Like We Care (14 page)

It was this gap—between the basically normal kids Annie worked with and the net-deformed poseurs who swaggered and sulked within her view— that caught Annie’s attention. Clearly a fair number of her stringers were avid R
²
Rev fans. The net’s astronomical ratings and broad demographics confirmed that. But these kids weren’t buying into the whole package. They were cherry-picking what they needed from the programming without allowing it to define them.

These kids, Annie noted, weren’t truly represented in the R
²
Rev universe. Because they had no visual appeal or behavioral toxicity, the net’s “regular” fans weren’t getting their due. Since her own studies in the field found that the vast majority of R
²
Rev’s viewers skewed normal, wouldn’t the net be broadening its appeal by giving them some attention?

Her reports would be cutting edge, would still root themselves in teens sticking it to convention, but be free of piercings, tattoos, gangsta armor, and sneering contempt. Just for variety.

This was the pitch Annie had breathlessly begun to lay on Hutch earlier in the week, just as he was being called into a meeting. She hadn’t heard from him since.

“Annie, hi!” Gwen had chirped with a flat-toned peppiness. Annie hated Gwen, knew that she had been sleeping with Hutch for the past several months. Way beyond that, Annie also knew that despite the fact that Gwen was merely a ten-dollar-an-hour assistant, she was
there
, in Manhattan, at the core of the R
²
Rev dynamo, while Annie—VP In Charge of Extracting Casey Lattimer’s Head From His Ass—was interminably, inextricably elsewhere.

“You know what? You just missed him. He just went into his nine o’clock.”

Annie simmered. Grinding her teeth, she glanced toward the bank and saw an ancient-looking and very skittish guard actually opening the door in response to Casey’s diarrhea dance. She figured she was obligated to keep half an eye on this to see if it led anywhere.

“Since when has Hutch had a nine o’clock?”

“It’s actually yesterday’s three o’clock. He’s a very busy boy, you know. So how
are
you?”

“Gwen, look. I need to talk to him. I want you to tell him I do not appreciate being ignored like this.”

“Annie,” Gwen said in a disapproving tone, not as an assistant protecting her boss but like a spouse defending her man. “Hutch gets all of his messages. Who he chooses to return is his business. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him when he finds the time.”

Annie heard the bleat of Gwen’s other line. “Sweetie, I have to—”

Annie jabbed dead her cell, refusing Gwen the satisfaction of casting her back into oblivion. In a jarring paranoid flash, she pictured Hutch dialing in on the other line from his office fifteen feet away, conspiring with Gwen in this bit of theatre to keep Annie and her dream away from him.

The bank guard had now detected something hinky in this ridiculous young man begging to use his toilet. He was trying to pull the door shut, but Casey—God love him—had jammed his foot in the way.

Yeah, this’ll play in the package somewhere, Annie noted.

She hit the speed dial for her stringer in Elmwood Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb a day’s drive away. In addition to scouring for Casey environments, Annie had begun to ask her stringers to come back to her with story ideas that fed into her vision of profiling less odious members of the net’s audience. Look beyond the rote delinquency and easy posturing. What were kids
really
pissed off about?

Karen Dix—16 and plain, anorexic but fighting back—picked up.

“Karen, hey. It’s Annie McCullough with—”

The sound of the gunshot stilled the town square. Annie remained unmoved for a millisecond, programmed from birth to know that the sound of a bullet was merely entertainment fodder on her TV: carnage had now commenced, to be pantomimed for your viewing pleasure.

But then she turned with a jerk toward the bank.

Casey was balled up on the ground, clutching his side and gasping violently for air. The doddering old guard stood frozen in confusion, the gun still in his hand, as Annie’s crew leapt from the van.

In a subsequent unguarded millisecond, during the thin slice of reality in which a person’s response is unchecked and pure as ether, Annie caught herself thinking eagerly:

“Wait’ll New York sees
this!
”

H
istory would show that it was a boy named Wad who bit first.

He was gathered there at the Happy Snack with Joel and Slopes and the rest of the tribe, luxuriating on a brilliant, biting fall afternoon. The hoods and side panels of their cars, heated by the sun, provided a womb-like embrace as the boys pressed against their vehicles for warmth.

There was the usual flow in and out of the store, Joel’s fading declaration of a consumer boycott having impressed pretty much no one. Joel himself seemed ready to crack, his nicotine jones perhaps behind him, but the relentless need to buy something sweet or salty or crunchy or bubbly or gooey pressing in on him like a thumb against an artery.

Already Todd had seen him sneak a drag off someone else’s cigarette and a fistful of Cheetos from someone else’s bag, after which he looked to Todd with a shrug that was both defiance and self-loathing.

“Dude, this is
hard
,” the look said.

Everyone was waiting for the moment that came every afternoon when Daljit Singh emptied the trash cans and lugged the bags to the dumpster. His wife—sullen and scared and seemingly three feet tall—would be brought down from their apartment above the store to grimly man the cash register, at which time the day’s prime shoplifting would commence. Before departing the store every afternoon, Daljit moved over-stock items to prominent shelf positions in hopes that the thieves would rid him of merchandise cluttering up his miniscule storage closet. He would write them into that night’s lost inventory report, and the store’s mark-up would rise another fraction of a cent. The day of the six dollar hotdog drew even closer.

The throng stirred as the simmering brown man made his exit, fumbling beneath the squishy bulk of several slick bags of garbage, just from inside the store. By this time of day, the four trash cans in the parking lot would be overflowing and in need of relief.

It was like leaves from a tree or skin from a snake—the debris left behind by the endless banquet.

Daljit always had to elbow his way through the mob to get to the trash cans, the teenagers leaning against the receptacles as if they would crumple to the ground from sheer lack of will if not for the support. Again, there was a glowering strand of racism that some of the more brutish boys laid upon the dark-toned shopkeeper in order to keep their testosterone percolating. Daljit sucked it up and bowed timidly, praying that such boys would continue to patronize him in whatever manner they found pleasing.

Wad Wendell watched Daljit through a slit-eyed sneer. “You know, my grandpa died in World War II tryin’ to
kill
people like that.”

A happy snort escaped from Todd’s lips. “Yeah, parachuting into India and shooting up the place pretty much turned the war around. I hear Spielberg’s about to start production on
Saving Wad’s Grandpa.”

Elemental in this wise-ass remark was at least a passing grasp of world history, which left Wad completely unarmed. All he could do in rebuttal was grunt and spit toward Todd’s feet.

Wad lit his last smoke and threw the empty pack to the ground. Slopes was already in movement, headed for the store. He put out his hand to Wad.

“Lend me five bucks. I’ll buy you another pack while I’m in there.”

Wad instinctively jabbed his hand into his pocket to comply, but when it returned with a balled up twenty, he unfurled it and studied it with new purpose. He looked again toward Daljit Singh, barking at a couple of sophomores for ignoring the freshly emptied trash can and throwing their refuse at his feet.

He considered his twenty again, eyeing it meaningfully as if about to send it on a long journey, then returned his disapproving glare to Daljit Singh.

“Nah,” he said to Slopes while looking to Joel for approval. “Think I’ll pass.”

Wad took the top corners of the bill between his thumb and forefingers and idly let it air out.

Slopes redirected his open palm to Joel. “Five bucks.”

Joel went into his pocket and found a ten. He smiled at Slopes as if prepared to comply, but then smoothed the bill out against the muscled contour of his leg. “Sorry. Got other plans for this.”

A cloak of solidarity seemed to be falling over the gang. Slopes grew pissed and slightly panicked as everyone looked away, intent on jerking him around.

He finally descended on Todd, parked on the hood of Ted Starkey’s Camry. Slopes was a starting defensive lineman—he could easily beat the shit out of Todd Noland, which he did once when they were in the eighth grade.

“I want you to think very carefully before answering this question: Five bucks.”

Todd knew the eyes of Joel and the others were upon him, but to enlist them in his defense would be pussy. He looked past Slopes and saw Daljit Singh working his way toward them. They had stationed themselves alongside one of the trash cans.

Events were coalescing. If this was to be about taking stands, here was his.

“Nah,” Todd drawled boldly.

Slopes bore down. “Asswipe, you want I should—”

“Yo, Jimmy,” Wad suddenly said, trying to throw some muscle into his voice. “You lookin’ for this?”

Everyone turned as Wad continued to brandish the twenty dollar bill like a banner. Daljit, who was legitimately scared of the burly senior boys towering over him, forced himself to look up from his garbage duty.

Wad stared him down cockily. “Thinkin’ I might just hang onto this. What do you think about that? Thinkin’ you might not be taking any more money offa me. Ever. That be okay by you?”

Daljit could’ve fallen back on his usual shtick of pretending not to understand English, but he felt something menacing bubbling up. His wife was alone in the store. He needed to eat whatever shit was required here and get back to his post.

He looked from Wad to Joel and the others. Joel, his ten spot still in hand, understood. He unfurled his money in the same fashion as Wad and displayed it to Daljit with a thin smile.

The others saw that something was happening and proceeded to fish through their pockets. The stand being taken was lost on most. All that mattered was that they follow the lead, just like always.

Todd watched the defiance flow slowly through the group. There was no taunting, no harsh words, as they stared down Daljit Singh. Just a small regalia of paper money, like flags of a united nation, blowing in the breeze.

Awed, Todd almost missed the chance to take part. He quickly burrowed into his jacket pocket and unearthed a single damned dollar bill. He had to laugh to himself. Once again, Todd Noland comes up small.

But denomination wasn’t the point. He staked his dollar alongside the others: The front was complete.

The parking lot crowd was aware of what was happening. The freshmen and sophomores, ever-mindful of trends set by the upper classmen that would trigger which lemming-like behavior they would be obliged to indulge in, paid close attention.

“We’re tired of you taking all our money and treating us like shit,” Wad said with a swagger. “Till you start showing us some respect, this all stays with us.”

As he watched his livelihood disappear back into the pockets of those accursed loose-fitting khakis, Daljit suddenly understood what was being threatened. This was food taken from his children’s mouths, dollars that one day would stretch end to end to carry him and his family back to his beloved India.

He was outnumbered, but war had been declared.

“This parking lot is all for customers,” he hissed. “You be buying something, or I call police!”

Joel stood up and drew closer. As always, he would see this through.

“You really wanna do that?” he asked. “’Cause once you’re through, we’ll tell ’em how you’ve been selling cigarettes to fifteen-year-olds by the case. You couldn’t even
begin
to pay the fine they’d lay on you.”

It always led back to money: How much could you take off this mob? How much could
that
mob take off you?

Daljit saw nowhere to go. He spit angrily and went back to struggling with the full trash receptacle, an incensed stream of foreign curses billowing from his clenched teeth. “American fuckers” was the sole English phrase that could be understood by the crowd.

The trash bag was stuck, it was so full of paper and plastic and cardboard. He fought with it furiously as the teens watched in amusement.

Then a small, nearly weightless object bounced off his pant cuff and jangled to the cement. The penny danced in a weak circle for a second or two before lying down flat.

Joel stood over Daljit, smiling coldly. “A little something for you.”

Wad, never one to miss a chance to piss on someone, found a penny in his pocket and lofted it in a lazy arc toward the shopkeeper. Some of the guys in the gang did, too, followed by a junior none of them recognized.

Pennies started falling all around Daljit’s feet. Feeling the mocking sting as each hit the pavement, he pulled the full trash bag from its container with one mighty tug, quickly replaced it with an empty, and began pushing his way back toward his store.

One kid, a truly dangerous sophomore named Dan Kilby, whipped a penny at Daljit with full force, catching the man in the neck. Skin was broken.

Joel saw this and jumped up on the hood of his car.

“Hey!” he shouted.

Everyone turned. He could convey it with a look: This wasn’t about physically hurting anyone.

Daljit rubbed his stung neck, confused why this boy had come to his defense.

A few more pennies were flung lazily, but by this time Daljit had reached the front door and disappeared back inside. He passed teenagers emerging empty-handed—word had already spread that a boycott was on. When the crowd saw that they had refrained from buying, some applauded.