Read So Yesterday for Free Online Page B

screen.
    "Cassandra, her roommate. Or girlfriend—no one's
sure."
    "That would be girlfriend," Jen said.
"No one bothers to take a picture of their roommate."
    "Maybe not, but when I
first got my phone, I was taking pictures of my sock drawer."
    She gripped my arm. "How will you live without
it?"
    "I don't call it living."
    I clicked again. A guy wearing
a black beret, maybe a little floppier than the last beret craze. A
cool-hunting picture.
    "Logo's too big, band's
too tight," Jen said. "And no berets in summer."
    "And that shirt looks way
Uptown," I said. "Not the sort of thing you'd see in Chinatown."
I checked the picture's time stamp. "She took it yesterday."
    The next picture brought a
small gasp from Jen. It was a shoe, Jen's shoe, the rising-sun laces instantly recognizable. I
could even see the hexagonal pattern of the East River Park promenade.
    "Is that ... ? That's the picture you—"
    "Uh, yeah, I sent it to
Mandy," I confessed.
    She pulled away, turned to me
with narrowed eyes. I felt the musty-couch intimacy that had built up between
us swirling away.
    "You're not still confused about what I do for a
living, are you?"
    "No. But it's just sinking in." She looked
down at her laces. "I'm trying to figure out if I feel violated."
    "Uh, try flattered, maybe?"
    "Hang on—what exactly was Mandy going to do with
it?"
    "Take a look at it? Maybe pass it up the food
chain." I cleared my throat, deciding to go for broke. "Possibly use
it in an ad or two. Put it into mass production. Make it available in every
mall in America. Run your laces into the ground, basically."
    I saw questions crossing Jen's
face, the familiar ones: Am I being ripped off? Is this a compliment? Am I
secretly famous? When do I get my percentage?
    And of course: Is this guy an asshole or
what?
    "Wow," she said, after a long, awkward
moment. "I always wondered how that happened."
    "How what happened?"
    "How cool stuff became uncool so fast. Like one
day I see a couple of cholos wearing aprons on the street. Then ten minutes later
they're in Kmart. But I guess I didn't realize what an industry it was. I
figured at least some of it happened naturally."
    I sighed. "It does, sometimes. But usually nature
gets a helping hand."
    "Right. Like sunsets with lots of
pollution."
    "Or genetically engineered bananas."
    She laughed, glancing at her laces again. "Okay,
I'll get over it. You sure know how to flatter a girl."
    I grinned happily—with that sudden and complete
failure of irony detection that occurs when irony most needs to be
detected—while questions rattled through my brain: Was she really flattered?
Was I a fraud? Had I blown everything? What was "everything," anyway?
    To cover my confusion, I clicked to the next picture.
    The shoe.
    My brain settled, focused by the beauty. We huddled
again, pressed close for the best view on the little screen. The picture was
minuscule, badly lit, agonizingly blurry, but the elegant lines and textures
were somehow still there.
    We sat for a solid minute, sucking in the beauty,
while around us trancy coffee shop music played, cappuccinos roared into being,
and would-be writers wrote novels set in coffee shops. In the bliss our shoulders
practically melted together, and I felt forgiven for stealing Jen's shoelace
mojo. The bootleg-or-maybe-not shoe was just that good.
    Finally we pulled away from each other, blinking and
breathless, as if we'd shared a kiss instead of a cell-phone screen.
    "When did she take that?" Jen asked.
    I checked the time stamp. "Yesterday. A couple of
hours before the tasting."
    "They look like they're on a desk."
    "That's her office, I think." The shoe was
sitting on a paper-strewn expanse not unlike Mandy's desk up in the client's
Midtown tower.
    "Which means ... What does it mean?"
    "Search me. Last picture?"
    She looked at the screen for another greedy moment
before nodding.
    I clicked. It was a picture of nothing. Or something
terrible.
    Dark and blurry, an abstract gash of light