Chapter One

Teen Inc

Stefan Petrucha

THERE’S NO “I” IN TEEN

Ever wonder what’d happen if everyone just stopped believing in money? After all, it’s only worth something because people think it is. It’s not food, which people need, or gold, which people like. It’s just paper. Heck, for the most part it isn’t even paper, it’s just a record on some computer bank. Can’t get more nothing than that. The whole world’s economy runs on a shared illusion. It’s totally Zen. Go figure.

So, what if everyone one day said, “Hey! This is paper! I’m doing all this work for paper! What am I, out of my freaking head?”

And—poof—no more money.

Would it be a cooler world? I dunno. Would it be worse? Doubt it. But it sure would be different. Especially for all those corporations out there running things. Corporations, after all, are big machines designed to make money. In fact, they’re legally obligated to try to make money. Like, if Exxon or PepsiCo had a choice between saving some guy who was drowning or making money, they’d be obligated to let the guy drown.

Weird, huh?

This is the kind of thing I think to myself sometimes, especially when I’m headed to a morning meeting. Waking up early on a school day puts me in a bad mood to begin with, and who needs the extra stress? I mean, I just turned fourteen, I’m not six. I’m not even ten. I can’t believe I even have to show up for these things anymore.

But I do, so I went, trudging out of my office suite, past the gang in Marketing & PR, and right on down the hall to pain-in-the-ass central.

I knew there was going to be trouble the minute I opened the thick glass door to the conference room. The place was packed. Every seat had a manager in it. My meetings were never this well attended. They were all sipping from Styro-foam coffee cups or plastic water bottles. Despite all the people, it was so quiet you could hear every freaking slurp. If you closed your eyes, it sounded like you were in a swamp.

They also had one of those really cool, giant touch-screen setups. You know, the kind you connect to your laptop? Instead of clicking, you touch it, and there’s a special pen you can actually write on it with? They only use that when they really want my attention. So, like I said, trouble.

At first I figured it was going to be yet another homework presentation or a lecture on how I should stay in my room after hours and not wander the halls because it freaks security, complete with a video of me playing hand-ball in the parking lot, but it wasn’t.

It was worse.

I made my way to the seat at the head of the table, sleepily waving to Nancy Alein. She’d been my manager, or rather, the head of the department that managed me, for about ten months. Nice enough person, but stiff, stiff, stiff. Always wore suits, even on casual day, blouse buttoned up to the neck. You know the type? Didn’t like “messes.”

I, of course, much in the same way corporations exist for money, am pretty much by obligation a mess.

Nancy gave me a curt nod. As soon as I sat in my nice cushy chair, she turned on the big screen. No intros, no nothing. That’s Nancy, all business.

Page one of a PowerPoint presentation lit the room, with foot-high letters: Jaiden Beale Dating Options 1Q

My eyes nearly popped out of my head, raced down the hall, and jumped out the window to their grisly death. “No!” I shouted. “No way! We are not going to talk about who I date!”

Nancy held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Jaiden, please. Bob, weren’t we supposed to cut that front page? Why wasn’t it cut?”

“Sorry. There was a rush . . .”

Furious, I headed for the door, determined to force my whole body through the glass. Nancy, legal pad in hand, leaped to her feet and raced me.

“Jaiden, we’re not going to tell you anything,” she said. “We’ll just facilitate . . .”

“Offer support . . . ,” said Bob, cutting in. He’s one of the other managers.

Cutting off Nancy is a bad idea. It’s a thing with her. She gave old Bob a laser glare that melted him in his seat. He’s not an idea man anyway. I’m not sure what he does, other than rephrase whatever the person talking before him says. Staring at him, she finished her sentence, “. . . the process for you.”

They had ways of making my life tough if I didn’t cooperate, lots of ways—no DVDs, video games, Internet time, no “screens” as Nancy liked to sum it up.

I trudged back to my seat. I looked at my shoes. I looked at the wall. I looked back at the screen. I banged my head against the table. After the last whack, I kept my fore-head down and looked up. Through my hair, I saw every-one waiting.
Nancy stepped up to the screen and pressed her finger against a spot. A picture of a kind of familiar blond girl with curly hair appeared. On the right was a list of stats, like her name (Donna something), her year, her interests, her grades. It was kind of like a MySpace page, only with more detail. I twisted my head to the side for a better look.

Nancy cleared her throat and went into her prepared remarks. I hate those. I wish they’d just send me a memo so I could decide not to read it. She said, “We’re here because your last HR evaluation indicated that although you’re doing okay academically, socially you’re, to put it bluntly, a little less advanced than your peers. Realizing this particular aspect of your transition to public school can be tough, we thought we’d pitch in and take a look at some potential . . . friends.”

I pointed at the screen. “Guys, that’s a diary entry up there, and her personal chat-room handles. Isn’t this like an invasion of privacy?” I said.

“It’s like it, but it’s not,” Nancy explained. That was about it for her sense of humor. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. “All this data is public. Your demographic . . . um . . . people your age tend to put a lot of personal info on the Web, thinking it’s somehow private. Some of your fellow students probably do this for themselves. We just did a little typing to assemble it for you.”

“Because I’m too stupid or lame to make friends myself?”

“No,” she said. She extended the o to make it sound like a three-syllable word. “We’re all very, very proud of you, and genuinely pleased with the strides you’ve made.”

Everyone, I mean everyone, nodded supportively, like they were a bunch of bobble heads on one big corporate body, which is funny if you think about it because the root of corporate means to give something a body, and if anything, a corporation really has no physical body, mak-ing it kind of incorporeal. Anyway, when they do that I feel like I’m talking to an alien group-mind like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“Adolescence is an awkward time,” this other guy, Jack Minger, offered. Jack’s not so bad. Has kids of his own. Thinks he knows just how to lie to us. “We all go through it, well, most of us.”

The “most of us” crack got a few chuckles but Nancy chimed in before any big laugh riots could ensue. “Just look. No pressure. Just . . . fun.” she said. Her shoulders shivered. They shivered whenever she said fun, as if she were saying vomit.

She turned back to the screen. “Donna Maybridge. Same age, same grade. Also just started at Deever High this year. Likes science fiction and South Park. You have lunch the same period so there’s a perfect chance to interface.”

She looked back at me and waited, as if I were going to say something like, “she’s the girl for me” but I just raised my eyebrows and let her think it meant whatever.

She pressed the screen again. A sour-faced girl with curly black hair appeared.

“Shanna Denton?” I blurted out. “No way! That girl wants to kill me!”

Well, she did. Ever since that day she came to class wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt and I said, “Hey, nice shirt.”

That’s all I said, I swear. I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, just friendly, really, and it’s like now I have this death stalker for life.
Nancy wisely touched the screen again.

Secretly, I hoped one of their choices might be Jenny Tate. It’d be sweet to be “forced” to talk to her. I could just tell them she was cool, and they’d fall all over themselves to get me a file. But no way would I say anything about her to the suits. It’s hard enough to keep from acting like a lame washout, wimpy sad-ass zombie loser whenever she’s in eye range. Knowing more about her would only make me more nervous.

But Jenny wasn’t next. Instead, the screen filled with the image of a dark-skinned girl with long black hair. “Caitlin Fermelli. She’s a little more academically inclined than you are, taking three honors classes, but you do have similar tastes in music. We were hoping her study habits might rub off on you.”

I knew her, but I wasn’t interested. Even so, I mentally made a note of her chat-room handle: beeswax29.

So it went, one profile after another, like I was a sultan reviewing women who’d applied for my harem, or a director auditioning starlets. By the end of the meeting I still felt totally stupid, but I like to think my sense of stupidity filled the room and infected everyone.

At long, long last, Nancy glanced at her watch. “Time. Jaiden, I have printouts prepared. Before you run off, this is important. Should you decide to follow up, there’s some information we’ll have to review about dating etiquette, substance abuse, abstinence as a healthy choice, and, if necessary, the proper use of a condom...”

“Jeez!” I screamed. I put my hand over my ears and tore into the hall, dying to put some mileage between myself and Team Awkward.

Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you’ve probably figured out by now that my name’s Jaiden. This is not because I had a grandfather named Jaiden, or because I looked like a Jaiden. I got the name because of a naming committee that met three times fourteen years ago. After a lot of back-and-forth, they outsourced the project to a branding firm. The branding firm came up with Jaiden.

If you’re a time traveler from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and think a company is something that makes things, a branding firm is a little hard to understand. Their “product” as they like to call it, is ideas. They sit around all day coming up with names and designs (“customer experiences”) they think people will remember—like for Prozac, the antidepressant drug. That name was invented by a company called Interbrand. It was a combination of pro, meaning “positive,” and zac, suggesting exactness, or precision. Take it and you become “exactly positive.” Get it? If you think that’s strange, remind me to tell you what a corporate-identity specialist does. No lie, it’s a real job.

Anyway, Interbrand was too expensive, so I’m the only human being in the whole world named by LogoStrong, the company that came up with Um-drops, the gentle yet effective laxative. So, Jaiden it was. Jaiden Beale. Beale, they couldn’t decide on, in committee or otherwise. It was my parents’ last name. Other than my genes, “Beale” was all my parents left me.

Oh, yeah. That and a forty-million-dollar wrongful death settlement.

But I can’t touch a penny until I’m twenty-five. Until then, NECorp, the company responsible for killing them, is my legal guardian, my parent corporation if you will.

Wacky world, huh?

To be fair, it wasn’t NECorp, exactly, it was SafeWarm, a fully owned and operated subsidiary, that produced the faulty gas valve that caused the kitchen explosion that killed Mom and Dad. To be even more specific, there was this floor manager, Dan Blake, a real mover and shaker. Not a very patient guy either. He made some changes to the production process that could’ve safely doubled the valve production, but he was out to make a name for him-self, so he quadrupled it, speeding things up to a point where a bad valve slipped through Quality Assurance.

They fired his ass. I don’t know what happened to him after that, but I like to think he goes from job to job, get-ting his ass fired, like a damned spirit, condemned to wan-der the earth searching for his lost, I dunno, his lost ass, I guess.

The explosion happened two days after my parents brought me home, unnamed, from the hospital. According to the news accounts, they were heating a bottle for me at the time. The blast took out half the house. Me and the nursery were in the other half.

It was a huge, huge scandal. I didn’t have any other family, but the high-powered law firm of Helson, Holtz and Mannifeld saw an opportunity to win fame and fortune, so they represented me while I was put up for adoption.

Many heads rolled aside from Dan’s. Stock dropped. SafeWarm was sort of put to death. Actually, it was dis-banded, its pieces sold. If you ask me, old Dan should have been disbanded and had his pieces sold, instead of just be-ing fired.

The press was all over it for weeks and NECorp was afraid the court case would destroy them, until their CEO, Mr. Desmond Hammond III, came up with this truly whacked idea. He offered a big payout on the condition that NECorp be allowed to raise me. He pointed out that I didn’t have parents anyway, and wouldn’t it be hard to be certain that whoever wanted to adopt me wasn’t just in it for the money and fame?

It was a kind of a PR, sleight-of-hand thing. Instead of thinking about poor parentless me and how I should have forty billion instead of forty million, questions started flying about whether a corporation could raise a child.

It was brilliant. Mr. Hammond is a crazed genius type, famous for engineering NECorp’s explosive growth, but also famous for being totally weird and, lately, for having a tendency to agree with whomever he spoke to last, whether it was a janitor, or the blue jay that landed on his window ledge.

NECorp promised to give me the best upbringing possible. When they outlined the specifics—the well-rounded education I’d get, the care and affection—my attorneys started listening, and, after securing their own big payback, said yes.

For the nitpickers among us, technically, I don’t think I was adopted directly by NECorp. A corporation is a legal person under the law, with the same rights and (supposedly) responsibilities, so you’d think maybe having one adopt a kid wouldn’t be quite so weird. But it turns out that lots of states have adoption laws that define people as the flesh-and-blood kind.

There are, however, a few states that have no such legal definition, and it was in one of those states that NECorp created The Jaiden Beale Fellowship, Inc., another fully owned and operated subsidy, and I think, technically, it’s that entity that is my “biological” parent corporation. That’s the closest I understand it, anyway. Some guy from Legal once explained it, but, really, it made my head spin.

I’m sure having one or two parents try to figure out how to raise you sucks sometimes, but trust me, steering committees, focus groups, and upper-level executives approving everything is way worse. Just one example? It took three months and twenty memos before I was allowed to watch my first episode of South Park—and it wasn’t even that funny. At that rate, I’d be seventeen be-fore I get permission to see an R-rated movie, and by then I wouldn’t need permission.

So sometimes I wish that people would stop believing in money and that NECorp would just go away.

By the time I made it to the cafeteria, I had ten minutes before I had to catch my bus, so I raced up to Ben at the grill.

Sometimes, I get a few stares from visitors, but they’re quickly told who I am. I feel more comfortable on Fridays, casual day, since my T-shirt and jeans don’t stand out quite so much.

“The usual?” Ben said. He’s my man. Kind of short, about my height of five feet five inches, so we see eye to eye. He’s stocky as all hell, though, so you wouldn’t want to cross him. Been making me breakfast weekdays for five years. He’s got this mellow way of doing everything, cracking eggs, swishing the whisk, flipping the home fries. I love to watch him cook. He’s like a Zen master of cholesterol.

I nodded and he tossed some fresh bacon on the grill. That great sizzling, salty smell woke me up a bit, and I finally started to forget about the meeting.

That is, until Ben smiled and asked, “How’d the dating game go?”

If it was anyone else talking, I’d have walked. “You get a memo?”

He shook his head and gave me a mysterious smile. “I don’t need a memo. I keep telling you everyone likes to talk while they’re waiting on line. If you were listening, you’d have known about it days ago. How bad was it?”

“Picture the worst, double it, then bury it until it stinks.”

He slid a clean plate out and gave me a look. “Want them to stop?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Ask a girl out yourself.”

“Right.”

“Be smart,” Ben said. “Their job is to make sure you reach certain benchmarks. It’s like quotas, sales figures for them. You make the goals, they leave you alone, but the longer it takes, the more their jobs are at risk, so the more they have to get involved. Remember what happened when you were failing math last year?”

How could I forget? Nancy, in one of her least endearing moves, decided I should be sent on a retreat with accounting. You haven’t lived until you’ve had forced bonding with twenty high-level accountants.

“Hold that thought,” Ben said as he flipped my eggs. “Now ask yourself if it would be so awful to ask some girl, even just a friend you like, to go to a movie?”

I gave him a shrug. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He always talked sense. That’s why I liked him so much. That’s also probably why he’s a short-order cook. The more sense you make around here, the less they pay you.

To get the really high-paying jobs, you have to be totally nuts.

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE
THE BOX

I scarfed down my breakfast, even the home fries, which I hate to do, because I love them more than life itself. Then I booked across the lobby, said a quick hello to the guard, opened the doors, and entered what is still sometimes referred to as the real world.

The nine-to-fivers were just arriving, streaming in from the expressway, making the parking lot a mess. When I’m on time, I avoid the crunch. Now I had to dodge tons of cars. My goal was a housing development beyond a small patch of trees on the far end of NECorp. That’s where the school bus picked me up, so no one would see where I lived.

NECorp’s world corporate headquarters is a humon-gous white building surrounded by an artificial lake. It's got towers, sleek flat surfaces, two domes, huge windows the size of countries, and abstract fountains and statues all over the place. Looks like a cool retro spaceship from the otherwise boring old movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The moon is cool, too, but you don’t want anyone thinking you live there, right? Which brings me to the fact that in school, my “true” identity was a secret, shared with no one. Yeah, I know, I’m no Spider-Man, and there were all those news stories about me, so you’d think anonymity would be impossible, but my adoption was over a decade ago, and the press basically got tired of me after I learned to walk. Sure, anyone could figure out who I was if they wanted to, but so far no one wanted to. I was, in the mean-time, free to hide in plain sight.

Just as the bus showed up, I stumbled out from the trees and scrambled up the steps, the doors phishing shut behind me. Nate Buckman, ultimate computer freak, was on board as usual.

“Beale!” he called out in a deep voice. He put his fancy handheld PDA in his lap and high-fived me as I sat next to him. His voice was the only thing about him that was deep. He was a short, thin, bookish kid with glasses. He also had these kind of fat, chunky cheeks and buckteeth. In grade school they called him “Chipmunk Cheeks.”

Since I was his friend, I just called him Nate.

Honestly, I thought of him as totally normal, compared to me. In fact, Nate was my image of what a normal kid should be. Except maybe for the teeth. We started talking on the bus the first day of school and found out we liked the same kind of music, the same science fiction, the same video games, and not the same girls, so we got along great.

Speaking of which . . .

“Still like Caitlin?” I asked him.

“As long as I’m still breathing,” he said as he absently surfed the Web.

I nudged him. “Well, what if you knew her screen name at TeenTime.com?”

He made a face. “What if monkeys flew out of my butt and handed me a winning lottery ticket?”

I took out a pen and scribbled beeswax29 on his note-book.

His eyes lit up, and he actually put the PDA down. “No way!”

“Yes,” I said, with utmost somberness. “It is indeed, way.”

He looked at the scribble again, then back at me. “For real? I owe you, like, my liver! Wait? What am I going to say to her? What can I talk about? I can’t believe this!”

He went on like that for the rest of the ride. His voice even jumped an octave once or twice. It almost made the whole ugly meeting worthwhile, except for the excruciating embarrassment. Eventually we arrived at the school.

As a building, Deever High is not so great. It’s old, I know because the cornerstone I pass on the way in every day says 1953, which I think puts its birth in the middle of the Red Scare or the Korean War, or both, a time when I guess everyone was too busy fighting something to care much about how best to build high schools. It’s got this weird brick-and-steel construction that looks like it came out of a toy box, and everything inside smells gross, a com-bination of sneakers, paint, sour milk, mold; you know the drill. The entrance doors have like a million coats of aqua paint on them that’s so ugly you’d think they’d have stopped making it long before you could put a million coats of it on anything.

But I loved it more than anyplace I’d ever seen, be-cause, even with the work, the occasional lousy teacher, and the bullies, it was the only place in my whole corporate existence where I felt almost normal.

I said good-bye to Nate, who was so busy making notes on his PDA on what to say to Caitlin that he didn’t even no-tice, and headed for homeroom. The rest of the morning was pretty dull, except maybe for a moment during second period art history where Shanna Denton, as usual, kept giving me the evil eye. Sometimes I’m afraid she’s actually going to kill me because of that Hello Kitty thing. Her skin just oozed hatred for me. It made me feel like actually reading the file Nancy had given me on her, just to get some juicy gossip, but I figured ultimately it would only get me into more trouble.

Third period bio was when my blood pressure always shot up. Not because I really loved biology, or the teacher, Ms. Chrob, who was as affable as a sack of potatoes and looked like one, too. I barely paid attention to her, but bio was the class I shared with Jenny Tate. She always sat by the windows way in the front, I always sat against the wall way in the back. I liked to think of it as “our” class. Ha.

But what could I say about Jenny, really, since I’d never even spoken to her? I wished I knew something about her other than her name and the way she looked, but I bet whatever else there was to know was really great, too. I planned to actually say hello to her someday, to break the ice or whatever. Much as Nate was my buddy, my giving him Caitlin’s screen handle was also a little experiment. I wanted to see how Nate would handle it and what would happen. If it worked out for him, hey, why not me?

When Jenny wasn’t already in her seat when I arrived, I was briefly bummed, thinking she might be absent. But then I got this tingle at the back of my head, a sort of Jenny-radar, and in she walked. She was wearing a short orangey blouse that I guess would usually expose her midriff, but she had a sweater tied around her waist, so no skin in sight.

I was vaguely aware that Ms. Chrob had started talking: “Looks like everyone’s here, so before we begin our review of the digestive system . . .”

Or something like that. Anyway, Jenny had this light skin with tons of freckles, really clean red hair, and bright green eyes. I mean green you could spot from halfway down the hall.

“I want to give you your assignments for our project this year, but first, a warning. One year we had two students bring in the heart of a dog for a project on the circulatory system. We’re still not sure where they got it, but since then the school has had a strict models-only policy.”

When Jenny shifted, moving further into the light of the sun, the skin on her face totally vanished, but you could still make out her freckles, like little backward stars, dark against light.

“You’ll be paired up into randomly assigned teams, to give everyone an opportunity to actually do the work instead of socializing.”

Suddenly, Jenny’s head turned and I caught a flash of those green eyes. It was like she felt me thinking about her the same way I could sense it when she walked into the room. Or maybe the sun was getting to be too much. Either way, I couldn’t bear it, so I turned away quickly.

Those rare moments when Jenny was facing me were the only times I ever looked at Ms. Chrob. Don’t get me wrong. Despite appearances I am not a bad student. It was usually pretty easy to catch up with whatever Chrob was talking about. She repeated it often enough, like we were idiots. Like right then I knew she was talking about that stupid project she’d only mentioned a billion times. Now, she was reading out the names of the teams.

“Drevin and Gallancy,” she said. “Bergstom and Perry.”

Of course you know what I was wishing for and dreading. Wishing for, because I really wanted it; dreading it because I knew if it happened, I’d wind up acting like a total idiot and ruining everything forever. At least when something’s a fantasy, it’s still possible, you know? You can pretend forever that you have something to look forward to.

Likewise, I never thought in a million years the universe would ever organize itself around my daydreams. Mostly it seemed like things happened regardless of what I wanted, like that great meeting this morning. But every now and then . ..

“Tate and Beale.”

For a few seconds, I thought I was wishing it so hard that I’d hallucinated. I briefly feared that I was crazy now, forever stuck inside a dream.

But it did happen. I had heard it.

Jenny Tate was going to be my project partner! For a month!

I hoped to hell I wasn’t grinning like an idiot. I was still staring at the front of the classroom, but I realized I had to do something to avoid seeming like a loser right off the bat. I had to look at her and smile or nod or wink. No, not winking. That would be ridiculous. Just look and nod. Look and nod.

Only I couldn’t. You ever stop to think about how many thoughts and muscles it takes to do a precision movement like turn your head, make eye contact with someone, and nod? If you really think about it, you’ll wonder how it ever happens.

All of a sudden, I wished I’d had Nancy there with me giving me a PowerPoint presentation on how to move my neck.

First, twist your head as shown here. If you don’t get it the first time, click on the illustration to see the process again.

Seconds ticked by. Soon it would be too late, or late enough for whatever I did to look really weird, like I was stuck in a time delay like when they interview someone half a world away and you have this ungodly pause be-tween the question and the answer.

Summoning all my will, I swallowed and turned, just like in the PowerPoint illustration I imagined. Jenny was al-ready looking at me, like maybe she hadn’t even stopped from before they announced our names. I think I smiled, but I definitely nodded. She smiled and nodded back.

There’s this movie called Contact with Jodie Foster, where she meets an alien species for the first time, and there’s this huge gulf between them and it’s really tough for them to figure out how to communicate.

It was sort of like that.

The rest of class I was afraid to even look at her. So I looked at Chrob. I even listened to her. I took notes. I understood things about cellular structure—the nucleus, the cell wall, protoplasm, the endoplasmic reticulum, which is kind of a circulatory system inside the individual cell. I was feeling focused, academic, like maybe I wanted to study biology in college.

Then the bell rang.

Everyone shifted out of their seats. I stood up very carefully in case Jenny was still watching. After all, I didn’t want her to see me fall down or anything.

There she was, walking up to me.

“So . . . ,” I said. She smiled again, and waited for me to finish whatever it was I was going to say. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that was.

Another word. Say another word. Make a sentence.

“We’re going to be working together, huh?”

“Looks that way,” she said. “Any idea which project you want to do?”

No. Say no.

“Uh . . . nope.”

“Me neither. Maybe we should get together like this weekend and get started?”

Together? Of course, together! It’s a group project, idiot! Okay, talk again now.

“You mean like Saturday?”

She looked worried. “Is that too soon? That’s not cool, is it? I’m not very cool. I get that from my family. And now I’m talking too much.”

What do I say? I can’t tell her I think she’s cool, that wouldn’t be cool . . .

“Yes. No. I mean this weekend is fine. Totally fine. And cool.”

She laughed a little. “Don’t you live near Westerly Avenue? My cousin Madge lives around there, and she’s seen you get on the bus. I could bike over and meet you at your house.”

“Sure. Great. What time?” I managed.

I forgot what time she mentioned, but it didn’t matter. I could ask later, after I had more practice actually speaking to her. Right then, all I had to do was get away without tripping or drooling or bursting into hysterical laughter. I smiled again, not too weirdly, I hoped, exited the class, and turned a hallway corner. Checking to make sure she hadn’t followed, I jumped into the air, then pounded my feet into the floor one after the other until it felt like my toes would fall off.

Jenny Tate was going to be my project partner, and she wanted to work at my house!

It wasn’t turning out to be such a bad day at all.

In fact, it was probably the best day I’d ever had.

Now the only problem was, where was I going to get a house?