Figure it out.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Cassie remained at Level 1 overnight, with a Hold Action icon that meant the Hive algorithm had determined there was a good chance that her ongoing virality would bump her to Level 2. So no one was to take action; no range was assigned; no hashtag had been elevated. She was in limbo, wondering not whether she would go to hell but rather to which circle.
Hey, classics reference! Congratulations, Mom!
Not for the first time, she was relieved that her mom knew next to nothing about the current world and so wasn’t aware that her daughter was about to be handed some ridiculous punishment as a result of her joke.
In homeroom, Sarah paled at the sight of her, then flinched as Cassie slid into the empty seat next to her. “Oh, relax,” Cassie said, disgusted. “It’s not contagious.”
But everyone at Westfield had apparently received the same directive Sarah had: either avoid Cassie McKinney outright or openly mock her. She passed Skylar, he of #DumpSkylar fame, in the hallway and their eyes met in sympathetic solidarity. Well, Cassie thought, he appears no worse for wear. Eventually everything will be fine.
It was kind of freeing, in a way, being in Level 1. Quiet. In a few days, it would all be over.
But then, on her way to lunch, her earbud dinged again.
It was just as well, she realized dully, staring at her screen. Now seemed like the perfect opportunity to avoid the cafeteria — and Rowan — altogether and go hide out in the library.
Cassie knew no one who had borne a Level 2 punishment, but she’d followed Level 2 events online, of course. While Level 1s were awarded pretty freely (especially locally), the difference in virality numbers between Levels was exponential, so someone had to do something really wrong to jump to Level 2. But all in all, a Level 2 punishment — a few days without food; being shunned; having to apologize in an online video — would be bearable. Embarrassing, but not life changing.
In the media center, Cassie found an empty desk in a quiet corner and tried to make herself invisible while she strategized her next move. She had limited options. Talking to her mom was, naturally, off the table; she could only imagine how smug Rachel would be, how many versions of “I told you so” she would come up with.
Rowan wasn’t talking to her, which meant the rest of the group wasn’t either, just like a cluster of well-behaved remote-controlled robots. Her friends from her old school hadn’t heard from her in months, and Cassie knew she couldn’t go to them now. And how could she blame them? She’d ghosted them. They owed her nothing.
Glancing around the library, which used to house books and now was mostly just storage space for various technologies, Cassie felt the threat of tears behind her eyes. She had no one.
She couldn’t believe that that was what she once wanted.
*
Cassie was in a state of high-level misery when she got home. It was, she supposed, nice to know who your friends really were. But the circumstances were — to use one of her dad’s favorite terms — suboptimal. Especially given that it appeared she had no friends.
Level 2. She still couldn’t believe it. And the Hold Action icon remained. It was possible — likely, even — that it would go away and she would remain at Level 2. But the idea of hitting Level 3 was sheer madness. She just wanted this to be over already.
It was equally maddening that her mother managed to exist in a world where knowledge of the Levels, of the Hive overall, was negligible. She studied Rachel carefully when she got home, checking for hints that she knew Cassie was in a bit of trouble — or even, maybe, for an opening to discuss this with her — but amazingly, her mother knew nothing. So she switched to her default mode, in which she ignored Rachel to the very best of her abilities (hint: exceptionally well). Filtering Momspeak through her brain and keeping only the important stuff was a skill she’d mastered shortly after her father’s death, when Rachel had begun blathering at length on topics that were of no interest to Cassie. She employed those skills tonight powerfully, if she did say so herself, and managed to get to bedtime without contributing much more than the occasional grunt, nod or eye-roll to the conversation.
That afternoon she had been exhausted, zombielike. But now, she slipped into bed and knew immediately that sleep would not come. Not for her. She would be tossing and turning and checking her phone.
You could always turn the phone off, Cassie, said the voice in her head that sounded like her mother’s. The suggestion was true but impossible. Even with her phone limited to just voice and text, there was no way in the world she would turn it off. She couldn’t even tolerate the fifteen minutes it was unavailable to her during mandatory software updates.
And then — she remembered something. Rachel often had trouble sleeping and sometimes took melatonin to help herself drift off. She didn’t just take pills or drops, either: she had these chocolate candies laced with the stuff.
Cassie climbed out of bed, crept past the door to her mother’s room and sneaked into the kitchen. There, in a cabinet above the stove, she found the stash of melatonin candies, packaged in a cheerful red-and-blue box with the words SWEET SLUMBER! splashed across it in yellow.
According to the box, a partial dose — one candy — would help you relax. Two candies would really knock you out and three would send you into “blissful dreamland!”
She would settle for plain old sleep, honestly. Blissful dreamland seemed too much to hope for.
Those dosages were for old people, though. Younger metabolisms burned hotter and faster. Cassie figured she’d need a higher dose, so she chomped her way through five of the candy-coated slumber bombs. It felt weird slugging down so much candy at bedtime, but she made short work of them and then, satisfied that she’d solved at least this problem, headed back to bed.