Scored

by Lauren McLaughlin

“Anyway,” Ms. Wheeler said, “I think you’ve forgotten about the incident at Chauncey Beach?”

  “You mean the fire in the dunes?” she said. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “You said yourself they were trying to draw out the authorities.”

  “That was just a guess!”

  Ms. Wheeler held up her palms. “Look. Who knows what they were doing back there? The point is that these people think they’re above the law. And we’re going to demonstrate that they’re not.” She leaned back in her leather chair. “You’re not worried about Diego Landis, are you? Has he gotten to you?”

  Imani wasn’t sure what Ms. Wheeler meant by that, but she knew she didn’t want to be responsible for Diego’s arrest. That was never part of the deal.

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about him anyway,” Ms. Wheeler said. “At best, he’ll spend a day or two in jail. This is just for show. But it’ll keep Dena Landis occupied for a while. You see, we’re usually on the back foot with these people. They act. We react. We never know what they’re going to throw at us, so we’re never prepared. It’s a smart strategy, so I’ve borrowed it. I’m going to throw everything at them at once. An expulsion, an arrest, and an emergency town referendum to ban all unscored from Somerton High.” Ms. Wheeler’s eyes seemed to glow with the idea.

  Imani was speechless. She’d never seen Ms. Wheeler like this before.

  “I’ve already gotten the town council’s support for it,” Ms. Wheeler continued. “They’re in total agreement that something has to be done. We can’t just stand by idly while the unscored victimize our children. Cady Fazio was a seventy before she met Parker Gray. A seventy.”

  “I know,” Imani said flatly.

  “She could have worked in retail, health services. At seventy, there are real possibilities. And now look at her.” Ms. Wheeler shook her head in pity.

  But Imani was unconvinced by the display. Only last week, Ms. Wheeler had congratulated her for “discarding” Cady. Did she now expect Imani to believe that Cady mattered?

  “Of course, none of this should concern you,” Ms. Wheeler said. “You should be focusing on yourself, and your own fitness. That’s the important thing. You’ll see. You’ll be over that scholarship line before you know it.” She flashed Imani her radiant smile, then unfurled her tap pad and began typing.

  “But—” Imani cut herself off. She was going to remind Ms. Wheeler that getting over the scholarship line was out of the question, a fact that had necessitated the whole scheme with Diego Landis in the first place. But the ease with which Ms. Wheeler had forgotten those details, which in the past would have made Imani feel small, made her angry. Now that Ms. Wheeler had gotten what she needed, she was dismissing Imani with generic reassurances. She was treating Imani like a detail to be smoothed over, a gum wrapper to be discarded.

  Ms. Wheeler didn’t look up when Imani stood and opened the door to leave.

  “Close it on the way out, will you?” Ms. Wheeler said.

  Imani left the door open. There were still ten minutes left of lunch, but she didn’t return to the lunchroom. She went straight to her locker, grabbed her coat and backpack, and left.

  Once outside, she ran all the way down the Causeway.

  17. the river of unknowing

  NEXT TO THE battered mermaid in the Abruzzi Antiques parking lot was a cement swan with only one wing. Imani stared at it while sitting on the stone elephant, her legs swinging back and forth. Where had the Abruzzis found these broken creatures, she wondered, and why? Who would buy them? She couldn’t imagine anyone going to the trouble of hauling one into a truck and carrying it away. Maybe the Abruzzis had bought them to keep them company.

  It was warm and bright. Imani slid out of her coat and told herself to stand up and face the eyeball. But her body wouldn’t move. It preferred keeping her at eye level with the stone creatures. She felt at home with them, as if she were part of that unwanted zoo—so full of promise once, but now terminally damaged.

  Imani lay back on the cool cement of the elephant’s back. The eyeball dangling above was a black spot against the bright blue sky, inviting her confession. But Imani wasn’t sure what her sins were. They seemed to contradict each other. In the end, she knew it wouldn’t matter anyway. The software already knew.

  The software knew everything.

  Imani skipped dinner, claiming a stomachache, and spent the evening in her room doing, and redoing, her Spanish homework. Just after eight o’clock, her father’s heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. To avoid having to speak with him, she dug out her Spanish book and started redoing her homework once more.

  Her father knocked twice, then opened the door and peeked in. “I brought you some bread,” he said. When she didn’t respond right away, he opened the door and entered, holding out a buttered slice of toast on a paper towel. “You gotta eat something.”

  “Thanks.” Imani took it from him and nibbled a corner, keeping her Spanish book open meaningfully.

  Her father was undeterred. “Isiah says there’s a school meeting tomorrow night? Something for parents?” He sat on the edge of her bed, and Imani moved over to make room for him.

  “Yeah, but don’t bother,” she said. “Isn’t Isiah’s scrimmage tomorrow night?”

  “I just want to make sure we’re represented, that’s all.”

  Imani laughed gently. It was so typical of her father to believe he would have some say in what transpired with Ms. Wheeler and the town council. Though frequently cynical about the abuses of the rich and powerful, her father was, at heart, an idealist. Imani had always liked this about him.

  “They’re not voting,” she said. “I think there’s going to be a referendum vote at some point, but this is just a show meeting. It’s basically Ms. Wheeler and the town council trying to convince everyone to ban the unscored from school.”

  Her father sucked in air through his teeth. “Is this because of what happened with Cady and that video?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And now they want to ban all the unscored? Can they do that?”

  “Maybe,” she said. In the end, she knew the lawyers would hash it out according to laws and statutes neither she nor her father would understand. But if Ms. Wheeler got her referendum vote, Imani suspected she’d win at the polls. There were more scored than unscored in Somerton, and they would vote in the interest of their children.

  Her father was shaking his head. “It just doesn’t seem right to me,” he said. “Don’t those kids deserve an education, just like anyone else? It doesn’t seem right at all.”

  Imani snorted. What did right and wrong have to do with anything?

  Her father sighed in frustration. “So I take it you don’t want to discuss this,” he said. “Even though it’s about your best friend.”

  There was a tone of judgment that Imani found difficult to take, given how much she had struggled with the choices she’d made and how little he understood that struggle. She closed her Spanish book and put down her pen. “Okay, let’s talk about it then. Let’s talk about how my best friend threw her life and my life away so she could date Parker Gray. Let’s talk about how we can all be ‘represented’ by attending some pointless meeting whose only real purpose is for Ms. Wheeler to make Dena Landis look foolish. Let’s pretend this is a problem we can solve using old-fashioned common sense and morality, as if these things had any relevance in the world at all!”

  As Imani spoke, her father’s face hardened. “Now you listen here, Imani Jane. You know as well as I do that I will not have you speaking to me that way.”

  “Fine.” She opened her Spanish book and resumed conjugating verbs.

  “I did not say we were finished.”

  Imani kept her head in her Spanish book, fully expecting him to pluck it from her hands and throw it onto the floor. When a muscle in his arm tensed she waited for the fallout, but he stayed put, the fire of his temper fading quickly into something closer to sadness. In a voice so soft Imani h
ardly recognized it, he said: “Where did you go, Imani?”

  She would have preferred the fire. When she didn’t answer, he sat and stared at his oil-stained fingers. Imani went back to her verbs, screwing up her face in pretend concentration, but all she could sense was her father’s large presence and his even larger sadness. He seemed as alone with it, despite their proximity, as she was alone with her own troubles. Between the two of them was a river of unknowing.

  After a while, her father stood up, the bed bouncing back lighter than air. His footsteps descended the stairs. Imani could hear him speaking to her mother quietly, but not quietly enough, about how “family don’t mean nothing anymore.” Her mother tried to comfort him, but even from that distance, Imani could hear the strain in her voice. This was clearly a topic familiar to both of them, though new to Imani. She picked out a few words here and there: “your own children,” “opportunity,” “lost,” and, from her father, “equalize, my ass.” When her mother failed to quiet him, she pulled him into the kitchen, where their discussion grew unintelligible.

  Imani listened to the rise and fall of their voices for a while, wondering what it was they thought they’d “lost.” Then, at 8:17, having had enough of that day, she turned off the light, slipped under the covers, and closed her eyes.

  Sleep never came.

  18. stone creatures

  MARINA ROAD WAS darker than it had ever been. No clouds, no moon, and the sky a dense black whose pinprick stars seemed to hoard their light. Imani crept slowly between the swaying marsh reeds, trying to be soothed by the cool air, but it only energized her fear. And the smell of life and death in multitudes unseen beyond the tall reeds allowed her merely to pretend to a sense of perspective on what she was doing. She was one small person of billions, a member of one species of billions. In the long historical scheme of things, her actions were insignificant, her choices minor, her mistakes trifling. But despite all of that, her fear was as big as the sky itself.

  When she reached the end of Marina Road, the Causeway was deserted. On either side, widely spaced streetlights cast small pools of light, one of them capturing the stone elephant and the eyeball dangling above it, an eyeball she now thought of as her own.

  Imani removed her cell from her pocket and dialed a number she’d wanted to dial for two weeks. After six rings, the familiar voice said: “I’m doing very important things. Leave a message.”

  There was a beep, then a pause, in which Imani accepted that she was ruining her score for good. “Call me back,” she said. “It’s an emergency. I mean it.”

  When she hung up, a car drove by. Imani crouched into the bank of marsh reeds, the impulse to hide her actions having become, by now, an instinct. Her cell buzzed in her palm.

  “Why are you calling me?” Cady asked. “What are you doing?”

  “I need a favor,” Imani said. “I need to call Diego Landis. Do you have his number? Does Parker?”

  “What are you talking about?” Cady sounded worried. “Where are you?”

  “It’s really important that I get in touch with him right now,” Imani pleaded. “Doesn’t Parker know him? Are you with him now?”

  Cady paused before answering. “You’re not being very smart.”

  “Please, Cady.”

  “I’ll call you back,” Cady said, then hung up.

  It was getting cold. Imani had only grabbed a light coat as she left the house, not wanting to wake her parents.

  Her cell buzzed again.

  “Parker just called him,” Cady said. “He’s not answering.”

  Imani slumped into the cold sand.

  “Why are you calling Diego Landis anyway?” Cady asked. “Why are you calling me?”

  “Cady, I need a ride.”

  Cady sighed heavily. “What have you done?”

  Imani didn’t answer right away. Though unable to cast her behavior in a moral framework of any enduring solidity, she knew that what she had done was, in some indefinable way, wrong. So she began at the beginning, with Diego’s proposal, then told Cady the whole story. She left nothing out, and when she had finished, it was so quiet she would have sworn she heard Cady breathing. “Are you still there?” Imani asked.

  “I can’t believe you did that” was the answer. “I really can’t believe you—”

  There was a click, then a dial tone.

  “Cady?” Imani said, her voice shaking.

  Cady had hung up.

  Imani looked at her cell. It was 9:47. Even if she went back to get her bicycle, she wouldn’t have made it to St. James in time to warn Diego. In all likelihood, the police were already there.

  Imani wanted to feel conned. It was Ms. Wheeler, after all, who’d led her to believe that betraying Diego’s trust was the fit course of action. But as consoling as this thought was, a surge of honesty prevented her from blaming Ms. Wheeler. The scheme had been Imani’s idea. And, for all she knew, Ms. Wheeler was right. All of her actions leading up to that moment might have been the model of fitness. Maybe it was this belated crisis of conscience that would doom her in the end. She was supposed to have faith in the score and in the five elements of fitness. Hadn’t Imani learned this from the example of Ms. Wheeler and the other high 90s? Would Anil Hanesh be standing at the edge of Marina Road trying to reverse his actions for the benefit of an unscored? What was Diego Landis anyway but another gum wrapper to be discarded?

  The wind blew down the Causeway, and Imani tucked farther into the marsh reeds, wanting to dissolve into the muck and tang of her beloved wetlands. She’d had such big dreams. She was going to be the savior of Somerton, cruising down the river with her fancy degree and her specialized knowledge, the secrets of life itself instilled, through hours of research, into the folds of her brain. Now look at her. She was even less than those stone creatures across the street. At least they had never abandoned a friend or betrayed a trust.

  For a long time, Imani sat rubbing her cell’s tap screen against her thigh and watching the time progress by minutes, until a sound in the distance roused her. At first, she thought it was a flock of geese, but as it approached, recognition made her heart race. She stood up and went to the edge of Marina Road, holding her breath in anticipation.

  A few seconds later, Frankenscooter crested the hill.

  Bending low over the handlebars, and charging at breakneck speed, Cady rounded the 7-Eleven. Imani readied herself to dodge as Cady veered toward her, and was still in that readied posture as Cady fishtailed to a halt only inches from her knees. Cady threw Imani her helmet, then lifted the visor on her own.

  “Cell died,” she said. “We’re going to have to break some speed limits.”

  Imani stuffed her head into her helmet and climbed on. “Whatever it takes,” she said.

  With a lurch and a fishtail, they were off.

  19. the free fall café

  THERE WERE ONLY a few cars on the Causeway, but Cady enraged them all as she weaved, bobbed, and ran red lights. The eyeballs ticked by overhead. Imani knew her score was plummeting, and, though she could feel the weight of it in the pit of her stomach, her mind blazed with a single purpose: to save Diego Landis.

  In nearly impossible time, they arrived at the wrought iron archway of St. James College.

  “Where to?” Cady shouted.

  “Abate Hall,” Imani said. “But I don’t know where that is.”

  “I do.”

  Cady sped up and cut diagonally across a quad whose velvety lawn yielded muddily to Frankenscooter’s all-terrain tires. The campus was like something from another world, with dignified stone buildings standing next to modern glass ones, and in between, a lush landscaping that Imani knew was maintained by people like her parents: townies, locals, clamdiggers. The university was one of the biggest employers in Somerton, in need of a steady supply of janitors, maids, gardeners, and food servers.

  Cady drove past a cathedral, then came to a sudden halt at a bike rack in front of an old stone building.

  “I’m pre
tty sure this is it,” Cady said. “Student Center or something?”

  The words Anthony Abate Hall were carved into the stone facade. Parked right in front were four police cruisers.

  Imani gave Cady her helmet and started up the broad stone steps. “Wait here for me,” she said.

  “No way,” Cady said, stowing their helmets and racing to catch up with Imani.

  A pair of college students looked at them curiously from where they sat smoking cigarettes on the steps.

  Inside the entrance, beneath a stone archway, was a huge corkboard layered with announcements, in the center of which was a postcard-sized flyer for the Chaos Foundation, which read:

  Free Fall Café 10 p.m. Wednesday

  “I think that’s the pub upstairs,” Cady said. “Come on.”

  Imani followed her up a wide spiral staircase. “How do you know this?”

  “Parker’s cousin comes to parties here all the time,” she said. “Did you hear that?”

  It sounded like the pop and squeal of a PA system. Imani and Cady followed it to the second floor. At the entrance to the Free Fall Café, two alarming sights greeted them. The first was a deconstructed eyeball nailed above the entrance, its innards splayed out like a squid autopsy. The second was a group of Somerton police officers facing what looked like a small stage.

  The pub was packed with college students, so Imani’s view of the stage was obstructed, but she could just make out the girl with the black-and-white hair holding a microphone with something strapped across her chest. “I’d like to thank Somerton’s finest for joining us,” she sneered into the mike.

  The crowd hooted and cheered while the cops, some of them no older than the students, shuffled nervously. Imani recognized an 80 among them who’d graduated from Somerton High three years earlier, but couldn’t remember his name. His blue police hat dwarfed his long lean face. She took Cady’s hand and cut through a group of college guys toward the stage.

  “Look,” one of them said. “Townies.”