“Oh my God. You’re scored?” Erica whispered the word “scored,” but in a way that managed to make it louder. “No, no, no. That’s great. I’m so glad you came.” Her face filled with kindness and a hint of pity that made Imani uncomfortable. “You’re, like, completely welcome here,” she said.
“Thanks, Erica,” Diego said. He guided Imani away. “Don’t mind her,” he said under his breath. “She gets all excited when she meets the scored.”
“Why?” Imani asked.
“She thinks she can rescue them or something,” Diego mumbled, as if he were embarrassed.
Erica returned to her cluster of friends but continued gesturing toward Imani with an aura of good intentions that felt patronizing.
“I didn’t realize I needed rescuing,” Imani said.
Diego sat on a felled tree near the fire. “You wouldn’t, though, would you?”
Imani sat next to him. After the exchange with Erica—she’d never met a friendly unscored—she took comfort in the protocol of insults she and Diego had established. “So what is this?” She glanced around at the assortment of strangers, some with longish hair like Diego’s, some in the sloppy style of the local rich kids. “A secret hideout?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We come here to engage in antisocial behavior while plotting the downfall of society.”
“I thought society had already fallen.”
“It’s sick,” he said. “But it’s still standing.”
“And what’s your strategy to bring it down?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “Now, can we cut the crap, please, and get down to business? I need a thesis for my paper. I gave you yours.”
“Fine,” Imani said. She was equally eager to begin extracting information from him. “Why don’t you explore the philosophy behind the score?”
“What? Total mind control and world domination?” Diego asked.
“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘a more perfect humanity through technology.’ ”
Diego leaned away from her. “Are you kidding me?”
“What? You don’t think that’s a worthy goal?”
Diego narrowed his eyes at her in an expression that seemed to say, You are vastly strange and a little scary. It was, of course, intended as an insult, but Imani didn’t mind it. She enjoyed being unfathomable to Diego. As he continued to stare at her, she prepared to unleash Nathan Klein’s line on him.
But Diego stole the moment. “It’s code,” he said.
Imani was thrown off. “What’s code?”
“ ‘A more perfect humanity through technology,’ ” he said. “It’s code for eliminating the unscored.”
“Says who?”
“We’re a glitch in their program,” he said. “What Score Corp wants is to make the entire human race as predictable and controllable as machines.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Imani scoffed.
“You’re calling me ridiculous?” His face was totally flat.
“How about paranoid?” Imani amended.
Diego chuckled dismissively, then poked at the sand with a stick.
“Oh, come on,” Imani prodded. “You’re saying the whole point of the score is to oppress you? Don’t you think that’s a little self-centered?”
Diego threw his head back and squinted against the sun, a mocking smile on his face. “You’re so naive.”
“And you’re an overblown twit!”
“Whoa!” He faced her, still smiling. “Twit? Really?” He picked up the tiny stick and broke it in half. “Did you get that from your thesaurus?”
Imani looked away, annoyed.
“Or is that what you’re stuck with because the software prohibits swearing?” Diego asked.
“It fits,” Imani said. “And the software doesn’t prohibit swearing.”
“So say ‘fuck.’ Say ‘fuck, fuck, fuck.’ ”
Imani stared at him coldly.
“See?” he said. “You can’t do it. Can you?”
“I can do it. I choose not to.”
“Oh, of course. Because it’s a violation … of what? Impulse control?”
Rapport, actually, Imani thought, but she wasn’t interested in a debate on the fitness of swearing.
“Fine, I’m a twit then,” he said. “You know what you are?”
Imani braced herself. He’d probably rehearsed something.
Diego leaned forward and brought his lips to her ear. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
“Rangers!” It was a young boy, around thirteen, standing at the top of a dune. Everyone at the bottom of the pit froze. Then, hearing the buzz in the distance, they all jumped into action.
Diego was off the felled tree at the first warning. He grabbed Imani’s hand and yanked her up the steep incline of the dune. Imani pulled free of him instinctively but struggled to get up the side. It was like climbing up a sugar bowl. When Diego reached back again for her, she took his hand and let him pull her upward.
“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” she asked as they climbed.
“Nope,” he said. “All the inland dunes beyond the boardwalk are off-limits.”
When they got to the top, she pulled her hand free of his. “So what are you doing here?” she asked.
“Being antisocial?” he offered. He headed to the boardwalk and joined the others scrambling to get their bikes and scooters upright. When he had righted his, he removed one helmet and threw it to Imani. “Are you ready for some fun?”
Imani caught the helmet but didn’t move.
Diego straddled his scooter, put on his own helmet, and waited for her, while the others took off down the boardwalk in a melee of sand and sound. “You can stay if you want to,” Diego said over the noise. “But the rangers will turn you in to the police.”
“And you know this because?”
He flashed her that devious smile, then revved his scooter.
Imani put on the helmet and joined him on the scooter, convinced she’d made a terrible—and irreversible—mistake by going there with him. Diego lurched for the boardwalk, then sped to catch up with the others, passing several within seconds. Imani squeezed Diego’s hips with her knees. In the rush to escape, she hadn’t thought about Diego’s whispered words, but they returned now, mixing themselves into the adrenaline rush of flight. She pushed back from Diego to leave room for the phantom third rider, and gripped the trunk with both hands. The scooter wobbled over the boards, nearly knocking her off. Diego reached back with one hand, grabbed her arm, and pulled her closer to him. She had no choice but to plaster herself to his back and wrap her arms around his waist for the rest of the rough ride. Silently, she vowed to make him pay for the indignity.
After a minute, the long line of scooters stopped and bunched up as people in the front yelled back at them. Imani couldn’t hear what they were saying, so she stood on Diego’s pedals and spotted the black three-wheeled ATV of a Chauncey Beach ranger up ahead.
“Hold on,” Diego said. He shouted at the people behind them to turn around.
The boardwalk was less than five feet wide, and his words launched a near-disastrous rotation of bikes and scooters. Diego and Imani came within inches of tumbling off the edge as Diego turned his scooter in four arcs. He was no Cady Fazio, Imani thought. Cady would have had Frankenscooter turned around and out of there in no time flat.
Up ahead, two scooters fell off the boardwalk and made their way through the underbrush, sending pinwheels of sand into the faces of their friends.
“Where are we going?” Imani shouted over the roar. Diego didn’t answer. When the boardwalk ended, he launched straight into the sand. For a moment, she feared he would take them down into the pit. She clung to his waist in anticipation. But instead of taking them down, he pulled in front of the others and led the whole pack away from the pit and over the lower dunes. Before long, they were heading down the broad beach toward the water. Hogg Island loomed in the distance. Bearings gained, Imani realized they were at the back of
Chauncey Beach, not far from where she had taken Diego by boat.
Diego leaned over the handlebars as he sped for the shoreline. Imani put her head on his back, clasped one hand around her other wrist, and tried to breathe. The ocean sped by them on the right, and on their left, faster scooters caught up, then overtook them. The kids on bikes had to carry them down the dunes, but once they hit firm sand, they pedaled furiously.
At the top of one of the dunes was a green-clad ranger, standing on the pedals of his ATV. Though she knew some of the Chauncey Beach rangers, she didn’t recognize him. They were mostly 70s and hailed from Somerton and the surrounding area. One of them, Tara Luboff, had been her babysitter when she was a kid. Imani dreaded being caught on the back of an unscored’s scooter by the girl who used to make her burnt popcorn. The ranger at the top of the dune spoke calmly into a unit on his wrist, then, after watching the line of bikes and scooters flee, he disappeared into the dunes.
It was a long ride down the shoreline. Chauncey Beach stretched for ten miles from the back to the parking lot. The rangers didn’t pursue them; they didn’t have to. The only way off the beach was through the parking lot. All they had to do was wait there.
Up ahead, two kids peeled off from the pack and headed through the soft sand back up to the dunes.
“Hold on,” Diego shouted over his shoulder. Then he too peeled off and followed the kids up the dunes.
They picked up the boardwalk again and followed for a while until Diego stopped suddenly. He planted his feet on either side and twisted around to face Imani.
“Here’s the drill,” he said.
Imani began to lift her visor, but he put his hand over hers, then pointed to an eyeball in the trees. It was overgrown with vines, but there were probably others. They must have been close to the parking lot.
Imani secured her visor. “You have a drill?”
“Yeah, it’s a game we play with the rangers. How it works is a few of us meet them in the parking lot and lead them into the woods toward Manor Hill while the others head home.”
“And then what happens?”
“Well, then we hope the Chaunceys don’t release the dogs.”
“What?”
“The rangers are pussies,” he said. “They won’t go very far onto the Chaunceys’ private property.”
“Because of the dogs,” Imani said. She was aware of the Chaunceys’ infamous Dobermans. “What an excellent drill. What a meaningful way to spend your weekend. First you despoil a pristine dune with your fire and beer cans. Then you—”
“They have no right declaring those dunes off-limits,” Diego said, his voice rising in anger. “Who the hell are they to decide where we can and can’t go? What is this, a police state?”
“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
“You’re so naive.”
“Yeah, I think we covered that earlier. And they’re not the police. They work for the Fish and Wildlife Department.”
“So?” he said. “Do they own the sand? Do they own the air?”
“They don’t own anything,” Imani said. “These are public lands. They’re just trying to protect them.”
“Well, I don’t acknowledge their right to do that,” he said. “I think it’s bullshit that some government agency can just declare a piece of the world off-limits. They let hunters roam through here to shoot deer.”
Imani shook her head. “That’s for population control.”
“I knew that,” he said. But the defensiveness in his tone told Imani he hadn’t.
“Just get me out of here,” she said.
He faced front and lurched the scooter forward punishingly. Imani’s knees tightened around his hips, but she did not put her arms around him again.
Up ahead, the two other kids sat up on their parked scooters, waving for Diego to stop. Diego cut the engine and walked it the rest of the way toward them. Where the boardwalk ended, there was a small hill that led right down to the parking lot. The exit was less than twenty yards to the left.
“Let’s do it now,” the girl said. “Before the others get here.”
“I’m not going with you,” Diego said. He gestured toward Imani with his head.
“Three scooters are better than two,” the girl said. “If the rangers think they have a shot at pulling us down, they’ll chase us farther into the woods.”
“I have to get her out of here,” he said.
“Why?” The girl looked Imani up and down. “What’s so special about her?”
Imani could only make out the girl’s eyes, in the opening of her helmet, smudged in bright blue eyeliner with yellow mascara. The unscored often dressed bizarrely, as if to accentuate their outcast status, a habit Imani had never understood.
“I just do,” Diego said.
He and Imani got off, then he pushed the scooter as gently as possible down the low hill, almost losing control on a patch of beach grass. About a hundred yards away, the two rangers, one male, one female, sat on their ATVs facing the burger stand where they expected the other scooters to arrive any minute via the boardwalk. The gentle purring of their motors covered Diego and Imani’s retreat.
They were yards away from the exit, moments from a clean getaway, when the two kids they’d left behind came barreling down the hill at top speed. When the rangers spotted them charging across the parking lot, they saw Diego and Imani too.
Diego scrambled onto the scooter, and Imani slid on right behind him. Diego skidded a 180 on a patch of sand until they were facing an oncoming ranger. She wore a helmet, so Imani couldn’t tell if it was Tara Luboff. As the ranger sped toward them, Diego attempted to turn the scooter around rather than powering his way out of the jam.
“Don’t you know how to ride this thing?” Imani yelled. She was trying to calculate just how many points she’d lose for being arrested when an incredible sight stole all of her attention.
Behind the advancing ranger, beyond the burger stand, three scooters crested the top of a dune with a fantail of sand, then nose-dived into the parking lot at full speed. Another one followed. Then another and another. While Diego and Imani careened inelegantly around the exit gate to make for Chauncey Beach Road, they overtook the female ranger and crisscrossed in front of her. A steady pulse of bikes and scooters came screaming down the boardwalk. Joining the others, they harassed the ranger like a swarm of wasps.
Imani twisted around to watch as the ranger stopped short. The last thing she saw as Diego sped down Chauncey Beach Road was the ranger grabbing a girl by the elbow and tearing her from her bicycle. Imani gasped. Both the girl and her bike were still airborne when a bend in the road tore them from Imani’s sight. The savagery of the ranger’s act, along with the fact that it might have been her former babysitter, horrified her.
Diego sped down Chauncey Beach Road, his scooter straining to reach its maximum speed. At some point, she wasn’t sure when, Imani had let go of the trunk and clung to Diego’s waist, her right hand clamped over her left wrist.
Now that they were on smooth asphalt, Imani let go and held on to the trunk again. Eventually, Diego’s friends appeared beside them, gathering into a single line until one of them took the lead. Once they were safely out of the rangers’ jurisdiction, they all streamed into the parking lot of an ice cream stand, still shuttered for the off-season.
Diego stopped, then told Imani to wait while he joined the others dismounting their scooters to gather in shifting huddles. Imani kept her visor down but gathered from the discussions that the rangers had gotten a girl and a guy. They were hurt but not severely. One girl, who seemed older than the rest, possibly college-aged, stood apart from the others to make a call. She had black-and-white-striped hair and wore a short black skirt with tall black boots. She rejoined her friends and assured them all that “wheels were turning.” When the others returned to their scooters, the girl walked with Diego back to his.
“Foundation, Wednesday,” she told him. “Do not be late this time.”
“You’re always late.”
“No,” he said. “You always start too early.”
Imani got off the scooter so that Diego could get on. The girl with the black-and-white hair gave her a quick glance, then walked away to her own scooter.
“Who’s she?” Imani asked.
“No one.”
As Diego turned right to head into the town of Somerton, Imani began to wonder if the gathering at the pit had a political purpose. Was it possible they had set the fire to draw out the rangers? Were they hoping to be arrested? Were those the “wheels” that were turning?
Diego pulled into the alley behind the ice rink and stopped by the door. He didn’t cut the motor. He waited while Imani climbed off.
“So what I said back there at the pit?” he said. “You know, about you being …” He rolled his eyes. “Beautiful?”
“Yeah?” she said.
“I was just messing with you,” he said.
“Sure, whatever.” She took off the helmet and handed it to him. “So what’s the foundation? That girl with the striped hair told you not to be late for it.”
“It’s nothing.”
Imani gave him his mother’s coat and sat down on the concrete steps to unlace her boots. “How can you be late for nothing?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “Believe me.”
“What if I do?”
Diego rolled his scooter back onto its stand and watched her take the boots off.
“What?” she said. “You think I can’t handle it, whatever it is?”
He laughed. “It’s the Chaos Foundation,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s your kind of thing.” He reached back to get Imani’s own coat and boots from the trunk, then tossed them to her. “So you’re not mad at me?”
Imani wanted to press him for more details about the Chaos Foundation, but she detected a distinct unwillingness to divulge them, and she didn’t want to raise suspicion.
“Mad about what?” she asked, shoving her feet into her own boots. “Being recklessly endangered by someone who can barely drive a scooter?”
“Excuse me, but I’m an excellent driver.”
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