by Laura Preble
“Great.” She pokes her head outside and motions for someone to follow her. A burly, bearded camera guy comes in after her, shaking water out of his hair, grumbling about “human interest.” “This is Bruce, our photographer. So, Becca, we just want to ask a few questions, and then we’ll just film your meeting.”
“Oh. Okay. But Shelby here is really our spokesgeek.” She pulls me in front of her so quickly that I nearly fall over. “I need to take care of some shipping details, so why don’t you talk to her?”
Of course, this had to happen on a day when, as I said, I look, feel, and smell like a wet dog. I’m sure this will come through on television; they say you always look ten times bigger and smellier on TV. “So, Shelby, tell us about this Campaign for Calories. What’s it all about?”
Brain stall. I guess the rain did it to me, too. “Uh. Well, Campaign for Calories is a thing we’re doing to help fatten up supermodels.”
“We?” Chantal Nelson, television reporter, asks, acting as if she cares.
“The Queen Geek Social Club. That’s us.” I motion to the rest of the girls, who are all staring. They look like a herd of big-eyed deer. “Say hi, Queen Geeks.”
They come to life, snap out of their stupor, and all wave and hoot and holler.
“Great.” The woman smiles with huge white teeth the size of Scrabble tiles. “Can you tell us why you’re doing this?”
Why are we doing this? An excellent question. Because Becca told us to? Hmmm. That wouldn’t sound very good. Think, think . . . “Because we feel it’s time for high school girls to stop thinking they have to look perfect to be happy.”
“You do?” Perfect Chantal frowns slightly, as if I’ve told her some very bad news. “Why?”
“Because we don’t need to look perfect to be happy,” Amber says, standing up. “We can be just who we are. That’s enough.”
Perfect Chantal seems stuck. I don’t know what she expected, but I guess it wasn’t us. “Well, that’s a unique point of view. What do you hope to accomplish by mailing off all these goodies?”
Elisa jumps up. “We found the agency with the least favorable body-fat-to-height ratio, and we’re sending all the snacks to them. We hope they’ll feed the models.” All the other girls laugh, and camera guy Bruce busily films us all.
After a few more pithy questions, Chantal goes outside and we see her doing her little lead-in or close-out thing that the news people do. “I wonder what she’s saying?” Elisa asks, craning to read lips out the window.
Amber strikes a dramatic pose. “Probably something like, ‘There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The fate of the Western female world lies in the delicate hands of these budding activists, a blooming garden of flowers who wish to—’ ”
“You sound like a tampon commercial,” Becca calls from the back of the room, where she is busily scrawling addresses on labels. “Could some of you TV stars help me lug these boxes to my mom’s car after school? And will McLachlan let us keep them here until then?”
“Let me call my dad,” I offer. “We have the Volvo wagon. The Jeep won’t have much room.”
The photographer turns off his light, and I see them turning to leave, so I quickly duck my head out the door. “Hey, is this going to be on TV?”
She turns toward me, smiles and says, “I think the piece might run tonight at eleven. In fact, I think it might be picked up by the networks. It’s such a cute story. You girls are precious.”
“Yeah, thanks. You too.”
She doesn’t quite know how to take this, so she just throws me a little wave and tip-taps away on her high heels, dodging puddles and clusters of freshman boys who ogle her without even trying to conceal it.
Dad picks us up and we load the Twinkie boxes into the Volvo (even into the front passenger seat and beside the two of us in back); Becca calls her mom to be sure she can stay over so we can watch the news. “This is great,” Dad says as he steers through the leftover drizzle on the way home. “You girls might make a big impact.”
“That would be cool, huh?” Becca is grinning from ear to ear, and she has been since lunch was over.
“That’s just because you want to be Empress of the World,” I whisper.
“No I don’t. I want to be Queen Geek of the World.” We both start giggling like we’re about five years old.
“You two okay back there?” Dad calls from the front seat.
“Yeah, yeah. We’re good.” To Becca, I whisper again. “So, what if it does go on the national news? What then?”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when it happens. For now, let’s just get these things to the post office and off to what’s-her-name’s modeling agency.”
Dad kindly battles afternoon traffic to get us to the post office (and kindly foots the bill for mailing several hundred Twinkies, which is a lot more than you might think) and we finally end up at my house, huddling in my bedroom with a plateful of Euphoria’s chocolate chip cookies, counting down the minutes until the news is on.
“If everybody watches it, we could be famous,” Becca says between cookie bites. “I mean, people might even come to the school to see how we do it.”
“See how we do what?”
“The club.”
“We don’t even know how we do the club. We just get together and stuff happens.”
Becca sighs loudly. “It doesn’t sound very good when you say it that way.” She throws the rest of her cookie on the plate. “Yuck. How many of these have I eaten?”
“I stopped counting when I could see the bottom of the plate.” Unfortunately, there is very little but plate left, which means we managed to inhale all those yummies. Oh well. “I think we need to really ramp up the Invisible Boy thing.”
“Not before the dance!” She sits upright, a horrified look on her face. The look is somewhat softened by the big smear of chocolate across her lower lip.
“Sure, why not? It will make them appreciate us more.” To be honest, I am seriously wanting to torture Fletcher, and this is the only reason I’m pushing for the event to happen soon. It’s a way to get even with him while making it look like a positive political activity. Plus, I’m really mad about the disintegration of that bet; I had plans for that hundred dollars. “I think we should do it in two weeks. That gives us a little time to plan, and leaves a week before the dance.”
“And then we’re dangerously close to finals and the end of the year.”
That’s hard to believe, really. I mean, it seems like we just started school, that I just met Becca. To think about the year ending is not something I want to tackle at the moment. Who knows where somebody like Becca spends the summer? Paris? The Swiss Alps? I’m sure she won’t stick around here. But I decide to think about that tomorrow.
Becca has moved to my computer, a sure sign that she’s serious about moving forward with our plan. “Do you have a file started yet for Nibid?”
“What’s tha—”
“National Invisible Boy Day. Nibid. I get tired of saying it.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I tap a few keys, and my folder opens. She starts a file and begins to type furiously. “What are you doing?”
“Typing our manifesto. Could you get some milk and give me a minute?”
I leave her with the glow of my computer monitor giving a radioactive shine to her face. In the kitchen, Euphoria is using a built-in drawer in her midsection to hold the items she’s emptying from the fridge. “It looks like a science project in here,” she mutters as she throws a can of old spaghetti sauce into the bin with a bang. “Since your father is a scientist, he ought to know the harmful effects of bacteria.”
“Maybe they’re an experiment. You shouldn’t throw them out—it might be the cure for cancer or something.”
She pauses for a split second, and I see her thinking about it, but then she laughs her mechanical chuckle. “You can’t fool me, missy. If he’d wanted it saved, he probably wouldn’t have put it in the fridge.”
I grab the milk jug
. “Can’t pull anything over on you, huh?” As I pour two huge glasses, I say, as casually as I can, “So is Dad over this dating frenzy?”
“Hmmm. Do you think pickles go bad?” She’s eyeing a moldy-looking jar of green gook.
“Uh . . . I don’t think I’d eat them, so yeah, pitch ’em.” To stall for time, I rummage for a tray to put the glasses on. “So? Dad? Dating?”
“Oh. No, I think he’s done for a while. That skinny teacher got scared off, I think. He got too stressed.” She pulls out a Tupperware container full of something foul-looking. “Hmmm. He needs to invent something that will clean the refrigerator.”
I don’t say out loud that he did, in fact, invent something that cleans the refrigerator, because I think she’d find that insulting. Still, happy with the news that Dad seems safely date-free for the moment, I take my milk to my room to see what new conquests Becca has engineered.
“Ah!” she exclaims as I push the door open with my elbow. “At last! My evil assistant!”
“Why do I always have to be the evil assistant?”
“You look better in the sequined tights. Anyway, here’s what I came up with. Get comfortable.”
After I’ve snuggled up in my bed with my milk and cookies, she continues in her most authoritative voice. “Green Pines Queen Geek Social Club invites you to participate in National Invisible Boy Day. For one day only, boys will not exist to girls! We don’t see them! We don’t hear them! We don’t acknowledge their existence! Be free of them for twenty-four hours and see what a difference a day makes!”
“Beautiful.” I sigh. As she continues to proofread, I imagine the day. Fletcher comes up to me; I ignore him. He is puzzled; I ignore him. He begs for forgiveness; I yawn and ignore him. By the end of the day, he is driven insane by my total lack of interest in his existence; he loses his mind and is sent off to St. Bongo’s Home for Wayward Boys, never to be seen again. Well, maybe that last part is a little extreme. Maybe he could come back for high school reunions.
“Oh my God, it’s time for the news!” Becca screams and jumps up from the computer and we dash into the living room. The news has just started, so we have to sit through several pointless stories about kittens being rescued, kids who are born conjoined, and water-skiing squirrels. Finally, they get to our story.
“Ah! There you are!” Becca squeals as the picture on the screen narrows to include just my face.
“Do I really have that many zits? I had no idea.”
“The camera adds ten zits, everybody knows that. Turn it up!” I frantically punch at the volume button, and we catch some of newswoman Chantal Nelson’s commentary: “These are clearly girls who know what they want, and it isn’t a size ten figure.” A shot of Elisa bending over her backpack fills the screen, making her back end look ten times bigger than it really is, which is fairly large.
“Oh, that is just not fair,” Becca mutters. “Not cool.”
“And their hope is that one day, all models will be of a ‘normal’ size, thus changing forever the idea that models must be beautiful.”
“What?” Becca screams, then throws a pencil at the television screen. “She got it totally wrong!”
“Are you surprised?” I ask. “I mean, she’s one of them. If she exposes our secret plot to make them more human, the ones who aren’t will have to go back to the mother ship.”
The piece ends with some of that dopey music they play when the squirrel water-skis, and shots of us girls all laughing and packing up Twinkies. They also happen to catch Elisa eating one, which really doesn’t help put us in a good light.
“Okay, well,” Becca slumps against the couch. “At least she got our name right.”
“Great. So now everybody will know that we’re the ones who want models to stop being beautiful and be more like us.”
“Sure, you could look at it that way,” Becca answers. “Or you could say, ‘Well, why do any of us have to be beautiful? And what does that mean anyway?’”
“Too deep for me. I’m heading for the cookie plate.” I jump up and run toward my room.
With a joyous squeal, Becca is hot on my heels.
13
NATIONAL INVISIBLE BOY DAY (or What You Can’t See Can’t Hurt You)
The television spot is the talk of the school on Thursday, and it feels good to be a celebrity, even if it does mean that people keep taping Twinkies to my locker. Since the Queen Geek Social Club seems to be on a roll, we call a special meeting for lunch under our tree, with just Amber and Elisa and me and Becca, a little party to celebrate our being media darlings.
Elisa digs a big plastic bottle of fizzy yellow liquid from her backpack, and four plastic champagne glasses. “It’s just lemon mineral water with food coloring, but I figured we could pretend,” she says as she pours us all a glass of bubbly.
Becca raises her glass. “Here’s to the Queen Geeks. May we be fruitful and multiply!”
We all clink our glasses (which sounds more like a plastic thunk) and drink our toast. Elisa wipes the bubbles from her lips and says, “And I’d like to add, here’s to the Twinkies that will make a difference in some poor supermodel’s life. Once they taste fat, they’ll never go back!”
“Yeah, you know from personal experience,” Amber sniggers. “I saw you sneaking one on TV.”
Elisa goes red. “Well, that was just a sampling. I wanted to be sure they hadn’t been tampered with. We don’t want to get sued.”
“Okay. So our next move is Nibid.”
“And that is?” Amber gives her a confused squint.
“Ignoring boys, you know. Making them invisible.”
“I do that anyway. No big challenge,” she says, yawning. “And they return the favor.”
“The dance is only three weeks away, so we’d better do the ignoring day fast so we can stop ignoring them and they can ask us out,” Elisa reasons. “I, for one, do not want a repeat of last year’s eighth grade grad dance, where the only person left to go with was Jeff Hall, and he asked me and I went because I felt sorry for him.”
“Yeah, and he did that robot mime dance in front of the whole eighth grade,” Amber crows. “That was awesome!”
“Awesome if you weren’t his date,” Elisa mutters. “I got teased about that for weeks.”
Munching her way through a wilty salad, Becca says emphatically, “We do it next week.”
“Too soon!” I squeak. “We don’t have time to get ready. How can we get everyone on board? Get the word out?”
“Oh, like that’s a problem. Just start a cell phone gossip chain,” Amber says. “Haven’t you noticed how some stupid piece of gossip goes all around the school in less than a day? Why is that?”
“Uh . . .” Elisa squints at her, confused. “This isn’t gossip.”
Amber whacks her with an empty chip bag. “No, it isn’t, genius. But if we make it sound like it is gossip, it will go around the school quicker than head lice at a preschool party. So we need to make it gossipy.”
“About a person?” Becca asks, leaning against the tree. “That could be tricky. Who would our gossip be about? Who’s had anything bad happen, love-life-wise?”
All eyes turn toward me. Great.
“Oh, no,” I say, stuffing my lunch bag back into my backpack. “I’m not going to be the topic of hot gossip for the next week.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. Gossip only stays fresh for a day or so.” Elisa has retrieved her Palm Pilot and is jotting some notes on it. “Okay, so I have access to a hundred and twenty-five numbers here and I can send a simultaneous message to all of them. Then they’ll pass it on, and pretty soon it’s like the flu—everybody’s gotten it. But what’s the message?”
We all sit quietly, pondering this crucial question. Well, I was pondering why I had to be the one singled out to be the designated loser and focus of the chitchat virus. Just as I’m thinking of convincing arguments to make the gossip be about someone else (anyone else, really), Becca comes up with one of her brilliant strategie
s. Really, her talents are wasted in high school. She should either work for the government or become someone’s mother.
“Okay. I’ve got it.” She shushes everybody and gestures for them to come near. “We text everybody that Shelby has a terminal illness. And to raise money, we’re asking all the girls to participate in Nibid.”
“That is absolutely immoral. I look healthy as a horse, not to mention that it’s really tasteless. No terminal illnesses.” Honestly, the things some people will do for a little success. It makes me queasy.
“What if Shelby needs some kind of surgery?” Amber offers.
“How about we don’t lie to people?” I suggest. I mean, lying always leads to trouble, in my experience. I could just see this ending up with me on a gurney somewhere, being put under while some dude in a surgical mask asks, “And which testicle are we removing, Mr. Jones?” No thanks. “It really needs to be something that has some small particle of truth in it.”
“Well, you broke up with Anders,” Elisa points out. “That’s tragic.”
“I didn’t break up with him. You can’t break up with someone you never dated. We just got our signals crossed.”
“A contest!” Becca shouts. “A contest! Like the radio stations do. If you’re caught doing it, then you might get some really amazing prize, like a new car!”
Elisa laughs. “Where are we going to get a new car, or an old car for that matter?”
Suddenly, I receive one of those amazing ideas that usually only happen when you’re asleep, and you can’t remember the idea itself, only that you didn’t have pants on when you got it in your dream. Okay, maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I get this great idea, like a jolt of lightning through my head. “We tell them that if they participate, they get a thousand dollars.”
A stunned silence greets me. After I listen to the rewind of what I just said, I can see why they look at me like I’ve been inhaling Krazy Glue.
“Okay, that’s dumber than the car idea,” Amber snorts. “Let’s give them money if they participate?”