A Catastrophe of Nerdish Proportions (2 page)

Ha-ha, I now had the goods. And what was Kiki going to do, raise her hand and tell the teacher I had just stolen her notebook?

“Mrs. Rolanda, Mrs. Rolanda, Maureen just stole my notebook!”

OMG, was she suicidal? Once the teacher saw the kind of things Kiki was writing about me and my friends, her head was going to roll way more than mine would.

The whole class turned around.

“En español, Kiki,”
Mrs. Rolanda said.
“Dime en español.”

Kiki rolled her eyes.
“Maureen-o just stole-o my notebook-o.”

Mrs. Rolanda shook her head. After eleven years of teaching at this school, she was used to kids like Kiki thinking they could just add an
O
to the end of everything as a way of getting by. She turned her attention to me.

“¿Cuál es el problema? ¿Esto es cierto, Maureen? ¿Tomé sin permiso el cuaderno de Kiki?”

Though I didn't understand all the words she'd said, I did know that
cuaderno
meant notebook.

“Sí,”
I began, ready to admit my crime.
“Pero…”
I said as I slowly began to slide Kiki's Slam Book out from underneath my papers. I mean, even though I wasn't a snitch, if Kiki wanted the teacher to see all the cruel and nasty stuff she'd been writing, what was I going to do?

I pulled the notebook out, glanced at the cover, and prepared to hand it over to our teacher so that Kiki could get what was coming to her. That's when the shock hit me.

It didn't say slam book on the front; it said slang book.

Gulp.
I'd misread it.

Mrs. Rolanda glared.
“Señorita, estoy esperando una respuesta.”

She was waiting for an answer.
Double gulp
. What to do?

Now, sure, I could put small, simple sentences together like “My name is Maureen” (
Me llamo Maureen
) or “I like the hamburger” (
Me gusta la hamburgesa
), but my language abilities were nowhere near good enough to explain to Mrs. Rolanda that I had gotten the wrong idea about Kiki's notebook, thought she was spreading vicious rumors about me and my friends, and planned to throw the Slam Book into the trash, so that no one else's feelings would get hurt. I mean, a person would practically have to be bilingual to explain that.

But, of course, I had to say something. After all, Mrs. Rolanda was expecting
una respuesta
, an answer. And I could tell by the way her dark brown eyes were lasering in on me that she was getting madder and madder by the minute.

“Usted verá como un pollo,”
I replied nervously. Translation: “You look like a chicken.”

Okay, okay, I admit it, I panicked. And messed up a few words, too. But like I said, I was nervous.

For the next five days I was assigned after-school detention. My task was to write the following sentence on the board two hundred times each day:
No robare las cosas que pertenecen a otros estudiantes y mi maestra no parece ave de corral.


Translation: I will not steal the property of other students, and my teacher does not look like poultry.

Does stuff like this happen to other kids, too?

“D
on't you just love your new cell phone, Maureen?” Beanpole asked as she pushed a bunch of buttons.

“Well, I don't want to French-kiss it like you do yours,” I replied. “Ya think maybe you can put that thing away for, like, five minutes? I thought we were having a conversation here.”

“Sure,” she said, but I could tell she didn't really want to. Slowly, Beanpole placed her new cellie back inside her gray-and-pink backpack, but of course she did it in a way that let her still spy the screen, as if she were expecting a text message from the president or something. Truth was, there was no cell service where we were sitting.

“I mean, I guess I could let bygones be bygones,” I admitted. “But I don't trust them. I just know the ThreePees are gonna try to get us.”

“You're being paranoid,” Beanpole assured me. “That whole Slam Book thing, you do realize you made it all up in your head, right?”

“Whatever,” I said as I returned to my lunch.
Mmm, Twinkies.

Statistically speaking, very few nonchocolate foods rank higher on the taste-bud pleasure scale than Twinkies. And if bacon was taken off the list, ladies and gentlemen, we might have a winner.

“I thought you were, you know, trying to watch what you ate,” Beanpole said in a friendly, noncritical tone.

“Yeah, well, I've been kind of yo dieting these past few weeks,” I confessed.

“Don't you mean yo-yo dieting?” she said.

“Nah, it's been pretty one-sided lately.”

Beanpole watched as I enjoyed another bite of my midday cuisine (gooey white cream injected into a tube of yellow-colored cake? Come on, how genius is that?). She smiled, warm and kind.

Beanpole was always warm and kind. And friendly and considerate, too. Could there be anything more annoying?

And in her kindest way, she said, “But you were doing so well on your diet there for a while.”

“Diets, like rules, are meant to be broken,” I insisted as I popped the last bite of Twinkie into my mouth. “Mmm,” I said. “Finger-lickin' good. And trust me, nobody ever licks their fingers after eating celery stalks.”

Again, Beanpole smiled, gentle and nice. Didn't she know that when the space invaders came they were going to eat the gentle and nice people first?

Essentially, I am short and squat, and Beanpole is tall and thin. I am sarcastic and skeptical; Beanpole is cheerful and optimistic. I am moody, indecisive, and greatly lacking in self-esteem; Beanpole is outgoing, generous, and ready to try anything. If it's true that opposites attract, then she and I are magnetized.

“Aw, you can't give up on yourself, Mo,” Beanpole said. “Remember, you're all you've got.”

“Yeah, and you just happen to”—
Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh
—“have a lot.”

I glared at the girl sitting next to me, the one who had just made the comment.

“Especially,” she added, grinning from ear to ear, “when it comes to the size of your butt.”

Remember the Allergy Alice girl I mentioned, the one I'd saved? Well, that is the third member of our flock. Q is her name, at least that's what I call her, and she is…well, how do I say this nicely?

Q is a freak.

I'd started calling her Q a few months ago, because calling someone Allergy Alice every time you want to speak to her is just too much of a mouthful; she needed a shorter name. Besides, everything the girl says or does is a mental, medical, or social mystery, like some sort of giant question mark, so the name Q made sense.

And that
Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh
sound? It came from the NASA-approved scuba tank she always carried around with her.

All right, it isn't a real scuba tank. In reality, it's an inhaler filled with protein inhibitors that are supposed to keep her pancreas from oozing out her ear or something like that.

Essentially, Q has a few allergies, but only to small, rare, hard-to-encounter things—like water, air, and grass. Fact is, I've seen a few weirdwads in my day, but Q is the strangest, most offbeat, most peculiarest kid I've ever met.

It's what I most like about her. Q is who she is, and she is it all the time. She just doesn't care what other people think.

Q wears scarves in eighty-eight-degree weather—and doesn't care what other people think. Q attaches a tissue dispenser to her belt loop—and doesn't care what other people think. Q uses a spork to eat her lunch, finding “the functionality of a spoon-fork combo both efficient and environmentally conscious.”

What guts. I mean, who at this school just can be who they are without worrying about what everyone else thinks? Sure, Q is a kook, but she is also the kid least likely to give in to peer pressure, which, when I really think about it, might make her the least kooky kid on campus.

Bizarre how that makes sense, right?

Anyway, put together, me, Q, and Beanpole made up the Nerd Girls. Feared by all we were not.

“Aachoo!”
Q sneezed and then pulled out a tissue from her belt-loop holster. Lunch for her today consisted of boiled carrots and skinless apples with a few wheat-free, gluten-free, flavor-free crackers tossed in for good measure. Some kids are lactose intolerant; Q is any-element-on-the-periodic-table intolerant.

“Is this bothering you?” Beanpole asked, holding up a tuna sandwich that had been made in the shape of a bald eagle.

Beanpole's mom always prepared her daughter's food around themes and motifs. Today's were courage and bravery.

Don't ask.

“No, it's not the sandwich,” Q answered. “It's all the dust in here.”

For some reason, Beanpole had decided that the three of us should eat lunch indoors today. Way indoors. Like inside-the-art-classroom indoors. I had stopped asking questions about stuff like this a while ago, figuring that, hey, when you're friends with whack jobs, you do wacky things.

“You need to leave?” Beanpole asked.

“Nah,” Q replied. “Aside from this lumpy chair, I like the atmosphere.”

“You're sitting on a paintbrush,” I informed her.

“Oh.” Q lifted her rear, picked up the paintbrush, and looked at the bristles. “I was wondering why my tush felt all prickly.”

A moment later, Q put the paintbrush right back underneath her butt.

“You're still gonna sit on it?” I asked.

“It's kind of like a bristly massage,” she replied. “And tingles are good for my pulmonary circulation.”

Yup, every day a new adventure.

I gazed around the art room. Paint cans, half-finished ceramic sculptures, fans to dry papier-mâché projects, all kinds of cheerful, arty-farty stuff filled the space. Just out of curiosity, I picked up some dweeb's nearly finished coffee cup and noticed that it was decorated with yellow smiley faces.

“You know,” I said philosophically, “I don't see why kids our age are always supposed to be cheery and blissful and popping with joy all the time. I mean, the only thing I'm popping with is zits.”

Beanpole, however, wasn't listening. Instead, her eyes were glued to her phone. She checked for a new text message.

Nothing.

“Can I just say, for the record, that I love my new phone?” she remarked. “Alice, do you love your new phone?”

“The plastic casing makes my ears itch. I have to talk on”—
Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh
—“speaker with it.”

“May I continue with the point I was trying to make?” I asked as I reached for the apricot I'd packed for lunch.

Well, the apricot strudel.

“We need to be on guard against an attack from the snob-wads.”

“It really bothers me that my mom doesn't go out,” Q interjected, nibbling on a carrot. “I mean, she has absolutely no life outside of worrying about me. It's like her entire existence revolves around me.”

“Are we not going to discuss the ThreePees?” I asked.

“That's because she loves you, Alice,” Beanpole said. “And she's concerned that something might happen to you.”

“I'll take that as a no,” I said, even though neither of them was acknowledging me.

“But I'm stronger than she thinks I am,” Q said. “I mean, I'm not an invalid.”

“You get light-headed from corn,” I said, jumping into their conversation. Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? “Not exactly the stuff of Supergirl there, Q.”

“Well, I need to do something. She's sacrificed enough for me these past couple of years. Too much.” Q paused and considered it. “Yep, I'm gonna do something.”

“What?” I asked. Almost nobody on campus knew the real truth about Q, but Beanpole and I did. There had been an accident, a terrible car crash, in which Q's father and sister had died. Q's mother wasn't in the car at the time, but Q was. Right in the backseat. Incredibly, she survived.

But she was the only one. Stuff like that'll mess you up.

“I don't know what I'm gonna do,” Q told us. “But I'm gonna do something. I have to. It's my mom.”

Q used to hide her emotions and bury her feelings, but ever since she came clean about the guilt of surviving, and feeling as if the car accident were her fault, she's turned into some sort of fountain of honesty. At least among us, that is. To the outside world, Q is still a semi-odd recluse, but with Beanpole and me she is a straight shooter. Like for example, if she likes your purple T-shirt, she'll tell you, “Cool purp shirt.” But if she thinks your green flip-flops look weak, she'll tell you, “Lame-o foot canoes…Try a new set of toe kayaks.”

Yeah, sometimes you have to decode what she's talking about, but still, she tells it like it is. Me, I struggle with honesty and expressing my real feelings. I mean, my mom could put on forty-five pounds and walk around the house knocking picture frames off the table with her butt, and still I'd say things like, “Put on weight? Nope, haven't noticed a thing. But perhaps you could pass the doughnuts.”

Sarcasm's more my thing. I blame television.

“You know,” I said, thinking about this, “I say we make a pact to be truthful with one another. Really honest. Beanpole, tell me something honest.”

Beanpole raised her eyes and thought deeply about the question. “I love my new phone.”

“How profound. I see Nobel prizes in your future. Q, how 'bout you?” I said. “Tell me one honest thing, just one truthful thing about this whole mixed-up, crazy universe.”

“Your gluteus says
Aardvarks
on it,” she replied. “
Aardvarks
is a”—
Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh
—“funny word.”

I stood, put my hands on my hips, and turned to show the lettering on my backside.

“Might I point out that these are the new, Capri-style school athletic pants I'm wearing?” I answered. “You know, trying to show some school spirit over here.”

“Aardvarks.”

“Don't say that.”

“Aardvarks.”

“Less funny the second time.”

“Actually, it was the fourth,” Q answered. “Accurate statistics are important to me.”

Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh.

“Aardvark. Fifth time.”

Deep breaths, Maureen,
I told myself.
Deep breaths.

“Well, what's wrong with being an Aardvark, anyway? I like being an Aardvark,” Beanpole declared. Then, to emphasize her point, she stood like George Washington about to make a speech at Valley Forge. “After all, I am who I—”
BAM!
Beanpole smashed her head into a shelf on the wall, banging her noggin so hard I thought she'd given herself a concussion.

Oh, yeah, in case I forgot to mention, Beanpole is prone to accidents the same way I am prone to cookies.

“Don't worry, don't worry, I'm okay,” she declared, sitting down and rubbing the top of her cranium. “I'm okay.”

“Can you guys please just tell me one thing?” I asked. “And be honest.” I hesitated, reluctant to say the words aloud, even to my closest friends. “Do these pants make my thighs look, you know, like turkey drumsticks?”

Beanpole studied my legs. “You mean like the kind injected with hormones to plump 'em up?”

I glared.

“No, not at all,” Beanpole said, backpedaling. “Not at all.”

“You are so unconvincing.” I reached for my backpack. “All right, can we leave now, please? We're not even supposed to be in here.”

“But they never lock the door,” Beanpole said.

“The lock's busted,” Q said, smelling her carrot stick before taking another bite. “Whole school knows it.”

“That doesn't mean we're allowed in here,” I said. “And why do you smell your carrot sticks before you eat them?”

“Aardvark.”

“Well, if we get caught in here,” I said, “you know we're going to get into trouble.”

“Not if we don't mess anything up,” Beanpole said.

“Aardvark. Ninth time.”