinking. She knows the tides. Holy f %*#, she is a clamdigger!

  Diego reddened, and Imani knew she could have rescued him with some kind of assurance, some casual display of magnanimity, but why would she do that when she could luxuriate in his discomfort? It was the perfect counterstrike to his previous crack about that book. How brilliant, she thought, that this intellectual giant with his holier-than-thou principles was a garden variety elitist.

  “S-s-sorry …,” Diego stammered eventually. “I didn’t mean to imply that … I mean, it’s totally cool if you’re a—”

  “Save it,” Imani said. “Just remember that I’m the one with the boat.”

  Diego’s eyes widened. If Imani left him, he’d have to walk ten miles to the front side of Chauncey Beach, then another two to the nearest road, or attempt a shortcut through the unmarked dunes. Imani let him consider those options for a while. When he’d digested them, she drew a short line in the sand. “Round one to Imani LeMonde.”

  “Conceded.” He let his left eye linger on hers, though whether it was to acknowledge his defeat or to demonstrate the magnanimity she had lacked, Imani couldn’t tell. At any rate, the wind quickly made a shroud of his h
air and he was forced to tuck it behind his ears again.

  “So you were saying?” Imani began.

  “Huh?”

  “Some prattle about Sherry Potter’s disappearance?”

  “Oh, right. The lost interview. Do you know about it?”

  Imani didn’t.

  “Okay,” he said. “You know who Sherry Potter is, right?”

  “Inventor of the score. With her husband, Nathan Klein.”

  “Right,” he said. “So Sherry Potter gave one last interview before she disappeared. One interview where she completely discredited everything she and her husband did.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It was destroyed,” Diego said. “It never aired. And she hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “How do you know it’s real?”

  “Search it,” he said.

  “Why?” Imani asked.

  “Because if I were you, that’s what I’d write my paper on.”

  “How is that ‘opposing the score’?”

  Diego rolled his eyes as if Imani were the thickest person in the universe. “Because Sherry Potter obviously believed her invention was a crime against humanity,” he said. “Maybe you should find out why.”

  “Hmm,” Imani said. She was aware of Sherry Potter’s disappearance and of the rumors of her rift with Nathan Klein. It was potentially fertile ground for a paper opposing the score. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “In the meantime, I have some issues with your answers.”

  “I assumed you would.” Diego smiled in anticipation.

  “I didn’t retype them because I have a life, but I recall you saying something about antisocial behavior being the only behavior worth defending?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And just so you know, I retyped your answers because you have the handwriting of a psychopath.”

  Imani opened her mouth to object but ultimately couldn’t. It was true. Her handwriting was an abomination. She had no patience for penmanship. She needed to record at the speed of thought and could type at lightning speed but hated even the feel of a pen in her hand. “Well, shouldn’t you be defending my handwriting, then?”

  “It’s not antisocial,” he said. “It’s just sloppy.”

  “Well, that’s why we have computers.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure that’s why they were invented.”

  The wind, which seemed to have it in for Diego, plastered his hair across his face in a most undignified manner. Imani dug the rubber band out of her pocket and forced it into his hand. Reluctantly, he pulled his hair into a short ponytail. Without the curtain of hair, he looked different to Imani: angular and raw.

  “What?” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Imani turned away and looked at the blue horizon, but with her peripheral vision she could see Diego grinning. He seemed to think he was winning whatever game they were playing. He was as sure of himself there at the back side of Chauncey Beach as he was in the classroom or at Rita Mae’s. Where did that confidence come from? Was it the result of being rich, of knowing that no matter what you did or said, the world would open up for you? And what were his true motives toward Imani? Surely he didn’t need that scholarship. Was he planning to turn her into a case study, as Ms. Wheeler suggested? Or was he merely toying with her? Whatever his motives, Imani felt compelled now to beat him. Whether it was an argument about some book or the scholarship itself, she wanted to win. She took a deep breath, then faced him. There was something animal-like about his jawline, but she refused to be intimidated by it.

  “Forget about the stupid homework assignment,” she said. “Tell me about your mother.”

  Suspicion flickered across the planes of his face. “My mother?” he asked.

  Imani tried to remain poker-faced but was forced to turn away. She took a few deep salty breaths and reminded herself that she was on home turf here, that Diego was the outsider. Then she faced him with the most innocent expression she could muster under the circumstances. “Yeah,” she said, “maybe I’ll write my paper on her.”

  Diego’s eyes narrowed.

  Imani forced a note of light flirtation into her tone. “I hear she knows even more about this anti-score stuff than you do.”

  Diego’s blue eyes flashed with something like hostility. Then he turned away. “Sure,” he said lightheartedly. “But if I were you, I’d look into Sherry Potter first.”

  “I can do that,” Imani said, matching his lightness.

  Then she too faced the ocean. She wanted to draw strength from it, but it offered none. The ocean was many things, but it was never sneaky, never dishonest. When it changed tacks, it was direct and merciless. When it placed you within its sights, it did so with a swagger Imani envied. She was on her own in this game. She’d have to find the strength to play it from within.

  12. a more perfect humanity

  IMANI DIDN’T BELIEVE in Sherry Potter’s disappearance. It was impossible to disappear; there were cameras everywhere. Even if the press didn’t know where Sherry Potter was, Imani was sure that Score Corp did, which meant her husband, Nathan Klein, did. Imani was also sure that the so-called lost interview was a conspiracy theory, hatched by creepers in lieu of a defensible argument for their cause. In any case, she decided not to debate the issue with Diego. She had a higher objective, and needed to draw him out to succeed. Even if she didn’t end up writing her paper on Diego’s mother, she had promised Ms. Wheeler and, more importantly, that eyeball that she’d uncover something useful.

  So on Friday during study period, she claimed a tablet at the school library to search the lost interview, hoping to find just enough to show interest, butter Diego up, and then elicit some real information. Her search led her down blind alley after blind alley, with no actual “lost interview” appearing. The closest she got was a video of some girl who claimed to be Sherry Potter’s assistant listening to a recording of it while describing what she heard. Before she could finish, someone barged into her dingy apartment and yanked her away. It looked amateurishly staged, which Imani found disappointing. She’d thought Diego was smarter than that and began to wonder if she’d mistaken his confidence for intelligence.

  The search was not a complete loss for Imani, however. While there was no plausible evidence for the interview, there was an abundance of material about the Potter-Kleins themselves, and Imani quickly found herself spiraling down a search rabbit hole, consuming article after article about this oddball pair of geniuses. Her favorite bit was a ten-year-old interview with veteran reporter Martin Belzer. He was a star of news feeds and someone she knew her mother had a crush on. But he looked different in this interview—younger, thinner, more aggressive.

  The video featured footage of the Potter-Kleins’ Cape Cod beach house, where they were shown riding horses while Martin Belzer provided a brief voice-over about the “reclusive couple” and their “world-changing software program.” It explained how the Potter-Kleins had dropped out of MIT, cycled through a handful of startup companies, earned and lost a few million, and then finally designed the software at the heart of the score.

  Their home was a sleek wooden deckhouse with eyeballs everywhere. After a short tour, Martin sat with them in front of a digital fireplace to begin the inquisition.

  The Potter-Kleins came across as friendly and open to Imani. Sherry was pretty and serious, with salt-and-pepper hair cut into a soft bob. Nathan was tall and gaunt with heavy black eyebrows and restless eyes. Despite being in their forties, they were both scored. They got a monthly report just like Imani did. Nathan’s lowest score was 52, he admitted. Sherry had never scored below 80.

  When Martin asked them why they invented the software, the Potter-Kleins looked at each other with a trace of trepidation.

  Then Nathan answered: “We saw the inability of social programs, including public education, to eradicate poverty, and we decided it was a failure of technology.”

  “A failure of technology?” Martin asked.

&
nbsp; “Of course,” Nathan answered. “Here we had this incredible tool at our disposal with the Internet. We had search. We had wikis. We had all the social networking tools. We had micro-lending and personalized charity. But poverty wasn’t going away. If anything, the Internet was widening the gap between rich and poor.”

  “The digital divide,” Martin interjected.

  “Sure, that,” Nathan answered, “but also the fact that certain societal structures were being reinforced rather than challenged by the Internet. You know, poverty is not merely a question of resources. It’s also a collection of behaviors.”

  “And that’s not to blame the victim,” Sherry interrupted. “Structural economic issues certainly have their role.”

  “Yes,” Nathan conceded. “But behavioral patterns reinforce inequities because people tend to behave according to the dictates of whatever value system they’re born into. And the value systems of the poor tend to reinforce poverty. High birth rates, high drop-out rates, short-term versus delayed gratification.”

  “All excellent replicators,” Sherry added.

  “It’s a runaway feedback loop,” Nathan continued. “A self-replicating pattern. And no one found a way to stop it. No one.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, “so you’re telling me you were looking for a way to …”

  “To interrupt the pattern,” Nathan said.

  “But first,” Sherry added, “we had to understand it.”

  “Exactly,” Nathan said. “So we created a software program that could crunch huge quantities of data in search of the nonobvious patterns.”

  “We already knew the obvious ones,” Sherry said.

  “Exactly,” Nathan agreed. “And it’s really just blind luck that this all happened around the same time that surveillance cameras were cropping up everywhere.”

  The way they spoke seemed to Imani like a duet between a guitar and a piano, overlapping at times but always complementing.

  “Our software could identify subjects through biometric markers,” Sherry said. “Like face and gait recognition. But now we could link that data with things like Web usage and direct address.”