Welcome to Dweeb Club

by Betsy Uhrig

  People say this kind of stuff to women giving birth in their cars by the side of the road all the time, but it wasn’t helpful here. And in fact, it probably isn’t that helpful to the women giving birth either.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She’s tame. She’s a tame skunk. We’re taking her to the natural history museum. They’ve been looking for her.”

  For a moment I was stunned that I’d been able to get this out without some adult interruption.

  “You mean Penelope?” asked the Animal Control woman.

  “Yes!” I said. “Penelope, from the natural history museum.”

  The two officers exchanged glances.

  And now that we had that straightened out, I prepared to be on my way.

  Until: “Kid,” said the woman, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Penelope came back to the museum on her own. I don’t know who that skunk is, but it’s not Penelope.”

  Chapter 30

  AND THAT’S HOW I CAME to be called Skunk Boy for several days in school and for weeks in my own home.

  Alice’s Dork series was replaced by a long-running and very popular show called The Adventures of Skunk Boy, featuring me and a skunk puppet that she happened to have handy. Even Dad thought it was hilarious.

  My picture appeared in the town paper the following week, below the headline “Local Boy in Skunk Attack.” And I have to admit that I looked like a total dork in the photo, standing there cluelessly beneath this obviously freaked-out skunk. Alice pinned it up on her bulletin board.

  The skunk wasn’t rabid—just disoriented from being woken up during the day. The Animal Control people sneaked up behind it and tranquilized it right there on my shoulder. No one asked where we’d found it—I think they assumed it had launched itself at me there on the street. Anyway, it went to live at the natural history museum until they were sure it was healthy. They named it Jason, to my sister’s delight.

  So yes, the skunk got to be called Jason and I got to be called Skunk Boy. Funny how that worked.

  * * *

  In case you’re curious about whether Steve’s experiment with the cameras succeeded, the answer is no, it did not. When the camera from the cafeteria was moved to the main hall, it recorded the main hall in the present, not the future. This was a blow for Steve.

  “What am I going to do now?” he said when we’d watched the midnight recordings from the main hall and the cafeteria (present in main hall, future in cafeteria, as usual). He ran a hand through his doomed hair.

  “Give up?” Hoppy said unsympathetically. “Let’s face it. Assuming these images are our future—and we all do, right?” Everyone nodded. “The future doesn’t look that good for most of us.” Hoppy was at the controls, and she started moving around the cafeteria, darting toward each of us in turn as she narrated our fates. “I look exactly like my mother. And I’m acting like her too. Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m telling the servers in the cafeteria how to set up the food trays more efficiently.”

  “You are,” said Andrew. “And they’re doing it.”

  “Of course they are,” said Hoppy. “And look at Sonia! She’s obviously dealing with some personal stuff by constantly changing fashions and boys.”

  “Hey!” said Sonia. But she shook her head as we watched her future self sitting on the lap of a kid whose facial hair made future Nikhil’s look dignified. Both of them were wearing mismatched plaid clothing with all kinds of chains attached at various points. They looked like they might be chained together, or at least hard to pull apart in a hurry.

  “Wow,” Sonia said. “I’m dressed like a set of bagpipes. My parents might be strict and all, but seriously—this is how I act out? Moving from one weird style to another and accessorizing with a different matching boy? And what am I doing with the old, out-of-style boys? Stashing their bodies in the cafeteria freezer?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Hoppy said bitterly. “I’ve probably got the freezer so well organized you’d never be able to hide anything in there.”

  Hoppy resumed her pitiless tour of our futures. “Poor Vincent. Whatever candle he’s burning at both ends is about to burn out. And there’s Jason. Talking with his mouth full and staring into space.”

  It wasn’t space I was staring at, but I wasn’t going to point that out.

  “Nikhil trying to look like a man with that moth-eaten mustache,” Hoppy continued. “Andrew undermining his own college choice. Steve’s hair gel from hell. Face it,” she wound up. “The only winner here seems to be Lara.” And she zoomed in on the tall blonde standing inside the doorway.

  No one said anything for a moment. I’m fairly certain that only Hoppy, Lara, and I knew this incredibly cool vision was Lara. And it’s a good thing I did know, because if I hadn’t, there’s a strong chance I would have gasped and then blurted out something like “There’s no way that fabulous person could be Lara!” No one, including me, did that out loud, fortunately. But some of them were definitely thinking it.

  It wasn’t that future Lara was gorgeous in any kind of artificial way. But she somehow gave the impression that there was a special spotlight on her, the kind of spotlight that seems to follow celebrities around even when they’re hurrying through airports or trying to avoid photographers in dingy alleys. She seemed to be in charge of herself in a way that hardly any teenager has a right to be.

  “So what do we do?” asked Sonia. “Is this it? Are we stuck with this future?”

  “No,” said Steve. “We can’t be. This is a future, not the future. I mean, Nikhil has already ditched the whole mustache idea, right?”

  “So why do I still have one here?” Nikhil asked gloomily. “Why hasn’t the future changed now that I’ve changed my mind?”

  Chapter 31

  “THERE MUST BE A WAY to figure out how this works,” said Hoppy.

  “We could try the help screen,” I said, not volunteering that I had already tried it and been insulted by it.

  “Help screens are no help,” said Nikhil.

  We all knew this, but we also knew that there were no other options.

  “Here it is,” said Hoppy. “It’s called a T.W.E.R.P. screen. Which is on-brand. What do you want to know?”

  “You know what we want to know,” said Steve.

  “That’s what the help screen is asking,” said Hoppy. “It doesn’t list topics or anything. It just says ‘What do you want to know?’ ”

  What did we want to know, exactly?

  Different things, it turned out.

  “What’s wrong with my hair?” Steve.

  “Why do I look like a zombie?” Vincent.

  “What happened to my good taste?” Sonia.

  “Why do I still have that mustache?” Nikhil.

  “Yo!” shouted Hoppy above the anguished cries for answers. “How about ‘Can we change the future?’ ”

  “That seems like a general philosophical question, not a help-screen-type question,” said Andrew.

  “Well, this is a smart program,” said Hoppy, typing in what she’d said. She then shifted what was on the laptop to the big screen so we could all see.

  Sorry! popped up in the answer window. That question is outside the parameters of this system. Please try something else.

  “Told you,” said Andrew. “It can’t answer G.P.Q.s.”

  “Huh?” said Vincent.

  “General philosophical questions,” said Andrew.

  “Oh, right,” said Vincent. “G.P.Q.s. Of course.”

  “Be more specific,” said Steve to Hoppy.

  Hoppy sighed forcefully. “All right,” she said. “Here goes.”

  Why does Steve’s hair look like a plastic dog turd in the future? she typed.

  “Specific enough for you?” she asked Steve.

  “There’s no need to be cruel,” said Steve. But he was staring intently at the screen.

  Which came back with the same canned response about parameters.

  “I guess it’s not that smart af
ter all,” said Vincent.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Hoppy, “is how it knows my name but it can’t at least try to answer a question like this.”

  “What do you mean it knows your name?” Nikhil asked.

  “When I first clicked on the help screen, it used my name,” said Hoppy.

  “That’s because we all registered with our names the first day,” said Andrew. “And you logged on as yourself, right?”

  “Right,” said Hoppy. “But I registered as Harriet. And when I opened the help screen, it said, ‘Hello, Hoppy.’ ”

  “Weird,” Steve said.

  “But not that weird,” said Andrew. “It also threatened to release those butt-ugly photos of us on the Internet, right? So it must have access to your social media stuff, Hoppy. Maybe that’s where it got your nickname.”

  “But that’s what I mean,” said Hoppy. “Why would it bother to search around and find my nickname when it could call me Harriet? Or not call me anything.”

  “You’re thinking that it’s smarter than it needs to be,” said Andrew.

  “Exactly,” said Hoppy. “So why can’t it answer a G.P.Q. about the future? Or a specific one about Steve’s hair?”

  “You would think,” said Steve when we’d stewed for a while, “that if it has access to our social media, it would at least come back with something like ‘That does not compute’ ”—and yes, he did say this in a fake robot voice, exactly like you’re picturing—“when Hoppy typed ‘Steve’s hair’ and ‘dog turd’ in the same sentence. Am I right?”

  He was right. More right than he knew. This was a program that had chatted with me like an old friend, or at least like my sister, when I’d asked it questions. Why was it acting like a machine now?

  Maybe I had managed to goad the T.W.E.R.P. screen into insulting me by badgering it with questions. I tried to remember exactly what I had asked, thinking Hoppy could get it to insult her too. Or at least admit that it knew something about the future.

  I racked my brain and finally said, “Ask it what a plus-five file is.” I did remember that much from last week.

  “Why?” more than one person asked.

  “Because that’s what it calls the future files. Plus sign and the numeral five.”

  “How do you know that?” Nikhil asked. Kind of pointedly.

  “I, ah, I asked it some questions last week. When you guys were skunk trapping.”

  Lara was looking at me like I was Steve’s future hair. Only not plastic. I avoided her gaze the way she used to avoid mine.

  “What the heck,” said Hoppy, typing away.

  What is a +5 file?

  The answer came back quickly, and let’s just say parameters were mentioned again.

  “I guess it likes you better than me,” said Hoppy.

  “Maybe Jason should type it,” Lara said. And it was probably my imagination, but it seemed to me that she said it in the way a pirate would say “Maybe Jason should walk the plank.”

  So I sat down at the other laptop, logged in, and clicked on the red question mark.

  Hello, Jason. What do you want to know?

  “No surprise there,” said Vincent. “Jason doesn’t have a nickname.”

  At least it hadn’t called me a dork. Yet.

  What is a +5 file? I typed.

  Sorry! That question is outside the parameters of this system. Please try something else.

  Chapter 32

  THE ENTIRE H.A.I.R. CLUB WAS looking at me like I was a few fins short of a flounder. And maybe I was. Maybe I had hallucinated the whole help-screen exchange before.

  I shrugged and said, “Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. Sorry.”

  Which deflated any accusations they had been getting ready to throw at me.

  Except: “Seems like a weirdly detailed hallucination,” said Nikhil.

  No one else said anything. I was pretty sure Lara’s eyes were calling me a lying piece of dog toupee, but I wasn’t going to test that theory.

  “We’re out of time,” Steve said eventually.

  He didn’t mean that our disappointing futures were set in stone and there was nothing we could do about it, but can we be blamed for taking it that way and slouching dejectedly out of the room?

  Probably we can, actually. I mean, our fates didn’t look that depressing. We were overprivileged American kids whose tiny problems were laughable to the vast majority of Earth’s population, now and five years in the future. I get that. But we were still left with a question that anyone can sympathize with. If we didn’t like the way our futures were shaping up—and almost none of us did—could we change them, or were we stuck with what we were seeing?

  Nikhil, to take a simple example, had decided not to grow a mustache. But was he somehow destined to grow one in spite of that? Maybe he was going to develop a skin condition on his upper lip that could only be cured by not shaving. Or maybe his dad would act all hurt that Nikhil didn’t want to follow in his facial-hair footsteps and guilt Nikhil into growing it.

  Or, to take a more complex example, maybe I was destined to have a crush on Lara even though, at the moment, I was plain terrified of her. It was already clear that she was destined to dislike me strongly for all time.

  These questions bothered me for the first part of my walk home, but my brain felt like it was overheating and maybe starting to bubble, so I switched to a topic that was easier to think about, even if I still had no answers. Which was why the help screen had treated me like a stranger today. I was almost sure I had asked it the same question as before, but this time I’d gotten the cold shoulder instead of a warm personal insult. Something must have been different.

  The only difference I could think of was that the other time I’d been alone. Maybe the help screen was a bully, picking on people when there was no one there to defend them. Not that anyone in that room would have defended me—they would have piled on and enjoyed themselves while they were at it. And that didn’t explain why it had been at all helpful the first time. Bullies aren’t ever helpful as a rule. Being the opposite of helpful is more their thing.

  By the time I got home, I had faced the fact that these questions were way out of my league technologically. Up in my room, I sat down at my laptop and thought about googling the problem, but I couldn’t figure out how to word it.

  There was only one thing left to try: the Family Help Desk, as we called her. I e-mailed Aunt Shannon.

  There’s something weird going on with the H.A.I.R. Club help screen, I wrote. I asked it a question the other day and got a detailed answer. I asked it the same question today and it said, basically, “That does not compute.” The only difference was that I was alone the first day and I was with the whole club today. The program knows who’s there. What do you think happened?

  I didn’t know what Aunt Shannon did all day at work, but she almost always answered her e-mails immediately. Sometimes before there’d been enough time to type. At least the way I type. So I didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

  Wow. Your Prescient Technologies mystery gets even more mysterious! I’m going to have to mull this over. In the meantime, has anyone else had the same experience?

  I replied: No, just me. No one else has been alone with it as far as I know. And when Hoppy asked the same question with everyone there, she got the non-response too.

  She replied: Scientifically speaking, you should try the same question again when you’re alone, and Hoppy (or someone else) should do the same. Then you’ll have some real data.

  I don’t suppose you’d care to share with me what the question was?

  I sat back in my chair. I should have known she’d be curious. I should have thought about how much I wanted to tell her before I e-mailed her. And about how much the other club members would want me to tell her. I couldn’t remember if the mile-long user agreement allowed us to talk to others about what we saw on those screens, even just the help one. I certainly had no desire to reread it to find out.

  I b
orrowed a phrase from Shannon and wrote back:

  I’m going to have to mull that over.

  Chapter 33

  BUT THAT MULLING HAD TO wait, because I got some unasked-for help from an unexpected source.

  First, some background on my uncle Luke. As I’ve mentioned, he is my mother’s baby brother. He is also kind of a baby, period, especially when it comes to his health.

  Uncle Luke, who worked at home by himself, tended to fixate on any bodily sensation or weirdness that caught his attention. My mom claimed he once called her at 3:00 a.m. because a hangnail was “pulsating.” She told him where to put his pulsating hangnail.

  So he’d always been bad, but it got way worse after Woozle came along. Now that he had Woozle, he could look up any tiny thing that occurred to him and then click on Images, and then freak out and call my mother. Keep in mind that my mother was a bookseller with no medical training—but she was his big sister and she tended to be able to talk him down.

  * * *

  The next day when I got home from school, my mother and Alice were in the driveway. My mother had her “medical kit,” which was a ziplock containing a handful of Band-Aids, a tube of antiseptic, and a paper bag for Luke to breathe in when he was panicked and started panting.

  “Get in the car,” she said as I walked into earshot.

  “Seriously?”

  “He got his ear pierced and thinks he’s got an infection that’s going to his brain.”

  “Something has gone to his brain,” I muttered.

  “You’ve gone to his brain,” said Alice.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing to you.”

  When we arrived at Luke and Shannon’s house, we found Luke lying on the sofa.

  “You’re fine,” said my mom, barely glancing at him.

  “My ear’s hot, and I think there are red streaks going down the side of my neck, and I’m dizzy and disoriented,” Luke whined.