Nerd Girls Read online

Mr. Piddles took me by the arm.

  “Justice must rule, Miss Saunders,” he said as he began to escort me away. “For without justice, society is lost. Come with me.”

  “But don’t be too hard on her, Mr. P.,” said Kiki in my defense as I was being led away. “She’s kinda got self-esteem issues, you know. About her weight.”

  Kiki turned to me with pretend kindness in her eyes.

  “Aw, don’t feel low, Maureen,” she said in a gentle voice. “You’re just…” She took a moment to think of something really delicious. “Big boned. That’s all.”

  Kiki looked at Brittany-Brattany and gave a little nod.

  “Yeah, Maureen, you’re just big boned,” Brittany-Brattany responded.

  “Yeah,” added Sofes, also pretending to be concerned about my feelings. “You’re not some kind of fat-butt, plump-o blob with an eating disorder. You’re just big boned.”

  Even Mr. Piddles rolled his eyes at that one. But, angry as he was, all he cared about at that moment was justice. My justice. As a social studies teacher, he was obsessed with it.

  “Let’s go, Miss Saunders,” instructed Mr. Piddles, escorting me out of the courtyard and into detention. “You must now pay your debt to society.”

  And that’s when it happened, the worst of it all. As I was guided across the lunch area and taken away to what I knew was sure to be a horrible doom, past the ThreePees, past the cafeteria workers, past all the students in my grade, my worst possible nightmare came true.

  I saw Logan Meyers. Yep, Logan Meyers, the Greek god of middle-school boys was staring right at me.

  And laughing his butt off.

  I dropped my head. The ThreePees had won again. Won big-time.

  Intellectually, it made no sense for me to have a crush on Logan Meyers. He was so far out of my league that I may as well have been playing one-on-one basketball against Kobe Bryant. But this crush didn’t come from my brains. This was a DNA crush. It came from genetics. Biological composition. The flames of the heart. Logan Meyers was like jelly doughnuts to me: I knew I shouldn’t even look at them, but in the chromosomal content passed down to me by my ancestry, my genes screamed “I NEED ME SOME SUGAR-SUGAR!!!”

  And who can fight their DNA, right? When it came to things like cupcakes, French fries, and Logan Meyers-es, I don’t even know why I tried to resist. It was pointless, like heredity or Darwinism or something.

  Logan Meyers is actually the reason I had taken up the clarinet. According to my band teacher, Mrs. Marks, playing music could make your problems disappear.

  Of course, when I played the clarinet, cats screeched, but that was their problem. My problem was to figure out how to stop liking a boy who would never in a million years ever stoop to the level of liking me. Not so easy even if I was willing to learn every instrument in the jazz band.

  When I finally got home that afternoon, after writing on Mr. Piddles’s chalkboard I WILL NOT STEAL THE LUNCHES OF MY PEERS 500 times (could there be a stupider punishment than writing standards on the board until my hand felt like it was going to fall off?), I picked up my clarinet, aligned my fingers just like Mrs. Marks had taught me, thought about my pathetic dorkasaurusness in life, and blew a high C.

  Out came a long stream of bubbles.

  “What the…” I thought. Then it hit me. I tasted soap.

  I spit and spit and spit. Bl-uck.

  “MART-EEEEEE!!” I shouted.

  I ran downstairs and flew into the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter, Boo?” asked my mom. Ever since I was a little girl, my mother called me Boo. She meant it in an affectionate way, but it always made me feel like when she found out she was pregnant with me, the news scared her so much, it was like Boo…you’re gonna have a baked potato.

  “Marty filled my clarinet with liquid detergent, and now my mouth tastes like the floor of a Laundromat!” I said.

  “Wasn’t me,” answered Marty, without looking up from the table, where he was tinkering with some kind of electronic gizmo.

  “Marty…” asked my mother, “did you fill Boo’s clarinet with dish soap?”

  “Wasn’t me,” he repeated. But of course we knew it was Marty. He was the king of the practical joke. From covering the toilet seat with Saran Wrap when I was being potty trained so that the pee-pee leaked all over my leg, to turning my alarm clock forward a few hours every now and then so that some mornings I was up and ready for school by three thirty a.m., to putting spicy vapor rub in my training bra so that my nipples felt like they were going to burn off when I first started preparing for “womanhood,” my brother, Marty, was Mr. Bag-of-Funny-Tricks.

  Yeah, real funny.

  “Ma-homm...” I whined.

  “Maar-teee…” said my mother with a mildly disapproving look.

  “Sorr-eee,” Marty answered, confessing to the crime. And that was the end of that. In my mom’s eyes, severe discipline had been just been handed out, and she was quite confident that Marty, never wanting to face such wrath again, would never, ever dare to prank me in the future. After all, who could stand up to such fearsome punishment?

  I stared at Marty’s secret black bag. No matter where he went, he had this black bag with him, and inside was every type of practical-joke tool ever invented on the planet. I lunged for it, but I was too slow, and he pulled it away.

  “You stink at the clarinet anyway,” said my sister, Ashley, as she walked into the kitchen while sending out a text message on her phone. “Like you stink at everything.”

  “Shut up, Ash, before I pound your face into meatballs,” I answered.

  “Now, that’s not nice, Ashley,” interjected my mom. “Maureen is very talented.”

  “At what?” asked my younger sister, smacking some bubble gum and still not looking up from her phone.

  “Yeah, at what?” I asked.

  “Well…” said my mom, taking off an oven mitt and starting to think. “Let’s see. You are special.”

  “Vague,” I answered.

  “Unique.”

  “Also vague,” I added. She paused. I waited. This was going to be good. All my life my mother kept insisting to me that I was talented. That I had gifts. That I had something to offer the world that no one else could offer.

  “You have to remember, Boo, you’re like a snowflake,” she said with cheery encouragement. “You’re entirely distinctive in this world.”

  “Yeah,” said my punk sister. “You’re distinctively on YouTube.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Maureen is on YouTube! Maureen is on YouTube!” Ashley darted off into the other room to fire up the computer. The rest of us followed.

  A minute later we were staring at YouTube, at a newly posted video called A Chunky Chick Does the Peanut-Butter-andMango-Marmalade Big Butt Dance.

  It had been up less than an hour and it already had 847 hits.

  I watched in horror as it started to play. Ashley giggled and began texting her friend.

  YEP I C IT!

  Marty the butthead laughed. My mother looked at me like I was a sad, pathetic puppy dog who wasn’t even going to be given the dignity of being drowned in a lake.

  Me, I headed for the stairs, went to my room, and closed the bedroom door behind me. The only sound I heard was the hysterical laughter of my older brother and younger sister as I shouted “Mrmph mrmph rumff bloomf!” and squished peanutbutter-banana-and-mango-marmalade-on-whole-wheat-toast sandwiches like some sort of demented dancing fat girl freak from outer space.

  The ThreePees weren’t just mean…they were cruel.

  My mom let me stay home sick from school the next two days. She told the office that I had a bit of a temperature. I told her I was suicidal.

  “You shouldn’t joke about things like that, Boo,” she said. “You’re a very special, very talented person, and one day this is all going to seem like small potatoes.”

  “Mom,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes. “The Chunky Chick Does the Peanut-Butter-and-Mango-Marmalad
e Big Butt Dance is never going to seem like small potatoes. Never, ever, ever.”

  “Just wait, Boo, you’ll see,” she answered. “‘Sometimes in life, if you want to have rainbows, you gotta have rain.’”

  I rolled my eyes. This is exactly why my dad had divorced her. While everyone else saw reality, my mom saw bright, cheery, positive stuff—all the time. And what could be more annoying than someone who always saw the bright side of things when you were crazy depressed?

  “Come on, Mom,” I said, heading to the cupboard, “give it a break.”

  “You watch,” she replied.

  Six cookies should do it, I thought. For a start.

  “How ’bout an apple, Boo?” she suggested as she saw me fill up my hands with deliciousness.

  “Mom, this situation calls for chocolate,” I answered. “It’s what I like to call a double fudger.”

  Mom watched as I plopped some dark brown love into my face hole. The world might have been cruel and rude and mean and hurtful, but chocolate understood me.

  Chocolate loved me.

  “Oh, Boo…” said my mom in an uplifting, supportive tone. “No need to catastrophize.”

  Catastrophize? Where did she come up with these words?

  “Sometimes,” she added, “what seems like the worst actually brings about the best. You just never know.”

  I rolled my eyes and plunked another cookie into my mouth.

  “You just never know,” she repeated, to make her point.

  And then, to make my point, I repeated my cookie plunking. Twice more.

  Despite all of this repetition, my mom still would not let me repeat my “please call the school, and tell them I am sick” routine. I argued, but she wouldn’t budge on a third day home.

  “But I have scientific proof I am suffering from the Indonesian mumps,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Combined with vertigo.”

  Still nothing. I upped the odds.

  “Complicated by symptoms of Africanized bacterial meningitis,” I argued. “I swear. I found it on the Internet.”

  Mom gently patted me on the shoulder, told me I’d be fine, and not to trust everything I saw on the World Wide Web.

  I sulked my way back to my room.

  The entire night was spent biting my fingernails and freaking out about my return to school the next day. Well, not just my fingernails. I bit some chocolate-covered graham crackers too. A person’s gotta do what they gotta do to make it through the night, right?

  The next day, when the car stopped to drop me off, I felt tears forming in my eyes. I didn’t want to get out of the minivan. Like, I really, really didn’t want to get out of the minivan. And how sad is that when you don’t want to get out of a minvan?

  “Gimme two minutes before you come out, Maureen. I don’t want anyone to see me with you.”

  “Ash-leee,” warned my mother in another one of her disapproving tones. Oh yeah, I’m sure after that kind of scolding, my sister would never dare ridicule me again.

  “Just kidding, Mom,” said Ashley with a fake smile as she slid open the door. Then she held up two fingers and mouthed the words “Two minutes.” After all, she had a social life to think about.

  I guess I couldn’t blame her.

  I remained where I was, stuck to the seat. Mom being mom, she smiled warmly, and then told me that when you fall off the horse, you gotta get back on.

  Really, those were her exact words.

  “When you fall off the horse, you gotta get back on.”

  “But the horse broke my butt,” I answered. “And no one sits in a saddle with a broken butt.”

  “Well, now your butt matches your face,” said Ashley, reaching back into the car. “Sorry, Mom, forgot my lunch.”

  Mom, once again disapprovingly rolled her eyes. Really, I’m not sure how Ashley handled such ferocious motherly fury.

  “Two minutes,” Ashley mouthed again, and then she disappeared.

  My mom looked at me with a cheerful, encouraging smile. However, as soft as she was on the outside, I knew there was no way in the world she was going to let me stay home from school another day. It wasn’t fair. With me, Mom was always the toughest.

  I slumped out of the car, didn’t say good-bye, and moped toward class. And if I’d thought I was a loser/loner/nerd/geek/ dorkasaurus before I’d done the Chunky Chick Does the PeanutButter-and-Mango-Marmalade Big Butt Dance, now I felt like one of those contagious kids that could give the whole school head lice.

  And no one wants head lice. Not even your best friend.

  My two best friends were, of course, nothing but a distant memory these days anyway. They had both moved away last summer because their dads worked for the same company, and they had both lost their jobs in the bad economy. Go figure.

  Cyndy went to Texas, Rachel went to Idaho, and though the Web allowed the three of us to keep in touch, it just wasn’t the same through texting and stuff and all. And now there wasn’t a respectable person on my campus that was ever going to talk to me again.

  At least not without laughing in my face.

  I hung my head as I shuffled sadly through the halls. Earth was nothing more than a cold, bitter rock floating aimlessly in outer space.

  A cold, bitter rock with homework. How depressing is that?

  I was alone on a lonely planet. Until lunch, that is.

  Of course I sat at a table all by myself. Of course I never expected anyone to approach me unless they planned on making fun of me. And of course I packed cupcakes. Three of them. The world may have hated me, but baked goods were the last of my loyal comrades, and despite the fact that my mother had put asparagus spears and a no-skin chicken breast into my lunch bag, I was able to sneak in my own private triple play: chocolate, vanilla, and Mr. Lemon.

  No, there weren’t many good things about Grover Park Middle School, but at least it had Paradise Palace right across the street. Paradise Palace was a convenience store that specialized in the cheapest kind of junk food sold on the planet. They had honey buns filled with brown ooze, doughnuts dunked in green sludge, and pieces of pink cake that looked so artificial they must have been baked in an oven in a nuclear waste dump.

  Truly, there wasn’t a piece of real fruit anywhere in the store. Not even an overripe banana. Just junk food. Adults might have hated it, but for a kid like me, the place across the street was truly paradise.

  Hey, maybe that’s where they got their name, Paradise Palace?

  “Ahhh,” I said staring at the day’s only joy.

  Sitting all by myself, I chomped into life’s last remaining bliss. Mrs. Marks was wrong about the clarinet. Music couldn’t take your problems away—but cupcakes stuffed with synthetic yellow cream could.

  Mmmm. The lemon drenched my tongue. Then, as I went in for heavenly bite number two, out of the corner of my eye I saw Beanpole Barbara approaching my table.

  Beanpole Barbara?

  At first she didn’t say anything. Not a word. All she did was sit down at the far end of my table and try to act casual.

  I stared at her. She avoided eye contact with me and tried to look relaxed and innocent.

  Then, a moment later, she slid over. Just an inch. I continued to stare. Beanpole Barbara looked up at the sky as if she were watching the clouds roll by or something, just another regular ol’ day in a regular ol’ world with regular ol’ birds flying through the air. I waited, wondering, What in the world is Beanpole Barbara, the klutz of the century, doing right now?”

  She moved a little closer.

  Then a little closer.

  All the while, Beanpole Barbara looked at the clouds. Soon enough she had slid all the way down to the end of the bench so that she was sitting right across from me. However, since she was pretending to be watching the clouds instead of watching where she was going, Beanpole Barbara took another slide and then fell right off the end of the seat, and she crashed to the ground with a gigantic thud!

  “Ouch,” she said, rolling in
dirt.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I asked.

  Beanpole Barbara didn’t answer. Instead, she nodded her head and waved to someone who was hiding behind a tree.

  “C’mon,” Beanpole Barbara whispered, with another nod. “C’mon.”

  Suddenly, Allergy Alice appeared from behind a thick tree trunk. After shuffling her feet for a moment, she walked over. Barbara got up from the ground, and they both sat down across from me.

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “G’head” said Beanpole Barbara, trying to get Allergy Alice to speak. “G’head.”

  Allergy Alice paused, then opened her mouth. But she didn’t speak. Instead she raised an inhaler the size of a scuba tank to her lips and took such a big wheeze off of the thing it sounded like she was the daughter of Darth Vader.

  Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh.

  I stared at her like she was a freak.

  “G’head,” said Beanpole Barbara one more time.

  Allergy Alice raised her eyes and looked at me. “Why’d you stand up for me?” she asked.

  There was a pause. They both stared and waited. I shook my head.

  “’Cause I’m stupid, that’s why,” I said. And that was the truth. I mean, why a plumpy person like me would choose to stand up for a walking immunization clinic like Alice by eating a picnic basket’s worth of peanut butter sandwiches in front of the entire school remains a mystery to me.

  “’Cause I’m stupid,” I said again.

  “Well, I didn’t think it was stupid,” said Beanpole Barbara. “I…” Beanpole paused. “Thought it was brave.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the 1,043rd hit on YouTube either, now, are you?” I replied.

  “5,468.”

  “Huh?”

  “5,468,” Allergy Alice repeated. “It’s getting kinda popular.”

  “Great. Thanks for the update.”

  “Accurate statistics, they’re important to me.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she just nodded her head and raised her scuba tank again.

  Wheeesh-whooosh. Wheeesh-whooosh.

  The three of us sat there for a moment in silence. Suddenly, Beanpole Barbara tried to throw something perky into the conversation.