So Yesterday (16 page)

She leaned closer, as if the couch were bugged. (The
electronic kind, not the biting kind. Bugs in your hair. Bugs in your chair.)

"Well, these people went to a lot of trouble to
set up last night, right? Spent lots of cash."

"Yeah. They had to create a brand of shampoo,
shoot an advertisement for it, cough up money to cosponsor the party. Those
things can cost a million, easy."

"And most insanely, they gave away about five
hundred Wi-Fi-capable digital cameras. All this just to collect a bunch of
pictures of rich people behaving badly."

I nodded, remembering flashes coming from every
direction as the chaos had increased. The more the cameras unleashed paka-paka,
the worse the behavior had gotten, resulting in more pictures being taken, and
so on.

"Yeah, I guess they'd have a ton of those this
morning."

"Which sounds like blackmail as a motive,"
she said.

"I'm not so sure about that." I leaned back
into the musty embrace of the couch. "Granted, everyone got plastered and
acted like idiots. But that's hardly illegal. I mean, who would pay hush money
to cover up a twenty-year-old being drunk and stupid at a party?"

"A politician? Maybe someone important's son or
daughter was there."

I shook my head. "That's too small a target. The
anti-client thinks big. Frankly, I don't believe they're in this to make
money."

"Didn't Lexa say that there's lots of money in
cool?"

"There is. But that doesn't mean the anti-client
thinks it's cool to have money."

Jen untangled that for a second, then leaned back and
sighed. "So what do you think, Hunter?"

I could still see the woman mouthing the words
Call
me.
I would have to sooner or
later, but not until I knew more.

"I think we need to find out who she is."

"The woman on roller skates?" Jen reached
into her back pocket and pulled out four printouts—pictures of NASCAR Man, the
bald guy, Future Woman, and the missing black woman, all wearing sunglasses to
protect themselves from the Poo-Sham flashes. "In all that chaos, it was
pretty easy getting these."

"I'm glad you did." Even in the blurry
photograph I could see it. "She's the one we need to find."

"Why her?"

"It's my job to spot where cool comes from, Jen.
I can see who's leading and who's following, where the trend starts and how it
spreads. The first time I saw you, I
knew
you'd innovated those laces
yourself."

Jen looked down at her shoes and shrugged, admitting
it was true.

I looked at the picture again. This woman was an
actual resident of the client's fantasy world, a place where shoes could fly,
where motion was magnetism, and where she was pure charisma on roller skates.

"Trust me," I said. "This isn't a lone,
crazed cool hunter we're looking out for; it's a movement. And she's the
Innovator."

Chapter 23
        

IT'S
A SMALL WORLD. SCIENTISTS HAVE PROVEN THIS.

In
1967
a researcher named Stanley
Milgram asked a few hundred people in Kansas to try to get packages to a small
number of "targets," random strangers in Boston. The Kansans could
send the package to anyone they knew personally, who could then pass it on to
anyone
they
knew personally, until a chain of friends between
Kansas and Boston was uncovered.

The packages arrived on target much quicker than
anyone expected. The average number of links between searcher and target was
5.6,
immortalized as "six degrees of
separation." (Or six degrees of my mom's favorite actor.) In our small
world (small country, really) you're only about six handshakes away from the
perfect lover you haven't met, the celebrity you most despise, and the person
who innovated the phrase "Talk to the hand."

Now, if the world is that small, then the world of
cool hunting is
minuscule.
Assuming that Jen's and my
paka-paka realizations were correct and the anti-client was a group of cool
hunters, then I doubted there were more than a couple of handshakes between us
and the missing black woman.

The trick was finding the right hands to shake.

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

But first we had to go to the
dry cleaner's.

We dropped off the shirt, pants, and bow tie so that
they would all sparkle for their return trip to the store and my wounded
refund. I watched as the man snipped off the plastic tags.

"You wear these
clothes?"

"Yes."

Snip. "With tags in
them?"

"Yes."

Snip, snip. "You supposed
to take off tags."

"Yes."

Snip, snip, snip, pause.
"Your hands are purple?"

"Yes."

"Can you fix this jacket?" Jen interrupted our
scintillating conversation, which led to a longer pause, full of head-shaking
and sad expressions. I took the opportunity to sweep up the tags with my purple
hands and tuck them into my pocket for safekeeping.

"No. Cannot fix."

She shoved it back into her bag, folding it carefully
for reasons that were purely symbolic: respect for the dead.

"Don't
worry Hunter I'll see what I can do."
     
j

The man looked at Jen and
shook his head again.

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

Central Park, like the rest of
New York, is part of a grid system.

Parks in other cities come in various shapes—organic
blobs, triangles, winding shapes that follow rivers. But Central Park is a
precise rectangle, stuck onto the irregular isle of Manhattan like a label on
a shrink-wrapped piece of meat.

Near the bottom of the label,
in the fine print, a very cool tribe meets every Saturday afternoon. They skate
to music, rolling in circles around a | DJ playing ancient disco without irony.

Technically they're not even
part of the cool pyramid, because they're Laggards, trapped in a time bubble,
like those guys in Kiss T-shirts. But much cooler. They date to the early years
of the Americans with Disabilities Act, when the government mandated wheelchair
ramps for every curb and building in the country, unexpectedly creating the
modern culture of boards, skates, and scooters.

That was a long time ago. They are so ancient, so
yesterday, that they're totally cutting edge.

And every Saturday, Hiro Wakata, Lord of All Things
with wheels, shows up here, practicing his double reverses and cool hunting up
a storm.

Normally I kept a respectful distance from this
ritual, not wanting to poach on a fellow hunter's territory, so it had been
months since I'd last come by (to watch—attaching wheels to my feet makes me
less cool, not more). But Hiro was the obvious first handshake in search of the
anti-client. In his late twenties, he's pretty old for a cool hunter, knows
everyone, and has been rolling since he learned to walk.

He was easy to spot among the fifty or so skaters in
orbit around the DJ, wearing a sleeveless hooded white sweatshirt, sweeping
fast and close to the ragged edge of spectators. He'd become famous for
half-pipe styling as a kid, so roller skating was a second language, but he
spoke it beautifully. (He was also fluent in motorcycles, electric
micro-scooters, and mountain boards.)

I waved as he zoomed by, and on his next pass Hiro
broke out of the circle, the rumble of his wheels sputtering and spitting
gravel as he crossed the unswept outer ring of asphalt. He slid to an
ice-hockey stop in front of us.

"Yo, Hunter, new hair?"

"Yeah. I'm in disguise these days."

"Cool. Like the hands, too." He spun around
the other way to face Jen rather than turn his head a few degrees; a life on
wheels had addicted him to frequent rotation. "Jen, right? I liked what
you said at the meeting the other day. Very cool."

I saw her suppress an eye roll. For a group of
trendsetters, our response to her was annoyingly predictable, I guess.
"Thanks."

"Mandy was so pissed. Ha! You roll?"

"Not well enough to join you guys," Jen
said. The couple passing in front of us—her skating backward, him forward—did a
360 under-and-over together, never losing their grip on each other's hands. Jen
and I whistled together.

"Don't sweat it, come anytime." Hiro pulled
a 350 and was facing me again. "So, what's up?"

"I was wondering if you could help me find
someone, Hiro. She's a skater."

He took a slow spin, a happy king surveying his
domain. "Well, you came to the right place."

Jen pulled out the printed photo. "This is
her."

He looked at it for a second and nodded, suddenly
somber.

"Wow, she hasn't changed much. I haven't seen her
for a long time. Not since the split."

"The split?"

"Yeah, like ten years ago. I was just a kid then,
back when the cops hassled us all the time." He gestured at the DJ,
ensconced within four stacks of speakers, two turntables, and a sputtering
generator. "Used to be Wick's boom box on a milk crate right there, ready
to roll when we got busted. She was an original, started this club when she was
thirteen."

I took the deep, pleasing breath of being right—she
was
an Innovator.

"Her name's Wick?" Jen asked. "That
short for 'Wicked,' by any chance?"

Hiro rolled from side to side in amusement. "Not
at all. Short for Mwadi Wickersham."

The name wasn't familiar. "So she doesn't hang
out here anymore?"

"Like I said, she left when the core group signed
up with . . ." He named a certain skate company associated with the
in-line revolution.

"Because she didn't want any corporate
ties," Jen said.

Hiro shrugged. "She never said anything about
selling out. Hell, I was all logoed up in my half-pipe days, but that never
bothered her. The split wasn't about sponsorship; it was about going
in-line." He lifted one foot, revealing the four colinear wheels of his
blade. "Mwadi was all about classic skates, which is what the originals
wore. We kept it up until the early nineties, after everyone else had switched.
Two-by-two or death, you know?"

Jen's eyes widened. "You mean, this is all about
what
kind
of
roller skates
to
wear?"
she cried.

Hiro rolled backward, spreading his hands.
"What's
about what kind of skates to
wear?"

"We're not sure," I said in my calming
voice. "Maybe nothing. So, you haven't seen her lately. Do you know how to
find her?"

He shook his head. "No, it was a sad thing.
Beautiful skater, but she couldn't stand to go in-line. And it's not like it
was some kind of mega-deal. They just wanted to give us free blades and better
sound equipment. Maybe do a photo shoot or two."

"You said it was a split," Jen said.
"So more people than just Wick left?"

"Yeah, a few. But most wound up rolling back. The
whole deal was just for one summer. Not Mwadi, though. She like
...
vanished."

"Any of these guys?" She produced the other
pictures.

"No, none of them were splitters. But I know
him...."
He pointed at NASCAR Man.
"That's Futura. Futura Garamond."

"He hangs out here?"

"Never. But I know him from working at
City
Blades.
He's a designer." "He designs skates?"

Hiro shook his head. "No, man. Magazines."

CHAPTER 24

WE HEADED
BACK TO MY HOUSE TO DO RESEARCH. I COULD FEEL

us getting closer to the anti-client, the degrees of
separation dropping like Becky Hammon's free throws.

We waited for the
6
train on an almost-empty platform, the few Saturday
Midtown shoppers around us carrying enough bags to look vaguely deranged. One
thing about lunatics in New York—they've given carrying lots of stuff a bad
name. Whenever I've got more than a backpack, I feel certifiable.

"So, this guy does magazines," Jen said.
"You think there's any connection with
Hoi Aristoi?"

"Maybe. I've still got my free issue at home. We
can check. But I can't imagine that the whole magazine was a sham."

"Yeah, that
is
getting paranoid," she
said. "Of course, that's what they want."

"What is?"

"For us to start questioning everything. Is this
party real? This product? This social group? Is cool even real?"

I nodded. "My mother asks that a lot."

"Doesn't everyone?"

A train came and we got on, finding ourselves in a single-advertiser
car. The whole train was plastered with ads for a certain brand of wrist-watch,
the name of which rhymes with
watch.
Jen shuddered.

"What's wrong?"

"I always remember the first morning I got on
this train," she said. "I looked at my watch and then all the watches
in the ads. And they all said the same time mine did."

I looked around. The watches in the ads all were set
to ten after ten. "Yeah. The photo-shoot guys set them that way so they
look like a smiling face."

"I know, but it's like time
froze in here after that morning."

I laughed. "I guess even
watch ads are right twice a day."

"I've never
recovered."

I looked into her face, which scanned the smiling
watch faces above us, a small mammal watching for predatory birds.

"You are very easily rewired, Jen."

"Thanks. But just hold me."

I started to say we could change cars, but holding her
was better.

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

We found my parents' apartment
empty, my father at a daylong conference on hantavirus and my mother at her
karate class. I thanked the fates that I had no older sisters and led Jen into
my room, seeing her eyes light up at my shelves of cool-hunting booty: vintage
client suedes and high-tops, MP3 players the size of swizzle sticks, and fad
history lessons in the form of clackers, Slinkies, scrunchies, pet rocks, and
black rubber wristbands. But then I realized something awful