Teen, Inc. Read online

  TEEN, INC.

  STEFAN PETRUCHA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 There’s No “I” in Teen

  2 Meanwhile, Outside The Box

  3 Home Suite Home

  4 A Fearful Synergy

  5 Actioning Out

  6 Running Up The Flagpole

  7 A Win/Lose Situation

  8 Winning People and Influencing Friends

  9 Back in The Black and Blue

  10 Down and Out Sizing

  11 Dotting TS, Crossing Eyes

  12 Mergers and Inquisitions

  13 To B2B or Not to B2B

  14 Moving and Shaking Can Be A Seizure, Too

  15 Breaking In on The Ground Floor

  16 Yours For The Multitasking

  17 Posttruth

  Acknowledgments

  Imprint

  To my father,

  who spent most of his life

  railing against the machine.

  I guess some of it rubbed off …

  1

  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 Styrofoam 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 touchscreen 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 handball 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 forehead down and looked up. Through my hair, I saw everyone 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, making 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 himself, 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, getting his ass fired, like a damned spirit, condemned to wander 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 disbanded, its pieces sold. If you ask me, old Dan should have been disbanded and had his pieces sold, instead of just being 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 befo
re 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.