The Unidentified by Rae Mariz Page B

goggles are for recreational use only. go! go!
    go!
    I thumbed in a protest message to PediaFix(r), and half-listened to Ari tell me about what Rocket had told her about the VIP Lounge.
    “She makes it sound like the whole place is coated with pixie dust,” I said, sipping my tea.
    “Yes, pixie dust and power.” She sighed dreamily. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “I wish my tracker was still working,” she said, flicking her notebook(r) screen as if that would help. “I don’t know if Aerwear has been back to my page. I posted images of my punk ballet slippers and everything—”
    “Your tracker’s not working?”
    “Yeah, I think admin found out about it and blocked it.”
    I opened my notebook(r) to check, even though I swore to myself that I wouldn’t. The eyeball icon was gone.
    “It worked last night,” I said more to myself than to Ari.
    “Do you think someone who was at the IAW yesterday told?”
    “Who would tell ?” Ari said, tearing off a piece of her pastry and popping it in her mouth.
    Yeah. I didn’t know. I thought about the Illegal Arts Workshop, about the voice telling us how to subvert Network security.
    “Have you ever heard of Zeronet?” I asked Ari.
    “Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and trying to lick powdered sugar off her lips and fingertips.
    “They visited my page last night.”
    “Huh,” she said, obviously not interested.
    “You know who else visited my page?” I dangled the scrap of gossip out to get her attention. “Jeremy Swift.”
    “No way,” she said, frowning. “Let me see.”
    “I can’t. The tracker’s down.”
    Then her tone got sharp. “Well, that’s convenient.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Ari laughed a fake and tinkly kind of laugh. “Seriously, Kid. If you want to start rumors about Jeremy being interested in you, there has to be at least some possibility of it being true.”
    I looked at Ari. Looked at her glittery violet eyes, so different from the hazel ones I had looked into when we used to tell each other secrets and confessed our crushes.
    They weren’t the same eyes that cried for me when I was having problems at home. Not the same eyes that winked at me when we were pulling pranks on Mikey.
    “I’m just trying to look out for you,” she said.
    “Right,” I said quietly.
    My intouch(r) hummed in my hand.
    cwinterson: please come to my office for an important announcement @KID “Anyway, I have to go.” I picked up my bag, getting ready to leave.
    “What? Where are you going? We never get to hang out anymore,” she complained. I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was the one who kept blowing off band practice with me and Mikey to hang out with Rocket and the Craft-sters.
    “Winterson wants to see me.” I quickly slammed back the last of my tea.
    She looked irritated. “Fine, then. Next time you can order your own matcha manju .”
    My eyes were watering. The tea had been way too hot.
    I headed over to Winterson’s office, humiliated. I was pissed at Ari, mostly because she was probably right. Who was I trying to fool? Swift was just interested in my excess online hours, it was stupid to think it was anything else.
    I slumped down in the chair across from Winterson and waited for the “big announcement.”
    She stared at me quietly for a moment. “Katey,” she began, “earlier this week you asked me about suicide…”
    “I’m not depressed, if that’s what you think,” I said quickly.
    “No, no. After our talk I asked around a little in headquarters to see what was going on. The sponsors weren’t responsible for that stunt last week, in case you were still wondering.”
    Nope. I wasn’t still wondering. That was stale news.
    “But because of our conversation,” Winterson said, biting her pinky nail, “the sponsors got interested and began their own investigation to find more information.”
    “No one was interested,” I said. “No one cared.”
    “Well, that’s actually what