So Yesterday (12 page)

The party's edges softened around me, and I started to
see imperfections
in
my fellow
penguins' bow ties. All that individuality being expressed, according to Emily
Post. Or had I gone with Vanderbilt? I couldn't remember, which seemed like a
bad sign.

Perhaps my anxiety didn't have to do with Mandy's
disappearance, the potential dangers of the anti-client, the pretensions of the
hoi
aristoi,
or even the mysteries of Jen's
affections. It wasn't even low blood sugar. It was much simpler than that.

I was alone at a parry.

No one likes to feel left out. Like the small herd of
stuffed impalas gazing sightlessly across the room toward me, I was a social
animal. And here I was standing in a tuxedo, holding a gift bag and an empty
glass of orange juice, feeling alone among a bunch of people I didn't know and
instinctively didn't like.

Where was Jen? I thought of calling her but didn't
really have anything to report yet. It just looked like any other launch party
so far.

At this point I would have settled for a glimpse of
the bald guy, even NASCAR Man or Future Woman. Hiding or fleeing would be
better than standing around alone. Anything to give me a purpose.

Another tray went by, carrying something that looked
like food, and I followed it.

The tray led me down a short hall toward the
outer-space section of the museum. The planetarium rose up before me, a huge
white globe on curved legs, as awe inspiring as an alien spaceship. Yet as so
often happens in museums, I was thinking about food. I plowed after the tray,
not catching the white-coated caterer until he was mobbed by a small and hungry
crowd.

The tray was covered with sushi experiments gone awry,
tiny towers of fish eggs and multicolored tentacles, something that
nonmetaphorical penguins might eat. Not exactly what I'd been hunting for, but
I grabbed a pair of what looked like plain rice balls and stuffed one into my
mouth. Something inside it exploded into saltiness and fishiness, a sushi booby
trap. I swallowed anyway, then inhaled the second.

My mouth was so full that I couldn't scream when a certain
bald-headed man stepped up next to me.

Chapter
16

"MRRF,"
I SAID IN ALARM.

He muttered something incoherent, his eyes drifting
past me.

I swallowed the rice ball in a solid, choking clump.

He kept muttering, and gradually I realized that he
wasn't muttering at me. A thin black headset stretched in front of his mouth,
and his eyes had the faraway look of the homeless and the wireless. He was on a
hands-free phone, and his gaze went
straight
through
me.

With my blond hair and penguin suit, I was invisible.

I turned and took a few steps away, the tight fist of
nerves in my mostly empty stomach slowly unclenching, no longer threatening to
squeeze the swallowed-whole sushi back up. I continued toward the planetarium,
trying to take even steps, until a hanging beach-ball-sized model of Saturn
presented itself.

I ducked behind the planet and counted to ten, waiting
for his bald head to appear, another five goons behind him wearing headsets and
predatory smiles.

But he didn't come, and I dared a glimpse.

He stood in the same spot, still talking on his
headset. He was a non-penguin, dressed in the all black of security personnel
and surveying the crowd, clearly on the lookout.

For me.

I smiled. Jen's disguise had worked. He hadn't
connected the new non-Hunter with the skater kid he'd seen this morning.

Still, walking back past him seemed like pushing my
luck. I looked ahead for another section of the party to explore. In front of
me the planetarium was admitting a steady stream of partyers into its maw. A
sign announced continuous showings of the new TV ad for Poo-Sham. Inside it
would be dark, and I could recover my cool in a familiar focus-group-like
setting. Watching advertisements was something I was good at.

I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the
hanging planet, striding purposefully toward the planetarium. On the way I
snagged a glass of champagne, straightening my cuff links and feeling very
secret agent.

************************************

Poo-Sham turned out to be some
pretty trippy shampoo.

The lights dimmed in the planetarium. The chairs
tipped back, and my body sank into the rumbling presence of a museum-class
speaker system. Stars shimmered to life above our heads, as crystal clear as
on some cold night on a high mountain.

Then a rectangle of light appeared, a giant television
screen carving itself out from the universe.

The ad began in the usual shampoo-ad way—a model in
the shower, lather covering her head. Then she was dressing, her hair dry and
bouncing in slow motion, with the best highlights that special effects could
produce. (Somewhere, lower-level Lexa types had acted as machines for turning
coffee into highlights.)

Then the model's date arrived. Her Poo-Sham hair
dazzled him, and he sputtered, "Did you just shake a tower?"

She smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.

Next they were arriving at the theater, and the usher,
tongue-tied by the glamorous hair, babbled, "May I sew you to your
sheets?"

Our heroine smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.

Then at dinner the still-bedazzled date ordered
"lack of ram with keys and parrots."

Guess what? Smacuous viling, hicking of flair.

The ad ended with a close-up on the bottle and a
voice-over:

"Poo-Sham—it horrifies your glare!"

The planetarium went dark, the audience buzzing for a
moment in Poo-Sham bemusement and giggles. Then some sort of software freak-out
seemed to take over the projector. The entire screen flickered rapidly back and
forth from deep blue to blinding red, sending a needle of weirdness deep into
my brain.

The flashing stopped as suddenly as it had started,
and the stars came back, the lights came up, and people were clapping.

I stumbled out of the planetarium, blinking, having
completely forgotten the bald guy, the anti-client, everything. The flashing
screen had done something to me.

The champagne glass in my hand was empty, so I grabbed
another orange juice from a tray. Half-formed thoughts flickered through me, as
if somebody had hit the reboot switch for my brain.

This orange juice turned out to be even more spiked
than the first one I'd had, but I needed its cold reality in my hand. So I kept
drinking, trying to walk off the weirdness left over from the Poo-Sham
experience.

Something was bothering the back of my mind, not
allowing me to settle. Like everyone, I've watched a lot of TV, seen
lots
of advertisements. I've even
been paid to critique them. But something was deeply wrong with the Poo-Sham
ad. Not just the flickering screen at the end, but some even bigger affront to
my sensibilities.

It hadn't looked
real.

You know when you're watching a movie, and someone's
watching TV in the movie, and it's showing some TV show that doesn't really
exist, with some fake talk-show host they just invented for the movie? And it
always looks
wrong?
That happens because you and I, like every other
American, are partly machines for turning coffee into TV watching. And we're
really, really good at it.

Two seconds after switching on a television show, we
know whether it's from the late 1980s or last year and whether it's a cop show
or a sitcom or a made-for-TV movie, major network or public broadcasting or the
dog-walking channel, all this from subtle clues of lighting, camera angles, and
the quality of the videotape. Instantly.

You can't get anything past us.

"Roo-Sham isn't peal," I said aloud.

A men's room door caught the corner of my eye, and I
pushed my way in. Setting the empty glass on the sink, I rummaged through my
gift bag and found the tiny complimentary bottle of Poo-Sham.

I squished a bit onto one finger. It was bright purple
but otherwise looked and smelled like shampoo. Running the water, I rubbed it
into a lather. It foamed up in a very shampoolike way.

In the mirror a wild-eyed, peroxided stranger who had
clearly gone insane stared back at me.

I frowned. Maybe the day's paranoid proceedings had
gone to my head, or maybe Jen's hair acid really had leached into my brain.
Apparently Poo-Sham was real. They just had a goofy advertising campaign. I
sighed and washed my hands.

For five minutes I washed my hands.

But they remained purple.

************************************

Poo-Sham was a sham. It was some sort of seriously
strong dye. The entire party was a plot to turn rich people purple.

"This doesn't make any sense," I said to the
peroxide stranger, drying my still-purple hands. I'd managed to say it right,
so possibly the fluorescent lights were bringing me back to reality. But my
hands were shaking from hunger, and I could feel the rum and champagne
threatening to make my head spin.

Food was required.

I left the gift bag behind in case there were any more
booby traps inside it, keeping only the magazine and the free digital camera.
The camera was covered with Poo-Sham logos and therefore the most likely
candidate for menace, but it was so little and
cute.
I mean, come on. Free digital
camera!

My newly purple hands weren't helping the penguin
disguise, so I stuffed them into my pockets, trying to look casual, not like a
man who had been dyed twice in one day. I was glad no Poo-Sham had gotten into
my new hair.

I pulled out my phone and called Jen, getting her
message again. For the hundredth time I wondered where she was. I desperately
wanted to tell her about the bald man, the fake shampoo, and its fake ad and
see if she'd uncovered anything herself.

Mostly I wanted to ask her: Why would the anti-client
want to dye people purple?

A tray went by, tiny double-decker salmon sandwiches.
I followed it back toward the Hall of African Mammals, wondering how to reach
for one without my purple hands attracting attention.

The bald man was where I'd left him, in the passageway
between rooms, still chattering on his headset. I straightened my shoulders,
trusting my disguise to get me past once more.

But the bottleneck in the hall
brought the waiter to a halt, the mob falling on the sandwiches. They were
going fast. I bared my teeth, mildly drunk and thoroughly starving, and decided
to risk it. I
had
to have food.

I reached out and snatched a
sandwich, shoving half of it into my
I
mouth. Like the rice balls, it
was too salty, but I clutched it tightly and kept eating, keeping my back to
the bald guy.

No one paid me any notice. The
backs of my hands weren't as purple as the palms. I decided to try for one more
sandwich before leaving the bald guy behind.

Glancing around at the cluster
of salmon eaters, I noticed they all had drinks. Words were slurring, and I
head a woman lapse into Poo-Shamese:

"This farty has great
pood." Her group dissolved into giggles.

People were getting drunk, of course. The salty food
was compelling everyone to imbibe. The Noble Savage was everywhere, and now the
free cameras were coming out, giggles and flashes popping from every direction.

Between voracious bites I noticed that the Poo-Sham
cameras did that stutter thing, blinking rapidly just before the main flash, to
shrink your pupil and prevent satanic red-eye. But the sputtering little
flickers were even more distracting than usual. They alternated red and blue,
just like the flickering screen that had rocked my brain at the end of the
Poo-Sham ad. My head started to throb again.

Was the whole party a trap?

No, I had to be imagining it.
One more sandwich and I'd be fine.

As I reached out, a familiar
smell wafted into my nostrils.

"Mom?" I said
softly. It was one of the scents she'd designed.

I turned around, sandwich in
purple hand, and came face-to-face with Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith.