Scored by Lily Harlem

Author:Lily Harlem [Harlem, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Lily Harlem
Published: 2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

12. a more perfect humanity

IMANI DIDN’T BELIEVE in Sherry Potter’s disappearance. It was impossible to disappear; there were cameras everywhere. Even if the press didn’t know where Sherry Potter was, Imani was sure that Score Corp did, which meant her husband, Nathan Klein, did. Imani was also sure that the so-called lost interview was a conspiracy theory, hatched by creepers in lieu of a defensible argument for their cause. In any case, she decided not to debate the issue with Diego. She had a higher objective, and needed to draw him out to succeed. Even if she didn’t end up writing her paper on Diego’s mother, she had promised Ms. Wheeler and, more importantly, that eyeball that she’d uncover something useful.

So on Friday during study period, she claimed a tablet at the school library to search the lost interview, hoping to find just enough to show interest, butter Diego up, and then elicit some real information. Her search led her down blind alley after blind alley, with no actual “lost interview” appearing. The closest she got was a video of some girl who claimed to be Sherry Potter’s assistant listening to a recording of it while describing what she heard. Before she could finish, someone barged into her dingy apartment and yanked her away. It looked amateurishly staged, which Imani found disappointing. She’d thought Diego was smarter than that and began to wonder if she’d mistaken his confidence for intelligence.

The search was not a complete loss for Imani, however. While there was no plausible evidence for the interview, there was an abundance of material about the Potter-Kleins themselves, and Imani quickly found herself spiraling down a search rabbit hole, consuming article after article about this oddball pair of geniuses. Her favorite bit was a ten-year-old interview with veteran reporter Martin Belzer. He was a star of news feeds and someone she knew her mother had a crush on. But he looked different in this interview—younger, thinner, more aggressive.

The video featured footage of the Potter-Kleins’ Cape Cod beach house, where they were shown riding horses while Martin Belzer provided a brief voice-over about the “reclusive couple” and their “world-changing software program.” It explained how the Potter-Kleins had dropped out of MIT, cycled through a handful of startup companies, earned and lost a few million, and then finally designed the software at the heart of the score.

Their home was a sleek wooden deckhouse with eyeballs everywhere. After a short tour, Martin sat with them in front of a digital fireplace to begin the inquisition.

The Potter-Kleins came across as friendly and open to Imani. Sherry was pretty and serious, with salt-and-pepper hair cut into a soft bob. Nathan was tall and gaunt with heavy black eyebrows and restless eyes. Despite being in their forties, they were both scored. They got a monthly report just like Imani did. Nathan’s lowest score was 52, he admitted. Sherry had never scored below 80.

When Martin asked them why they invented the software, the Potter-Kleins looked at each other with a trace of trepidation.

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