The Unidentified by Rae Mariz

the rack. But I’d heard him doing some mixing in the Studio, and his beats made me a fangirl.
    I moved closer to hear what they were saying.
    “They almost done?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    He checked his intouch(r). “I need to make an appearance at the VIP Lounge,” he said, pointing a loaded finger-gun to his head and pulling the trigger. “Can you watch the door?”
    The girl held out her hands and Tycho passed her a bunch of what looked like Game ID cards.
    “We’ll coordinate later,” he said, taking a few strides toward the escalator. She swiped her card and went into Chez Chess cafe.
    I swiped and followed after her. Stepping in, I was hit with the bass rattle of Wu Tang Clan: “Rraw, I’ma give it t’ya, with no trivia…” They always played classic music in there.
    The black-and-white-checked tile floors gleamed.
    Each table was filled with two people sitting directly across from each other, staring intensely at the board, sipping coffee. Some tables had a few people hanging around them, watching the games unfold.
    The bore-core girl was at the counter explaining to the barista that she wanted her espresso shot, steamed milk, and butterscotch syrup all in separate cups.
    The woman behind the counter rolled her eyes and started brewing the beverage.
    “You don’t think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?” I asked.
    She turned around to look at me. Her eyes were much softer up close, they kind of danced subtly.
    softer up close, they kind of danced subtly.
    “But that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the individual parts for what they are,” she said, gathering the three small cups.
    “You’re friends with Lexie Phillips, right?” I blurted out, hoping to get her to admit how the parts added up.
    The guarded look came back. “Lexie has a lot of friends.”
    “But Cayenne Lewis doesn’t have that many. Not anymore. You know her, too, right? And Tycho Williams.
    You have a lot of popular friends, but I don’t know your name.”
    “It’s none of your business,” she said, then turned and carried her tiny glasses to a seat by the door.
    I smiled. It was like a challenge, and I was determined to find out how Miss None-of-Your-Business fit in with the rest. I found a free table and moved the pieces out from opening position to make room for my notebook(r). I logged on to the Network main page.
    I started by searching for Lexie Phillips’s profile page.
    And the girl was right, Lexie did have a lot of friends. She was ranked in the Top 50 most popular for our school site, which was pretty impressive if she’d only been playing Level 13-17 for a few months. Still, her inflated status was good for me because it meant she had a popularity plug-in that made her page viewable by all . I didn’t need to be a “friend” to view her schedule or content. People in the Top 50 were so popular that privacy was a status no longer available to them. I scrolled through Lexie’s list of friends, but there were so many. There was no way I was going to but there were so many. There was no way I was going to find bore-core girl’s name on that list.
    I scanned through the other parts of Lexie’s profile.
    She kept a weird page. None of the interests she listed made sense. She said she was into the history of plumbing through the ages, tracking weather patterns, and practicing echo-location. Under her Content Accomplishments she said she was proud of her ability to bench-press 208 pounds. Her Hopes and Dreams included one day discovering a species of tiny frog that had moth wings, and trampolining on cumulous clouds.
    I lol’d. She had filled her entire profile page with an overload of nonsense information, never once mentioning her Save the Princess team score, or who her best friend was, or anything real. I wondered if she felt the same way about those things as I did about my music, or if she just liked effing with people. Still, I had to admit, I kind of secretly wished she actually was