Being Nikki

Chapter 11
CHRISTOPHER WAS ACTUALLY AWAKE, for once, and greeted me with a smile. “How’s it going?” he asked.   “Oh,” I began, telling myself, Don’t you dare smile back, Em Watts, no matter how much you might want to because of how much you love him and what that smile does to you! He’s evil! And even if he’s not, he doesn’t like you! Well, he does, but not the real you. The dead you.   And that’s just wrong. And so is what he and his cousin want to do.     Right?   But before I had a chance to say anything more to Christopher, Whitney Robertson, who was sitting one desk over, leaned forward and whispered, “Oh, my God, is that top Temperley? It’s so nice. ”   “How was your weekend?” Whitney’s henchwoman, Lindsey Jacobs, seated in the row beside hers, was also leaning forward eagerly. “I saw online that you were in St. John with Brandon Stark. ” There were photos of our trip online? Great. If there were any of Brandon and me making out, I was going to murder someone. “That must have been incredible! I would give anything to get out of here for a couple of days, the weather’s been so miserable. And with Brandon Stark! He’s so hot. How could you even stand to come back? I’d have killed myself. ”   She had no idea.   “Ladies. ” Mr. Greer sounded snide. “So sorry to interrupt. But some of you might recall that it’s the last week of the semester, and we’re finishing up our final three-minute oral presentations, which will count as a quarter of your grade, before winter break. ”   I couldn’t help groaning inwardly. I was completely unprepared for this. And it was going to be my turn to give my presentation sometime soon, and I hadn’t had a second to work on it. When I’d got home from Christopher’s last night, I’d been astonished to find Lulu there instead of out partying with her friends, and in the kitchen making, of all things, coq au vin.   Since I’d never seen her cook anything more complicated than microwave popcorn, I’d been sure she was suffering some kind of stroke and had almost called for an ambulance.   But it hadn’t been a breakdown. Lulu had been cooking for Nikki’s brother, Steven, whom she’d sent out in search of “a really crunchy baguette of French bread” to go with the meal she was preparing.   “I want your brother to think I can cook,” Lulu had informed me when I asked her what the heck was going on. “No, wait, maybe I don’t. Wait, which do you think he’d think is cuter, a girl who lied and tried to cook just for him, or a girl who really knows how to cook?”   I’d given her a weary look and said, “Lulu, I’ll tell you what’s not cute. You, right now. This is pathetic. If you want Steven to like you, why don’t you try being yourself? That’s what you’ve always told me, remember? To just be myself?” Not that it’d ever worked. Well, it had, of course. Just not with Christopher.   I could have worked on my homework after dinner, I suppose, but somehow I’d ended up on the couch between Steven and Lulu, while he told her (after she’d prompted him) about his job as radioman on the sub on which he served.   And then when I’d tried to sneak off to work, Lulu had followed me, clearly aching for a little girl talk, asking over and over again, “But…do you really think he likes me?”   “Lulu,” I’d said to her. “You just met him. Why do you like him so much already?”   Lulu sighed and snuggled down into the pillows beside me. “Because he’s just so…amazing. ”   So far, the most amazing thing I’d seen about Nikki’s brother, Steven, was that he’d volunteered to wash all the really big pots Lulu had used making the coq au vin, the ones that wouldn’t fit into the dishwasher and that Lulu was going to leave for Katerina to wash when she got to the loft in the morning.   But I had to admit…for a guy, that was pretty amazing.   Still, if I’d used our girl chat time to do my homework instead of listening to how amazing Steven Howard was, I’d probably have felt a lot less like throwing up than I did the next morning, when I saw Mr. Greer flipping through his roster.   “So if we could get straight to business,” Mr. Greer said. “I’d like to call on…”   Not me, I prayed. Not me, not me, not me, and I swear I’ll stay home and study till midnight every night this week…   “…Christopher Maloney. ”   Christopher got up and went to the front of the room. I noticed with some chagrin that I wasn’t the only girl in class whose head turned as he walked by. Christopher’s look in the past few weeks had gone from preppy Polo shirts, which used to cause him to blend right in with the Jason Kleins of the school—Whitney’s boyfriend and reigning king of the Walking Dead—to wearing his newly acquired black leather jacket indoors. McKayla Donofrio (I swear I was going to rip that tortoiseshell hair band right off her head, and not even care how much hair I took with it) stared as he went past her, and both Whitney’s and Lindsey’s eyebrows shot up as well…and not, as in the past, because they were making fun of him, but because his form-fitting jeans didn’t leave much to the imagination.   “And…,” Mr. Greer said from his desk, when Christopher reached the front of the room and indicated he was ready to begin. Mr. Greer timed all our speeches with an oven timer. Things were nothing at Tribeca Alternative, considered one of Manhattan’s finest prep schools, if not high tech. “…GO!”   “Stark Enterprises,” Christopher began, “is now the world’s largest corporation, surpassing even the oil companies, pulling in almost three hundred billion dollars a year. ”   Wait. What? Christopher’s three-minute final oral presentation was on Stark Enterprises?   I felt myself begin to sink down in my seat.   From the sound of it, he wasn’t about to say anything good, either. Not that I had anything good to say about Stark. But it was just slightly embarrassing that I, the Face of Stark, was sitting here in the classroom while a fellow student went on a rant about my employer. I could feel everyone’s gaze nervously sliding toward me.   “Stark Enterprises,” Christopher went on, “declares a profit of over seven billion dollars a year, and yet, with more than one million employees—this country’s largest business—the average employee makes only fifteen thousand dollars a year before taxes for full-time work—hardly enough to sustain the average household in America. But Stark employees receive medical benefits only after two years of work, and then at such high premiums they often have to supplement them with government-subsidized health care programs. Essentially, many full-time Stark employees, who aren’t allowed to unionize, find themselves depending on Medicaid to pay for their health care. Meanwhile, Robert Stark, Stark CEO and chairman, routinely appears on the Forbes List of Wealthiest People in the World, generally in the top ten, with a personal worth of somewhere around forty billion. ”   Hearing this, several people began muttering…and not just Lindsey and Whitney, who whispered that Brandon Stark was worth a lot more than they thought. I knew what was coming next (from them): They were going to want to know if I could get them Brandon’s cell number.   “During the past twenty years,” Christopher went on, “it’s been illustrated again and again that while on the surface, Stark Megastores seem to provide convenience and low prices to the consumer—and Stark Enterprises receives tax incentives for building their stores in many towns—that convenience comes with a cost…and that cost to the communities in which these megastores appear may prove irreparable, since they wipe out locally owned businesses that didn’t get tax breaks, don’t sell cheap, knockoff products made exclusively in China, and so can’t compete with Stark’s rock-bottom prices. These megastores turn whole communities into ghost towns as locally owned businesses are forced to close. And who suffers because of this? We do, the taxpayers, when states and cities then have to finance downtown revitalization programs, which usually fail, since it’s easier for everyone to shop at Stark, where the parking is more convenient. ”   I looked around to see how people were reacting to all this. Normally, this early in the morning, most of the class would have been asleep—including Mr. Greer, who had a bad habit of dozing through his students’ oral presentations.   But weirdly, everyone was wide-awake, and paying total attention to Christopher. This, of course, only fed into his rant.   “Stark keeps costs down by outsourcing every step of the way, paying nothing to the American worker,” he continued. “And Stark Quark, this computer Stark is launching after the new year, is no exception. Not a single person involved in the manufacture of it was employed in this country. And to guarantee every kid in every American household will be clamoring for one this Christmas, Stark has arranged for the new Quarks to come with the only available copies of Realm, the new version of the Journeyquest RPG, and has been doing an aggressive ad campaign for the PCs for weeks now—”   I sank even lower in my chair. No one here could have missed the commercial, which had gone viral on YouTube, showing Nikki Howard plinking around on a Quark keyboard resting on her bare stomach while floating on a raft in a Stark brand bikini in a laptop-shaped pool. The Quarks are waterproof (well, splashproof. You couldn’t actually drop them in water, as I discovered when I accidentally did just that) and come in a variety of colors. The ad shows Nikki in a different-colored bikini to match each of the colors the computers come in, while a boppy rock tune plays in the background. There’s no mention, of course, of how technically useful the laptops are…just that they’re pretty.   Kind of like Nikki Howard, now that I thought of it.   “If we want to keep America from going the way of ancient Rome,” Christopher continued, seemingly unaware of the uncomfortable silence as I caught Lindsey humming the Quark jingle, “which in the fifth century found itself in a similar situation, with a collapsing economy and a society dependent on imported goods, we have to become producers again, and stop consuming so much. Otherwise, people like Robert Stark are going to continue getting insanely rich off our laziness, our refusal even to go buy our music at a music store, books at a bookstore, food at grocery stores, and clothes at clothing stores, because it’s more convenient to buy all of these things in one place. Some of us are so lazy, we’d rather waste fossil fuels driving a few miles to get all of them in one store, made overseas at a discount price—even if the quality is substandard—than buy them in a few local stores, made in the good old USA. Let’s take a moment to think about what this is doing to the communities we live in, not to mention to the American spirit—murdering them. Because that, not progress, is the true legacy of Stark: murder. ”   There was a moment of silence as what Christopher had said sunk in, during which he simply looked out at us with his ocean blue eyes. Not just out at us in general, I realized after a few seconds, but out at me…yes, me, directly at me, like I was there in the room as some kind of representative of Stark.   Which might technically have been correct. But, hello, I was the last person who needed convincing of Stark’s evilness. Look what they had done to me.   I mean, sure, they had saved my life.   But they had also forced me to completely give it up, too, in most of the ways that matter. I couldn’t even spend the holidays with my family. Give me a break.   And okay, I completely agreed with every point Christopher brought up about Stark in his speech. But what did he expect me to do about it? Quit because my boss was the devil? Yeah, well, I couldn’t quit.   Not that I could mention this in front of everyone.   I had no choice but to sit up straighter in my seat, fold my arms, and stare right back at him. Even though, of course, doing so caused me to have to look at those lips again…those lips that yesterday I’d so foolishly thought might be close to finally brushing mine. I still wanted them to. Desperately.   I was smiling bitterly to myself about this when the oven timer on Mr. Greer’s desk went off, and I jumped, as did a few other people in the room. Everyone except Christopher, who just kept staring at me, cool as an iced mocha latte.   Then someone—McKayla Donofrio. Of course. That suck-up. Was there nothing she’d stoop to in order to get Christopher’s attention?—started to clap. A few seconds later, more than half the class was applauding. Like they really meant it, too, not sarcastically like they sometimes did when someone did something spastic like drop their tray in the cafeteria.   And Mr. Greer was going, “Excellent work, Christopher. Really excellent work. Strong, persuasive argument. I think you went a little under three minutes, but I won’t take off any points for that because it was such an improvement over your past piece. You can take your seat now. ”   Christopher went back toward his seat. I didn’t miss the swift glances both Whitney and Lindsey, who were among the people applauding, gave him as he passed them. I couldn’t believe how quickly Christopher went from being a social pariah to almost revered by them. It was as if they could sense how dead he was inside…just like they were.   And yet a part of me refused to believe Christopher really was one of them, a member of the Walking Dead. I knew he couldn’t really be dead inside. Not the Christopher I loved. He was, after all, only doing what he was doing for revenge…revenge for what had happened to me. That thirst for revenge had made him blind to everything else, like the fact that I wasn’t really dead—that I was sitting right in front of him…turned in my seat to face him, as a matter of fact, and saying, “Nice speech. ”   Well, what else was I going to say? Everyone was watching to see how I was going to react. I had to play the game.   Christopher nodded. “Thanks. Do you have that information we talked about yesterday?”   “Part of it,” I said, and fished from the depths of my tote bag the Social Security number I’d cadged from Steven that morning. I slid it across his desk toward him. “I’ll try to get the rest of it soon. ”   I wasn’t entirely sure this was true—or how I was going to get it for him if I did decide that’s what I was going to do. But I wasn’t ready to say I wouldn’t help him when there was still a chance he was my only hope of finding Mrs. Howard.   And when there was a chance that, by helping him, maybe…just maybe…he might stop hating me.   He took the slip of paper and put it in his jacket pocket, just as Mr. Greer was calling the name of his next victim—fortunately not mine.   “Everything I said up there,” Christopher said, “is true, you know. ”   His words burned. And he knew it.   “Yeah,” I said. “I’m aware of that. ”   “And yet you’re still loyal to Robert Stark. ” He was smiling a little. I didn’t get what the smile was about. It was like he knew something—something about me.   But how could he, when the most fundamental thing of all continued to escape him completely?   “I don’t have what you want,” I said.   “But you’re going to get it for me,” Christopher said. He was so confident. He had never been this confident when we were friends. About anything. It was sexy…but also a little frightening. “Right?”   “Um,” I said, just as Nikki’s cell phone, deep in my tote, began to chime “Barracuda. ” “I’ll let you know. ”   McKayla Donofrio, who’d been about to begin her three-minute oral presentation on whatever incredibly boring topic she’d chosen, no doubt about the dairy industry and its unfairness to the lactose intolerant, glared in my direction.   “Okay,” she said. “What’s with Fergie? That’s not cool, whoever didn’t turn off their cell. ” She said whoever, but from the direction of her gaze, she clearly meant me. “You could extend some common courtesy, you know. ”   “Sorry,” I said, digging through my tote. “Sorry, sorry. ” I found and turned off my cell.   But not before I saw the text from my agent, Rebecca.   Rehearsal going on for Stark Angel show right now, she’d written. Where are you????