The Unidentified (12 page)

He looked disappointed. “Well, would you mind if I swiped with your card? They’re free,” he said quickly, seeing the hesitation on my face. “I just maxed out my sample all otment on my card, that’s all .”

“Oh. Sure,” I said, sliding my card over to him.

He went to the display and got a two-pill sample packet. “You sure you don’t want?”

I shook my head.

He shrugged and took both of them. I watched his neck He shrugged and took both of them. I watched his neck as he swallowed them dry.

He smiled at me. “Ready to do this?”

Jeremy positioned my notebook(r) in between us and I watched his lips move as he pointed to equations, trying to help me work out a strategy to defeat the end stage and pass the level. He hunched over the screen, frowning and intense.

He looked up at me. “You getting all of this?”

“I guess.”

“Come on. Think of it like a puzzle, or code. You just need to figure out the right pieces to make it work.”

He moved his chair closer to mine, leaned in close with the Study Aide(r). Even though this didn’t exactly help me concentrate on math, my senses focused to take in the whole experience of being near him. A kind of contact high, or something. I could feel his arm resting on the back of my chair. His shirt smelled like cotton and cinnamon, and something else. Like welded metal or outer space. With him sitting beside me, I was hyperaware of everything. And when I stared at the problems in front of us, I could understand what he was showing me.

I found the puzzle piece that fit.

“You ready?”

I nodded and swiped my ID at the VR grapher, the redesigned flight simulator that ran the Functions Graphing program I needed to pass to get to the next level. I climbed into the cockpit and strapped in, the harness tight across my shoulders. I looked at the dark screen, gripped the my shoulders. I looked at the dark screen, gripped the controls in my sweaty hands, and breathed out. It felt like I had been holding my breath for the past forty minutes.

I waited for Jeremy to shut the door so the program would start. He ran his hand nervously through his hair, looked around quickly, then jumped into the capsule, pulling the door shut behind him.

“What are you doing!?”

“Coming along for the ride.” He laughed. His laugh sounded like rain clouds clearing.

The countdown had begun.
10
…
9
…

“But you don’t have a belt!”

“Come on, you can’t expect me to spend the morning studying Quadratic Functions, and not get to ride?” he said, trying to maneuver in the cramped capsule.

His knee jabbed into my thigh.

“Oops, sorry,” he said.

6
…
5
…
4
…

I started laughing, a little maniacally. This wasn’t how I imagined playing the final stage.

“You can do this, easy,” he said, bracing his arm against the ceiling and looking at the screen.

“Here we go!” I practically shouted as the capsule started vibrating.

3
…
2
…
1
…

The first equation appeared on the screen and the timer started counting down. I had to do fifteen equations in twenty minutes.

I did the work, finding the vertex and plugging in various values of
x
to find
y
. I plotted the coordinates. Hit Submit.

The capsule tilted back and, together with the screen graphic, gave the illusion of acceleration along a gently curving parabola, first down, then back up.

“Whee,” he said flatly.

I graphed two more functions, and we rode their paths like a carnival ride. The adrenaline of the time pressure and Jeremy close beside me added to the thrill that I was getting them right.

Then I saw the fourth function.

“Oh Google,” I swore. “Look at the leading coefficient!

It’s negative!” I glanced quickly at Jeremy. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“It’ll be way steep, too,” he said, staring at the screen, calculating it in his head. Then he looked around the capsule trying to position himself better. “Just solve it like the other ones.”

“OK,” I said, plotting the coordinates. “Ready?”

The parabola was opened upside down and we were about to climb and then plunge down the side of it. I hesitated before hitting Submit.

“Do it!” he said.

The whole capsule tilted violently backward as we moved up the path. Jeremy slid up out of the seat and bumped his head on the ceiling. When we got to the vertex and plunged over the edge, my breath caught in my throat. It felt like we were falling face-first off the side of a cliff.

Then we leveled out for the next function.

“Good game,” Jeremy said, rubbing the back of his head. His dark, messy hair was getting even messier.

“Hurry! Watch your time!”

I went on to the next function, then the next. I knew what I had to do now and could actually get them done pretty fast.

Probably because every time I hit Submit and the animation-ride sequence started up, Jeremy took my hand from the controllers and we yelled our lungs out as we plunged down each function’s course. I would do anything for more moments like those, even math endgames.

When the last function had been graphed, the capsule settled to a halt. My scores scrolled by on the screen. I got only one wrong, and that was Jeremy’s fault because he had been shifting around and hit the Submit button before I was ready. My time bonus was surprisingly high too.

At last, the words every girl wants to see after rocketing around in a capsule with a cute boy: LEVEL COMPLETE.

Jeremy moved closer, if that was possible, and said quietly to me. “Good game. Now, um, if you don’t mind opening the door, I’d like to unfold myself.”

I unstrapped my safety belt and opened the door, peeking around Math Attack to make sure there weren’t any supervisors roaming around. We didn’t want my level score to be invalidated because there were too many pilots in the cockpit. Someone might’ve thought we were cheating.

“That was click,” Jeremy said, stretching. “So fun.”

It wasn’t impossible to cheat in the Game.

Theoretically, you could just hand your ID to a particularly smart and morally ambiguous friend and watch your points add up. But if you did that you’d miss out on this
feeling
of passing a level. It was an endorphin rush I wouldn’t want to trade away. After hours or days or weeks of frustration and perseverance and insanity, somehow doing it. Getting another step closer to beating the Game.

I checked my intouch(r). I’d missed a lot of updates from Mikey while I was rocketing around with Swift.

mikes:
is polishing the world’s next robotic prize- fighting champ!

mikes:
is sending our hero into the ring!

Oh no. I was missing the beginning of the battle.

“Good game,” Jeremy said when we had logged out of Math Attack.

“You said that already,” I said, still glowing with my accomplishment.

“I meant about getting branded.”

I sobered up quick. “That hasn’t been made public yet.”

He laughed. “Oh, right.” He took my hand in his. “It’s just that Protecht Securities is my sponsor too, so I kind of knew they were interested in you.”

I was quiet, thinking about it. So Protecht Securities wanted to brand me?

“I thought it made sense,” he said, shrugging. “If we were both branded by the same company. You know,
together?
”

He squeezed my hand a little bit. In my other hand, Mikey was demanding my attention.

mikes:
is suffering a devastating loss.

mikes:
why aren’t you here? @KID

Mikey was at his workspace in DIY Depot. He was kind of just staring off into space when I walked in.

“Oh no! Is that Cripple?” There was a box of mangled metal parts on Mikey’s work table.

“Yeah,” Mikey said, bowing his head in respect. “He fought a good fight. Where were you?”

“Sorry I missed it,” I said, evading the question. I glanced at the beloved’s mechanical remains, now barely recognizable as scrap metal. “What’re you going to do now?”

“Fix him up again. The little guy is powered by pure fight.”

That wasn’t technically true, Cripple had battery packs, but Mikey was definitely driven by something I didn’t fully understand. “Mikey. Hey, Mikey?” I said.

He looked up from his circuit board.

“Way to be my best friend.”

He grinned. “Aww…high five!”

We reached up to five each other, but missed. I knocked over a small box filled with screws. They rained out on the floor.

“We are so hopeless,” I laughed, looking at the mess.

“Defeat makes me hungry,” Mikey said, pushing Cripple’s cardboard casket away. “Let’s get food.”

We went to the Vending Machine down the hall , looking to make a selection from the tastiest-looking coin- looking to make a selection from the tastiest-looking coin- op.

“The problem with the Vending Machine,” Mikey said, examining the elaborate Rube Goldberg-like chain-reaction machines that the Tinkers and Gearheads designed for their sponsors, “is that after all the marbles roll through their chutes and trigger all the music box mechanisms or whatever…like, after the hamster wheel powers the conveyor belt and drops your purchase in your hand, all the magic is gone. It’s just corporate candy and the only thing left to do is eat it. Boring.”

“You make a very unconvincing argument,” I teased.

“Since when do you not want to eat Javajacks?”

“Was I talking about Javajacks? Javajacks don’t count.” He swiped his card to release a coin token and dropped it in the slot. A box of the stuff slid down retro Hot Wheels(r) tracks, bounced on a trampoline, and fell through a basketball hoop. “Eating these are
even better
than the hype.” He poured a handful in his mouth. “But I still need to get real food,” he said, his words muffled by chocolate and caffeine crunches.

We logged out of the DIY Depot and took the escalator down to Culture Shock. While passing the third floor Pure Science rooms, I saw Eva Bloom and Palmer Phillips leaving Cosmonova together. The nature documentaries they showed on the domed screen of Cosmonova were nothing compared to the nature shows that went on in the seats. Kids usually just went there to make out.

“What was Rocket’s boyfriend doing with Eva Bloom in Cosmonova?” I asked, but it was almost a rhetorical Cosmonova?” I asked, but it was almost a rhetorical question. Everyone knew.

Mikey laughed and mimed a gesture that could be interpreted as eating a burrito. Except it wasn’t.

“Quit being obscene,” I snapped at him. I was about to intouch(r) Ari with the news of potential cheat-code evidence, but I didn’t.

I didn’t want to start a big rumor riot, but I hoped for Rocket’s sake that Palmer and Eva both just had an unad- vertised interest in images from the Hubble space telescope.

Down in Culture Shock, I waited in line with Mikey. He spent the whole time telling dirty jokes about Team Player sponsors.

I wanted to tell him,
Hey, guess what? I’m getting
branded. Implausible, right?
But I couldn’t really come up with a way to say it that didn’t sound like a betrayal.

“Hey, where’re you going?” he asked when I started to walk away before the punchline, which probably was something about “getting branded in the locker room.”

“I’m not in the mood for Mexican. I’m going to get a slice of pizza.”

At the Little Italy counter, I pointed and mumbled, “Pepperoni,
grazie
.” Then I went to find Mikey again, determined now to just get it said. But I got distracted.

“Look, it’s them,” I said, nudging him after he had finished insulting the Culture Shock staff in Spanish. Some of the staff looked annoyed, but others were impressed with his pronunciation and verb tense agreement.

“?Quienes?”
he asked, picking up his burrito and
“?Quienes?”
he asked, picking up his burrito and Poke(r) cola and looking around.

I tried to be sly and point out Sophia and the guy I assumed was Elijah sitting at a table. “The Unidentified.”

Mikey laughed at me. “Them? That’s who you’ve got on your naughty list?” He started walking over to them.

“What’re you doing?” I hissed, but followed after him.

“Hey, is it OK if we sit here?” Mikey said, already taking a seat beside Elijah and unwrapping his burrito. I stood there kind of awkwardly while Sophia looked me over.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” I blurted out. “All the nosy questions, or whatever. I…” I didn’t know how to finish my sentence.

“Yeah, it’s true,” Mikey said with his mouth full. “She’s got some kind of condition. We’ve been to doctors, but there’s nothing they can do.” He took another bite. “She’s beyond help.”

“Shut up,” I mumbled, and quickly took a seat. The acne-cheeked Elijah kept watching me, but I didn’t trust myself to make eye contact.

I sort of stared at Sophia’s plate while she ate her pizza. She pulled it apart like a buzzard—a hypersystematic, obsessive-compulsive buzzard. She piled the pepperoni into a wobbling tower, peeled off the cheese layer and folded it into a pile, careful to first scrape off the sauce into a glob to the side of her now-naked crust.

“I know you from somewhere,” Mikey said looking at Elijah. “You race, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But…you’re not a Team Player?”

“No. I’m not.” He reached over to take one of Mikey’s nacho chips. “The last one to the finish line doesn’t generally get a logo, the glory, or name-recognition.” He licked the salt from his fingers and held out his hand. “I’m Elijah.”

Mikey glanced at me, then took Elijah’s hand in the awkwardly formal gesture. Elijah held on a little too long.

“Don’t,” Sophia warned, not looking up from her plate.

“I’m just being friendly,” he said, leaning back in his chair now.

Elijah didn’t seem to notice the elaborate ritual taking place on Sophia’s plate. He was probably used to it. But I had to ask, “Why are you skinning your pizza?”

“I like to deconstruct my food into its composite parts when possible. There’s an elemental purity to the act, and the essences of the ingredients are better appreciated separately.”