The Unidentified (2 page)

“Palmer Phillips is just all credit. So hot,” Quelly Atkins said above the clicking of the herd’s high heels. The others cashed in their agreement.

“I can’t believe he’s going out with that Craftster skank Roksana Wronski.”

“Only because she won that FreshFlash(r) photo contest. After the promo thing she did, they
had
to brand her,” Quelly said, examining the ends of her cinnamon red hair.

“You mean that
porno
thing,” Ashleah Carter snarked.

Their cutting laughter seemed to carry over to our table on a powdery cloud of girl-smell, a mix of fruity and vanilla- perfumed magazines.

I watched Ari to see how she’d react to the Fascists speaking smut about her friend Rocket. She behaved pretty much as expected, picking up her intouch(r) and fanning the clique flame wars.

aria:
echo just called you a skank @ROCKET “Anyone notice how anti-fat she’s getting?” Quelly said almost wistfully. “I swear I could see vertebrae.”

“Whatever. Fame is a fickle…um…something,” Echo Petersson said, looking at the designer shoes her sponsors had hooked her up with. “She just better watch her back.”

“Palmer needs to drop her. Hard.”

“Yeah, on her face. Like Cayenne,” Quelly said, laughing.

“Who?” Eva said coldly, her one syllable completely voiding the poor girl’s existence.

The giggling group of Fashion Fascists marched past.

Ari watched them go.

“Choke. Gag. Retch,” she said in a sardonic staccato.

“Those little Hitlers are going to stink up the Sweatshop with that poison.” She pinched her nose and continued in a nasally whine, “They should get charged, like, emissions credits or something.” She read her intouch(r) and laughed.

“Rocket’s so pissed about what they just said. She’s up on the fourth floor and about to pollute their moisturizer supplies…Hey, are you listening to me?”

I wasn’t listening to her. I was watching a bird land on the planter by the trash can. It dive-bombed this other bird, then fluttered back up into the “trees” in the Pit. I tried to tap out the rhythm of its wing beats on the tabletop. It gave me an idea for a new song.

It’s weird that the starlings were in the Game at all .

They were an uncontrollable element in an otherwise carefully designed environment. The blackbird scavengers grew fat and sassy on the food remains of hundreds of sloppy teenagers and there was nothing the administrators could do about it. Those cute and ruthless little bastards perched on tables and stared, defiant and unblinking.

I watched the birds fly up to the skylight, but lost them in the glare. The sky outside was white. Blank-screen boring.

Up on the fifth floor, I saw two or three people fooling around by the railings. The figures moved like silhouettes against the featureless white sky, like shadow puppets dancing. Or wrestling. Or—

The hairs on my arm electric-tingled. One of the puppets, one of the people, fell.

I held my breath, all the noise in the Pit stopped. This was not happening.

Someone had pushed a body over the edge. And it was falling.

Ari didn’t see it, her attention was back on her notebook(r) mirror. She was making faces at the screen, fixing her lip gloss and stuff.

The body landed with a dull thud maybe ten feet away from us.

Thick red goop splattered when the body hit the ground, graphic horror film-style. A girl screamed and people stood up on chairs to get a better look.

Where the head should’ve been, there was just a red splatter mark, like a burst water balloon. A sign taped to the back of the dummy’s sweater read:

UNIDENTIFIED. CHOOSE YOUR SUICIDE.

I turned away, but Ari didn’t react. She just stared at the figure lying facedown on the ground.

A piece of the burst balloon face rested by my sneaker toe. The face was drawn on with black ink Sharpie.

Shriveled up on the floor, it looked desperate and defeated.

I picked it up.

Ari checked her clothes for stains. Drops of splatter glistened on her chin. “What do you think they’re selling?” he asked.

Rumors and buzz rippled through the crowd as if the body had been a pebble thrown into a pool of water.

Kids were inching their way up to the dummy body, taking low-res pictures of the aftermath, then leaving.

Until the disturbance faded away into nothing.

Ari was sure that it was a school-sponsored publicity stunt. She was only interested in it long enough to register that it was a bad publicity stunt, because she didn’t know what she was supposed to buy.

“Fail,” she said in a jaded voice, looking around to see if anyone was interested in her opinion.

But I wasn’t sure. There was something raw and clumsy about the spectacle that corporations just didn’t know how to imitate.

I guess I wanted to know what they were selling as much as everyone else…but I also wanted to know who
they
were.

Ari was hunched over her intouch(r). Her rapid thumb movements pounded out a text message, probably to one of the Craftsters. She snorted back laughter, then pressed Send.

My intouch(r) buzzed when she uploaded since I was subscribed to her stream. She had written:

aria:
i think i know who took your dress form @ROCKET “You think
that’s
Rocket’s dress form?” I asked, taking a closer look at the lifeless body.

Ari looked up. “What? No.” She glanced again at the dummy corpse. “No way. That’s not even close to her measurements. All the Craftsters made mannequins with our individual body shapes, and someone took Rocket’s last week from her work station. I bet Quelly took it.”

Ari went on to explain some ongoing Sweatshop drama. I was disappointed that she thought a misplaced mannequin was a more interesting whodunit than a body dropped from the fifth floor.

“Besides,” Ari said, “you shouldn’t comment on people’s private conversations, Kid. It’s rude.”

“Right. Sorry,” I mumbled.

“And it just leads to misunderstandings, which can cause emotional trauma, and result in mental anguish…”

Her voice trailed off as she checked her intouch(r). I didn’t know what Rocket replied since I wasn’t on her stream, but Ari said, “Hey, I need to go up to four. You coming?”

“No,” I said, still looking at the dummy corpse. “No, I have a meeting with Winterson. But you’re coming to the Studio later, right?”

Ari did that thing she does when she’s kind of annoyed. She shakes the hair out her eyes really fast, sighs dramatically, and does a kind of half-shrug, sending her bracelets hula-hooping into irritated little orbits around her wrists.

“I guess.”

I took one last look at the body. At the shape of the splatter mark, kind of bird-wing shaped. Then I started walking to the other side of the first floor, to Carol Winterson’s office.

I felt ridiculously sorry for it, the dummy. That no one cared that it ended its life for some unknowable reason, and now it was just lying there waiting for the cleanup crew to mop up its goo. Then I had to remind myself that it was fake. Not real.

Carol Winterson was my advisor. She was forty-mumble years old, but kind of new to the Game. I heard she had worked as a teacher in one of the last unaffiliated schools, but took the position because she wanted to be where the students needed her most. Which didn’t make any sense.

The Game gave us everything we wanted. It was
designed
to do that.

The Game started when the government admitted they had zero funding for education and the sponsors swooped in to invest in “the future.” They set up Game locations all over the nation, like chain stores, to guarantee that the quality of education would be consistent at all sites. This new system was good for the government, good for the economy, good for the students. A win-win-win situation, as they said in the marketing literature.

“Katey. Come in, have a seat. I’ll be with you in a sec.”

Winterson had the phone cradled between her shoulder and ear while she was trying to type something.

The sponsors didn’t bother hooking up the counselors and educators with their latest tech swag. They saved all the best toys for the kids.

I rubbed my thumb against my intouch(r), felt it purring in my pocket with news. I ached to pick it up and check the updates, but Winterson asked students to keep them off in her office.

I watched her fumble around with her ghetto technology, gray strands streaking through her frizzy dark hair like rocket trails in the night sky. She was clueless, but it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been stuck with someone semisavvy. One of those advisors who weren’t much more than failed cool hunters, roaming around the school with their hip hairstyles that were grab like maybe six months ago. Someone like Ari’s advisor, Jaye, who was more interested in hearing about self-esteem issues and asking leading questions on how we felt about the sponsors and school policies than providing educational guidance.

I tried to listen in on Winterson’s phone conversation.

Whoever she was talking to, it sounded like they were talking about me. Or I could just be a paranoid egomaniac, I don’t know. But the talk was overly cryptic, a lot of
mmhmm
s and glancing my way. The shadows in the corners of her mouth meant Winterson was pissed and bad at hiding it. She hung up, painfully civilized.

“Sorry about that, Katey. Let’s see now.” She squinted at her screen. “How’s things?”

“Fine, I guess.”

I dug around in the bowl of corporate candies Winterson kept on her desk, trying to find something not gross. She turned slightly and peered over her shoulder at the surveillance camera behind her before focusing on the screen again.

“Your scores are looking good,” she said. “You’re riding high on the bell curve.”

“Yay. I’m average,” I said, waving a cherry-flavored lollipop in sarcastic celebration.

Winterson’s lips tightened into a sympathetic smile.

I looked down and wrestled with the candy wrapper.

No matter how much time I dedicated to playing the Game, it didn’t feel like I was the kind of person who was ever going to get high scores.

“I see you got bonus points for speed on six of your last ten PLAY missions,” she said. I know she was trying to be encouraging, but it made me feel like a bigger loser.

“Yeah, I’ve been trying to solve the clues fast to get the time bonus. To save up score credit for completion prizes or whatever.”

“Is there a particular prize you have your eye on?”

The sponsors donated products to an end-of-year auction where the players with the highest scores could cash in their points for prizes after they completed their seventeenth and final level of the Game. I was still only on Level 15, but all the scores add up, so if I kept performing at this degree of dazzling mediocrity I would probably be able to afford like a “thanks for playing” button or something.

“My mom is hoping I can get enough points for the free ride scholarship.” It was a bundled package with prizes from restaurant and real-estate sponsors for everything I’d need for living a whole year in the city after I left the Game.

“But I’d really like recording and mixing gear for a home studio. Not that I’ll ever have the score for any of that, but…”

Winterson nodded and made a note in her computer.

“I see you’ve made some changes to your profile.”

“Yeah, you noticed?”

“It’s been flagged as ‘insufficient use of Network page’ by the administrators.”

I almost choked on the fruity juices of the lollipop.

“What? I’m not blowing off my content assignments. I uploaded some songs Mikey and I wrote a few weeks ago, and I just did that essay-review for media literacy score.”

“I know. Your Game content is fine, but they’re
concerned
about the status of your Network page. Here, under the About Me section, you wrote ‘None of the above.’”

I felt strangely embarrassed. I mean, I knew administrators monitored our pages—it was where we uploaded all our content assignments to be evaluated for score—but I didn’t think they would make a big deal about what I wrote in the About Me section. I knew other kids who’d written much worse.

“So?” I would’ve left it blank if I could. I couldn’t think of anything clever to put there, didn’t really know how to describe myself to potential viewers of my profile. “Aren’t we allowed to edit our pages?”

“It was such a dramatic change though,” she noted. “It alerted the administrators that there might be an issue you wished to discuss with me. A lot of identifying content had been removed. Have you recently had a falling-out with a friend?”

Our Network profile pages were created when our parents registered us for the Game. They supplied all the facts and details during sign-up, but we were supposed to be free to mod our layouts to express our aesthetics. I had never really been into code accessories so I’d always let Ari design my page.

She made the background photo collages of the two of us together, and maybe a lyric we’d written or something. It was sweet. But lately I noticed she had been putting things on my page that seemed more like she was describing the person she wished I was instead of who I was. So I tried to do it myself, and apparently failed at that, too.

Winterson struggled to swivel her screen toward me to show me my Network page. I barely glanced at it; I knew what it looked like.

Compared to the tricked-out layouts and designs of other kids’ pages, it was pretty pathetic.

“Your stated interests are: ‘friends, music, and mysteries,’” she read from the screen.

“Yeah, so? That’s all true.”

“I know, Katey, but don’t you think you could be a little more specific? Even your friend list is much less defined than a girl of your social capabilities should be. Why don’t you share more of your interests and activities? People want to get to know you.”

I made some noncommittal noises. I didn’t really know