Talk Nerdy to Me

by Tiffany Schmidt

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-4010-7

  eISBN 978-1-68335-735-3

  Text copyright © 2020 Tiffany Schmidt

  Lettering copyright © 2020 Danielle Kroll

  Book design by Jade Rector

  Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  FOR ANN-WITH-AN-E HELTZEL,

  A TRUE KINDRED SPIRIT.

  AND TO ALL THE STEM GIRLS OUT

  THERE: YOU WILL CHANGE THE

  WORLD. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE IT.

  Gilbert took from his desk a little pink candy heart with a gold motto on it, “You are sweet,” and slipped it under the curve of Anne’s arm. Whereupon Anne arose, took the pink heart gingerly between the tips of her fingers, dropped it on the floor, ground it to powder beneath her heel, and resumed her position without deigning to bestow a glance on Gilbert.

  —Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

  1

  I spun the dial on the fine focus lens of the microscope, wishing it were as easy to bring clarity to my life as it was to the bacteria wet-mounted on the slide. The bio classroom hummed with conversations happening at a half dozen lab benches. The clink of slides, the snap of stage clips, the clatter of laptop keys as observations were recorded—these made up the soundtrack of both my favorite part of the day and the best memories of my childhood.

  “How would you describe this color, Eliza?” My best friend, Merrilee Campbell, pointed to the cluster of Gram-positive bacteria we’d stained with crystal violet and mordant. “Ink-spilled twilight? Wine-crushed shadows?”

  “Purple.” There was no one in the world I’d rather have as a lab partner, but Merri and I disagreed about the amount of descriptive language I’d tolerate in our reports.

  I squeezed the bulb on our eyedropper and added a bead of safranin beside the cover slip of a second slide. I watched the capillary action of it draw under the glass to mix with the liquid containing our specimen.

  My life was supposed to be as simple as this Gram-staining assignment—one I’d first completed at age eight under my parents’ scrutiny in the laboratory that dominated the first floor of our house. Back in second grade, I’d followed the steps and gotten the correct answer.

  Eight years later, I still had clear directions, but outcomes felt less certain. Not for this experiment, but for my life. My parents had rules for everything I did: nutrition, sleep, exercise, socializing, studying. They weren’t technically around to see if I followed them, but they remotely monitored the data collected by my iLive LifeTracker wristband and recorded in my daily log from wherever they were working—currently Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station.

  But nowhere in their restrictions and guidelines did they account for the feeling of restlessness that was spreading beneath my skin like an allergic reaction to my regulated life.

  Merri grinned and nudged me, pointing to her laptop. “‘Purple’ is boring. I already had ‘aubergine’—I was checking to see if you were paying attention. You’ve been fiddling with that slide for five minutes. Everything okay?”

  I forced a nod. The last thing I needed was Dr. Badawi sending an email. The desire to be acknowledged by celebrity scientists frequently led my teachers to be overzealous when communicating with my parents.

  Last year my math teacher had reported I’d seemed “withdrawn.” My parents had asked for the lessons being taught that day, then responded: What you’re describing as “withdrawn” is more precisely known as “boredom.” Eliza has been capable of solving for the volume of a tetrahedron since she was nine. If you’d like to see her engaged, provide material that challenges her. This was one of the many reasons I’d left the all-girls charter school I’d attended from sixth to ninth grade and was now a sophomore at Reginald R. Hero Preparatory School—aka Hero High.

  I handed Merri the slide I’d prepared. “I’m fine. This is done. You should be able to see the Gram-negative bacteria in pink.”

  “Want the first look? Or have you already done this experiment a million times?”

  “Only once.” My parents had no patience for repetition. I learned lessons the first time, or I figured them out on my own in secret. I’d had to memorize picture books on their first read, because there were no endless nights of Curious George or Harry the Dirty Dog. Instead I’d gotten lectures on the bad science in the first (“No real anthropologist would behave like that!”) and the lack of observational skills in the second (“The premise is they don’t recognize their dog because he’s dirty? They aren’t fit pet owners. They shouldn’t be allowed to raise children.”).

  My parents were experts at being judgmental—even in areas where they lacked expertise. Raising children? Not unless you counted child-rearing-by-proxy. We hadn’t shared a roof for more than a week in eight years. Not since the disaster in Brazil.

  “Ohhh! Pretty.” Merri didn’t move away from the eyepiece, but she kicked my stool. Her sister Rory had painted dogs in top hats on the toes of Merri’s canvas shoes. I had a pair with double helixes in my closet. They were next to the shoes I wanted to be wearing right now—my sneakers. Preferably with my treadmill beneath their soles. “Brand-new-eraser pink? Or kitten’s tongue?”

  I laughed, pulling my thoughts away from the workout I had planned for tonight. Not the one I’d record in my log for my parents, but the additional miles I’d run after I’d taken off my iLive wristband. They’d think I was showering or studying for the hour it charged; instead that time was mine. A whole sixty minutes where I was breaking rules and setting my own pace—literally and figuratively.

  “Kitten? Who are you and what have you done with Merrilee?” Tobias May, her other best friend, turned around at the lab table in front of ours. He was annoying, but he wasn’t wrong—Merri was a canine person to her core, courtesy of her parents’ specialty pet boutique, Haute Dog.

  “Kittens’ tongues are pinker.” Merri stated it like a fact—she was good at selling self-invented “facts” as truths. “Plus I couldn’t think of other pinks. I’ll have to ask Rory.”

  Toby grinned. He’d started dating Merri’s younger sister eight days ago on New Year’s Eve. This had made him more tolerable, both because he’d finally gotten over his unrequited crush on Merri and because he was around a lot less. Also, he and Rory were endurably adorable—I’d been scrutinizing how the traits that irritated me about each of them seemed smoothed when they were together.

  I was very observant—I would’ve made a great pet owner: able to identify my dog dirty, clean, shaved, dyed, etc. . . . if I’d been allowed to have one. But lately my observational skills had been focused on all the couples around me: Toby and Rory; Merri and Headmaster William
s’s son, Fielding; his sister, Sera, and her girlfriend, Hannah. The more people that paired up, the more the walls felt like they were closing in on me.

  “So, how are things going at the BBB?” Merri asked Toby and his lab partner.

  “Don’t encourage him,” I muttered, but it was too late. Curtis Cavendish grinned over his shoulder. He nicknamed everything. Five-foot Merri was “Short Stack.” Toby was his last name, “May.” Thin ballerina Sera was “Tiny Dancer.” Our cafeteria table was “the Lunch Bunch.” They weren’t clever nicknames—that would be expecting too much.

  He’d tried giving me a nickname once—I’d made it clear that repeating it would be at his own peril.

  Their lab table was “BBB”—“Brown Bros’ Bench”—because Toby was Latinx and Curtis was biracial: white dad and Egyptian mom. They could call themselves whatever they wanted; my problem was with the person who’d turned around to fully face us, almost knocking a box of slides to the floor as he leaned his elbows on the lab bench behind him. Curtis crossed his long legs at the ankles, highlighting his red-and-yellow-striped socks and bright red sneakers. At least he’d finally stopped wearing flip-flops. It was January in Pennsylvania. No one wanted to watch his brown toes turn blue.

  “’Sup, SPP?” he said with a nod that made the top of his hair bob. It’d grown longer since September—swooped upward in a style that defied gravity and suggested his grooming routine consisted of globbing on product and twisting the hair out of his eyes while running out the door.

  “I told you we’re not responding to that.” Beside me, Merri shrugged, then nodded to show her loyalty.

  “I get that I can’t call you”—I raised an eyebrow, and Curtis winked before continuing—“that other thing, but SPP—‘Smarty-Pants Partnership’—what’s not to like?”

  I pointed a finger directly at him and ignored Merri’s kick to my ankle. Back in September, after a memorable first meeting where Curtis had practically stared at me and drooled, he hadn’t looked at me directly for weeks. It had been a bombardment of furtive glances, and he’d stammered whenever he spoke. Now he did the opposite, pinning me with direct eye contact that made me feel like he had the fine-tuning capacity of a microscope. Like he could see all my details and flaws. He paired this with one of those smiles people called “infectious.” But it wasn’t actually contagious. It was facial mimicry. An evolutionary mechanism caused by our brains’ desire to create emotional connections.

  I ignored the impulses of my striosomes, looking away to pick up the tiny squares of tissue paper that had separated our coverslips.

  “It was better than my first idea: P-G-I-G. Pronounced pee-gig.” He popped his collar, a move that would’ve been obnoxiously egotistical on anyone else. On him it was purposely over-the-top. “Pretty girls in goggles.”

  If Merri weren’t standing next to me, she would’ve laughed. She might’ve let him call her “P-gig” or joked that it was an upgrade from “Short Stack,” since she wasn’t a fan of references to her height. But the way she felt about “short” was the way I felt about “pretty.” So, instead of smiling, she watched me with concern.

  I knew what I looked like—but I’d done nothing to earn the blue eyes and blond hair and curves and eyelashes that made people pause. It was genetics, not some divine blessing. And, yes, there was privilege that came with beauty, but there was also a cost. Blonde jokes weren’t compatible with being taken seriously as a scholar, and I’d had enough post-puberty conversations where people’s eyes slid below my chin to know my body had become a distraction.

  If experiential evidence weren’t enough, my parents frequently reminded me beauty was a liability for any female in their field, telling me I’d have to work twice as hard to “transcend” my appearance. I always bit back the reply I wanted to give: “Maybe other people should work twice as hard at not being biased or lacking in self-control.”

  Instead I settled for uniforms slightly too big, hair scraped back in tight ponytails, no makeup. Which was fine. I mean, it made my mornings more efficient, so I shouldn’t complain.

  “P-gig?” Toby groaned. “That might be one of your better ones, Curtis.”

  “It will stand for ‘perfectly genius intellectual garroting’ if you say it again.” There—that was an almost civil response. Toby and I were reactive in the best of circumstances, with both of us in competition for Merri’s time and attention. But lately—post-him-plus-Rory—we’d found a tenuous peace. I was trying to maintain it.

  He snorted, but it was Curtis who responded. “Is your issue specifically with nicknames, or are you opposed to fun in general?” When I ignored him and unplugged our microscope, he turned to Merri. “I’ll entertain all thoughts and theories.”

  Merri claimed we had “friendship ESP”—which was nonsense, of course. But still, hers was broken, because she blurted out, “Nicknames. She hates them.”

  Curtis bit down on his lower lip, but it did nothing to hide the curve of his smile. “Oh, I’m guessing you had a good one then.”

  If by “good one” he meant “one that had haunted me for years at Woodcreek Charter School for Girls,” then, yes, it had been “good.”

  Brandi Erlich had coined “Brainiac Barbie” with the targeted cruelty of a sixth grader whose popularity is untouchable. I’d spent years with it chasing me in whispers, giggles, and hair flips. When I protested, the usage escalated to questions about if my “plastic face melted in the sun” and charades of mincing high-heeled footsteps.

  I straightened the strap on my safety goggles. “This conversation is over.”

  “Now you’ve got me intrigued.” Curtis tapped his chin. “May, who do we know that goes to their old school?”

  My throat tightened. I was supposed to be done with days of scraping Barbie stickers off my locker and finding little plastic shoes in my bag. Retorts raced through my mind, but when I opened my mouth all that sputtered out was a shrill, “No!”

  Dr. Badawi turned from where she was demonstrating something to Sera and Nicole. Merri pretended to look in our unplugged scope, I nudged my laptop out of sleep mode, and Toby capped his bottles of stains. Curtis didn’t bother pretending to be occupied, but he did shoot me a look that might’ve been contrite.

  I turned away.

  “It’s awfully noisy in this corner.” Dr. Badawi peered at us through glasses that were cartoonishly thick and permanently smudged.

  “We were discussing our results.” Merri’s wide-eyed panic screamed liar.

  “Oh?” Dr. Badawi pointed to the guys. “Tell me what you’ve chosen as a real-life application of this experiment.”

  Curtis straightened. He towered over our teacher, but not in an intimidating way. He was too indolent, too smiley to intimidate. “Pharma. When there’s a contaminant found in a production process, they use Gram staining to narrow down the type of bacteria to help determine the source and if it’s pathogenic. Gram-negative organisms are more likely to be harmful. Gram-positive organisms are only potentially pathogenic if cocci, not rods.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Toby. He was capable—clearly the one who carried the weight at their lab bench—but I’d never heard him express interest in pharmacology. Yet the answer Curtis had rattled off was mirrored on the laptop screen between them on the bench. His gaze slid to me. He raised his eyebrows and grinned at my skeptical expression.

  “Very good, Mr. Cavendish,” said Dr. Badawi. “But I’m concerned about the level of chatter between the partnerships in this corner of the room. I think I’ll shuffle you to see if it helps with focus.”

  “That’s not necessary.” My words came out firm—and without foresight. Had that sounded like an order? This woman lionized my parents and fawned over my work. I didn’t want to abuse that, but . . . switching partners? No.

  “I’ll give you one more chance.” She held up a finger, then used it to point at each of us. “In the meantime, get packed up.”

  I glared at the bench in front of ours as we put away our ma
terials, grateful Toby wasn’t in my next two periods and that Curtis wisely decided to give Merri and me space as we all walked to our shared history class.

  “Too bad Fielding’s not in bio. So many YA novels start with two people sharing a lab station, creating their own sort of chemistry . . .” Merri trailed off to smile at whatever scenario she was imagining. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she mixed us up.”

  “Don’t start.” I wasn’t in the mood for teasing, not while fearing I’d manipulated the power dynamic with my teacher in unintentional ways. If Dr. Badawi didn’t change us, I’d worry I’d influenced that. If she did . . . “Her assigning partners undermines the meritocracy. I work with you not because we’re friends but because you’re good at science and do your share.”

  “And because of my write-ups, right? Wait until you see the Gram positive–versus–Gram negative star-crossed love story I’m putting in our report for you to edit out.”

  I laughed, and the muscles in my shoulders loosened. Merri’s romantic vignettes had their own folder on my hard drive, and her writing skills were approaching those found in the books that filled her room. When her name was on a cover, I’d be first in line to get my copy signed.

  A lanky figure darted past us and onto the lawn to catch a red ball being thrown from across the quad. We weren’t allowed on the grass. The guy tossed the ball in the air, then put it in his mouth. Gross. My smile dropped. “I cannot be paired with Curtis. On any given day it’s as likely he’ll ingest the experiment as complete it.”

  Merri snorted and opened the door to the humanities building. “I think Curtis would be fun to work with.”

  “‘Fun’ is not a quality I want in someone who impacts my grades. I can’t afford for them to suffer because his life goal is being named ‘Class Clown.’”

  Someone called Merri’s name, and she waved. She knew almost every person at Hero High. I knew only our direct classmates. But thanks to a big article in the summer newsletter about my parents and my transfer, everyone on campus knew of me.