Queen Geeks in Love

by Laura Preble

  “Aren’t you hot?” I touch the sleeve of the coat. She subtly moves away, just a step.

  “No.” She swings her long dark hair behind her. “It’s actually not too bad.”

  “I’ve never seen that coat before.”

  “Oh,” she says, smiling. “It’s Jon’s.”

  As if on cue, Becca runs up like a platinum-blond puppy just taken off the leash. “Hey, hey, hey, Queen Geeks!” She jumps up and down, the little spikes of her hair never moving. In honor of the first day of school, she has electric blue tips on the ends. It’s one of our school colors. “I’m am so pumped about school this year. I have just been bursting with ideas! I was up all night thinking about GeekFest.”

  Amber and I shoot each other quizzical expressions. With her eye makeup, her quizzical expression looks like a cater-piller doing the hula. “GeekFest?” we say in unison.

  Elisa pokes her face in between me and Amber. “Did someone say GeekFest? Is that like a Warped Tour for pencil pushers?”

  “No.” Becca waves her hands spastically. “It’s just a fantastic idea I had. Actually, we had. Remember how we were talking about it last night, at the Whippy Dip?”

  “I’m trying to forget.” Elisa groans as she tries (and fails) to climb up on the boulder. “Anyway, the last thing I want to do is display my inherent geekiness to the world on a stage. It’s one thing to do stuff behind the scenes, but we’re talking potential full-scale humiliation here. I, for one, vote no.”

  Becca shoots her a withering look. “Fine. We can discuss it some more.”

  “Is that what I said?” Elisa looks at me, bewildered. “How does she mistranslate everything I say? Oh, and Amber, what’s with the G.I. Joe trench coat? Are you plotting a takeover of the girls’ bathroom or something?”

  Amber just sniffs and looks the other way. “We’d better get our schedules.” She starts walking toward the long line of tables staffed with harried counselors, and we follow.

  “That was a great start to the year,” Elisa mumbles to me as we follow in Becca’s obviously pissed-off wake.

  I go through my morning in sort of a fog. Period one, World History; period two, Tech Fundamentals; period three, English; period four, math. Honestly, I don’t track anything anyone is saying because in each class it’s just a course outline, class rules, and a seating chart. The first day, as I believe I said before, sucks. And Fletcher isn’t in any of my classes, although Becca is in my period five P.E. class (right after lunch! Have they no mercy?!). Period six is Home Ec, or Home Ick, as I call it. Why do I need Home Ick if I have a robot to do my domestic bidding?

  Lunchtime finally arrives after an agonizing morning of lectures and sleepiness. (And I like school, really; I can just imagine how utterly hideous it must be for the kids who really hate learning anything.) Last year our traditional lunch spot was under this little sapling tree near the English building, but it looks as if some seniors have confiscated it this year, so I just sort of hover around the general area waiting for somebody to show up.

  Fletcher and I didn’t really have lunch together much last year; we only started really being interested in each other right at the end. So I’m sort of surprised when he is the first to arrive.

  “Hey,” he says, pecking me on the cheek. “Did you bring lunch, or are you going to brave the line?”

  I wave my blue nylon thermal bag at him. “I try not to eat the food here. I have a theory that they’re trying to neutralize the brain cells we do have with trans fats and animal byproducts.”

  “You sound like one of those conspiracy theorists.” He plops down under the sapling, totally ignoring the senior girls who are standing on the other side of it. They don’t ignore him, though. They shoot him looks that would kill another girl, but since he’s a guy, he ignores them. They look at me like I should be able to get him to move, but I decide to pretend I don’t get it, and I plop down next to him. The girls drift away, sending nasty vibes washing back on us like a rancid outgoing tide.

  Fletcher leans against the sapling and sighs contentedly. “Ah, it’s good to be back, huh?”

  “Are you high?” I unpack my peanut butter sandwich on sprouted whole wheat bread and take a chomp. I am starving. “It’s so not good to be back.”

  “Aren’t you thirsting for knowledge?”

  “I’m thirsting for coffee, and if the barbarians that ran this place had any smidgen of human kindness, they’d provide it.”

  “Hey,” Becca says cheerily as she joins us under the tree. She’s dining on the famous Green Pines vegetarian jalapeno nachos today, guaranteed to rot even the strongest of stomachs. “Don’t lecture me about my food, Shelby,” she says, reading my mind. “I forgot to bring something, and this was the only thing hot that didn’t involve mystery meat.”

  “I’m not sure mystery cheese is much better.” I grab a chip and dip into the river of molten goo. “Mmmm. Tastes like Elmer’s glue.”

  Amber and Elisa join us, and we have a nice little huddle of girls plus Fletcher noshing on various lunch items when Jon approaches. I can tell this because Amber suddenly sticks her boobs out and Becca’s nostrils suddenly flare, and she scooches over closer to Amber so Jon can’t sit between them. I’d hoped the whole Bermuda Triangle of love had been closed down for the year, but obviously that’s only a wish, not a reality.

  “Hi, Jon,” Amber coos. She coos, I swear! It’s getting more disgusting every time I see them together. I hope if I get like that, somebody throws a bucket of cold water over my head. He waves, smooths his flip of jet-black hair away from his eyes, and eases to the ground next to Amber.

  “Hey, Jon, great to see you,” Elisa says mockingly. “Isn’t that black clothing kind of hot in the middle of August?”

  “Ah, no,” he answers, grinning. “I think it’s better to wear black, because it absorbs the heat.”

  Elisa chokes on her uncooked Lean Pocket. “That’s why you don’t want to wear it, genius!”

  “Actually, we wear it in protest of the heat,” Amber says decidedly as she feeds Jon a piece of string cheese. “It’s defiance. All the great writers wore black too. We can’t really be truly great unless we wear black.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” Fletcher asks.

  “No.” Amber eats the rest of the cheese. “But it sounds semi-reasonable, huh? We just wear it because it looks good, to be honest. Right, Jon?”

  He nods, fixing her with this look of utter devotion before he plants a big, wet kiss on her cheese-crumbed lips.

  Elisa swats at him with the Lean Pocket wrapper. “Cut it out! Some of us are trying to eat here!”

  Becca has been strangely silent through all of this. I watch her, and she is like a jungle cat figuring out a strategy to attack its prey. Kind of scary. I knew she wouldn’t give up on Jon. It’s going to be a long year.

  “Hey,” a deep voice booms from above. Is it God? Buddha? Superman? Upside down I see the white-blond eyebrows and hair of that giant guy I met at the movie theater.

  “Hi, Carl.” Fletcher waves at him. “Sit down. You guys, this is Carl Schwaiger.” Everybody waves a wilty greeting as Carl the Giant lowers himself to the ground, which for him is not that easy. One of his legs is about as long as both of mine if they were lined up end to end.

  “Well, this is turning into quite a party,” Becca says frostily.

  Carl scratches his freshly-shaved fuzzy blond hair. “Hot, huh?”

  Becca examines him as if he’s a bug under a microscope. “Yes, Carl. Yes, it’s hot. Very good.”

  “Geez, no need to be nasty,” I say. I’m the only one who can say it to her, and I feel it’s my duty, even if Carl is a giant and seems to have the reasoning power of a Cheeto.

  Carl just grins ear to ear, and looks pleased with himself for some reason.

  We spend the rest of our too-short lunch talking about classes and general high school tragedies, and then the bell rings. Carl stands up and stretches, which dislodges a number of dead
twigs that fall on Becca. “God! Look what you did!” she rages at him as she tries to brush the dead bits from her shirt.

  “Oh, sorry,” he blunders, trying to help her extract dried leaves from her blouse without coming anywhere near her boobs. He turns cherry red and she slaps his hand away. Fletcher is convulsing with laughter.

  “Stop enjoying this,” I hiss at him, giving him a slap on the forearm.

  “Well, it’s funny,” he says, shrugging. “Walk you to class?”

  “P.E.” I give him the look of doom. “Becca and I both have it.”

  “Sounds like a dreaded disease. ‘We both have it. Will we survive?’”

  Elisa and Amber/Jon (I’ve started to think of them as one person) say their good-byes. Carl has shuffled away, and Becca is shaking her head as she joins us. “What is up with that guy, Fletcher? Is he developmentally challenged or something?”

  “No, no,” he says, stifling his snickers. “He’s actually really smart.”

  “About what?” she asks as she picks up her backpack. We start our slow, unpleasant walk toward the gym.

  “He’s a science guy. Very into particle physics.”

  “How can you be ‘into’ particle physics?” Becca snorts. “He probably thinks particle physics is the science of sweeping up confetti after a football game.”

  “Bye,” Fletcher says, giving me a real kiss that makes my socks roll up and my ears tingle. He runs toward the math building while we continue toward the doomnasium.

  Becca lopes thoughtfully, but says nothing.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Not really.” She keeps loping.

  “Is it the Jon thing?”

  She stops, gives me a lopsided grin, and puts an arm around me. “You know, I wish we were gay. Things would be so much easier.”

  “I doubt it.” We walk in step with each other. “If you dated girls, they’d piss you off too.”

  “Yeah, but I could steal their clothes!”

  10

  RETURN OF THE QUEENS

  (or A Festival of Geeks)

  We get through the first week of school and Saturday I get to sleep in. There’s nothing quite like it, that first Saturday after school starts; you wake up in the dark thinking you have to get up and get dressed, but then you have that beautiful realization that it’s the weekend and you can go back to your summer slacker ways.

  Except that my phone rings at about ten in the morning. “Doesn’t everyone in the world know that teenagers aren’t supposed to get up before noon on Saturday?” I groan as I blindly grope for the receiver. Euphoria isn’t even there to help me, so I’m on my own. “Hello?” I croak.

  “I’ve had a brainstorm!” Becca’s voice explodes in my ear.

  “Could you maybe freeze it and thaw it out later?”

  “Come on, Shelby! Seriously. I’m coming over there.”

  “No—” But it’s too late. The other line is dead, and judging from her tone of voice, she’s probably flying to my house—behold, the power of coffee.

  Dad is sitting at the table reading a newspaper, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. “You look like that Headless Horseman guy,” I say, ruffling his hair.

  “Ichabod Crane?” He peers at me over the top of the specs. “I think I’m much sexier than Ichabod Crane.”

  “No comment.” I stumble into the kitchen and grab a box of cereal from the cupboard. “Where’s Euphoria?”

  Dad sighs heavily. “Ah. She’s grieving over Fred.”

  “Why? What happened to Fred?”

  “I was mowing the back and he ran over a huge piece of concrete.”

  “Not good. Internal injuries?”

  Dad nods solemnly. “It’s not a total loss, though. He’s going to be an organ donor. I have three things on the drawing board—”

  “Aw, that’s just creepy.” I sit across from him and dig a huge spoonful of cereal out of the bowl and hoist it to my mouth. “It’s like parting out a member of the family.”

  “It’s either that or take him to the dump. And that just seems undignified.” Dad squints at my breakfast. “Corn flakes? Is that going to get you through the morning?”

  “I have lots of sugar on them, so I’ll be fine. Oh, Becca’s on her way over. Just so you don’t go parading around in your underwear.”

  “Well, that was my plan, but I guess I could fix the bathroom sink instead.” He glances up at a wall clock. “Kind of early, huh?”

  “Tell me about it. That girl never winds down.” Chomp, chomp.

  Dad gulps the last of his coffee, then looks at me contemplatively. “Honey, do you have any questions? About life? Boys? College? Anything?”

  Every once in a while Dad gets this urge to parent me. Since my mom died, he’s been sort of bad at it. It’s not because he’s a bad guy or anything, he just doesn’t have that thing that most moms have: that sense of when to talk, what to do, how to comfort, when to butt out. He tries, though, which is more than I can say for some dads I know.

  “I was kind of curious about particle physics.”

  I see him relax. Particle physics is much less dangerous than boys, in my dad’s mind. “Oh. Well, that’s a little hard to explain simply. It’s the study of various parts of the atom and how they interact. Neutrons, electrons, protons, quarks—”

  I don’t really care that much about particle physics, to be honest. I just didn’t want to talk about boys.

  “And then when you get into some of the real quandaries, like string theory and the Grand Unified Theory, which is, by the way, sort of the Holy Grail of physics, then you really get into some passionate discussion.” He’s all flustered. Talking about science is for my dad what talking about American Idol is to other people. “Anyway,” he continues without taking a breath, “how serious are you about Fletcher?”

  I nearly choke on my corn flakes. “What?”

  “I’d just like to know how you feel about him. You’ve been seeing a lot of him, and I just want to know where things are going.”

  It’s weird. I love my dad, but I do not want to talk to him about my love life. There is just something fundamentally strange about telling your dad how you feel about a guy. I guess maybe this is because I’ve always been his girl, you know, his little girl. And when Mom died, it was kind of like he and I were a team by ourselves. I started dating a lot last year, but it was never serious at all. So now, I’m threatening to break up the team? And leave my poor, widowed dad alone? I suck. All I say is, “I don’t know.”

  Dad coughs uncomfortably. “You don’t know where things are going, or you don’t know how you feel about him?”

  “Dad, it’s nothing to worry about. I know how to take care of myself.” I concentrate really hard on my cereal, willing it to fly out of the bowl and hit the wall to distract my dad. It does not comply. So much for my super geektastic powers.

  “I’m not worried, exactly.” He leans over and covers my hand with his. “I just want to be part of the important things in your life. I feel like you were little, and now you’re not…and since your mother…I just haven’t been that involved, I guess.”

  I feel a knot building up in my throat. Must distract myself…“Hey, check this out!” I take some of the drier corn flakes from my bowl and try to stack them. I manage to stack five before they topple over. Dad just sighs again. He’s starting to sound like a flat tire.

  “Okay.” He stands up, stretches, and strokes my hair. “Okay. Well, if you ever want to talk about it, I’m here. Want a ride to school, oh mighty corn-flake stacker?”

  “It’s Saturday, Dad, remember?” I scoop up the fallen flakes and return them to the bowl, then capture them on my spoon and cruelly eat them. There is no room for failure here, little flakes of corn. You must keep it together, not topple over sideways, or you get eaten.

  When Becca arrives (Thea drops her off and then drives away in a cloud of artistically frustrated Jeep exhaust), we escape to my room. “What is she working on this time?” I ask.


  Becca flops down onto my bed. “Oh, I think it was a piece commissioned by the La Jolla Snooty Art Society. They hired her to paint this hideous mural with racehorses and ladies in huge, expensive hats. It really pisses her off.”

  “Why did she agree to do it, then?”

  “My dad is shorting her on the child support, so we kind of need the money. He has a serious case of P.I.T.A.S.”

  “P.I.T.A.S.?” It sounds kind of like “penis”, but with a t in the middle.

  “Oh, I never told you that one?” She sits up and laughs. “Pain in the Ass Syndrome. It’s a not too rare disease affecting millions of divorced parents.”

  “Nice.”

  “Oh!” She jumps in place and digs into her pocket, producing a scrap of paper. “I got another poem! It was stuck in my math book. How did he do that without me knowing?”

  “Maybe since you rarely crack open your math book…” I grab the paper and read.

  Tweedledee and Tweedledum

  Were twins both short of stature

  The Cheshire Cat grinned all day long

  Like I’d do if I had ya.

  I look up at her. “That’s incredibly bad.”

  “Sure, sure,” she says, snatching her poem back. “But it’s the thought that counts, right? I mean, this guy is seriously into pursuing me. How many guys do you know who would bother to write poems and sneak them into a book?”

  “True.” I play with a pencil, twirl it upside down, right side up. “You have no idea who it is?”

  “Nope, but he must go to Green Pines.” She turns over onto her belly and picks lint off my quilt. “It’s kind of fun not knowing.”

  “Yeah. So, what do you want to do today?”

  “Hmmm. Well, eating, for sure. Is your dad available for transport purposes?”