Deadly Pink (2 page)

“Be that as it may...” Principal Overstreet said.

We all looked at her, but she didn't really have anything to say; I guess she just didn't like our bickering.

Ms. Bennett stepped into the breach, too elegant to put up with bickering, either. “Be that as it may, we can tell, approximately, where in the Rasmussem-created scenario she is. I myself went in and tried to talk her out. She refused to listen to me.”

This was so weird, so...
more
than weird. I couldn't even tell what I should be thinking.

I saw Ms. Bennett looking at me, waiting for me to realize she was looking at me. She said, “We're hoping she'll listen to you.”

Me? Somehow this was coming down to
me?

I had caught that part where Ms. Oh-So-Well-Dressed Bennett had said she'd
gone in
to talk to Emily.

“I think it's insane,” Mom said. “First one of my daughters gets stuck in their crazy game; then they want my other daughter to just step right in after her.”

“Mrs. Pizzelli,” Ms. Bennett said, “I've already explained: there's no danger. I told you that I went into the game and was perfectly capable of coming back out again. Emily could come out, too. She's simply choosing not to. We're hoping Grace can get her to see reason.”

Liking a game is one thing. Playing into the wee hours of the morning even though it's a school day is one thing. Shouting “Just a minute” when your mother hollers at you to get off the computer
now
because she's called you for dinner twice already—all of that is one thing.

Emily wouldn't come out?

“If,” Mom said,
“if
someone from the family needs to do this, it should be me.”

Ms. Bennett shook her head. “You're not a gamer. You'd be overwhelmed. Without experience, you wouldn't know where to begin, how to get around, what's important and what's only background. We'd lose valuable time. The programs are meant to last from thirty to sixty minutes. The equipment is rated safe for eight times that exposure. But it's not meant for sustained immersion.”

Everything she said made sense, too much sense. There was no way I could hope Mom would insist on being the one to go—not when I could see so clearly it would be better for Emily to have me there.

In the movies, the good guys always fight each other for the opportunity to do the dangerous stuff. The Rasmus sem people were saying this
wasn't
dangerous. And
still
the responsibility was enough to freeze me solid.

Mrs. Overstreet, as a principal in charge of her students' safety, said to me, “Grace, you don't have to do this if you don't want to.”

For the first time in my life, I wanted to hug her.

“No,” Ms. Bennett agreed. “Of course she doesn't
have to.
But there's no reason she shouldn't. It's not like we're asking her to donate a kidney or something.”

Suddenly we were into donating body parts?
Would
I donate a kidney? I wondered. Much as I loved Emily, I wasn't sure I could.

“Oh, I wish your father would pick up the damn phone,” Mom said, “and tell me what we should do.”

Somehow, that cleared my head.
We SHOULD,
I thought,
be able to make up our minds on our own.

“No danger of me getting stuck in there?” I asked.

“Absolutely none,” Ms. Engineer and Mr. Lawyer said in unison.

“Then,” I had to admit, “I guess I don't see any reason why not.”

My mother sniffled but didn't try to talk me out of it.

Mr. Kroll smiled his non-smile smile and opened his briefcase again. “Fine. We just have one or two papers for you to sign...”

Chapter 2

The Other Sister

T
HE RASMUSSEM PEOPLE
had a mobot, one of those new artificial intelligence cars—the kind you program, and don't need a driver for. I've been in one a few times, because the Arnold family has one, and Mrs. Arnold has chaperoned a couple of our class field trips. My mother, of course, doesn't trust the technology. Although she admits that computers can react faster than humans in most cases, she keeps thinking some sort of situation will arise that the computer hasn't been programmed for, that a human driver could think his or her way around. Mr. Kroll pointed out to her that there hasn't been a single accident involving a city bus ever since they switched over to artificial intelligence drivers.

“The buses have robotic drivers,” Mom argued as we all climbed into the mobot limo. The limo looked odd, like a toy, because the whole vehicle was like the
back
of a limo—just seats for riders, no front seat or steering wheel or anything.

“The robotic driver is just to give people something to look at,” Mr. Kroll said. “The technology is the same. Once people get sophisticated enough to—Ow!”

He glared at Ms. Bennett, who had worked hard to accidentally step on his foot with her high heel. “Sorry,” she murmured, and settled herself down between him and Mom, even though that was a bit crowded and left me sitting across from all three of them. “Now, Grace,” she said before Mr. Kroll or Mom could continue arguing the finer points of transportation in the twenty-first century, “tell me about your sister.”

My mind, of course, went blank. What did she want to know? I thought of the time I'd been at my friend Cassandra's house, and Cassandra had been crying, and I asked her what was the matter. “I hate my sister,” she said. “I wish she'd never been born.”

“What did she do?” I asked.

“She's just mean,” Cassandra told me.
“You
know. You have an older sister.”

But I hadn't known. Emily had never been mean—or at least not I-wish-she'd-never-been-born mean. When I thought of Emily, I thought of the time she helped me get out of my muddy clothes after Mom said “Don't get your clothes muddy”—and Emily had them in the washing machine, then in the dryer, then hanging back up in the closet before Mom got home.

So I looked at the Rasmussem people, who wanted to know about Emily, and I asked Ms. Bennett, “What about her?”

“Does she have friends?”

“Sure.”

Ms. Bennett continued to look at me expectantly. Was I supposed to give names and addresses?

Mom filled in. “Emily has lots of friends. When she was living at home, she would have had a sleepover or gone to somebody else's house every weekend if we'd let her. She loves staying in the dorm—s he says it's like a sleepover every day of the week.”

“So she's enjoying the college experience?” Ms. Bennett asked.

“Yes,” Mom told her, somewhere between proud and snappy, as though she suspected Ms. Bennett was somehow or other criticizing Emily.

“Problems at home?”

Even though Ms. Bennett was still looking at me, and I was shaking my head no, it was Mom who answered. “My husband and I have very good relationships with both our daughters. Don't you go implying that this is somehow our fault.”

Mr. Kroll said, “Neither Rasmussem Corporation nor its employees mean to imply—”

Ms. Bennett talked right over him, “And yet Emily's note clearly shows that she has chosen not to return to her home or college.”

Ah, yes, the note. That short, scary note: “Not anybody's fault. This is MY choice.” What in the world could that mean? Other than, of course, what it sounded like it meant?

“Well, that's nonsense,” Mom was telling Ms. Bennett. “Emily has come home just about every weekend.”

Ms. Bennett raised her eyebrows.

Mom supplied the explanation no one had asked for: “Because she still has ties to her high school friends.”

She didn't say what she could have: Emily has always been the popular sister. Mom's good about not labeling, for which I can only be thankful, because Emily is the popular one, the smart one, the pretty one—which either leaves me with negatives or with nothing. Dad calls me levelheaded. That's pretty much a last-ditch-effort-to-say-
something
kind of compliment, if you ask me: Grace, her personality is such an inoffensive shade of beige.

“All right,” Ms. Bennett said smoothly.

All right?
I thought. It was like she was conceding a point in a debate.
Were
we debating?

Ms. Bennett asked, “Boyfriend?”

“Yes,” Mom told her. “Frank Lupiano, a nice boy who both Mr. Pizzelli and I approve of.”

“Did she meet him at college?” Ms. Bennett asked.

“High school,” Mom said. “He's gone to Boston now, but they're always calling or messaging each other. They're still very close.”

“Hmmm,” Ms. Bennett said. “Is there anything you can think of, Grace? Any unhappiness your sister might have shared with you?” She held up a hand to silence my mother, who was about to protest.

Popular, smart, pretty. If Emily hadn't also been the kind one, I could have hated her. Instead, I wanted to
be
her. “No,” I said. “I can't think of anything.”

“We'll let that go for now,” Ms. Bennett said. “You tell us if anything comes to mind.”

“All right,” I said. I could have said that Emily was the well-adjusted daughter in our family. Sure, I have friends, but Emily had more friends than she knew what to do with. She was a joiner, and all you had to do was look at her yearbook to see that there was hardly a club she didn't belong to. And most often, she was voted president of the club.

Me, the only thing I've ever joined was Odyssey of the Mind, and that was because my homeroom teacher bullied me into it. But I dropped out because (a) I am not really team oriented, and mostly (b) I was too worried about freezing up during the spontaneous, or improvisational, part. What if I blurted out something stupid and embarrassed myself ? Or what if I couldn't think of anything at all and the whole team failed because of me? Emily didn't have worries like that.

And yet, apparently, she had some sort of worries.

And I was supposed to find out what they were. And talk her out of worrying about them.

Which was another worry for me.

Rasmussem Corporation was founded in Rochester, so the facility on Lake Avenue is both gaming arcade and international headquarters. When we got there, I saw a sign in the front window of the arcade:

CLOSED FOR ROUTINE MAINTENANCE
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

Mom saw it, too, and sniffed. “Don't want to scare the paying customers away.”

Ms. Bennett, who was getting pretty good with forestalling argument by holding up her hand, held her hand up for Mr. Kroll.

The mobot limo drove around to the back, where we could get out without anyone on the street seeing. Once we were on the sidewalk, the car drove off—presumably to park itself somewhere it wouldn't get ticketed, towed, or de-hubcapped. Ms. Bennett swiped her nametag under a scanner to open the service door.

Someone must have been watching for us, because a young woman in a white lab coat was coming down the hallway to greet us.

“Any change?” Ms. Bennett asked her.

The young woman, who looked about Emily's age, shook her head.

Ms. Bennett told us, “Emily is in gaming cubicle eighteen.”

“Can I get you anything?” the girl—her name badge identified her as Sybella—asked Mom. “There's a Tim Hortons next door, and their coffees are pretty good.”

Mom looked ready to slap her. “You've gone and gotten my daughter stuck in one of your stupid games, and you're thinking an iced cappuccino is going to make me feel better?”

You could see the Sybella girl thinking like,
Yeah, probably caffeine wasn't the best thing to offer YOU.

Mr. Kroll—cut off yet again by one of Ms. Bennett's
Silence
gestures—announced, “I'll be in my office if anyone needs me.” He hesitated, perhaps debating whether to inform Mom that neither Rasmussem nor any of its employees had been the ones to get Emily stuck in the game, or maybe considering whether he wanted to tell Sybella that
he
would like a cup of coffee. In any case, Ms. Bennett was hustling us down the hall, and he stayed behind.

If you go into Rasmussem to play a game with a group, they put you all together in a room big enough to accommodate however many total immersion couches you need, even though once you're hooked up, you're completely unaware of your physical surroundings and you don't need to be near the people you're playing with. You can play a game with people on a different continent ... if you happen to be the kind of person who knows people on different continents, or if you don't mind playing with people you don't know. The friends-all-together part is just for those few minutes before they hook you up and after the game is finished.

On the other hand, if you're playing a solitary game, they put you in a room that's only about a couple of feet longer and a couple of feet wider than the total immersion couch itself. Even the word
couch
is a bit of a hyperbole, as what we're talking about here comes closer to a doctor's examining table than anything you're likely to find in a living room.

Ms. Bennett opened a door, and there was Emily lying on her couch in her cubicle. I thought, in my levelheaded way,
We won’t all be able to fit in there at once.

Another part of me taunted,
You're trying to avoid thinking about Emily.
It was true. My mind was flitting from one unimportant detail to another: the size of the cubicle; how Emily was wearing jeans and a white lab coat like the coffee enthusiast who had met us at the door; how her body looked small and little-girlish and unprotected, because if I saw her asleep at home, she'd be wrapped up in a blanket or comforter. I even took in that her eyes were closed but—beneath the lids—were darting back and forth, which I knew was because the Rasmussem experience taps into the same part of the brain where dreams come from. But it was still kind of creepy.

Mom, on the other hand, rushed right into that cubicle and cupped Emily's face in her hands. Then she dropped to her knees beside Emily's couch and began to cry—deep, racking sobs.

I could see Ms. Bennett hesitate before deciding to put her arm around Mom's shoulders. “It's okay, Mrs. Pizzelli. She isn't in pain—the exact opposite, in fact. And we will find a way to get her to come back.”