What's Your Status? (6 page)

Shy Time
I hate my phone.

La Lisse → mad_mac, Shy Time
Madison et Shy, nous avons allez aux café après l’ecole? Oui? Non? Dites-moi, sil te plait.

Shy Time → mad_mac, La Lisse
Yes! I mean, OUI!

mad_mac → La Lisse, Shy Time
I’ll be there! Very much need to talk to you two. Might be late—I have detention
and a prom committee meeting, and at some point I have to deal with the DJ. I swear, I’m about to replace him with an iPod.

DJ Tanner → mad_mac
Okay, that was way harsh, Mad.

After the last bell of the day rang, I headed for detention, holding the dreaded yellow slip of paper in my hand. My English teacher, Mr. Underwood, true to form, had given me detention for as many minutes as I’d been late for his class. Which seemed excessive to me, considering that nobody was learning anything of importance in that class anyway.

After we’d gone through a semester of Agatha Christie mysteries and Sherlock Holmes classics, Mr. Underwood had switched course abruptly and we’d started reading Sir Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Most of us in class—while we had sympathy for Mr. Underwood, his
bad toupee, and the mental breakdown that had left him able to teach us only his favorite books—felt fairly certain that as a result of this year, we were all going to do very poorly on the English portion of the SAT IIs. And while I’d enjoyed the mysteries, I was finding the Bond novels a little hard to get through. I found it difficult to believe that during the Cold War, the fate of the free world always rested on some British guy in a tux. And really, why the tux? It seemed improbable that so many espionage missions needed to be conducted in formal wear.

I passed my old locker, which class couple Jimmy Arnett and Liz Franklin were currently making out against. I was beyond thankful that after the hacking mess—in which Jimmy and Liz had been particularly targeted—they were back together and going strong again. They were even riding in our limo on Saturday, with the condition that they might be sent to opposite sides of the car if their PDAs became too egregious.

Liz gave me a quick wave, then returned to kissing Jimmy. I waved back, even though she was clearly now focused on other things. My old locker had become Jimmy and Liz’s favorite makeout spot, now that I was no longer using it. I had learned from Connor Atkins—Schuyler’s boyfriend, the school’s “Internet Liaison,” and the one student Dr. Trent seemed to like—that after Dell had been expelled, there had been talk about changing all the locker combinations, since Dell had kept a copy of the locker-combination database. But it had been ruled too expensive, so only the students who’d been the victim of thefts had their lockers reassigned. Including me.

And my new locker was located in the school’s equivalent of Siberia, which took at least five minutes to get to and from, making me even later than usual to my classes.

I made it to the basement and stood outside the classroom always used for detention. I really didn’t want to go in, but I also didn’t want to find out what would happen if you were late to a detention you got for being late to class. I took out my phone, updated my status, and headed inside.

mad_mac
Has been unavoidably detained. In detention.

“Here,” I said as I handed my yellow slip to the teacher manning the desk.

“MacDonald,” she said, glancing at it and raising her eyebrows. “We’ve certainly been seeing a lot of you lately.”

I wondered how she’d managed to catch this, but never seemed to pay any attention to the arson kid, who at that moment looked much more gleeful than I felt comfortable with.

“Well,” I said, “it’s just that my new locker is really far away, and—”

“Just take a seat anywhere,” she interrupted, signing my slip and nodding toward the desks. “You know the drill by now, I’m sure.”

Feeling unfairly maligned, a victim of the school’s poor layout, I scanned the classroom and saw Glen Turtell sitting in his usual spot, with an empty desk to
his right. I smiled and headed over. Turtell and I had known each other since elementary school. He was a permanent fixture both in detention and outside Dr. Trent’s office, as he was usually the first one called in after a theft or an altercation. While I’d always known that Turtell would have my back if I ever needed him, we’d never really hung out. But that had changed a few months ago. During the hacking fallout, we’d become closer friends, and he’d provided valuable information that had led me to figuring out Dell’s role. And we had been inadvertently hanging out a lot more recently, as Turtell was dating Kittson, and Kittson continued to monopolize all my free time.

“Hey, Glen,” I said, and Turtell glanced up from the textbook he’d been reading.

“Sup, Mad?” he asked.

“How’s it going?” I asked, sliding into the seat next to him.

Turtell shook his head. “Not good. The Man’s trying to keep me down.”

This often seemed to be what landed Turtell in detention. “What happened this time?”

He closed his book and glared down at the cover, which featured a picture of Alexander Hamilton. “It’s Dr. Trent.” I nodded. This was most often the man Turtell was referring to. “I just posted some of my own opinions on my Q feed, and just like that, he shuts me down. Disables my account for the rest of the day. Can he even do that? I mean, what is this, the gazpacho?”

That gave me pause for a moment. “You mean the
gestapo?” I asked, and Turtell nodded. “Oh. Well, what did you say?”

“Nothing! Just that we need a regime change in this school. I mean, why does the
assistant
headmaster have this much power, anyway? And how can they spy on us like this?”

I smiled at him. “Glen, don’t be ridiculous.” As Status Q had started getting more popular, Dr. Trent had required that all Putnam High students using it follow the school’s lame profile and allow the school account to follow theirs, as he had for Friendverse. He’d also insisted that students activate the GPS feature, to dissuade people from cutting class. But all that had seemed to do was allow people to meet up when they
did
cut class, so I had assumed that—as usual—the administration wasn’t paying any attention. “Dr. Trent isn’t
spying
on us.”

Turtell shook his head. “He is. I swear. He’s shut my account down at least three times. What about freedom of speech?”

“He’s probably just watching yours now, because you keep saying inflammatory things. But there’s no way he’s watching everyone. The school’s too big, and everyone updates about a million times a day.” Turtell didn’t look convinced. “How’s it going with Kittson?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

Turtell got the slightly dopey look on his face that he always got whenever anyone mentioned his girlfriend. “She’s amazing.” He sighed. Kittson and Turtell were a bit of an odd match, but from everything that I could see, they seemed to be working out.

“Good,” I said, smiling at him and sneaking a glance at the clock to see how much time was left. “I’m glad everything’s going well.”

“There’s just one thing,” Turtell said, his expression clouding. Clearly, I had spoken too soon. “You know she wants to win prom queen,” he said.

“I’m aware,” I assured him. I didn’t think it was possible to live in the same zip code as Kittson and not be aware of that.

“And you know she’s going to win,” Turtell continued. I nodded. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Kittson would be crowned prom queen. Everyone also seemed to think that Justin, the ex Kittson and I shared, was a shoo-in for prom king. “Yeah,” Turtell said, shaking his head. “That’s the problem.”

I looked at Turtell for a moment, trying to understand, wondering if this was another gazpacho thing. “I’m not following,” I said finally.

Turtell turned more fully toward me. “The prom king and queen have a dance together,” he said. “After the queen is crowned. I’ve looked into it. It’s tradition.”

“I know,” I said, trying to stifle a small sigh. This had been the subject of one of my ongoing fights with DJ Tanner, who seemed convinced that “Arrgh! Love Is Dead!” would be a great song to mark this moment.

“I…I don’t want Kittson to dance with anyone else,” Turtell mumbled, now speaking, apparently, directly to Alexander Hamilton. “I mean, I’m supposed to stand there and watch some other guy dance with my girlfriend?”