by Laura Preble
“So, we’re looking for free vegetarian food,” she says deliberately. “Hmm. Okay. There’s a soup and salad place over there.”
“Yeah. Nobody eats there. It’s healthy.”
“Perfect. Follow me.” Again I see her slip into some other personality like it’s a coat she’s putting on. She suddenly seems older, and she seems, impossibly, taller, and she walks with great purpose toward Green Machine, the only food place in the mall that doesn’t have a deep fryer, but instead has a big flat of wheatgrass perched at the end of the salad bar. For those of you not from California, wheatgrass juice is something that is supposed to be really good for you, but it’s basically like mowing your lawn, putting the clippings in a blender, and serving with a bendy straw. The vegetarian places usually have squares of it growing in their restaurants so it’s fresh, but it looks seriously like somebody stole a piece of a golf course and you expect Tiger Woods to show up and ask to play through while you wait for your tofu wrap.
She approaches the counter, and I nearly collapse and melt into a puddle. Austin Buckley is talking into a silver cell phone while he leans next to the well-manicured wheatgrass.
Austin Buckley: unapproachable senior at Green Pines, the absolute perfect combination of every element that should exist in a guy. He’s about five feet nine and has thick straw-blond hair; a tan complexion with perfect skin; broad, muscular shoulders (he’s a swimmer); and the highest IQ of anyone at Green Pines. He aced his SAT, and there was a rumor floating around last year that the testing service hired him to help debug their tests. He speaks two languages (other than English) and is a member of Mensa. He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who turns me into absolute Jell-O, and I’ve never even talked to him. I feel myself hunching over to cover my killer boobs. I don’t want someone like Austin Buckley thinking I’m using my sex appeal to get his attention.
Becca stands at the counter, looking slightly bored, and I desperately pluck at her sleeve, trying to get her to give up whatever plan she has. Austin sees her, ignores her, and turns his back so he can continue his phone conversation. Becca clears her throat, and he sort of half looks at her, then goes back to what he’s saying. “I told him that if we didn’t get the next Halo game, I was going to totally run away.” Becca rolls her eyes, picks up a baby carrot from the salad bar, and flings it with amazing accuracy at Austin’s perfect head. I’m tempted to faint, but that would only draw attention to me, and so I decide to remain conscious.
He turns and she flashes him a big smile. “I’ll call you back,” he says into the phone, clearly annoyed with the distraction. I can’t believe we’re interrupting Austin Buckley! Very bored, he says, “WelcometoGreenMachinecanItakeyourorder?”
“Hi.” Becca studies the menu board above his head. “I’d like a large Green Garden salad bar, with the potato salad and the Meatless Meatball soup. And my assistant will have—” she glances over at me, motioning for me to get in the game.
“Uh . . . a Green Giant Jumbo Baked Potato with everything, a salad bar, and a cup of Oodles of Noodles soup. Oh, and an iced tea.”
“Two,” Becca adds.
Austin, who is working alone, sighs heavily as if we have just asked him to donate a kidney. He punches numbers in the cash register, then practically throws two large, waxy cups at us. “Drinks over there.” He flops a finger in the general direction of the beverage station as if all his power has been sucked dry from our taxing order. “Uh. That’ll be eighteen fifty-eight.” He extends his left hand to take our cash, with the right hand poised over the register to open the drawer. Becca doesn’t move.
Finally, when no one dumps cash in his hand, he realizes we are going to be more of a pain than he thought. “Is there a problem?”
“Problem? No.” Becca squints behind him, then takes a small spiral-bound notebook from her back jeans pocket. To me she says “Pen, please.”
I fumble in my purse for a pen, praying it’s not covered with gum or a melted Hershey bar or anything. “Pen,” I say, handing it to her like a nurse assisting an eminent surgeon.
She clicks the pen decisively. He had begun to prep our food, but now slows and pays attention to what Becca’s doing. She’s writing furiously, eyeballing various things behind the counter, clucking now and again, shaking her head in disapproval.
Now he’s a bit nervous. “Uh . . . is there a problem?” he asks again. To distract my mind from the awesome presence of Austin Buckley, I imagine that the Green Machine training manual probably only gives workers something like four phrases that are to fit every occasion: (1) Can I take your order? (2) That’ll be such and such amount. (3) Is there a problem? and (4) I’ve caught a body part in the juicer and need medical assistance.
“Go about your business,” Becca says authoritatively. Amazingly, Austin does as he’s told, but still eyes her warily. He’s prepping my jumbo potato without looking, sprinkling cheese, then chives, then Comet cleanser on it. Becca shakes her head, points to the potato, and purses her lips like a teacher who just caught someone cheating.
“Oh, my God!” Austin’s deep, dark, rich voice sort of squeaks, which slightly tarnishes his greatness. He fumbles with the potato like it’s on fire, then dumps it in a big gray trash can near the door. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t think she ordered scouring powder with her potato,” Becca says sweetly as she turns to me. “Did you?”
I shake my head, simultaneously trying to disappear under the counter. Austin has now turned a bright shade of red, and he’s kind of hyperventilating. He’s moved on to serving soup from the big steaming pots, but he’s shaking and it’s spilling out of the ladle, most of it missing the bowl. Becca puts the notebook decisively down on the counter. “Listen, Austin is it?”
His eyes widen. “How did you know my name?”
Becca points to his name tag.
“Oh.” He relaxes slightly. “Yeah. Right.”
“Austin. I have to tell you some bad news. I’m Marian Dent, with the Green Machine quality-control task force. We randomly check all of our franchises to be sure the Green Machine name means quality everywhere. I’m afraid that you’ve failed miserably by nearly poisoning my assistant with Comet.”
“But—but I—”
“Shh, shh.” Becca stops him with her hand, which she places gently over his mouth. “Don’t speak.”
“But—”
“Shh.”
“I just—”
“Shh. Austin. It’s all right. We understand, don’t we, Isabelle? We’ve all been there. We’ve all put Comet in someone’s potato. Well, no, we haven’t, but the point is, we’ve all made little mistakes like this. Now, I don’t want to see you lose your job, Austin.”
Austin goes from bright red to pasty tan (he can’t achieve pasty white due to his flawless skin) in seconds.
“In fact, I’ll make you a deal. Let’s just forget this ever happened. Let’s start over. Why don’t we just forget about that potato, and you make us something else? We’ll just wait over there. You just bring it over when you’re ready. No rush.”
Austin is falling over himself with gratefulness. “I—thank you. Thank you.” He bustles around the kitchen area, all industrious and saved from minimum-wage destruction. Becca waves to him benevolently, and we take a seat at a nearby table.
“Wow.” That’s all I can say. I cannot imagine anyone cooler than Becca Gallagher. My huge crush on Austin Buckley has magically vanished. And, just for the record, there was no Comet in my new baked potato.
4
TWINKIES AND SYMPATHY (or Fat Food for Fashionistas)
When you’re a vegetarian at a public high school, your food choices are limited. You can have salad or you can eat the jalapeño chilies from the cheese sauce on the nachos. Because of this, lunch is usually not my best meal of the day.
After a month of hanging out together, Becca and I have formed a habit of sitting in the same spot every day for lunch: It’s under a tree near the panther sculpture outside the Englis
h building. If you aren’t familiar with high school etiquette as it applies to lunch, here it is: Everybody has a Place. If you stray from your Place, it throws off the whole balance of the universe, resulting in potential disaster and possible physical violence. If, for example, we stray from our designated tree and decide instead to sit on the stone bench near the big asphalt black circle, several girls in the Kick Your Ass clique will live up to their name and explain, in no uncertain terms, why we should find another place to sit.
Becca and I sit under our tree from noon to twelve-thirty every day, picking at salads or, if we are lucky enough to bring something edible from home, we eat that. One Wednesday in March, Becca says, between bites of egg salad sandwich on bulgur wheat bread, “We need to find others of our kind.”
“Huh?”
“We need to find others of our kind,” she repeats. “I mean, there’s got to be other girls here who aren’t like the bench sitters and the cheerleaders. Aren’t most of the kids more like us?”
“I kind of doubt it.” I am still excavating a salad that has unidentifiable vegetables hiding in the iceberg lettuce. “If they were more like us, I probably would’ve had friends before you showed up.”
“Well, you date.”
After the initial lesbian rumor (which died down after a couple of weeks), my dating life returned to pretty much normal, except that if Becca and I wanted to do something, I always picked her over the date. Guys are no substitute for friends; most of the time they can’t even talk to you, and either they’re afraid to touch you or they’re all hands. Sometimes I wonder why I even do it, but then I remember: They smell nice and make my tummy buzz. I can’t explain hormones, even if my dad is a scientist.
Becca picks a blade of grass from the lawn and holds it up. “Here’s you.” She picks another and puts it next to the first blade. “Here’s us.” She blows on the pieces of grass and they go scattering, blending into the lawn. “Two of us, we can’t do much. But if we had more like us, we could do great things.”
“Why do you want to do great things? I’ve been having a lot of fun, just the two of us.”
“Sure,” she says. “Me too. But don’t you think we have a higher calling?”
Hmmm. When Becca starts to talk like this, I feel kind of out of control, to be honest. I’ve gone along all my school career just keeping to myself pretty much; I always felt, although I didn’t consciously know this, that if I just kept to myself and stayed out of the way, I’d get through high school with minimal damage. But lately, she’s started talking like this more and more, about how we need a network of people like us to “do great things.” To be honest, it kind of scares me.
“Explain to me what you think is our ‘higher calling,’” I ask as I stab at my salad. “And maybe while you’re at it, you can figure out why the cafeteria only buys wilted lettuce.”
“Shelby, our higher calling is to gather all of the weirdos together, to combine our weirdness into a force of nature.”
“Hmm. Sounds pretty exciting.” I don’t sound excited, by the way.
“Look.” She leans in so her face is only inches away, and those green eyes, wide with enthusiasm or insanity, drill into mine. “What I’m saying is, if all the geeks got together, what a wonderful world this would be!”
I look away. “Yeah, safety in numbers and all that. But—”
“Safety! Who’s talking safety?” She stands up now, spreads her arms wide, and twirls, which causes most of the Bench People to turn and sneer in our direction. “I’m talking strength in numbers. I’m talking about being a force for change. I’m talking about uniting all the geeks who right now huddle in their little dark corners afraid of the jocks and the cheerleaders and the preppies. I’m talking about—”
“Could you talk about it sitting down?” I’ve shaded my eyes from the sun that blazes behind her, illuminating her bleached hair like a halo on a crazy saint. “People are staring.”
“Let them stare!” she yells, but she sits down with a flop, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. She sighs and beams at me, and then her face lights up like a Christmas candle. “I’ve got it!”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. Maybe you can get some medication.” I’m mostly kidding. I totally love Becca’s energy and enthusiasm, but I’ll tell you a secret: The whole “notice me” thing is kind of scary. I’ve always been the kind of geek who doesn’t so much care what people think, but I also don’t make it a point to irritate them with my uniqueness. In the social order of a high school, there’s an unwritten law: Those who are strange find their place and keep their weirdness to themselves, so it does not infect other, more cool people; the cool people keep to themselves so the less cool people don’t feel bad or inadequate. They rarely mix, except on occasion when dating, and that has its own set of rules. But over the weeks I’ve gotten to know Becca, it’s become clear to me that her vision of geek isn’t necessarily one of hiding her light under a bushel and blending in.
“You don’t sound very thrilled with my idea.” She cocks her head to one side, waiting for me to answer.
“Well, I don’t know how I feel about it. The fact is, most people on this campus don’t want to be different. They want to wear the same clothes, eat the same food, listen to the same music as everybody else. If we try and bring all the people together who are different, won’t that make them all the same?”
She shakes her head in bewilderment. “Huh? You lost me on that twist of logic, Alice.”
“Alice?”
“Alice in Wonderland. She never fit in, never knew what people expected of her. Until she stood up for herself, she got kicked around, got smaller, got taller, and nearly got her head chopped off.”
“That’s because she kept making a big deal about things. She kept complaining and trying to change stuff, and that’s why she got in trouble.”
“Oh, so if she’d just done what the Mad Hatter said, she’d have been fine?”
“Why are we arguing about Alice in Wonderland?”
“We’re not. We’re arguing about the Red Queen.” The lunch bell rings, and I feel less full than when we started eating. There’s a hollow place in my stomach, and I’m worried that Becca has decided to ditch me in favor of some braver geek. Of course, I don’t say this to her.
She cleans up her lunch stuff, grabs her backpack, and gives me an unexpected hug. “Listen, Shelby, whatever we do, we’ll be friends. Don’t worry about that. But,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “think about the Red Queen. What does she want most from Alice?”
“I don’t know,” I moan hopelessly. “This feels disgustingly like English class.”
“Think about it. I’ll see you after school?” She’s already flying away, tromping over the green grass in her hightop sneakers, shedding unseen waves of weirdness after her.
“Where should we meet?” I call after her.
“Library,” I hear faintly over the roar of the hordes going off to class for fifth period.
Our library is unlike most other school libraries. One difference is that we have a two-sided fireplace; the other is that the people who go there don’t usually go to read. Okay, well, maybe all the school libraries are like that last one, but I know they don’t have fireplaces.
It’s more of a social hub after school than at any other time. Kids go there to work on reports and to wait for rides, but you also see a ton of them on cell phones, or text-messaging people, or even making out in the reference room. One time when I was working on a report about STDs, I found an unused condom in one of the reference books, which meant that either the publisher was pretty progressive or the person reading the book before me hadn’t read closely enough.
Becca is sitting at a table near the window, with a bunch of magazines spread out in front of her. “Hey,” she says. “Sit.”
“What are you working on?”
“My plan for global domination,” she answers casually. I wait for her to say she’s kidding.
“Okay. Really, w
hat are you working on?”
“Here.” She shoves a Cosmo Girl magazine in front of me. “Look at the ads.”
I thumb through the glossy pages, seeing photo after photo of waifish supermodels who look like they just got off a bad heroin binge. “Yeah. And?”
“This is the way we find Our People.” She grabs the Cosmo Girl from me and opens it to a particularly icky ad for bras where the model looks like a rack of baby back ribs with a side of silk. “We need to start a campaign.”
“For what?”
“Just hear me out. I know you aren’t exactly the activist type—”
“Hey! I am a vegetarian!” I remind her.
“Okay, you’re not an activist except for when it comes to cows. But here’s how we find others like us. We start a campaign that will unite all the girl geeks, bring them out of hiding, as it were.”
“What does this have to do with fashion models?”
“Okay, here it is,” she says in hushed, reverent tones. “Campaign for Calories.”
“And . . . ?”
“Oh, Shelby! C’mon! Do I have to spell it out?”
“I guess so, because I have no idea what you’re talking about, Becca!”
She hangs her head in discouragement. “All right. We introduce a movement called Campaign for Calories. We collect really fattening food to send to supermodels to help them get fatter.”
“They don’t want to get fatter. That’s the point.”
“I know that!” she practically yells at me. “It’s not really about the Campaign for Calories! It’s about finding people who think like we do!”
“So, by collecting gross snack food, we will be able to find others who don’t fit in, and then we can form a group, and then they can fit in with us?”
“Precisely.”
“And what happens to all the Twinkies?” I think this is an important point, because everyone who has read anything about nutrition knows that Twinkies could be the one food that will survive a nuclear blast. No one should eat them. Not even fashion models.
