"Wait we have one left," the runner said, bringing out what was surely the most expensive bouquet of all: a three- foot-tall arrangement of two hundred white roses, in the palest ivory color. All the girls swooned. Almost no boys bought white roses ever. It was too big a sign of commitment. But this one practically trumpeted a captured heart.
The runner set the bouquet in front of Schuyler.
Mimi raised an eyebrow. She had always won the roses lottery. What was this all about?
"For me?" Schuyler asked, awestruck by the size of the thing.
She took the card from the tallest stem.
"For Schuyler, who doesn't like love stories." It was not signed.
Mimi glared at her red bouquets; the flowers seemed to wilt a little at her stare. She didn't have to guess who had sent the dazzling white flowers to the little beast. White for light. White for love. White for forever.
The time for her plan was at hand.
When she walked by Schuyler's desk, she pretended to trip, and caught a strand of Schuyler's dark hair under her fingertips as she steadied herself on Schuyler's chair.
"Ouch!" Schuyler yelped.
"Watch it," Mimi sniffed, the strand of hair securely in hand.
It wouldn't be long now.
After mastering the first principle of the glom, Schuyler had moved on to the second principle: suggestion. The second tenet was the ability to plant a seed of an idea in another mind.
"It is how we push the Red Bloods to strive for excellence, art, and beauty," her grandfather revealed. "We use the suggestion. It is a useful tool. Most people don't like to think their ideas are not theirs, so we suggest them instead. If we did not, the humans would have never had the New Deal, Social Security, or even Lincoln Center."
Suggestion was even more complicated than telepathy. Lawrence explained that one had to do it subtly, so the human would not feel as if they were being manipulated. "Subliminal advertising was invented by one of our kind, of course, but when the Red Bloods discovered it, they immediately forbade its use. A pity."
The night before, Lawrence had asked her to suggest something to Anderson. After several hours of Schuyler attempting to not only find the target signal, but to send something to it, Anderson suddenly stood up and said that he felt like a cup of tea, and did anyone else want one?
When he left, Lawrence looked over at his granddaughter.
"That was you, wasn't it?"
Schuyler nodded. It had taken almost all of her strength to send one simple request.
"Good. Tomorrow we will move from afternoon delicacies to more important matters."
The next day at school, the effort it had taken to perform the suggestion took its toll on Schuyler. As she walked down the back hallways after third period, she suddenly began to feel woozy. She swooned and would have tumbled down the back stairs, had Jack Force not been there to catch her.
"Hold on," he said. "Are you okay?"
Schuyler opened her eyes. Jack was looking at her, con- cerned.
"I just lost my footing...I fainted."
The girls on the stairway behind her exchanged knowing smiles. Fainting was a regular occurrence at the school, and a telltale sign of anorexia. Of course Schuyler Van Alen was suffering from an eating disorder. Everyone could tell the bitch was too skinny.
"Let me take you home," Jack said, lifting her to her feet.
"No--Oliver--my Conduit--he can...and really, it's nothing, just I've been working too hard on the glom," she said, half delirious.
"I believe Oliver is currently giving a presentation in English class," Jack said. "But I can call for him if you'd like."
Schuyler shook her head. No, it wasn't fair to ask Ollie to take a bad grade just because she felt ill.
"C'mon, let me put you in a cab and get you home safe."