A Catastrophe of Nerdish Proportions

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  “What, she’s going to take the back way and go down Seventeenth Street?” I asked sarcastically. “That’s, like, two or three extra miles and another ten to fifteen minutes, with the stop signs. We’re already late.”

  “I trust my trusty phone,” Beanpole said, turning her cellie around to show me. “And it says the highway’s jammed.”

  I looked at the map. Where there was bad traffic, the roadway on the screen was red. Highway 4, however, was not just red; it was red and black, with stripes and a big exclamation point in the middle, which could only mean one thing:

  An accident. A bad accident.

  “Whaddya think?” Beanpole said.

  I checked the time on my phone. It was already 4:43. “We’ll be cutting it close.”

  “But if we take the highway, we might not make it at all,” Beanpole replied. “And Seventeenth Street is pure green right now, no traffic at all,” she added, proudly holding up her phone. “Let’s vote. Who says the back way? Raise your hand,” she said.

  And then, to show her enthusiasm for taking the back way, Beanpole’s hand screamed to the sky. “I vote for…Ouch!” She smashed her wrist into the roof. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m okay.” Beanpole cradled her arm. I swear I thought I’d heard a bone crack. “Remind me to try and remain at one with the universe, accepting things as they are today, okay, Mo? I’m a little excited right now.”

  “Whatever you say, Nerdy Lama.”

  “Back way,” Q chirped, casting her vote. Slowly, I nodded in agreement.

  “Okay, back way it is,” Mrs. Applebee said. “Assuming we should even be going in the first place.”

  “Which we should,” Q replied.

  After another shake of her head, Mrs. Applebee began to drive, and we set out for the Civic Center, making it just in time.

  And when I say just in time, I literally mean just in time. We walked through the doors at 5:26. Kiki looked as if she were about to have a heart attack. She frantically waved us up to the registration table, and we scurried over to meet her.

  “Grover Park Aardvarks, all here,” Kiki said breathlessly to the seated woman. As it turns out, the lady in charge of officially verifying the registration of each of the Academic Septathlon participants was also the Supreme Judge of the night’s proceedings. Her name was Miss Terrier, a woman in her fifties who was as thin as a rail and dressed in a smart, conservative, bluish-gray business suit. Her small glasses and pointy nose made her look like some kind of cross between a Harvard PhD and an evil stepmother from a terrifying fairy tale. “Quick, give her your papers,” Kiki instructed.

  “What papers?” Beanpole said, a puzzled look on her face.

  Kiki froze.

  “Ha-ha, just kidding.” Beanpole pulled out the official forms and handed them to Miss Terrier. “We’re the Aardvarks,” she said, perky and proud. “Nice to meet you.”

  Miss Terrier glanced at the clock sitting on the registration desk in front of her.

  5:28.

  “I’m charmed.” Miss Terrier took our paperwork. We watched anxiously as she looked over the rim of her glasses to inspect our forms, making sure every i was dotted and each t was crossed. A quiet panic flooded through me as I prayed that none of us had been careless enough to have missed a line or forgotten a signature.

  I think it was Miss Terrier’s hair that most made me nervous. She wore it in the tightest bun I’d ever seen, not a single strand out of place. It was as if even her follicles knew they had to follow the proper rules and procedures, or they’d be dealt with in the most severe manner.

  After what seemed like ten thousand hours of formal form inspection, Miss Terrier took out a red stamp and punched our documents.

  “Grover Park Aardvarks, check,” she said, putting our papers in the black tray to her left. “Wait there, please.”

  Phew, we made it. We walked over to the spot Miss Terrier had pointed to, near the other teams by the stage door.

  “What on God’s green earth took you dorks so long?” Kiki asked as we headed to our designated waiting spot. “Another two minutes and we’d have been disqualified.”

  “There was traffic,” I said.

  “You should have left earlier,” Brattany said.

  “We made it, didn’t we?” Q said through a cough.

  Kiki and Brattany took notice of Q’s condition and stared at her with semihorror on their faces, as if she had the plague or something.

  “If you were so worried, why didn’t you text us?” I asked, trying to draw attention away from Q’s appearance.

  “I don’t want any of your nerd numbers in my phone,” Kiki said.

  “Yeah, it might lead to further communication once this thing is over, and that’s the last thing we want,” Brattany said with a sneer.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Well, what if I told you that—”

  “Can we not argue for a minute, please?” Beanpole interjected. “I mean, we’re here, we’re looking good in our uniforms, and we’re ready to break out some Aardvark whomp-’em powder. Come on, let’s do a cheer.

  “We’re the Aardvarks,

  The mighty, mighty Aardvarks!

  We’re the—”

  “Can the rah-rah stuff, Beanpole,” Kiki interrupted. “I’m still not over the heart attack you almost gave me.”

  “Yeah,” Brattany said. “I mean, just look at that.”

  We turned around and saw the Gilded Gophers from Evanton Middle School racing up to Miss Terrier’s table.

  “Made it,” said their coach.

  “No, you did not.” Miss Terrier pointed to the clock on her desk.

  “Oh, come on,” the coach replied. He was a plump, balding man dressed in a green shirt with a yellow tie. “There was a motorcycle accident on the highway. What were we supposed to do?”

  “I do not dictate the regulations, Mr. Harper. I merely enforce them,” Miss Terrier responded. “Rules are rules, and five thirty was the deadline.”

  I looked at the time on my cell phone: 5:33.

  “But it’s not fair,” one of the students pleaded.

  “You can’t be serious,” said another.

  The Gilded Gophers were from a charter school on the east side of town, and they had come in second place the past three years in a row. This year, however, their team was filled with veterans of the Academic Septathlon, and if anyone was expected to challenge Saint Dianne’s for the regional championship, it was the kids from Evanton.

  “Have a heart, Miss Terrier,” Mr. Harper pleaded.

  “Heart has nothing to do with it,” Miss Terrier responded. “Rules dictate my actions, Mr. Harper. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Suddenly another team raced through the side doors—the Townsend Owls—and rushed up to the sign-in table with panicked looks on their faces.

  Miss Terrier, without a hint of emotion on her face, directed her eyes toward the clock on her desk.

  The coach of the Owls glanced at the coach from Evanton. She could tell by the look on Mr. Harper’s face that the Gophers had just been ruled ineligible. Same motorcycle accident. Same traffic to the Civic Center. Same reason for her school being late.

  She lowered her head, knowing, without having even spoken a word, that her team, despite all its hard work and long hours of preparation, had just been ruled ineligible. Wordlessly, she turned to her students.

  A brown-eyed girl with a ponytail began to cry. Then another student started to weep. A boy punched the air. Seeing the hurt on the faces of these kids felt like a steak knife in my heart, especially since it was a result of something completely unpreventable.

  However, the pain I felt for them was clearly not a pain that was being felt by anyone else in the hall. One look at Wynston Haimes showed that. She was smiling and snickering with her teammates. After all, with Evanton out of it, Saint Dianne’s chances of continuing their unprecedented winning streak had just skyrocketed.

  Wow, I thought. The Septathlon was cutthroat. Like, ugly cutthroat. I
mean, where was the sportsmanship?

  A third team came racing through the doors, victims of the traffic jam. There were supposed to be nine teams doing battle that night. The motorcycle accident had just cut the number down to six.

  One of the coolest things about being backstage before any kind of giant show is peeking through the curtains to look out into the audience, without their even knowing you are able to see them. However, at the Civic Center it was even cooler, because backstage was high tech all the way, with video monitors and fancy-looking LED lights that controlled everything. From where we waited, we could see, via little television screens, the outer hall by the concession stand; the whole front of the stage; the entire backstage area, where the TV crew from the local-access channel were checking wires and setting up; and even the audience.

  “Eww, look, that guy in the middle row just picked his nose,” said some kid from Moore Middle School. “I’ll bet you a Twix bar he eats it.”

  “You lose,” said his friend, also from Moore. “He just stuck it under the seat.”

  “Hey, look, Mo,” Beanpole said, pointing at a different screen. “There’s your father.”

  It was my father. I watched as he made his way through the seventeenth row toward the center, where my sister, mother, and brother were sitting. My dad took the empty seat right next to my brother.

  Marty looked up.

  When he saw my dad, I could tell right away he was shocked and had no idea he would be here tonight. The look on my brother’s face morphed into an instant scowl. Angrily, he rose from his chair and changed seats, moving to the other side of Mom, putting as much distance between himself and our father as he could.

  Wow, even through the video screen I could see the rage boiling inside him.

  “Any last words of advice for your team, Coach?”

  I turned, startled by the voice. It was Mr. Mazer, the principal. Next to him stood Vice Principal Stone. Both of them wore coats and ties, looking all schoolly formal.

  “Of course I do,” Vice Principal Stone answered. “Just remember,” he said to the six of us, “if you get eliminated early enough, my wife and I can go catch a movie.”

  Principal Mazer gazed quizzically at Mr. Stone.

  “My girls and I, we always joke around like that,” Mr. Stone explained with a chuckle.

  We chuckled back.

  “Oh,” Mr. Mazer said, offering up a halfhearted chuckle of his own. “Well, it’s almost showtime. Are the Aardvarks ready? You look ready. I mean, without a doubt, you’ll be the best-dressed team out there tonight.”

  Beanpole smiled a big and proud smile, and then, out of sheer enthusiasm, waved hello to a student from Rawlston Middle School. No, she didn’t know the kid, but to Beanpole, what did that matter? She was friendly to everybody, at one with the universe.

  However, Mr. Mazer’s comment had upset me. I mean, even though the subject hadn’t come up among me and Q and Beanpole, we had noticed when we first walked into the Civic Center that the ThreePees were wearing matching green barrettes that would sparkle under the stage lights.

  And we nerds had conveniently been left out when it came to this fashionable add-on. I was instantly bitter. Especially after all that Beanpole’s mom had done to make our team look so good. Beanpole noticed the barrettes, but being Beanpole, she just shrugged it off.

  “We still look great, Mo. Don’t make mountains out of molehills.”

  “I’d like to make them into molehills,” I said. It was just such a low-class move, I thought.

  “Of course, we didn’t get quite the student-body support that some of the other teams have,” Mr. Mazer continued as he looked around at all the different students backstage.

  Boy, he could say that again. I mean, some schools must have had at least one hundred kids in the audience, belting out cheers, getting rowdy, causing a lot of ruckus to root for their classmates. Our team had zilch in terms of encouragement. Nine out of ten kids at Grover Park probably didn’t even know that the Academic Septathlon was going on tonight.

  “But the one student we do have in the audience seems to be trying to hold his own out there,” Mr. Mazer added.

  Huh? Mr. Mazer looked at the monitor. Saint Dianne’s had a sea of navy-and-red-clad kids who were doing cheers that looked professionally coordinated. The Youngly Middle School Cobras had fans dressed in orange and black who were making some kind of hissing sounds. Grover Park had one kid—exactly one loony, bonkers, semidemented student who was standing up in the middle of the crowd screaming at the top of his lungs:

  “Grover Park,

  Not stupid,

  Smart!

  Grover Park,

  Not stupid,

  Smart!”

  “Is that Logan Meyers?” Beanpole asked.

  “What kind of cheer is that?” Brattany said, wrinkling her brow.

  “Oh, he came to support me,” Kiki said, batting her eyelashes. “Isn’t that sweeeeet?” I rolled my eyes. “You know,” she continued, “that’s the kind of gesture that makes me think about taking him back.”

  “Vomit alert,” I said through a fake cough.

  Kiki glowered at me, but before she could say anything, the lights in the hall blinked twice, then dimmed, like in a power outage.

  “Hey, the five-minute warning,” Mr. Mazer said. “I should get back to my seat. Oh, Mr. Piddles, you made it. Good.”

  “Wow,” Mr. Piddles said as he approached. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Mazer replied. “I saved you a seat.”

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Piddles said. “It’ll give us a chance to”—he paused and made eye contact with me—“talk.” He gave me one of those famous laser-beam teacher stares.

  I lowered my eyes.

  “You know,” he continued, “about some campus developments I have recently been told of…”

  “Oh, joy,” Mr. Stone remarked sarcastically. “Shop talk, after hours.”

  “Indeed, I do think it will be of interest to you, Mr. Stone,” Mr. Piddles answered. “Highly so, in fact.”

  “I have no doubt,” Mr. Stone replied, in an I really couldn’t care less voice.

  “Well, Aardvarks, we’re off. Good luck out there,” Mr. Mazer said. “We’ll be rooting for you.”

  Vice Principal Stone, lagging behind as Mr. Mazer and Mr. Piddles headed off to take their seats, turned around in such a way that neither of his colleagues could see or hear him, and pointed at his watch.

  “Moo-vie.”

  A moment later, he was gone.

  “He’s not nice,” Beanpole said in a firm tone.

  “Wow, you really roasted him with that one, Beanpole,” I said. “I mean, that’s almost go-wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap language, coming from you.”

  “So, what was that all about?” Kiki asked, hands on her hips.

  “What?” I said.

  “The look Mr. P. gave you.”

  Gulp. Over Kiki’s shoulder, I spotted the door to the backstage restroom.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to pee.”

  Phew, I thought as I headed toward the bathroom. Avoided that one. I guess sometimes there are benefits to having a teensy bladder.

  After a well-timed pee and a hand wash with pink bathroom soap, I returned to my group. However, my group wasn’t where I had left it. While I was in the restroom, each of the schools had been placed in some sort of order by the back wall, all the coaches gone. Standing with the teams, to my surprise, were the judges. All three. There were two men, one tall and thin, one potbellied and wearing glasses, and of course, there was the chief, Miss “No Nonsense” Terrier.

  “There’s our captain,” Kiki said as I walked up, bitterness clearly in her voice.

  “Wrists?” Miss Terrier said to me.

  “Huh?”

  “We need to see your wrists,” the tall judge said.

  “We’ve had cheaters,” the potbellied man explaine
d as Beanpole pulled her long sleeves back down after having just gone through the inspection I was about to go through.

  I held out my arms and pulled up my sleeves. “Nothing to hide,” I said.

  Satisfied, Miss Terrier turned to Q, the last in our group.

  “And you, too, young lady.”

  Q, having already taken off her nonregulation calculator watch in the car and given it to her mom, pulled up her sleeves to prove she had nothing written on her arms.

  “All clear,” she said.

  The judges nodded in approval.

  “And that is?” Miss Terrier asked, peering at the oddly shaped item in Q’s left pocket.

  “A medical device,” Q said, withdrawing her inhaler. “It meets all the criteria on page thirty-six, paragraph four, section two in the regulatory handbook.”

  Miss Terrier inspected the device.

  “And yes, I have a doctor’s note on file with school, should you need to”—Q began to cough—“should you need to verify.”

  The potbellied judge smiled. “Well, indeed, it is refreshing to have a contestant who’s taken the time to familiarize herself with the rules.”

  Q grinned.

  “Knowing the rules and obeying the rules are not the same thing,” Miss Terrier noted as she slowly handed back Q’s scuba tank. “Let’s just hope that tonight your team doesn’t confuse the two.”

  “I don’t believe we will,” Q answered. The two of them, Q and Miss Terrier, looked deeply into one another’s eyes.

  Is Q having a staring contest with the Queen of Mean? Like, OMG, is she crazy?

  “Good,” Miss Terrier replied, the first to blink. “Then you’ll be sure to remember that once the competition starts, only the captain will be permitted to officially address the judges.”

  “Once the competition begins, we certainly will,” Q replied. “But technically, it hasn’t started yet.”

  “But technically, it’s about to,” Miss Terrier responded. “And I like technicalities.”

  Q took a slurp from her inhaler. Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh. “Me, too.”