So Yesterday - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,48

apartment empty, my father at a daylong conference on hantavirus and my mother at her karate class. I thanked the fates that I had no older sisters and led Jen into my room, seeing her eyes light up at my shelves of cool-hunting booty: vintage client suedes and high-tops, MP3 players the size of swizzle sticks, and fad history lessons in the form of clackers, Slinkies, scrunchies, pet rocks, and black rubber wristbands. But then I realized something awful

I had forgotten to hide my bottle jerseys.

"What the hell are those?" Jen asked.

A confession: I was an Innovator once, but only once.

You probably don't know about bottle jerseys. They're made from plastic foam, close cousins to those sleeves that keep beer cans cold. Bottle jerseys fit over the tops of water bottles. They have an athlete's name and number printed on them and little armholes, like a miniature team uniform. They're a giveaway at basketball games, handed out to the first five thousand ticket holders, sponsored by the Bronx Zoo or some candy bar or whatever.

My innovation was this: Instead of putting my bottle jersey on a water bottle, I stuck it on my hand. The pinky and thumb go out the armholes, and the middle three fingers come out the top. It looks like a cross between a wrist cast and a basketball-player hand puppet. I did it a couple of years ago at a Knicks game, and it shot through Madison Square Garden faster than Legionnaire's disease through a cruise liner. It was on the street the next day and cool for about three weeks among kids with a maximum age of thirteen.

I haven't seen it anywhere since.

It's not much, but it's mine.

Jen stood very still, regarding the rows of empty water bottles wearing their jerseys with the pathetic pride of small dogs in sweaters, organized by team and player position, lacking only tiny basketballs to form their own tiny league.

"Uh, those are bottle jerseys. It's kind of a... collection."

"Where did they come from? Some sort of psycho marketing scheme?"

"Actually, I bought most of them on eBay. You can't get them at team stores - for any specific player you have to track down someone who went to the right game. Not an easy task, I assure you," I chortled.

"Do you ever play ball, Hunter?"

"Well, not since I got cut from my junior high team. The move from Minnesota revealed certain holes in my game. Like an inability to score or defend. All that's left of my hoop dreams are the bottle jerseys." I laughed self-deprecatingly again, as if my deprecation wasn't already in the bag.

"Oh," Jen said, taking a doubtful closer look at a water bottle dressed as Latrell Sprewell (Knicks vs. Lakers, 2001-02 season, sponsored by a certain pink-packeted brand of sugar substitute and currently fetching about thirty-six dollars at auction. Maybe more).

"Kind of like collectible action figures," she said, and named a certain science-fiction franchise that had lasted four films too long.

I woke up my laptop, my heart stuttering with shame.

First we Googled the name Mwadi Wickersham and got zilch. No smattering of irrelevant hits or even a "Did you mean...?" Just nothing.

It's unsettling when Google doesn't work. Like when my aunt Macy in Minnesota stops talking, you know some major shit is about to hit the fan.

But Futura Garamond was stamped all over the Web.

The first search gave us only a trash heap of hits on font libraries. It turned out that both Futura and Garamond are the names of classic fonts. Adding a couple of more terms {designer, City Blades) we found Futura Garamond the human being and learned that as a young designer, he had created typefaces for surfing and skater magazines, messy alphabets with names like YoMamals Gothic and BooksAreDead Bold. From font design he'd gone on to lay out the lyrics in countless CD slip cases, rebrand a major music magazine or two, and join the inevitable Web-design start-up destined to implode just after the turn of the century.

"Spot the trend?" Jen said as I leaned over her shoulder, my reading slowed by the new raspberry smell of her hair.

"Uh, yeah, I do."

Futura had been fired from every job he'd ever held, mostly for making text unreadable. His trademark was radical concepts like...

a two-column design in which you

but across them, resulting in random-

face of five hundred years of text design,

unlike that caused by flashing red and

ical equivalent of a paka-paka attack,

rage he had committed against legibil-

his desire to rewire the brains