The Complexitor sat at home in his favorite lounge chair before a wide-screen TV, drinking a perfectly chilled microbrew beer. The camera followed a tiny white ball as various golfers tried to hit it into a hole impossibly far away. He wasn’t watching. He was sulking.
It had been two days and he still didn’t have any answers. He ran the situation over and over through his mind, without a single satisfying result. How had it all gone wrong? He had analyzed the game for several days, and planned for nearly a week. He had the best information available on the DMIC. He had taken all his vitamins. He was, as his cousin said, “juiced”. It couldn’t fail and yet somehow, it did.
The DMIC was simply stronger than he had anticipated, probably by a factor of two or more. What’s worse, Roberts had told him that they were aggressively recruiting high school students. He took another sip. He hated to contemplate the possibility, but maybe he needed a partner. The idea seemed comforting at first, but before he could follow it any further, the embarassment of defeat returned with a vengeance. Maybe their recruits were responsible for their success? That could have been the mitigating factor — no, it had to have been. Very well. He would take care of that. He would defeat the DMIC by taking out their new recruits. He would clip the new buds.
That evening, he decided to go out to the local watering hole for those involved in the incompetence trade — Starry Nights. It was an industrial club that didn’t make it, and from the outside, it still looked that way. The parking lot was littered with trash, weeds grew through the cracked asphalt, and a “For Sale” sign was staked outside. The building itself featured impenetrable black glass all around, and was plastered with glow-in-the-dark stickers of planets, comets, stars, and other astronomical objects. The two double-glass entrance doors featured spiral galaxies — one spinning clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. Above the doors, written in a fluid, futuristic cursive letters was the name of club itself. When the Complexitor arrived, he took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and followed the byzantine instructions written down. After a series of knocks and wiping sounds made by dragging his fingers across glass, the doors jangled and opened. He quickly stepped inside.
* * *
Brandon swung open the door to the DMIC lounge. HIM sat in his usual position with a dainty cup of tea between his two meaty, oversized hands, oblivious to the chaos around him. Veero hovered just below the ceiling, fading in and out, while Wenchy and O-Man stood just below her, hurling insults at one another. O-Man was dressed in a white T-shirt with jarring blue letters superimposed on red letters which read simply “No”, shimmery green pants that featured water droplets falling into a lake in a holographic pattern, and his usual goggle-glasses. Velvet Katherine laid on the sofa, chin propped up on one elbow, smiling.
“No, what’s important here is assigning blame! Whose fault is it?” asked Wenchy.
“Yours,” said O-Man. “You’re supposed to be a tomboy. You fumbled the ball!”
“I didn’t want to get my dress snagged on the couch! You should’ve thrown it TO me instead of to my Side Of The Room.”
Velvet Katherine noticed Brandon and in reply, stretched out her hand and curled three fingers in slowly. HIM nodded as he lifted the teacup to his lips.
Velvet Katherine said drolly, “Welcome to the asylum.”
“What’s going on?” Brandon asked.
She idly pointed to a foam football that was wedged in the oak cabinet where Veero’s control circuitry was housed. HIM put down the empty cup and stated, “Arena football gone bad. They jarred her controls.”
“Oh,” said Brandon. He took a seat on the couch facing away from him, slightly amused and slightly confused. “Are they going to fix her?”
“Someday,” sighed HIM. “It’s not hard, but it’s the principle that’s at stake.”
“And the pride,” added Velvet Katherine.
“Are we still having a meeting?”
“Of course,” darted Velvet Katherine. “The children just need to get it out of their systems.”
O-Man and Wenchy continued arguing; Velvet Katherine raised her voice and repeated herself.
Wenchy was about to slap O-Man and he was lunging for a cushion on HIM’s sofa when what Katherine had said registered. Wenchy looked over at Brandon, blushed slightly, and composed herself. O-Man grumbled and headed over to the oak cabinet. When his back was turned, Wenchy stuck out her tongue at him. Brandon rolled his eyes.
An uncomfortable silence filled the room until Veero popped off with, “I was right here! Right here!” She sighed and slumped over, floating down to HIM’s sofa. She adjusted her glasses and looked over at him, smirking. “Tagging hair isn’t a real tackle!” HIM quickly looked away.
O-Man shut the oak cabinet and then stood before the coffee table as Wenchy sat down beside Brandon. He rifled through some notes that he pulled out of his green pants. “Ok, conclave meeting this Wednesday. Six PM sharp. I’ll drive.”
Everyone but Brandon protested. O-Man grinned, feigning hurt. “Just making sure that you’re awake.”
Wenchy jabbed Brandon in the ribs, her voice low and secretive. “Do you remember what the conclave is?”
Brandon blinked. “Uhm, I know it’s a level higher up than the chapter.”
Wenchy pointed to him and then unfurled an imaginary book with her hands.
O-Man continued, “More on that later. Here’s the status on the McCallahan Lake project. We’ve verified that there are no other sources of incompetence in the area and our surveillance has indicated that none are forthcoming. The maintenance work is not large enough for Farley to subcontract.”
“On the other hand, the system isn’t being maintained poorly enough to get the attention of county water management. So far, it’s just minor disturbances like low water pressure and occasional disruptions to service. It may be a year before trouble hits, but when it does hit, it will be big.”
“If it’s a big deal, we don’t handle it anymore, right?” asked Brandon.
“True,” said O-Man. “But what if something becomes a big deal because we didn’t stop it? That’s major bad and Bernie would find out for sure.”
“Bernie! Grr!” said Veero.
“We also have a tendency to lose funding in those situations,” noted Velvet Katherine, almost nonchalantly.
“And if that’s not bad enough, all the other chapters laugh at us,” added Wenchy. “So while it might seem like a good idea, it really isn’t.” She turned to look at O-Man. “By the way, why didn’t you use the roach motel defense?”
O-Man shrugged. “We ran through several scenarios and only the mobile truck repair looked possible. Even that was only an outside chance because one of the guys is a gonzo truck mechanic — it’s the only thing he cares about.”
“What else did you find out?” asked Velvet Katherine.
O-Man scanned through his notes. “There’s an election coming up for the county commission. Our next plan of attack is to publicize the sorry state of the drainage system. We’re gonna take photos and send them to various bloggers.”
Wenchy nodded. “The harpoon strategy.”
“The next thing is to fill in Brandon in on what happened behind the scenes last Friday.” He gestured to Wenchy, who took his place before the table. She smiled at him and he sat down, folding his arms as if bracing for impact.
“Here’s the official rundown,” she began. “It was mostly a success — grade B. We managed to foil the Complexitor. The background to this is that while you,” and here she looked at Brandon, “and the other junior members were executing the visual component of Operation Flash Fire, we were tracking the Complexitor. We had him penned in and he didn’t even know it!”
Velvet Katherine looked at Wenchy with a “stay on course” sort of look.
“Ahem. Well, after the visual component took its toll, he tried to make a direct play. Jackie interrupted him and then O-Man and Velvet Katherine brought him to heel. It would have been a perfect ending, too, but he got away. More to the point, O-Man let him get away.”
“But no-one’s ever put a Wankel engine in a DeLorian! What would you say to that question?” he asked, spreading his arms wide.
Velvet Katherine replied curtly, “No-one in this room knows what you mean.”
O-Man protested, “You were there, too!”
“We always leave the dirty work to you,” she replied.
“It seems,” interrupted HIM, “that we all have something to learn from this.”
The room fell instantly still. After a few painfully quiet moments, Velvet Katherine spoke. “Point taken. Wenchy?”
Wenchy bit her lip in a way that Brandon thought was irresistably cute. “I will make suspect apprehension a part of strategy.” She adjusted her glasses. “Now about that conclave meeting.” O-Man got back up before the table and they launched into the particulars.
The rest of the discussion was a blur to Brandon, because for the first time, he had thought that Wenchy was cute. The times before he had felt nervous or fragile around her, and he hadn’t wanted that dream to end, and he had felt this glow inside that wasn’t entirely a joy in conquering algebra, but until a few moments ago, it hadn’t all added up. Now it had. She was cute — even when she was snapping her fingers before his eyes.
“Earth to LM. Study time.”
He blinked and realized that the discussion was over. “Oh sorry. I guess I spaced out.”
She led the way into the office. “I noticed! But don’t worry — there’s no test on that stuff. In fact, you’ll have the day off.”
He followed her inside. “I will?”
“Yes. You’re still being trained. A few more weeks and then you’ll be able to attend off-site functions.” She saw his disappointed look. “Hey, it’s for your good as well as ours. Life goes better with training!”
She cleared off the whiteboard and changed the subject. “So how has algebra been treating you? How did studying go this weekend?”
“It went alright,” he said. “I studied for about an hour and a half.”
“Hmm,” she said, picking up a ruler and pointing it at him. “Are you sure that’s enough?”
“Uh, not entirely. But it’s more than I was doing before.”
“Good, good,” she said.
“I’ve been using the techniques.”
“Even better!” Inwardly, she smiled. She had told him to imagine that the problems were important and that his answers mattered. “Make up a story to go with it. In the real world, after all, no-one drops a random math problem in your lap! There’s always a reason why you have to solve it.”
“They’ve been working out really well.” His eyes met her for a moment too long and he had to look away. She looked at him strangely. “Oh no,” she thought. “Not again!” With a familiar pit in her stomach, she realized that this meant a call to his mom. She hurriedly switched the subject.
“And the class itself?”
“Oh. We’re getting to the end of the section on points and lines and Mrs. Turner always has a test at the end of a section. She said it’ll be this Friday.”
“Ah, test prep. I’ve got you covered.” She laid out a laminated sheet before him, that discussed four different methods to study and retain information. Each section had a few steps with fun things mixed between to make studying memorable.
After giving him a minute or so to look it over, she announced, “Algebra is not the only class, though. Our sources tell us that Biology and Physics are having you for breakfast — or at least brunch.”
Brandon wasn’t sure he got that one. “Yeah. I don’t understand biology. Physics is a little easier, though.”
She nodded. “Physics is O-Man’s department,” she said. “Veero’s interested in biology.”
Brandon blinked.
“That and alt rock,” Wenchy added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for an AI/hologram system to have interests.
“We’ll get you started with them after this. But one more thing,” she added. “Don’t forget to study even classes that you’re great in. You’ve gotta keep brushing your teeth even if you didn’t have cavaties last time!” She added, “Now let’s go see what Veero is doing.”
* * * * *
The Complexitor’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the inside of the failed nightclub. Fanning out in a concave half-circle hugging the windows sat a handful of wooden circular tables, surrounded by clusters of chairs. The chairs were stacked one upside down on top of the other, as if the club had not yet opened. Further in, an empty black dance floor stretched from one end of the club to the other, and above, stage-like track lighting bathed the area in an antisceptic smoky-white glow. Further in stood the bar, and he could make out several people sitting there, some conversing with the bartender, others conversing with one another. Off to the side of the bar were comfortable-looking square lounge chairs clumped around low tables. The faint odor of cigars and the unpleasant smell of cheap draft beer came to his nostrils. The music pulsed annoyingly in the background — some sort of nondescript and out-of-date rave material. He really didn’t care for music; it was distracting and as a result, he never bothered to learn much about it except as a way to group similarly annoying things together. The only reason he knew it was rave was because of his cousin. He grit his teeth and made his way to the bar.
The bartender gave him the usual desultory nod as a welcome. He ambled over to tables and noticed a few familiar faces. “Mr. C!” called out one, while others waved him over. He pulled out a comfortable chair and settled in.
Around the table sat his compatriots in the incompetence industry. They weren’t friends, and they weren’t acquaintances, and they didn’t come to drink; they simply talked about various aspects of the business and shared their personal stories. He supposed that “business associates” was the best way to describe them. That was the word that his primary information source, Roberts, used.
A slender man dressed in a neon orange jumpsuit with black goggles and a perpetual grin on his face sat directly opposite the Complexitor. He was Number Four, a representative of the Orange Brigade. Lambda was there also, a young man with a purple flat-top and various Greek symbols down his cargo shorts. He sat with one leg on the floor and the other leg resting on top, bouncing his foot to the beat. His shirt was a picture of suspenders made to look as though he were wearing them. He seemed relaxed and balanced, which was very unusual for him. The last person at the table was Roberts, who wore a long, tan trenchcoat that he seemed to disappear into, leaving only his head to peek out, a head that was covered with short, fine bristles of white hair in patches. Behind gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes were electric blue, piercing, and calculating.
“So howzit?” asked Lambda.
“Could be worse,” said the Complexitor. Roberts raised an eyebrow, and then waved for the bartender.
“Yes. It could be. And that’s our job!” said Number Four, happily, as though he were hopped up on happy pills.
“They were just discussing math,” said Lambda, frowning non-seriously at Roberts. “You got here just in time, man!”
“Probabilities, to be precise,” said Roberts.
The Complexitor laughed. “I bet that you were taking odds on Lambda making it the whole evening without an incident.”
“Ding ding ding!” said Lambda. “The truth is, I’ve gone the whole day without a single accidental act of incompetence! That’s why your words can’t touch me!”
“He’s refining his unability! You go!” said Number Four. The Complexitor sighed. He didn’t like to think of their talents as inverted abilities, and that was a big reason why he didn’t join the Orange brigade — the getup was another.
Roberts said, “I told him that it would be no problem for him to continue that streak the rest of this evening. However, my estimates of that are quite low.”
“Whatever,” said Lambda, bouncing his foot to the beat.
“So how’s everyone else doing?” asked the Complexitor, nodding to the bartender as he passed out another glass for everyone.
“I can’t complain,” said Roberts. “The information trade is booming.”
“Things are smashing in orange land!” said Number Four. “This last mission we caused fifty acts of incompetence at our latest flash breakdance session. Granted, they were fifty acts of bad dancing, but they occurred all within a few minutes of each other, which put a dent in the local competence grid, for certain!” And that was another reason, thought the Complexitor. Staging acts which encouraged mass incompetence was mindless and had no lasting effect. He was convinced that the competence grid was something that existed only in their orange minds.
“How about you, Complexitor?” asked Roberts. “How did your operation turn out?”
The Complexitor took a deep breath. “Not so well. In fact, it was a total bust.”
The others leaned in a little closer. Good news was good, but bad news was even better. “Things started off well — no obvious signs of a resistance,” he said, feeling like a police officer reading a report. “It wasn’t until the second quarter that I realized how much we had underestimated them.”
“No way!” said Number Four with a downturned thumb.
The Complexitor continued, “They knew about the my sensitivity,” he said, tapping the outermost of his three sunglasses, “and they exploited it to its full potential.”
“It’s almost like they knew more about you than you knew about them,” said Lambda.
“I know,” said the Complexitor, looking at Roberts. “After that, I tried to influence the game head-on, but my official source dried up, and then I met Jackie.”
“Jackie? Interesting,” said Roberts.
“I’ll spare you the rest,” the Complexitor continued with an annoyed glance at Roberts, “but I managed to evade capture. They were far stronger than we expected, by a factor of at least two.”
Number Four let out a low whistle. “I can’t find an upside to all that, and that’s depressing! Who were you fighting?”
Under his breath, the Complexitor said, “The DMIC.”
Lambda and Number Four looked at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing.
The Complexitor quaffed his scotch and looked off into the distance. “Go on, laugh. It’s not like I went in there blind.”
Lambda said, “I’m sorry, man, I just can’t help it. Geez. The DMIC? Aren’t they like the place where garbagemen go who can’t get into garbage school?”
“No,” said Number Four, slapping his knee. “That’s where the garbage goes that can’t make it as garbage!” Lambda kept laughing but looked at him strangely.
That’s another reason, the Complexitor said to himself. Their jokes don’t make sense.
Even Roberts let a little grin tug his lips upward.
The Complexitor looked at them each dully in turn. “I appreciate all your support.”
Lambda stopped laughing and said at last, “Sorry man. I know it’s gotta sting.” He laughed a little more, recovered his composure, and then asked, “So what’s your followup?”
“I don’t have anything definite. I will be reevaluating my information sources, though,” the Complexitor stated.
Roberts took a sip of his drink. “Probabilities, probabilities. All our information is extrapolated from what my sources know to what might be, and even what they know might be wrong. What we’ve learned is that our estimates of the DMIC — as improbable as this might be — are low. This is good knowledge to have.”
“You should have joined us!” chirruped Number Four.
The Complexitor leaned back in his chair and felt a playful, almost tender poke. He turned and looked up straight into the eyes of Tristiana.
With the smoky-white lights behind her, she seemed like an angel stepping forth from the clouds, at first. Two off-white wings protruded from her shoulder blades, reaching half-way down her back, ending in sharp pinions — a nice sewing job, he admitted. Her hair was a long, black affair that fanned out over her forehead slightly and then splayed down to where her wings began. A silver star had its center as her left eye, and a dagger had its center as her right. Her gossamer-like top seemed to ripple in some breeze, while spiderweb-textured black gloves ran from her fingers to her elbows, tapering into translucence. Her ruffled black dress was cut in sharp lines as if it had been cut from paper that bled glittering silver gel. Her shoes were off-white slippers with tiny silver-outlined wings behind the heel, a star on the left toe, and a dagger on the right. High cheekbones gifted her with an elevated air, but her eyes focussed on him like he were prey and her smile was twisted in a grin of uncertain sanity.
The Complexitor knew about her and had seen her around, but their paths had never crossed. He knew she wasn’t an emissary or a messenger-girl. She curled a finger and beckoned him aside. He got up and nodded to the table, with the remaining occupants each looking some degree of stunned.
Once at the bar, she said, “I hear you’ve been having a little — trouble.” Her voice matched her appearance — lines alternatingly silky-sweet and huskily mad.
“Word gets around,” he said, looking at an empty glass beside him.
“I can help, you know.”
“How?”
She sat down beside him and playfully imitated his sitting position, laying her head on her arms, and then her arms on the bar. She then lifted her head, turned it sideways to wink at him with the star eye. “Now I can’t tell you all that! But I can mystify!” She swirled her hands higher and higher as if coaxing a balloon into flight. “If I can mystify three junior members of the DMIC” — and she held out three fingers — “then you have to do something for me.”
He laughed. “If you can do that, be my guest.”
She stood up sharply and pushed the bar stool under the table. In a voice like a game show host, she announced, “It’s — a — deal!”
The Complexitor could feel the eyes of strangers on him. Applause broke out from various sections of the bar and she bowed to each in turn.
She stood up and turned to face him, grabbing his nose between her thumb and forefinger. She whispered, “Prepare to meet your doom! Be here Wednesday. I’ll be waiting.” She laughed selfishly and sashayed away, wings flapping slightly as she went.
* * * *
Tuesday morning, Lauren took the long way to homeroom — down the main hall, down the B wing, and then up K. She scanned the right side of the hall and found Danielle, hanging out with two of her friends. “Ugh, I hate acting like this, but here goes nothing!” she thought, slowing her pace and waving hi to Danielle.
Danielle was a short, brown-haired girl, whom most would describe as cute. She was friendly, wore her hair in a ponytail, and smiled more than most. She knew Lauren from second-period English, but they didn’t talk much.
“Hi Lauren. Forget your homework?”
Lauren forced herself into an artificially happy smile and made her voice perky. She said, “No, I got it all done. Just barely, though!”
Danielle’s other two friends were freshmen that Lauren didn’t know, but they knew about her. When she joined them, they each backed up a few feet.
“Me too,” said Danielle. “I wish we would get through the Odyssey already! Blech!”
Lauren fought back the urge to swing her backpack around and knock them all out. The adventure stuff was the only poetry worth reading! Her anger vanished instantly when she realized that Dana would agree. “That’s weird. I wonder what she would say if I asked her about it.” Instead she just nodded.
Then Danielle introduced her to the other two girls — Anna, and Charlotte. In a moment, Lauren could tell that she picked the perfect day to talk to Danielle. All three of them wore sharp clothes, color-coordinated well, and had hairstyles that fit them to a tee.
Before they could get back to their conversation, Lauren said quietly, “Actually, I need to ask a question.”
Anna and Charlotte looked at each other and quickly thrust their hands in their pockets, fumbling for their lunch money.
Lauren sighed. “No, that’s not it. I need some advice.”
Danielle smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Lauren Mitchell needs advice?”
“Yes,” said Lauren, looking off into space, and down at her shoes. “I have to go to a wedding, and I don’t know how I should look.”
Danielle smiled even larger. “So what kind of advice do you need?”
Lauren stumbled with the word. “F-f-f-fashion advice.”
The three girls looked at her in shock.
“Yes, fashion advice! I need it! Tell me everything you know!” The way she said it, it sounded like a threat, but she was blushing and had pulled her cap down over her eyes. The girls laughed and took a few steps closer. In no time, they were all discussing what a good wedding outfit would be for someone who didn’t have to be in the wedding itself. They even gave her ideas for hairstyles, after Lauren had reluctantly removed her MOPAR cap.
Just then, a skinny kid with a rumpled brown jacket and a T-shirt that read, “It’s not me, it’s YOU,” passed by the group of girls. He stopped and looked at them. “Lauren?” He saw a tall, blonde girl standing on tip-toes, with her long, straight hair falling about her shoulders, but she wore a t-shirt sporting a cartoonish funny car, and clutched a cap like a safety blanket. “No way!”
She stormed out of the group and towered over him. “Forget what you just saw, Eddie. One more thing.”
“What’s that?” His voice quavered as fear shot through every muscle.
“Start running.”
He bolted down the hall, skidded left around the corner and kept going. Brian was headed towards his locker in the same hallway when he saw Eddie speeding away from him. He paused and looked sidelong down K wing. There, he saw Lauren all smiles, putting her cap on, leaving a group of girls that she had been talking to. He had a sudden, strange, feeling that he had just seen something he wasn’t supposed to have seen. He ducked back in the hall and turned around to take the long way to homeroom.
* * * * *
“Do you have it?” He turned around to face a rasta hat-wearing redhead girl carrying a black backpack completely covered with buttons. She wore a black tie-dyed t-shirt with a silver whirpool that reached from the edges to the center. He blinked and looked away, becoming dizzy after just a few seconds looking at.
“Uh, not here,” he said, stepping out of the flow of traffic leaving class. “But I can get it for you.” There was something about her that made him nervous. Maybe it was knowing that she was a higher-level geek than he was. Maybe it was the fact that she was cute. Maybe it was both.
Dana was in no mood for pleasantries. She wanted her lightsaber back and she wanted it now. “Ok, let’s go get it.” They went to his locker and after fumbling with a few books, he pulled it out and handed it over. She held it up and examined it several different ways. “Not even a scratch. Excellent!”
“I even put new batteries in it,” he said, getting the last of his books into his backpack.
She pressed the ‘on’ button and a brilliant red glow instantly outlined the clear center column. She swung it around a few times, completely oblivious to the stares of the other students as they passed by. “Excellent plus two!” she said, turning it back off and then collapsing it down to its usual size.
He shut his locker and turned to her and said, “Thanks for letting me borrow it. That was really cool of you.” Before she could zing him about returning it late or notice his expression, she caught a glimpse of Brandon from the corner of her eye.
“Later!” She ran off down the hall, light saber in hand, as stealthily as she could.
He looked after her and said to himself, “She’s so cool.”
* * * * *
Lunchtime was filled with strange energy, as if you could feel the relationships between people reconfigure, buckle, and sway. Brian knew that something was up the moment he saw Brandon. He had seemed a little strange on the ride to school, but by now, he was completely different — out of it and way too happy.
“What’s up with you?” Brian asked.
“Me? Oh. Nothing,” said Brandon, whose dreamy and out-of-focus eyes, were slowly refocusing. “Did I forget to zip up or something?”
Brian laughed. “No, man. It’s your eyes. You look out of it.”
“Oh.” He smiled.
Lauren sat down and noticed that Brian looked more serious than usual. Brandon gave him a sidelong glance and knew what that expression meant — he was thinking of something to say, or trying to avoid saying something. Lauren looked over at Dana and Jimmy, who joined the table with their lunches. “Oh yeah,” said Brandon as he went to go get his, and Brian fumbled around with his brown bag.
Lauren waited for a break in the conversation and then asked Dana if her class had read the Odyssey yet in English.
“We read it a few weeks ago, and no, you can’t have my notes,” said Dana, crossing her arms defiantly.
Jimmy took out a worn paperback titled, “Hyperdrive in Your Backyard, Cheap and Easy” and crouched behind it.
“That’s not it,” said Lauren, thinking to herself, “Didn’t I just do this?” She continued, “What’s your favorite part?”
Dana blinked, nervously looked around the table for someone to help her out. Was it a trick? Why was Lauren asking her something so geeky?
Dana smiled and pulled her rasta hat down over one eye. “The end. You’re not there yet, but there’s lots of blood.” She leered at Lauren. Lauren leered back. “You mean you didn’t like the monsters at all? What about the adventure?”
“Of course I liked those parts too.” Jimmy elbowed her and said softly, “How many Cyclops sketches did you make, anyways?”
Dana turned beet red and took his book. “Traitor!”
Lauren adjusted her cap in a way that Brian noticed as being more girly than usual. He blinked. Then she chomped a french fry in half, and he looked relieved.
“I just thought it was cool,” she said, “the way that Odysseus is going from place to place, like it’s some kind of naval road trip, you know?”
Dana looked at Lauren with a piercing gaze for several moments and then, after deciding that she wasn’t using a Jedi mind trick, she said guardedly, “That was cool.” Jimmy’s book fell from her hand and he caught it before it hit the cafeteria floor. “And it was poetry. I didn’t think you could do that with poetry.”
“Me either,” agreed Lauren.
Brandon looked from Dana back to Lauren to Dana. “Wow. I think this is the first time you have ever agreed on anything important.”
“Maybe so,” said Lauren, a little hurriedly. “But don’t get used to it. I still won’t play those stupid card games.”
“Like we’d let you!” replied Dana. Jimmy rolled his eyes and Brian excused himself.
Lauren took a few bites and then asked Brandon if he noticed anything about Brian.
Brandon thought hard about what to say next. He didn’t want to give away Brian’s thought process, but he didn’t want to lie, either. “Yeah. I think he’s thinking about something.”
“Uh oh,” said Lauren. “Hope he doesn’t hurt himself. Then again, what’s up with you?” She pushed him playfully.
Brandon just shrugged. “I’m just a little out of it today. Hey, it happens.”
Dana had noticed that, too; he did look like he had a vision of something; his eyes had this far off look, kind of like Legolas — she stopped herself. She still had to figure out what he was doing. It was time to expand the area of coverage. She grinned to herself. If her cellphone still worked, she would have sent herself a text to add to her mission calendar.
On the other side of town, the Complexitor pulled the buzzing phone out of his cargo shorts. He flipped it open and read the text message. He grit his teeth and replied as quickly as his large fingers would allow — “I can’t. Bad idea. No room here.” He pressed “Send” and put the phone back. What was his cousin thinking?
* * * * *
That night at the mall, Tristiana stood in the narrow hall outside the women’s bathroom in the mall. She looked like any other young mall denizen, with a little bit more flair for the gothic; her star and dagger symbols still surrounded her eyes, and on her white tennis shoes, she had painted a matching star and dagger on the corresponding shoe. She held up a backlit compact mirror and leaned against the wall. Etched around the inside of the compact in electric pink were the words, “Faedar 3.0″. In place of a mirror was an LCD, showing the mall divided into a green grid with several green dots clustered nearby. She smiled, licked her lips and shut the compact, slipping it into her overly-cute black purse.
This was the night, she thought. She would mystify three members of the DMIC and then the Complexitor — she giggled to herself and stepped out into the mall.
