Very LeFreak (9 page)

CHAPTER 12

Hello Hello Hello, Is There Anybody in There?

That Richard Chamberlain had been onto something. Appeasement could maybe possibly work.

Wait a minute. Neville Chamberlain had been the appeasement dude. Richard Chamberlain was the gay priest? Or had that been Richard Simmons?

Whatever. Neville Chamberlain. Was the World War II appeasement dude. Very was sure of it.

And she’d figured this out without a Google query!

Very was, indeed, kickin’ it old school in the natural world. One whole comfortably numb week in April, without the constant techno blast surging through her bloodstream, and she was accomplishing things. At the behest of Dean Dean, she’d rewritten that Lit Hum paper, actually reading the texts instead of merely Googling relevant passages. She hadn’t skipped a class since the electronic purge, which meant she also hadn’t sent or answered an IM or a meme, which meant she’d somewhat absorbed the lectures she’d been supposed to be listening to all along. (That Econ shit … Whoa. Important.) She’d also completed two shifts at the Morningside Avenue Food Co-op, and was now the proud owner of two bushels of organic, fiber-rich Empire apples that could substitute for the nutrient-poor, credit-card-delivery meals Very couldn’t afford for at least a week. Best of all, her joystick-induced carpal tunnel syndrome had eased, the chronic tension in her hand happily giving over to pain-free textbook-page flipping rather than video-game playing.

The music thing was kind of killing her, and she was going to find where Lavinia had hidden her emergency spare iPod even if she had to do a body search on the girl, but, Very had to admit, this taking away of her gadgets, this
allowing
her treasonous friends to think they were helping her, wasn’t entirely a bad idea. For the time being.

Clean for a week now, Very felt an epic shift occurring in her body chemistry, rather like the sudden temporal rift that happened from long-distance airplane travel, from falling asleep on takeoff and then landing to awake in a completely different environment. The intervention was a joke, Very reminded herself, but she could prove to the world, and to herself, that SHE COULD DO IT.

SHE COULD DO IT by pretending the whole experience was a virtual science experiment she was being forced to act out in the Real World.

Very missed her gadgets, surely, but the emotional weight of them might indeed have been a burden. With no laptop or phone on which to scan for messages from El Virus (now MIA for almost a month, which was like a quarter century in online romance time) and without the immediate means through which to send or answer a meme or play a video game, Very had to acknowledge she felt suddenly free, like that delicious feeling of going to a foreign country and not speaking the language or knowing the customs but randomly setting out into the culture to see what would happen. Could acclimation happen?

Well, no, acclimation couldn’t really happen. Very would get her stuff back eventually, and the sooner the better. And the sooner she appeared to have relaxed into it, the better the traitors would determine her mental well-being to be, and return her fucking stuff to her already. Appeasement was just that: appeasement. Everyone knew it didn’t last. (Sorry, Neville.)

For now, Very would play the game. She only had to survive a few more weeks, until classes ended in early May. While most of her classmates had internships and far-flung adventures lined up for their summer breaks, Very had yet to figure out a plan, having decided long ago that El Virus would appear just as final exams concluded to whisk her away for a summer of frolic and fun. So this No Techno experiment might help and not hinder the reality check Very’s summer planning needed, since Real World El Virus was apparently nowhere on the horizon.

Very had refused to speak to Lavinia in the first couple days after the intervention. But the silent treatment had quickly grown old, and boring, too, with no online adventures or music to distract Very in their room. All it had taken was one batch of microwaved Chewy Chips Ahoy! that Lavinia had brought in just for Very, and Very fell out of Mad and into Yum with her Chum in an instant. Very wished she had higher standards for holding a grudge, but, at least where Lavinia was concerned, she didn’t, apparently.

For pragmatism’s sake, Lavinia put Very on a thirty-minutes-per-day Internet allowance regimen specifically for the purpose of researching a summer job and abode. The addendum to that allowance, however, was that the research would be done on Lavinia’s laptop, by Lavinia. Which meant Lavinia had to do the thinking for Very, which Very minded not at all. Bonus all around.

“So which is it?” Lavinia said, tapping away. “We’ve only got three weeks of school left before finals, and you need to figure this out already. Do you want to spend the summer in New Haven and find a job there, or try to stay in Manhattan? It’s possible to sublet graduate student apartments over the summer. But pricey.”

Very, sitting next to Lavinia on Lavinia’s bed, dropped her head onto Lavinia’s shoulder. “Why can’t I just live with you?” she asked.

Lavinia said, “A summer in Vermont would be so exciting for you, I’m sure.”

“Better than a summer in New Haven,” Very whined.

“You’d want to be a camp counselor to a bunch of tyrannical tween girls with me?”

“No,” Very said. Hang out with Lavinia all summer—sure, why not? Work, at a job—no way, ick[dot]yuck[dot]horrible. Very wondered why she couldn’t be the offspring of independently wealthy people and do, like, nothing all summer, but in a really posh apartment paid for by someone else, and with an unlimited food-delivery line of credit? (Also, as always, the optimal situation would include cable and other assorted hookups on someone else’s dollah.)

Lavinia pointed to some Web site hits on her laptop. “Look, I’ve found a few job possibilities for you in New Haven. Just temp stuff, but good leads. Do you have a résumé prepared?”

Very had to incite Lavinia to stop dropping that douchey “ré-sumé” word already. Her head still relaxed on Lavinia’s shoulder, Very moved her arm from behind Lavinia’s back to Lavinia’s behind. She then slipped her hand underneath her roommate’s shirt. Her hand was barely an inch up the warm, soft skin of Lavinia’s back before Lavinia jumped off the bed.

“Don’t think you can molest me to find your spare iPod,” Lavinia said. “I know your tricks.”

How was it that Lavinia knew Very’s every predatory thought?

“Please,” Very pleaded. “I just want my music. Where’s the spare ‘Pod? You know my primary music library is on my spare and not on the iPhone. Please. Don’t make me beg. Or I’ll have to tickle the location out of you.”

Lavinia rolled her eyes. “I’m not ticklish.”

“That’s not what your crew girlfriend told me.”

Lavinia would not rise to the bait. “Sorry. No ‘Pod for you. I will not be your enabler.” Lavinia took her CD case from her desk and handed it to Very. “If you want to listen to music, here’s my collection. You can listen to it on my Internet-less and radio-less CD player.”

“But …,” Very sputtered. “Your music sucks.” Lavinia’s taste was so predictably college-radio alternative music. Absolutely not. Unacceptable. Too earnest. Very needed her groovefire.

“Deal with it,” Lavinia said. “Hum to yourself if you need a tune.”

Very singsonged, “Please let Very have her iPod, darlingest, most beautiful Lavinia.”

“Will not enable you will not enable you will not enable you,” Lavinia said. She retrieved her laptop from her bed, away from nearness to Very. “Stop this nonsense already. I’m going out.”

“Where?” Very said. Lavinia had
better
not say …

“Study break with some friends from crew.”

That.

Very hated Lavinia’s crew friends. They were all like Lavinia, so smart and sporty and together, without being super special like Lavinia. They had names like Amanda and … a few more Jennifers, Very was pretty sure. She’d only met, like, five of them, but she’d hated them on sight for diverting Lavinia’s attention. She hated Lavinia having fun without her. True, Very socialized plenty without need of Lavinia, but that didn’t mean Lavinia should also be so entitled.

Very said, “You mean you guys will be meeting in some Amanda’s room and pretend to study but really watch her collection of
The L Word
episodes?”

“Queer as Folk,”
Lavinia retorted.

Very loved it when Lavinia played back. “How butch of you.”

Lavinia pointed at the dinosaur computer that Very had been relegated to. “Stop dodging the subject. I’m assuming you have no résumé. Prepare one. I expect you to have a rough draft finished by the time I get back tonight.”

Very shrugged, indifferent.

Lavinia softened. “Okay. You’re killing me with that sad face. One song when I get home. I’ll give you one song.”

“We’ll have a spontaneous dance party?” Very asked, brightening.

“One song. Dance party. If your résumé is drafted by the time I get back. Affirmative.”

“Spice Girls?” Very said.

“Pussycat Dolls!” Lavinia called out as she left the room.

“Poseurs,” Very muttered.

Dreabbie stood in the doorway Lavinia had just abandoned, holding Very’s iPhone. “Are you ready for your ten-minute-allowance message check?” Dreabbie asked.

Was she!

Very snatched the phone from Dreabbie’s hand and popped open her messages.

And there it was, at last.

Contact.

From El Virus.

His message said:
Find me, dearest. Monsignor needs rescuing
.

Catch him if she could.

She would.

CHAPTER 13

April Showers Bring … Full-on Freaks

She was a LeFreak who was a freak magnet.

Very would never have imagined Jean-Wayne Chang was
this
much of a freak, however.

Dy-no-mite!

First, he wore deep-sea-green eyeliner. No big, right? Right. Lots of guys wore eyeliner. But. Jean-Wayne only wore eyeliner when going online to engage in a certain fetish involving fishes that Very might normally have dismissed as cool-but-not-her-thing, but that, in this case, she’d embrace wholeheartedly.

She had to, because J.-W. was the master leading her back to her domain.

Meaning, second, J.-W. was a source, a hustler, a kingpin, within his secret world.

His secret world consisted of a posse of engineering-major dudes who also wore green eyeliner but who couldn’t trace their inner lids with the same suave flair that Jean-Wayne pulled off. The posse met for after-midnight rituals in a basement cove in the East Asian Library, where they immersed themselves in all-night marathons playing a hypnotic, postmodern Dungeons & Dragons–esque game called
Dream with the Fishes
. It was a cult game, played online between various teams around the world, an elite who could join only by invitation. The Columbia team’s gaming station was in an unused, unmarked room, which one could enter only by pressing a thumb into an unseen finger-scan machine behind a peeling hallway wall. The room was set up with an enormous plasma screen that took up the length of one of the room’s four walls. Chairs that looked hijacked from the first-class section of an airliner were set up with video consoles attached to the arms. The chairs were assembled in neat rows for prime viewing position opposite the wall screen.

If she hadn’t known better, Very might have guessed the room was decorated in tribute to the bridge on any given
Enterprise/Battlestar Galactica
starship. (She would never suggest to the guys that their decorating scheme was so space-age-crossover derivative, however. She valued her own life too much.) She also might have guessed that Jean-Wayne had allowed her secret entry into the cove because what the group needed most was not necessarily a token girl, but a sixties-era stewardess figure who could bring them cocktails while they gamed, and whose Fresh-woman Ten-, er, Fifteen-induced cleavage could offer them up the fantasy of mile-high (or mile-low, in their case) adventures while they cavorted/hunted/massacred/algae’d their way through their oceanic underworld game.

Very’s instinct had been right that Jean-Wayne was the weak link in her friends’ stand against her technology habit. She’d found him straightaway after reading the first message from El Virus. She’d gone to his and Bryan’s room. She was actually looking for Bryan, knowing he was the one really holding the grudge, ergo, he must be the one who’d hidden her laptop. And she needed her baby back. NOW. No more games. No more appeasement. She couldn’t go online on any of the university computer terminals because they required a university log-on—and Dean Dean had arranged for Very’s unsupervised online privileges to be turned off until she could be approved for good-behavior repatriation by Dreabbie. Lavinia took her laptop with her at all times now, so as not to tempt Very, and sure, Very could ask any number of fellow students if she could use their laptops, but she wanted to think she had her situation under control. She hadn’t stooped so low as to beg others for Internet time or to go to some Internet kiosk—How ghetto. She wasn’t that cheap or far gone. Not yet, anyway. She
would
stoop so low as to sneak into Bryan and Jean-Wayne’s room, however, and she would damn well find her own machine therein even if she had to uncover untold amounts of dirty socks and porn in their room in order to do so.

When Very got her machine back, her first playlist would be called “Gimme Back My Machine, Bitches,” and it would shuffle songs by Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Cat Power, The Smiths, Eminem, Kanye, Janis, and Erykah Badu, and she might throw in “Jenifa” by De La Soul for Lavinia, depending on how angry she felt at the moment of compiling the musical diary entry.

There turned out to be no need to sneak into Bryan and Jean-Wayne’s room. The boys’ door was open when Very arrived. Jean-Wayne was inside the room, applying eyeliner in the mirror.

“Where’s Bryan?” Very asked him, standing in the doorway.

“Dunno where he went,” Jean-Wayne said. “He’s out with a girl.”

“Shut up.”

“Not a real date. Just someone Debbie thought she could set him up with.”

“Ew.”

“Kinda.”

Very stepped inside the room and sat down on Bryan’s bed. Best just to get right to it. “I want my laptop back,” Very demanded of Jean-Wayne. “Do you know where he’s hidden it?”

“No.”

“But it is Bryan who has hidden it. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to give me the speech about not enabling me?”

“No.”

Cool. Trust established.

“So why are you putting on eyeliner?” Very asked.

“Want to find out?”

She jumped back up from Bryan’s bed. “Yup.” Very pulled one of Bryan’s light jackets, the geeky newspaper delivery boy jacket that she used to love, from his closet to go out with Jean-Wayne.

She’d work the laptop situation later. The eyeliner mystery beckoned first.

See, Very could walk away from her so-called problem anytime. She just had.

Jean-Wayne placed a pair of sunglasses over his eyes, and together they headed out. “I was going to come find you now anyway. Something special has been arranged for you, by my secret society.” His tone sounded ominous, and what with him dropping the words “secret society,” and his green eyeliner, sunglasses, and overall great fashion sense, Very imagined him to be taking her to a Skull and Bones–type tribunal, but like one of the Ray-Banned Leprechauns, as fashioned by Calvin Klein.

It was 2 a.m. as they walked toward the East Asian Library, on the kind of April night Very loved, drizzly and brisk, with the promise of a dewy, warm morning ahead. Straggles of students milled along College Walk and on the steps at
Alma Mater
, but the campus was empty of its hordes of daytime people. Very loved this serene time on campus, seeing the stately university buildings framed in nightlights, hearing the hum of buses and taxis going up and down Broadway nearby, with only shadow figures dotting the landscape, smoking and talking and passing beers in brown bags. This must be the cozy campus fantasy her mother had wanted for her.

“You need it badly,” Jean-Wayne said to Very as they walked up the steps toward the library.

“Excuse me?” she asked, mildly insulted. Her slutty reputation aside, his comment seemed a crude suggestion from such a gentleman.

“Not
that,”
Jean-Wayne said.

“Because I can get
that
if I want it,” she said.

“No one would dispute that. I mean, you need a fix. I can see it in your eyes. They’ve gone all hollow since you were turned off. It’s hurting me, that empty look of yours since your goods were taken away.”

Could it be that Jean-Wayne understood her predicament? And knew that appeasement was obviously a big fat fake that needed to end?

Very said, “So you’re going to help me? Give me back my machine?”

“No. I don’t know where Bryan put it, to be honest. But I am taking you to a special place for a fix. Think of it as like a flophouse, for people like us.”

“What do you mean, ‘people like us’?”

“People who need uninterrupted, nonjudgmental tech time.”

She was people like Jean-Wayne, indeed.

There were more messages awaiting her from El Virus. Very knew it. Her great love never sent only one message; he always sent one starter followed by a blitz of many. But she’d need unlimited, unsupervised online access in order to find the messages. She didn’t want to beg for it. But here Jean-Wayne was, her newest bestest friend ever, intuiting her need, prepared to give her what she craved, with seemingly no strings attached.

“Outsiders are forbidden here,” Jean-Wayne said as they approached a side door to the library. They entered a long, narrow hallway that was dimly lit. Jean-Wayne tapped twice on a janitor’s closet door, then kicked it. The door opened to a dark staircase leading downward. Jean-Wayne retrieved a flashlight from his coat pocket and ushered Very down the stairs. They had reached the peeling wall, against which Jean-Wayne placed his index finger for scanning. As the unseen machine processed his fingerprint, Jean-Wayne told Very, “The group has made an exception for you. You’re sort of like a rogue hero to them. Guys here, on the inside, they feel for your situation. Want to help you out.”

They entered the dark room. Very couldn’t believe what she saw. The sheer green of it all overwhelmed the space. The walls were painted a bluish green, and ceiling track lights emitted soft pastel shades of green. A massive plasma screen dwarfed the room, with the oceanic game on majestic display. The background sea green color against which the game was set was so vibrant and mesmerizing that Very could see how playing the game could be like smoking crack—instant narcotic, instant addiction. It was like you looked at that screen and were immediately transported down under to a private deep-sea adventure, surrounded by lush plant life and schools of tropical fish, each player an eco-warrior up against fish, whales, sharks, pirate ships, coral reefs, tsunamis, icebergs—all the waves of ocean life from around the world. The noises emanating from the game—waves crashing, water lapping, dolphins squealing, boat engines churning—somehow all these even sounded green, if it was possible to apply a color to a sound.

“You play
Dream with the Fishes!”
Very said to Jean-Wayne, dazzled. “How did I not know this about you before?”

“What happens in
Dreams
stays in
Dreams,”
Jean-Wayne said. He took off his sunglasses and guided her around to the front side of the chairs to introduce her to the assembled players. There were seven other dudes already assembled, all with tribal forms of green stripes splashed across their faces. They were already deep inside the game—their eyes had that glassy look Very knew so well—but they acknowledged her presence with nods and grunts.

Very recognized a few of the grunts from their profiles on the now-defunct Grid site. Yes, defunct. But who de-functing cared? Not Very, that was certain. What Grid?

Bryan, at the “encouragement” of Dean Dean and Dreabbie, had announced he’d shut down The Grid immediately after the intervention, but who’d even notice? A replacement site of one sort or another would undoubtedly pop up soon, if it hadn’t already. It wasn’t like people weren’t already connected by a million other sites, anyway. It wasn’t like Very couldn’t put up another site
like that
, whenever she wanted to, and next time without stupid Bryan knowing all the passwords and programming code.

She could shrug off The Grid as easily as she’d shrugged off Bryan. No problem.

Of the
Dreams
players assembled, two were boys Very was pretty sure she’d made out with at freshman orientation so many months ago, or maybe she’d asked them to make out with each other at that first party she’d thrown—not entirely a clear memory so many kegs ago. One player she recognized as her definitely post–b-day party make-out partner formerly known as Ghana, and she was clear on that memory (nice), and one player she recognized as a fellow Canadian friend of J.-W.’s (they traveled in packs, those Canucks on campus). The remaining players Very recognized from around campus but didn’t know—but she’d like to, she could tell already.

Jean-Wayne said to the group, “Everyone, this is Very. Very, everyone.”

Aargh!
she wanted to say, pirate-voice, to the boys in their captain’s chairs. Instead, she said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” they mumbled back.

“So do I get to play
Dreams
also?” Very asked Jean-Wayne.

“No way. There’s a whole initiation ritual you’d have to go through. And sorry to be all sexist pig on you, but girls suck at this game. Total downer. But see that empty chair over there? Hector the Janitor delivered it here for you. Big fan of yours, apparently. There’s a laptop on the chair, donated for your personal use in this room. Obviously, all necessary hardware and software are on the machine already. So go to it. Return to the mother ship.”

Jean-Wayne sat himself down in the empty chair in the middle of the group—he was clearly the team leader—and picked up his console to enter the game. And instantly, he was Inside, and Very knew she was on her own here. The boys had their feed, and she should step aside to go to hers.

There was a moment’s hesitation—perhaps she’d been better off restricted from all this? But the moment was only that: a moment.

Of course she wanted to hit the juice. She stepped out of the boys’ game vision and over to her queen’s chair behind their rows. She saw the laptop, shiny and beautiful, calling to her.

She’d answer.