So Yesterday (2 page)

"Okay, Mandy,
whatever." I looked at Jen, who was scrolling absently through numbers,
politely not listening, maybe a little saddened by how old and decrepit her own
phone was (at least six months). I made a decision.

"Can I bring
someone?"

"Uh, sure. We need
more bodies. But are they... you know?"

Jen glanced at me, her
eyes narrowing, beginning to realize that I was talking about her. The sun was
catching more blue in her hair. I could see that she'd dyed a few slender
strands bright purple, hidden underneath the black outer layers, letting
glimpses of color through when the wind stirred her hair.

"Yeah.
Definitely."

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

"A
what
tasting?"

"A cool
tasting," I repeated. "But that's just what Mandy and I call them.
Officially it's a 'focus group.'"

"Focusing on
what?"

I told her the name of
the client, which did
not
get the Nod.

"I know," I
said. "But you get a free pair and fifty bucks." Once the words had
left my mouth, I wondered if Mandy would cough up money for Jen as well as me.
Well, if she didn't, Jen could always have my fifty. It was random money
anyway.

But I wondered why I had
invited her. Usually people in my profession don't like competition. It's one
of those jobs, like politician, where there's already too many and everyone
who's never tried it thinks they could do it better.

"Sounds kind of
weird," Jen said.

I shrugged. "It's
just a job. You get paid for your opinion."

"We look at
shoes?"

"We watch an ad.
Thirty seconds of TV, fifty bucks."

She looked into the
currents of the river, having a two-second debate inside her head. I knew what
she was thinking.
Am I being exploited? Am I selling out? Am I pulling a
scam? Is this a trick? Who do I think I'm fooling? Who cares what I think,
anyway?

I've thought all those
things myself.

She shrugged. "Hey.
Fifty bucks."

I let my breath out,
just then realizing I'd been holding it. "My thoughts exactly."

Chapter 2

I RECOGNIZED HALF THE
FACES AT THE TASTING. ANTOINE AND Trez, who worked at Dr. Jay's in the Bronx.
Hiro Wakata, a board under his arm and headphones around his neck big enough to
wear while parking an airplane with orange flashlights. The Silicon Alley
crew, led by Lexa Legault behind chunky black eyeglass frames and clutching an
MP3 player (made by a certain computer company whose name is a fruit often used
in making pies). Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith, having slummed her way over from
Fifth Avenue, and Tina Catalina, whose pink T-shirt bore a slogan in English
clearly composed by someone who spoke only Japanese. All of them looked very
central casting.

I always felt a little
out of place at these things. Most kids my age give away their opinions for
free, thrilled just to be asked, so they never make it into the
paid-focus-group circuit. As a result, Jen and I were the youngest people in
the room. We were also the only ones who weren't dressed to represent. She was
in Logo Exile uniform, and I was in cool-hunting camouflage. My non-brand
T-shirt was the color of dried chewing gum, my corduroys the gray of a rainy
day, my Mets cap
{not
Yankees) was pointed exactly straight
ahead. Like a spy trying to blend into the crowd or a guy painting his
apartment on laundry day, I avoid dressing cool for a focus group, which I
figure is like showing up drunk to a wine tasting.

Antoine bumped my fist
with his usual, "My man, Hunter," as he checked out Jen, wincing at
the basketball under her arm, obviously thinking she was trying
way
too
hard. But when his eyes caught her sneakers, they filled with pleasure.

"Nice laces."

"I saw them
first," I said firmly. I'd already phoned the picture to Mandy, but if
Antoine got a good look at them, the pattern would be spreading across the
Bronx like a nasty flu. Or maybe they'd fizzle; you never knew.

He spread his hands in
surrender and kept his eyes above her ankles. Honor among thieves.

I asked myself again why
I had brought Jen here. To impress her? She was more likely to be seriously
unimpressed. To impress
them?

Who cared what they
thought? Besides a handful of multibillion-dollar corporations and five or six
trendy magazines?

"New girlfriend,
Hunter?" Hillary of the Hyphen was also checking out Jen but in a
completely different way, her blue eyes glazing over at Jen's Logo Exile
ensemble. Hillary's black dress, black bag, and black shoes all had first and
last names, their initials wrought in tiny gold buckles, and, like her, came
from Fifth Avenue. She saved me the trouble of a comeback. "Oh, that's
right. There wasn't an old one."

"Not as old as you,
I'm sure," Jen said, not missing a beat.

Antoine whistled and
spun on one heel with a squeak, clearing the deck. I pulled Jen over toward the
chairs at the far side of the conference room, inside Mandy's clueless force
field, out of range of Hillary's hundred-dollar claws (per hand).

"Hi, Hunter. Thanks
for coming." Mandy was in serious client-wear, red and white and swooshed
all over. She was peering down at the conference room's control panel, perhaps
intimidated by its spaceship complexity.
 
She pressed a button, and blackout curtains jumped into motion, closing
across the sixtieth-floor view of Central Park. A tentative stab later, wooden
panels slid apart on one wall, revealing a TV that probably cost more than a
Van Gogh but was much flatter.

"This is Jen."

"Nice laces,"
Mandy said, not bothering to look down, giving me the Nod. I saw a printout of
my Jen-shoe photograph tucked into her clipboard, headed for mass production.

I sat Jen down and
whispered, "She approves of you."

"This is all very
weird," she answered.

"Duh."

Hillary Hyphen, who had
recently reached the big two-oh, managed to close her mouth just as the lights
began to fade.

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

The ad was set in the
standard client fantasy world. It was nighttime and raining, and everything was
wet and slick and beautiful, blue highlights gleaming from every metal surface.
Three client-wearing models were in motion, each leaving their glamorous job to
the beat of some German DJ's last-week remix of a song older than Hillary. One
of the models was riding a beautiful motorcycle, another was on a bicycle with
about fifty gears, and the last one (the woman, I noticed, these things being
important) was on foot, her swooshes splashing through puddles reflecting
Don't Walk
signs.

"Oh, I get it.
Run,"
Jen whispered.

I chuckled. There are
only about twelve words in the client's language, but at least everyone is
fluent.

Guess what? The three
models were all headed to the same cool bar, which looked like a cross between
a velvet couch factory and an operating room. They all ordered gleaming
non-brand beers, looking thrilled to see each other, energized by their
glamorous journeys across the fantasy world.

"Moving is
fun," I whispered.

“Fun is good,'' Jen
agreed.

The ad came to a
tear-jerking end, our heroes leaving their beers untouched, having decided to
keep moving. I guess they were going for a ride/run together? Wouldn't that be
a little awkward? Whatever.

The lights came up.

"So"—Mandy
spread her hands—"what do we think about 'Don't Walk'?"

It's funny that ads have
titles, like little movies. But only the people who shoot them—and people like
me—ever find out what those titles are.

"I liked the
motorcycle," Tina Catalina said. "Japanese street bikes are way
back."

Mandy's eyes went to Hiro
Wakata, Lord of All Things with Wheels, who gave her the Nod, and she checked
off a box on her clipboard. I'd thought American was in, but apparently the
motorcycle gurus had decided otherwise.

"Skate remix,"
Lexa Legault offered, and the rest of the cyber-geeks nodded. The German DJ had
their vote.

"A'ight
shoes," Trez said, just to fill a brief silence. He and Antoine would have
approved them months ago. Shoes that didn't make it in the Bronx were shipped
off to Siberia, or New Jersey, or somewhere like that.

And besides, this
tasting wasn't really about the shoes. It was about how all the little elements
of the fantasy world added up or didn't.

"Was that
Plastique, where they wound up?" Hillary Hyphen said. "That club is
so last April."

Mandy checked her
clipboard. "No, it's someplace in London." That shut Hillary up. The
client was very clever, shooting the street scenes in New York and the
interiors on another continent. You never wanted too much reality leaking into
fantasy world. Reality gets old so fast.

"So we liked
it?" Mandy asked the group. "Nothing felt wrong to you guys?"

She looked around
expectantly. Spotting cool was only half our job. The more important half was
spotting
un
cool before it made trouble. Like a race-car driver,
the client worried more about crashing and burning than winning every lap.

The room stayed silent,
and Mandy started to lower her clipboard happily to the table.

Then Jen spoke up.

"I was kind of
bugged by the missing-black-woman formation."

Mandy blinked. "The
what?"

Jen shrugged
uncomfortably, feeling the eyes on her.

"Yeah, I know what
you mean," I said, even though I didn't.

Jen took a slow breath,
collecting her thoughts. "You know, the guy on the motorcycle was black.
The guy on the bike was white. The woman was white. That's the usual bunch, you
know? Like everybody's accounted for? Except not really. I call that the
missing-black-woman formation. It kind of happens a lot."

It was quiet for another
moment. But gears were spinning. Tina Catalina let out a long sigh of
recognition.

"Like the
Mod
Squad!"
she said.

"Yeah," Hiro
chimed in, "or the three main characters in . . ." He named a certain
trilogy of movies about cyber-reality and frozen kung fu whose title ends in an
X,
counts as a brand, and therefore will not grace these pages.

The floodgates broke.
More comic books, movies, and TV shows tumbled off everyone's lips, a dozen
stuffed-full pop-cultural memory banks rifled for examples of
missing-black-woman formations until Mandy looked ready to cry.

She smacked the
clipboard down.

"Is this something
I should have
known about?"
she said sharply, sweeping her
eyes around the table.

An unhappy silence fell
over the conference room. I felt like an evil genius's henchman when something
goes wrong in a certain series of secret agent films—as if Mandy might push a
button on the control panel and we would be ejected, chairs and all, out the
roof and into some lake in Central Park.

But Antoine cleared his
throat and saved us all from the piranhas. "Hey, I never heard of this
missing whatever before."

"Me neither,"
said Trez.

Lexa Legault had been
tapping at her wireless notebook and said, "I got nothing. Zero relevant
hits on ..." She named a certain Web search tool whose name means a very
large number. (Oh, forget it. I'm not going to get very far telling this story
if I can't say "Google.")

"It's not a big
deal," Jen said. "It just popped into my head, you know?"

"Yeah, like who
watches
The Mod Squad
anymore?" Hillary Hyphen said, ending
her eye roll with an exquisite glare at Jen. Hillary looked happy, at least, to
see us kids put in our place.

The flush in Mandy's
cheeks began to fade. She hadn't let the client miss a trend, a vital new
concept, a youthquake. This was just some random thought that hadn't existed
before today's meeting.

But as things wrapped up
and Mandy paid me (for both of us, it turned out), she gave me a cold look, and
I realized that I was in trouble. Something had been invented here that was
going to spread. By the very nature of the meeting, the MBWF had had its last
day of Google anonymity.
 
The client
would have about a week to get this advertisement on and off the air before
Jen's rampaging new turn of phrase made it look its dated as a seventies cop
show.

Mandy's look was telling
me that I had done something inexcusable.

1 had brought an
Innovator to a cool tasting, where only Trendsetters were allowed.

Chapter 3

AT THE TOP OF THE
PYRAMID THERE ARE THE INNOVATORS.

The first kid to keep
her wallet on a big chunky chain. The first to wear way-too-big pants on
purpose. To wash jeans in acid, stick a safety pin in something, or wear a
hooded sweatshirt inside a leather jacket. The mythical first guy who wore his
baseball cap
backward.

When you
meet them, most Innovators don't look that cool, not in the sense of
fashionable, anyway. There's always something off about them.
 
Like they're uncomfortable with the world.
Most Innovators are actually Logo Exiles, trying to get by with the twelve
pieces of clothing that are never in or out of style.
   

Except, like Jen's
laces, there's always one thing that stands out on an Innovator. Something new.

Next level down the
pyramid are the Trendsetters.

The Trendsetter's goal
is to be the
second
person in the world to catch the latest
disease. They watch carefully for innovations, always ready to jump on board.
But more importantly, other people watch them. Unlike the Innovators, they
are
cool, so when they pick up an innovation, it
becomes
cool.
A Trendsetter's most important job is gatekeeper, the filter that separates out
real Innovators from those cra2y people wearing garbage bags. (Although I've
heard that in the 1980s, there were some Trendsetters who actually started
wearing garbage bags. No comment.)