Very LeFreak (10 page)

CHAPTER 14

28 Messages, 21 Days till Finals, 99 Problems
(Actually, Quite a Bit More)             

She is Ensign Bella de la Mermaid on starship USSR
Galactica Titanica.
She is Venezuelan for this episode, just because. (Technically, she is Venezuelexican, since the Northern South Americas’ hostile takeover of Central America back on 001, so many moons ago.) She doesn’t so much look native Venezuelan, but who cares? Her long, curly red hair is up-do’d, with soft tendrils caressing the sides of her alabaster face and sheer-pink-lipsticked mouth, and she wears a minidress Federation uniform with bitch-ass black go-go boots
.

It feels good to be a Venezuelan hurtling through space
.

“Mi Enseñita Sirena,” he calls her, using his best conquistador accent. He is El Capitán. Her loco virus himbo. He is the hot-headed, brilliant leader of their rogue starship, which has renounced the Federation and gone on a pirate mission to explore strange new worlds
populated entirely by fairies and gnomes. Their journey has been long and arduous, and it turns out there aren’t a lot of fairy/gnome planets waiting to be discovered, and trying to outrun the Federation or Cylon or whoever-the-hell-they-are bounty hunters has gotten to be exhausting
.

Luckily they have taken solace in each other and their marathon lovemaking sessions on the lido deck, closed-circuit-filmed and available for downloadable viewing to folks back on 001, who are loving the Ensign-Capitán action and who are commenting all over the ‘sphere with
OMFG
s and
LOL;>
s and
¡Muy calientes!
Viewers delight in funding the starship’s maladventures at such a reasonable download cost. Premium entertainment of this caliber is recession-proof. Obvs
.

Online polls rage, as polls, and rages, tend to do. Some 45 percent of viewers think El Capitán will dump his Enseñita for the first hybrid fairy/gnome species he finds to seduce, while 86 percent of males aged 12-17 have voted Ensign Mermaid “Best Boobs on a Rogue Starship,” a slap for sure to the 79 percent of females aged 18-34 who voted hard-bodied El Capitán way hotter than his Jell-O–bellied lover
.

This episode is The One Where Enseñita Demands a Promotion. “To what?” El Capitán asks her as they lie sprawled on a long pool chair in a post-humpty-dance embrace, virtual sun beaming onto their glistening bodies. “You propose I promote you to, like, sergeant?” He sounds dubious
.

She is not. She says, “I don’t think we have sergeants on starships. I’d like to be … second in command. Affirmative. Number Two.”

El Capitán wants to know, all commanding, “Number TWO! Dream big much? I mean, I could conceivably see you as Eighteen, or maybe Fifty-eight is more realistic, slacker. What makes you think you’ve earned that rank? Truly?”

“I’ll show you how I can earn that promotion,” she murmurs, straddling him
.

Fade to black, computer malfunction, CENSORED
.

Very had thrown herself deep down back into the Internet black hole and, mmmmm, yes yes yes, ahhh, mmmmm, YES, such sweet relief.

El Virus had sent her a total of twenty-eight messages. She knew they were code for something. Very just had to figure out what.

As her fingers tapped the keyboard, she savored the rush—it was almost orgasmic. This laptop Jean-Wayne had hooked her up with was a virtual love machine. It talked back to her, flirted with her, played with her, adored her. It let her check out friends’ photos and updates from around the world, it offered up visions of people doing naked tai chi, it approved when she IM’d everyone she’d ever known who could be found online at that very moment. It encouraged her to gamble her mythic fortune away in online poker. It practically applauded as she hunted the clues from El Virus.

That discarded computer clunker that Lavinia had loaned Very before this, what good was that? It had only let her type stupid papers. The typing part was helpful, obviously—Very had for once completed all her course work on time, and fairly cogently as well, without the online distraction. She hoped Dean Dean would be impressed. But still. The disconnected machine had helped her achieve no state of physical and mental satisfaction. It only got the job done.

Very rather liked this newly discovered flophouse approach to computing. As the boys
Dream’d
and Very surfed behind them, sharing in their green if not their screen, she liked the sense of community she felt with them, this den-sharing of an electronic vortex. Her drug of choice might have been different from the boys’, but the goal was the same. Total assimilation Inside. No resident advisor interruptions, no studying, no money worries, no Real World nonsense.

He was being a tease, though, her El Virus. He’d left her a trail of messages, but sent her on a treasure hunt she had no idea how to decode. There was his posting on a Living Simple Listserv, providing a recipe for vegan maple cookies. A status update that linked to a new, alternative Wikipedia entry he’d written about Calvin Coolidge (who, according to the new entry, was
not
related to Calvin of
Calvin and Hobbes
fame, nor to Canadian singer Rita Coolidge; good to get that clarified). He’d uploaded images onto Very’s different pages, picturing Amy Winehouse, photos of whom practically gave Very a hard-on of beehive-hair envy, and President Gerald Ford. He’d sent missives to her various accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, Mac, Hotmail, etc.—she had them all covered, even AOL, for quaintness’ sake), but he only sent links. One link was to a message board of heated conversation by members of the Cooperative of Dairy Heartland Farmers, and another to a Walt Whitman poem called “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” an elegy for Abraham Lincoln in which Whitman used the hermit thrush as a symbol of the American voice. And so on. The messages’ only purpose, as far as Very could deduce, was to inflict a smattering of information chaos upon her wounded soul.

Also, Very hadn’t realized El Virus was
that
into American presidents. Personally, she found British prime ministers more fascinating and worthy of Wikipedia time.

He’d sent no monk photos.

She was intrigued, but disappointed.

No explanation of his disappearance.

Not one query of
And how are
you
?

Not that their relationship had ever been genuinely chatty, but it would have been nice to know he’d been thinking about her in that benign kind of way, as bigger than just a text message or .jpg. Further, he’d disappeared for a whole month. He’d gone from communicating with her electronically several times a day to not at all. He owed her an explanation. Didn’t he
?

Still. The electronic hunt.

Total turn-on.

A nuclear explosion walloped across the green
Dreams
screen. Very looked up from her laptop daze to see that the boys’ game had resulted in a decimated Pacific atoll, mercifully unpopulated, except by the schools of fried fish. Now she was hungry.

“Annihilation!” the voices in the chairs ahead of her cried out.

“Doritos!” she called out from behind them.

Break time. The games, and her laptop, were turned to Standby as a green trunk on a side wall was opened by Ghana. Inside, a treasure trove of munchies awaited consumption: Doritos and Twinkies and the mandatory Red Bulls. Perfection. These boys really knew how to party. That green trunk might as well have had a 7-Eleven logo emblazoned on it. The secret gaming room could only be improved with a green Slurpee machine.

And if she could ask her new benefactors to decode the messages from El Virus.

But El Virus was Very’s secret man. He was not to be shared even with a secret society.

Very settled for some extreme caffeination and real-boy flirt time in the meantime. That green-splashed Ghana looked mighty tasty.

CHAPTER 15

Time Is Not on My Side:
Two Weeks Left to Figure Out a Plan

Very needed more.

More El Virus.

More ether (net).

She would find and rescue her monsignor.

Now that she was back in, no way was she going back out.

She even resented sleeping time. Any time that kept her offline.

Her hunger to commune with El Virus burned deeper than ever.

And her hunger for the return of her own laptop burned even deeper than that.

Going online in
Dreams
world was awesome. But it was a fantasy that couldn’t be sustained. Even Very knew that.

Summer break was right around the corner. The
Dreams
boys would disperse, and their secret library nook would be locked up until the fall.

Perhaps it was a delayed reaction, but Very was finally, fully pissed at Bryan. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking, not going completely ballistic on him when he said he’d taken away her machine temporarily. She’d let herself believe he was doing it because he cared about her that much. She’d let herself believe, because she wanted to believe.

The laptop had been Very’s last material bond to her mother. The prior year, on Very’s eighteenth birthday, Aunt Esther had handed Very a check for two thousand dollars. The money had been held in an account awaiting Very’s passage into legal adulthood. It was money from a savings account that Cat had opened in Very’s name when Very was a child. Cat had always been broke, but somehow, over the years, unbeknownst to Very, her mother had managed to tuck away twenty or fifty or seventy-five dollars at a time that she’d earned in various waitressing gigs, intending the funds to provide for her daughter’s college education.

The couple thousand dollars would not begin to cover Very’s university costs. But it was her mother’s last legacy to her. Aunt Esther had suggested Very use the funds to buy herself a new laptop that Very could use when she went away to college. They’d both agreed Cat would have been pleased with that plan.

The laptop had been her proudest possession as an incoming freshman at Columbia University. She’d used that laptop for her schoolwork, her socializing—for everything. She’d used it to program The Grid. But now The Grid had been dismantled, and the foursome of friends hardly hung out together at all anymore.

Very realized she didn’t even know what Bryan’s plans were for the summer. Had his hope for an internship at a tech company in Portland worked out? Or would he spend another summer sweeping up his mother’s yoga studio? Would any of the sexual confidence she hoped she’d imparted to him do him any good with the ladies back home in Oregon?

No, wrong. She shouldn’t be having sympathetic feelings for Bryan. He was hiding her beloved machine. He had dismantled her online project. He was a dick. In the worst sense.

But Very was determined not to beg him for the machine back. She couldn’t let Bryan know her hunger burned that deep.
The Grid? Who cares. That old thing. Whatever
.

With Jean-Wayne’s help, Very could get her fix on the outside just fine until her gadgets were returned to her soon, and then she could take her habits back inside—to the privacy of her own machine.

Summer break loomed, and Very realized now how she would fill it.

She was going to go on an epic adventure to find El Virus. She figured she’d start with a road trip to various presidential libraries across the nation; that’s probably where his clues led. She’d begin at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt library in Hyde Park, New York, then go on to the Harry S. Truman library in Independence, Missouri, and all the way to the Richard Nixon library in Yorba Linda, California, if that’s what it took. She’d even backtrack to the Calvin Coolidge library in Northampton, Massachusetts, if necessary, although that one seemed so footnote-able.

What Very needed to figure out was how to finance her journey. She also needed to buy one of those gorgeous GPS gizmos and learn how to drive, but she’d worry about that part later. For now, she had to focus on fund-raising.

Could she sell her laptop and live off her iPhone to get her online fix, once her stuff was returned to her at the end of the semester? No, that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t sell off the laptop; her mother had provided that for her. And Very’s thumbs were too chubby for full-time iPhone tapping—she’d go crazy.

She could sell sexual favors to the
Dreams
team….

No, too sleazy. And it would make the groping sessions she’d resumed with Ghana in the hallway outside the
Dreams
room less fulfilling.

What an absurd idea, to sell sexual favors. What had happened to Very that she would even consider stooping that low to finance her expedition? Maybe Dreabbie was right, and Very did have a problem?

Silly.

No way.

Next idea.

She could sell her eggs to infertile couples. The
Columbia Spectator
was always running classifieds looking for donor eggs from healthy, Ivy League–smart young women.

That could work.

Okay. At least Very had a backup plan now. But selling her eggs might take too much time, with all the paperwork and testing and blood samples and surrendering her genetic code and whatever. The summer could be over before she got paid.

What to do?

Very decided to turn to the one person who always had a good answer for everything.

She found her best guru, Hector the Janitor, mopping the floors in the dining hall.

“You’re looking for a smoke?” he asked her. Hector reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette for Very.

“I’m looking for something more,” she said. She held up her customary payment to Hector—one of Aunt Esther’s sweaters that Hector’s mother-in-law apparently adored. “I need guidance.”

“Do you ever, señorita,” Hector said.

CHAPTER 16