Read Online Bellwether by Connie Willis - Free Book Online

i tattooed right between her eyes.
    “What’s your tattoo?”
    “It’s not a tattoo,” she said, brushing her hair back so I could see it better. It was a lowercase i. “Nobody wears tattoos anymore.”
    I started to draw her attention to her snowy owl and noticed that she was wearing duct tape there, too, a small circular patch right where the snowy owl had been.
    “Tattoos are artificial. Sticking all those chemicals and cancerinogens under your skin,” she said. “It’s a brand.”
    “A brand,” I said, wishing, as usual, that I hadn’t started this.
    “Brands are organic. You’re not injecting something into your body. You’re bringing out something that’s already there in your natural body. Fire’s one of the four elements, you know.”
    Sarah, over in Chem, would love to hear that. “I’ve never seen one before,” I said. “What does the i stand for?”
    She looked confused. “Stand for? It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s I. You know, me. Who I am. It’s a personal statement.”
    I decided not to ask her why her brand was lowercase, or if it had occurred to her that anyone seeing her with it would immediately assume it stood for incompetent.
    “It’s ‘I,’” she said. “A person who doesn’t need anybody else, especially not a swarb who would sit at the communal table and order Sumatra.” She sighed deeply.
    The waiter brought our lattes in Alice-in-Wonderland-sized cups, which might be a trend but was probably just a practical adjustment. Pouring steaming liquids into clear glass can have disastrous results.
    Flip sighed again, a huge sigh, and licked the foam despondently off the back of her long-handled spoon.
    “Do you ever feel com plete ly itch?”
    Since I had no idea what itch was, I licked the back of my own spoon and hoped the question was rhetorical.
    It was. “I mean, like take today. Here it is, the weekend, and I’m stuck sitting here with you.” Here she rolled her eyes and sighed again. “Guys suck, you know.”
    By which I took it she meant Brine, of the bovver boots and assorted studs.
    “Life sucks. You say to yourself, What am I doing in my job?”
    Not much, I thought.
    “So, everything sucks. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not accomplishing anything. I’m twenty-two!” She ate a spoonful of foam. “Like, why can’t I ever meet a guy who isn’t a swarb?”
    It might be the forehead tattoo, I thought, and then remembered I wasn’t any better off than Flip.
    “It’s just like Groupthink says.” She looked at me expectantly, and then expelled so much air I thought she was going to deflate. “How can you not know about Groupthink? They’re the most in band in Seattle. It’s like their song says, ‘Spinning my wheels on the launchpad, spitting I dunno and itch.’ This is too bumming,” she said, glaring at me like it was my fault. “I gotta get out of here.”
    She snatched up her check and slouched off through the crowd toward our waiter.
    After a minute he came over and handed the check to me. “Your friend said you’d pay this,” he said. “She said to tip me twenty percent.”
     
     
    alice blue—–(1902—4)—– Color fad inspired by President Teddy Roosevelt’s pretty and vivacious teenage daughter, of whom her father once said, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Alice Roosevelt was one of the first “media stars”; her every move, comment, and outfit was copied by an eager public. When a dress was designed for her to match her gray-blue eyes, reporters dubbed it Alice blue, and the color became instantly popular. The musical comedy Irene featured a song called “Alice Blue Gown,” shops marketed gray-blue fabric, hats, and hair ribbons, and hundreds of babies were named Alice and dressed not in the traditional pink but in Alice blue.
     
    After Flip left I went back to the personals, but they seemed sad and a little desperate: “Lonely SWF seeks someone