Nerd Girls Read online

  For Sienna and Tracey…

  and the inner nerd that lives in us all.

  acknowledgments

  With gobs of appreciation to the best two folks with whom a nerdwad could ever hope to work, Wendy Lefkon and Al Zuckerman.

  Copyright © 2011 Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  For information address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-5950-6

  Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com

  Table of Contents

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  6

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  8

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  10

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  Also by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

  The Hoopster

  The Hoopster: A Teacher’s Guide

  Hip-Hop High School

  Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics

  Homeboyz

  The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez

  I have a 3.73 grade point average and my body looks like a baked potato. My eyes are brown, my hair is brown, and sometimes when I snack on too many fig bars and run real fast in PE, I end up with brown streaks in my underpants, too.

  I’m not just un-cool; I’m anti-cool. I mean, I even know how to properly use a semicolon in a sentence. What could be more pathetic than that?

  I’ll tell you what’s more pathetic: the entire life of Allergy Alice Applebee, that’s what. She’s got Guinness Book of World Record “sensitivities,” the kinds that make her have to travel with a list of Things to Avoid. If she touches a mango she breaks out in a rash. If she eats wheat, her vision blurs. And if she, heaven forbid, comes into contact with any sort of nut, dried seed, or botanical kernel, her throat swells, her esophagus contracts, and her glands begin to expand as if she had been stung by a swarm of bumblebees.

  Today the ThreePees are going to sit next to Allergy Alice in the cafeteria and eat peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches on whole wheat toast with mango marmalade for lunch. Some students think Allergy Alice might explode. Literally, they think she’s going to internally combust like one of those overfilled water balloons that blasts apart when kept on a water faucet for too long. But instead of H2O flying everywhere, spleens, gastric valves, and parts of her pancreas are going to splatter against the lunchroom walls. At least, that’s what they’re hoping for. Word buzzing around class is that this will be totally YouTubal, the kind of video that could go viral. The ThreePees think it might even break the one million hit mark.

  Gawd, I hate the ThreePees. They rule the 8th grade.

  And they know it.

  The ThreePees is a name that stands for, well…the three P’s: Pretty, Popular, and Perfect. They’re the girls who have all the friends, all the glamor, all the clothes, and all the attention. They have everything. It’s not fair, especially to a dorkasaurus like me.

  To parents and teachers, the ThreePees come off like innocent little angels, shining examples of everything a young lady can be. But inside the cruel cage of middle school, when there aren’t any grown-ups around, the ThreePees are mean, power hungry, and bossy. They think they’re better than everyone else, and all my life they’ve made me feel like a loser/geek/doofus/turd.

  Of course, I’ve helped them out a bit.

  Like once, in fourth grade, I was so eager to answer a math-a-thon question that I smashed the silver bell too hard and it broke into a thousand pieces, sending a hunk of flying metal across the room that drilled Brace Face Stace in the center of her cranium.

  Everyone laughed, even as Brace Face Stace was being wheeled away on an ambulance stretcher with a Harry Potter–type lightning bolt etched into her forehead. I think she was woozy with a concussion, too, because all Brace Face Stace kept mumbling about as the paramedics rolled her out of class was, “Corns and cheese. Corns and cheese.”

  Another time, when I made a homemade halogen light for the science fair, I left the ground wire exposed, and when the teacher, Mr. Upton, went to inspect my handiwork, he got shocked so bad by the electrical current that his contact lenses caused a burn ring to form around his pupils. Now he looks like a man who is always staring at students with googly eyes, like he’s from outer space or something.

  Mr. Upton used to just be weird. I made him spooky.

  But the worst was my birthday party in fifth grade, when I realized that if I pinched my nose and closed my mouth, I could blow a soft stream of air out of my right ear. So, thinking it’d be cool to blow out the candle on my birthday cake with ear air instead of mouth air, I turned my head sideways and prepared to dazzle my classmates with my supernatural, extraterrestrial, spectaculabulously amazing, one-of-a-kind abilities. However, being that I couldn’t produce a very strong stream of ear air to blow out the flame, I had to lean in really close to the candle.

  That’s when I set my hair on fire. My classmates started screaming. I just thought they were excited about my supernatural, extraterrestrial, spectaculabulously amazing, one-of-a-kind abilities. Our teacher, Mr. Hanson, thinking quickly, ran over and began slam-dunking my head into the birthday cake. I had no idea what was going on as he smashed my noggin up and down and around and around into the frosting. He must have dunked me at least twenty times, rotating my ears so that the front of my face, the back of my brain, my cheeks, and even my eyebrows were free from any further flare-ups.

  I almost drowned in cake icing.

  Of course, the smoke from my burning hair ended up causing the fire alarm to go off. Oh, the joy of walking single file out to the soccer field with cake mush covering my entire skull. Per district policy, the entire campus had to wait thirty minutes until the fire trucks came and gave us the all clear to return to class. I wasn’t even given a paper towel.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I said, pulling away from this weird sensation I felt tingling in my ear.

  “I like frosting,” Tommy Tardo answered. He pulled a finger full of white stuff out of my earlobe and plunked it into his mouth.

  “Ew! Gross,” I said.

  Tommy Tardo licked my vanilla-flavored earwax and grinned. He had crooked teeth and a wandering eye. “Burned hair smells like toasted marshmallows. I like campfires. More, please.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “More, please?” he repeated with an outstretched finger. “Vanilla is the color of white dogs.”

  We haven’t seen Tommy Tardo at school in a while. Rumor is, he was transferred to a school with soft walls.

  It’s like that with a lot of kids around here. From the outside, Grover Park, California, might seem like a normal place with normal people and normal families, but once you’re on the inside, forget it. This community is filled with wackos. It’s like there was a crazy magnet put into the center of the earth, and all it does is pull the cuckoo birds here. From kids to parents to teachers, most everyone is nuts.

  But nuts in their own “special” ways. Sheesh!

  Back in class, I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was three minutes to lunch. Three minutes to eleven thirty. Three minutes until Allergy Alice’s doom.

  One of the ThreePees, Kiki Masters, spoke.

&nbs
p; By the way, what kind of a name is Kiki? It sounds like some sort of Hawaiian fruit drink or something. Why the ThreePees always have the most exotic of everything when my name is Maureen—how boring is that?—is just another way that my life is totally and completely not fair.

  Kiki (giggling): This might cause the biggest allergic reaction ever documented.

  Brittany-“Brattany” Johnston (inspecting her pedicure): Urrgh, is my polish chipped?

  Sophia “Sofes” O’Reilly (giggling back): Yeah, like more allergic than when that guy tried to jump his motorcycle over all those cars and totally crashed.

  Kiki (paused and puzzled): A guy crashing a motorcycle isn’t the same as an allergic reaction, Sofes.

  Sofes (now puzzled herself): Oh…yeah.

  Brittany-Brattany (still inspecting her pedicure): Urrgh.

  Kiki rolled her eyes, Brittany-Brattany picked at her toes, and Sofia O’Reilly flipped her hair and went right on being Sofes, a girl who would lose an intellectual battle of wits with a bottle of glue.

  But goodness, did she have a nice nose. Just perfect. Sofes had the kind of nose that people put on Christmas cards. If there were justice in the world, one day a stray volleyball would fly through the air in gym class and smash her into pudding.

  Okay, maybe that’s mean. But the ThreePees are mean. Mean as snakes. Besides, I hate volleyball. That’s because once in sixth grade they made us play and I went running to save a point, tripped over my shoe, hit a pole, and ended up getting tangled in the net like some kind of bluefin tuna.

  Like I said, total dorkasaurus.

  I looked up. Two minutes to the bell. Two minutes to lunchtime. Two minutes to the end of Allergy Alice Applebee as we knew her.

  Unless...I thought to myself.

  Look, I’m no hero. Don’t know why I ever thought I should act like one either. I mean, new students at new schools who come in without knowing anybody at the start of a school year always get picked on by their new classmates, right? That’s like a law of the universe or something.

  At least it was at our school.

  Anyway, the lunch bell rang, and little Miss Allergy Alice had the nerve to walk on over to a faraway table, off in the corner, away from the rest of humanity, all by herself, to start eating her de-skinned celery stalks or whatever nontoxic foodstuff she was allowed to munch on.

  Yeesh, the gall of that girl. Every other kid in our class knew that Allergy Alice was about to be made famous on the Internet as the star of The World’s Biggest Allergic Reaction Ever Caught on Tape, and there she was sitting all alone in the corner of the outdoor cafeteria like one of those stupid ducks waiting to get blasted by a hunter dressed in an orange safety vest.

  Swim away, little duck, swim away! I wanted to scream. But ducks are obviously not the most intelligent of creatures, because if they were, they’d have long ago figured out a way to outsmart overweight, middle-aged goobers-with-guns who spend their Saturday mornings standing in the tall grass blowing quack-quack sounds.

  Not that I have anything against hunting innocent little cute fuzzy feathered animals with submachine guns or anything.

  The ThreePees made their move. They looked like some sort of middle-school S.W.A.T. team. Kiki, flashing hand signals, crossed the courtyard and sat down next to Allergy Alice on her left. Sofes O’Reilly followed and zipped to her right. Brittany-Brattany Johnston smoothly slid in and took a seat directly across the table from the weirdo girl.

  And out came the sandwiches.

  Allergy Alice, surrounded, must have thought at first that some of the kids at her new school were about to make friends with her. But then, when Brittany-Brattany reached into her purse and took out a cell phone video camera, the new girl musta realized that she was being set up. After all, she was boxed in.

  Like a duck.

  Each ThreePee began to unwrap the cellophane of her sandwich. The stage was set.

  So let the show begin, I thought to myself. Let the show begin.

  I stormed over.

  Before any of the ThreePees knew what hit them, I snatched up the peanut-butter-banana-and-mango-marmalade sandwiches right off the table.

  “A-ha!” I screamed. TheThreePees were stunned. Shocked. Entirely caught off guard. It was a masterful sneak attack.

  My plan, it had worked!!

  But I didn’t really have much of a plan beyond grabbing the sandwiches, so after ripping the weapons of torment from the hands of these evildoers, I decided to really make my point by…

  By eating their sandwiches in front of them.

  Not just eating them, but really stuffing them in there. Defiantly. I wanted to prove that this was the end. No more! Forever beyond this moment the ThreePees would no longer rule our campus. People weren’t going to take it anymore. People were going to stand up and fight. People like me would have to be dealt with. The rule of tyranny was over!

  I stuffed one, then two peanut-butter-banana-and-mangomarmalade-on-whole-wheat-toast sandwiches into my mouth and gave a deep, menacing squint of my eye. No more! I thought, No more, you jerkfaces!

  I crammed them in really good.

  No more!

  The ThreePees sat stone silent. They were totally in awe. I’d never experienced such triumph.

  Then, being that there was no more room in my mouth, I began to squish the other sandwiches in my hand. Really crush them, like Godzilla would crush a car in one of those monster movies. And I continued to stare, too—to glare at the ThreePees with a dark menace in my eye.

  Then I spoke.

  “Take that!” I screamed.

  But actually, it sounded more like, “Mrmph mrmph!”

  Okay, so the peanut butter in my mouth made it hard to talk, but still, I was feeling good. Feeling strong. Feeling empowered.

  “Mrmph mrmph!” I yelled again. “This is for the little guy. This is for the underdog. This is for the people who get bullied by meanie-snobs like the three of you!”

  I squished with extra force.

  “Well, not in my house, bay-bee. Not in my house today!”

  It all played out beautifully. Except it sounded like this:

  “Mrmph mrmph!! Mrmph mrmph rumff bloomf! Mrmph mrmph klemtthh blrrrp phlim sconf!”

  Then I began to jump up and down and yell at the top of my lungs, screaming as if I had just won a gold medal at the Olympics.

  “Mrmph rumff bloomf klmmtthh!” I shouted. “Mrmph rumff mrmph bloomf klmmtthh!”

  Bread crumbs flew out of my mouth. Bits of mango sailed like missile shots from between my lips. But I didn’t care. It was over. It was finally over. The ThreePees would never rule this land again! I’d never basked in such sandwich-squishing glory.

  Then I looked up. Brittany-Brattany was videotaping me.

  Videotaping me?

  Yep, videotaping me. Videotaping the whole thing. The face stuffing. The mouth spitting chunks of jelly and bread. The jumping up and down like a monkey at the zoo while babbling incoherent phrases such as “Mrmph mrmph mrmph!” She’d recorded it all.

  Oh no! I thought.

  I did the only thing I could think of.

  I RAN!

  My eyes bugged out and I dashed off. Of course, the Three-Pees chased me, Brittany-Brattany taping me the whole time.

  I ran toward the bathroom. But Kiki was faster and blocked my path to the door.

  I ran toward the water fountain. But Sofes was faster and prevented me from getting a drink.

  I ran toward the classrooms. I ran toward the nurse’s office. I ran toward the fire exit door, the kind with the warning sign on it that says “DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR OR ALARM WILL SOUND.”

  No matter where I ran, they cut me off. I was boxed in.

  Like a duck.

  “What in the world is going on here?” shouted Mr. Piddles as he came charging up to investigate the chaos. Every student in the cafeteria area was watching.

  Kiki spoke first.

  “Maureen stole our lunches.”

  Mr. Pidd
les stared at me with a disapproving teacher’s glare, the kind that indicated I was about to be in really big trouble. He waited for an answer.

  “Mrmph mrmph rumff bloomf,” I said.

  “And she used a lot of bad language, too,” added Kiki.

  “Mrmph rumff blrrrp phloonth,” I replied in my own defense.

  “And then she threatened to sock me. To punch me in the nose.”

  Mr. Piddles glared at me, the top of his bald head turning red.

  He was one of those antiviolence teachers who had been picked on his whole life for loser-ness, so the threat of one kid bopping another was an especially touchy subject with him.

  “Yeah,” added Brittany-Brattany, “we were just trying to make friends with the new girl, make her feel, you know, welcome, and Maureen freaked out.”

  “Mrmph mrmph rumff bloomf,” I protested. “Mrmph mrmph rumff bloomf.”

  “Like, uh, yeah,” added Sofes. “We were just trying to make the allergy weirdo feel tolerated, and this blimped-out wacko went all bonkers on us. Like, uh, where’s the sensitivity for others this school always preaches?”

  Sofes rolled her eyes as if she had just made a really good intellectual point. I rolled my eyes too. Mr. Piddles wasn’t actually going to believe them, was he?

  Of course he was.

  Mr. Piddles glared at me, his egg-shaped head starting to glow like a hot red coal in a furnace.

  “Did you steal their sandwiches?” Mr. Piddles asked, crossing his arms.

  I gave a last-ditch effort at trying to gulp down the peanut butter and unstick my stuck-together mouth, but the back of my throat was glued to my tongue as if I had swallowed a container of wet cement or something. It was hopeless.

  That’s when I realized it was over. Silenced by peanut butter, handcuffed by palms covered in mango marmalade, sweating like a pig from trying to outrun three faster girls around the courtyard, they had me. Once again, the ThreePees had me.

  I lowered my head.

  “I am only going to ask you this one more time,” Mr. Piddles repeated. “Did you steal their sandwiches?”

  “Nrmph,” I meekly responded.