The Karma Beat Read Online Free Page B

company.
    “Both.” Mom sighed. “The Directorate wants to change my position at Genie Communications so that I’m just a VP with an office and no real duties. Then I could focus on the work for the U.N.I.V.E.R.S.E. But I don’t want to. I enjoy the cell business, and besides, I like having a job I can fess up to. I don’t want my friends to think that I’m paid to do nothing.”
    The U.N.I.V.E.R.S.E. had decided to start a cell phone company as a cover in the early nineties. Unfortunately, the company had been a huge success. They’d intended to have primarily genie clients. The flat monthly rate for unlimited local calls had caught on. Everyone I knew had a Genie phone. Now they were the most successful cell phone company in the Southeast. Mom basically worked two demanding jobs.
    We had free cell service and lots of goodies. My friends loved the free merchandise Mom brought home. Pink pens, pink lava lamps, and lots of mirrors shaped like genie bottles. Their logo was a genie rising from a pink, bejeweled bottle with the words, “Who needs three wishes when you have unlimited local minutes?”
    “What are the U.N.I.V.E.R.S.E. meetings about?” I asked casually as I poured some cereal.
    “Jen, you know I can’t tell you that.” She continued to flip through the large binder, so I figured she wasn’t onto me yet.
    “Mom, I was wondering. How many people know everything I do? I mean if I go to grant three wishes, you know about it, but who else? Does everybody who works with you have that information?”
    Mom looked up from her work. “I’m not sure what you’re worried about. I can tell you that your assigned monitor, the Directorate, and their senior staff can access the information.”
    That was a lot more people than I realized, and it wouldn’t make Leo’s search very easy.
    She tucked a strand of her fiery red hair behind her ear. “You’re not reading 1984 in school are you? I know your father rants and raves, but the U.N.I.V.E.R.S.E. really isn’t that kind of big brother.”
    “Um, yeah, I know.” I took a big bite of my cereal. I didn’t even know who my monitor was, much less Leo’s father’s. I knew who was on the Directorate, but I didn’t know where they were or what they looked like. The senior staffers probably numbered more than fifty, but I could maybe find their names.
    “How are you liking the Genie5000?” Mom asked.
    My new cell phone was the latest and greatest, a phone engineered solely for Genie Communications. “I love it. I like the new purple.” I’d passed my old one on to Alex.
    “I prefer the nostalgic pink myself.”
    They’d chosen pink twenty years ago because they thought it would limit their customer base. I guess their market share proved them wrong.
    They’d gotten tired of seeing men walking around with the pink phones. In Atlanta, the Genie phone was a sure-tell sign of how cheap a man was. Most of the realtors and businessmen in town had used the phone despite the color. A few had done some scary things with magic markers. Then a competitor capitalized on the situation by selling skins in a variety of colors. Suddenly men were back to carrying silver or black, and Genie Communications decided to give in and manufacture additional colors. They still pushed the pink though. I’d grown up with pink phones.
    “Tell Alex I can get her a skin for the phone if she gets tired of the pink,” Mom said as I finished off my cereal.
    “I’ll try,” I mumbled, but Mom didn’t notice. I hadn’t found time to mention my problem with my best friend. If Alex didn’t forgive me by dinner, I’d ask my mother for advice.
     
    Thirty minutes later, Ian pulled the Toyota into a space in the Bearden High lot between a Mercedes and an Audi convertible. Our school was situated squarely in Dunwoody, an upper middle class suburb of Atlanta. Even the apartment dwellers among us had parents who could pay well over fifteen hundred dollars a month on rent.
    When you lived