Like We Care (18 page)

“You’re throwing bombs, just by refusing to get played.”

“We’re not buying this shit.”

She turned excitedly. “Kenny. Get a mike on. . .”

Her eyes met Todd’s. He went liquid. “Todd. But. . . Wait.”

He was engaged, he saw the whole picture. He would saw off a thumb to keep this girl’s attention, but he knew that if anything here was going to stick, it needed a face. And it wasn’t going to be his.

“You have to meet Joel Kasten. This was all his idea. He’s really the guy you want to interview.”

Her eyes searched the crowd. “We’ll talk to him, too. Where is he?”

“He’s at school right now. You know, we still have to be in class and stuff.”

In fact, Joel hadn’t come around yesterday, and might not today. His commitment was fading. That morning Todd saw Joel in the school parking lot with a full pack of cigarettes. He was buying somewhere.

“But he’s got a free hour after lunch. He’ll—”

Kenny had already handed Annie a lapel mike. With a brazenness that would’ve kicked off some great porn if he weren’t surrounded by several dozens of his classmates, Annie stuck her hand up inside the bottom of Todd’s shirt and started snaking the mike up toward his collar.

It tickled. There was way too much giggling going on here.

“Hey!” Todd protested, both at the intrusion and the predictable stirring in his shorts. Her fingers—her New York fingers—were cold against his skin.

“You want to be heard, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” he lied, yanking on the mike cable.

“Hey, kid,” Kenny growled darkly from beside the camera, “don’t fuck with that.”

Annie fussed with the mike, pinning it to Todd’s collar, then primping him as if she were his mother sending him off to Sunday school. His perimeter was
way
penetrated.

“Okay, so tell me about—”

“Look,” he protested, “I know how this works. This is all just entertainment for you guys. It’s all just crap to run between the commercials. If it doesn’t have the right angle, if it doesn’t look like everything else on R
²
Rev, it’s never going to see the light of day. Right?”

Annie studied him hard. Who
was
this kid? And how quickly would the Hutch Posners of the world seize up and die if there were too many more like him?

“Well, yeah.”

“Well, I think this is a good story. I think what we’re talking about here is important. But nobody at all would’ve bought into it if it wasn’t for Joel. He made the difference. So maybe you oughta take my word for it and give him a chance to tell you what this is all about. He’ll give you what you need.”

She could tell that this kid was the brains behind the movement. She understood the bargain being struck here. “And,” she said, “I’ll give
you
what you need.”

Todd shrugged. “I think people should hear what we’ve got to say. If R
²
Rev doesn’t want to run it. . . whatever. But I’m not doing this.”

He yanked the mike off. Annie was impressed. Here was a kid who didn’t want to mug for the camera, who obviously had a message, but was savvy enough to know that he didn’t have the charisma to pull it off. He obviously understood the medium. If he had found a face to sell the product, who was Annie to argue?

“Okay. We’ll wait.”

“Okay,” Todd said, more than a little spent. Here was this gorgeous older woman, from only the hottest channel in the country, with a video crew that could clearly kick his ass, and little Todd Noland had stood his ground. He was that sure he was onto something.

“So,” he wheezed, suddenly charged with occupying her until Joel turned up, “why didn’t you get somebody to shoot Casey Lattimer a long time ago?”

“C
ome on, dude. Let it go.”

Todd had pounced on Joel the moment he left his Spanish class. He breathlessly told him about this total piece of ass from R
²
Rev who was waiting for him down at the Happy Snack, eager to put him on camera and possibly before a national audience, espousing his views on the boycott.

But this girl and her crew were headed out of town. They had to go
now.

Joel wasn’t impressed.

“It’s kind of stale, isn’t it?”

“It’s stale because there hasn’t been anybody new to bring into this. Everybody we know paid attention for a couple weeks, and now it’s like ‘Yeah, yeah. . . whatever.’ What we cared about when this started hasn’t changed. We just needed fresh ears to hear about it. This is our chance!”

Todd’s enthusiasm wasn’t working on Joel. The average teenager was conditioned to pull away from anything suggesting sincerity or ambition. And, besides, who could be expected to stay passionate about something for more than a couple weeks anyway?

“I don’t know. . .”

“She’s killer, I’m telling you, dude. And she really cares about what we’re saying. Christ, she was actually interested in
me.
Wait’ll she gets a look at you.”

This Todd, he was good. Joel scrunched up his face with contemplation, then generously surrendered.

“Okay, but look, if I miss another practice, Coach is gonna call my old man, and I don’t need that kind of drama. Tell her if she’ll come to the field—”

“No! It has to be at the Happy Snack. They need to do you there, for the visuals.”

Joel studied him hard. It was like there was software downloaded into this kid that no one else his age had access to.

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“Because I’ve ruled Video Club since seventh grade,” he pleaded without embarrassment. “Because the whole time you’ve been out winning trophies and bagging the honeys and being Big Chief Jockstrap, I’ve been home watching television. Really
watching
television. This is stuff I know about.”

Joel hadn’t really noted Todd’s intensity on this whole thing until now. And, for the first time, it seemed like too much.

“Look,” he withdrew. “I think I just want to—”

“Dude, you have no clue what it’s like to not have anything going on,
ever.
Since kindergarten, you’ve had all of us kissing your ass and making your life pretty damned sweet. Everything you do, somebody notices.

“This thing down at the Happy Snack,
I
did that. You’re the one everybody’s listening to, but who put you up to it? I wanted to see what would happen and, dude,
something happened.
”

Joel instinctively wanted to rebut this, wanted to challenge Todd’s assertion that Joel was anything other than the true instigator of their little protest. But there was no getting around the fact that when Todd first started yammering about money and cigarettes and sticking it to Jimmy the Swami, Joel didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“I just want to see this through to the end. I just want to find out if I really got this figured out. You know?”

Joel felt his longing. They had been best friends way back when—virtual strangers in the middle bit, Joel actually pretty shitty to him when their paths crossed—but here they were: older, more filled in. And good friends once again.

That thing that had brought them together as five-year-olds—who knew it was still living there? Surely anything that innocent should’ve been ground down and excreted years ago.

But there it was.

Joel looked at Todd with a bemused shake of the head. “You are too numerous,” he said with a crooked grin. “Maybe the most. The most numerous.”

Todd was already leading Joel down the hallway. He whipped out a legal pad full of notes. Talking points.

“Okay, I don’t know how much time she’s gonna give you, so I think you should start with this. . .”

He was gorgeous. Annie had to give Todd that. When he delivered Joel to her, the parking lot crowd parted reverently to let him pass, like he was Jesus come to say whatever it was that Jesus had to say that day, and she instantly saw that he had It. Whatever quality it was that made celluloid and pixels resonate
just so
for those who find fortune with their good looks, this Joel Kasten kid splashed it around more than a little.

He might open his mouth and she’d be in the van and gone before he got to his first “dude,” but just to look at him? That thing you wanted to have twanged? Annie’s got twanged.

“Christ, he’s my little brother’s age,” Annie thought as she sized him up.

Introductions were made, and Annie’s hand went up Joel’s shirt with the mike. There was absolutely nothing appropriate about the way she noted how taut and hairless his stomach was.

The throng, given almost two hours to turn out at word of R
²
Rev’s presence, had grown to a gratifying size. And they all hooted derisively as Joel got felt up by this honey from New York.

He preened and flashed his goofy smile. Annie blushed, withdrew her hand, and composed herself for her first question. Carlos was already taping. He wanted to get the hell out of this hick burg.

“All right. Joel Kasten, seventeen. Senior, Dickinson High School. Berline, Illinois. Tell me what’s going on here.”

Joel centered himself. Todd had put a lot of pressure on him on the way over, and all of a sudden everything was on him. It was going to take a little time to ramp up.

“Okay. Well, you know. . . Like, when did you start smoking?”

“Who says I—?”

“You reek,” he said, beaming guiltily. There was nothing better than knocking a pretty girl down a peg or two.

Annie maintained a professional non-reaction as the boys in the crew stifled laughs.

“I started smoking when I was fifteen.”

“And you knew cigarettes could kill you. You
still
know cigarettes could kill you, right? Cancer will pretty much kick your ass if it gets hold of you. Right?”

“Okay. . .”

“And the companies that make the cigarettes, they know this. Right?”

“They say—”

“These companies
know
that a few hundred thousand people a year die from cigarettes, and they
know
that almost all of them started smoking when they were young and stupid and easy to fool, just like us. Right? And once you start, it’s almost impossible to stop. They
know
this.”

“Sure.”

“The laws, which are a joke, tell them they can’t be selling to us, but they’d have no business without us. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So, and maybe I’m just talking outta my ass, but—can I say ‘ass’?”

“Yes,” Annie said, perturbed at Joel for continually breaking his flow. She was already seeing the edit. “We like ‘ass’.”

“So maybe I’m talking outta my ass, but it seems pretty obvious to me that these companies are okay with killing teenagers by the thousands just to make a buck. And I don’t know why we’re not pissed off about that. Christ, if these same old farts were up in the water tower shooting us down in those kinds of numbers, we’d kick their asses.

“I mean, I know we’re supposed to smoke because we’re
not
supposed to smoke, know what I’m saying? And, yeah, it’ll piss off our parents and make us look like hard-asses and, anyway, if the cancer’s gonna get us, it’s not like it’s gonna get us
today.

“So, we all—everybody who smokes—we think we’re getting away with something all sneaky and cool, and meanwhile we’re doing just what the cigarette companies are banking on us doing.

“We’re getting played, maybe to death,” Joel summed up with a genuine sense of bafflement. “Just seems like a hell of a price to pay for a pose.”

Annie listened, transfixed. This was great stuff.

“So. . .?”

“So we figured it out,” he shrugged cockily. “And we’re not buying this shit.”

“Does this mean—?”

“And you know what else I found out?” Joel was getting revved up. “The clothes and shoes and crap we all spend way too much money on, the stuff that they spend about twelve billion dollars advertising to drill it into our heads that we ain’t happening unless we’re wearing their shit. You know who makes that stuff? Little kids! Poor little tiny kids, making like two nickels a day in some smelly-ass country, for stuff that we’re spending hundreds,
thousands
of dollars on. What’s up with that?”

Todd grew uneasy, wondering if he should find a way to cut Joel off— this wasn’t from the talking points. Joel was tapping into his own storehouse of knowledge. That couldn’t be good.

And yet Joel was now sounding his most impassioned, and it was coming through. Annie hung on his every word.

“I mean, hey,
we’re
teenagers. We’re obnoxious and lazy and stupid. If you want to see us suffer, who could blame you? But. . .” He fumbled for a second, honestly offended by the thought. “Little kids, eight- and nine-year-old kids, not getting to play, just working all the time for like no money, all so we can look fine down at the mall and maybe get some nookie?

“We’re supposed to be cool with that? I don’t think so.”

The moment presented itself. He went for it.

He was wearing a J. Crew collared shirt, one of his favorites. And he impulsively yanked at it, ripping off buttons as it tore. His lapel mike flew off with the shirt; Annie, with remarkable agility, grabbed it in mid-air and trained it on Joel, who now stood before the camera shirtless, his chiseled chest and sculpted biceps rendering him nearly god-like.