Free So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld Page B

it's hard
to get your cool back after you lose it, you know? It's like when you're walking
down the street, perfectly dressed, grooving to some excellent sound track in
your head, and you trip on a crack in the sidewalk? A second ago you were so
cool, and suddenly . . . everyone's just looking at you. You're back in
Jersey." She shook her head. "Is that hurting?"
    "How could you tell?"
    "Something about the grinding teeth."
    "When does it stop?"
    She weighed invisible objects in her hands.
"Depends. We can stop it anytime. But for every second of pain now, you'll
be blonder and less Hunter-like when you come face-to-face with the bad guys
tonight."
    "So, it's pain now or pain later."
    "Pretty much." She pulled the fridge's giant
trigger and reached in for a carton of milk. From the jangling metal overhead,
she acquired a mixing bowl and poured some in. "This is ready for when
you can't stand it anymore."
    "Milk?"
    "It neutralizes the bleach. It's like your head
has an ulcer."
    "That feels accurate." I steeled myself,
eyes on the undulating white surface of the milk settling in the bowl. Blonder
was better, safer. But the route to blond was long and hot.
    "Distract me more," I pleaded.
    "You grew up in the city?"
    "No. Moved here from
Minnesota when I was thirteen."
    "Huh, the opposite of me.
What was that like?"
    I chewed my lip. It wasn't an
experience I talked about much, but I had to talk about something.
"Eye-opening."
    "What do you mean?"
    A finger of acid was making its way down the back of
my neck. I rubbed it.
    "Come on, Hunter, you can
make it. Become one with the bleach."
    "I am becoming one with the
bleach!"
    She laughed. "Just talk
to me, then."
    "Okay, here's the thing: Back in Fort Snelling, I
was pretty popular. Good at sports, lots of friends, teachers liked me. I
thought I was cool. But my first day in New York, I turned out to be the least
cool kid in school. I dressed from a mall, listened to total MOR, and didn't
have the first clue that people in other places did anything else."
    "Ouch."
    "No, this is ouch. That
was more like ... being suddenly
erased."
    "That doesn't sound like
much fun."
    "Not really." My voice cracked a bit,
related to the acid on my head. "But once I realized I wasn't going to
have any friends, the pressure was off, you know?"
    She sighed. "I do know."
    "So it got kind of interesting. Back in Minnesota
we had maybe four basic cliques: ropers, jocks, freaks, and socials. But
suddenly I was in this school with eighty-seven different tribes. I realized
that there was this massive communication system all around me, a billion coded
messages being sent every day with clothes, hair, music, slang. I started
watching, trying to break the code."
    I blinked and took a breath. My head was melting.
    "Go on."
    I tried to shrug, which reorganized the pain in new
and interesting ways. "After a year of watching, I went on to high school,
where I got to reinvent myself."
    She was silent for a moment. I hadn't meant to get
into quite so much detail and wondered if the acid was seeping into my brain,
making it
porous.
    "Wow." She took one of my hands.
"Sounds horrible."
    "Yeah, it sucked."
    "But that's how you got into cool hunting, isn't
it?"
    I nodded, which sent a second little trail of acid
down my back. My scalp was sweating now, trickles slow and incendiary, like
flowing lava, as seen on a certain cable channel associated with wildlife,
experimental aircraft, and volcanoes. I forced my mind away from the image.
    "I started taking pictures on the street, trying
to figure out what was cool and what wasn't and why. I got a little obsessive,
which happens sometimes, and started writing commentary. Then that turned into
a blog. And about three years ago Mandy saw my site and sent me an e-mail: 'The
client needs you.'"
    "Huh. Happy ending."
    I tried to agree, but at that moment the only happy
ending would have been my head in a bucket of milk. A bathtub of milk. A
swimming pool of ice cream.
    "I guess