Teen, Inc. Read online

  With Jenny and the memo gone, I was flummoxed, which was a vocabulary word about a month ago. I stumbled back into the car. As we drove, Tony called Nancy and she met us at the front entrance, steaming.

  The first thing she did when she saw me was grab me by the arm, pinching my wound under my coat.

  “Isn’t that feeling better yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head, hoping for sympathy. Instead, she shoved me all the way to my suite where she slammed the door and started hissing and whisper-screaming. For someone who usually didn’t show emotion, she shared beautifully.

  “I gave you that memo so you’d know what was going on! Not so you could take it to your girlfriend!”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s not even talking to me! What’d you think I was going to do with it? If it’s true, it’s got to stop, right? People could get sick, right?”

  “Of course, but we have to be careful about how we do it. LiteSpring is how Ted Bungrin made his name. Now the Veeps look at him like he’s the CEO. If all this comes out, he’s done for, but he could take down the whole company with him. All of NECorp.”

  “So, you’re afraid of getting fired?”

  “It’s on the list, yes! Unless this is handled right thousands could lose their jobs. You lose, too. A bankrupt NECorp can’t pay you when you come of age.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  She glared. “Of course not. Why would you? You were raised by a corporation, after all. Okay, let’s try it the reasonable way.”

  She buttoned her suit jacket and tried to calm her voice. “Once you gave that memo to Eric Tate, it would prove there’s someone inside NECorp leaking information. After that, anyone who didn’t circle the wagons with Bun-grin would be gone, and, in the end, so would the company. Is that what you want?”

  I slumped in my chair. “You might have mentioned all this stuff beforehand.”

  “I wanted you to read it! You made such a big deal out of going to school, I couldn’t tell you before because I was afraid people were listening. Who expected a quiet kid like you to start making major lunchroom announcements?”

  I shrugged. “So what’s the plan?”

  She sat down herself and exhaled. “The truth will come out sooner or later, but if NECorp moves first it can control the situation. We have to shut down the plant, switch back to the old production method, apologize, and pay for the remediation. If we do that fast, the story might only last two or three news cycles and the damage would be minimal. But Bungrin will never do that. It’d be suicide for him. And, unfortunately, right now, there’s only one person who can pull rank on him.”

  Even I knew who that was. “Hammond? You’re going to talk to Mr. Wacky?”

  She sighed. “He is the CEO, Jaiden, and he’s not always … wacky. And no, I’m not going to talk to him. I couldn’t even get an appointment. You’re going to talk to him. Yes, you. He likes you.”

  That much was true. Mr. Hammond always did like me, and I had a standing offer to visit whenever I wanted.

  “I’ll walk you up now.”

  “Now?”

  “The longer we wait, the more chance Bungrin will find out what we’re doing.”

  We took the main elevator to the fifth floor, which was, in its entirety, Mr. Hammond’s office. The doors slid open and it was like the tomb of the Emperor Chin. China was named after this guy, so it doesn’t get bigger. That place had over six thousand statues of soldiers, each different, and a model of the capital city, with (ironically) mercury in the rivers, to make it look like water. One of the seven gaudiest wonders of the world.

  Mr. Hammond’s outer office was kind of like that.

  I’m serious. Rare birds flew in the air, and along one side ran a fake stream that fed a pond with goldfish. The stream ran the length of the room, then through the wall and into Mr. Hammond’s office, right by his assistant’s desk.

  It was like visiting the Wizard of Oz.

  Cheryl Diego, his assistant, was kind of short, but had an extremely pointy face. She always wore thick black glasses that looked like weapons. When she walked through the building, everyone cleared a path. When she saw me, though, she smiled and said, “Go right in, Jaiden. He’ll be happy to see you.”

  With the stream beside me, I looked back at Nancy, hoping she might come with me, but we both knew that wasn’t possible. It might look like she’d put me up to it and, if Bungrin found out, she’d be toast. So she gave me a little thumbs-up, the most blatant encouragement I think I’ve ever gotten from her, and hightailed it for the elevator.

  Even the new doors to Hammond’s office were weird. They were these huge black things he’d recently installed. They looked like monoliths. Expecting them to be heavy, I gave one a shove, shocked to see it swing in really fast. Fortunately, it had some kind of pneumatic braking system and didn’t slam into the wall. It just sort of slowed by itself.

  Inside was a landing strip for small aircraft that passed for a desk. The only thing on it was a blank yellow legal pad and a sharp pencil. But that wasn’t what dominated the place. It was the water wall.

  The stream in the waiting room was fed by a fountain twenty feet wide. Water came out of the ceiling in a steady solid gush that cascaded down a flat face of gray stone. If you looked carefully, you could see the NECorp logo etched in the stone. It was like NECorp had improved on nature.

  Mr. Hammond stood in front of it, like he was standing in a rain forest. He wore a dark, comfortable suit that matched the stone. His curly hair was more salt than pepper, and he liked to let it grow into a wild, mangy mess so he reminded himself of Einstein.

  As I came in, his face lit up with a warm grin, but his eyes, as always, sparkled with major insanity.

  “Jaiden,” he said, “if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

  You have to know Mr. Hammond to appreciate the question. He used to show me a nickel and a dime when I was a kid and ask which I wanted. It’s an old joke, but, okay, parts of my life are like bad movies and parts are like old jokes. Anyway, he always laughed when I took the nickel. This went on for years until he asked why I kept taking the larger nickel, even though the smaller dime was worth more.

  I didn’t really want the damn nickel or the damn dime anymore. (I figured I’d only made about $1.20 all together.) So I told him, “If I took the dime, you’d stop offering me money. So, really, I made more by taking the nickel.”

  I thought he’d be pissed, but he laughed his ass off and gave me twenty bucks. Back then it was nickels and dimes. These days it’s philosophical questions, but silly ones, like the tree in the forest thing, or can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it. I think it was his way of saying everything is silly, so it really didn’t matter what you did.

  But I liked to answer him anyway, in case there was another twenty coming.

  “Sure it does,” I said. “It has to.”

  “Ah,” he said, raising a finger. “How do you know?”

  I shrugged. “Same way you know there’s a tree if there’s no one there to see it.”

  He thought about it a second, then laughed, but I didn’t get any money.

  “It’s a delight to watch your mind grow,” he said. “I’ve watched this company grow, too, but it’s not the same. Business I understand, but people are strange things.”

  He turned back to the water like it was a window. Sometimes I thought it was sad, but sometimes he seemed so tickled to hear himself talk I had to wonder if maybe he was really happy.

  “People aren’t built for modern life, Jaiden. Men aren’t bred for suits and cars and cubicles, they were made to wander the antelope-filled plains, to hunt. It was simple in the past, whoever was strongest and fastest would be leader. If you got out of line, well, then the leader would just beat the crap out of you. Can you imagine?”

  I was going to say, yeah, I thought I saw a movie or read about a war like that once, but he wasn’t really asking. It was o
ne of those rhetorical questions.

  He raised an eyebrow. “It’s still like that, but thanks to money, what constitutes strength is different. The weak can now hire muscle to do the crap beating. Maybe it’s fairer, but someone still has to threaten to beat up someone else to make it work—or there’d be anarchy, barbarism.

  “Did you know there was a major corporation in Japan that let their employees use bamboo sticks to beat dummies made to look like their foremen? Can’t you see them Jaiden, whacking and screaming, maybe knocking the stuffing out of the dummy, maybe striking the head so hard that the bamboo splinters or their ‘foreman’s’ face cracks? Wouldn’t you like to do that to some teacher at your school?”

  This time he really was asking, so I said, “I don’t hate any of them that much.”

  He nodded. “You’re a kind young man. That’s how we raised you. And of course, we don’t allow that here at NECorp, but we do have a gym, and who knows what people think when they’re playing basketball or running on the treadmill? I used to pretend I was being chased by a tiger. Then I started pretending I was the tiger. Much more satisfying.”

  He smiled to himself. “What do you like to pretend to be, Jaiden?”

  “I like Star Wars,” I offered. Not that I run around pretending I’m Darth Vader anymore, but I didn’t feel like explaining Gandhi and the Hulk to him.

  “Good,” he said with a little smile. “Good.”

  That’s what Mr. Hammond was like, jumping from Japan to treadmills to tigers. Some people thought that made him brilliant, but really, doesn’t he just sound nuts?

  Before he went off on another tangent, I thought I’d get to the point: “Mr. Hammond, I know about the pollution from LiteSpring, how it’s worse than ever.”

  He sighed. The sound of it mixed with the rush of clean water. Then he looked off, like a cat focusing on something invisible in midair.

  “Oh, that,” he said. Then he actually stepped away from the wall, walked toward his huge desk, and leaned on it. “A serious business. Frankly, I wish you didn’t know about it, but you’re old enough to understand that sometimes when you try to do good, you wind up doing harm instead. Then the question becomes, how do you get out of it doing the least additional damage?”

  I shrugged. “Isn’t honesty the best policy?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, no, Jaiden. Maybe in love, but … scratch that, not even in love. The problem with truth is that people have different truths. Take my little waterfall. I look at it and see the essence of life, shapeless, yet informing everything, filling my heart, my lungs, my mind, my soul, making the world alive with meaning. Someone else might see a waste of water, resources that might better be used to feed a starving village.”

  “So … why don’t you feed the village?”

  He smiled. “Yes, yes, why don’t we just feed the world? Give the people what they need? After all, NECorp is rich! The problem with giving away everything is that then you have nothing left to give, then even more people go hungry and you go hungry yourself. But … if you build businesses and businesses create jobs, the giving can go on forever, until it’s Christmas every day!

  “At the level I work, Jaiden, everything is very, very abstract, but very, very important. If I make one decision over another, it could cost or create thousands of jobs, millions of dollars could be made or evaporate into the air. Just evaporate. I need a clear mind and the freedom to let it explore. My water wall helps me, and that helps everyone. If it helped me make just one million-dollar decision, don’t you think it’s worth it?”

  “I don’t know—how much does it cost?”

  And couldn’t you get yourself, like, a dog instead?

  He spun abruptly. “That’s not the point. Do you think NECorp is evil? Do you think we want to be pouring mercury into the rivers here like it was soda pop?”

  Geez, like soda pop?

  “No sir, I don’t.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. “Of course not. We’ve made you smarter than that. I must do something about it, but it has to be the right move. NECorp isn’t just a building, Jaiden. What about our investors? Some people think all our stockholders are wealthy, but a lot are retired, living on fixed incomes. I’ve met some, during a … holiday, I think. We can’t just abandon them because we made a mistake, can we?”

  “No, sir.”

  He stepped back. “Good.”

  He looked at his water wall again. “Since you know about it, here’s another question for your young mind. I don’t expect you to have the correct answer, because maybe there isn’t one, but what do you think is the right thing to do about LiteSpring?”

  He meant it as an exercise, to show how tough it was to face the kind of problems he dealt with every day, but really, he just lobbed it right over the plate at me, didn’t he?

  I pretty much repeated what Nancy said: “The truth is going to come out sooner or later, so I’d move first in order to control the situation. Shut down the plant, go back to old production methods, apologize, and pay for the remediation. Move quick and it might only last two or three news cycles. Any damage could be minimal.”

  He kind of stumbled backward so the back of his head got splashed with water from the fountain. He shook his head to get the water off, then came forward, narrowing his eyes, looking a little like that tiger he liked to pretend to be. I thought he was going to scream and accuse me of being someone’s mouthpiece, but as big drops of water hit the shoulders of his expensive suit and ran down the front, he laughed.

  “That’s it!” he said. “Perfect! We have to be proactive! It’s simple. It’s strong.”

  He was so happy, I felt like asking him if I could have a big fountain, too.

  “I’ll move on this at once.”

  He walked over to his desk, grabbed that single yellow legal pad and pencil, and started scribbling.

  I was thinking, hey, mission accomplished, time to get the hell out of there. But just as I was about to make myself scarce, the monolith doors swung open and in stepped none other than our Senior Vice President of Evil, Teddy Bear Bungrin.

  When he saw me, a huge grin swelled on his face, like it was infected.

  “Jaiden! There you are, kiddo!”

  He actually reached forward and mussed my hair.

  Mr. Hammond looked up. I was expecting him to fire the creep then and there, but he just smiled. “Ted, I see you’ve made the acquaintance of our young ward.”

  “Sure have,” Ted answered. “In fact, I was just searching the whole damn building for the scamp. And of course he was in the last place I looked. Ha.”

  “Glad you’re here. We need to have a chat about Lite-Spring. I’ve made some decisions,” Mr. Hammond said. Then he gave me a wink.

  Bungrin didn’t blink. “Sure, Desmond.”

  Mr. Hammond nodded at me. “Why don’t you get going, Jaiden? Ted and I may have to wrassle a bit!” He moved his hands and shoulders like he was with the WWE.

  Ted smiled, I smiled, Mr. Hammond smiled. We were all smiling, but none of us meant it. Maybe it was all the ozone in the air, but I started to feel that suit growing on me again.

  Brrr.

  As I headed out, Bungrin grabbed me by the arm—the one with the bandage. It hurt like hell, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

  “Oh, kiddo, heard about your speech in school today. In fact, it’s all over the papers. Good move. You’re off the hook with me and now you’ll be famous with your friends. Stupid idea on my part, I guess. Now go do your homework.”

  His tone was chilling, but even that didn’t dampen my mood. Mr. Hammond was going to make NECorp do the right thing. Maybe in a couple of days, I could tell Jenny about it, and maybe her dad would change her mind about me and the company and …

  I raced off to tell Nancy the news.

  12

  MERGERS AND INQUISITIONS

  Think they’ll whack this Ted Bungrin guy?”

  I stared at Nate’s jagged little picture on my laptop and
made a face.

  “No. Geez, this is a corporation, not the Mafia.”

  I never would’ve gotten the webcam to work if Nate hadn’t walked me through it. There was some Flash memory I had to upgrade, and the guys in our Information Technology (IT) department get totally wonky if they have to do anything aside from install or uninstall MS Office.

  “But you’d like them to whack him, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure. It’d probably improve the gene pool.”

  “So what do you think is going to happen for real?”

  I was sitting on my bed. Nancy had been thrilled with the news about my meeting with Hammond and there wasn’t much homework, so it turned out to be a quiet night for a change. And I did owe Nate a call.

  “They’ll hang him out to dry in front of the press, then buy out his contract, giving him millions of dollars just to pack his desk,” I said. “And Jenny’s dad will give me some sort of award for environmental excellence.”

  I laid back and imagined Jenny kissing me at the ceremony. I shifted a little onto my arm and a throbbing pain from the cut washed the daydream out of my head.

  Nate poked his head around the screen, looking confused. “Where’d you go? I’m staring at a wall with some loser Star Wars poster on it.”

  “Sorry.” I held the laptop up over me so the little camera pointed at my face. The thing was about the size of a dime. “How’s that?”

  “Better. Except now I do see your face.”

  I blew a half-raspberry at him. “Get used to it. I’m all over the damn place.”

  “I know. You getting calls from the papers and the cable channels?”

  “No. My line’s pretty private. So don’t you go giving away the number, Nate, okay? It could really screw me.”

  “Hey, me you can trust. I owe you my very existence, remember?”

  I leaned over to look out the window, but twisted the laptop so Nate could still see me. “There are news vans out front, you know, with those huge satellite feed antennas? But security keeps kicking them off the property. Nancy’s fielding all the interview requests. She says we may have to have a press conference tomorrow afternoon, just to keep them from camping out. I may get to go on Oprah.”