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keenly aware of the eyeball dangling above and to the right of Connor, as he was surely aware of the eyeball dangling above and to the left of her. Already, their exchange had the aroma of performance about it. And while Imani wisely avoided milking it for effect, Connor had obviously rehearsed a whole speech about how “forgiving” and even “magnanimous” he and the other 60s were prepared to be regarding Imani’s past unfit behavior. In an attempt to get at least some of it on the record, he managed to spit out the words “forgiving” and “magnanimous” with little explanatory context. Imani knew he’d be penalized for it.
    When Connor had finished, there was an uncomfortable pause; then Deon spoke, quietly and without ever looking up from his sandwich. “Magnanimous,” he said. “Characterized by a lofty and courageous spirit. Showing nobility and generosity of the mind.”
    The table fell silent for a moment, then Jayla shook her head and joined with Amber in rolling her eyes. Judging from the reactions of the rest of the gang—all variations on the eye roll or the shaken head—Imani got the impression that the quiet outburst was typical behavior for Deon. As Amber might have said, the boy had a severe rapport deficiency. And though Imani’s gang was making it clear that she was expected to despise him for it, his actions had precisely the opposite effect on her. As Deon nibbled his sandwich in ratlike mouthfuls, she found herself warming to him.
    At study period, Imani rushed to the school library to claim one of the tablets bolted, against theft, to the long wooden table by the window. The bolts were optimistic at best, as the tablets had been out-of-date even when purchased and were insufficient for most media files. But as they constituted the only link to the outside world at school, each one was claimed before the late bell rang.
    The tablets were supposed to be used for homework, and since you had to sign in to use them, Score Corp could, and did, track usage. Despite this, lowbies could be relied upon to hack their way around the firewalls into the forbidden realms of porn, which occasionally flickered at the corners of Imani’s vision. She knew better than to let curiosity get the better of her, however. Her eyes never wandered from her own tablet’s screen. There were eyeballs dangling above, which would have caught that.
    Imani wasn’t doing homework, but she
was
doing research.Though Score Corp refused to reveal any information about its scoring algorithm, other than to insist that it got “smarter all the time,” scientists had arrived at the five key elements of fitness through reverse engineering. Specifically, they had studied behavioral patterns in risers and droppers. Like most scored, Imani knew the five elements by heart: peer group, impulse control, congruity, diligence, and rapport.
    Peer group had been her weakness, but she’d solved that problem by dumping Cady. What she needed to know was whether that would be enough to get her back over the scholarship line. Her fingers flew across the tablet’s tap pad, taking her on a journey studded with amazing riser stories and tragic dropper stories, but it all came to a crushing halt when she found this piece of data:
    Although there are many cases of scores dropping rapidly, even as much as sixty points in one month, there are very few examples of scores rising suddenly
.
    Imani had heard of such a discrepancy but had never given it much thought. Her score had wavered between 92 and 97 for years, with no dramatic changes. Now, however, she had one month to rise twenty-six points and wondered if dumping Cady would be enough. As she jumped from site to site in search of an answer more optimistic than the ones she kept finding, her attention was drawn to the library’s main desk, where her principal, Ms. Wheeler, stood in quiet discussion with the head librarian.
    Ms. Wheeler was a cool and distant figure: young, pale, with short