by Laura Preble
“No,” I say without even checking. I don’t want to deal with the potential boyfriend grilling in front of Becca. She’ll probably tell him anything he wants to know, and everything I don’t want him to know. I don’t even know what that is, but I’m sure Becca will somehow figure it out and tell him. “Let’s walk somewhere.”
We decide on the park that’s a block from my house. It has a swing set (which I still really love to play on) and tennis courts, so we take the cheap racquets and dirty, ratty tennis balls stowed in our garage. “Let’s pack a lunch too,” Becca suggests as she stuffs tennis balls into her pockets. We head for the kitchen.
Euphoria has resurfaced, and although it may be hard to believe, she looks depressed. Becca doesn’t notice; she just randomly opens cupboards and drawers, finds a plastic grocery bag, and fills it with Oreos, a box of Cheez-Its, chewy granola bars, and a container of Chinese food she finds in the fridge.
“Uh…do we really need all that stuff?” I ask.
“We need to keep hydrated.” She also throws in two cans of soda, a bottle of water, and two containers of chocolate pudding.
Euphoria sighs a deep, whiny sigh.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Oh, Shelby,” she says sadly. “Don’t fall in love.”
Becca stops her savage hunt for junk food. “Euphoria? Are you depressed? Is that possible?”
How does one handle a depressed robot? The usual remedies don’t work: chocolate, ice cream, mindless TV, sad music. “Can I do anything for you, Euphoria?” I ask.
“No, honey.” She rolls slowly toward the sink. “With Fred gone, life just doesn’t have the same glow that it did. Maybe I’ll just put my claw down this garbage disposal.”
“No!” we both yell in unison.
I grab her arm. “Don’t you see how wrong it would be? Fred would want you to go on.”
Becca turns Euphoria so she’s staring right into her optical sensors. “Euphoria, Fred is in a better place—” She glances over at me to be sure that’s right.
“He was parted out,” I sort of whisper.
“—and I’m sure he’d want you to go on, to preserve his memory. There will be other lawn mowers, Euphoria. It may be too soon, but remember this: Once you’ve loved, you are more likely to love again. Isn’t that right, Shelby?”
“Uh…I guess so.” I’m not as up on the Cosmo psychology as Becca, but I assume she’s correct.
“Now, we’re going to the park. Why don’t you go watch a movie? Maybe Forbidden Planet? I know how much you love Robby the Robot. Let him help you ease your suffering.”
Euphoria bleeps forlornly. “Maybe I’ll do that.” She wheels around and says to me, “Shelby, when you come back, do you think you could give me an oil bath?”
“Sure.” I give her a hug, and even a kiss on her shiny head. “Don’t worry. It’ll work out.”
“I suppose,” she says as she rolls toward the living room humming the theme song from Titanic.
“Wow,” Becca says as we head out the front door. “Do they make robot antidepressants?”
It’s a beautiful Saturday, not too hot, which is kind of unusual for August. Lots of little kids are orbiting around the play area, trying to get their summer fun in before the school year kicks into high gear. The only shady spot to sit is underneath a big, twisted oak tree. The swings are all occupied, unfortunately.
Becca stretches her long legs in front of her and reclines against the tree. “Ah. Weekends are like little summers.”
“Except once we start getting massive amounts of homework, there won’t be even little summers anymore.”
“Don’t be so negative.” She takes off her sunglasses and sits up excitedly. “We have so much to do. I want our first meeting to be Friday, so we need to get organized.”
The idea of doing another full-scale Queen Geek project makes me kind of queasy. I already feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of sophomore schoolwork, and then there’s Fletcher to add to the mix. Plus, my robot is in need of serious therapy, and who knows about my dad? But I know I’ll get dragged into it anyway, so I guess it’s better to just face it. “What do you want to do?”
“I think on Friday we should first of all tell everyone about the website.”
“The one Jon made?”
She nods. “Yeah. We can still use it. We can link to a MySpace page and build a whole network of Queen Geeks! And then”—she pauses for effect—“we have to work on GeekFest.”
“Yeah, you said that before. What is that, exactly?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“No. Really?”
She ignores my finely tuned sarcasm. “GeekFest will be a twisted talent show and film festival. We’ll invite anyone to participate, with an audition, of course. We don’t want anybody doing just any old act. And I think we should introduce the whole thing as the Geektastic Four! I was thinking of making a movie we could show at the show.”
“A movie? When would we have time to make a movie?”
She looks a bit disappointed. She hates when I pull her helium balloon of hope to the ground and stick a pin in it. “Well, maybe that’s too much. But I do like the idea of a show.”
“Okay, so let’s suppose we do a show. Where?”
“Well, duh,” she replies, making a really dumb-looking face. “In the theater.”
“Oh. You think the drama teacher is just going to let us borrow his theater?”
She hadn’t thought of that, of course. She just assumes that whatever she wants to have happen, will happen. It’s kind of an admirable quality unless you happen to be the person who gets the task of outlining why an outrageous plan won’t work, or engineering the same outrageous plan so that it will. “Isn’t Amber in drama?”
“She’s taken a class, I think.” I send an acorn skidding across the asphalt walkway. “But let’s assume for the moment that we can get the theater. We sell tickets?”
“Sure. People don’t like things that are free. If they don’t pay for it, they think it must be lame.”
“And what do we do with the money?”
She ponders this for a moment while scratching absently at her dragon tattoo. “We…spend it?”
“On what? We’ll need to say what the money will be used for.”
She squints at me and nods wisely. “You’re right, Yoda. We do need to have a purpose. What should our cause be?”
“Let’s bring it up at the meeting.” I see a vacant swing and head over before a little kid snags it. They don’t like to share. “Many brains are better than two.”
She follows me, and when another kid occupying a swing sees her, he bolts off the seat and rushes to his mommy. Becca is, as I’ve said, pretty tall, and when she lets her tat show, it scares people sometimes. Especially little kids and old people, who I guess have an innate fear of dragons or tattoos or both.
I love swinging. It must be something to do with rocking as a baby, because there’s no other logical reasons why I should like it so much. I love seeing the ground move and the sky shift, and the grass get blurry, and colors melt far away. There’s a freedom in swinging that is hard to beat. It’s not hard to do, you don’t need expensive equipment, and even the athletically challenged can go as high as their weight and fear will allow them to go. Becca always swings higher than I do.
Her long legs slice through the air like stenciled scissors, and her pink tennies look like cotton candy against the sky. “I think it’s going to be a great school year,” she says resolutely, with just a hint of doubt in her voice.
We contact everyone and make all the necessary arrangements for the meeting to go forward on Friday. Elisa manages to convince Ms. McLachlan that we could use the room and leave it intact. (We had a bit of a mishap with some discarded Twinkies last year in the same room. Unfortunately, ants do not read the “no food allowed” sign posted near the trash can, so our smushed leftovers sent the little guys into an eating frenzy. Ms. McLachlan came in one morning
and found a boatload of ant bodies exploded on her floor. Twinkies really aren’t good for anyone.) Anyway, the week drags by and we finally get to Friday, and our all-important first meeting. Elisa, Amber, Becca, and I get there early so we can greet newcomers and such, and Ms. McLachlan stands looking puzzled as we put up our Geektastic Four posters and write the website address on the whiteboard.
A lot of the other girls from last year show up: Amitha Bargout, Claudette and Caroline (sisters), Sherrie Johnson, and tiny, mousy Cheryl Abbott, now a sophomore too. There are also a lot of new girls, some freshmen, a lot of sophomores like us, and even a junior or two. No seniors, which is to be expected. By that point they’re usually getting off campus as soon as possible, and want nothing to do with clubs of any kind.
Becca beams with pride at the number of girls in the room, nearly thirty. “Hi, everyone,” she says. “Welcome to this year’s first meeting of the Queen Geek Social Club.” She hands me a clipboard and gestures toward the left side of the room. “This is Shelby Chapelle, I’m Becca Gallagher, and we’re passing around a clipboard so you can give us your name and e-mail.” I guess I’ve been relegated to being the secretary for the club. Yawn. I sort of half-heartedly start passing the clipboard and curse my poopy attitude.
“Before we start, I’d like to introduce our four officers, myself, Shelby, and Elisa Crunch and Amber Fellerman, there in back.”
Amber and Elisa wave sort of sheepishly. Becca continues. “So, our mission here is to be a safe haven for the geeks of Green Pines. Last year, many of you know, we became kind of famous for our Campaign for Calories, where we sent Twinkies to a modeling agency in L.A.”
“You go, girl!” a very overweight girl in the front row pipes up. Everybody laughs.
“And we brought you movie hottie Brandon Keller last year, and the fantastic pirate-themed spring dance. So”—Becca is all smiles—“this year, we wanted to do something equally as great. Here’s our idea: First, we gather more and more geeks to the fold, and we do this by getting the word out on our website. Get the word out to your friends, or anyone you think would be a likely candidate for the club, even if she doesn’t live here. We want to start an online geek community too.”
A sort of Emo-looking girl raises her hand. “Yeah. If you’re just trying to get geeks, isn’t that kind of discriminatory? I mean, aren’t you asking people to put themselves into a kind of box?” I see other heads shaking a bit in agreement. “You’re stereotyping people.”
Becca pauses for a moment, and I see her strategizing an answer in her head. I know it will be the perfect answer, because that’s how it always is. It would be a huge waste if she didn’t become a politician, really. “Here’s how I see it,” she says finally. “Pretty much everybody who’s a geek knows it, right?”
The Emo girl nods. “Sure, I guess.”
“So, if you describe yourself as a geek, how am I stereotyping you? You chose to describe yourself that way for some reason.”
A steady hum rises in the room. Another win for world domination!
“Here’s the bottom line,” Becca says, motioning for quiet. “You can call it whatever you want, but if you are a smart, funny, clever person who likes quirky stuff, sci-fi, horror, books, whatever isn’t mainstream America, then I guess you could qualify as a geek. Does that mean we’re all alike? No. But we do have things in common. And isn’t that why people make clubs in the first place?”
I expect one of those scenes from movies where one person stands and starts to clap very slowly, then others rise and join in until there’s a standing ovation. Instead, everyone just sort of shrugs or makes a kind of resigned-looking face, and the meeting goes forward. Reality is never as exciting as a movie. That’s a serious design flaw, if you ask me.
“Could you guys help me pass these out?” Becca asks, waving a stack of lemon-colored fliers.
“What’s this?” I whisper as I grab a small batch and begin passing.
“GeekFest,” she whispers back. “We need to get the momentum going soon if we want to make it by Christmas.”
“Christm—” I begin to shriek, but she interrupts.
“If you look at the flier, you’ll see that one of the activities we want to do is called GeekFest. Now, this is not your run-of-the-mill talent show. This is a multimedia, integrated, state-of-the-art festival to showcase our campus’ most talented geeks. We envision film screenings, live acts, music, comedy, anything. It just needs to be good, no goofs or people just doing it to look stupid. So, that’s the basic idea, but of course, we want your input.”
She waits patiently while no one says anything. I think the new kids are kind of overwhelmed by her intense enthusiasm. As her best friend, it is my job to bail her out, so I raise my hand. “So, what kind of things might you guys want to do in the GeekFest? Oh, and did I mention that all the money we make will be going toward a goal that you decide?”
“Can we just split it up thirty ways and go buy a pack of gum?” Somebody from the back says.
“No, no,” Becca says. “We want to use the money for something good for all of us. We can talk about that later, I guess. But right now, we need to know if this is something you all want to do. If it isn’t, then we should think of something else.”
Amber stands in back. “Here’s why I think it’s a good idea.” She walks slowly toward the front of the room. “The jocks get pep vallies. The band kids get parades. Student government gets pretty much anything they want. What do we get? We get a badly read bulletin announcement once a week if we’re lucky. Don’t we deserve to be seen?”
“Yeah,” Elisa joins in. “Last year, when we did the dance, everybody knew who we were. We were even on TV. Well, you know how it is in high school, it’s all like ‘what have you done lately?’ So I say, if it will get us attention and some money to toss around, let’s go for it. I for one already have my act all planned.”
“You do?” Becca arches an eyebrow.
“Sure.” Elisa does a really awkward hip-hop move. “I plan to mosh to my own rap song.”
Caroline, one of the sisters, says, “You don’t mosh with hip hop, Elisa. Anyways, you can’t do it on your own. You need a pit full of people to mosh.”
“Oh.” Elisa looks kind of disappointed. “Maybe I can bust a move, then.”
Caroline rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “Listen, I think this is a good idea and all, but aren’t you afraid people will just come to make fun of us?”
“Not if it’s good.” Becca points to Claudette, Caroline’s sister. “Don’t you have a singing duo or something?”
They look at each other as if a family secret has been outed. “Uh…we rap,” Caroline says hesitantly. “Kind of. But we usually don’t rap in front of other people.”
“Then what’s the point?” Becca says, firing up her world domination guns. “I mean, if nobody hears you, you aren’t really communicating anything, so what’s the point?”
“We entertain each other,” Claudette says, crossing her arms in front of her. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Well, hang on,” Caroline replies, a bit softer. Her sister gives her the wide-eyed stare of death so common in high school. “Or not.” She looks down at her shoes.
“Okay, well, think about it.” Becca passes out little stickers with the website address on them. “For now, just go to the website, check it out, get on the blog, tell other people about it. We’ll meet again next week. Thanks for coming.”
The room erupts into idle chatter and the chomping of potato chips and apples as Becca slumps dejectedly onto Ms. McLachlan’s rotating stool. “What’s wrong?” I ask, knowing what’s wrong. But sometimes you just have to ask anyway, just to be polite.
“They don’t seem to care at all!” She moans, putting her spiky blond head on the podium in front of her.
Amber and Elisa have gathered for moral support. “Hey, don’t be discouraged,” Amber says. “Look how many people came! I mean, that was better than last year when we start
ed. Look on the bright side.”
Becca turns her head sideways and grimaces, squinting with one skeptical eye. “When the Emo girl tries to make me feel better, I know it’s bad.”
“I am not Emo, dammit!” Amber yells loudly enough for everybody in the room to stop talking at once, resulting in that awkward silence that make everyone uncomfortable. “I…it’s not like Finding Nemo. Dammit,” she says half-heartedly, hoping her true Emo nature has not been revealed. Maybe she should have been the Amazing Miss Moody instead of Art-tastic. All the other girls resume their discussions, and soon enough the bell rings signaling the end of lunch. Cruel, cruel bell.
We follow the stream of girls out of the room, and Becca grabs my arm. “Listen, Shelby,” she says urgently, “plan to spend this weekend with me figuring out what to do. Okay? I really need your help.”
As we cross campus toward the doomnasium, Fletcher trots up beside me. Becca sighs heavily and runs the other way. “Do I smell bad or something?” he asks, gesturing toward the departing Becca.
“No.” He slips his hand in mine. “We just had a not-so-stellar meeting. She talked about GeekFest and people weren’t wild.”
“GeekFest, huh?” He thinks for a moment, then stops me in midstride, turns me toward him, and plants a big wet kiss on my lips. It lasts awhile too, enough so that other kids start making smoochy noises and tell us to get a room. I break away, feeling flushed, embarrassed, and tingly. “What were we talking about?”
“Uh…” is all I can say. See, this is why I don’t like love. It reduces all your language skills to single syllables. If I could just find a way to reconfigure the hormones in—he kisses me again, and all I can think of is yum, yum, yum, yes.
“So, see you later?” he asks, unaware that he has somehow sucked all my brain cells out through my lips.
“Uh…” He stands there, waiting for an answer that does not come.
“Shel, see you later? Yes? I have to talk to you about this weekend.” He gives me a quick peck and ruffles my hair. “Meet me after school at the Rock.”
“Yeah.” He waves, and I watch his dash of reddish hair disappear in the sea of teenaged bodies. I float to P.E., unaware that my feet are actually moving. I really wish he wouldn’t do that. Kind of.