“Got me,” he had to admit.
“There are lots of kids from Bradford here,” CeeCee said. “Although they all want you to think they’re in college — or even older.” Scowling, she hooked a thumb at a tall red-haired woman with bold blue eyes and nothing much on. Oddly, most of the proxies seemed to be avoiding her. “She’ll tell you she works at her family’s brokerage, but she’s really in my class. That’s Pat Twonky.”
Besides suffering from a comical name, Pat was a big lump of a girl with a sullen personality. Now Matt understood why people were staying away.
He also realized that CeeCee had just told him that she went to Bradford.
“I guess I should thank you for the warning,” Matt told her. “But ripping away people’s masks is a dangerous hobby. Now you’ve got me thinking about you. Do I just go with the blond-and-beautiful image I see here, or should I try to look behind it? Maybe you’re just a wannabe blonde — actually you’ve got stringy, mousy-brown hair.”
“Yikes!” CeeCee exclaimed. A couple of strands of hair wrapped around her finger came loose. Unconsciously, her fingers tied them into a little bow. “What a nasty thing to say!”
“Or maybe you’re a computer geekette who’s just here to see how the other half lives.”
“More like the other ten percent,” CeeCee corrected. “Is that why you’re here?”
Matt ignored the dig. “Suppose,” he went on, “you don’t exist at all! Maybe you’re a computer sim, set up to clue in newcomers to Maxim’s.”
CeeCee had to clamp her lips together, but they curved enchantingly upward. Matt could barely hear her laughter. “You’re terrible,” she said. “And paranoid, if you’re worrying about flirting with a sim.”
“Helps keep me real,” Matt replied. “What else can I do when I meet someone who looks perfect no matter what color her sweater is?”
You’re letting yourself get distracted, a little voice warned in the back of his head. He was saying things he’d normally never say to a girl. But working from behind his proxy, it was just so easy to go with the flow, to play the game.
Beyond CeeCee’s smiling face, a new figure swam into existence — another visitor arriving at Maxim’s. The newcomer was a tall female figure, completely surrounded in a cloud of veils.
The veiled woman started past them, then suddenly whipped round to confront CeeCee. “Hey!” an angry voice demanded. “I thought players here were supposed to come as proxies, not copies.”
“The house rules say come as you want,” CeeCee answered sulkily.
“Probably some pimply-faced little high school twit who wonders what it’s like to be pretty.” Matt couldn’t believe how much scorn the stranger put into that one word. “It’s not enough to start work before the sun rises, spend most of your free time learning lines, and have little idiots copy your hairdo. But I draw the line at rich get-a-lifes stealing my face!”
Matt stared back and forth between the two young women. This had to be the real Courtney Vance — and boy, was she in a bad mood!
CeeCee’s face was red with embarrassment — and anger. “I’d call it more borrowing for a night. And I came as Alicia Fieldston.”
That was the character Courtney portrayed, Matt remembered.
“You know,” CeeCee went on. “The character with the improvements the studio adds, so I wouldn’t look like this…” Suddenly, CeeCee’s eyebrows became heavy and ragged. “Or this….” Her perfect nose went a little off center.
“Why, you little…” the real Courtney Vance growled.
But the girl in the virtual copy had heard enough. CeeCee suddenly swung, her fist catching the veiled figure in the side of the jaw.
Matt winced as he heard the impact of knuckles against flesh and bone. That had to hurt!
The real Courtney Vance vanished like a popped soap bubble.
Matt stood where he was, the thought still echoing in his brain. That had to hurt. CeeCee had harmed Courtney Vance with a virtual attack. CeeCee had to be one of the people he was looking for!
He turned to the girl, who was shaking out her fist.
But before Matt could speak, they were joined by a figure that towered over them both. It was roughly in the shape of a human, if humans came nine feet high and were constructed of glowing crystals. Instantly, Matt christened the intruder Mr. Jewels.
The crystalline figure lumbered up to CeeCee. “Can’t leave you on your tod even for a couple of minutes, can I?” The words came out in harsh, clanging tones.
“On her what?” a confused Matt started to say.
A big, glittering hand stretched out to clamp onto CeeCee’s arm. Although the finger-crystals glowed softly, Matt knew they must be hard as stone.
CeeCee merely looked at Mr. Jewels in silence, her face a mask of fear — and pain.
I’ve got to do something, Matt thought, even as he wondered how his stick body would survive being stomped by those big, rocky feet.
But before he could move, CeeCee and her big, jeweled friend both vanished from Maxim’s.
Chapter 4
Matt yawned as he rode the autobus to school the next morning. He’d spent a sleepless night going over what he’d learned from his virtual visit to Maxim’s.
Not that it amounts to all that much, he thought as he walked onto the academy campus.
During Prep period, he pulled Andy and David Gray aside. “Leif got me into a rich kids’ virtual hangout last night,” he reported. “I think I may have met some of our friends from Camden Yards.”
“Which ones?” Andy immediately asked. “John Dillinger, or the cute blond?”
“I can’t be sure,” Matt admitted. “They were in different proxies, of course. One was a guy made up of crystals — I called him Mr. Jewels. The other was a girl named CeeCee. She came as Courtney Vance.”
“You mean the actress who plays the doctor on Central Hospital?” David asked.
“I didn’t know you watched the holo-soaps,” Andy teased.
“Come on,” David said defensively. “Her image is all over the Net.”
“It sure is.” Andy thought for a second. “Very pretty, and very blond.”
“It might be a clue,” Matt said. “If CeeCee is the same girl from the stadium, she likes to appear as a blond — maybe she has blond hair.”
“Or maybe she’s a wannabe-blond,” Andy shot back. “I came across a dictionary of old-fashioned slang — Valley Speak, they called it. They had a couple of names for girls with blond hair — loxies and boxies.”
Matt and David glanced at each other, baffled.
“A loxie is like Goldilocks — she gets her blond hair from Ma Nature,” Andy explained with a grin. “Other girls got their blond hair from a box. Nowadays, they can play proxies who look the way they want to. Your CeeCee may weigh three hundred pounds and have a shaved head.”
“Got any other clues for Sherlock over here to trash?” David asked.
“The real Courtney Vance turned up,” Matt said. “CeeCee hit her — and hurt her.”
Both of his friends stopped kidding. “What happened then?” Andy asked.
“Then this jewel-guy came lumbering over. He complained about not being able to leave CeeCee on her tod.” Matt smiled, proud of himself. “I tracked down that expression on the Net — it’s British slang for leaving someone alone. So Mr. Jewels may be British — maybe somebody from the diplomatic community.”
“Or maybe it’s someone pretending to be British,” David objected. “Have you heard about that new proxy program, Idiom Savant? It instantly translates whatever you say into any of a dozen other languages. The only giveaway is in the lips of the proxy. There’s a slight delay between the lip movements and the sound as the program processes the translation.”