So Yesterday

"Oh, I get it. Run," Jen whispered.

I chuckled. There are only about twelve words in the client's language, but at least everyone is fluent.

Guess what? The three models were all headed to the same cool bar, which looked like a cross between a velvet couch factory and an operating room. They all ordered gleaming non-brand beers, looking thrilled to see each other, energized by their glamorous journeys across the fantasy world.

"Moving is fun," I whispered.

“Fun is good, ' Jen agreed.

The ad came to a tear-jerking end, our heroes leaving their beers untouched, having decided to keep moving. I guess they were going for a ride/run together? Wouldn't that be a little awkward? Whatever.

The lights came up.

"So" — Mandy spread her hands—"what do we think about 'Don't Walk'?"

It's fu

"I liked the motorcycle," Tina Catalina said. "Japanese street bikes are way back."

Mandy's eyes went to Hiro Wakata, Lord of All Things with Wheels, who gave her the Nod, and she checked off a box on her clipboard. I'd thought American was in, but apparently the motorcycle gurus had decided otherwise.

"Skate remix," Lexa Legault offered, and the rest of the cyber-geeks nodded. The German DJ had their vote.

"A'ight shoes," Trez said, just to fill a brief silence. He and Antoine would have approved them months ago. Shoes that didn't make it in the Bronx were shipped off to Siberia, or New Jersey, or somewhere like that.

And besides, this tasting wasn't really about the shoes. It was about how all the little elements of the fantasy world added up or didn't.

"Was that Plastique, where they wound up?" Hillary Hyphen said. "That club is so last April."

Mandy checked her clipboard. "No, it's someplace in London." That shut Hillary up. The client was very clever, shooting the street scenes in New York and the interiors on another continent. You never wanted too much reality leaking into fantasy world. Reality gets old so fast.

"So we liked it?" Mandy asked the group. "Nothing felt wrong to you guys?"

She looked around expectantly. Spotting cool was only half our job. The more important half was spotting uncool before it made trouble. Like a race-car driver, the client worried more about crashing and burning than wi

The room stayed silent, and Mandy started to lower her clipboard happily to the table.

Then Jen spoke up.

"I was kind of bugged by the missing-black-woman formation."

Mandy blinked. "The what?"

Jen shrugged uncomfortably, feeling the eyes on her.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," I said, even though I didn't.

Jen took a slow breath, collecting her thoughts. "You know, the guy on the motorcycle was black. The guy on the bike was white. The woman was white. That's the usual bunch, you know? Like everybody's accounted for? Except not really. I call that the missing-black-woman formation. It kind of happens a lot."

It was quiet for another moment. But gears were spi

"Like the Mod Squad!" she said.

"Yeah," Hiro chimed in, "or the three main characters in…" He named a certain trilogy of movies about cyber-reality and frozen kung fu whose title ends in an X, counts as a brand, and therefore will not grace these pages.

The floodgates broke. More comic books, movies, and TV shows tumbled off everyone's lips, a dozen stuffed-full pop-cultural memory banks rifled for examples of missing-black-woman formations until Mandy looked ready to cry.

She smacked the clipboard down.

"Is this something I should have known about?" she said sharply, sweeping her eyes around the table.

An unhappy silence fell over the conference room. I felt like an evil genius's henchman when something goes wrong in a certain series of secret agent films—as if Mandy might push a button on the control panel and we would be ejected, chairs and all, out the roof and into some lake in Central Park.

But Antoine cleared his throat and saved us all from the piranhas. "Hey, I never heard of this missing whatever before."

"Me neither," said Trez.

Lexa Legault had been tapping at her wireless notebook and said, "I got nothing. Zero relevant hits on…" She named a certain Web search tool whose name means a very large number. (Oh, forget it. I'm not going to get very far telling this story if I can't say "Google.")

"It's not a big deal," Jen said. "It just popped into my head, you know?"

"Yeah, like who watches The Mod Squad anymore?" Hillary Hyphen said, ending her eye roll with an exquisite glare at Jen. Hillary looked happy, at least, to see us kids put in our place.

The flush in Mandy's cheeks began to fade. She hadn't let the client miss a trend, a vital new concept, a youthquake. This was just some random thought that hadn't existed before today's meeting.

But as things wrapped up and Mandy paid me (for both of us, it turned out), she gave me a cold look, and I realized that I was in trouble. Something had been invented here that was going to spread. By the very nature of the meeting, the MBWF had had its last day of Google anonymity. The client would have about a week to get this advertisement on and off the air before Jen's rampaging new turn of phrase made it look its dated as a seventies cop show.

Mandy's look was telling me that I had done something inexcusable.

1 had brought an I

Chapter 3

AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID THERE ARE THE INNOVATORS.

The first kid to keep her wallet on a big chunky chain. The first to wear way-too-big pants on purpose. To wash jeans in acid, stick a safety pin in something, or wear a hooded sweatshirt inside a leather jacket. The mythical first guy who wore his baseball cap backward.

When you meet them, most I

Except, like Jen's laces, there's always one thing that stands out on an I

Next level down the pyramid are the Trendsetters.

The Trendsetter's goal is to be the second person in the world to catch the latest disease. They watch carefully for i

Below them are the Early Adopters.

Adopters always have the latest phone, the latest music player plugged into their ear, and they're the guys who download the trailer a year before the movie comes out. (As they grow older, Early Adopters' closets fill up with dinosaur media: Betamax videos, laser discs, eight-track tapes.) They test and tweak the trend, softening the edges. And one vital difference from Trendsetters: Early Adopters saw their stuff in a magazine first, not on the street.

Further down we have the Consumers. The people who have to see a product on TV, placed in two movies, fifteen magazine ads, and on a giant rack in the mall before saying, "Hey, that's pretty cool."

At which point it's not.