Read The Bar Code Tattoo for Free Online Page B

Maybe the bar code was just a great method of organizing things, proposed by some efficiency expert. Everything was about efficiency these days. It might be obnoxious, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was some sinister plot behind it.
    Putting her palms on either side of her head, she shut her eyes and squeezed, as if to push down all these maddening, confusing thoughts. When she opened her eyes again, she took in the things in her room as if seeing them as a stranger might, wondering what they might tell someone about the girl who lived there.
    Her open closet was packed sloppily with clothing — she had never been neat — last season’s silvers behind this year’s neon-colored fabrics. Then there was the poster of Ty Zambor, Lunar Tick’s drummer, that Amber had given her and even hung for her. The top of her Lucite dresser was strewn with colored sketching pencils, makeup, her handheld organizer, and her pocket-sized communo-disc, the two-inch card that connected her to phones, computers, faxes, and scanners. How much longer would her mother be able to pay the monthly fee on that?
    Her eyes traveled to the mirror above her dresser and it reflected back a picture of her father. Startled, she sat bolt upright. No! It was only her own reflection that she’d seen.
    What a strange trick of shadow and desire, making her think, just for an instant, that she saw her father in the mirror. She stood and stared at her reflection. Why hadn’t she ever noticed before how much she looked like him? The same hazel eyes and wide mouth.
    Well, sure, everyone always said she looked like her grandmother, her father’s mother. It made sense that her father looked like his mother as well. She had often wished she’d known Grandma Cathy better, but she’d lived so far away and died ten years ago. It was funny not to know someone from whom you’d inherited so many of the genes that made you … you.
    Digital numbers streamed from pole to pole of her clock. 8:45. 8:46. 8:47. Titanium wires that carried them were nearly invisible, making the numbers appear to float in midair.
    Amber would be waiting for her. She had to decide.
    Out in the hall, her mother shuffled by and, in a low voice, sang a song from the early days of the century, the days when she had been a young woman. “ I’m like a bird, I only fly away ….” The bedroom door swung shut behind her.
    Kayla pulled on her hot-pink, stretch one-piece suit and finished the look with black boots. She grabbed her silver solar jacket from the closet and snapped out the wrinkles before she slid into it.Checking her image in the mirror, she put on silver lipstick and black eyeliner.
    That’s good , she approved her look.
    No sad songs for her. No suicide. No beatings in the school hall. She would fit in, go along, and be okay. Life was too difficult to do it any other way.
    In ten minutes she was out of the house, heading toward Amber, who waited in her tidy, well-clipped front yard and waved when she saw Kayla. “Final level!” her friend cheered. “You have not looked so hot since … well, you know … your dad and all. Never mind. Seventeen is going to be the beginning of the new Kayla. I just know it.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Promise me you’ll dress like this on Monday at school. You’ll have the guys dragging their tongues along the hall after you.”
    “Ew!” Kayla laughed at the bizarre image.
    “You know what I mean, Kayla.”
    What would Kayla say to Mfumbe and Zekeal when she showed up with the tattoo on Monday? She admired Mfumbe and liked him. She wanted him to like her. And Zekeal … she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She tried so hard not to because Nedra was always pressed up next to him. There was no chance anything could happen between them as long as Nedra and he were so tight.
    Still … Zekeal’s face might pop into her mind at any time, even when she didn’t want it to. Nomatter how hard she tried to banish the picture, she was powerless