Stuffed (4 page)

“We do have a lot of people in common,” I agreed. “I'm thinking maybe only forty people on each of our lists would be different from the others'.”

“So you think 120 people are going to make a difference?” Julia asked.

“No, I was thinking less than that. Probably half of those people will just delete the message and put it in their trash.”

“So it's a waste of time,” Julia said.

“No, it's a
start
. What if those 60 people who do respond send out a blast to everybody on
their
contact list? That would mean 60 people with 40 contacts each is 2,400 people. And then if half of those people do a blast of
40 people, there would be 48,000 contacts who receive the message.”

“That can't be right,” Oswald said.

“Yes it is. Look.” I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. “See for yourself.”

Oswald and Julia looked at my figures.

“And you see that by the sixth generation— the sixth time it spreads out—the message could reach three hundred and eighty-four
million
people.”

Julia looked up at me. “This actually could work, couldn't it?”

“If the message goes out to that many people and only some of them listen, you can make a difference in how many people eat at Frankie's. We actually could make it a Frankie's Free Friday.” I paused. “So?”

“So, I think we should do it,” Julia said.

“Oswald?” I asked, although I knew Julia had already given
his
answer.

“I'm in. What do we do now?” he asked.

“Let me draft the letter and then I'll MSN you both tonight and we can go for it.”

“Tonight?” Julia asked, sounding surprisingly hesitant.

“No point in waiting. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish.”

“It's just that Oswald and I were going out,” Julia said.

“Hopefully you won't be going out all night.”

I sat down at the computer. I needed to write the letter we were going to send out. I knew what I wanted to say—sort of, but not exactly. This had to be perfect. The success, or failure, of this whole project depended on what I wrote. I had been thinking about it a lot, and I knew what I wanted to write. I just had to write it.

Here it goes.

Hello Friend,

   
This is not a junk letter and I'm not trying to sell you something. I don't want your money.

   
I want to tell you about something and invite you to take part in something big.

   
You all know Frankie's. You've all eaten there. What you might not know is that Frankie's is maybe the worst place you could eat. Worse than all the other fast-food places because it's the only one that doesn't serve any healthy food at all! My class watched a documentary called “Stuffed,” and we learned that Frankie's food makes you fat and unhealthy and even sick. The people who run Frankie's give away toys and trinkets and run contests to get us to eat there. It feels like they're tricking us to get us to eat their food.

   
Me and my friends are tired of Frankie's taking advantage of us. We're
proposing a boycott. We're calling it “Frankie's Free Friday”—a day when nobody eats at Frankie's! We're proposing that we do this on Friday, April 13. We want to make Friday the 13th unlucky for Frankie's.

   
And, we need your help to make it happen. Here's how it works. We're blasting this message out to 40 people on our contact lists. We want you to forward this message to 40 people on your list and ask them to send it out to 40 people on their list, and so on and so on. If we all do this, we can reach millions and millions of people and we can make a difference. We can say to Frankie's, “We're not being fooled any longer…give us some real food to eat!”

I read through the letter. It said what I wanted to say and, according to my spell-checker, everything was even spelled right. I knew Julia wouldn't be completely happy. She'd want me to use stronger words—maybe
call the food poison or something like that, but I had decided against it. If she didn't like it, she should have written it.

I copied the message and then clicked on the MSN icon at the bottom of the page. My contact list came up. I clicked on both Oswald and Julia and worked my way through the list, deciding which forty people were going to get my message. I tried to aim for people who I figured wouldn't be on either of their lists, people who were far away. I wanted this message to go across the country.

There it was, forty contacts all ready to get the same message. This was the first step. All I had to do was send it. My finger hovered above the enter key. Once I pushed that button, the message would be gone and I couldn't get it back. It would shoot off in forty different directions to forty different people. Some of them were just around the corner, and most were within the city, but a few were going to cross the entire country. Instantly.

It might mean nothing. It might mean a lot. I pushed send. I saw the little icon—
sending mail
. It flashed, flashed, flashed—bang—it
was gone. Now all I had to do was wait and see what was going to happen.

Another message window made a warbling sound as it popped up on the bottom of my screen. I was having trouble finishing my paper on “The Power of the Internet for Mass Communication” because people on the Internet kept trying to communicate with me.

I clicked on it and the message opened up on the screen. It was my friend Barbie in California. How cool was that—her name was Barbie, she claimed she had blond hair and she lived in California. Too bad she didn't live in Malibu, ‘cause that would have been perfect…well, perfect if my display name had been Ken instead of I-Man.

hey, I-man, how's it going?
good. u get my message about
frankie's? I typed.
got and sent. 40 ppl.
thx for doing.
any word on other ppl doing it? She
asked.
u are # 6 that I herd from.
do u think this will work? Barbie
asked. hope so. g2g
l8ter

It was unbelievable. In only an hour, six of the people I'd blasted had popped up. Including Barbie, that made three who had instantly sent out a blast to people on their contact lists. I chatted with the other three who had responded, and they all agreed to do the same thing. That meant my one message had now gone out to at least two hundred and eighty people—all within one hour!

I scanned my contact list. Neither Oswald nor Julia was online. They were probably still out together doing something. Together. Without me. Now that they were a couple, they did things as a pair. Before, three of us had seemed like the right number. I missed that. I missed them. Now I was a third wheel. No point in crying about it. I was smart enough to know the two of them wouldn't last forever. I was actually surprised it had
lasted this long. The problem was that when this strange couple thing was over, we'd still never be able to get back what we had. That was over.

“Ian!”

I turned around. It was Julia, running through the hall, barging by and through people.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Did you check your MSN this morning?” she asked.

“I didn't need to check. I was on it until almost three in the morning.”

“Then you know how incredibly fast things are moving. Do you know
I
got your message—from
three
different people— people who had received your message and then passed it on, and I was one of the people they passed it on to!”

“Actually,” I said and smiled, “somebody already sent the message back to me.”

“You're kidding!”

I shook my head. “I tracked it back. Somebody on my blast list sent it to somebody else, who then sent it to me. They didn't notice my e-mail address on the bottom as the guy who had started the chain.”

“That's amazing. One of those people who sent me the message is my cousin in Boston. Nobody I know would even know him, but somehow it got to him and then back to me. Unbelievable!” Julia shrieked.

“The power of the Internet…like I said.”

“Not that I doubted you, but this is wild.”

I fought the urge to say something about how I really did think that she doubted me. I kept my mouth shut.

“It's funny, but I was going to include my cousin on my blast so we could reach far away,” Julia said.

“What movie did you and Oswald see?” I asked.

“It was very good. At least
I
thought it was very good.”

“But Oswald didn't?”

“He has the worst taste in movies of anybody I've ever met.”

“Just because somebody doesn't like the same thing as you doesn't mean they have bad taste. He can have his own opinion.”

“I know he can have his own opinion. I just wish he wouldn't tell me what it was during the movie.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“You know how Oswald likes to talk in the movies…make little comments? Well, I told him it was juvenile and he shouldn't do that anymore,” she explained. “And somehow that led to us having an argument.”

“It did?” I was shocked. Oswald was so whipped I didn't think he'd object to anything Julia said.

“Yes. He started sulking and then he wouldn't talk to me even
after
the movie ended and then I had to call him to try and talk things over. Eventually he apologized.”

“
He
apologized?” I asked in disbelief.

“You know, for talking in the movies and then being difficult. Sometimes I just don't know about him.” She paused. “About us.”

“What don't you know?”

“I just think…maybe I shouldn't be talking to you about this because Oswald is your friend as well.”

“And your friend too, before he became your boyfriend,” I pointed out.

“It's just that you're the only other person I'm close to who I can tell what I'm thinking, who can maybe give me some advice.”

“Not me,” I said, holding up my hands. “I got nothing to say.”

“You always have something to say,” she argued.

“And I'm learning pretty quickly that sometimes the smartest thing a person can say is nothing. I gotta get to class now. See you,
and
Oswald, at lunch.”

The whole day had been a blur. People— some I knew, but most were just kids I'd seen around the school—kept coming up and telling me they'd received my message. They'd heard through the school grapevine that I was I-Man, the guy who started it all.

They had got the e-mail from friends and relatives and people they hardly even knew. The message was sent by next-door neighbors or by people down the street, across the city
and from the farthest reaches of the whole country. One guy told me he'd received his message from a friend in England…
England
! Somehow, in less than twelve hours, my message had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and bounced all the way back here. Talk about the potential for Internet mass communications!

I rushed into the house. I didn't even stop to grab something to eat. More than I was hungry, I was curious. I rushed downstairs, pushed through the door to my bedroom and plopped down at the computer. I wiggled the mouse and then clicked on my e-mail account. I wanted to see if I'd received any e-mails before I went online to check out the live messages on
MSN
.

The computer clicked over…
connecting
…
checking mail
…
receiving mail
…
receiving mail
…
receiving mail
…
receiving mail
…
receiving mail.

Why was it taking so long to receive mail? I looked at the bottom to check the number of e-mails being downloaded. The number was spinning…
127 messages
…
149
…
197
…
216
…

Now it felt like it was my head that was
spinning. I pressed myself back in my chair, as if I needed to get a little more distance from the computer, and watched in awe and amazement as the number kept growing and growing and growing…
374 messages
…
410 messages
…This couldn't be real. This had to be a mistake, maybe a virus or something. It finally came to a stop.

678 unread messages.

Wow. I didn't know if I should be excited or scared or overwhelmed. Instead I felt all three. How in the world could you possibly get, and read, that many messages? Then I realized there was only one way. I clicked on the first message.

I-Man. Good job. Frankie's sucks and
we'll let them know that kids have the
power to take em down. u rule!

Not a bad first message. I ruled. I clicked on the second message.

I work at Frankie's. If you think the food
is bad for you, you should see what
goes on in the back room. Nobody
spits in the food or anything. Spitting
in the food would be better for you.
Take it from me, nobody who works
here eats here. Peace out.

That message was disturbing as well as reassuring. Next message.

Wat are u, some sort of veggie freak?
y don't you stop hugging trees n
be a man n eat real burgers. Your
e-mail shouldn't be I-Man it should
be I-girl!

I wanted to answer that one, but I didn't have time. I still had—I looked at the screen—I still had
675 unread messages
. Then the computer chimed and started to download more mail. Bold-faced, unread messages flooded onto the screen. When I looked down again it read
697 unread messages.
In the time it had taken me to read three messages, another twenty had been sent. I had to read faster.

“Ian, time for dinner!” my father bellowed down the stairs.

“I don't have time!” I yelled back, my eyes glued on the screen, my fingers on the keys. I'd been working for close to three hours. I'd read over five hundred e-mails—and even answered forty or fifty.