The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You

by Lily Anderson

  “You always go one too far.” I sighed. “I can actually hear you scraping the bottom of the barrel of your limited intellect.”

  We got to the front of the room and Harper bumped me with her arm, throwing me a warning look that pointed out that I should stop sniping at Ben West. Scowling at her, I scooped up a book and shoved past West on my way back to my seat.

  Most of the new senior class at the Mess had started at Aragon Prep, Messina’s warm and squishy sister school. From kindergarten to eighth grade, Aragon had spent countless hours teaching all of us how to socialize with our peers and have fun with our education. And then the Mess spent four years making us forget all of that crap and get ready to go to college and/or take over the world.

  That’s why the class list was posted constantly. Outside of the attendance office, locked in a Poly(methyl methacrylate)—Plexiglas—case, the class lists were posted in order of rank on the first of every month. Just to keep the student body with a healthy—and occasionally nervous-breakdown-inducing—sense of competition.

  I had done the Rank Tango with Ben West throughout junior year. One month, I’d be third, then he’d replace me. He’d managed a 103 percent in Statistical Anomalies—beating me by one percent—and I’d stayed firmly stuck at number four for the rest of the year.

  We’d been playing this game for as long as I could remember. Despite the lazy insults and his nonstop blathering on, Ben West was always there to sweep a victory away from me. When I won the geography bee in third grade, he’d won the spelling bee. When I’d trounced him at kickball, he’d wiped the four square court with me.

  And that didn’t even include the incident with the monkey bars.

  All I wanted was one win that he couldn’t take away from me. If I could dethrone him from the number three spot in our class—Cornell and Harper were one and two, respectively—and stay there until graduation, I would be able to dance out of the Mess with no regrets. A decade of battles with Ben West would be worth it if I won the war.

  I retrieved a pencil and my Spider-Man binder from my bag. Flipping the binder open to the first fresh sheet of sweet-smelling college-ruled notebook paper, I dated the top right-hand corner. T-minus 179 days until graduation.

  “‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she with silent lips,” shouted Mr. Cline, his voice suddenly booming with theatrical intensity. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

  He looked around the room with narrowed eyes, breathing heavily.

  “This is the promise of ‘The New Colossus,’” he said in a reverential whisper. “Written by whom, Miss France?”

  Mary-Anne cocked her head at him. “Emma Lazarus.”

  “Correct,” he roared, spinning to the whiteboard to scrawl the name under his own. “Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew from Portugal. The voice of the disenfranchised immigrant!”

  As he started listing the accomplishments of Emma Lazarus and the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, my pencil flew over the notebook paper. We hadn’t even opened the textbook and I was already a page of notes in.

  Just a normal first day at the Mess.

  To: Messina Academy Students

  From: Administrative Services

  Subject: Salutations!

  Welcome pupils, new and old, to the Messina Academy for the Gifted.

  As you enter this morning with your proverbial clean slate, you may note some changes to our institution. Thanks to a generous donation from the Donnelly family, we have secured a second mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization capabilities.…

  2

  “Where were you this morning?” Harper asked the second Meg was within earshot of us in the cafeteria. “We waited for you out front.”

  Meg set her tray down on our table, smoothing her pleated skirt as she sat down. As expected, her glossy black hair had been meticulously curled.

  Like short women across the globe, Meg looked like she would be harmless, but she was a pocket-sized ball of fury when you crossed her. We’d called her Pikachu through most of our time at Aragon Prep until the day she started sobbing and told us that it made her sound fat. We’d given up on nicknames that day. And discovered a sync in our menstrual cycles.

  “My parents made a huge deal about this being my last first day of high school,” she said airily. “There was breakfast with my grandparents and a Skype conversation with my brother. It was a nice thought, but it put me totally behind schedule. Sometimes, they care too much.”

  “You should try being an only child,” I said, laughing. “It’s like that every day.”

  “Pretty much,” Harper said.

  “I don’t know how the two of you survive,” Meg said. “Did I miss anything important before the bell?”

  “Cornell and Harper continue to try to make out with each other via telepathy,” I said, stabbing my fork into the wilted lettuce that the Mess cafeteria mockingly called a salad.

  Harper squawked, spewing chicken nugget breading onto the table. Meg covered her plate as Harper flapped her hands, blindly searching for a napkin.

  “Untrue.” Harper coughed. “That’s not what happened at all.”

  Meg wasn’t convinced but she seemed to weigh her options and come to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth seeing if Harper would actually lay an egg if we kept talking about Cornell.

  “Anything else?”

  I scanned around the cafeteria and found West sitting on the other side of the room with Cornell and the Donnelly twins. I pointed at him and Meg clasped her hands to her face, sucking in a gasp.

  “What is that on Ben’s face?”

  “Exactly,” I said, shoving a forkful of salad into my mouth. “Good luck eating your chicken nuggets after that.”

  “Is it real?” she asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure.” I cringed as I spotted West shoving pizza under the flap of hair. “I considered trying to rip it off of him during first period, but I’m afraid that I’d disturb the family of mice living in it. I wonder what he’s doing with the politicos. Doesn’t he normally run with the Dungeons & Dragons crowd?”

  “Mike Shepherd kicked him out last year,” Meg said. “He’s on the student council now.”

  Harper smoothed her soiled napkin on the side of her tray, patting it into place. “He and Cornell had the same internship over the summer.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “Have you been Internet stalking again, Miss Leonard?”

  “Is it possible that Peter’s eyes got bluer?” Meg asked, squinting into the spotlight that was Peter Donnelly’s all-American good looks. “I think being president is making him more handsome.”

  Harper tried to hide in her hunched shoulders. “Please stop staring at them. It’s so conspicuous.”

  I eyed her warily. “You’re lucky we aren’t marching over there and telling Cornell to grow a pair.”

  “You would not,” she said. “Especially since Ben is sitting with him.”

  “That’s probably true,” I conceded. “I’d like to keep my salad down and West’s insults have been superlame today. I think the mustache might be draining his intellect. Which is useful because I am going to take the number three spot before the end of the year.”

  Meg’s face contorted in disgust. “That’s your big plan for senior year? You want to be number three?”

  “Well, I can’t beat Harper or her future husband without giving up sleeping and eating and comics. So yeah, I’ll settle for being number three. I’ll get a cake shaped like a four and shove it in Ben West’s stupid hairy face after he walks across the stage at graduation. And then I’ll rip off my cap and gown, revealing a red leather jacket and black skinny jeans and moonwalk all the way home.”

  “Wow,” Harper said after a moment of silence. “That was detailed.”

  I reached over and flicked a piece of chicken n
ugget shrapnel from her specs. “I’ve had time to plan with all of the good TV being on hiatus. Without Game of Thrones, I get weird.”

  “That’s why I took classes over the break,” Harper said. “And rewatched Supernatural.”

  “God, I love the Winchester brothers,” Meg said. She nibbled on the end of a chicken nugget. “You know, considering it’s our senior year, normal people might be thinking about things like the harvest festival.”

  “What about the harvest festival?” I frowned. “It’s the same thing every year. We get dressed up, we’re the only girls on campus not dressed up like trampy tramps, we drink apple cider, we eat kettle corn, and Harper gets a stomachache. It’s not even on real Halloween.”

  “Yes, but we’re seniors,” Meg said, ever the voice of the obvious. “Maybe we should try to, you know, go with other people?”

  “Other people like the yearbook staff or other people like you want to turn this into some kind of cliché mating ritual?” I asked.

  “Closer to the second one,” said Harper.

  “Less mating, more dating,” Meg added cheerfully.

  “Dear God,” I said, unable to stop my face from twisting in horror. “And I thought that talking to West would be the lamest thing that happened today. Did you really just say ‘less mating, more dating’?”

  “Trixie, you know that boys are my risk this year,” she said loftily. “Well, boys and manga. I’m branching out emotionally and intellectually.”

  I tried not to groan. Instead of giving the usual birds-and-bees talk, Meg’s psychologist parents had sat her down with a model of the human brain. Upon hearing that her prefrontal cortex was developing slower than her limbic system, making her more prone to risky behaviors—like drug addiction and uncontrollable sexual impulses—Meg had come to the conclusion that the only way to beat nature was to decide her own risks to keep her brain preoccupied from real dangers.

  The Great Thought Experiment, as she referred to it, had started off small enough. She’d pushed herself gently out of her comfort zone with Internet videos on hair care and the proper application of makeup. She’d secretly mastered the art of nerd burlesque with the help of Jo Jo Stiletto’s books and blogs. She joined the yearbook committee for a year to learn graphic design—and then dragged me and Harper to help with distribution. She spent a year referring to her parents by their first names.

  But on a particularly hot day over summer vacation, as we’d lain in the sprinklers in her backyard, she’d looked over at me and asked, “Why don’t we have any male friends?”

  “We don’t have many friends at all,” I’d said. Which was true. With Harper stuck in summer school classes at the university, Meg and I had been soaking up the sun alone.

  “I can’t go to college without having any interactions with the opposite sex,” Meg had said, plucking damp blades of grass between her fingers.

  “You want a degree in women’s studies. You could just go to an all girls’ school.”

  This had been met with spiny silence.

  It appeared my beloved best friends were on the fast track to becoming utterly antifeminist. Instead of comparing notes on our classes or comic books or which Joss Whedon show was the best—Firefly, obviously—they’d started this secret campaign to get boyfriends. Outwardly, they were the same brilliant, proudly nerdy ladies that I knew and loved. But then there was the boy crazy, scheming part of them that I could not condone.

  I was seventeen. I had eyes and girl parts and functional hormones. I was aware that we went to school with a few not-ugly boys. But I didn’t want to date them. I just wanted to get into a decent college and escape the Mess with as little emotional baggage as possible. Was that so much to ask?

  Apparently it was. Because Harper and Meg refused to let the whole boyfriends thing go.

  “You two are more than welcome to throw yourselves at whomever you want,” I said drily. “I won’t stop you. But I refuse to be party to this.”

  “Trixie.” Meg sighed, but I held up my hand to stop her.

  “Look around you,” I said, gesturing to the crowded cafeteria. “Look at the bounty of uniform-clad, mid-pubescent, Axe-body-sprayed boys we have been given as our only option for dating. Let’s say for one minute that I decided to hop on your bandwagon and tried to lure one of these losers into dating me. I’m not Mary-Anne France.”

  I pointed to the student council table again. Mary-Anne was sitting next to Peter Donnelly, smiling demurely behind a bottle of mineral water. Her hair was loosely curled, resting delicately on the shoulders of a perfectly tailored cardigan. There was peach shimmer on her eyelids the same color as the goo on her mouth. The rest of the cafeteria was zit-ridden, nearsighted, and pit-stained. Mary-Anne was starring in her own personal version of a magazine spread, using her genius only to find ways to make her uniform look couture.

  Okay, fine. She’d also published two volumes of startlingly insightful poetry, but that’s beside the point.

  “I am like a twelve-year-old boy with massive boobs,” I continued. “Comic books and science fiction? I am not the kind of girlfriend a seventeen-year-old boy wants.”

  “Well,” Harper said, attempting to find the flaw in my logic. Her face lit up and she flapped her hands. “You could find a college guy. You’re too mature for high school boys. What about one of the guys from the comic book store? They’re nice and nerdy and not in high school.”

  “No way.” I laughed. “Any college guy who wants to date a seventeen-year-old has some kind of massive problem. Creepy pedophiles that can’t date girls their own age are not on my bucket list.”

  “So you’re going to die alone without ever attempting romantic love?” Meg asked.

  “No,” I said. “I am going to get through this year, go off to a good college, and meet handsome, educated sophomores who appreciate Marvel over DC and think that it’s rad that I look like Rogue from X-Men. Maybe I’ll add the white streak to my hair to hedge my bets.”

  “So, you won’t be finding a date for the harvest festival?” Harper asked.

  I chomped another forkful of salad. “Nope.”

  “Well, I am not Team Spinster,” Meg said, shifting in her seat to look at Harper. “You should ask Cornell. And then he can set me up with a Donnelly.”

  “Either Donnelly?” Harper asked. “Even if it’s Jack?”

  “Poor life choice,” I declared. “Jack Donnelly is a sociopath. He’d probably murder you in the haunted house and then go bob for apples like it never happened.”

  Also wedged into the student council table, hiding behind a copy of House of Leaves, Jack Donnelly seemed oblivious to the fact that his lunch companions were laughing and throwing things at each other. He and Peter were fraternal twins, sharing the same blue eyes and massive forehead. On Peter, the look was charming, if a little goofy. Jack, on the other hand, just seemed sinister. Peter was the class president. Jack had been caught drinking cough syrup for fun in the eighth grade. It made no sense that they’d once shared a womb.

  “I heard that the Donnellys donated that mass spectrometer so that Jack could test a Flowers for Algernon smart drug without killing lab rats,” Harper said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Obviously, he’d just kill the lab rats. He was overly enthusiastic about dissecting things in biology.”

  “He’s not a sociopath,” Meg said. “It would have shown up on his entrance exam. He’s just not chatty. And that’s fine. I’ll chat and he can buy my kettle corn.”

  “That sounds like prostitution,” I said.

  Meg rolled her eyes. “You think all dating sounds like prostitution.”

  “If it looks like a duck and sells its time like a duck,” I said. “How can you guys even consider dates when we haven’t nailed down costumes yet? I’ve decided that I’m going to go as OG Maleficent. None of that Angelina Jolie nonsense. I want to be warm.”

  In order to get into the harvest festival, you had to wear a costume. And being the largest group of
underage geniuses on the West Coast the student body of the Mess always went all out. Yes, there would be plenty of sexy witches, cats, and other farm animals, but generally everyone went to the extreme with it. It was the only thing I liked about the festival, really. I wasn’t much for the scary movies, haunted houses part of things. But an excuse to bust out a hot-glue gun and my sewing machine? I was the conductor of that train. All aboard.

  The girls relaxed a little, letting the conversation drift away from boys and toward whether or not we should all go as Disney villains. Harper had her heart set on being Supergirl and Meg didn’t really care what she went as providing that she could wear heels with it. I agreed to help her craft a Queen of Hearts costume if she would help me papier-mâché my Maleficent horned headpiece.

  “We should do it as soon as possible,” Meg said. She sent a worried frown toward her backpack. “I’m three classes in and I already have two essays to do.”

  “Same here,” Harper said. “And about fifty pages of reading to do before tomorrow.”

  I glanced down at my arm, where I’d started writing my homework notes. It looked like I’d have a full sleeve by the end of the day. “And you two want boyfriends?”

  The girls fixed me with the same It doesn’t signify glare. There was no reasoning with them when they were like this.

  “Okay,” I said, drawing the word out into a snarky warble. “I’m just saying: we’re all trapped in a codependent relationship with the Mess until June.”

  “You can’t make out with the Mess,” Meg said.

  I shook my head, my ponytail wagging against my neck in defeat. “No, my darling Margaret, you cannot. But we have three weeks before the first rank list comes out, so I’m going to try my darndest.”

  [4:02 PM]

  Harper

  Can you bring me that Sarah Vowell book about the Puritans tomorrow? I need a quote for an essay.