“She sent me something last night.” Ronnie bumped Clair. “It was weird. Hang on—I’ll show you.”
A forwarded message appeared in Clair’s infield, which had changed to greens and grays to match the New Manteca campus. Bumps kept coming in about the crashlander ball. Another time she might have been pleased by her newfound notoriety, but not today.
Clair fixed on the message from Ronnie and blinked her left eyelid.
“It worked” was all Libby had said, about two hours after the party. “Now I’m beautiful!”
“I think she was talking about Improvement,” Ronnie said. “Check her transit data.”
Like Ronnie and Tash, Clair had close-friend privileges to Libby’s profile, which told her where Libby went and who with. Useful when Libby was running late, now it told Clair exactly where she had been the day before. There was a string of seventeen rapid jumps in the evening, when Clair and Libby had been looking for the crashlander ball, but there was also a long series of Lucky Jumps in the afternoon and another after Libby had said good night. Clair quickly tallied them up. Ninety jumps in one day. At two minutes a jump, that totaled around three hours’ lag.
Tash whistled. “No wonder she had a migraine!”
“What did she mean about being beautiful?” Clair asked Ronnie. “It can’t have worked, right?”
“Impossible,” said Ronnie. “That’s why she bumped me, I think.”
“She wants you to believe because she really wants to believe . . . ?”
“Maybe she convinced herself the birthmark was actually fading,” said Tash. “She must have been ultralagged.”
“So then she crashes,” said Clair. “And what does she wake up to . . . ?”
“Bumps about you and Zep,” said Ronnie with characteristic bluntness.
“And of course the birthmark’s still there, which makes her embarrassed as well as angry.”
Clair was satisfied that they had her best friend’s mood mapped out but decidedly unsatisfied by what that left her with. She was unable to do anything until Libby responded, and she found it impossible to concentrate as a result. Her right foot hooked around her left ankle and jiggled restlessly. Not turning up for school wasn’t especially unusual; everyone skipped now and again, even Clair. But not like this, without an explanation, a single word . . . that wasn’t Libby’s style. She was a broadcaster, not a brooder.
“Clair? Clair, are you paying attention?”
She blinked and refocused. The teacher was talking to her, and the entire class was staring.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gathering up her backpack and avoiding the eyes of her friends. “I’m not feeling well.”
That was a lie, but staying would be a waste of time. There was no faking out a live teacher. That was the whole point of school, Clair’s mom said. Anyone could cheat by copying answers from the Air; school was for learning how to cheat people.
6
Outside, Clair felt crushed by the silence. Ronnie and Tash sent bumps after her to see if she was okay. Had she heard something? Clair said she hadn’t and that she’d be coming back to class soon. What else could she do? She wasn’t sure that going anywhere would do any good. She just needed to think.
A chat request appeared in her infield.
Libby.
Before Clair could wink on it, the patch disappeared.
She thought, just for a second, about letting it go. Libby wasn’t normally so hesitant. If she really wanted to talk to Clair, she’d call back when she was sure of it.
But that didn’t fix anything now, Clair told herself. If best friends couldn’t talk through their issues, who could?
She responded with a request of her own, and it sat there for thirty seconds before anything happened. Then a window opened onto Libby’s bedroom. The shades were down, so if it was sunny outside in Sweden-somewhere, Clair couldn’t tell. Inside, the room was dark and grainy. Libby was a pale shape curled half beneath the covers. She was lying on her side with her head under a pillow.
“Why can’t I see you?” Libby said in a gravelly voice.
“I’m walking outside at school. Why aren’t you here?”
“Slept in. Mad headache.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you answer my bumps?”
“Turned everything off. It was all too much.”
“What was?”
“Spam . . . strange messages . . .”
“What kind of messages? About the ball?”
“Just strange . . . Improvement stuff. I deleted everything.”
“Oh,” said Clair, feeling as though she’d dodged a bullet. If Libby had emptied her infield and switched off her feed, that meant she couldn’t possibly have seen the news. But she would eventually. “Listen—”
“Can’t talk long. Got to sleep some more.” Libby rolled over, pushing the pillow to one side. “Don’t want to waste this golden opportunity, before Mom gets home.”
“I need to talk to you when you’re feeling better.”
“I am feeling better,” Libby said with a sigh. “Slightly. Talk about what?”
“It’s just . . . the party. It didn’t end well. There was some confusion . . .”
“You’re telling me. I think I drunk-bumped Zep at one point when I got home. Did he say anything to you?”
“No. Why would he?” He had done the right thing and stayed away. Or was it the cowardly thing? Clair couldn’t decide. “I hope you feel better about all that today. There’s really no reason—”
“To worry about him being a cheating toad? Sure there is. He was cheating when he hitched up with me.” She laughed, then clutched her head. “Ouch.”
Clair chickened out. It felt almost cruel, raising the subject when Libby was feeling so bad. “I didn’t think you drank that much last night.”
“Neither did I. This is the worst migraine I’ve ever had. Comes and goes at weird times—just when I think it’s done, it crashes back in. . . .”
“Do you need anything? I can probably get permission to come over—”
“You need to stay in school and study for both of us. I’ll learn by osmosis. Maybe we could make it a permanent arrangement.”
Libby grinned up at Clair via the camera pinned to the wall beside her bed. It was Clair’s first good look at her. Libby’s hair was pulled up in a nighttime knot. Her smile was wide and bright, but there were bags under her eyes, and her skin looked even whiter than usual—like the thin, fragile layer of ice riming the dome of the Sphinx Observatory.
“Stay beautiful,” Clair said.
Libby raised herself onto one elbow, smile falling away. Her face ballooned bigger still in the window.
“You can see me, right?” She winced. “Ouch,” she said again. “Crashing. Bye.”
The window closed. Clair stared through the space it had been, not looking at the campus around her, not looking at anything, really, but the negative image of Libby as it faded from her retina.
Clair had seen Libby. What she hadn’t seen was Libby’s birthmark.
She bumped Ronnie. Clair knew what she would say but she needed to hear it again.
“Are you absolutely sure Improvement won’t work?”
“Positive. Don’t waste your time. And think of the Magic Mayflies. You don’t want to piss them off, do you?”
Clair smiled despite herself. “The Magic Mayflies” referred to a story Ronnie’s mom had told them when they were kids to explain how d-mat worked. You stepped into a booth and dissolved into a kind of pollen made entirely of light, which the Mayflies gathered and carried through the air to where you wanted to go. So if you used d-mat too much, the magic might run out, leaving you stranded.