Welcome to Dweeb Club

by Betsy Uhrig

  “You know what?” he said. “I think we need a club historian too. I mean, this is the first year for a new club. We need a record.”

  “Isn’t that the secretary’s job?” the traitorous Vincent asked.

  “The secretary records the minutes of the meetings,” said Hoppy.

  “I have no idea what that means,” said Sonia, club secretary.

  “You write down what we talk about at the meetings and what we decide,” Hoppy explained.

  “How do you even know that?” Andrew asked for all of us.

  Hoppy shrugged. “Hopkins Hairnets is a family company. I go to some board meetings.”

  “So what would a historian do, I mean, theoretically?” I asked as casually as I could.

  “The historian would keep a written history of what happens to the club,” said Steve.

  “And that’s different from what we decide?” I asked.

  “It definitely is,” said Hoppy. “Believe me.”

  So that’s the tragic tale of how I wanted to be the president of the Flounder Bay Upper School H.A.I.R. Club and ended up the historian—a pity position invented especially for me.

  What follows is the historian’s account of how the club’s first year turned out to be way more interesting than any of us could ever have expected.

  Chapter 4

  I WAS IN MY ROOM that evening, typing the first pages of H.A.I.R. Club official history, which mostly meant playing around with fonts, when my aunt and uncle arrived at the house. They lived nearby and came over for dinner a lot.

  Uncle Luke is my mother’s baby brother, as she still calls him and apparently always will. His wife, Shannon, is my cool aunt, or at least I thought she was until that night.

  We sat around the table after dinner, eating dessert and waiting for Uncle Luke to do his missing-tooth trick with a glob of brownie. This trick was a favorite of my sister Alice’s. She was six and had some missing teeth herself.

  In the meantime, Shannon asked me how seventh grade was going. My parents perked up here, because I hadn’t told them anything and they were probably afraid I was some kind of outcast who’d spent the first days of school inside his own locker, dangling from a hook by his underpants.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  At this my parents perked back down, because it was the response they were used to already.

  “Have you joined any clubs?” Shannon asked.

  I was a little annoyed by her question, because hadn’t she skipped right over asking me if I’d gone out for any sports? I thought about telling her I’d gone out for football, just to see if she’d do a spit take with her coffee.

  “Why do we have to keep talking about Jason?” Alice whined. “I’m sick of talking about Jason and his new school.”

  “We talked about your school last year,” said my mother. “Remember? When it was new. This year Jason’s school is new.”

  “But my new school was Jason’s old school,” Alice said.

  “Alice,” said my dad in his first-and-only-warning voice. “Leave it.”

  “I was actually voted the official historian for a club today,” I said to Shannon.

  “Awesome,” said Shannon. “Which club?”

  “Dork Club,” said Alice, using her favorite word for anything involving me.

  “It isn’t Dork Club,” I said, though I couldn’t be totally sure of that. “It’s H.A.I.R. Club.”

  “That’s not a real club,” said Alice. “It’s just letters.”

  “Of course it’s a real club,” said Shannon. “The letters must stand for something. Sounds mysterious and intriguing to me.”

  Alice looked a bit ill. How was it possible that her cool aunt could be interested in something her dork brother was doing? I may have looked surprised myself, for the same reason. I mean, Shannon had tattoos around her upper arms and wore T-shirts and sneakers to work.

  “H.A.I.R.,” said Alice, who was learning to spell, “spells ‘dork.’ ” Not that she was good at it. She was, however, very good at hijacking a conversation. Especially one focused on me.

  “No, it doesn’t, honey,” my mom said to her. “It spells ‘hair.’ The h sound is ‘hah’—”

  “Clubs are for dorks,” Alice declared.

  “I was in the computer club in school,” said Shannon, who probably meant to contradict Alice, though her example wasn’t the best.

  “You are such a nerd!” Luke said affectionately.

  “No, she’s not,” said Alice. “She has tattoos.”

  “Don’t let those fool you, kid,” said Luke. “You know what those tattoos are around her arms?”

  It turned out none of us did.

  “Tell them, hon,” said Luke.

  “They’re the runes from the dwarves’ map in The Hobbit,” said Shannon.

  “The Hobbit isn’t nerdy,” said Alice, who only knew it from the movies she wasn’t allowed to watch.

  “Oh-ho, yes, it is,” said Luke. “Those tattoos basically mean ‘I’m a gigantic nerd’ in Dwarvish. They’re like a beacon for fellow geeks.”

  “Worked on you, didn’t it?” said Shannon, punching his arm.

  Cool Aunt Shannon was a nerd. A cool nerd, maybe? Was there such a thing? At what point did her nerd side overtake her cool side? This was actually an interesting question, but now was not the time for it. Luke was doing his brownie-glob thing.

  Chapter 5

  THE EIGHT REMAINING H.A.I.R. CLUB members gathered on Thursday in the classroom where the first meeting had taken place, then Ms. Grossman walked us downstairs to the school’s basement.

  “The equipment is set up in an unused janitors’ closet down here,” she explained as we descended.

  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one thinking along the lines of Great, not only are we in the losingest club ever, but they’ve stuck us in a closet in the basement. No one said anything, though, and this was probably due to the fact that it was sort of interesting being allowed in the basement, which was ordinarily off-limits to students.

  All kinds of stuff lurked down there: ancient gym equipment that looked like it had been used for jousting in the Middle Ages, giant rusty kitchen appliances that looked like they should have been thrown out, bags and bags of that sand they throw over puke on the floor, and enough shovels and brooms and pitchforks to equip a good-size angry mob.

  We went past a couple of janitors’ closets that were in use and ended up at the last one on the hall: H.A.I.R. Club headquarters.

  “Gross,” said Hoppy as we squeezed inside.

  “Awesome,” said Andrew at the same time.

  It was both. A smallish room with barely enough space for nine of us. Two metal desks. Two rolling chairs with janitor-butt imprints in them. A buzzing fluorescent light overhead. It was like the interrogation room in a very-low-budget cop show. All of this is what made it gross.

  What made it awesome outweighed those things. On the desks were two slender laptop computers that looked like they came from a Star Trek set. Not the older TV shows, not the movies. The new streaming TV shows you have to pay for. On one wall was a bank of nine cardboard-thin big-screen monitors. This equipment looked like an advanced alien civilization had left it here to shame our backward technology.

  The monitor screens were blank until Ms. Grossman powered up one of the laptops, and then they all brightened at once. We oohed and aahed as if she’d lit up a giant holiday display, even though the screens showed our school, which was boring enough when it wasn’t almost empty, which it was now.

  Eight screens showed a different area: four sides of the exterior of the school, the cafeteria, the main hallway and the upstairs hallway, and the lobby outside the office. The scenes weren’t static; they shifted slowly so you could see different angles. Ms. Grossman tapped the laptop, and sound came from invisible speakers on the screens.

  “Each screen has its own volume setting,” she said, “so you don’t have to listen to them all at once.” She lowered the volume on
each of them, one at a time, until there was silence again. “Eight of the screens show what’s happening live,” she said. “But the cameras are also recording twenty-four seven, so you can play back anything from any time on the laptops or on the ninth screen. Neat, huh?”

  We nodded, even though no one besides Ms. Grossman would have used the word “neat” to describe anything in this room. Or anything ever.

  “And that’s about the extent of my knowledge of this system,” Ms. Grossman admitted. “The donor said you’d be able to figure out the rest using the onscreen prompts.”

  She looked at her watch. “One more thing,” she said. “This goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway. This is a security system. If we did have a security issue, the authorities here at school and even the police would have priority access to it. But no one is monitoring it on a regular basis except you. So if you see something that you think someone in authority should know about, you need to tell me or the office immediately. Understood?”

  “Understood,” President Steve said for all of us.

  “And also,” Ms. Grossman went on, “if you see or learn something that might embarrass someone but is in no way a security issue?”

  She paused for the idea of this to sink in. It did. Possibilities that no one had even considered popped up in our imaginations.

  “It doesn’t leave this room,” Ms. Grossman concluded. “And if you’re not sure where to draw that line, you come to me. Got it? If any of you abuses the trust we’ve put in you by giving you access to this system, you will be out of the club first and quite possibly in a lot more trouble after that. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Steve repeated.

  “Excellent,” said Ms. Grossman. “Take good care of this stuff. Make sure you’re out of here by four, and don’t forget to lock up.” And she left the office, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 6

  AS SOON AS MS. GROSSMAN WAS gone, there was a mad rush for the laptops. Andrew and Nikhil got there first and had managed to sit down before Steve held up a hand.

  “Wait,” he said. “Before we get started…”

  “Yes?” said Nikhil when the pause had gone on for too long.

  Steve’s eyes widened and he concluded: “Is this stuff amazing or what?”

  “It’s very amazing,” said Hoppy. “But isn’t it also weird?”

  “It is weird,” said Andrew, looking at the screen in front of him. “This is not a normal laptop.”

  “Not that,” said Hoppy. “Or, not only that. I mean, isn’t it weird that the school is basically giving a bunch of seventh graders access to everything that goes on here?”

  She walked over to the big screen showing the main hall, where a few kids were wandering around. She turned up the sound using a bar on the side. We could hear Stork Legs and Saxophone Case arguing about whose mother they should call for a ride home.

  “Yeah,” said Vincent, “but it’s giving us access to the most boring place in the known universe: this school.”

  “Plus,” said Nikhil, still concentrating on the screen in front of him, “whoever set this up has thought of all that. Take a look.”

  We crowded around, jostling for a view of the screen in front of him. “Read All Legal Provisions Header (R.A.L.P.H.),” it said at the top, with a lot of tiny print underneath.

  “It’s one of those user agreements,” said Nikhil. “The kind you usually just scroll over and agree to without reading it?”

  “Yeah,” said Vincent. “So keep scrolling.”

  “It won’t let you,” said Nikhil. “I already tried. You have to read it.”

  “How does it know?” asked Sonia.

  “It must somehow scan your eyeballs,” said Andrew from behind his screen.

  “Does it hurt?” asked Sonia.

  “My eyes! My eyes!” Nikhil croaked dramatically and unhelpfully.

  “Cut it out,” Steve said. “It doesn’t hurt,” he assured Sonia. “Does it?” he asked Andrew.

  “No. Can’t feel a thing.”

  We took turns reading the agreement and signing our lives away. We basically had to promise to forfeit our entire futures if we used anything we learned from the system recordings for “personal gain” or to “injure or discomfit another party or parties.” It went on and on about “discretion” and “ethical behavior.”

  My eyes were so glazed by the time I was done with the “Nondisclosure of Overtly Proprietary Equipment (N.O.P.E.)” clause that I’m surprised the computer was able to tell I’d read the last few paragraphs, which were about not telling anyone outside the club how the equipment worked. But somehow it knew. It wouldn’t let Vincent sign off until he’d gone back over a section that he admitted he had skimmed.

  “Check this out,” said Vincent when he was finally done. He turned the laptop around so more of us could see it. “It took our pictures while we were reading and made profiles for us.”

  “I look awful,” said Sonia, who was sitting at the other laptop. “The puke green of the wall in the background clashes with my shirt. Can I retake mine?”

  We all looked awful in our pictures because we’d been reading something boring when they were taken without our knowledge or consent. We looked slack-jawed and glassy-eyed. Even Glamorous Steve’s photo looked like a late-night mug shot.

  We hunted desperately for a way to retake the pictures, with no luck. It was Laura who noticed the tiny print under them.

  “It says,” she reported in a voice so quiet we had to lean in toward her, “ ‘This photograph will be disseminated as widely as possible under Broadcasting of Unflattering Reading Photographs (B.U.R.P.) protocol in the event of any perceived breach of the user agreement by the above-pictured individual.’ ”

  “Fiendishly clever,” said Andrew. “So if we mess up and break the agreement we just signed, these pictures will be all over the Internet.”

  “It can’t do that,” Nikhil scoffed. “How would it even know?”

  “You don’t think so?” said Hoppy. “You can be the first to test it, then.”

  Nikhil chose not to test it, then or ever. The rest of us never even considered it.

  “All right!” Vincent announced after a moment. “We’re in.”

  * * *

  A new screen had opened up with the company name and what was apparently its motto:

  WELCOME TO PRESCIENT SECURITY SYSTEMS

  YOUR FUTURE IS SAFE WITH US

  “As long as we don’t breach the user agreement,” I said. “If we do that, our future is totally ruined, am I right?”

  Chapter 7

  NIKHIL AND ANDREW WERE BACK behind the laptops, learning their way around.

  “Watch this,” said Andrew, pointing at the big screen showing the front of the building. We watched as he made the focus zoom in on three kids sitting on a bench outside the main doors. He zoomed and he zoomed until we were way past a close-up and inside the left nostril of the kid in the middle.

  “Gross,” said Hoppy.

  “Awesome,” said Vincent at the same time.

  It was both. With the focus that close, the audio had zoomed in too—we could hear the air whooshing in and out of the kid’s nose.

  “I’m thinking deviated septum,” said Andrew.

  “Maybe allergies,” said Sonia.

  “Too bad there isn’t more going on at this time of day,” said Nikhil, who’d been moving around other locations on the other screens while we listened to Deviated Septum’s nose whistle.

  There was general nodding until Steve remembered an important fact: “It’s recording twenty-four seven, though, isn’t it?” he said. “Doesn’t that mean we can watch what happened earlier too?”

  “Yup,” said Andrew. He started punching away at the laptop like someone in the midst of a red alert in a sci-fi movie. “Here we go: Archives.”

  The ninth screen, which had been blank, lit up. It showed the main hall too, only now it was full of kids. The time stamp in the corner indicated
that school was about to start—this morning.

  “Look!” said Steve. “There I am.”

  Sure enough, Steve, who had a locker in the main hall, was coming toward the camera.

  “Don’t you dare go up my nose,” he warned, but it was too late—Andrew was already there.

  “Wow,” said Sonia quietly.

  Even the inside of Steve’s nose was perfect.

  We zoomed back out, and Nikhil appeared onscreen opposite Steve.

  “Do my ears really look like that from behind?” Nikhil asked.

  I, for one, knew that they did.

  “Like what?” Sonia asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Nikhil. “Handles.”

  “Or a radar array,” Vincent put in.

  “I can’t believe we’re using this super-duper security system to monitor our own ear placement,” said Andrew.

  “I can’t believe you used the word ‘super-duper,’ ” said Nikhil.

  “I think ‘super-duper’ is two words,” said Hoppy.

  This got no response because it didn’t deserve one.

  “Ms. Grossman said we should lock up at four,” said Steve. “What time is it?”

  “It’s three fifty-seven,” said Andrew, consulting the laptop screen.

  So we turned off the monitors and shut down the laptops. Then we filed out of the janitors’ closet and Steve locked the door behind us.

  “So is H.A.I.R. Club totally cool or totally boring?” Vincent asked.

  This got no response because none of us had one.

  Chapter 8

  “HOW WAS DORK CLUB, DOOFUS?” Alice asked when I got home that afternoon.

  “You know,” I said, “a dork and a doofus aren’t the same thing.”

  “But you are one,” said Alice.

  “I am what?” Why did I engage with her? Why?

  “A dork and a doofus. You’re a dorkus!” Alice cackled at her own joke. “You’re a dookus. You’re a dookie!”