The next day I was a zombie. Ange and I had chatted — flirted — until 4AM. Lucky for me, it was a Saturday and I was able to sleep in, but between the hangover and the sleep-dep, I could barely put two thoughts together. By lunchtime, I managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets. I staggered down toward the Turk’s to buy my coffee — these days, if I was alone, I always bought my coffee there, like the Turk and I were part of a secret club. On the way, I passed a lot of fresh graffiti. I liked Mission graffiti; a lot of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student stencils. I liked that the Mission’s taggers kept right on going, under the nose of the DHS. Another kind of Xnet, I supposed — they must have all kinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked. Some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, I noticed. Maybe they used Xnet! Painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard’s fence were the drippy words: DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 25. I stopped. Had someone left my “party” last night and come here with a can of paint? A lot of those people lived in the neighborhood. I got my coffee and had a little wander around town. I kept thinking I should be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. That’s how it used to be on a lazy Saturday like this. But who was I going to call? Van wasn’t talking to me, I didn’t think I was ready to talk to Jolu, and Darryl — Well, I couldn’t call Darryl. I got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the Xnet’s blogs. These anonablogs were untraceable to any author — unless that author was stupid enough to put
143 · LITTLE BROTHER
passed on the way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.” I’d been spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A big concert — I had no idea how to do one of those, but I was glad someone did. And now that I thought of it, I was damned proud that they were using the Xnet to do it.