Scored by Lauren McLaughlin Page A

considerably less than the assurance Imani was hoping for, but it was something.
    “One problem, though,” Ms. Wheeler said. “Won’t Diego suspect something if you agree to openly collaborate with him?”
    Imani paused to think about this. “I’ll sneak around with him. It was his suggestion to be discreet.”
    “And how will the software interpret that?”
    Imani sighed. There were too many tangles in this growing web.
    “Of course,” Ms. Wheeler said, “you could make a preemptive confession. Tell an eyeball what you’re planning to do beforehand. Lay it all on the line so the software knows what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”
    Now it was Imani’s turn to bite her lip. The idea of speaking directly to an eyeball continued to frighten her. “I guess I could do that,” she said.
    “You’d have to be completely honest,” Ms. Wheeler warned.
    “I could do that,” Imani whispered.
    “Otherwise it’s gaming.”
    “I wouldn’t be gaming,” she said.
    “Well.” Ms. Wheeler leaned forward with a friendly and conspiratorial smile. “You’d be gaming Diego Landis.”
    “True,” Imani said.
    “And his mother,” Ms. Wheeler added.
    But this, Imani thought, was an unexpected bonus.
    There were seventeen eyeballs between school and home, but Imani waited until she got to Marina Road. Then she ran across to Abruzzi Antiques, an establishment so unpatronized it was more hobby than business. The OPEN sign hung in the door, but the elderly Mrs. Abruzzi was nowhere to be seen. In the disused parking lot were an ancient phone booth and a menagerie of crumbling seagull-fouled garden sculptures. Standing like a guard at the foot of a street lamp from which hung an eyeball was a cement elephant about four feet high. Dropping her backpack, Imani climbed onto the elephant’s back and stood up. This brought her closer to an eyeball than she’d ever been before. Its shiny black surface reflected the sun so perfectly it hurt her eyes.
    “Hi,” Imani said to it, then paused, enslaved by the conventions of dialogue. “I guess I don’t have to introduce myself because you already know who I am, right? I’m Imani LeMonde?” She knew something was tracking her words, something far away in a central processing station, some nonphysical thing made of ones and zeroes. It read her lips and formed a judgment sounder than any she could form. “So I’m here to confess something I’m about to do,” she said. “And I want to be completely honest with you. I’m going to be spending time with an unscored named Diego Landis. It’s not because I like him or anything. I actually find him …” Imani’s gaze drifted upward as she searched for the right words.“Annoying,” she said. “And foulmouthed. So there will be swearing. I mean,
I
won’t be swearing, but he will. Anyway, my original reason for doing this was research for a paper. There’s a scholarship given by the Otis Institute, which I’m sure you can look up or whatever. And then I learned that Diego is the son of a creeper lawyer who has been suing the school. So I thought that I could use my connection with Diego to learn about his mother’s plans to fight … well, to fight
you
.”
    Imani stared at the small black ball, which seemed suddenly fragile.
    “They want to destroy you,” she said, “because they don’t believe in upward mobility and all the things you’ve promised.” She swallowed, knowing the software would process the gesture according to its own superior logic. “But I do,” she said.
    She wasn’t gaming. She
did
believe in the things the score promised. At least, she thought she did. She’d never found any reason
not
to believe in them.
    When she climbed down from the stone elephant, she came face to face with an armless mermaid. The pitted thing had been through blizzards, heat waves, and callous movers only to wind up in that parking lot in Somerton. Still, as it gazed beyond the pizza shop toward the ocean,