“Hold the phone,” Shoto said. “Are you telling me you’re on Team Blane?”
“Of course not,” Art3mis replied, looking mildly revolted. “Blane is even worse than Duckie. I never thought either one of them was a good match for Andie. And Kira Morrow held the same opinion…”
“OK…” Shoto said slowly. “But I still don’t understand why you decapitated Duckie.”
“To ‘recast the foul,’？” she said. “And ‘restore his ending.’？”
“How are we supposed to restore the ending where Andie winds up with Duckie, when you just killed Duckie?” I asked.
“I’ll show you,” she said. “But we need to make one more stop first.”
She took off running again, and since we really had no choice, Aech, Shoto, and I followed. After several more identical-looking hallways, Art3mis finally slid to a halt in front of a long row of orange lockers. One of these lockers had a warning scrawled across its door in black magic marker: TOUCH THIS LOCKER AND YOU DIE, FAG!
“Hey!” I shouted. “Bender’s locker!”
Aech nodded and folded her arms. “I always questioned his reasoning here,” she said. “Don’t you think this homophobic graffiti would encourage people to mess with his locker rather than discourage them? Bender didn’t think things through!”
“Yeah,” Art3mis replied. “Lucky for us…”
She turned and grabbed a fire ax off the wall. She used it to smash open Bender’s combination lock, then gingerly opened the locker door and quickly yanked her hand clear. When the door popped open, a small guillotine slid down the length of its frame, chopping off the toe of a sneaker that was poking out of the bottom of the locker.
Art3mis dug through the locker’s bizarre contents until she finally found a crumpled brown paper bag. She opened it and pulled out another, even smaller paper bag, stained with what appeared to be French-fry grease. From inside that bag, she then withdrew a clear plastic sandwich bag, filled with a copious amount of marijuana.
Arty held up the bag of weed in her left hand and Duckie’s shoes in her right.
“We’ve got the magic herb and the magic slippers,” Art3mis said. “Now it’s time for us to hit the city, baby. Dead-on. We have some drinks. A little nightlife. Some dancing…Let’s go!”
She took off running again. We ran after her.
Once we made it back outside, Art3mis took us on a shortcut across the football field, and as we walked past one of the goal posts, we triggered another needle drop on the simulation’s soundtrack. It happened to be one of Aech’s all-time least-favorite songs—“Don’t You （Forget About Me）” by Simple Minds. She already looked as if her nerves were hanging by a thread, and this nearly pushed her over the edge.
“Oh, give me a fucking break!” she cried, shouting to be heard over the opening of the song. “Seriously? Do all of us need to be here for this shit right now?”
I gave her a playful shove forward, and we ran to catch up with Art3mis and Shoto. As we did, the song continued to play, and when it reached its crescendo, Aech mockingly raised her right fist to the sky. It made the rest of us crack up.
A few seconds later, Aech’s smile vanished.
“I’m getting a call,” she said. “It’s Endira. I promised to check in. I gotta take this. Gimme one second.”
Aech walked several yards away and turned her back to us before she answered the call. I caught a glimpse of the worried face of her fiancée, Endira, in a vidfeed window in front of her. She was calling from their home in L.A., where she was still holding a vigil beside Aech’s sabotaged immersion vault. Aech muted their conversation, so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. But we didn’t need to. It was obvious that Endira was distraught and Aech was trying to calm her down.
Shoto sighed. “I know we don’t have time for this. But I’ve been dying to talk to Kiki too.”
Art3mis looked thoughtful for a moment. Then she turned to me. “It won’t take all four of us to collect this shard,” she said. “How about you and I keep moving and give Aech and Shoto a few minutes with their ladies? We can call them once we have it.”
The prospect of being alone with Art3mis for the first time in years rendered me momentarily speechless. After a few seconds of awkward silence I finally blurted out a response.
“Sure,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “That’s a great idea. And very thoughtful of you.”