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middle of the river of commuters, trying to get by as we continued to “smoke.”
    Then Oswald’s watch started to beep. We dropped our invisible cigarettes to the ground and stomped them out. After Oswald and I started to cough, people all around us started to cough and hack. It was an incredible noise.
    I caught the look in the eyes of those trying to rush by us. Some looked worried, as if we had some virus they might catch.
    My watch went off a second time, and I fell to the concrete. In the split second of my fall, I saw other people collapse all around me.
    I couldn’t move—I was “dead”—a victim of smoking. But I tried to look at the scene with one partially opened eye. I couldn’t see the people on the ground, but I could see the circle of people standing, mouths open,staring down at us. It was a big circle, so there must have been a lot of dead people lying on the sidewalk.
    I closed my eye and tried to picture the circle growing, as more and more people who were trying to get home were blocked and backed up. It would have been so cool to see the whole thing as it was happening. Julia would have a great angle, so we’d be able to see it when we watched the tape.
    I’d expected there to be a lot of noise, but it seemed remarkably quiet. The only sounds were those of the passing cars. I had to fight the urge to sit up and look around. The ground was starting to feel cold, and I was starting to get nervous. It had to be longer than a minute by now, for sure. Had Oswald’s watch gone wrong, or had it gone off and I hadn’t heard it and everybody else had left already? I opened one eye. There were still bodies all around me, including Oswald.
    The alarm sounded—the second one from Oswald’s watch—and I jumped to my feet. Everybody else got to theirs at the same instant. We broke through the circle andstarted to melt into the crowd. It was easy because now that the dam had been broken, the whole crowd started to surge forward.
    I realized that half of the mob was moving in our direction. There wasn’t much choice. The six lanes of traffic hemmed us in on one side and the building hemmed us in on the other, so there were only the two ways to go.
    We’d gone only a half dozen steps when I was startled by the sight of two uniformed police officers coming toward us. They were moving quickly, and they looked very serious.
    â€œJust keep walking,” I hissed. “Don’t look at them, eyes straight forward.”
    We shifted off to the side, as did the rest of the crowd, allowing the two officers to steam on past us.
    â€œNothing to it,” I said as we continued to walk.
    We hit the stairs and headed toward Julia and the video. I couldn’t wait to see both of them.

chapter eight
    I opened my book to the right page. I had to at least look like I was following along as the teacher kept babbling on.
    I knew this stuff pretty well. Actually I had almost a ninety in history so I knew this stuff
really
well. It was just that I had other things on my mind right now. The only history that really interested me was more recent—yesterday.
    Oswald and I had been up till almost two in the morning going over the digital tape.We’d watched it a half dozen times. It was more than good. It was nothing short of great.
    I’d paused the tape so we could count the bodies on the ground. It was hard to tell in some places where one body stopped and the next started, but we’d done a rough count and got at least thirty people on the ground and four times as many in the circle that had surrounded us.
    It was just like I’d imagined, the crowd getting bigger and bigger as we blocked traffic. There were hundreds of them.
    I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the people in the crowd had figured out what we were doing: showing how smoking cigarettes led to death. It was a flash mob, but it was a flash mob with meaning.
    Julia had done a