Free Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

my first date in six months—even if it was only a “date” in the lame sense of being an arrangement to meet someone. Still, the concept made me nervous, all my underused muscles of dating anxiety springing into action. I started checking out my reflection in shop windows and wondering if Lace would like the Kill Fee T-shirt I was wearing. Why hadn’t I put on something less threadbare? And what was with my hair these days? Apparently, Dr. Rat, the Shrink, and my other Night Watch pals didn’t feel compelled to tell me it was sticking out at the sides.
    After two minutes in front of a bank window, trying to stick it behind my ears, I despaired of fixing it. Then I despaired of my life in general.
    What was the point of a good haircut when nothing could come of it anyway?
     
    Lace sat down across from me, wearing the same leather jacket as the night before, this time over a wool dress. Under a beret that was the same dark brown as her eyes, her hair still smelled like jasmine-scented shampoo. She looked like she’d had about as much sleep as I had.
    Seeing Lace in the daylight, both of us sober, I realized for the first time that she might be a few years older than me. Her leather jacket was brown—with buttons, not black and zippered like mine—and the rest of her outfit looked like something you would wear to an office job. My Kill Fee T-shirt felt suddenly dorky, and I hunched my shoulders together so my jacket would fall across the screaming demon on my chest.
    “What up?” she said, feeling my scrutiny, and I dropped my eyes back to the table.
    “Uh, nothing. How was your class?” I asked, spattering some more Tabasco over my scrambled eggs and bacon. Before she’d arrived, I’d already consumed a pepper steak to calm my nerves.
    “All right, I guess. Some guest lecturer yakking about ethics.”
    “Ethics?”
    “Journalistic ethics.”
    “Oh.” I stirred my black coffee for no particular reason. “Journalists have ethics?”
    Lace cast her eyes around for a waiter or waitress, one finger pointing at my coffee. She nodded as the connection was made, then turned back to me. “They’re supposed to. You know, don’t reveal your sources. Don’t destroy people’s lives just to get a story. Don’t pay people for interviews.”
    “You’re studying journalism?”
    “Journalism and the law, actually.”
    I nodded, wondering if that was an undergraduate major. Somehow, it didn’t sound like one. I revised Lace’s age up to the lower to mid-twenties and felt myself relax a little. Suddenly, this was even less a date than it had been a moment before.
    “Cool,” I said.
    She looked at me like I might be retarded.
    I tried to smile back at her, realizing that my small-talk muscles were incredibly rusty, the result of socializing only with people in a secret organization who pretty much only socialized with one another. Of course, if I could just steer the conversation to rinderpest infection rates in Africa, I knew I’d blow her away.
    Rebecky—at sixty-seven and three hundred pounds, my favorite waitress in the world to flirt with—appeared and handed Lace a cup of coffee and a menu.
    “How’re you doing there, Cal?” she asked.
    “Just fine, thanks.”
    “You sure? You haven’t been eating much lately.” She gave me a sly wink.
    “On a diet,” I said, patting my stomach.
    Her standard response: “Wish that diet worked on me.”
    Rebecky chuckled as she walked away. She’s amazed by my appetite, but her repertoire of where-does-Cal-put-it-all jokes had shrunk to the bare minimum over the last months. As a guy with something to hide, there’s one thing I’ve learned: People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that’s the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.
    Lace looked up from her menu. “Speaking of funny diets, Cal, what the hell happened in my building last winter?”
    I leaned back and sipped coffee. Evidently, Lace wasn’t up for small