Free So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld

associated with
Thanksgiving Day parades and Santa Claus movies. It was not a place Jen or I
usually shopped. But that was the point, I was learning. We were shopping for
the non-Hunter.
    The non-Hunter wore bow ties. He preferred crisply
laundered white shirts and tasteful silk vests. The non-Hunter seemed not to
know it was summer outside; I suppose he went from one air-conditioned place to
another in an air-conditioned limousine. He was going to blend right in at a
party for Hoi
Aristoi.
    And hopefully, the non-Hunter would fly in the face of
all the evidence one might collect from the real Hunter's cell phone. To pursue
the anti-client, I would become the anti-me.
    The real me checked out a random price tag.
"These jackets are like a thousand bucks!"
    "Yeah, but we can return everything Monday and
get a refund. Fashion shoots do it all the time. You've got a credit card,
right?"
    "Uh, yeah." The refund plan seemed like a
risky proposition to me, but Innovators generally lack the risk-assessment
gene. Jen wandered the aisles in a kind of trance, her fingers trailing in the
textures of overpriced fabrics, sucking up the ambience of this entirely
different set of New York tribal costumes.
    She stopped to spin a rack of cripplingly expensive
bow ties, and my nerves blipped her radar. "Relax, Hunter. We've got four
hours before the party officially starts. Which means five before anyone will
show. All day to get you dressed."
    "What about getting you dressed, Jen?"
    She nodded, sighing. "I've been giving that some
thought. It'll be too easy to recognize us if we're together. So I'll probably
look for some alternate mode of disguise."
    "Wait. We're not going together?"
    "Hey, this isn't too bad."
    She pulled out a jacket, a jet black synthetic that
sucked the light from the room, double-breasted and textured like rough and
supple paper.
    "Wow, cool."
    "Yeah, you're right. Too you." She put it
back. "We need something that doesn't make a statement. Something that's
not trying very hard."
    "What? You think I'm trying too hard?"
    Jen laughed, turning from the racks to catch my eye.
"Just hard enough."
    She spun away and headed off toward more jackets,
leaving me to contemplate these words. I wound up hanging out in front of a
triple mirror, wallowing in the discomfort of seeing what I looked like from
unfamiliar directions. Did my ears really stick out like that? Surely that was
not my profile. And when had my shirt gotten half tucked in at the back?
    Then I noticed what I was wearing. When cool hunting,
I usually disappear into corduroys, sportswear, and laundry-day splendor,
turning invisible. But this morning I'd unconsciously slipped into my real
clothes. Generic corduroy had resolved into baggy black painters, the usual
oversized chewing-gum-colored tee replaced by a light gray wife beater under
an open black shirt with a collar. No wonder my parents had noticed, somehow
reading the signs, resulting in the unexpected psychic leap when Mom had asked
whether I liked Jen.
    Maybe it was obvious to everyone. Maybe I was trying
too hard.
    "I think we're all set." Jen appeared behind
me, the mirrors splitting her into multiple views, full hangers swinging from
one hand. I took them from her, regressing to when Mom used to take me
shopping, and equally unsure of the result.
    "Are you sure we couldn't just disguise ourselves
as waiters or something?"
    "Yeah, right. That is so Mission Impossible." (By which she meant the
original TV show and not the movie franchise, so I'll allow it.)
    She reached up to ruffle my hair, checking out the
angles in the mirror, and smiled. "Take one last look, Hunter. By tonight
you won't recognize yourself."
     

Chapter 13
    "THIS
IS GOING TO STING,” JEN SAID.
    It did. Of course it did.
    Bleach is acid, the great destroyer. You see, each of
your hairs is protected by an outer layer called a cuticle, which holds in the
pigment that gives the hair its color. The purpose of bleach is to destroy
these