Queen Geeks in Love

by Laura Preble

  The chatter starts again immediately, visions of dollar signs dancing in girls’ heads. Becca tries to calm them down, but finally has to wolf whistle to get them to shut up. “Okay, that sounds like a good idea. So, where will the money go? Any worthy causes you all want to discuss?”

  “Us?” Elisa shouts. “Pizza?”

  “Very unselfish,” Amber replies. “I think we should do something to support the arts.”

  While this whole very worthwhile discussion goes forward, I keep watching the door. This is how shallow of a person I am: Instead of thinking about poor, starving orphans with no shoes, I am thinking about whether or not Fletcher Berkowitz will walk through the door. That is really pathetic. I try to refocus my mind on worthwhile charities—Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, Mothers Against Drunk Driving—but then everything keeps getting all mixed up with Fletcher again, so my ideas come out Salivation Army, Habit-Forming Hunk-manity, stuff like that. I told you it was pathetic.

  When I rejoin the actual conversation already in progress, Amitha is talking about the environment. “If the planet tanks, then so does everything else. That’s why I think we should raise money for recycling bins on campus. It’s sad that we don’t have any way for the whole school to recycle!”

  “I agree about the planet and stuff,” a mousy blonde in the front row says. “But I think we should be raising money to redecorate the campus. Our campus environment is so bland. I mean, even if we could just paint everything purple—”

  The room erupts in a noisy shouting down of purple paint. “Hang on!” Becca yells. “We have to do something that we’re actually allowed to do! I don’t think they’ll let us just repaint the school, even if we want to.”

  Lunchtime always goes so fast when we have a meeting, and today is no exception. Elisa gives Becca the sign that time is running out. “Okay, well, think of what cause you want to work for and we’ll talk next week. Until then…” She passes out bright orange fliers. “We need these put up all over campus. We’re holding auditions next Friday after school in the theater, and we need a lot of people to be there to audition their acts. Please talk about it to your classes. Tell them about the raffle prize, even if we don’t know what the charity will be. See you next Friday. And please plan to do something in the show. The more outrageous, the better!”

  We walk toward P.E., which will be especially awful with the temperature hovering around hellish. “Why don’t you come over after school and we’ll go swimming?” Becca suggests. “Thea is picking me up. She says the extreme heat is bad for my adolescent chi.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Exactly. But if it gets me a ride home, I’m all over it.”

  We get to her house (after being lectured by Thea about our ying and yang and chi), and strip off our clothes as quickly as possible. There is no comfortable clothing in Southern California during a September heat wave.

  “Race you!” Becca yells from her room as I’m still struggling into one of her spare suits in the bathroom. It looks bad, of course; she’s a lot taller than I am, and it kind of hangs on me, but since it’s just us, it doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of best friends; you can look like you’re wearing an ill-fitting spandex baggy and they just don’t care.

  The plunge into the water is heavenly, shocking, numbing, invigorating. Exactly the prescription for my first full week without even the hope of love and affection. As I rise to the surface, I feel Becca’s stupid shark grabber toy poking at my head. “Cut it out!”

  She makes the shark talk to me. “Are you feeling depressed, baby?” she asks in her best gravelly shark-from-Jersey voice. “C’mere, let ol’ Jaws show you what a real French kiss feels like!” The plastic fish’s mouth is opening and closing spastically while Becca makes disgusting smoochy noises.

  I slap it away, but can’t help laughing. “Probably the best date I’ll have this year.” I pull myself out of the pool, grab a sun-warmed towel, and take a moment to enjoy the fuzzy loveliness of being wrapped in fluff.

  “Seriously, though, you’ve got to snap out of it.” Becca rubs sunscreen on her shoulders. “You can’t let it ruin your life!”

  “Easy for you to say,” I mutter, the words slipping out before I can even think about them.

  Frosty silence. “What?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.” I try to grab the sunscreen from her, but she snatches the bottle away and stares at me over the tops of her groovy movie-star sunglasses.

  “Easy for me to say? Why? Because I’m a big loser and I’ve never had a boyfriend?”

  “You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

  She eases up a bit. “Sure.” She stands at the edge of the pool, body straight and perfect, and she slices into the surface of the blue-green water with barely a splash. It’s a miracle she hasn’t had a boyfriend. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Most guys are too afraid of her to bother, though, but if one ever gets past that…well…I don’t want to think about what it would be like without Becca now that I’ve had life with her. I realize that sounds kind of stalker-obsessive Selena-fan-club-lady-ish, but she seriously changed my life, and now that this thing with Fletcher has twisted toward dysfunction, she’s probably the only thing that will keep me sane.

  She cleanly undulates through the water, touches the other side of the pool, and comes back, barely coming up for air. When she does emerge, her blond spikes come first, and she looks like a punk Statue of Liberty being dredged from the New York harbor.

  “What are you going to do for the show?” She towels off and plops down next to me on a green lounge chair.

  “Hmmm?”

  “What is your act going to be?”

  I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Act? I’m not doing an act!”

  Her jaw drops in exaggerated surprise. “What? You’re not going to get up in front of a bunch of people and bare your soul? You? The princess of intimacy?”

  I concentrate on rubbing lotion on my legs. “I don’t think that has much to do with the show. The fact is, I have no talent.”

  “You do. I’ve seen you dance.”

  “Right. I’m going to get up in front of the school and pull a Napoleon Dynamite? I don’t think so.”

  She stretches her arms behind her luxuriously. “Anyway, I was thinking karaoke would be more the thing.”

  Karaoke. Just the word makes me nauseous. I think of that stupid party, and the song…. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  “Flushing the toilet won’t make it go away!” she calls after me. I think she means my discomfort.

  When I get home on Saturday (after spending the night at Becca’s), I find that Euphoria and my dad have a new hobby—they’re trying to build a mate for her. They’re in the garage pounding and welding and riveting something.

  “So, Euphoria’s consulting on this, huh?” I ask. She’s hovering over my dad, holding one of those snake-necked car mechanic lights in one of her claws.

  “I want to be sure he gets the hardware wired correctly,” Euphoria drawls. “With Fred, things just never were right.”

  Dad pauses, looks up and says, “He had a screw loose!” He laughs as if he’s the Last Comic Standing, while Euphoria and I both just stare at him. “Well, fine. I thought it was funny. He’d think it’s funny too, if he were functional.” He taps on what I suppose is the head (made from aluminum hubcaps and a silver stereo speaker) and says, “We guys have to stick together, right, Eugene?”

  “Eugene?” I pick up a bundle of fiber-optic cable lying on the worktable. “You couldn’t think of a better robot name than Eugene?”

  “Suggestions?” Dad asks, as he focuses on the inner workings of Eugene’s processors with a soddering iron and a pair of tweezers.

  “I don’t know…something more scientific or mechanical. Albert, maybe. Einstein, Galileo, Kawasaki.”

  Euphoria beeps loudly. “I like Eugene. It makes him seem more approachable and open.”

  “More human?”
<
br />   “Exactly.”

  “Considering he has car parts for ears, that’s kind of ironic.” I pick up a rag and wipe a stray spot of grease from Euphoria’s neck plate.

  Dad squints at Eugene’s rivets and says, “Thea called me about the Halloween party, and she’s offered to help get it organized, and decorate the house, and help get some of the food together.” He snaps some part into place on Eugene’s hubcap head. “There. Now all we need is some programming and a battery.”

  “Thea is going to help you cook?” I can’t help laughing. “I don’t think Thea has ever actually made anything herself. That should be interesting. I bet her idea of helping is to make Meredith come over and help you.”

  “We don’t need help, anyway,” Euphoria says, sounding kind of hurt. “We’ve managed just fine for this long.”

  “Still,” Dad says, grunting with the exertion of standing Eugene upright, “I think it would be a good idea to have another parent involved. These girls are pretty wild. I don’t think the two of us could possibly keep them contained, Euphoria.”

  I spend the weekend in something of a daze. Becca calls to talk about our upcoming GeekFest auditions. I do homework. I lie on my bed and stare at the phosphorescent stars glued to my ceiling. I count them. Every time I count them the number is different, which makes me wonder if it’s me or if some weird warp in the space/time continuum is messing with my mind. Probably I just can’t count.

  Monday begins an endless week of trying not to think about what a mess I’ve made of my life. All I do is go to class, sort of pay attention, eat lunch with my friends (and I barely talk), and go home every single day. I spend a lot of time swinging on the porch swing, playing a game with myself about whether or not I can get my leg to go between the banisters without getting it jammed and broken. Dad hovers around me, maybe sensing the deep emotional pit I’ve thrown myself into. “Want to go to a movie?” he asks.

  “No.” Movies remind me of Fletcher.

  “How about ice cream?”

  “No.” Ice cream reminds me of Fletcher.

  “Maybe we could take a road trip over the weekend to Lake Tahoe.”

  “No.” Four of the letters in Fletcher’s name are also in the name Lake Tahoe. It’s a good thing I’m totally over him or it might really start to get in the way of my life.

  Friday finally comes, and it’s time for auditions after school. We’ve plastered the campus with Day-Glo orange posters advertising our fantastic raffle and the GeekFest, and I hear some kids talking about it. Mr. Willfield meets us at the door to the theater.

  “So, just be careful that you don’t let anyone touch any of the set pieces,” he is telling Amber as I walk up. “Especially the barn and the shoe. People like to climb in the shoe, and it’s only made of chicken wire and paper, so they could put a foot right through it.”

  “Put a foot right through a shoe!” I quip, laughing uproariously at my own stupid joke. Somebody’s got to do it. Obviously, I’m turning into my dad and will have a long, painful life full of puns, and my only friends will eventually be people who laugh at those Jackass movies. Okay, probably not even the Jackass people. They prefer physical humor, especially it if involves the mutilation of body parts or the disbursement of embarrassing fluids. I’m doomed to a pun-filled life of loneliness.

  Amber knocks on my head as if I am a wooden door. “Hello? Did you hear what he said?”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr. Willfield said that we have to be careful with the set pieces for their show, and that we should just leave the lights the way they are,” Amber says, all business. “Did you make the audition forms, by the way?”

  Oops. Fortunately for me, Becca rolls up at just that moment. “I made them.” She produces a very optimistic stack of paper.

  Mr. Willfield looks a bit nervous about leaving his theater for us to ruin. “Just be careful,” he says, waggling a finger at me specifically. “I’m leaving, and I’ve arranged for someone else to lock up the theater when you’re finished. Just leave it the way you found it, that’s all I ask. Oh, and no food or drink in there.”

  He waves with one hand as he heaves a heavy leather bag onto one shoulder and marches off toward the teacher’s parking lot. Elisa, who’s just navigated through the swarms of sweaty teenagers stampeding to get home, watches him speed off. “For a short guy, he walks really fast,” she comments.

  “It’s the art,” Amber says airily. “It just makes you live life more deeply.”

  As we follow her into the dimly lit theater, Elisa mumbles, “So, what are the rest of us doing? Paddling in the shallow end?”

  Within a few minutes, Amitha, Caroline, and Claudette appear, and Becca assigns them to door duty, where they are to give out audition forms to the willing victims who show up. The rest of us take seats in the front row, and wait.

  After about fifteen minutes, the small talk has sort of gotten tired, and Becca cranes her neck toward the back of the theater, frowning. “Where is everybody?”

  After another fifteen minutes, she charges into the lobby. Then, followed by Amitha and the sisters, she trudges back into the theater looking forlorn and dejected. “Nobody came. Not one person,” she says.

  “Yeah, I wonder why people would stay away from something named GeekFest?” Elisa says.

  “Shut up.” Becca plops back into her seat and the other girls join us. “Now what?”

  “Well,” Caroline says, “why don’t we just do it ourselves?”

  “Who’s gonna pay to see us do anything?” Elisa snorts.

  “It’s all how you package it,” Claudette says, thumping her chair arm for emphasis. “If we make it look good, it will be good.”

  Becca jumps up, somewhat revived. “That’s right. So, do we have a theme or something?”

  “Art coffeehouse. Bohemian.” Amber closes her Cleopatra eyes and envisions some beatnik paradise. “But that would be hard to do in here. We need a smaller place, with tables and candles and espresso…”

  “We have to do it in here so we have enough seats to sell enough tickets to get enough people interested!”

  “Why exactly are we doing this?” I hear my voice as if it’s outside my body. “Isn’t this a lot of effort for nothing?”

  Becca drops her chin and stares at me with the bird-of-prey stare she gets when she’s really pissed. “Excuse me?”

  “Just listen.” I get up from my chair, walk to the front of the scuffed black stage, and hoist myself up so I’m sitting on the edge. “We need a reason to do this, a reason to care about it. That’s probably why no one auditioned. There’s no purpose, no focus.”

  “Or they just prefer to play video games and watch TV,” Elisa offers.

  I ignore her. “If you really want this to work, we have to have a real reason that we want to do it, other than perpetuating our own little club.”

  Everyone just sits there, staring into space. I hear dust bunnies kicking each other. I understand their frustration.

  “Let’s raise money for a juice bar,” Elisa says.

  We all stop and stare at her genius. A juice bar! Who wouldn’t want that? Smoothies every day, whenever. That would be an amazing thing. “And once the smoothie bar is up and running, the money made could help keep it going.” Elisa whips out Wembley and does some calculations. “If we sold about twenty per day at four dollars each, I think we could do it. That is, if we have enough money to start, to get equipment and stuff.”

  “Somebody will have to ask permission from the office,” Amitha cautions.

  “You’re the designated geek,” Becca says. “They love you up there. You get perfect grades, and you’re in Key Club.”

  So, after a few more minutes of pointless chatter and excitement, we leave since no one is auditioning. Everyone whips out cell phones and calls for rides, but I slip away and head for the street on foot. Why? Even though we’re about to embark on this big juice bar adventure of embarrassment, all I can think of is how much it won’t matter because n
obody loves me. I know this sounds ridiculously pathetic, but once again I start to wallow in the swamp of self-imposed rejection. I decide to walk home. As I get to the street, I hear monster footsteps pounding on the pavement behind me. Becca catches up, barely panting at all. “Hey,” she says, putting an arm around my neck. “Trying to run away?”

  “Just wanted to be alone.” I keep walking, leaving her a few steps behind, amazed.

  “Alone?” She scurries to me and matches my pace. “Why?”

  I kick at a stone on the sidewalk. “I don’t know. I’m just not good company.”

  “Is this about Fletcher?” She sounds annoyed.

  “No,” I answer. “It’s about me, I think.”

  “Listen, Shelby, you have got to snap out of this.” She hustles in front of me and blocks my path. “You’ve become this totally different person. Why don’t you just call him, or just let it go?”

  “He’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.” I think about all the phone messages he left, all the times my phone was vibrating and I ignored it. Maybe it’s me who doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. But it sure doesn’t feel like that.

  “You know that’s not true.” She strides silently beside me, waiting for an answer. Do I know it’s not true? I think back to our date at the restaurant, the movies, just hanging out…. I don’t know. She says, “I have a great idea.”

  “That’s one of those phrases that makes the skin on the back of my neck crawl.”

  “No, seriously. I have a plan for you to get him back.”

  I stop, and she continues on for a couple of steps (because someone her size just doesn’t brake quickly), and I just stare at her in disbelief. “You want to do another project that is about me getting my boyfriend back?”