Queen Geeks in Love

by Laura Preble

  I just lean into his shoulder and start crying again. He strokes my hair and we sit there for what seems like hours. When I finally come up for air, I’ve left a little black puddle on the sleeve of his T-shirt. He’s smiling sweetly at me; he kisses my forehead. “Whatever is going on with you, I get it. You need time and some room, and I don’t need that, so we’re having problems. I’ll always be your friend, Shelby, so don’t forget that.”

  “You’ll always be my friend?” A knife stabs at my heart. That’s what guys always say when they never intend on actually speaking to you again. “Look, I know I’ve been kind of a jerk, but I really care about you, you know that, right?”

  He looks down at his shoes. “I know you do, as much as you can. But you’re just not in a place where you can be with me. I don’t think it’s about me. And honestly”—he gives me a crooked smile—“I could probably love you. But I can’t do all this drama, and I need somebody who isn’t afraid of what we could have together.” He cups my face gently in his hands and kisses my lips tenderly, sending electricity shooting through every nerve in my body. “But like I said, I’ll always be your friend.”

  “Wait—” I try to clutch at his pant leg as he stands up. “I can try harder.”

  He squats down, shaking his head. “See, that’s it. You can’t try to love somebody. You just do it. I’m sorry if I hurt you, and I hope you know I didn’t mean to. I’ll talk to you soon.” He pats my head as he leaves, and I watch him fade into the trees; I follow his silhouette, a dark wavy figure drifting through the heat across the brown-green baseball field.

  I get home somehow. Dad is on the porch waiting, as I knew he would be. “Hey,” he calls, sounding overly casual. He’s pretending to read the paper. “How was school?”

  “Fantastic.” I try to escape into the house, but no such luck.

  “Come sit down.” He moves over to make room for me on the swing. “School called.”

  I don’t say anything. We start swinging slowly, rhythmically, and he puts an arm around my shoulders. I lean into him like I used to do when I was little, and we just sit there, swinging, for a long time. Finally, he says, “You’re only fifteen. Things change.”

  “Too many things have already changed.” For some reason, I’m thinking about Mom, which I always tend to do whenever I feel really depressed. Dad knows it too; I think he must do the same thing.

  “You’ve had more to deal with in your life than people who are three times your age,” he whispers in my ear. “It doesn’t just go away.”

  “Why not?”

  He chuckles a little, but I can tell he’s sad too, thinking about her. “It just doesn’t. I don’t want it to, really. I want to remember her. Even if it hurts.”

  “What does that have to do with this whole mess?”

  Dad doesn’t answer. I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t know, or because he doesn’t want to say, but the question just hangs there like a cloud full of rain waiting to let loose on a dusty field, making everything a muddy mess.

  As promised, Becca comes over, with Amber and Elisa crammed into the back of Thea’s Jeep. “Get in!” she yells over the din of the motor. I look at Dad, and he nods. “Go ahead. Just be back in a couple of hours, okay?”

  I know I look like absolute and utter hammer-beaten crap, but I get in anyway, wedging between Amber and Elisa. Not enough seat belts, but we’ve never worried about that; wedged that tightly, I doubt I could even move if the Jeep rolled. “Where are we going?” I yell.

  “Surprise!” everybody screams. Despite the day-long cry fest, I feel just a teeny bit better.

  Thea drives for about fifteen minutes (and that’s kind of like being on the scariest thrill ride ever, except you can never get off or push the emergency stop button), and then steers the car into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Okay,” Becca calls from the front seat. “Guess what we’re doing?”

  “We’re going to bust the ninety-nine cent store for selling stuff for a dollar?”

  “Wrong. Guess again.” Amber giggles and Elisa spits into a tissue and rubs mascara off my cheek.

  “I don’t know.” I swat at Elisa. “Stop spitting on me!”

  “Just don’t want you to look like a raccoon. Somebody will think you already bought your costume.”

  “Elisa!” Everyone, including Thea, yelps in horror. Momentarily, I see why. We pull up and park in front of the most enormous Halloween store I’ve ever seen.

  Becca unsnaps her seat belt, then turns around fully, beaming at me. “We knew you were sad, so we thought, what can we do that will really take your mind off of this whole thing? I mean, besides club stuff? And we thought—”

  “A Halloween party!” Amber shrieks, jumping up and down in her seat like she’s two. “At your house!”

  “My house?”

  Thea turns too. “We already talked to your dad about it. When the girls told me what happened, I did what I always do when I’m depressed: I try to create. And Halloween’s only a few weeks away. We are going to create the best party ever, and find you the most amazing costume you’ve ever seen!”

  Even though I still feel like my heart is made of chunks of concrete, I admit that I feel ever-so-slightly better. We pile out of the Jeep and enter the temple of Halloween known as Masquerade. This is a store that only shows up before Halloween, but it has every possible decoration and costume piece ever made in Taiwan or China.

  Some sweaty-looking guy in a Frankenstein suit greets us at the door. “Boo,” he says, without much enthusiasm. “Welcome to Masquerade, where prices are so low, it’s scary!” He scratches indelicately at his neck bolts and yawns as we walk through.

  “So lifelike,” Elisa mutters, poking his chest with her finger as she walks by.

  Thea gathers us in a knot in front of the steaming plastic cauldrons. “Okay. So, Shelby, do you have any Halloween decorations at your house?”

  “Euphoria,” Amber says. I throw her a disapproving look. “Well, she could be a decoration. If you pimped her out.”

  “I’m not pimping out my robot.” I turn to Thea and say, “We have some stuff, but it’s in storage, and from what I remember, it’s pretty crappy. Cardboard skeletons, that kind of stuff.”

  “Hmmm.” Thea rubs at her nose ring as she thinks. This is a habit she always has had since I’ve known her, but it still throws me; I always expect her to yank the thing out of her nose and begin to bleed profusely. “What kind of theme do we want?”

  “Besides ‘terrifying yet fun’?” Becca asks sarcastically. “God, Mom, it’s just a party, not the second coming of Picasso!”

  Thea ignores her. “I mean, we should have some idea of the general theme before we start looking. It’ll save us time, Becca. Now. I’d propose you go for a Haunted Mansion kind of thing. Cobwebs, moving portraits, haunted mirrors, stuff like that.”

  “That sounds kind of expensive,” I say. My dad has enough money, but he’s not rich or anything. I don’t think he’d approve of me spending his hard-earned cash on cobwebs, especially when we have our own and they’re free.

  “Money is no object,” Thea chirps. “I’m paying. I’m actually going to use some of these things in a photographic montage I’m doing for the Bowling Green State University pop culture museum. So, it’s all write-off-able!”

  With our mission firmly in mind (that is, to make my house as haunted as possible using resin and batteries), we split up and wander through the store. I check out the haunted portraits, because I’ve always thought they looked cool. You’ve probably seen them; they look like old photographs of real people, but they shift and turn into skeletons or some other ghoulish version of the same person when you move. As I walk through the gallery of shifting zombie-people, I realize that I don’t feel quite as bad as I did. Maybe it’s because, in perspective, my life and problems don’t seem too bad, really. At least I’m not the living dead.

  “Friend of yours?” Becca asks as she points to a particularly creepy Victorian lady in
a bride’s gown who shifts into a skeleton corpse.

  “That’s probably going to be me,” I joke. Kind of.

  Becca smiles and puts an arm around me. “Quit talking like that. This is a temporary dating setback. In the meantime, you will throw yourself into this party, into the Queen Geeks, into GeekFest, and into your amazing friendships. You want to buy the corpse bride?”

  “Might as well, if we’re going for a Haunted Mansion theme.” I grab one from the stack, and put it into the cart Becca is pushing. “We should probably get a groom, just to be fair. What about this one?” It’s a young, geeky guy who turns into the devil, complete with cute little horns, glowing red eyes, and a spiky tail.

  “Hmmm. What would your psychiatrist say?” She grabs one anyway.

  After an hour of cruising around the store, we all meet up near the despondent Frankenstein greeter, who sits on a stool made of resin bones reading a BMX magazine. Thea flits from cart to cart, checking out our haul. “Oh, I love those portraits,” she exclaims over our wedded couple. “And Amber found a haunted mirror.”

  “Check it out.” Amber holds it up, and when I look into it, my face looks like it’s melting all over itself. “Real attractive, huh?”

  “Guess my sunscreen didn’t work,” I say, moving my face from side to side to see the goopy, waxy clumps of skin seem to drip down my cheeks.

  Elisa produces fake cobwebs, three ancient-looking tombstones, assorted stuffed ravens and rubber snakes, and a weird disembodied bald man’s head in a crystal ball. “I got a date,” she says, kissing the globe.

  “What’s it do?” Becca asks, grabbing the bowling-ball-sized crystal sphere.

  “Check it out.” Elisa sets it on a shelf, flips a switch, and the eyes open. The mouth moves, kind of like a fish without water, and then, from a cheesy speaker, the voice says, “Your fate will be decided by a woman in red.”

  “It’s a fortune-telling thing!” Amber nudges everyone aside and waves at the ball. “Is it motion sensitive?”

  In answer, the head belches.

  “That’s classy.” Becca turns it over and switches it off. “It would probably be pretty fun, though.”

  We get all our stuff to the checkout and Thea foots the bill, which is a lot higher than I would ever expect for a pile of plastic and stuff you use once a year. As we try to find a way to wedge all the stuff into the Jeep while still leaving room for us, Becca starts talking about GeekFest. For a second, a ghostly tinge of sadness over Fletcher pops up, but then it kind of gets buried under her unrelenting enthusiasm.

  “We’re doing auditions a week from Wednesday,” Becca says. “We need to figure out what we want to say to advertise it.”

  “We need to make it sound cool,” Amber suggests.

  “It’s GeekFest. How can it be cool?” Elisa snorts as she climbs awkwardly into the Jeep. “I think we should ask the club members to participate, and we need a reason that everybody else would care about it. What if it’s a fund-raiser for something really important to everyone?”

  We all just think about it for a minute, and then all thoughts are blown away by the thunderous revving of the Jeep. Since it’s so tough to have a conversation over the roar, we all just sit with our thoughts until Thea pulls into my driveway and the noise finally cuts out.

  Dad is sitting on the porch again, something he’s been doing entirely too much, in my opinion. “Hey,” he calls. “Did you stock up on scary stuff?”

  “Yep,” Elisa says, charging up the steps. “We even got a fortune-teller who works for free.”

  Thea and the rest of us grab bags and boxes to carry into the house. Dad jumps up, trots down the steps, and grabs the mirror from Thea. “Here, let me help.”

  She frowns at him, puzzled. “It’s not all that heavy, you know.”

  He frowns back, equally puzzled. “Yeah, but…I just felt like I should help.”

  Satisfied, she shrugs and grabs another box, then follows Dad up the steps. I don’t think she’s used to having a man around who actually does something useful. Anyway, we follow them into the house, where Euphoria is already clucking over where she’s going to put everything. “Til Halloween!” she shrieks metallically. “That’s more than a month away! Where can I put all of this until then?”

  Thea has never seen Euphoria, which is kind of amazing; I realize she’s actually never set foot in my house. She usually just zips up the driveway, drops off or picks up, and flits away again. She stands, holding a box of cobwebs, staring openmouthed at my robot. Gingerly, she creeps a little closer, and pokes Euphoria gently, to which Euphoria replies, “Hands off, miss. I practice all the martial arts.”

  Dad puts down the mirror and intervenes. “This is Euphoria. Don’t let her intimidate you. It takes her a while to get comfortable with new people.”

  “Get comfortable—” Thea repeats vaguely.

  Dad can see she’s freaked out, and freaking Thea out is pretty hard to do. “Well,” he stammers, “I made her. She’s sort of a domestic and personal assistant.”

  Euphoria emits an ear-splitting bleep. “I’ll have you know that I am neither a domestic nor a personal servant. I—”

  “I never said servant. Did I say servant?” Dad looks to us for confirmation. We all shake our heads and murmur protests.

  “Oh.” Her bleeps get a little less intense, and she finally amps down. “Sorry. I’m just a little sensitive. People have prejudices against the A.I. community, you know.”

  “A.I.?” Thea murmurs, then looks at Dad.

  “Artificial intelligence,” he says, patting Euphoria’s upper claw. “She’s programmed to make decisions and react in real time to all kinds of situations.”

  “And you made this?”

  Euphoria bleeps again, offended. “I’m not a ‘this’!” she cries indignantly, then rolls off to the kitchen, I assume. That’s usually where she goes when she’s upset.

  Thea licks her lips, and shakes her head as if trying to clear away a particularly bothersome hallucination. “Well, that is interesting.” She refocuses on Dad. “I assume you have a name besides Dad?”

  “Uh…” Dad stutters, and starts to turn red. Kind of weird. It’s not like his name is strange or anything. “It’s Richard. Rich for short.” He extends his hand to shake on it, and Thea smiles shyly and stares at her feet.

  Becca makes the crazy sign around her ear, and puts an arm around Thea. “Come on, Mom. Time to go bye-bye.”

  “Oh.” Thea clears her throat nervously. “Sure, honey. I do need to get back. I left some clay drying in the studio.”

  “Are you an artist?” Dad asks.

  “Oh, kind of,” Thea answers again with that shy girl voice. It’s kind of creeping me out.

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s fantastic,” Becca says, scooting in between them and practically shoving her mom out the door. “Seriously, we’ve got to go.”

  Dad watches from the front door as everyone heads for the Jeep. As he closes the door, I hear him murmur, “Artist, hmm?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He locks the door, and turns to me, putting both hands on my shoulders. “Feeling better?”

  “I guess.” His face looks a little different, kind of sweaty and a little bit younger. “Do you feel okay?”

  “Oh, sure.” He swipes at his salt-and-pepper hair, which always curls in odd ways, and rubs his forehead. “Just sort of tired. I’ve been thinking a lot about a new project at work. And I’ve been worried about you.”

  I put an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just going to keep really busy.”

  “Hmm.” We walk arm in arm toward the kitchen, where Euphoria is chopping something at a furious rate. “Well, that works for a while. But eventually, whatever you feel comes out anyway.”

  I grab another knife from the butcher’s block and help Euphoria hack some vegetables.

  15

  FRESH-SQUEEZED FESTIVAL

  (or Come for the Humiliation, Stay for the Jui
ce)

  The rest of the week supremely sucks, to be honest. It’s hot as a pancake griddle in Hell, and even though we have air-conditioning, every time you walk outside it’s a blast furnace. Teachers start piling on homework, and out of nowhere we have tests on stuff that I don’t even know exists. (To be fair, that’s probably my fault. I haven’t really been paying attention very much. Okay, not at all.) We Queen Geeks try having a study session, but geometry always dissolves into discussion of GeekFest, and English seems to morph into plans for the Halloween party, so we don’t get much done.

  Friday morning, I feel especially nervous as I walk to school, already sweating because of the heat. It’s our first meeting after Fletcher and Jon invaded, and I wonder if they’ll be back. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid Fletcher all week and haven’t heard word one from him, so I kind of think not. I secretly wish he would call. We are supposed to be “friends” now, right?

  Girls chatter and laugh as Becca beams at them like a goddess bestowing light on the humble worshippers. “Let’s get started,” she sings. “We have to tell you all about GeekFest.” She explains the concept, and then opens it up to a discussion of what the fund-raising focus might be.

  Amitha Bargout raises her hand. “What if we raised money for a charity?”

  “Would a lot of kids care about that?” Becca asks. Most of the girls shake their heads no, which is kind of a sad commentary on high school, but what are you going to do? It’s probably true.

  Caroline stands up. “I think a worthy cause is a great idea. We just have to make it sexy.”

  “It’s hard to make world hunger and diseases very sexy,” Elisa points out.

  “True.” Caroline turns to face the rest of the girls. “But it’s all how you spin it, right?”

  “You have an idea, huh?” Becca asks, eyes twinkling. “Okay, go ahead. What is it?”

  Caroline smiles, and points to her sister, Claudette. “We did something at our church a few years ago that was great, and it made lots of money and got a lot of people to participate. We did a ticket raffle, so that when you paid admission, you got a ticket stub. Whatever amount of money was collected for that night, you got some percentage of it—forty, fifty, whatever—and the rest went to the church. Or, in this case, whatever cause we decide to adopt.”