by Laura Preble
“Uh . . . don’t you think we should wait until we have everyone together to go over this?” I ask lamely, hoping for a reprieve. Euphoria rolls in with a plate of little sandwiches minus the crusts. “Egg salad,” she sings. Evie and Becca hungrily gulp down a couple of the miniature munchies.
“How long have you guys been working on this?” It’s incredibly detailed; there’s one spreadsheet filled with names and e-mail addresses of people from all over the world, and what looks like some kind of mechanical diagram with technical notes that I am unable to read. “Are we planning to overthrow the government or something? If we are, I need to go shopping for better shoes.”
“Planning is critical to something like this,” Evie says with her Australian spy voice. “In order to make it a success, we need to coordinate events in various locations exactly. And we need our contacts to organize on their ends as well.”
“I’d love to see them all organizing on their ends,” I joke lamely. Nobody laughs.
Becca and Evie are embroiled in the diabolical planning of this Operation Spiderweb, and their enthusiasm washes over me like lukewarm bathwater. I just can’t get revved up about anything after the way I behaved. I mean, if I am so weak that I actually attack Fletcher once I get him alone, it means that maybe Becca is right. Maybe I am letting my hormones walk all over me. Is that even physically possible?
“Earth to Shelby.” Becca waves a silver-ringed hand in front of my face. “What do you think?”
“About what?” I squint at her, fuzzy around the edges from too much pondering.
She sighs heavily, letting me know that my preoccupation with my psychotic lust is putting a crimp in her day. “Let it go, already,” she snaps. “You are not the first girl whose judgment has been impaired by boy sweat. I, myself, have been tempted to stray from the path of righteousness and onto the road of ruin and lost panties. However, I have not acted on this, and neither will you.”
“What about Carl?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
“What about him?” she asks casually as she scribbles with a red marker, filling in a portion of a pie chart.
“Were you ever really tempted to . . . to attack him?” I ask. Evie, who is leaning over a poster paper bubble graph of what looks like every country in the world, snickers slightly, then turns it into a cough. “And what are you laughing at?” I ask frostily.
Evie looks up, her dark eyes peering over the tops of her rectangular glasses. “I just think it’s funny how you all pretend that you are so strong and above the whole male-dependence thing, but look what we’re spending our time talking about! I think the perfect cure for this obsession is to focus on the task at hand: How to create a worldwide event that will blow everything else out of the water, prom-wise.”
I turn to Becca. “Have you sucked out her brain and made her your zombie? She sounds just like you.”
“Hey,” Evie says, less hurt than amused. “That’s not fair. I’ve always been like this. It just happens that I ran into all of you and now I have someone to share my insanity with.”
I suppose she’s right. If we were really all that free of boy obsession, we wouldn’t be spending so much time talking about them, thinking about them, dreaming about them, imagining them in tight Speedos. Okay, maybe that last part is just me. The point is, I realize that I’ve been so focused on trying to prove that Fletcher is no big deal that I’ve made him a big deal. What if he’s right? What if my attraction to him is simply a way to distance myself from my friends so I don’t have to take sides? So they’d reject me instead of me not choosing them? How is it possible that my psychology is this twisted before I hit twenty? Some therapist is going to make a lot of money on me someday.
“Fine,” I say to no one in particular. “What is my job, Queen Geek?”
Becca slings an arm around my shoulder and sits me down in front of her laptop. “Your job, oh Princess of Lust, is to do a search on Web technology and find out where we can purchase the items on this list.” She hands me a legal pad with three cramped pages of writing.
“You seriously think there’s any way we can buy any, not to mention all, of this stuff?” I laugh. “Okay, so who’s delusional now?”
Evie and Becca share a glance that makes me extremely uncomfortable. I suddenly feel like the odd geek out, like they’re part of some supersecret subgroup and I’m not cool enough to be in the loop. Last year, I was one of the people in the supersecret loop. I don’t like being loopless.
“Paying for the equipment shouldn’t be a problem,” Becca says breezily.
“And why is that? Have you sold a kidney or something?”
“No need.” Becca grins with the satisfaction usually only seen on the faces of cats after they eat someone’s pet parakeet. “I’ve got Melvin.”
I stare blankly at her. “Melvin.”
“Melvin.” Becca plops onto my sofa and puts her hands behind her blond-spiked head, leaning back like someone who has just been told they never need to worry about anything ever again. “I told you he’s in town.”
“Yeah, but you hate him,” I say a bit more forcefully than I intend to. “Would you seriously borrow money from him?”
“Nope,” she says, the cat-grin spreading so that it seems to eat up her ears. “He’s giving it to me. Free. No strings attached.”
“Listen to yourself,” I snap at her. “ ‘No strings attached.’ There’s no such thing!”
“Now wait a minute,” Evie interrupts. “Maybe he’s just realized how valuable his relationship with his daughter is. Would you consider any favor a father does for his daughter to have ‘strings attached’? Maybe he’s just trying to rebuild their relationship.”
I’m ready to bean her with a rotten kiwi, I swear. I try to keep my temper though. “Listen,” I say through clenched teeth. “Sure, parents do favors for their kids. But he’s clearly trying to buy off Becca. Of course, I don’t know how he thinks he’s going to rebuild his family when he lives in Hollywood and hardly ever sees either of them.”
“Well, he did rent an apartment a block away from the house,” Becca says quietly, not meeting my eyes.
“And why would he do that?” I ask, not really wanting to know.
“Because,” she says, her eyes flashing at me defiantly, “he wants Mom back for some ridiculous reason. And I intend to benefit from that.”
6
SOUL-SUCKING DEVIL DADDY (or Foolish Film Folly)
The day you realize that your best friend has actually sold her soul (or given it away, or traded it) is a sad day. Innocence is lost on such a day. And the likelihood of eating high-calorie foods rises exponentially.
After Becca drops the bombshell that Melvin has squatted in her neighborhood and is stalking Thea, I don’t say much else. We work on the graphs for a while, but then I think they sense that I’m detached, and they both realize they have some phantom homework assignment looming, so Becca decides to go with Evie over to Briley’s house next door to work on the phantom homework. I realize that this is just code for trying to ditch me.
They leave, and as the door swings shut, silence closes in around me like a noose. In order to make the noose looser, I head for the kitchen and dig out a carton of ice cream (thank the gods of dairy!) and a big spoon. After considering leaving off the fudge sauce (but only for a half second), I spoon a bunch of the gooey brown sweetness directly into the carton of butter pecan and eat from the container. It’s an eat-from-the-container kind of day.
Becca’s dad is trying to get back with her mom. My dad is in like (or in love) with Becca’s mom. There is some seriously nasty geometry forming here that makes the Bermuda Triangle look like something Elmo drew on Sesame Street. My dad will be heartbroken, of course; he hasn’t been seriously interested in anyone since my mom died, and now that he’s really considered giving his heart to someone, he’s going to get it ripped out. Ripped out, stomped on, and paid for.
The naive section of my mind argues that Becca has nothing to do
with this. The grown-ups make their own decisions; she can’t really influence who likes whom any more than our parents can influence who we feel attracted to. But if Melvin has moved in somewhere and is hovering like a big hairy spider, and Becca is planning on getting money out of it, doesn’t that sort of imply that she’s going to help him? And that she’s going to basically stab my dad in the heart with a steak knife?
The shock of the whole thing wears off a bit with the cold slap of ice cream. I pick up my cell and ring Becca, but she doesn’t answer. I know she’s next door; I’d just have to go over there and face her, but I can’t. I just feel like somebody punched me in the gut or stabbed me in the heart with a steak knife.
Euphoria rolls in with the dirty dishes and notices that I’m not my usual chipper self. “Something wrong?” she asks casually, pretending like she’s not fishing for information.
“Why?” I ask, trying to form words around the mounds of melting ice cream.
She wordlessly picks up the half-empty carton, and, in mute disapproval, waves it at me.
“I was hungry,” I say defensively as I retrieve the container from her claw.
“What happened?” She scoots away on her rollers so I can’t quite grab the ice cream. “I’m not giving this back until you talk.”
“Fine!” Blackmailing robots. That just fits my life perfectly. I tell her the whole story, and end with, “And now I feel like we’ve all been stabbed in the heart with steak knives.”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she replies. “But I see your point.” She rolls back and forth across the kitchen floor (her version of pacing) and I hear her processors humming. “I know what you should do.”
“You do?” I feel hopeful until I remember her previous bit of advice, which was to just ignore the problem until it was too late to do anything, and then run for a bomb shelter to avoid the emotional fallout.
“You tell your father that this Melvin person is in town and is trying to steal his woman.”
“I don’t think Thea is his woman,” I say, shuddering. “That sounds so caveman.”
“Regardless of what you call it, men all have a need to protect what belongs to them. If he considers her his woman, then he’ll try to protect her. So, as I said before you interrupted, you tell your father about this other man. You lead him to believe that Becca’s mother is not interested, but that he won’t leave her alone. He will be moved to protect her, and a confrontation will occur.” I wait for her brilliant ending to this amazing scenario. She says nothing more, just sits there buzzing happily.
“And?”
“And what?” She opens a cupboard and begins to inventory our cereals. “We need Cheerios.”
“Listen, Euphoria, I appreciate your advice, but it would be even more helpful if you actually finished a thought!” I sound nastier than I intend to, but I’m frustrated. And on a sugar high. “What happens after this confrontation?”
“Special K,” she murmurs as she closes the cupboard and turns to me. “Well, of course, the woman must choose. And if you think Becca is trying to manipulate her mother for personal gain, then it’s your duty to make sure your father wins, otherwise true love dies.”
I should never let her listen to pop radio. She starts sounding like Celine Dion if she spends too much time hearing sappy song lyrics. I swear, I think she believes that’s how human beings really go about dealing with relationships. She has no idea that it’s much messier and makes much less sense.
“So you think I should tip off my dad and get him to scare Melvin back to Los Angeles,” I muse out loud.
“It might not be such a bad idea,” she says, trying to shrug her nonexistent shoulders.
I throw the container of ice cream away and stalk off to my room to brood alone. Lying on my bed, I stare up at the Day-Glo stars plastered on my ceiling, and I remember when Dad and I put them up, one or two every night, trying to make the patterns of constellations. There’s the constellation Mickey Mouse, and there’s the constellation Peanut Butter Sandwich. Oh, those parents grow up so fast.
My cell buzzes in my pocket, shocking me out of reliving the good old days of my recent childhood. “Yes?” I answer coldly.
“So, what is with you?” Becca’s voice crackles with anger. “If you have a problem with me, just tell me what it is.”
“Are you alone? I don’t want Evie in our private conversations about our parents’ sex lives.”
Becca snorts. “Never say ‘sex’ and ‘parents’ in the same sentence. You’ll go to hell.” She pauses, sighs, and adds, “Okay, so just tell me. I really want to know.”
“Okay.” I swallow, knowing that what I’m about to say could get me banished from the Queen Geeks forever. Or for at least as long as Becca decides to remember she’s mad at me. “I think it’s wrong of you to take money from Melvin when you hate him.”
Silence on the other end. I hear her sigh. “Yeah, I know.”
“So why are you doing it?”
A pause again. “I guess because I feel like he owes me. Big-time.”
“And so you’re going to reclaim your inheritance by screwing with my dad’s love life?”
“Hey, wait a minute,” she snaps. “Don’t forget it was me who told you about the thing between our parents. God, that sounds so wrong.”
“Right. But if Melvin is back in the picture, my dad will probably get booted to the curb, right?”
“Well, you don’t have a lot of faith in your dad’s sex appeal. And again, that sounds so wrong.” Becca laughs, a slight chuckle in place of her donkey honk, gut-buster laugh. The situation, after all, isn’t all that funny. “Honestly, I know it’s sleazy, but I’m just playing Melvin for money. I know that Thea will have absolutely nothing to do with him. She is so angry with him that she doesn’t even want his chi poisoning her hallway, let alone her bedroom.”
“Chi?”
“You know, spiritual energy. All that stuff she’s into with the Sufi dancing and feng shui and tofu.”
“I eat tofu. Does that mean I have chi?”
Becca sighs, trying to be patient with me, the innocent, ignorant friend. “We all have chi, Shelby. You really need to take a world cultures class or watch the Travel Channel or something.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that we have a problem here. And you’re being sleazy.” I never thought I’d have the opportunity to call my best friend “sleazy,” but here we are. “And how does Melvin propose to pay you off, anyway? And for what?”
I hear Becca crinkling the Oreo package again on the other end of the line. “It’s for the greater good, Shelby. He’s going to help us finance Geek Prom by sponsoring a fund-raiser.”
“A fund-raiser.” I was kind of thinking he would write a blank check, but now I see that would be too obvious. Fund-raiser implies that there will be work, and lots of it. And guess who will be doing the heavy lifting? Not Becca. “A fund-raiser?”
Becca laughs, a conspiratorial giggle that she uses to try to make me feel like I’m on the inside of some great scheme. The truth is, I just feel like she’s telling me just so I don’t mess it up. “He’s going to have a movie coming out in a couple of weeks, so he’s going to designate one screening as our fund-raiser. And when it’s all over, he’ll realize it was pointless, and that neither my mom nor I like him at all, and he’ll zip back to Los Angeles in a huff. He’ll probably start dating one of the Olsen twins or something to get back at us.”
“And in the meantime, all the people you love just get screwed, and that’s okay because it’s for the greater good?”
I hear her shifting position on the bed, springs squeaking slightly, Oreo wrappers crinkling in protest. “In the end, it won’t hurt anybody, and it will help us do what we want to do. All I need is for you to support me on this, even if you don’t totally agree. I’m asking you, as your best friend: Will you please just help and not blab about the whole thing to your dad?”
She’s pulled the best friend card, which means I have
no choice but to agree, or lose the position as official best friend. Am I ready to do that? We’ve been through a lot together, Becca and I: She’s the only person I’ve ever met who I feel really understands me, and I’d never really had any good friends before I met her. Isn’t that worth taking a risk? And honestly, how hurt could my dad be by this? Wouldn’t he just laugh at stupid Melvin and his overflowing wallet? And Thea. She’s not a total idiot or anything. She’d see through this in a heartbeat, and ignore Melvin’s feeble attempt to get her back. So, all in all, things would be back to the way they were, but we’d have accomplished our goal, and Becca would be happy (at least until the next big thing comes along).
Reluctantly, I agree. “Okay. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I’ll help with the fund-raiser. I’ll even help with Geek Prom. But I don’t want my dad to get hurt. He’s been through enough already. If it looks like that’s happening, I’m going to spill my guts and he’s going to find out everything.”
“Hey, no big deal,” she says, her voice bright and cheery. “Like I said, Thea will never fall for it, and so they’ll probably just have a good laugh over it anyway while Melvin worships from afar with his Visa card.” She sighs again, as if she’s winding up to say something important, but then there’s just a big chasm of silence between us. We never have nothing to say to each other; since we met, we’ve been talking nonstop. But here we are, phone line crackling, and no conversation to deaden the noise.
“Were you going to say something?”
“Uh . . . no. I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow, huh?”
The silence again, and something unspoken between us. I’m not brave enough to mention that I’ve noticed it. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”
“Queen Geek meeting Friday, don’t forget.” The cell goes dead. I go back to picking out lonely constellations on my ceiling, the same thing I did before I met Becca and actually had someone to talk to.