"Wow. So you were way ahead of the crowd."

"Yeah, I guess." I took a sidelong glance at her, wondering if she'd figured me out already.

Jen bounced the basketball once and let it rise into the air in front of her, ringing like a bell, before catching it with long fingers. She studied its longitude lines for a moment, spinning it before her green eyes like a globe.

"Of course, you wouldn't want your name to get too popular, would you?"

"That would suck," I agreed. "Witness the Britney epidemic of the mid-1990s."

She shuddered, and my phone rang. The theme from The Twilight Zone, right on cue.

"See?" I said, holding it up for Jen. "It's doing its phone thing."

"Impressive."

The display veadshugrrl, which meant work.

"Hi, Mandy."

"Hunter? Are you doing anything?"

"Uh, not really."

"Can you do a tasting? It's kind of an emergency."

"Right now?"

"Yes. The client wants to put an advertisement on the air over the weekend, but they're not sure about it."

Mandy Wilkins always called her employers "the client," even though she'd worked for them for two years. They were a certain athletic shoe company named after a certain Greek god. Maybe she didn't like using four-letter words.

"I'm trying to get together whoever I can," Mandy said. "The client needs to make a decision in a couple of hours."

"How much does it pay?"

"Officially, just a pair."

"I've got way too many pairs," I said. A trunk full of shoes, not counting the ones I'd given away.

"How about fifty bucks? Out of my own pocket. I need you, Hunter."

"Okay, Mandy, whatever." I looked at Jen, who was scrolling absently through numbers, politely not listening, maybe a little saddened by how old and decrepit her own phone was (at least six months). I made a decision.

"Can I bring someone?"

"Uh, sure. We need more bodies. But are they… you know?"

Jen glanced at me, her eyes narrowing, beginning to realize that I was talking about her. The sun was catching more blue in her hair. I could see that she'd dyed a few slender strands bright purple, hidden underneath the black outer layers, letting glimpses of color through when the wind stirred her hair.

"Yeah. Definitely."

"A what tasting?"

"A cool tasting," I repeated. "But that's just what Mandy and I call them. Officially it's a 'focus group. "

"Focusing on what?"

I told her the name of the client, which did not get the Nod.

"I know," I said. "But you get a free pair and fifty bucks." Once the words had left my mouth, I wondered if Mandy would cough up money for Jen as well as me. Well, if she didn't, Jen could always have my fifty. It was random money anyway.

But I wondered why I had invited her. Usually people in my profession don't like competition. It's one of those jobs, like politician, where there's already too many and everyone who's never tried it thinks they could do it better.

"Sounds kind of weird," Jen said.

I shrugged. "It's just a job. You get paid for your opinion."

"We look at shoes?"

"We watch an ad. Thirty seconds of TV, fifty bucks."

She looked into the currents of the river, having a two-second debate inside her head. I knew what she was thinking. Am I being exploited? Am I selling out? Am I pulling a scam? Is this a trick? Who do I think I'm fooling? Who cares what I think, anyway?

I've thought all those things myself.

She shrugged. "Hey. Fifty bucks."

I let my breath out, just then realizing I'd been holding it. "My thoughts exactly."

I RECOGNIZED HALF THE FACES AT THE TASTING. ANTOINE AND Trez, who worked at Dr. Jay's in the Bronx. Hiro Wakata, a board under his arm and headphones around his neck big enough to wear while parking an airplane with orange flashlights. The Silicon Alley crew, led by Lexa Legault behind chunky black eyeglass frames and clutching an MP3 player (made by a certain computer company whose name is a fruit often used in making pies). Hillary Winston-hyphen-Smith, having slummed her way over from Fifth Avenue, and Tina Catalina, whose pink T-shirt bore a slogan in English clearly composed by someone who spoke only Japanese. All of them looked very central casting.

I always felt a little out of place at these things. Most kids my age give away their opinions for free, thrilled just to be asked, so they never make it into the paid-focus-group circuit. As a result, Jen and I were the youngest people in the room. We were also the only ones who weren't dressed to represent. She was in Logo Exile uniform, and I was in cool-hunting camouflage. My non-brand T-shirt was the color of dried chewing gum, my corduroys the gray of a rainy day, my Mets cap {not Yankees) was pointed exactly straight ahead. Like a spy trying to blend into the crowd or a guy painting his apartment on laundry day, I avoid dressing cool for a focus group, which I figure is like showing up drunk to a wine tasting.

Antoine bumped my fist with his usual, "My man, Hunter," as he checked out Jen, wincing at the basketball under her arm, obviously thinking she was trying way too hard. But when his eyes caught her sneakers, they filled with pleasure.

"Nice laces."

"I saw them first," I said firmly. I'd already phoned the picture to Mandy, but if Antoine got a good look at them, the pattern would be spreading across the Bronx like a nasty flu. Or maybe they'd fizzle; you never knew.

He spread his hands in surrender and kept his eyes above her ankles. Honor among thieves.

I asked myself again why I had brought Jen here. To impress her? She was more likely to be seriously unimpressed. To impress them?

Who cared what they thought? Besides a handful of multibillion-dollar corporations and five or six trendy magazines?

"New girlfriend, Hunter?" Hillary of the Hyphen was also checking out Jen but in a completely different way, her blue eyes glazing over at Jen's Logo Exile ensemble. Hillary's black dress, black bag, and black shoes all had first and last names, their initials wrought in tiny gold buckles, and, like her, came from Fifth Avenue. She saved me the trouble of a comeback. "Oh, that's right. There wasn't an old one."

"Not as old as you, I'm sure," Jen said, not missing a beat.

Antoine whistled and spun on one heel with a squeak, clearing the deck. I pulled Jen over toward the chairs at the far side of the conference room, inside Mandy's clueless force field, out of range of Hillary's hundred-dollar claws (per hand).

"Hi, Hunter. Thanks for coming." Mandy was in serious client-wear, red and white and swooshed all over. She was peering down at the conference room's control panel, perhaps intimidated by its spaceship complexity. She pressed a button, and blackout curtains jumped into motion, closing across the sixtieth-floor view of Central Park. A tentative stab later, wooden panels slid apart on one wall, revealing a TV that probably cost more than a Van Gogh but was much flatter.

"This is Jen."

"Nice laces," Mandy said, not bothering to look down, giving me the Nod. I saw a printout of my Jen-shoe photograph tucked into her clipboard, headed for mass production.

I sat Jen down and whispered, "She approves of you."

"This is all very weird," she answered.

"Duh."

Hillary Hyphen, who had recently reached the big two-oh, managed to close her mouth just as the lights began to fade.

The ad was set in the standard client fantasy world. It was nighttime and raining, and everything was wet and slick and beautiful, blue highlights gleaming from every metal surface. Three client-wearing models were in motion, each leaving their glamorous job to the beat of some German DJ's last-week remix of a song older than Hillary. One of the models was riding a beautiful motorcycle, another was on a bicycle with about fifty gears, and the last one (the woman, I noticed, these things being important) was on foot, her swooshes splashing through puddles reflecting Don't Walk signs.