So Yesterday (4 page)

Jen looked down at the
sidewalk, where an advertisement for some new bar had been spray painted.
"But she wanted me along, right?"

"You were
specifically mentioned."

"But I thought I
messed everything up."

"Messing things up
takes talent. Like I said yesterday, you've got a good eye. Mandy wants us to
look at something."

"To see if it's
cool?"

Apparently it was going
to be one of those days when people said that word to me a lot. I put my hands
up in surrender. "She just said she needed some original thinking. That's
all I know."

"Original
thinking?" Jen's shoulders twitched, as if her black T-shirt had shrunk in
the wash. "Don't you ever think your job is kind of weird?"

I shrugged. That's what
I usually do when people ask me philosophical questions about cool hunting.

But Jen didn't buy the
shrug. "You know what I mean, don't you?"

"Look, Jen, most
jobs are weird. My dad studies people sneezing on each other, and my mom makes
smells for a living. People get paid for writing down gossip about movie stars,
or judging cat shows, or selling pork-belly futures. And I'm not even sure what
pork-belly futures are."

Jen raised an eyebrow.
"Aren't they an option to buy pork bellies in the future at a certain
price?"

I opened my mouth and
found it empty of sound. This was my stock speech, and no one had ever called
me on the pork-belly-futures thing before.

"My dad's a
broker," she apologized.

"So tell me: why
anyone would want to buy pork bellies
at all?"

"I have no
idea."

Saved. "What I mean
is, if people get paid for all that stuff, why shouldn't someone get paid to
figure out what's cool?"

Jen spread her hands.
"Shouldn't it just
...be
cool?"

"Like have a
special glow or something?"

"No, but if
something's really cool, shouldn't people figure that out , on their own? Why
should they need 'Don't Walk' ads or magazines or trend spotters to tell
them?"

"Because most
people
aren't
cool."

"How do
you
know?"

"Look around
you."

She did. The guy walking
past was wearing a shirt five sizes too big (innovated by gangbangers to hide
guns in their waistbands), shorts down below his knees (innovated by surfers to
keep their thighs from getting sunburned), and oversized shoes (innovated by
skaters to save their feet from injury). Together all of these once-practical
ideas made the guy look like he'd been hit by a shrink ray and was about to
disappear into his clothes screaming,
"Help me!"
in an
ever-tinier voice.

Jen had to grin. Saved
again.

"That guy needs our
help," I said softly.

"That
guy will
never
be cool. But a lot of people are getting rich off
him trying. That's his money we made yesterday."
j

I sighed, looking up at
the thin slice of sky, and noticed the weathered, faded American flags that
hung from the fire escapes, rippling slowly in the breeze. They'd all been hung
on the same day, without any ads telling people they had to.

Jen was silent, probably
thinking I was mad at her.

But I wasn't. I was
contemplating 1918.

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

Because of my dad I know
all about 1918, the year there was a
really
nasty flu. It swept
across every country in the world. It killed more people j than World War I. A
billion
people got it, almost a third of everyone alive back then.

And you know what's
really amazing? The virus didn't spread over the radio, and you didn't get it
from watching TV or reading the side of a bus. No one was hired to spread it.
Everyone who contracted the disease got it from shaking hands with, or getting
sneezed on by, someone else who had it, right? So in one year just about
everyone in the world had shaken hands with someone who had shaken hands with
someone who had shaken hands with Patient Zero (which is what they call
Innovators in the crazy world of epidemiology).

So imagine that instead
of sneezing germs, all those people had been saying to each other, "Wow,
this new breath mint is great! Want one?" In just a year about a billion
people would be using that new breath mint without anyone ever spending a dime
on advertising.

Kind of makes you think.

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

The uncomfortable
silence stretched out for a while, and I found myself annoyed at my parents. If
they hadn't been bugging me about work this morning, I wouldn't have lost my
cool with Jen. She had a perfectly valid point about cool hunting—it's just that
I get tired of having the same argument with my parents every day, and with
other people, and with myself.

I tried to think of
something to say, but all I could think about was the 1918 flu, which didn't
seem like a scintillating topic of conversation. Sometimes I hate my brain.

Jen finally broke the
silence.

"Maybe she's not
coming."

I checked the time on my
phone. Mandy was ten minutes late, which was not like Mandy. We're talking
about someone who carries a clipboard.

Jen was looking down the
street toward the nearest subway stop, and I got the unpleasant idea that she
was thinking about leaving.

"Yeah, sorry. I'll
call her." I scrolled up
shugrrl
and pressed send. Six rings
later I got Mandy's voice mail.

"Must be on the
subway," I said, about to leave a message, but Jen reached out one hand,
touching me on the wrist.

"Hang up and call
her again."

"What?"

"Wait a
second." She watched a truck pass, then nodded at the phone. "Hang up
and call again."

"Okay." I
shrugged—that's Innovators for you—and pressed send.

Jen cocked her head,
then took a few steps toward the wall of plywood that surrounded a derelict
building next to us. She put her hands on the wood and leaned close to it, like
she was doing a psychic reading of the layers of graffiti and posters.

Again six rings.

"Uh, Mandy," I
said to the voice mail, "you said this morning, right? We're here; let us
know where you are."

Jen turned around, a
strange look on her face.

"So, let me
guess," she said. "Despite all her cool hunting, Mandy has really Top
40 taste in music."

"Uh, yeah," I
said. Maybe Jen
was
psychic. "Mandy pretty much only listens
to..." I named a certain 1970s Swedish mega-group whose name is a
four-letter word, definitely both band and brand and therefore banned from this
book.

"I thought
so," Jen said. "Come here. And redial."

I stood next to her and
pressed send yet again.

And through the shaky
plywood wall we heard tinny cell-phone tones playing a certain unforgettable
ditty.

"Take a chance on
me...."

Chapter 5

"HELLO?" I
POUNDED ON THE WOOD. "MANDY!"

We waited. No response.

I redialed once more to
make sure.

"Take a chance on
me . . ."
dribbled
out from behind the spray paint and advertising covering the plywood barrier.

"Okay," Jen
said. "Mandy's phone is in there."

Neither of us asked the
obvious question: So where was Mandy? Somewhere else altogether? Inside but
unconscious? Something worse than unconscious?

Jen found a spot where
two pieces of the plywood were chained together like double doors and pulled
them apart as far as the fat padlock allowed. Shielding her eyes, she peered
through the narrow gap.

"One more time,
maestro."

I pressed send, and the
little tune repeated. The refrain was starting to drive me crazy, even more
than it usually did.

"There's a phone
flashing in there," Jen said. "But that's all I can see."

We backed into the
street, getting a better look at the derelict building. The upper-floor windows
were bricked up with cinder blocks, dead gray eyes staring down at us. A coil
of razor wire topped the plywood barrier around the ground floor, the
fluttering remains of plastic bags collected on its spikes. An arm's length of
unspooled cassette tape was caught on the wire, the light wind making it
undulate and flicker in the sun.

The building must have
been abandoned for months. Maybe years. I mean,
cassette
tape?

"No way in," I
said, but found that I wasn't talking to anyone.

Jen was next door,
already up the front-stoop stairs and stabbing buzzer buttons at random. The
intercom popped, and a garbled voice queried her.

"Delivery,"
she said loudly and clearly.

The door buzzed. She
opened it, stuck her foot in, and waved at me impatiently to follow.

I swallowed. This was
what I got for hanging out with an Innovator.

But as I may have
mentioned or implied, I'm a Trendsetter. Our purpose in life is to be second in
line, to follow. I bounded up the steps and grabbed the outer door just as the
buzz came again and she pushed her way inside.

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

At the top of the third
flight of stairs a tousle-haired man was waiting, his head sticking out his
door. He looked at us sleepily.

"The delivery guy's
right behind us," Jen said, and kept on climbing.

A half flight up from
the sixth floor we found the door to the roof. A cagelike contraption sealed us
off from the last flight of stairs, the usual precaution to keep people from
getting into the building from topside. Of course, the door could be opened
from the inside in case of fire, but across the push bar a big red sticker was
plastered:

WARNING: ALARM
WILL SOUND IF OPENED

I panted, recovering from the
climb, relieved that we couldn't go any j farther. Even if Jen was an
Innovator, breaking into an abandoned building wasn't my idea of cool. Having
thought about it for a minute, I was
figuring we should call the police. Mandy must have
been mugged, her phone tossed into the derelict building.

But where was she?

"You know the trick to these alarms?" Jen
asked, placing one finger lightly on the push bar.

My relief faded. "There's a trick?"

"Yeah." She pushed, and an earsplitting
screech filled the stairway, loud enough to be heard by everyone in Chinatown.

"They stop on their own eventually!" she
shouted above the alarm, and darted through the door.

I covered my ears and looked back down the stairs, imagining
annoyed tenants emerging from every door. And then I followed Jen.

The roof was tar, painted silver to keep the summer
sun from boiling the people who lived on the top floor. We pounded across it,
the alarm still shrieking like a huge and angry teakettle behind us.

The next building over, the one we were trying to
break into (correction: that
Jen
was trying to break into—I was just along for the
ride), stood a bit shorter, a drop of six feet or so. She sat on the edge and
jumped, landing on black and ragged tar with a thump that sounded painful.

I climbed partway down, clinging to the edge, falling
the least possible distance but still managing to twist my ankle.

I scowled as I limped after Jen. It was all the
client's fault. A hundred pairs of shoes and they'd never sent me a sneaker
optimized for urban burglary.

The roof door of the abandoned building opened with a
metal screech, hanging on one hinge like a dislocated shoulder. Behind it was a
dark staircase that smelled of dust and old garbage and something as sharp and
nasty as the time my parents' apartment had a dead rat in the wall.

Jen looked back at me, showing a bit of hesitation for
the first time.

She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment the
alarm from the next building stopped, the silence hitting us like a hammer.

Through the ringing echoes in my ears I thought I
heard an annoyed voice on the roof behind us.

"Go on," I whispered.

We went down into the darkness.

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

Walking around New York, looking up, I often wonder
what goes on behind all those windows. Especially the empty ones.

I've been to parties in squats, old buildings taken
over by enterprising homesteaders who do their own repairs. And everyone knows
that crack-heads and homeless people occupy abandoned buildings, inhabiting an
invisible reality behind the blank windows and cinder blocks. There's this
rumor that Chinatown has its own secret government, an ancient system of laws
and obligations brought over from the old country, which I'd always imagined
being run from inside a derelict building like this, complete with town
meetings and trials and punishments meted out. Basically anything could be
going on behind those blank and faceless windows.

But I never thought I'd actually be finding out for
myself.

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

The air was difficult to
breathe, baked hard by the summer sun. As Jen descended, she left dust coiling
behind her in the few shafts of light. Her runners left footprints on the
stairs, which made me feel better. Maybe no one ever came here. Maybe some
buildings were just
...
empty.

Every floor down it got
darker.

Jen stopped after three flights, waiting for our eyes
to adjust, listening carefully to the silence. My ears were still ringing with
the alarm screech, but as far as I could tell, no one had followed us from the
building next door.

Who would do anything that crazy?

"Do you have any matches?" Jen said softly.

"No, but this works." I switched my phone to
camera mode, careful to turn the bright screen away so I didn't blind myself.
It shone like a little flashlight in the pitch blackness. It was a useful trick
for fiddling with keys on late nights.

"Gee, is there anything that phone doesn't
do?"

"It's no use against crackheads," I said.
"Or officials of the Chinatown secret government."

"The what?"

"I'll tell you later."

We descended the last three flights, the phone
scattering a weird blue light that gave our dancing shadows a ghostly pallor.

I darkened my phone when we reached the ground floor.
Now that our eyes had adjusted, the sun streaming through gaps in the plywood
shone like a row of spotlights. The ceiling was high, the whole floor
stretching out unobstructed except for a few thick, square columns. What had
once been store windows were now gaping rectangular holes in the wall, only
plywood separating us from the street. Not even broken glass remained.

"Someone's using this floor," Jen said.

"What do you mean?"

She scuffed one shoe across the concrete next to a
patch of light.

"No dust."

She was right. The sunlight revealed no coiling cloud
around her shoe. The floor had recently been swept clean.

I ran my thumb to the familiar shape of the send
button. A moment later the little multi-platinum tune played from a distant
corner.

As we crossed, taking careful steps, I saw that the
wall nearest to the flashing phone was lined with stacks of small boxes.
Someone was in fact using the building for storage.

Jen knelt and picked up the phone, checking the floor
around it.

"Nothing else here of Mandy's. Does she carry a
purse?"

"Just a clipboard. If she got mugged, would they
keep that?"

"Maybe they just tossed the phone in so she
couldn't call for help."

"Maybe
..."
My voice trailed off.

Of its own accord, my hand went to the stacked boxes,
pulled by magnets of familiarity and desire. I ran my fingers down the lids
spaced every four inches. The boxes were a common size and shape, so familiar
that I almost hadn't realized what they were at first.

Shoe boxes.

I reached up and pulled one from the top of the stack.
Opened it and breathed the new-car smell of unused plastic, heard the crinkle
of paper, felt plastic and rubber and string. I lifted out the pair and set
them on the ground in a shaft of sunlight.

Jen gasped, and I stepped back, blinking at the sudden
radiance of panels, laces, tongue, and tread. Neither of us said a word, but we
both knew instantly.

They were the coolest shoes we'd ever seen.