A Catastrophe of Nerdish Proportions

by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  No wonder it had taken the ThreePees three days to set this up. The whole room had been booby-trapped!

  “Don’t do it, Kiki,” I warned.

  “Too late, skinny-chubby…It’s done.”

  Kiki pressed the ON button, and the fans whirred to life.

  “Take cover!” I yelled, as if I were in the army. “INCOMING!”

  Beanpole and Q didn’t budge, because they had no idea what I was talking about.

  Seconds later, paint began to fly, splattering everywhere. Feathers and glitter and felt strips swirled about. Within seconds, we were in the middle of a hurricane.

  I tried the door again. Still locked.

  I tried to turn off a fan, but couldn’t see any buttons on it, because of the ever-increasing typhoon of arts and crafts.

  Finally, all I could do was try my best to block my face as art materials showered us from all angles. Purple, green, yellow, red. It was like being inside the middle of a cyclone.

  Then it stopped. Just stopped. Faintly, I heard a voice.

  “That’s enough, Kiki. That’s enough!” It was Sofes. “You said it wouldn’t be that bad.”

  Kiki laughed. “You get that?” she asked Brattany. “’Cause I can turn them back on.”

  “No, don’t,” Sofes protested.

  Brattany lowered her phone, checked the playback screen, and smiled. “Got it. Got it all.” She smirked wickedly, then laughed. “Wonder how many hits this one will have on YouTube?”

  “I wonder how long they are going to sit stuck in there before they’re discovered,” Kiki responded.

  Sofes wrinkled her brow. “You mean we’re not gonna let them out? What if they supplicate?”

  “You mean, suffocate,” Kiki said, correcting her.

  “Yeah, what if they suffocate?” Sofes repeated.

  “There’s air in there,” Kiki replied. “And fumes, too, I imagine.”

  Kiki high-fived Brattany and hooted, “Double-double nice-nice.” With the recent budget cuts, our school had an art teacher on campus only three days a week, and today, Friday, wasn’t one of them. That meant that it might not be until after the weekend before we’d be discovered.

  I gazed at Q. Paint, feathers, and sparkles decorated her forehead. She looked like she’d been mugged by a gang of preschoolers.

  “Well,” Sofes said, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of abandoning us in a locked room, “what if they starve to death?”

  Kiki glanced at us. “I’m sure the porky one will eat the other two before that happens. Now, come on, let’s go before someone comes.”

  “But wait,” Sofes protested. “We can’t just leave them in there.”

  “Oh, yes, we can,” Kiki shot back. “And we will.”

  Sofes didn’t challenge her further.

  “Hey, nerds, we’ll leave the key in the lock for you,” Kiki said, dangling a set of silver keys in the window where we could see them. “All you have to do to get out is get out to unlock the door and then you can get out.”

  “Like Houdini,” Brattany said as she high-fived Kiki one more time, their payback for what had happened to them at the talent show complete.

  Each of the ThreePees took one final look at us from the window. Kiki stared like a military general, as if she were a battlefield commander who had just done some stern and serious damage to her enemy. Brattany wore the smile of a snob, the kind of smirk that belongs to a kid who thinks she’s better than everyone else and likes rubbing their noses in it. Sofes, however, bit her bottom lip and twirled a strand of hair. She looked worried, concerned. For her, this was a prank that had gone too far.

  “Come on,” Kiki said. “We are outee.” A moment later, their heads dipped down below the window frame and they were gone, out of sight.

  I turned to Q. “You okay?”

  Slowly, she reached for her inhaler.

  Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp. Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp.

  “How ’bout you, Beanpole?”

  Beanpole raised her eyes but didn’t speak. Hurt, betrayal, and disbelief filled her face. I stared for a sec, completely unable to imagine how long a bath it was going to take to get all the paint and glitter off her body. This was what happened when you let bygones be bygones, I thought. People mowed you down.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said, trying the door handle again.

  Still locked.

  Beanpole lifted her phone to make a call. She pushed a few buttons, then stopped.

  “Ruined.” She looked at her device, which had been drenched in paint. “Totally destroyed.”

  Q and I quickly checked our cellies. “Great, no bars.”

  “I just wanted to bury the hatchet,” Beanpole explained, half apologizing to us, half trying to figure it out for herself. A tear filled with glitter fell from one eye. “I just thought that we should, you know, all try to get along.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew things could never be good between girls like them and girls like us. Meanness was in their blood. And stupidity was clearly in ours.

  The only sound in the supply room came from Q.

  Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp. Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp.

  One hour and forty-five minutes later, as we sat stranded in the art room, a click broke the silence.

  “What the stuffings happened to you?”

  Vice Principal Stone, a tall, gray-haired, medium-bellied old guy in a bright red tie, walked through the door.

  Of course, we Nerd Girls are a lot of things, but one thing we are not is snitches.

  “Nothing,” I said, a fuzzy pink feather drooping from my chin.

  Neither Beanpole nor Q said a word.

  Mr. Stone stared, semi-astounded at the sight of us. He waited for more of an explanation. We didn’t give him one. A gap of silence followed.

  Finally, seeing that he wasn’t getting anywhere with us, Mr. Stone shifted the black walkie-talkie he was carrying from his left hand to his right, and noticed that Beanpole was holding a cell phone.

  “Why didn’t you call someone?”

  Beanpole lifted her phone. “Destroyed.” She was so sad I thought we were going to have to have a funeral for this thing, like it was some sort of fluffy pet that had died or something.

  “No bars,” I commented, lifting up my phone.

  The vice principal tried to assess the situation. Mr. Stone was one of those old-time guys who had been around this school for, like, thirty years, and I could tell by the look on his face that he almost wished he’d never opened that door.

  After rubbing his temples in an I already have a migraine from this way, the VP slowly raised his walkie-talkie to his lips.

  “Stone to office. Stone to office. Copy.”

  No answer. The VP rolled his eyes and tried again.

  “Stone to office. Stone to office. Copy.” Mr. Stone gazed around the room. He had to have been thinking, What a disaster.

  “You realize I’m less than one year away from retirement, right? I mean, I don’t need this,” he said. “I don’t need this at all.”

  None of us responded.

  “Stone to office, Stone to office. Do you copy?!” he repeated, raising his voice. “Oh, come on,” he said in frustration to his walkie-talkie.

  “Um, how’d you find us?” Beanpole asked, a Popsicle stick dangling in her hair.

  “Anonymous tip,” he answered. Suddenly, a voice crackled from the radio.

  “Copy, Mr. Stone. G’head.”

  “Finally,” he said before speaking into the radio transmitter. “I need a hose, some soap, and three top-to-bottom Aardvark outfits from the PE room sent back to the C wing of the campus. Copy.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end, as if whoever was listening was struggling to understand the request.

  “Uhhh…why? Copy.”

  Mr. Stone glared at the three of us before responding.

  “Looks like we got ourselves a little situation with some of our scholars.”

  “Isay we kill
them. I say we rip off their perfect little noses, pluck out their pretty little eyelashes, and feed their earlobes to the birds,” I snarled as we sat in the waiting area out in front of Principal Mazer’s office. “And that’s just to start!”

  “Maybe we should consider turning the other cheek?” Beanpole offered.

  I stared in disbelief. “Did you just say, ‘Turn the other cheek’?”

  “Yeah, you know, like end this now, before it escalates even further.”

  Beanpole shuffled in her seat and did her best not to get any paint smudges on the brown chair. Even after having been demolished by the ThreePees, she remained thoughtful and considerate. Really, I didn’t understand the girl at all.

  “The only cheek I’m turning is my butt cheek, so they can pucker up and kiss it! I mean, it is ON now. To-ta-lee ON!” I said.

  “Yeah,” added Q, with a sinister glint in her eye. “Those witches need to pay.”

  “Think about your phone, Beanpole,” I reasoned. “Think about what they did to your brand-new, innocent, never-harmed-a-hair-on-anybody’s-head, defenseless little phone.”

  Conveniently, she changed the subject. “How’re your arms, Alice?”

  “Still tingly,” Q replied, gazing down at her left elbow. Though we’d taken showers in the girls’ locker room—pretty much a nightmarish experience even when you don’t have blue paint speckling your armpits—our bodies still had traces of the art blizzard all over them. “Lucky for me they only used acrylic-based materials. If they’d used oil-based paint, it could have been real trouble.”

  I caught a reflection of myself in the glass of the window behind me.

  “Jeez Louise, we look like human Picasso puppets. And…achoo! I have sparkles in my nostrils.”

  “Bless you,” Beanpole said.

  “Ooh, we’re gonna get those witches,” Q said, flashing her best Wild West gunfighter look. “And I mean good.”

  Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp. Wheee-bubble-bubble-grrp.

  “That thing still works?” I asked, nodding at her inhaler.

  “Far as I can tell,” she replied.

  I stared for a second. “Open,” I said.

  Q opened her mouth.

  “Yep, just fine. Aside from the fact that your tongue is neon green, I’d say your scuba tank is just hunky-freakin’-dory.”

  Q stuck out her tongue and struggled to see her reflection in the window behind us.

  “Ooh, I’m gonna get those witches,” she said. “We are gonna…” Suddenly, she clammed up in midsentence.

  I looked up. The ThreePees approached.

  Kiki, always in the middle, always up front, stepped forward. “Nice school spirit, ladies,” she said to us in a taunting voice. “Love the clothes. But what made you all decide to wear Aardvark PE outfits today?”

  Brattany struggled to contain her giggles.

  “For your information, we’re nerdvarks,” Beanpole snapped, as if that were really telling her something.

  Kiki paused. “Nerdvarks?” She processed the information.

  Oh no, I thought. Where in the world had that come from?

  “Ha! That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard,” Kiki said with a laugh.

  “We’ve got to put that in the YouTube title somewhere,” Brattany noted. “Nerdvarks…that’s brilliant.”

  “Okay, okay, enough of the chitter-chatter.” Mrs. Rumpkin, the roundish, crotchety, looks-kinda-like-a-bulldog school secretary, came over to separate us into two groups before there could be any more hostile interaction. “You girls, over there; you stay here. The principal will be right out.”

  The ThreePees didn’t exactly hustle over to the spot across the way where the secretary had pointed.

  “NOW!” Mrs. Rumpkin snapped. “And I don’t want any shenanigans, either, you got me?!”

  The ThreePees, not daring to push it with Mrs. Rumpkin—few kids ever did—waggled off to a spot about thirty feet away, on the other side of the office. Mrs. Rumpkin returned to a desk covered with papers and yellow sticky notes and all sorts of school memo things, and scowled, defying either group to interact so she could go all bulldog crazy on us.

  None of us risked it. Besides, we’d all be in the principal’s office soon enough. Forgetting the ThreePees for a moment, I turned to Beanpole.

  “Nerdvarks?” I said. “Why would you give them that kind of ammunition?”

  “Because,” Beanpole said as she sat up tall and with pride, “I’m not ashamed to be a nerdvark.” Just then, she realized she was sitting beside a water fountain. Deciding to take a drink, she bowed her head, leaned over, and pressed the button with grace and dignity.

  A huge stream of water blasted her in the face. Slowly, she turned back to me, her nose, chin, and cheeks dripping wet.

  “We’ve already talked about this,” she continued, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, even though water droplets were hanging from her nose. “We’ve just got to come to terms with the fact that we are who we are.” And then, to drive her point home, Beanpole once again straightened her spine and attempted to take the drink she had been unable to take a moment prior.

  She leaned forward, pressed the button, and splash! got blasted by a huge stream of water for a second time.

  She turned to us with a face so wet it looked as if she’d been bobbing for apples.

  “I think it’s broken.”

  “Nawww,” I said. “Ya think?”

  Q pulled a few tissues out of her belt holster—why she was wearing that thing on her PE shorts, I had no idea—and handed them to Beanpole.

  “Thank you,” Beanpole said as she blotted her face dry. However, when Kleenex gets wet, it sort of sticks to your skin, and a moment later, Beanpole looked up at me with all sorts of white tissue dots stuck to her face.

  “What?” she said. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “You realize that you will never have a boyfriend if you keep this up, right? I mean, unless you have a growth spurt and sprout breasts the size of beach balls, you might as well start shopping for cats.”

  Beanpole turned to Q. “Is it that bad?”

  “Cat pee is my kryptonite,” Q replied.

  Just as Q began picking white fuzz off Beanpole’s mug, Principal Mazer threw his door open and took a long, hard look at us.

  What a sight we must have been. Loaner PE clothes that didn’t fit well. Spots of half-washed-off paint and sparkles all over our bodies. One of us with a face that was peppered with dots and dashes of white tissue. And, of course, on the other side of the room sat the ThreePees, perfectly coifed and attired.

  Principal Mazer pointed. His message was loud and clear. “Inside. Now!”

  Heads down, we marched in, the ThreePees following behind us. Mr. Stone, the vice principal, was already inside, sitting in a worn chair in the corner, clearly annoyed that he had gotten caught up in all this nonsense.

  “Ladies,” Principal Mazer said, taking a seat behind his big wooden meant-to-scare-the-crud-out-of-kids CEO-style desk, “it’s time we had a little chat.”

  “But I’m not even sure why we’re here,” Kiki replied in her best I’m an innocent little angel voice.

  “Let’s not play games, Miss Masters,” the principal said.

  “But really,” Brattany commented, “we have no idea why we’re even in this office right now.”

  “Yeah,” Sofes added. “Like, when they were locked in the art room for the accidental art tornado, we, like, totally have an abibli.”

  Kiki hung her head in an I can’t believe she just said that way.

  “You mean, an alibi?” Principal Mazer responded.

  “Uh-huh,” Sofes said, her ponytail bouncing up and down. “One that’s rock solid.”

  “I’m sure it is, Miss O’Reilly. I am sure it is.”

  Kiki shot Sofes a look filled with laser beams. Sofes shrugged as if to say, What’d I do?

  “Now, this little competition/rivalry thing has gotten out of hand.�
�� Principal Mazer set his hands on his desk, interlacing his fingers. “And I want it to stop.”

  “But…” Kiki said.

  “Removing eyebrows, painting bodies,” Principal Mazer continued, without allowing Kiki to finish her thought. “I want this to cease, you understand? NOW!” Principal Mazer is a firm, short man. Not Oompa Loompa short, but short enough so that he is pretty much always the shortest adult in the room. “The pranks. The games. The competition. No more! This ends now, or else.”

  “Or else what?” Brattany asked.

  “Or else,” Principal Mazer replied in a menacing tone. “PPWB.”

  Each of us looked around at the others.

  “What’s that?”

  “Trust me, ladies, you do not want to know.” He rose from his chair, a stern frown covering his face. “I am going to have to pay two custodians overtime to deal with that mess, not to mention the cost of the supplies. And with our school budget the way it is, I mean, I ought to just…” He paused and took a moment to compose himself. “Look, kids make mistakes. I get that,” he said. “They deserve second chances, too, and I like to consider myself a fair man. But this ends now; am I clear, ladies? No more.”

  None of us responded. Mr. Stone glared at us from the corner of the room, silent but highly agitated. I could tell that if he had been in charge, we would have been paying a much heavier price.

  “I said, AM I CLEAR?!”

  “Yes,” “Uh-huh,” “Clear,” we replied.

  “Then out!” he ordered. “Before I lose my temper and change my mind.”

  “But we have an abibli,” Sofes interjected, trying to stick to the original game plan she had clearly cooked up with the Three-Pees prior to being summoned to the office. Principal Mazer glared. “I mean, alibi,” she said, softly correcting herself.

  “I’m warning you, I come from the school of positive discipline, but if I have to take this to the next level, I will. And trust me, nobody will be happy if I do.” Principal Mazer pointed toward the door, our time with him done.

  The six of us walked out of the office, past the secretary, and left the building. The final period would be ending soon—there were only, like, two minutes left in the day, so there was no need for us to return to class.