“Thank you!” he said, bowing slightly after each donation. “God bless you! Save Ferris?”
The current of the crowd quickly carried him over to us, and he held his Pepsi can out to Aech before repeating his desperate plea: “Save Ferris?”
Aech stared back at him stoically, then said, “Excuse me?”
“Well, see, we’re collecting money to buy Ferris Bueller a new kidney,” the blond guy explained. “And those run about fifty G’s or so. So if you could help out—”
Aech slapped the can out of his hands, sending it flying. Art3mis hurried over and pulled Aech away, laughing, while the flustered blond boy accused her of being a heartless wench.
“Don’t get distracted,” Art3mis said. “We need to keep track of Andie!” She pointed up ahead of us. “I think she went that way. NPC behavior is somewhat randomized here. Andie usually visits her locker first, but sometimes she wanders into one of these classrooms and sits down instead. So keep moving, and keep an eye out for her. We’ll sweep the classrooms on both sides of the hall as we go!”
Art3mis took off down the hall again, pushing and weaving through the oncoming torrent of NPC high school kids. Aech, Shoto, and I hurried after her.
The school bell rang a few seconds later, and the hallway began to clear as NPC students filtered into their individual classrooms. One of them bumped into me as she went by, and when she turned to say, “Excuse me,” I saw that it was a young Juliette Lewis, with her hair done up in a frizzy blond ’80s perm. I knew her best from her starring roles in Strange Days and From Dusk Till Dawn, so it took me a moment to remember that she’d portrayed Audrey Griswold in Christmas Vacation.
Art3mis was right—for someone who had trained themselves to identify pop-culture icons from the ’70s and ’80s, this world was one huge distraction.
As we continued to follow Art3mis, she instructed us to split up and look inside each classroom we passed, to see if we could locate Andie Walsh.
I ran to the nearest door and glanced inside, then retreated as soon as I saw that it was an economics class being taught by Ben Stein, who was, of course, currently calling the roll.
“Adams, Adamly, Adamowsky, Adamson, Adler, Anderson?” he said. “Anderson?”
“Here!” I heard Anderson shout as I turned away and hurried on to the next classroom.
It was the school’s computer room, and it was currently filled with student NPCs typing out their term papers on rows of ancient desktop computers. A sign posted above the chalkboard said HACKERS WILL BE EXPELLED, and that was one of the reasons I did a double-take a few seconds later, when I spotted the greatest fictional hacker of the ’80s, Bryce Lynch, sitting at one of the computers. Then I noticed that Bryce looked older than I remembered, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. That finally made me realize that I was looking at Buck Ripley, a character in The Great Outdoors portrayed by Chris Young, the same actor who had played Bryce Lynch on Max Headroom a few years earlier. Even so, before I turned to leave, I silently saluted him, recalling the dark time during Halliday’s contest when I’d used the name Bryce Lynch as my fake identity, to avoid detection by IOI and the Sixers.
A bit farther down the hall, I peeked into the open door of an art classroom. At first I thought it was empty, but then I spotted Keith Nelson （Eric Stoltz’s character from Some Kind of Wonderful） standing at an easel near the back of the room, painting a portrait of Lea Thompson, aka Miss Amanda Jones, with the song “Brilliant Mind” by Furniture playing out of a jambox on the desk beside him. I stood there transfixed for a moment, after it occurred to me that I was watching the original Marty McFly paint a portrait of his mother. Then Art3mis shouted for me to keep up, so I hurried to catch up with her. We passed by the open doors of the school gym, and inside we could see a bunch of girls in blue leotards doing various gymnastics exercises. On the wall, I noticed a large banner that said GO MULES GO! I pointed it out to Art3mis.
“I thought it was the Shermer Bulldogs,” I said.
“The football and wrestling teams are the Shermer Bulldogs,” she said. “The basketball team is the Shermer Mules. See?”
She pointed to a poster, announcing an upcoming away game, between the Shermer Mules and the Beacon Town Beavers.
Ahead of us, we found Shoto looking through another open doorway, into some sort of shop class, where dozens of male students were making identical ceramic elephant lamps. They lit up when the elephant’s trunk was pulled. But one of the boys couldn’t get his lamp to turn on, despite repeated attempts. When he turned around, we saw that it was Brian Johnson （Anthony Michael Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club）。 Aech turned away to continue on to the next classroom, and I reluctantly followed her. Just before I lost sight of him, I saw Brian frown and cast a terrified glance toward his gruff-looking shop teacher.