Geek High

by Piper Banks

  This is what it must be like to be Charlie, I thought, restlessly kicking at the bedsheets that were twisting uncomfortably around my legs.

  My best friend, Charlie, has chronic insomnia. She goes through manic periods where she doesn’t sleep for days—she just stays up all night painting. And then when she does finally sleep, she stays in bed all day long. She used to take medication to even out her moods, but she said it sapped her artistic creativity, and she stopped taking it. And her parents have this hippie, antimedication philosophy, so they let her do it. Although sometimes, when Charlie’s been up for three days straight, and is talking so fast the words are tripping on their way out of her mouth, I have to admit I question her parents’ judgment on that call.

  Sadie’s tried-and-true method for falling asleep is to wash down several peanut butter–smeared Ritz crackers with a glass of cold milk. It had always worked for me in the past, so I tossed the comforter aside, slid out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and padded down the hallway.

  I reached the foyer and took a left. The marble tile felt cold and hard beneath my bare feet. I had just reached the door to the kitchen and was about to walk through it when I heard voices: Dad and Peyton were in there. I quickly stepped back before they saw me. I had no interest in another uncomfortable conversation with my dad, who seemed intent on pretending that we had a great father-daughter relationship, or enduring another of Peyton’s narrow-eyed, nostril-flaring stares. I was just turning, about to retreat back to the guest room, when I heard my name.

  “This must be hard on Miranda, what with her mother just up and leaving,” Dad said. “I honestly don’t know what Sadie was thinking.”

  I froze, listening intently.

  “She obviously wasn’t thinking. Face it, the woman is a flake,” Peyton said.

  Anger burned in my throat, and my hands clenched into fists. How dared the Demon call Sadie names? It was one thing for me to complain about Sadie’s flakiness, but an entirely different matter altogether when Peyton did it.

  “I don’t see why, just because she decides to go tooting off to England, we should have to turn our lives upside down,” Peyton continued. “For God’s sake, she didn’t even check with us first.”

  “I thought you were happy that Miranda was staying with us,” Dad said.

  What on earth gave him that idea? I wondered. Peyton practically hissed every time I walked in the room.

  “Oh, I am,” Peyton said, sounding completely insincere.

  Yeah, right, I thought.

  “It’s just…Miranda…well, she’s just a bit…odd,” Peyton said.

  My face flamed, and my stomach felt pinched and sour. I knew Peyton didn’t like me and resented my living there, but having her call me odd was somehow worse. Odd. It made me sound…defective.

  “Odd?” Dad asked. And I was glad to hear that he sounded almost angry.

  “It’s not that she’s not a lovely girl,” Peyton hurried on. “I’m sure she is. It’s just that she’s exactly the same age as Hannah, but she acts so much younger. Miranda’s, well…less sophisticated than girls her age normally are these days.”

  I waited for Dad to tell Peyton off. After all, what kind of a parent could listen to someone make such catty comments about their kid and not get upset? And surely he wasn’t buying that whole I’m sure she’s a lovely girl crap.

  But my dad didn’t get mad. He just sighed and said, “Well, Miranda’s always been young for her age. She’s a late bloomer.”

  My jaw dropped at this. He was agreeing with her? Sure, late bloomer sounded a heck of a lot better than odd, but didn’t it amount to the same thing? They thought I was a freak. An odd, late-blooming freak.

  “I don’t want Hannah to feel uncomfortable,” Peyton said. “This is her home, after all.”

  “I think it will be good for Miranda to be around Hannah. Hannah could be a role model for her,” my dad, aka the Traitor, said.

  I heard a noise that sounded a lot like Willow does when she’s hacking up a glob of grass—I always tell her not to eat grass, but she never listens to me—and only belatedly realized that the noise had come from me. Dad and Peyton fell quiet.

  “Hannah, is that you?” Peyton called out.

  I turned and fled, moving as quickly and quietly as I could, until I reached the guest room. I closed the door behind me and jumped into bed, pulling the white duvet up over my head. I was so angry, I was shaking.

  Hannah, a role model? If the idea wasn’t so offensive, it would be laughable. Hannah was the most shallow, the most materialistic, the most empty-headed girl I’d ever known. And she was supposed to be a role model for me?

  A few minutes later, I heard a soft knock at my door.

  “Miranda? Are you awake?” my dad said.

  I didn’t answer.

  My New Year’s Resolutions, Revised, by Miranda Bloom:

  1. Stop obsessing over Emmett Dutch, aka My One True Love, and the most gorgeous, sensitive, brilliant guy at Geek High, and instead come to grips with the fact that he doesn’t know I’m alive. Which is really sad when you consider there are only a little over one hundred kids in the entire high school;

  2. Stop obsessing about the size of my nose. Yes, it’s freakishly large, but since there’s nothing I can do about that, it’s time I came to terms with it;

  3. Avoid mirrors, so as not to be reminded of my nose;

  4. Not to let certain people—i.e., the Felimonster and her Toady —get under my skin. Instead, when they taunt me, I will raise my chin and smile at them coolly, which is sure to annoy the snot out of them;

  5. Try to find a special talent other than the math thing. Maybe I’m really a brilliant sculptress or genius botanist, and just haven’t realized it yet;

  6.

  7. Remain calm and poised at all times, just like Audrey Hepburn;

  8. Somehow find a way to survive the year.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, Dad drove me to school. Kids come from all over town to go to Geek High—some commute as far as an hour each way—so the school doesn’t operate a bus, which is just as well. I used to take the bus when I was in public school, and have not-so-fond memories of the smell—a combination of diesel gasoline, tuna fish sandwiches, and moldy sneakers.

  I was still so angry about what I’d overheard the night before that I didn’t talk to my dad on the way in. Instead, I folded my arms over my chest and stared out the window, as though the passing scenery of suburban homes and 7-Elevens were incredibly interesting. But my dad misread my silence.

  “Are you nervous about your first day of school?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What classes are you taking this year?”

  “The usual.”

  “What’s the usual?”

  “Math, English, science, history,” I said in a bored monotone.

  My dad fell silent for a moment before rallying.

  “Did your mom call you when she got to London?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not bothering to add that I’d let her call go to voice mail.

  My dad sighed and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I know this must be hard on you,” he said. “Your mom going, living in a new house, school starting up. It’s a lot of change all at once.”

  “Nope. I’m used to having my parents desert me,” I said flatly.

  After that, he didn’t say anything for the rest of the trip.

  When we got to Geek High, Dad stopped a few car lengths back from the driveway that curves up toward the school. There was a line of cars in front of him, inching slowly forward. When the Notting Hill Independent School for Gifted Children first opened thirty years earlier, it was so small the entire school fit in a three-story Victorian-style house. But as the school’s reputation grew, and more kids enrolled, the building expanded, too. The Victorian was still there, but was now used for the administrative offices and a dining hall on the ground floor, while the low modern wings that branched out from
either side housed the classrooms. Kindergarten through eighth grades were in the east wing, and the high school was in the west.

  “You can drop me off here,” I said, unfastening my seat belt.

  “I’ll take you up to the front door,” Dad offered.

  “No, really, it’s okay.”

  The only parents who wait in line to deliver their children right to the front door are the parents of the kindergartners. Oh, and Padma Paswan’s mother, but she’s from India and really, really strict. Padma once told me that her parents have already arranged a marriage for her, and I don’t think she was kidding.

  I opened the door and slid out before my dad could argue with me. I gave him a little half wave, hoping he’d just drive off. Instead, he rolled down the window.

  “Have a great day, sweetheart! You look beautiful!” he called out.

  He was lying, of course. I’m not at all beautiful. The best that can be said of me is that, other than my freakishly large nose, I’m perfectly ordinary-looking. I have boring brown eyes, boring curly light brown hair that has an annoying tendency to go frizzy, and a scrawny build, no matter how much I eat. I know thin is in, but I’m not sexy thin…I’m little-boy thin. No hips, no boobs, no butt. Last year in creative writing class, Mrs. Gordon assigned us to write an essay on our best physical feature. I chose to write about my feet. It’s not that my feet are all that pretty; they, too, are perfectly ordinary. But since so many people have truly ugly feet, ordinary feet look good in comparison.

  I flushed bright red and glanced around, hoping against hope that no one had overheard my dad’s “beautiful” crack. But, sure enough, someone had.

  I could hear Felicity Glen, aka the Felimonster, snickering behind me before I saw her.

  “Miranda, do you think your father should be driving?” she called out as my dad pulled out of the car line, executed a three-point turn, and gave his horn a toot as he drove off. “He’s obviously blind.”

  I sighed and turned to face her.

  Why is it that the horrible girls are always so gorgeous? Felicity. Hannah. Every villainess on every television show about teenagers ever made. And the Felimonster was, annoyingly, the prettiest girl in school. She was petite and thin—sexy thin—with catlike green eyes, a perfect oval face, a little button nose, and Angelina Jolie lips. She had brown hair, too, but hers was dark with caramel highlights, and it fell in perfect shiny waves around her shoulders, seemingly immune to the humidity. And Felicity had such an extensive wardrobe, I’d once heard her claim that she had to keep a clothes diary in order to keep track of what she’d worn on each day, so that she didn’t commit the cardinal sin of wearing the same outfit twice in the same semester, horror of horrors. Today she was wearing a white linen shift and strappy brown sandals, and looked like she’d walked off the pages of a fashion magazine.

  Felicity had hated me ever since my first day at Geek Middle, three years earlier. Our social studies teacher, Mrs. Firestone, had asked a question about the Ais, a Native American tribe indigenous to this part of Florida before it was settled by Europeans. I raised my hand at the same time Felicity had raised hers, and Mrs. Firestone called on me. I’d read a book about the Ais the previous summer, so I was able to answer Mrs. Firestone’s questions, for which the teacher praised me lavishly. And from that moment on, Felicity—who apparently saw me as a threat to her position as the teacher’s pet—had loathed me, and did what she could to make my life miserable. Like making fun of my Minnetonka moccasins (which I thought were the height of cool when I was twelve). And spreading a false rumor that Sadie wrote erotic novels (romance is not erotica…they’re entirely different genres).

  Morgan Simpson, aka Felicity’s Toady, was standing next her. Morgan wasn’t nearly as pretty as Felicity, but she was every bit as vile. She was short and square, even though she was on a perpetual diet, and she wore her straight dirty-blond hair in an unflattering chin-length bob that made her round face look even rounder. Morgan’s greatest asset were her dimples, which gave teachers and other adult authority figures the mistaken impression that she was sweet-natured.

  Morgan was now laughing sycophantically at the Felimonster’s joke. “Yeah, right, because no one who could see would think she’s pretty,” she said, trying to imitate Felicity’s scornful tone.

  “Hello, Felicity,” I said, smiling over clenched teeth. “I see no one staked you in the heart over the summer. What a shame.”

  “I spent the summer at Yale, enrolled in a very selective fine-arts camp working with a voice coach,” Felicity said. She twirled a lock of dark hair around one finger and smiled coyly. Felicity’s a soprano, and, unfortunately, actually pretty talented.

  “Wow. Better not tell me any more. I might pass out from the excitement,” I said flatly.

  I turned and started to walk up the sidewalk toward the school. The Felimonster and Toady followed me to continue our conversation.

  “She met a guy there,” Morgan said, her voice gleeful.

  “Fascinating,” I said in the same monotone voice, not turning around.

  “An older guy. He’s a sophomore at Yale,” Morgan continued.

  I stopped in my tracks, closed my eyes briefly, and then, with a sigh, turned to face them. “Morgan, why exactly would you think I’d be even remotely interested in Felicity’s pathetic love life?”

  “At least I have a love life,” Felicity said, the smile fading from her face. “You’ve never even been on a date.”

  I could feel my cheeks burning again. Sadly, Felicity was right—I never had been on a date. The only guy who had ever asked me out was Danny Beck, a string-bean guy with an eye twitch, onion breath, and a photographic memory. He had been in our grade last year, and one day, in biology, had passed me a note asking me to go to the movies with him. Mortified, I quickly wrote back that I couldn’t, shoved the note across his desk, and every time I saw him after that, I looked away, avoiding eye contact.

  I still felt really bad about how I’d treated Danny, although his family moved to Tampa over the summer, so I’d missed out on my chance to apologize to him…and, possibly, my only opportunity to go on a date while in high school.

  Suddenly, I remembered Dad and Peyton’s conversation about me the night before: Miranda’s always been young for her age. She’s a late bloomer.

  Great. So when exactly was I going to bloom? When I was thirty?

  To make my dateless status even worse was the fact that Felicity spent all of last year going out with Peter Rossi, who’s a grade above us and a nationally ranked chess player. Last I heard, Felicity and Peter were still going strong, and were even spotted making out in the back row of the Orange Cove multiplex.

  “So what happened to Peter? Did he finally tire of having to wear strands of garlic around his neck when he took you out?” I asked.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in my ‘pathetic love life,’” Felicity said, smirking. She made air quotes with her fingers around pathetic love life.

  “Trust me, I’m not,” I said.

  “If you must know, I broke up with Peter ages ago. I didn’t want to be tied down when I went to Yale,” Felicity said airily. “But then I met Justin. And it was love at first sight.” She sighed happily.

  “And he’s nineteen,” Morgan broke in eagerly. She was so excited, she was practically panting. You’d have thought she was the one who had the older boyfriend.

  “Great. Thanks for telling me. My life is now finally complete,” I said.

  “You’re just jealous,” Morgan said, trying to imitate Felicity’s smirk, although it just made her look like she was constipated. Anyway, this was ironic coming from Morgan. She’d never dated anyone either, not even after she’d spread a rumor around school last year that she was easy.

  Felimonster snorted in response. “If you want my advice on how to get a guy, Miranda, I’ve got two words for you: Frizz-Ease.”

  My perpetually frizzy hair is a particularly sore spot for me, and I scowled at Felicity.
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  “Hey.” Charlie jogged up next to us. She was wearing black leggings and a diagonally striped shirt, a look that only someone as stylish as Charlie can pull off. Her short bright pink hair was pushed back in a black headband. She looked at my irritated expression, and then glanced at Felicity and Morgan, and immediately took stock of the situation.

  “Hey, Felicity,” Charlie said. She peered closer at my archnemesis, looking her over carefully. “You look different.”

  “Different how?” Felicity asked.

  “I don’t know. Just…different.” Charlie frowned for a minute. Then, suddenly, her face cleared and she snapped her fingers. “I know! You’ve gained weight, right?”

  Felicity paled beneath her golden tan. “No! I haven’t gained a single pound,” she said, looking nervously down at herself.

  “Really? Huh,” Charlie said. She shrugged. “Maybe you’re just retaining water.”

  The realization that Charlie was just screwing with her dawned in Felicity’s moss green eyes.

  “Oh, ha, ha,” Felicity hissed, and she and Morgan pushed past us, loudly saying, “Did you see what she was wearing? And what’s up with her hair? I mean, pink? God. What a freak.”

  Charlie clapped. “Excellent comeback. Really stellar. I mean it; I’m wounded. Deeply wounded,” Charlie called after them. She lowered her voice and turned toward me. “So what was that about?”

  “Felicity has a new boyfriend, and couldn’t wait to gloat about it,” I said. “Supposedly, he goes to Yale.”

  “That makes sense. College guys are all lushes, and he’d pretty much have to be drunk to go out with the Felimonster. How else could he stand to be around her?”

  I laughed. Charlie always knew just the right thing to say.

  “How’s the new pad?” Charlie asked as we started up the stone walk that led to the school.

  “Total nightmare,” I said. “Every bit as bad as I thought it would be.”