The Unidentified (7 page)

I just got messages from the sponsors, and a few updates from Ari, but no shout-outs to respond to. I put my intouch(r) away and was about to jump down from the edge of the planter but stopped to stare at a peek of pink blooming in the black soil where the “trees” buried their roots.

Someone on the other side of the planter said the words “Illegal Arts Workshop.” I perked up and tuned in on their conversation. Notice of Illegal Arts Workshops were spread entirely through word-of-mouth. They were totally unauthorized, and always a guaranteed good time.

But it wasn’t just the content of the conversation that caught my attention, I couldn’t stop listening to the sound of the speaker’s voice. I knew it from somewhere. I turned to see who was talking, and recognized the guy from the Park the other day sitting on the opposite edge of the planter.

He was flirting with a girl who looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen her before.

but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen her before.

She had short black hair and a small pink circle drawn high on her cheekbone. I was still trying to figure out how I knew her, when she looked over at me. The way she was staring reminded me of the birds in the Pit, defiant and unblinking.

The Urban Climber guy with the honeybee voice turned to look at me then too. He smiled, and I should’ve looked away, pretended to mess around with my intouch(r) or something, but instead I sort of smiled back. I felt caught.

That’s the best word I had to explain it—captured.

Captivated.

“Is there something we can help you with?” he said pleasantly, even though I’d just got caught lurking.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I grabbed my bag to leave, when I decided to just ask him. “You were in the Park the other day,” I said. “You were telling everyone whether they were in or out.”

“Yes,” he answered, even though I didn’t get a chance to ask my question.

“What were…How did you decide who to choose?”

The girl still hadn’t said a word, but she was staring at me hard. I couldn’t read her expression, and it was making me uncomfortable.

He shrugged and said, “It was completely random.

How do you choose?”

Something javajacked in my memory when he spoke the word “choose.” “What do you mean?”

“That’s what they want to know: what’s in and who’s out. They monitor all our interactions, looking for a way to out. They monitor all our interactions, looking for a way to untangle our complicated social systems to know what string to pull. When they’re watching for reasons, a random choice is the most subversive.”

I thought about that for a while. I understood all the words he used, but it still felt like he was speaking another language.

I glanced quickly at the girl he was with, then said, “You told me I was in.”

“Yeah, well. What do I know, right?”

He turned back to the girl with eyes like a bird, and I felt…disappointed.

“Kid!” I heard Ari calling my name. “Kid!”

I looked out from my corner, back into the brightness of the Pit. The sun reflected off the white tabletops, and through the glare I saw Ari. She was surrounded by a colorful flock of Craftsters. Ari waved me over and I got up to go to her.

“See you later, Kid,” the guy said softly as I hurried past them. I sat by Ari in the bright sun, trying to shake off the weird feeling. He made me feel like he could see my secrets, and I didn’t even know his name.

“What was going on over there?” Ari asked, craning her neck to look at the shadowy corner.

“Nothing. I don’t know,” I said honestly, but Ari frowned like I was keeping something from her.

She turned back to the Craftsters and continued to add her voice and laughter to the chatter. I just kind of sat there, watching them flip through pages of glossy feminist magazines, their poet-rockstar hairstyles teased up like the magazines, their poet-rockstar hairstyles teased up like the feather displays of jungle birds.

My intouch(r) chirped. I had gotten a new PLAY message:

PLAY:
what is the acceleration of a body in free fall?

submit before noon for time bonus.

I stared at the question. I knew “body” meant “any object” in physics-talk, but the question was eerie considering what went down here yesterday. The creepy feeling that someone knew my secrets just got stronger. It couldn’t be a coincidence—the administrators and sponsors must know something about that stunt, right?

I heard one of the Craftsters shriek, “Yeah! We should totally go!” followed by the goose-squawks of everyone’s chairs getting pushed back at the same time.

Ari was on her feet and noticed that I was still sitting there. She looked at me, then back to the rest of the crew flocking toward the passage, chitter-chatter and perfume plumes following after them.

Rocket glanced back at Ari, “You coming?”

Ari said she was coming, but sat down beside me, grinning at me, all breathless and brilliant.

Anyway, there we were alone at last and she was like, “Hey. So, did you hear?”

“What?”

“Come on, don’t
tell
me you didn’t hear.”

“Ari. Just say it.”

Ari had been known to hype the news of what she ate for breakfast.

“Guess whose page Aerwear cool hunters have visited eight times now?”

Her uncorked-champagne thumbs popped up, pointing to her chest with all the subtlety of a neon sign.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been tracking views,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “There’s a script code you can just copy and paste to watch who’s watching—but don’t spread it around, because admin will block it if they find out.” Then she squealed, “I’m totally going to get branded!”

“That’s great!” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could fake.

She frowned. “You’re just saying that.”

“What?”

“You don’t really want me to get branded.”

It kind of sucked that Ari knew me so well.

“I know this is something you really, really want. And you deserve it. You’ve been working so hard. I will be deliriously happy for you when you get it.”

Ari jumped up, flung her arms around my head, and squeezed.

I didn’t really see the point of branding. What was so great about being linked to a logo? Or maybe I just cultivated this attitude because it was never going to happen to me, and it was just easier to laugh with Mikey about it than obsessing over attracting cool hunter attention like Ari did.

People who got branded enjoyed a fair amount of fame and notoriety on campus. And if Ari got her status upgraded to the It List, everyone was going to know her name. She would get access to the VIP Lounge, the gathering place for Generation Triple-A. It was the exclusive lounge where rumors were made—the rumors of the place itself were legendary. All the free stuff they get. How they get to mingle with the cool hunters and brand representatives, who listen to them because their opinions
matter
and can make a difference. Getting branded fast- tracked you into a career of media, marketing, and shaping public opinion, which was what Ari always wanted.

She checked her intouch(r), then looked at me. “You are coming, right? You should COME!”

“Where?”

“To the Physics of Hollywood walkthrough in the Lecture Hall. Palmer Phillips invited Rocket and all of us to come because they’re going to sneak-preview clips from next summer’s blockbusters.”

Ari guilted me into following along with the other Craftsters, so I logged in to one of the scheduled Hints, Cheats, and Walkthroughs.

The lesson would probably cover some momentum and trajectory physics questions, and it would be the quickest way to solve my PLAY clue. But mostly I went to be with Ari. It felt like we weren’t interested in the same stuff anymore, and I missed just being around her. I didn’t need a Newtonian equation to figure out that the distance between us would increase at a ridiculous rate if we didn’t spend more time together.

So we all logged in to the Lecture Hall. It was a grab lesson. Mr. Tom Rogers was debunking the physics of Hollywood; showing all the action scenes of bodies flying through glass windows, noncombustible objects bursting into flames, guys getting electrocuted, stuff like that. Then he used computer animation (he’s the Digital Visual Effects instructor up on fifth) to enter in equations and apply the laws of physics to the scenes.

It was actually creepier to see the scenes with the real- world effects. Gruesome. Everyone in the Lecture Hall cringed as the carnage piled up on screen. Palmer Phillips had his arm around Rocket. She closed her eyes and hid her face in his shoulder. Palmer and some of his wiseass friends were laughing, but it was nervous laughter, the tone of it a little too sharp to be genuine.

I texted Mikey.

kidzero:
what do you think about mixing recordings of laughter? @MIKEY
kidzero:
it would make acoustically extreme music @MIKEY
mikes:
do it. @KID I set my intouch(r) to record, waiting for the nervous titters. I was feeling restless. Screens never held my attention for very long, even if they were flashing a series of crumpling bodies, and my attention started to wander.

Watching the wide eyes of the audience.

I noticed someone else not paying attention. I recognized her, the girl with the bird eyes from this morning.

Was she following me?

I could hardly see her face because her head was bent down, focused on her desk. She was carving something into the plastic desktop.

Her hair was shaved in the back, bowl-cut on top. It wasn’t a very grab haircut, but it made clear that she wasn’t trying to be pretty. Silver earrings lined the rim of her ear and I recognized the pink circle high on her cheekbone. I couldn’t tell if it was makeup or paint or a tattoo or what.

There was a screech of car tires on the screen, a sickening crash, and the kids groaned. Then laughed.

But she didn’t look up. The slow-burning flames from the screen reflected in her straight black hair, which swayed slightly with the effort of etching something into the desk.

Mr. Rogers gave some final hints to the class about Newton’s Second Law and the forces acting on a falling object, and then the lesson was over.

I quickly thumbed in my PLAY reply:
9.8 m/s2
and hit Submit.

Ari said loudly to the Craftsters, “I swear to Google, I think I almost puked.”

They all chattered in agreement, their faces lit with delighted terror.

“Did you almost puke?” Ari asked me.

I was watching the girl write on the desk.

“Did you almost puke?” she asked me again. “That was sick, right?”

I nodded, distracted. Everyone was gathering their stuff and heading toward the exit, but Palmer Phillips was walking over to the girl finishing up the etching in her desk.

She looked up to see him standing there, all broad shoulders and unnaturally blond hair. She quickly picked up her stuff to leave, and he just grinned at her. I’d heard that Palmer Phillips had his right canine sharpened to start a new trend—so far the lopsided vampire look hadn’t caught on.

“Ari?” I said, grabbing her arm. “Who’s that? Over there with Palmer Phillips.”

At the sound of Palmer’s name, Ari laser-beamed her attention to that side of the room. She frowned. “That’s Cayenne Lewis.”

“What?”
I nearly shrieked. “
That’s
Cayenne Lewis?” I stared at her trying to stash her things into her bag and ignore Palmer. “What happened to her?”

Ari nodded. “I know, right? She looks horrible. That haircut makes her look like a Beijing special-needs orphan.

I know she got dropped, that the Fashion Fascists kicked her out of the clique and everything. But come on. Did they go to her house and smash all her mirrors? There’s no excuse for looking that militantly tragic.”

“Why’d they kick her out?”

Ari shrugged. “Does there have to be a reason?”

I don’t know. Didn’t there?

I watched her as she rushed toward the exit of the Lecture Hall. Cayenne Lewis, holy shit. I looked closely at

her face and could almost recognize it, that profile passing everyone in the hall , never looking at them. Her hair had been really long when she was a Fashion Fascist. She would toss it over her shoulder like she was in a shampoo commercial and laugh. That was probably why I didn’t recognize her. That carefree vacant look she had was gone. Now she looked people in the face and dared them to blink.

“I thought she moved away or something,” I mumbled.

“Who?” Ari said, then realized I was still talking about Cayenne. “Oh.”

Ari let herself get swallowed up in the activity of the Craftsters, and I took a detour to the desk where Cayenne had been sitting. I read what she had written:

Suicide doll’s suicide

Pretty, but with death there’s no way to hide

Afraid to make a cut, see there’s nothing inside

If your friends told you to jump off a bridge

You’d step to the edge and fly.

I read through it a couple of times. Suicide doll. Even though it was a pretty gruesome poem, I smiled. I glanced at my balloon-face wrist accessory. The dot-dash-dot symbol carved into the plastic desktop looked like the expression on the balloon. Cayenne Lewis had to be connected to the body-drop stunt. Somehow.