The Queen Geek Social Club

by Laura Preble

  “Who cares!” Becca’s green eyes shine maniacally. “By that point, we’ve found our girls. We’ve found Our People!”

  “And then what?”

  “Exactly.” She scoops up the fashion magazines triumphantly. “Our first step is to find a place to meet.”

  “How about the benches in front of the telecom building? I don’t think those are usually taken.” Remember the bench etiquette thing: Only empty benches can be used for activities that are not usually scheduled.

  “Yeah. That’ll work. You put in a bulletin announcement for a meeting next week at lunch. Wednesday’s a good day.”

  “Oh, but I have to have some kind of club name to give it if we want it in the bulletin. They won’t just let random students put things in there. So, is it the Campaign for Calories Club?”

  “Remember Alice in Wonderland? How about something from that?” We both ponder and reject all the various possibilities from the book: Jabberwocky Club (easily confused for linguistics), the Walrus and the Carpenter Club (but that sounds too much like something the Christian Club would do, or a Beatles fan club), Cheshire Cat Club (could be mistaken for an orthodontia support group) and Mad Hatters (a bunch of angry people wearing baseball caps).

  “How about the Queen?” I finally ask. “Remember, you were talking about the Red Queen at lunch?”

  Becca smacks herself on the forehead. “Duh! Of course I was. I wanted to tell you that the Queen is the one who is crazy, but she’s in charge. Alice is the only sane one, but she stands out because she’s not like all the others, and the Queen tries to have her killed. So, I think it should be something to do with queens.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “What about Queen Bees?”

  “No. Sounds like a quilting club.” Becca squints in concentration.

  “Speed Queens?”

  “We’d get suspended for using drug terminology. It would probably attract the wrong crowd too.”

  “Queen Geeks?”

  The name resonates with both of us, like a bolt of lightning electrifying the otherwise drab library. I am surprised the Cosmo Girl doesn’t catch fire. “Queen Geeks!” Becca says the name quietly at first, then it keeps getting louder each time she repeats it. “Queen Geeks. Queen Geeks! QUEEN GEEKS!”

  The librarian is frowning in our general direction, trying to decide if we’re dangerous or simply teenagers. She apparently decides we’re benign, because she turns her back after shooting us one purse-lipped look of disapproval.

  Becca extends her hand. “Congratulations. You’ve just witnessed the birth of greatness.”

  “Okay.” I shake her hand and wait for her to stop pumping my fist. “Queen Geeks, huh? And I’m supposed to write what in the announcements?”

  “Wait.” She rips out a piece of loose-leaf paper and scrawls across it hastily. She hands me the paper, and it reads: ATTENTION ALL FEMALES: Are you tired of clothes that don’t fit, friends who don’t care, and boys who don’t get it? Are you tired of stick-thin fashion models and magazines that say you must look exactly like them? Then come to the first meeting of the Queen Geek Social Club and join our cause, Campaign for Calories, designed to fatten up those skinny models and put the fun back in fashion! Wednesday lunch, in front of the telecom building.”

  “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll submit it. I don’t know what will happen, but I’ll give it a try.”

  “That’s great.” Becca puts an arm around my shoulder. “This is going to be the best spring ever.”

  At home that afternoon, I find Dad actually sitting on our porch, reading the newspaper like a normal human being. I half expect him to be smoking a pipe with a golden retriever at his feet. Or, perhaps, smoking a golden retriever and stepping on the pipe. “Hey, Shelby.” He waves as I dash up the steps. “How was school?”

  “Oh, kind of weird.” I sit on the old green swing, my favorite thing on the whole porch. It creaks, like it always does. “Becca wants us to start a club.”

  “Hmm. What kind? Chess or something?”

  “I don’t even play chess anymore, Daddy.”

  “Yeah. You’re too busy. So, what’s the club?”

  I tell him the whole story, complete with my fear of Twinkie accumulation, and he nods and smiles the whole time. “Queen Geek Social Club, huh? Well, it sounds like it could be fun. Why don’t you want to do it?”

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” I keep swinging, trying not to let my feet hit the white banister that lines the outside like a row of soldiers guarding our house. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?” He folds the paper up and drops it to the floor.

  “What? You think I do know? And why, by the way, are you just sitting out here? Why aren’t you out back?”

  “I finished the project and I’m taking some time off.” He sighs and stretches, puts his hands behind his head. “I need to relax a little.”

  “Well, I’ve been saying that for months. Not that you listen to me.”

  “So, back to the club. What are you afraid of?”

  “Afraid? I’m not afraid!” But even as I say it, I realize that I am. “I’m hungry. I think I’ll go in and get something to eat. You want anything?”

  “Nope, I’m fine.” He picks up the paper again, and sighs contentedly. “If you figure out what you’re afraid of, that’s half the battle, you know.”

  “Thanks, Obi-Wan.” I lean over and kiss him on the forehead. “I’ll remember that.”

  Euphoria is in the kitchen chopping tomatoes for spaghetti sauce. “Hey, Shelby,” she buzzes. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. Do we have any chocolate?”

  “Supper’s gonna be ready in about half an hour, so don’t be fillin’ up on sweets.” She has turned on the stove and is throwing onions and mushrooms into a big skillet. “Super Spaghetti tonight. Is Becca coming over for dinner?”

  “No,” I say sort of defensively. “She doesn’t live here, you know.”

  “Sorry, Miss Uptight. No need to get your widgets in a knot.”

  I grab a few chocolate cookies from a jar on the counter in defiance of Euphoria’s command. “Ha!” I mutter as I savagely bite into one and head to my room.

  “Why does everything have to be so complicated?” I say to no one in particular as I flop down on my bed. Staring at the ceiling is one of the best ways I’ve found of clearing one’s mind. It also allows you to give the appearance of deep thought without the commitment of actually doing it. But even though I try to think of stupid, unimportant things like Twinkies, that thought brings me back to Becca, and to what my dad said about me being afraid. What does that mean?

  Okay, so here’s the reason I don’t want to have some dumb club. If Becca and I find “others of our kind” then that would mean that we’re not best friends anymore, right? Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of. Or maybe what she said about the Red Queen is true: Maybe I don’t really want to be Alice, standing out from everyone else because I’m different. This is a shocking thought to me, really, because I’ve always been someone who didn’t mind being different. Maybe there’s a difference between being different and pointing it out to everyone, though.

  Thursday morning, I put in the bulletin notice with minimal argument, although the receptionist does quiz me quite a bit about the club, asking me if it’s “official” and if we have a staff sponsor, and could I spell my name, please. I give her Ms. Napoli’s name as our faculty person, which could be a potential problem since she doesn’t know anything about it, but I’m a risk taker. So, the next day while I’m listening to announcements in Mrs. Pettinger’s third period algebra, I hear the thing that Becca wrote and I turned in, apparently read by someone with dyslexia and cataracts, and a cold chill goes up my spine. “ATTENTION ALL FEMALES: Are you tired of clothes that fit, friends who don’t care about boys who can’t get it? Are you tired of sticking fashion models and magazines and looking like them? Then come to the first meeting of the Queen Geeks and joint
claws, Campaign for Calories, designed to flatten up those skinny models and put the bun fack in fashion! Wednesday lunch, in front of the telecom building.”

  I sink into my desk, trying very hard to disappear. The only good thing about this is that no one knows who put the bulletin announcement in, I guess, so—

  “See Shelby Chapelle for additional details.” Somehow, the dyslexic near-blind announcement reader got that part right.

  All eyes in the class turn to me. Mrs. Pettinger arches her eyebrows and motions toward me with a very dramatic wave. “So, Shelby. What’s that all about?”

  “Uh,” is all I manage to say. The class sort of giggles, especially the pretty girls. Pretty girls can be mean. I will not be Red Queened by the pretty girls. I sit up straight and clear my throat. “It’s a new club, Queen Geeks, and it’s for girls who want to do something besides shop, talk about boys, and worry about hair extensions.”

  “Well, that describes me,” says Spencer, the class clown. “Can’t I join, even if I’m not a girl?”

  “You’re still a queen,” somebody in the back of the room says loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be identified.

  “Well, it sounds pretty interesting,” Mrs. Pettinger says. “Now, let’s talk about probabilities.”

  Unfortunately, the only probability I become aware of all day is the one where, as unlikely as it seems, someone in every one of my classes has heard the stupid announcement. What are the odds of that? I’m sure if I’d been able to concentrate in math class, I might know the answer, but I was too busy trying to will the earth to swallow me whole. That doesn’t work, by the way.

  The lunch bell finally rings. Becca is already under our tree devouring another egg salad sandwich and a huge jug of iced tea. “Hey,” she says through a mouthful of bread. “Did you hear our announcement?”

  “Oh yes. And I kept hearing about it all morning.” I flop down onto the ground, dejected.

  “What? All publicity is good publicity! It’s great that people are talking about it. It’s creating buzz.” She tosses a banana to me. “Eat something.”

  “Becca, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. I mean, what if a bunch of people show up and they just want to be disruptive and stupid, and—”

  She puts her hand up in front her to stop me from speaking. “Wait, wait. Go back. Let’s try that once more from the top, without the negativity.”

  “Is that what Buddhists do? Just make everything okay, no matter what?” I angrily peel the innocent banana.

  “Yeah, pretty much. But look, this could really turn into something great. The meeting’s next week, so we should figure out what we want to do.”

  “It’s your idea. What do you want to do?”

  “I told you. Campaign for Calories first. World domination later. Then maybe a nice pool party.”

  This is the first time I’ve had this thought: I sort of miss the old days before Becca, when my world revolved around school, dating, and my dad. It was a small world, after all, but I knew what was going on. I never felt out of control like I do now. As I watch Becca chow down on the rest of her sandwich, I wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake befriending a giant with a dragon tattoo.

  The week ends, the weekend ends, and since Becca’s driven up to L.A. to help her mom with some “movie work” (she won’t specify what), I’m on my own except for a Saturday night date with Spencer, the class clown I mentioned from math class. We decide to see a movie, and when he tells me he has tickets to a kung fu marathon at the old Ken Theatre, I nearly decide to kill myself with popcorn and Jujubes. It would take too long, though, so I figure I’ll just sit through the karate movies and think. Spencer is so into watching the feet and fists fly that he doesn’t even notice when my answer to every question is “Absolutely, Oprah.”

  As I munch on my second Godzilla-sized tub of real popcorn in real butter (with real artery-clogging cholesterol for no extra charge!) and watch the flickering giants of martial arts, I realize how nervous I am about Wednesday’s meeting. Why? At worst, it’ll just be a bunch of strange kids getting together to hang out at lunch, right? At best, we might actually come up with something cool to do, and I might meet some other interesting people from my school. So why the anxiety? I can’t figure it out so I go to the bathroom.

  As I’m reapplying lipstick in the silvery old mirror, Jasmine Jesperson comes into the bathroom. Jasmine is probably the prettiest senior girl on campus, and why she would be at a kung fu movie marathon is a bit of a mystery, but stranger things have happened, I suppose. She stops next to me and takes a brush from her purse, and then runs it through her long golden hair. “Hey,” she says, glancing over at me in the mirror. “Aren’t you Shelby Chapelle?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Are you the one starting that geek thing?” She turns toward me, gesturing with the hairbrush. “I heard the announcement, and I was like, what’s the deal? Why are you bagging on models?” Her brown eyes drill into me maliciously.

  “We weren’t trying to offend any models—”

  “Oh, really. By saying we’re all skinny and we need to eat or something? I think that’s kind of insulting, like we don’t know how to do it and you’re going to help us. That’s insulting. I’m perfectly capable of eating by myself. I don’t need help.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I say as sympathetically as I can. The white thought bubble above my head reads PLEASE GET OUT OF THE GENE POOL! “So, Jasmine, nice to see you. Good luck with that eating thing.”

  I walk out of the bathroom, leaving Jasmine in a cloud of confusion and vanilla body spray. Maybe the Queen Geeks thing isn’t such a bad idea after all.

  5

  QUEEN GEEK SOCIAL CLUB (or Chocolate Should Be Its Own Food Group)

  Becca comes over on Tuesday night, the eve of the Queen Geeks, and we strategize for our meeting over a plate of fudge pecan brownies. I do my best thinking when chocolate is involved.

  “Okay. So, the first thing is, we need to get e-mail and cell phone info on everybody. Can you be in charge of that?” She hands me a bright periwinkle-purple clipboard with neatly printed sheets of paper attached.

  “Wow. You’re organized.” I flip through the pages. “Are you expecting hundreds?”

  “It just looks better if we have papers.” Then she hands me another paper, a flier she’s created. “What do you think of that?”

  The flier is well done; Becca knows her computer graphics. It has a picture of a ’50s-type housewife on it with an expression of utter horror; she’s wearing a crown. Next to her is a pile of fashion magazines that comes up to her waist, and she’s holding one open to a page with an ad from the current Seventeen magazine, the one with movie star-pop slut Dallas Benton and her teeny-tiny boy body wrapped in what they call “boy shorts” and a teeny-tiny bandeau bra that barely covers anything because she has no breasts to speak of. Her ribs stick out, she arches her back as if she’s having a chiropractic adjustment, and the look on her face is either Please do me or I shouldn’t have had the bean burrito for lunch. In big purple letters, it says STOP THE MADNESS! LET’S GET THIS GIRL SOME TWINKIES! Below that, it says Queen Geek Social Club. Every Wednesday at lunch, telecom benches. Be there, be square, and let’s feed those supermodels with our Campaign for Calories!

  “This is awesome.” I pin the flier to my wall, right next to the big photo of Johnny Depp (from his Chocolat period, not the time between Pirates of the Caribbean and that creepy Secret Window movie where he wears unwashed clothes and weird glasses). From across the room, the flier is eye-catching. “Once we put these up on campus, people will be going nuts!”

  “So, you like it?” Becca grabs another brownie from the plate and takes a huge chunk out of it. “I think it’s pretty cool.”

  “Definitely. Now, once we get people to the meeting, what do we do?” Brownies are calling to me, so I eat another. Never argue with baked goods.

  “I figure we won’t have a ton of people tomorrow, since the fliers aren’t
up. All they have to go on is the announcement, which probably confused people.”

  “Yeah. I submitted it and even I didn’t know what it was about. It’s too bad they don’t teach kids how to read in school anymore.” I take the flier off the wall and give it back to Becca. “So, you gonna copy these? I think lavender paper, if you’re going to Kinko’s.”

  “Could your dad take us tonight? I’d love to pass these out tomorrow to the girls who do show up.”

  I shrug. “Supposedly he’s relaxing, so I guess that would be okay. Let’s see if we can find him.”

  We go through the house looking for Dad, but instead we find Euphoria scrubbing the sink with a long-handled scrubber brush. “Hey, have you seen Dad?”

  She snorts, which for her sounds a little like a garbage disposal trying to eat a metal spoon. “Last I saw of your father, he was on the back patio ‘relaxing.’ If you ask me, he’s just bein’ lazy. Expectin’ me to scrub the sink. I rust, for goodness’ sake. That man ain’t gonna rust if he picks up a scrub brush, ya know. It’d probably take his mind off things.”

  Euphoria is still grumbling as we head for the patio. The glowing red light from the fire pit throws patterns against the latticework, and I see Dad in silhouette, sitting absolutely still, something I rarely see him do, but now I’ve seen two days in a row. “Daddy?”

  “Right here.”

  We pick our way over flagstones, brushing jasmine flowers as we pass the fence. “I love that smell,” Becca murmurs.

  “Dad, could you drive us to Kinko’s?”

  Shifting in his chair, Dad reaches over and grabs a stick, pokes at the fire pit, and doesn’t answer.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Could you drive us to Kinko’s?”

  “Oh. Sure.” He stretches, sighs, and puts some sand on the fire to put it out. “Let me just get my keys.”

  He seems old at that moment, and he slowly walks toward the house. “Is something wrong with him?” Becca whispers.

  “I don’t know.”