So Yesterday Read Free

of
bugged by the missing-black-woman formation."
    Mandy blinked. "The
what?"
    Jen shrugged
uncomfortably, feeling the eyes on her.
    "Yeah, I know what
you mean," I said, even though I didn't.
    Jen took a slow breath,
collecting her thoughts. "You know, the guy on the motorcycle was black.
The guy on the bike was white. The woman was white. That's the usual bunch, you
know? Like everybody's accounted for? Except not really. I call that the
missing-black-woman formation. It kind of happens a lot."
    It was quiet for another
moment. But gears were spinning. Tina Catalina let out a long sigh of
recognition.
    "Like the Mod
Squad!" she said.
    "Yeah," Hiro
chimed in, "or the three main characters in . . ." He named a certain
trilogy of movies about cyber-reality and frozen kung fu whose title ends in an X, counts as a brand, and therefore will not grace these pages.
    The floodgates broke.
More comic books, movies, and TV shows tumbled off everyone's lips, a dozen
stuffed-full pop-cultural memory banks rifled for examples of
missing-black-woman formations until Mandy looked ready to cry.
    She smacked the
clipboard down.
    "Is this something
I should have known about?" she said sharply, sweeping her
eyes around the table.
    An unhappy silence fell
over the conference room. I felt like an evil genius's henchman when something
goes wrong in a certain series of secret agent films—as if Mandy might push a
button on the control panel and we would be ejected, chairs and all, out the
roof and into some lake in Central Park.
    But Antoine cleared his
throat and saved us all from the piranhas. "Hey, I never heard of this
missing whatever before."
    "Me neither,"
said Trez.
    Lexa Legault had been
tapping at her wireless notebook and said, "I got nothing. Zero relevant
hits on ..." She named a certain Web search tool whose name means a very
large number. (Oh, forget it. I'm not going to get very far telling this story
if I can't say "Google.")
    "It's not a big
deal," Jen said. "It just popped into my head, you know?"
    "Yeah, like who
watches The Mod Squad anymore?" Hillary Hyphen said, ending
her eye roll with an exquisite glare at Jen. Hillary looked happy, at least, to
see us kids put in our place.
    The flush in Mandy's
cheeks began to fade. She hadn't let the client miss a trend, a vital new
concept, a youthquake. This was just some random thought that hadn't existed
before today's meeting.
    But as things wrapped up
and Mandy paid me (for both of us, it turned out), she gave me a cold look, and
I realized that I was in trouble. Something had been invented here that was
going to spread. By the very nature of the meeting, the MBWF had had its last
day of Google anonymity.   The client
would have about a week to get this advertisement on and off the air before
Jen's rampaging new turn of phrase made it look its dated as a seventies cop
show.
    Mandy's look was telling
me that I had done something inexcusable.
    1 had brought an
Innovator to a cool tasting, where only Trendsetters were allowed.

 
    Chapter 3
    AT THE TOP OF THE
PYRAMID THERE ARE THE INNOVATORS.
    The first kid to keep
her wallet on a big chunky chain. The first to wear way-too-big pants on
purpose. To wash jeans in acid, stick a safety pin in something, or wear a
hooded sweatshirt inside a leather jacket. The mythical first guy who wore his
baseball cap backward.
    When you
meet them, most Innovators don't look that cool, not in the sense of
fashionable, anyway. There's always something off about them.   Like they're uncomfortable with the world.
Most Innovators are actually Logo Exiles, trying to get by with the twelve
pieces of clothing that are never in or out of style.    
    Except, like Jen's
laces, there's always one thing that stands out on an Innovator. Something new.
    Next level down the
pyramid are the Trendsetters.
    The Trendsetter's goal
is to be the second person in the world to catch the latest
disease. They watch carefully for innovations, always ready to jump on