Teen, Inc., Page 2

  “Hold that thought,” Ben said as he flipped my eggs. “Now ask yourself if it would be so awful to ask some girl, even just a friend you like, to go to a movie?”

  I gave him a shrug. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  He always talked sense. That’s why I liked him so much. That’s also probably why he’s a short-order cook. The more sense you make around here, the less they pay you.

  To get the really high-paying jobs, you have to be totally nuts.

  2

  MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BOX

  I scarfed down my breakfast, even the home fries, which I hate to do, because I love them more than life itself. Then I booked across the lobby, said a quick hello to the guard, opened the doors, and entered what is still sometimes referred to as the real world.

  The nine-to-fivers were just arriving, streaming in from the expressway, making the parking lot a mess. When I’m on time, I avoid the crunch. Now I had to dodge tons of cars. My goal was a housing development beyond a small patch of trees on the far end of NECorp. That’s where the school bus picked me up, so no one would see where I lived.

  NECorp’s world corporate headquarters is a humongous white building surrounded by an artificial lake. Its got towers, sleek flat surfaces, two domes, huge windows the size of countries, and abstract fountains and statues all over the place. Looks like a cool retro spaceship from the otherwise boring old movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  The moon is cool, too, but you don’t want anyone thinking you live there, right? Which brings me to the fact that in school, my “true” identity was a secret, shared with no one. Yeah, I know, I’m no Spider-Man, and there were all those news stories about me, so you’d think anonymity would be impossible, but my adoption was over a decade ago, and the press basically got tired of me after I learned to walk. Sure, anyone could figure out who I was if they wanted to, but so far no one wanted to. I was, in the meantime, free to hide in plain sight.

  Just as the bus showed up, I stumbled out from the trees and scrambled up the steps, the doors phishing shut behind me. Nate Buckman, ultimate computer freak, was on board as usual.

  “Beale!” he called out in a deep voice. He put his fancy handheld PDA in his lap and high-fived me as I sat next to him. His voice was the only thing about him that was deep. He was a short, thin, bookish kid with glasses. He also had these kind of fat, chunky cheeks and buckteeth. In grade school they called him “Chipmunk Cheeks.”

  Since I was his friend, I just called him Nate.

  Honestly, I thought of him as totally normal, compared to me. In fact, Nate was my image of what a normal kid should be. Except maybe for the teeth. We started talking on the bus the first day of school and found out we liked the same kind of music, the same science fiction, the same video games, and not the same girls, so we got along great.

  Speaking of which …

  “Still like Caitlin?” I asked him.

  “As long as I’m still breathing,” he said as he absently surfed the Web.

  I nudged him. “Well, what if you knew her screen name at TeenTime.com?”

  He made a face. “What if monkeys flew out of my butt and handed me a winning lottery ticket?”

  I took out a pen and scribbled beeswax29 on his notebook.

  His eyes lit up, and he actually put the PDA down. “No way!”

  “Yes,” I said, with utmost somberness. “It is indeed, way.”

  He looked at the scribble again, then back at me. “For real? I owe you, like, my liver! Wait? What am I going to say to her? What can I talk about? I can’t believe this!”

  He went on like that for the rest of the ride. His voice even jumped an octave once or twice. It almost made the whole ugly meeting worthwhile, except for the excruciating embarrassment. Eventually we arrived at the school.

  As a building, Deever High is not so great. It’s old, I know because the cornerstone I pass on the way in every day says 1953, which I think puts its birth in the middle of the Red Scare or the Korean War, or both, a time when I guess everyone was too busy fighting something to care much about how best to build high schools. It’s got this weird brick-and-steel construction that looks like it came out of a toy box, and everything inside smells gross, a combination of sneakers, paint, sour milk, mold; you know the drill. The entrance doors have like a million coats of aqua paint on them that’s so ugly you’d think they’d have stopped making it long before you could put a million coats of it on anything.

  But I loved it more than anyplace I’d ever seen, because, even with the work, the occasional lousy teacher, and the bullies, it was the only place in my whole corporate existence where I felt almost normal.

  I said good-bye to Nate, who was so busy making notes on his PDA on what to say to Caitlin that he didn’t even notice, and headed for homeroom. The rest of the morning was pretty dull, except maybe for a moment during second period art history where Shanna Denton, as usual, kept giving me the evil eye. Sometimes I’m afraid she’s actually going to kill me because of that Hello Kitty thing. Her skin just oozed hatred for me. It made me feel like actually reading the file Nancy had given me on her, just to get some juicy gossip, but I figured ultimately it would only get me into more trouble.

  Third period bio was when my blood pressure always shot up. Not because I really loved biology, or the teacher, Ms. Chrob, who was as affable as a sack of potatoes and looked like one, too. I barely paid attention to her, but bio was the class I shared with Jenny Tate. She always sat by the windows way in the front, I always sat against the wall way in the back. I liked to think of it as “our” class. Ha.

  But what could I say about Jenny, really, since I’d never even spoken to her? I wished I knew something about her other than her name and the way she looked, but I bet whatever else there was to know was really great, too. I planned to actually say hello to her someday, to break the ice or whatever. Much as Nate was my buddy, my giving him Caitlin’s screen handle was also a little experiment. I wanted to see how Nate would handle it and what would happen. If it worked out for him, hey, why not me?

  When Jenny wasn’t already in her seat when I arrived, I was briefly bummed, thinking she might be absent. But then I got this tingle at the back of my head, a sort of Jenny-radar, and in she walked. She was wearing a short orangey blouse that I guess would usually expose her midriff, but she had a sweater tied around her waist, so no skin in sight.

  I was vaguely aware that Ms. Chrob had started talking: “Looks like everyone’s here, so before we begin our review of the digestive system…”

  Or something like that. Anyway, Jenny had this light skin with tons of freckles, really clean red hair, and bright green eyes. I mean green you could spot from halfway down the hall.

  “I want to give you your assignments for our project this year, but first, a warning. One year we had two students bring in the heart of a dog for a project on the circulatory system. We’re still not sure where they got it, but since then the school has had a strict models-only policy.”

  When Jenny shifted, moving further into the light of the sun, the skin on her face totally vanished, but you could still make out her freckles, like little backward stars, dark against light.

  “You’ll be paired up into randomly assigned teams, to give everyone an opportunity to actually do the work instead of socializing.”

  Suddenly, Jenny’s head turned and I caught a flash of those green eyes. It was like she felt me thinking about her the same way I could sense it when she walked into the room. Or maybe the sun was getting to be too much. Either way, I couldn’t bear it, so I turned away quickly.

  Those rare moments when Jenny was facing me were the only times I ever looked at Ms. Chrob. Don’t get me wrong. Despite appearances I am not a bad student. It was usually pretty easy to catch up with whatever Chrob was talking about. She repeated it often enough, like we were idiots. Like right then I knew she was talking about that stupid project she’d only mentioned a billion times. Now, she was reading out the names of
the teams.

  “Drevin and Gallancy,” she said. “Bergstom and Perry.”

  Of course you know what I was wishing for and dreading. Wishing for, because I really wanted it; dreading it because I knew if it happened, I’d wind up acting like a total idiot and ruining everything forever. At least when something’s a fantasy, it’s still possible, you know? You can pretend forever that you have something to look forward to.

  Likewise, I never thought in a million years the universe would ever organize itself around my daydreams. Mostly it seemed like things happened regardless of what I wanted, like that great meeting this morning. But every now and then …

  “Tate and Beale.”

  For a few seconds, I thought I was wishing it so hard that I’d hallucinated. I briefly feared that I was crazy now, forever stuck inside a dream.

  But it did happen. I had heard it.

  Jenny Tate was going to be my project partner! For a month!

  I hoped to hell I wasn’t grinning like an idiot. I was still staring at the front of the classroom, but I realized I had to do something to avoid seeming like a loser right off the bat. I had to look at her and smile or nod or wink. No, not winking. That would be ridiculous. Just look and nod. Look and nod.

  Only I couldn’t. You ever stop to think about how many thoughts and muscles it takes to do a precision movement like turn your head, make eye contact with someone, and nod? If you really think about it, you’ll wonder how it ever happens.

  All of a sudden, I wished I’d had Nancy there with me giving me a PowerPoint presentation on how to move my neck.

  First, twist your head as shown here. If you don’t get it the first time, click on the illustration to see the process again.

  Seconds ticked by. Soon it would be too late, or late enough for whatever I did to look really weird, like I was stuck in a time delay like when they interview someone half a world away and you have this ungodly pause between the question and the answer.

  Summoning all my will, I swallowed and turned, just like in the PowerPoint illustration I imagined. Jenny was already looking at me, like maybe she hadn’t even stopped from before they announced our names. I think I smiled, but I definitely nodded. She smiled and nodded back.

  There’s this movie called Contact with Jodie Foster, where she meets an alien species for the first time, and there’s this huge gulf between them and it’s really tough for them to figure out how to communicate.

  It was sort of like that.

  The rest of class I was afraid to even look at her. So I looked at Chrob. I even listened to her. I took notes. I understood things about cellular structure—the nucleus, the cell wall, protoplasm, the endoplasmic reticulum, which is kind of a circulatory system inside the individual cell. I was feeling focused, academic, like maybe I wanted to study biology in college.

  Then the bell rang.

  Everyone shifted out of their seats. I stood up very carefully in case Jenny was still watching. After all, I didn’t want her to see me fall down or anything.

  There she was, walking up to me.

  “So…,” I said. She smiled again, and waited for me to finish whatever it was I was going to say. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that was.

  Another word. Say another word. Make a sentence.

  “We’re going to be working together, huh?”

  “Looks that way,” she said. “Any idea which project you want to do?”

  No. Say no.

  “Uh … nope.”

  “Me neither. Maybe we should get together like this weekend and get started?”

  Together? Of course, together! It’s a group project, idiot! Okay, talk again now.

  “You mean like Saturday?”

  She looked worried. “Is that too soon? That’s not cool, is it? I’m not very cool. I get that from my family. And now I’m talking too much.”

  What do I say? I can’t tell her I think she’s cool, that wouldn’t be cool …

  “Yes. No. I mean this weekend is fine. Totally fine. And cool.”

  She laughed a little. “Don’t you live near Westerly Avenue? My cousin Madge lives around there, and she’s seen you get on the bus. I could bike over and meet you at your house.”

  “Sure. Great. What time?” I managed.

  I forgot what time she mentioned, but it didn’t matter. I could ask later, after I had more practice actually speaking to her. Right then, all I had to do was get away without tripping or drooling or bursting into hysterical laughter. I smiled again, not too weirdly, I hoped, exited the class, and turned a hallway corner. Checking to make sure she hadn’t followed, I jumped into the air, then pounded my feet into the floor one after the other until it felt like my toes would fall off.

  Jenny Tate was going to be my project partner, and she wanted to work at my house!

  It wasn’t turning out to be such a bad day at all.

  In fact, it was probably the best day I’d ever had.

  Now the only problem was, where was I going to get a house?

  3

  HOME SUITE HOME

  My “room” is a converted office suite in Area 2B, which can be found toward the back of the PR department. It’s near a service elevator, so sometimes you’ll get banging when something’s loaded or unloaded, but otherwise it’s pretty private. It used to belong to Dave Laconte, a Super-Creep Veep who suddenly “retired.” Never heard the whole story. Probably one of those boring embezzlement things. Just once I’d like to see someone fired because he’s secretly a lycanthrope that’s slaughtering townsfolk.

  In my room, there’s a big white open area with lots of windows where I keep my bed, a cool plasma TV hooked up with a PS3, and some other junk. Then there’s a smaller room with my desk, for studying and reading. I guess if it wasn’t mine, and didn’t look so much like what it was, an office suite, I’d think it was pretty great.

  I was thinking, for a whole wild and crazy afternoon, that I’d just come out and tell Jenny my life story, reveal my identity, so to speak. If I were a superhero, that’d be exactly the sort of thing that’d impress a girl. “You see, Jenny, I secretly fight crime with the radioactive strength of a megaconglomerate.”

  But, no.

  After school, I went straight to good old Area 2B and took a long hard look at it. Over the years, I’d managed to cover a lot of the paneling (called “Executive Burl”) with posters and whatnot, but no matter what, especially with that romantic view of the parking lot, it still looked like a freaking office. I tried rearranging, sort of making my bed, kicking the clothes into one or two piles instead of six or seven. But it was hopeless.

  I couldn’t bring Jenny to NECorp. She’d freak and run.

  I keep a bunch of model spaceships on some shelves. I hadn’t played with them in years. I picked one up to look at. What I thought was some nice detail painting of an oil smudge turned out to be dust, which only served to remind me how long I’d been here. That got me to feeling sorry for myself, which got me to thinking about sucky life in general as it applied to my sucky life in specific.

  When I was a kid and I actually played with those models, I used to pretend I had my own TV show. It was a talk show, a weekly vehicle for my spontaneous wit and engaging patter. Sometimes, I’d interview my favorite people, like Mahatma Gandhi or the Incredible Hulk, who I think are both really interesting, but in different ways.

  I said I was a kid, okay?

  I canceled the show about two years ago because I was looking for other projects, and, well, it started feeling stupid pretending I was on TV. But I do still like to imagine that someday someone will ask what it was like to be the first kid raised by a corporation.

  It could happen. It’s a lot more likely than the werewolf thing.

  So, I figured I should have some sort of prepared answer. For the longest time, the stuff I came up with was your standard garbage, like, “Well, Bob, or Barbara, it was a unique and edifying experience with many challenges that made me a stronger person.” That sort of crap. Then,
in my first few weeks at Deever, I came up with a real answer.

  It happened thanks to Mr. Banyon’s English class. We were reading classic science fiction. At first I thought this would be cool, but it turned out to be mostly about “idea-driven” books, stories by people with names like Asimov and Ellison. I got into them, but they lacked the sort of cosmic-scale explosions that generally keep my attention.

  We also had to read two “seminal” novels, 1984, by George Orwell, and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Neither had any explosions, just all this dystopian stuff about where society was headed in the grim future and how gross we are as a species.

  For our paper, my first big paper, we had to compare them. Jack Minger, who was managing my homework at the time, offered to prep me, but I felt like I should do all the work myself. (See? I told you I wasn’t a bad student.) I thought long and hard, and the thing I came up with was that both of the main characters died, but in opposite ways.

  In 1984, the government runs everything like a really bad corporation. They make it, they own it, they distribute it, and you do what they tell you. The government’s cruel about it, too, outlawing any personal freedom. Like the book says, if it’s not compulsory, it’s forbidden. It also watches everyone all the time and tries to control their every move. They even had a logo, Big Brother, the guy supposed to be doing the watching, sort of the ultimate in dark branding. The main character, Winston Smith, tries to rebel, but they catch him and torture him. Eventually he just gives up and says okay, everything’s really great with the way you guys run things. I love Big Brother, I really do. So they stop torturing him and shoot him in the back of the head. The end.

  Cheery, huh?

  Brave New World was the opposite. Instead of gray and poor and deeply sad, everything was bright and shiny and totally shallow. People were born out of tubes and never knew their parents, so sex was just for fun. The government wasn’t cruel, but all the people were clueless (like Mr. Hammond, the CEO). Anyway, they found this guy, John, living in some part of the world they thought was unpopulated. He was raised the way people used to be, with a birth mother, which they thought was horribly gross, and given the birth video I saw once in hygiene, I tend to agree with them.