The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (3 page)

Harper smoothed her soiled napkin on the side of her tray, patting it into place. “He and Cornell had the same internship over the summer.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Have you been Internet stalking again, Miss Leonard?”

“Is it possible that Peter's eyes got bluer?” Meg asked, squinting into the spotlight that was Peter Donnelly's all-American good looks. “I think being president is making him more handsome.”

Harper tried to hide in her hunched shoulders. “Please stop staring at them. It's so conspicuous.”

I eyed her warily. “You're lucky we aren't marching over there and telling Cornell to grow a pair.”

“You would not,” she said. “Especially since Ben is sitting with him.”

“That's probably true,” I conceded. “I'd like to keep my salad down and West's insults have been superlame today. I think the mustache might be draining his intellect. Which is useful because I am going to take the number three spot before the end of the year.”

Meg's face contorted in disgust. “That's your big plan for senior year? You want to be number three?”

“Well, I can't beat Harper or her future husband without giving up sleeping and eating and comics. So yeah, I'll settle for being number three. I'll get a cake shaped like a four and shove it in Ben West's stupid hairy face after he walks across the stage at graduation. And then I'll rip off my cap and gown, revealing a red leather jacket and black skinny jeans and moonwalk all the way home.”

“Wow,” Harper said after a moment of silence. “That was detailed.”

I reached over and flicked a piece of chicken nugget shrapnel from her specs. “I've had time to plan with all of the good TV being on hiatus. Without
Game of Thrones,
I get weird.”

“That's why I took classes over the break,” Harper said. “And rewatched
Supernatural
.”

“God, I love the Winchester brothers,” Meg said. She nibbled on the end of a chicken nugget. “You know, considering it's our senior year, normal people might be thinking about things like the harvest festival.”

“What about the harvest festival?” I frowned. “It's the same thing every year. We get dressed up, we're the only girls on campus not dressed up like trampy tramps, we drink apple cider, we eat kettle corn, and Harper gets a stomachache. It's not even on real Halloween.”

“Yes, but we're seniors,” Meg said, ever the voice of the obvious. “Maybe we should try to, you know, go with other people?”

“Other people like the yearbook staff or other people like you want to turn this into some kind of cliché mating ritual?” I asked.

“Closer to the second one,” said Harper.

“Less mating, more dating,” Meg added cheerfully.

“Dear God,” I said, unable to stop my face from twisting in horror. “And I thought that talking to West would be the lamest thing that happened today. Did you really just say ‘less mating, more dating'?”

“Trixie, you know that boys are my risk this year,” she said loftily. “Well, boys and manga. I'm branching out emotionally and intellectually.”

I tried not to groan. Instead of giving the usual birds-and-bees talk, Meg's psychologist parents had sat her down with a model of the human brain. Upon hearing that her prefrontal cortex was developing slower than her limbic system, making her more prone to risky behaviors—like drug addiction and uncontrollable sexual impulses—Meg had come to the conclusion that the only way to beat nature was to decide her own risks to keep her brain preoccupied from real dangers.

The Great Thought Experiment, as she referred to it, had started off small enough. She'd pushed herself gently out of her comfort zone with Internet videos on hair care and the proper application of makeup. She'd secretly mastered the art of nerd burlesque with the help of Jo Jo Stiletto's books and blogs. She joined the yearbook committee for a year to learn graphic design—and then dragged me and Harper to help with distribution. She spent a year referring to her parents by their first names.

But on a particularly hot day over summer vacation, as we'd lain in the sprinklers in her backyard, she'd looked over at me and asked, “Why don't we have any male friends?”

“We don't have many friends at all,” I'd said. Which was true. With Harper stuck in summer school classes at the university, Meg and I had been soaking up the sun alone.

“I can't go to college without having any interactions with the opposite sex,” Meg had said, plucking damp blades of grass between her fingers.

“You want a degree in women's studies. You could just go to an all girls' school.”

This had been met with spiny silence.

It appeared my beloved best friends were on the fast track to becoming utterly antifeminist. Instead of comparing notes on our classes or comic books or which Joss Whedon show was the best—
Firefly,
obviously—they'd started this secret campaign to get boyfriends. Outwardly, they were the same brilliant, proudly nerdy ladies that I knew and loved. But then there was the boy crazy, scheming part of them that I could not condone.

I was seventeen. I had eyes and girl parts and functional hormones. I was aware that we went to school with a few not-ugly boys. But I didn't want to date them. I just wanted to get into a decent college and escape the Mess with as little emotional baggage as possible. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently it was. Because Harper and Meg refused to let the whole boyfriends thing go.

“You two are more than welcome to throw yourselves at whomever you want,” I said drily. “I won't stop you. But I refuse to be party to this.”

“Trixie.” Meg sighed, but I held up my hand to stop her.

“Look around you,” I said, gesturing to the crowded cafeteria. “Look at the bounty of uniform-clad, mid-pubescent, Axe-body-sprayed boys we have been given as our only option for dating. Let's say for one minute that I decided to hop on your bandwagon and tried to lure one of these losers into dating me. I'm not Mary-Anne France.”

I pointed to the student council table again. Mary-Anne was sitting next to Peter Donnelly, smiling demurely behind a bottle of mineral water. Her hair was loosely curled, resting delicately on the shoulders of a perfectly tailored cardigan. There was peach shimmer on her eyelids the same color as the goo on her mouth. The rest of the cafeteria was zit-ridden, nearsighted, and pit-stained. Mary-Anne was starring in her own personal version of a magazine spread, using her genius only to find ways to make her uniform look couture.

Okay, fine. She'd also published two volumes of startlingly insightful poetry, but that's beside the point.

“I am like a twelve-year-old boy with massive boobs,” I continued. “Comic books and science fiction? I am not the kind of girlfriend a seventeen-year-old boy wants.”

“Well,” Harper said, attempting to find the flaw in my logic. Her face lit up and she flapped her hands. “You could find a college guy. You're too mature for high school boys. What about one of the guys from the comic book store? They're nice and nerdy and not in high school.”

“No way.” I laughed. “Any college guy who wants to date a seventeen-year-old has some kind of massive problem. Creepy pedophiles that can't date girls their own age are not on my bucket list.”

“So you're going to die alone without ever attempting romantic love?” Meg asked.

“No,” I said. “I am going to get through this year, go off to a good college, and meet handsome, educated sophomores who appreciate Marvel over DC and think that it's rad that I look like Rogue from X-Men. Maybe I'll add the white streak to my hair to hedge my bets.”

“So, you won't be finding a date for the harvest festival?” Harper asked.

I chomped another forkful of salad. “Nope.”

“Well, I am not Team Spinster,” Meg said, shifting in her seat to look at Harper. “You should ask Cornell. And then he can set me up with a Donnelly.”

“Either Donnelly?” Harper asked. “Even if it's Jack?”

“Poor life choice,” I declared. “Jack Donnelly is a sociopath. He'd probably murder you in the haunted house and then go bob for apples like it never happened.”

Also wedged into the student council table, hiding behind a copy of
House of Leaves,
Jack Donnelly seemed oblivious to the fact that his lunch companions were laughing and throwing things at each other. He and Peter were fraternal twins, sharing the same blue eyes and massive forehead. On Peter, the look was charming, if a little goofy. Jack, on the other hand, just seemed sinister. Peter was the class president. Jack had been caught drinking cough syrup for fun in the eighth grade. It made no sense that they'd once shared a womb.

“I heard that the Donnellys donated that mass spectrometer so that Jack could test a
Flowers for Algernon
smart drug without killing lab rats,” Harper said.

“That's ridiculous,” I said. “Obviously, he'd just kill the lab rats. He was overly enthusiastic about dissecting things in biology.”

“He's not a sociopath,” Meg said. “It would have shown up on his entrance exam. He's just not chatty. And that's fine. I'll chat and he can buy my kettle corn.”

“That sounds like prostitution,” I said.

Meg rolled her eyes. “You think all dating sounds like prostitution.”

“If it looks like a duck and sells its time like a duck,” I said. “How can you guys even consider dates when we haven't nailed down costumes yet? I've decided that I'm going to go as OG Maleficent. None of that Angelina Jolie nonsense. I want to be warm.”

In order to get into the harvest festival, you had to wear a costume. And being the largest group of underage geniuses on the West Coast the student body of the Mess always went all out. Yes, there would be plenty of sexy witches, cats, and other farm animals, but generally everyone went to the extreme with it. It was the only thing I liked about the festival, really. I wasn't much for the scary movies, haunted houses part of things. But an excuse to bust out a hot-glue gun and my sewing machine? I was the conductor of that train. All aboard.

The girls relaxed a little, letting the conversation drift away from boys and toward whether or not we should all go as Disney villains. Harper had her heart set on being Supergirl and Meg didn't really care what she went as providing that she could wear heels with it. I agreed to help her craft a Queen of Hearts costume if she would help me papier-mâché my Maleficent horned headpiece.

“We should do it as soon as possible,” Meg said. She sent a worried frown toward her backpack. “I'm three classes in and I already have two essays to do.”

“Same here,” Harper said. “And about fifty pages of reading to do before tomorrow.”

I glanced down at my arm, where I'd started writing my homework notes. It looked like I'd have a full sleeve by the end of the day. “And you two want boyfriends?”

The girls fixed me with the same
It doesn't signify
glare. There was no reasoning with them when they were like this.

“Okay,” I said, drawing the word out into a snarky warble. “I'm just saying: we're all trapped in a codependent relationship with the Mess until June.”

“You can't make out with the Mess,” Meg said.

I shook my head, my ponytail wagging against my neck in defeat. “No, my darling Margaret, you cannot. But we have three weeks before the first rank list comes out, so I'm going to try my darndest.”

 

[4:02 PM]

Harper

Can you bring me that Sarah Vowell book about the Puritans tomorrow? I need a quote for an essay.

[4:31 PM]

Meg

Sending you ideas for my costume. I think cleavage is going to be essential to my thought experiment.

[4:45 PM]

Mom

Dinner in fifteen minutes.

 

3

I flipped over my
arm, tracking down the note I'd made there in Russian Lit and crossed it out. Harper had wasted many years giving me planners and calendars for my birthday in an attempt to get me to stop writing on my arms, but with this, there was no way I could forget about any special assignments. Besides, it gave me something to do in class when the teachers went off on unrelated tangents.

I capped the pen and tossed it aside before uncurling myself and padding out of the room. Sherry, our Chocolate Lab, galloped toward me and thrust his head into my hand, taking a tentative lick at the nontoxic remnants of dayglo ink as I walked toward the kitchen.

Mom was standing in front of the slow cooker on the counter, carefully ladling a steaming rust-colored sludge into a soup bowl.

“Lentils?” I asked, holding back the urge to add,
again
?

Dad gave me a nod that commended me on my restraint. “With tomatoes and white beans.”

“And okra,” Mom said. She thrust the bowl into my hands, swatting Sherry away as he leapt up to try to filch some.

“Sherlock,” Dad said firmly.

Sherry lowered his head and trotted over to Dad, who rubbed his ears. I rolled my eyes and sat down at the table across from him.

“It would have been easier just to let him eat some,” I said, shaking a napkin into my lap to avoid staining my khakis. “You know he hates okra.”

“He hates it because it makes him vomit,” Mom said, unironically plopping lentils into her own bowl.

“How was school, Trix?” Dad asked, possibly to keep me from pointing out our meal's resemblance to regurgitation.

“Mess-y.” I lifted my arm, showing him the long list of homework. “But it looks like you had an actual slapdash kind of first day.”

I twirled a finger in the air, outlining his face. There were tiny blue dots on his right temple.

He reached up and picked at one of the paint spots. It flaked off easily, but immediately fell into his lentils.