“No-o,” Peyton said, grabbing the aquamarine away from me and handing me laser lemon. “This is Cut ’n’ Curl Barbie.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. So the barber said, ‘But somebody had to do it first, and they couldn’t do it because everybody else was doing it, so why did they’—”
There was a sound at the door, and Peyton snatched the laser lemon out of my hand, flipped the tablet shut, stowed them both under the bed with amazing speed, and was sitting on the edge of it with her hands folded in her lap when her mother opened the door.
“Peyton, we’re watching a video now. Do—” she said, and stopped when she saw me. “You didn’t talk to Peyton while she was in her timeout, did you?”
“Not a word,” I said.
She turned back to Peyton. “Do you think you can exhibit positive peer behavior now?”
Peyton nodded wisely and tore out of the room, her mother following. I put the phone back on the nightstand and started after her, and then stopped and recovered the tablet from its hiding place and looked at it again.
It was a map, in spite of what Peyton had said. A combination map and diagram and picture, with an amazing amount of information packed onto one page: location, time elapsed, outfits worn. An amazing amount of data.
And it intersected in interesting ways, the lines crossing and recrossing to form elaborate intersections, radical red changing to lavender and orange in overlay. Barbie only rode her moped in the lower half of the picture, and there was a solid knot of stars in one corner. A statistical anomaly?
I wondered if a diagram-map-story like this would work for my twenties data. I’d tried maps and statistical charts and computational models, but never all three together, color-coded for date and vector and incidence. If I put it all together, what kinds of patterns would emerge?
There was a shriek from the living room. “It’s my birthday!” Brittany wailed.
I tucked the tablet back under the bed.
“My, Peyton,” Lindsay’s mother said. “What a creative way to show your need for attention.”
Pyrography [1900–05]
Craft fad in which designs were burned into wood or leather with a hot iron. Flowers, birds, horses, and knights in armor were branded onto pin cases, pen trays, glove boxes, pipe racks, playing card cases, and other similarly useless items. Died out because its ability threshold was too high. Everyone’s horses looked like cows.
Thursday the weather got worse. It was spitting snow when I got to work, and by lunch it was a full-blown blizzard. Flip had managed to break both copy machines, so I gathered up my flagpole-sitting clippings to be copied at Kinko’s, but as I walked out to my car I decided they could wait, and I scuttled back to the building, my head down against the snow. And practically ran into Shirl.
She was huddled next to a minivan, smoking a cigarette. She had a brown mitten on the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette, her coat collar was turned up, a muffler was wrapped around her chin, and she was shivering.
“Shirl!” I shouted against the wind. “What are you doing out here?”
She clumsily fished a piece of paper out of her coat pocket with her mittened hand and handed it to me. It was a memo declaring the entire building smoke-free.
“Flip,” I said, shaking snow off the already wet memo. “She’s behind this.” I crumpled the memo up and threw it on the ground. “Don’t you have a car?” I said.
She shook her head, shivering. “I get a ride to work.”
“You can sit in my car,” I said, and thought of a better place. “Come on.” I took hold of her arm. “I know someplace you can smoke.”
“The whole building’s been declared off-limits to smoking,” she said, resisting.
“This place isn’t in the building,” I said.
She stubbed out her cigarette. “This is a kind thing to do for an old lady,” she said, and we both scuttled back to the building through the driving snow.
We stopped inside the door to shake the snow off and take off our hats. Her leathery face was bright red with cold.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, unwrapping her muffler.
“When you’ve spent as much time studying fads as I have, you develop a hearty dislike for them,” I said. “Especially aversion fads. They seem to bring out the worst in people. And it’s the principle of the thing. Next it might be chocolate cheesecake. Or reading. Come on.”
I led her down the hall. “This place won’t be warm, but it’ll be out of the wind, and you won’t get snowed on, at least. And this antismoking fad should be dying out by spring. It’s reaching the extreme stage that inevitably produces a backlash.”
“Prohibition lasted thirteen years.”
“The law did. The fad didn’t. McCarthyism only lasted four.” I started down the stairs to Bio.
“Where exactly is this place?” Shirl asked.
“It’s Dr. O’Reilly’s lab,” I said. “It’s got a porch out back with an overhang.”
“And you’re sure he won’t mind?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “He never pays any attention to what other people think.”
“He sounds like an extraordinary young man,” Shirl said, and I thought, He really is.
He didn’t fit any of the usual patterns. He certainly wasn’t a rebel, refusing to go along with fads to assert his individuality. Rebellion can be a fad, too, as witness Hell’s Angels and peace symbols. And yet he wasn’t oblivious either. He was funny and intelligent and observant.
I tried to explain that to Shirl as we went downstairs to Bio. “It isn’t that he doesn’t care what other people think. It’s just that he doesn’t see what it has to do with him.”
“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”
I started down Bio’s hall, and it suddenly occurred to me that Alicia might be in the lab. “Wait here a sec,” I said to Shirl, and peeked in the door. “Bennett?”
He was hunched over his desk, practically hidden by papers.
“Can Shirl smoke out on the porch?” I said.
“Sure,” he said without looking up.
I went out and got Shirl.
“You can smoke in here if you want,” Bennett said when we came in.
“No, she can’t. HiTek’s made the whole building nonsmoking,” I said. “I told her she could smoke out on the porch.”
“Sure,” he said, standing up. “Feel free to come down here anytime. I’m always here.”
“Oh?” Shirl said. “You work on your project even during lunch?”
He told her he didn’t have a project to work on and he had to wait for his funding to be approved before he could get his macaques, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking at what he was wearing.
Flip had been right about Bennett. He was wearing a white shirt and a Cerenkhov blue tie.
“I’ve been working on this chaos thing,” he said, straightening the tie.
“Did Alicia decide chaos theory was the optimum project to win the Niebnitz Grant?” I said, and couldn’t keep the sharpness out of my voice.
“No,” he said, frowning at me. “When she was talking about variables the other day, it gave me an idea about why my prediction rate didn’t improve. So I refigured the data.”
“And did it help?” I said.
“No,” he said, looking abstracted, the way he had when Alicia’d been talking. “The more work I do on it, the more I think maybe Verhoest was right, and there is an outside force acting on the system.” He said to Shirl, “You’re probably not interested in this. Here, let me show you where the porch is.” He led her through the habitat to the back door. “When my macaques come, you’ll have to go around the side.” He opened the door, and snow and wind whirled in. “Are you sure you don’t want to smoke inside? You could stand in the door. Leave the door open at least so there’s some heat.”