So Yesterday (3 page)

Below them are the Early
Adopters.

Adopters always have the
latest phone, the latest music player plugged into their ear, and they're the
guys who download the trailer a year before the movie comes out. (As they grow
older, Early Adopters' closets fill up with dinosaur media: Betamax videos,
laser discs, eight-track tapes.) They test and tweak the trend, softening the
edges. And one vital difference from Trendsetters: Early Adopters saw their
stuff in a magazine first, not on the street.

Further down we have the
Consumers. The people who have to see a product on TV, placed in two movies,
fifteen magazine ads, and on a giant rack in the mall before saying, "Hey,
that's pretty cool."

At which point it's not.

Last are the Laggards. I
kind of like them. Proud in their mullets and feathered-back hair, they resist
all change, or at least all change since they got out of high school. And once
every ten years they suffer the uncomfortable realization that their brown
leather jackets with big lapels have become, briefly, cool.

But they bravely tuck in
their Kiss T-shirts and soldier on.

************************************

The unspoken rule was
that Mandy's meetings were for Trendsetters. Or at least people who had been
Trendsetters before Mandy hired them. Once you get paid for being trendy, who
knows what you are?

A cool hunter? Market
researcher? Scam artist?

A big joke?

But Jen was no joke,
whether she got fifty bucks for her opinion or not. She was an Innovator. And,
as I should have expected, she had committed the original sin of having
uttered an original thought.

"Did I get you in
trouble?" she asked on the street.

"Nah," I said.
(Nah
is Hunter-speak for
yes.)

"Come on. Mandy was
about to spit her pacifier."

I smiled at the image.
"Okay, sure. You got me in trouble."

Jen sighed, eyes
dropping to the gum-spotted street. "That always happens."

"What always
happens?"

"I say the wrong
thing." Sadness had settled into Jen's voice, which I couldn't allow.

I took a rant-sized
breath. "You mean, whenever you wind up hanging out with some new crowd
and they're all agreeing with each other— about the new movie they all think is
great, or the band they all love, or whatever is most recently super-cool—you
find yourself uncontrollably saying that it's actually crap? 0ust because it
is.) And suddenly they're all staring at you?"

Jen stopped right in
front of the NBA store, openmouthed, framed by the merciless windowscape of
team logos. I squinted in the glare.

"I guess so,
yeah," she said. "I mean,
exactly."

I smiled. I'd known a
few Innovators in my day. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be.
"And so your friends don't know what to do with you. So you shut up about
it, right?"

"Well, that's the
thing." She turned, and we kept walking downtown through the post-work
crowd. "I never really got the shut-up-about-it part."

"Good for
you."

"Which is how I got
you in trouble, Hunter."

"So what? It's not
like they can fix the ad with a re-edit. And it's too late to reshoot the whole
thing. It would be worse if you'd said the white guy's tie was too wide. Then
they'd actually have to do something."

"Oh, that makes me
feel better."

"Jen, you shouldn't
feel bad about this. You were the only one up there saying anything
interesting. We've all done a hundred of those tastings. Maybe we've gone
soft."

"Yeah, and maybe
there was an MBWF thing going on in that conference room, too."

"There was?" I
looked up at the skyscraper still hanging over us, and my memory flashed
through all the faces, all the neighborhoods, cool I groups, and constituencies
represented at the tasting. I slotted each participant into his or her place on
the cool Venn diagram.

Jen was right: the whole
focus group had been one big missing-black-woman formation.

"I hadn't even
noticed."

"Really?"

"Really." I
had to smile. "That makes it even better that you spoke up. Maybe it's not
what Mandy wanted to hear, but it's what she needs to hear."

Jen was silent as we
took the stairs down into the subway, swiped our cards to make the turnstiles
turn.

On the platform we faced
each other, close in the rush-hour crowd. Around us were guys with their
jackets over one arm in the summer heat and women who'd changed into sneakers
with their office attire. (I always wonder: who was the Innovator on
that
one? How many ankles and arches has she saved?) Jen was still looking
down, and I watched her expression shifting, her furrowed brow and green eyes
mobilized by another internal debate. I had the stray thought that she probably
made silly faces at little kids on the subway when their parents weren't
watching | and was really good at it.

She crinkled her nose in
the hot smelly air. "But didn't you just say it won't make any
difference?"

I shrugged. "Not
for 'Don't Walk.' But maybe next time—"

My phone rang. (Down in
the subway! At the risk of product placement, those guys in Finland do make
good phones.)

shugrrl,
said the display.

That was fast,
I thought.

And standing there,
pretty sure I was about to get fired, a funny thing happened. I found myself
not caring about the job, the money, or the free shoes, but really angry that
it was happening right in front of Jen and would make her feel crappy all over
again to have cost me my biggest client.

"Hi, Mandy."

"Just got off the
conference call. The ad airs this weekend, no changes."

"Congratulations."

"I told the client
about what you and your friend said."

I started to open my
mouth to say it hadn't been
my
idea at all. But that wouldn't
have done any good. So I swallowed the words.

"They were
intrigued," Mandy said flatly.

A train went by on the
other track, and the conversation took a ten-second pause. Jen was watching me
carefully, still with the bad-smell expression on her face. I mimed confusion
for her.

The train rattled away
into its hole.

"Intrigued as in
pissed off? Intrigued as in hit-man hiring?"

"Intrigued as in
interested, Hunter. They were glad to see some original thinking."

"Hey, Mandy, no
reason to get personal. I just take pictures."

"I mean it. They
were interested in what you said."

"Not interested
enough to change the ad."

"No, Hunter. Not
interested enough to reshoot a two-million-dollar ad. But there's this other
thing they want your help with, an issue that actually needs some original
thinking."

"It does?" I
gave Jen a puzzled look. "What kind of issue?"

"It just popped up
last week. It's sort of weird, Hunter. A big deal. You have to see for
yourself. And you've got to keep it secret. How's tomorrow?"

"Uh, I guess it's
all right. But it wasn't really me who—"

"Meet me at
eleven-thirty in Chinatown, Lispenard and Church, just below Canal."

"Okay."

"And bring your new
friend, of course. Don't be late."

Mandy disconnected. I
dropped the phone into my pocket.

Jen cleared her throat.
"So, I got you fired, didn't I?"

"No, I don't think
so." I tried to imagine Mandy meeting me in Chinatown and whacking me over
the head, dropping me in the Hudson sealed in concrete. "No, definitely
not."

"What did she
say?"

"I think we got
promoted."

"We?"

I nodded, finding
another smile on my face. "Yeah, we. Doing anything tomorrow?"

Chapter 4

"DID YOU WASH YOUR
HANDS?"

My father has asked me
that question at breakfast every day since I could talk. Probably before that.
He's an epidemiologist, which means he studies epidemics and spends a lot of
time looking at terrifying graphs of how diseases spread. These graphs, which
pretty much all look the same—like a fighter jet taking off—make him worry a
lot about germs.

"Yes, I washed my
hands." I try to say this in exactly the same way every morning, like a
robot. But my dad doesn't get the point.

"I'm glad to hear
it."

My mom offered a tiny
smile, pouring me some coffee. She's a perfume designer, someone who builds
complicated smells out of simple ones. Her designs wind up in stores on Fifth
Avenue, and I think I once caught a whiff of one on Hillary Hyphen. Which was
disturbing.

"Doing anything
today, Hunter?" she asked.

"Thought I'd go to
Chinatown."

"Oh, is it
cool
in Chinatown these days?"

Okay. My parents don't
really get my job. Not at all. Like most parents, they don't get cool. In fact,
they don't actually
believe
in cool. They think it's all a big
joke, like in those old movies where some guy scratches his armpit on a dance
floor and everyone follows along until armpit scratching becomes a new dance
craze. Yeah, right.

My parents like to
emphasize the word
cool
when asking me what's going on, as
if saying the word in an annoying tone
will help me see through its inherent shallowness. Or maybe it's just that cool
is a foreign language to them both and, like rude tourists, they think that
shouting will get them understood.

But they do sign the
stack of release forms I leave them every week.
 
(Because I'm a minor, they have to give permission before multinationals
pick my brain.) And they
seem
not to mind the free clothes,
phones, and other electronics that show up in the mail.

"I don't know, Mom.
My guess is that some of Chinatown is cool and some isn't. I'm not hunting,
just meeting a friend."

"Anyone we
know?"

"Her name's
Jen."

My father put down his
terrifying graph and raised an eyebrow. Mom raised both eyebrows.

"She's not my girlfriend
or anything," I said, making a terrible mistake.

"Oh, she's
not?" Dad said, half smiling. "Why do you mention that?"

I groaned. "Because
you had a look on your face."

"What kind of
look?"

"I just met her
yesterday."

"Wow," Mom
said. "You really do like her, don't you?"

I simultaneously
shrugged and rolled my eyes, sending a somewhat unclear message. I hoped Dad
would chalk up any redness in my face to sudden onset of West Nile fever.

My parents and I are
really close, but they have this annoying idea that I'm hiding huge swaths of
my romantic life from them. Which : would be fine, if there were huge swaths to
hide. Even medium-sized swaths.

They sat in patient
silence as I cowered behind my coffee cup, waiting for a response from me.
Catastrophically, all I managed to come up with was...

"Yeah, she's really
cool."

************************************

Jen was already there,
wearing non-brand, not-too-baggy jeans, the same rising-sun-laced runners as
the day before, and a black T-shirt. A very classic look.

For a moment she didn't
see me. Hands in pockets, leaning against a lamppost, she was checking out the
street. The block of Lispenard where Mandy was meeting us was wedged between
Chinatown and Tribeca, part industrial and part tourist-land. The Friday
morning traffic was mostly delivery trucks. Design firms and restaurants
occupied the ground floors, their signs in both Chinese and English. A few
places were boarded up, and patches of cobblestones showed through the asphalt,
revealing the true age of the neighborhood. These streets had first been laid
down by the Dutch in the 1600s.

All the buildings around
us were six stories tall. Most structures in Manhattan are six stories. Any
smaller, they're not worth building. Any taller and by law you have to put in
an elevator. Six-story buildings are the black T-shirt of New York
architecture.

I called Jen's name when
she spotted me, to which she said, "I can't believe I'm doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Coming down here
as some kind of...
cool maven."

I laughed. "Just
say the words
cool maven
a couple more times and you won't have
to worry about being one."

She rolled her eyes.
"You know what I mean, Hunter."

"Actually, I don't
know why we're down here any more than you do. Mandy was being all
mysterious."