So Yesterday - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,30

least of my worries: the anti-client might squash more than my ego.

I thought about all those movies where the doubtful guy says, "But we'll be walking straight into a trap!" And the brave guy says, "Yeah, but that's why they won't be expecting us." Which is, of course, complete crap. The whole point of setting a trap is that you expect someone to walk into it, right?

But they were expecting dark-haired Hunter of the Skater Shorts, not blond non-Hunter the Mighty Penguin.

I took a deep breath. I really needed some food.

By this hour the museum was closed to the public, but its hillside of marble stairs was still dotted with tourists. I joined the other party-bound filtering up through the tired and sunburned clots of camera pointers. We swept gratefully into the museum's air-conditioned cool, women in evening gowns and men in black tie. In the lobby a barosaurus skeleton reared up over our heads, eighty feet high, defending its skeletal young from a skeletal T. rex. I remembered coming here as a kid, wondering why all these dinosaur skeletons were bothering to eat each other when there clearly wasn't much meat on any of them.

The crowd was big enough to disappear into, the horde of voices smoothed to a rumble by marble echoes. Among my fellow penguins I felt very much in disguise, blending into the throng as velvet ropes channeled us from the lobby to the Hall of African Mammals.

This was the old part of the museum, dating to the days when conservationists went to other places, shot animals, brought their corpses back, and stuffed them. Which is a kind of conservation, I suppose. In the center of the huge hall a family of stuffed elephants tramped along together, massive and clueless. Set into the walls around us were dioramas - zebras, gorillas, and impalas against painted African landscapes, staring out at us with wide glass eyes, looking paralyzed with surprise, as if no one had told them that tuxedos were required.

The crowd was drifting in slow circles, moving clockwise around the elephants. True to Manhattan form, the party was just now kicking into gear two hours late, everyone grabbing their first drinks. The slow circling gave me the chance to scope things out, searching for a disguised Jen and any sign of the anti-client.

I was jumpy. The little plastic twigs of the clothing's tags were starting to poke, and I was still surprised by glimpses of a certain peroxide stranger in the glass that separated me from the Africa veldt. Every girl of Jen's height dragged my eyes after her, but unless she'd opted for plastic surgery, she wasn't any of them. Of course I flinched whenever a bald head popped up in the edges of my vision, half expecting a powerful hand to land on my shoulder and lead me away to some dark corner of the ^

museum. I moved through the party, nervous and hyper-alert, as if the pair of sleeping lions in the corner diorama were still alive.

To calm myself, I did what comes naturally to any cool hunter: I read the crowd.

The demographic of Hoi Aristoi was young and wealthy, the sort of people whose job it is to go to this sort of party. You know who they are. Their names are in bold type in gossip pages, presumably to remind them what they did last week. They were here to refine their social skills, readying themselves for the day when their trust funds would blossom into real inheritances, and they would join the boards of museums and orchestras and opera companies and go to more parties. The odd camera flash snapped, gathering fodder for the Sunday Styles section and celeb magazines' back pages. Apparently Hoi Aristoi really had aristocratic roots. Any magazine that could occupy the entire Museum of Natural History for a party was backed by people with serious social connections.

I wondered if any of the people here would ever actually read Hoi Aristoi. Would it run advice columns for the single scion? Essays on mink coat maintenance? Bargain buys for the bulimic's bathroom?

Not that the articles really mattered. Magazines are just wrapping for ads, and advertisers must have been lining up to fill the pages of Hoi Aristoi, ready to flog Hamptons real estate, deals on drug treatment centers and liposuction, a dozen labels I shall not name. And for every true aristocratic reader would come a hundred wannabes, pitiful creatures willing to buy a handbag or wristwatch advertised,