by Piper Banks
“Hey, Bloom,” Emmett said when he saw me.
Ugh. Bloom again.
Emmett stopped and waited for me to catch up, so I had no choice but to walk over to him, hoping I wouldn’t do or say anything dumb in his presence. But as soon as I got closer to him, I felt almost dizzy with longing. Not only did Emmett look great, but he smelled fantastic, too. Like soap and sun-warmed skin.
“Hi,” I said. My voice sounded oddly high. I hoped he didn’t notice.
Emmett hesitated. He looked at me, and then at the door. “Um, should I ring the bell?” he asked.
I realized then that I’d been staring at him. I had to stop doing that.
“No, of course not. Just come in. I’ll get Hannah for you,” I offered. The words tasted like sand in my mouth, but Emmett didn’t seem to notice.
“Great,” he said, brightening. “Cool dog, by the way.” He held out his hand for Willow to sniff, but she loyally ignored him.
“Thanks,” I said.
I opened the front door, and Emmett followed me inside. I took off Willow’s leash, freeing her to amble off to the laundry room where her water bowl was kept, and then led Emmett back to the kitchen. Hannah was there, using a small mirror to pluck her eyebrows. She was so busy trying to extract a hair, her face scrunched up in concentration, that she didn’t notice us come in.
“Hannah,” I said.
“What?” Hannah asked in the bored voice she reserved for me. She still didn’t look up from her mirror.
“Emmett’s here,” I said flatly.
“Hi,” Emmett said.
“What?” Hannah asked. She finally looked up. When Hannah saw Emmett standing behind me, she whipped the mirror and tweezers behind her back. “Oh! Hi! I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she explained. Hannah blushed prettily, so that the tip of her nose turned pink.
“I came in with Miranda,” Emmett explained. He smiled his amazing smile, where the right corner of his mouth curled up higher than the left.
“Oh,” Hannah said, laughing nervously. “I’m so embarassed.”
“It’s okay. I thought you looked cute,” Emmett said.
He did?
“You did?” Hannah asked. Her mouth curved up into her sex-kitten smile. She looked lovely in her new skirt paired with a strappy pink tank top. I felt a stab of defeat. I would never look that pretty. Never.
Emmett nodded, still grinning, and I was suddenly acutely aware of how superfluous I was to the conversation.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
Hannah nodded. “All set,” she said, picking up a pink cardigan from the kitchen counter and draping it over her bare shoulders.
“Okay. Um. Well. Have fun,” I said, and then I practically ran away from the kitchen. If Emmett or Hannah replied—or even heard me—they didn’t let on.
The only silver lining in this bleak, black storm cloud was that I managed to wait until I got back to my room with the door safely shut behind me before I burst into tears.
Chapter 15
SOCIAL SUICIDE?
GEEKHIGH.COM has learned that Miranda Bloom has been put in charge of planning this year’s Snowflake Gala. The event has sucked hard in years past…. Will this be the first Snowflake worth attending? Or will Bloom make it even worse, thus turning herself into the most reviled student at Geek High? Stay tuned…
“Finn!” I shrieked, when I found him in the dining hall, eating chicken-salad sandwiches with Charlie.
As my voice carried across the room, several heads swiveled toward me. “Hey, Miranda,” Padma called out in a tone of voice that made me know with absolute certainty that she’d already seen the blog. She tilted her head sympathetically to one side. “Are you okay?”
“Hey, Padma. I’m fine,” I said, my teeth gritted. I hurried over to Finn and Charlie’s table and sat down.
“You read it?” Finn asked, looking offensively cheerful. “What’d you think?”
“What did I think?” I repeated loudly.
“Shhh,” Charlie admonished me. “What if someone hears you?”
Charlie was tired today. Her face was pale and wan, and she was speaking slowly and deliberately, as though her head hurt.
“I don’t care!” I said.
“If anyone finds out Finn’s the one writing that stupid blog, he’ll get kicked out of school,” Charlie reminded me wearily.
“Fine by me. Shout as loud as you want, Miranda,” Finn said.
“Did you see what he wrote about me? Did you?” I asked Charlie. Charlie pushed the platter of sandwiches toward me, and I took one without enthusiasm.
“Yes. And I’ve already reamed him out about it,” Charlie said patiently. Today she was wearing a frilly-edged purple blouse that clashed with her pink hair over skinny jeans tucked into knee-high brown suede boots. The outfit would have looked ridiculous on me, but Charlie looked like a fashion model.
“Haven’t I been a good friend to you? Didn’t I go to that ridiculous computer gaming convention with you in West Palm last year?” I asked Finn in an anguished whisper.
“I did it for you,” Finn said, as he popped a carrot stick in his mouth.
“And exactly how does your twisted little brain figure that?” I asked.
“The only way to convince people that you’re not the one writing the blog was to target you in it. Tomorrow I’m going to post a blind item: ‘Guess which Geek High art genius and fashion maverick is being crushed on by a certain bespectacled barista at Grounded? Right now, he’s expressing his love with free lattes…while he works up the nerve to ask her out.’”
“Oh, please,” Charlie said, although I could tell from the way she’d perked up that she was pleased.
“So let me get this straight: You predict everyone’s going to hate me after the Snowflake is a flop, and then think it’s supposed to make me feel better when you blog about Mitch being in love with Charlie?” I asked.
“He’s not in love with me,” Charlie said. She smiled and shrugged modestly. “He’s just a little smitten.”
“You’re not helping,” I said to her.
“And next week I’m going to blog: ‘What studly computer whiz was recently seen kissing an unknown curvy blonde? Inquiring minds now want to know exactly who she is, but word on the street is that she’s an older woman. Developing…’”
“So now you’re just making stuff up?” Charlie asked him.
“Who said I was making it up?” Finn asked, winking at her before popping another carrot stick into his mouth.
“The only person you kissed last week was your mother,” Charlie shot back.
“That just goes to show how much you know,” Finn said smugly.
Charlie just snorted.
“Jealous much?” Finn teased her.
“Why would I be jealous of your imaginary friend?” Charlie retorted.
But I couldn’t pay attention to their bickering. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. First, I was being forced to plan the Snowflake, totally against my will. And now Finn had broadcast to the school that if the Snowflake sucked yet again, it would be all my fault. I knew he meant well, but still. I really didn’t need the added pressure.
“I guess I’d better start planning the stupid Snowflake,” I said bleakly. “Headmaster Hughes said I should get a committee together to work on it. I’ll put a sign-up sheet on the announcement board after lunch. Not that anyone’s going to volunteer.”
“Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “Finn and I will sign up.”
“Finn will not sign up,” Finn said.
“Finn, you will be on the committee,” Charlie said menacingly.
“Stop being so bossy,” Finn complained. “You can’t make me.”
“Oh, yes, I can. Don’t forget: I can still totally kick your butt,” Charlie said. She always gets irritable when she’s in one of her down moods.
“I’d like to see you try,” Finn said.
I just sighed and pushed my uneaten chicken-salad sandwich aside.
Considering how badly my week—no, my year—was going, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Emmett approached me the next day before mod lit class began.
“Hey, Bloom,” he said, plopping down into Charlie’s vacant chair. She’d ducked into the ladies’ room before class began, and hadn’t come out yet.
“Oh…hey,” I said.
“I was wondering…has your sister talked to you about me?”
“She’s not my sister,” I said automatically.
“Oh, right. I knew that,” Emmett said. “Hannah told me that you’re stepsisters.”
I suddenly wondered what else Hannah might have said to him about me. After all, she wasn’t exactly my biggest fan.
“Why?” I asked again. “I mean…did she say anything else about me?”
“No, not really,” he said vaguely. “Just…you know. The usual.”
Gah! The usual? What did that mean? Knowing Hannah, she probably said something like, “Miranda is the biggest dork I’ve ever met. Have you noticed the size of her nose? It’s freakishly large. And her hair is so frizzy, it looks like she stuck her finger in a socket.”
Total. Nightmare.
“The usual?” I repeated. My voice sounded a bit squeaky.
“Oh, she didn’t say anything bad,” Emmett said quickly. Too quickly.
Which meant that she’d said lots of bad things.
“Right,” I said. “Well…I think class is going to start in a minute….” And clearly I can never speak to you ever again, since every time you see me you’ll be thinking, “There’s Miranda with the big nose and frizzy hair.”
“It’s just…I couldn’t tell if she had fun the other night when we went out. I mean, I had fun. And I thought she did. But I couldn’t tell. And I wanted to ask her out again…I mean, I’m going to ask her out again…I was just hoping to get some inside information,” he said with an embarrassed chuckle.
Well, wasn’t that just great. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Emmett was going out with my horrible stepsister, now he was expecting me to give him dating tips on how best to woo her.
I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not the person to ask,” I said truthfully.
“Okay. Well, thanks, anyway. And if she does say anything to you…?” His voice trailed off in a question mark.
“I’ll tell you,” I promised, although I was thinking, I will?
“Thanks,” he said.
Charlie came into the classroom then, and Emmett quickly stood to vacate her chair.
“See you later, Bloom,” he said.
“Bye,” I said.
Charlie slid into her seat and turned to look at me, her eyebrows raised.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said quietly.
The last thing I wanted to do was go into it now. Especially since when I’d said good-bye to Emmett, I’d noticed that Felicity Glen had been leaning so far forward in an attempt to overhear our conversation, she’d nearly toppled out of her chair.
Mrs. Gordon walked in the room just as the bell rang.
“I hope everyone read the first five chapters of Brave New World and came prepared to discuss them,” she said brightly. “Can anyone tell me the difference between a utopian and a dystopian society?”
Finn immediately raised his hand—which startled me. Finn never volunteers in class. Mrs. Gordon looked surprised too, and she nodded at him.
“A utopian society would be ideal,” he said. “While a dystopian would be the opposite. A bad place with a totalitarian government.”
“And which would better characterize the society Aldous Huxley has created in Brave New World?” Mrs. Gordon asked.
“Utopian,” Finn said promptly.
“You would consider a society where free will and individuality have been stamped out a utopia?” Mrs. Gordon asked.
“No,” Finn admitted. “That part would clearly suck. But I have to say, I would dig the free love vibe they had going on.”
Tate Metcalf and Padma Paswan both snickered at this, although Tabitha Stone—who clearly didn’t believe in joking around when it came to literature—sniffed and cast a disapproving look at Finn.
“Are you going to tell me what Emmett said?” Charlie asked later, when she and I were camped out at our usual table at Grounded. Finn had a teleconference with executives from a gaming company, so he hadn’t joined us. I was starting to think that Finn had been right about Mitch, the counter guy, having a crush on Charlie. Mitch had been smiling dopily at her ever since we’d gotten there, and he’d already given us two rounds of mocha lattes on the house.
Mitch was actually sort of cute, although he used an inadvisable amount of hair gel to get his dark hair to stand up like porcupine quills. But he had a nice enough face—open brown eyes, a snub nose, a square chin, only slightly marred by a patch of acne on his forehead.
I gave Charlie the quick and dirty recap of my conversation with Emmett.
“At least he’s talking to me,” I said, determined to look on the bright side.
“About Hannah. And this was after he’d spent an evening out with her, and wasn’t repulsed. So he has no excuse,” Charlie said.
“She isn’t always awful,” I said, remembering how nice Hannah had been to me on our shopping trip. Even though I suspected that it was just an attempt to suck up to me on Avery’s behalf.
“Are we talking about the same Hannah who gets up two hours early to maximize her before-school mirror time? Who knows all of the magazine beauty editors by name? Whose deepest thought is to wonder if they’ll ever create a lip gloss that’s both long-wearing and shiny?” Charlie asked. She licked a spot of whipped cream off her upper lip.
“I know,” I said with a defeated moan. “What could she and Emmett possibly have in common? What would they talk about?”
“Maybe he’s deeply interested in what the spring hemlines are doing,” Charlie said.
“Or maybe he’ll create that long-wearing lip gloss for this year’s science fair,” I suggested, my lips twitching up in a smile.
“Wouldn’t that be quite the coup,” Charlie said, snickering. “Hey, I saw your sign-up sheet for the Snowflake committee on the announcement board.”
“Did you also notice that no one’s signed up yet?” I asked.
“I signed up. And I signed Finn up, although we’re going to have to blackmail him into actually showing up. Which won’t be easy, considering Finn has no shame,” Charlie said with an exasperated eye roll.
I felt a rush of gratitude toward her. Charlie wasn’t going to let me crash and burn all alone…she was going to go down with me. And if that isn’t friendship, I don’t know what is.
“I should get going,” Charlie said, stretching like a cat. She yawned. I knew that once she got home she’d go right to bed and sleep for fourteen hours straight, and even then her mom would have a hard time waking her up for school. I glanced over at Mitch. He was practically drooling as he watched Charlie, although she seemed completely unaware of his presence.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do for the short story Mrs. Gordon is making us write. I have zero ideas,” Charlie continued. She ran a hand through her short pink hair, leaving it adorably tousled.
“It’s going to be tough,” I said, thinking back to the assignment Mrs. Gordon had given us that morning. We had to write a short story in the spare style that many of the great modern writers favored.
“Yeah, right,” Charlie said with a snort. “It’ll be a breeze for you. In fact, you probably already have one lying around somewhere you can turn in.”
“No, I don’t,” I protested. “First of all, nothing that I write is good enough to use for a class assignment. And second, she said to write it in a modern style. I don’t do that. I don’t even know how to do that.”
“Okay, whatever you say,” Charlie said, sounding annoyingly superior.
“What?” I asked.
“Miranda, sometimes you are so clueless,” Charlie said, shaking her head.
> I love Charlie, and she’s a good friend and all, but I hate it when she gets like this. It’s so irritating.
Chapter 16
Miranda, stay after class for a minute, please,” Mr. Gordon said when the bell rang at the end of the study hall that doubled as my math class. I’d already completed all of the mathematics coursework that Geek High offered, and so I was now enrolled in a special self-study course. This semester I was working on advanced multivariable calculus. Mr. Gordon had gotten my syllabus from the math department at Harvard. Which sounds impressive, I know, but trust me: yawn.
I once read a book about an autistic man who could calculate sums in his head, like me. But, unlike me, numbers soothed him. He saw numbers as colors, experienced them as emotions. And he viewed his extraordinary math talent as a gift.
It’s the exact opposite for me. I don’t love numbers, and I can’t lose myself in them, like when I get absorbed in a good book. When presented with an equation, I can solve it easily. But that doesn’t bring me any pleasure. All it does is remind me what an oddball I am.
“Sure,” I said to Mr. Gordon. I shoved the heavy textbook into my already bulging knapsack.
Mr. Gordon waited until the other students had trooped out of the room, and then he leaned back against his desk and looked at me thoughtfully. He was tall and gangly and bald on top, with a fringe of hair around his ears, like Friar Tuck. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses and a revolving selection of argyle sweater-vests and bow ties. On cold days he always sported an ancient tweed jacket with worn leather pads on the elbows.
“We had our first meeting for the Mu Alpha Theta team yesterday afternoon, and I noticed you weren’t there,” Mr. Gordon said.
I’d known this conversation was coming, and I’d been dreading it. Because the thing is, I hate to let anyone down. And I knew that what I was about to say was going to disappoint Mr. Gordon, who was my second-favorite teacher, after his wife.