Lexicon

raised on hockey. She described how when she was six, her father took her to a game and she was terrified because the crowd was so angry. There was an incident, a splash of players on the ice, and she turned to her father for protection but his face was monstrous. On the way home, he asked if she’d had fun, and she said yes, but whenever she even saw hockey on TV, she felt sick.
    These were all lies, of course. You couldn’t tell a student anything true about yourself. This wasn’t a rule, exactly; it was obvious. She was in her second year and learning how people could be categorized into distinct psychographic groups based on how their brain worked. Segment 107, for example, was an intuition- and fear-motivated introvert personality: Those people made decisions based on avoiding the worst outcomes, found primary colors reassuring, and, when asked to pick a random number, would choose something small, which felt less vulnerable. If you knew someone was a 107, you knew how to persuade them—or, at least, which persuasion techniques were more likely to work. This was not very different from what Emily had always done, without thinking about it too much: You developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It was the same, only with more theory. So that was why you shouldn’t talk about yourself, and why the older students were so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you had to hide who you were. But she suspected she was not very good at this. She guessed there were a whole bunch of clues she was inadvertently dropping to someone like Jeremy Lattern every time she opened her mouth, or cut her hair, or chose a sweater. She figured the reason the school had a
no practicing
rule was that sometimes people did it.
    • • •
    “Tell me what they teach you,” she said. “Give me a sneak preview.”
    They were making slushies. They had progressed beyond milk shakes. The advantage of the slushie was you had to leave school grounds. Tuesdays and Fridays, if the weather was clear, they walked the three-quarters of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven. She liked walking beside Jeremy Lattern, because cars would zoom by and the drivers would probably assume she was his girlfriend.
    “You use very direct language,” he said. “You don’t ask. You command. That’s a useful instinct.”
    “So tell me why I’m learning Latin.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Do you always follow the rules?”
    “Yes.”
    “Bah,” she said, defeated.
    “The rules are important. What they teach us is dangerous.”
    “What they teach
you
is dangerous. What they teach
me
is Latin. Dude, I’m not asking for state secrets. Just give me something. One thing.”
    He attached the slushie lid and poked the straw through the plastic.
    “Bah,” she said again. They walked to the front of the store and stood in line behind a kid paying for gas. The man behind the counter was balding, in his fifties, Pakistani or something like it. She nudged Jeremy. “Which segment is this guy?” He didn’t answer. “I’m thinking one eighteen. Am I right? Come on, I’m doing segmentation; you can answer the question.”
    “Maybe one seventy.”
    She hadn’t considered that one, but saw instantly how it made sense. “See, that wasn’t so bad. Now what? What do we do once we know he’s a one seventy?”
    “We pay for our slushies,” Jeremy said.
    • • •
    She hung with Jeremy in his room sometimes. Once she stuck chewing gum into the lock before she left and came back when she knew he had a class. She went to his bookshelf and pulled down three titles she had been eyeing for a while. She was sitting on his bed, deep in
Sociographic Methods
, when the door opened. Jeremy stood there, one hand on the knob. She had never seen him mad before. “Give me that.”
    “No.” She sat on it.
    “Do you know what they’ll do—” He tried to grab it and she resisted and he landed on top of her. This she slightly engineered. His breath brushed her face. She let the textbook slide out and clunk to the floor. He raised a hand and it hovered a moment, then came down on her breast. She inhaled. He moved his hand away.
    “Keep going,” she said.
    “I can’t.”
    “Yes you can.”
    He rolled off. “It’s not allowed.”
    “Come
on
,” she said.
    “We’re not allowed to be together.” That was a rule. Fraternization. “It’s not safe.”
    “For who?”
    “Either of us.”
    She