Read Online Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos - Free Book Online Page A

growing up; his work had sounded so boring, so pointless. As she listened to her father now, his work didn’t sound any less boring. But she realized that, in a kind of twisted way, George was talking about chemistry the same way she talked—and thought—about performing.
    â€œI know the Adequate industries don’t pay as well, but you can live a full life,” George said. “A lot of my friends have found personal satisfaction as researchers, reporters, teachers, doctors—”
    â€œGeorge, face it.” Constantine exploded. “You sit in a lab all day doing feeble experiments that nobody cares about. I wanted to work on video games that
everyone
would play. It’s completely different. And excuse me, a
reporter?
That’ll be fun, writing about all the stuff going on in the creative industries. Maybe I can do an article on my sister, the star.” He laughed spitefully. “Or a teacher. That’s the best. I’ll watch class after class of sevens get tapped. Perfect.”
    Before George could reply, Constantine stood up. “Eva, come look at my Tap page,” he demanded. “Maybe you can tell me what went wrong.”
    Shrugging at her parents, Ivy followed him into the bedroom and watched as he turned on his Tabula. He got up from his desk chair and she sat down in it.
    As an ominous chord played, the name Constantine Vassiliotis swelled toward her on the screen. At the crescendo, the red letters burst into pieces and crumbled away, revealing Constantine’s Tap homepage. She navigated around it. He’d had 1,158 hits, which was a better than average number. But only about half had rated him a “Trendsetter” or above. There were the usual stills of the video game characters he liked, with blurbs about what her brother thought made them and their weapons appealing, powerful, cutting-edge. She watched his videos, most of which were unrelenting montages of explosions from recent games. He’d picked good ones, and set them to great music, but . . .
    â€œWhere’s your original content?” she asked, clicking through his files. “Did you come up with new game ideas?”
    Constantine shrugged. He lay on the bottom bed of his bunk, his legs crossed on the comforter, combat boots still on his feet. “Didn’t think I needed them. I sorta ran out of time.”
    Ran out of time? This was Tap. Nobody did any homework in seventh grade; even the teachers basically understood that the first half of the year was for creating Tap pages. Some of Ivy’s teachers had even let her work on hers during class.
    â€œWill spent months animating original stuff last year and he got overlooked,” Constantine said. “So I didn’t bother. I wanted to be on GameTech’s court eventually, anyway. Judging.” He punched the wall. “I can’t
believe
I’m an Adequate.”
    â€œBut . . .” Ivy bit her tongue. Calling her brother lazy, saying he hadn’t done enough, wouldn’t help anything. “You’re right,” she said, nodding. “It’s completely unfair. Your site rocks. I’m sorry.”
    Constantine snorted. “I can’t believe I have to go to school on Monday. I’d rather die.”
    â€œDon’t say that. You know George and Christina will be on watch for the next month.”
    Constantine rolled his eyes. “You’re the one with Skip McBrody’s career. Make sure
you
don’t have a little”—he put two fingers to his temple and flicked his thumb—“
accident.
”
    Ivy frowned. Since she’d been tapped, no one in her family had ever mentioned Skip’s suicide directly. “Thanks, Constantine. That’s kind of sick, you know.”
    The two sat in silence. “So . . . do you want to talk about the Tap some more?” Ivy asked at last.
    â€œNo offense, Eva, but I can’t really talk to you about