Revenge of the Geek (20 page)

“Fearless?”I repeated.

“That’s right.
Fearless
,”Charlie said. “Trust me. It’s the only way to go.”

Chapter Twenty-one

I
decided to follow Charlie’s advice. I would be fearless. As soon as I got home from Grounded, I went straight to my room and dug out all of my writing notebooks. I paged through one after another, looking for the perfect short story. Finally, I came across one I’d written months ago.

The story was called “The Traveler.”It was about a girl who was adopted at birth and ends up meeting her biological mother on an overseas flight. I’d written it last Christmas, when I was flying back to Orange Cove after visiting my mom in London. I’d gotten the inspiration for the story midflight, and skipped the in-flight movies to scribble it down while the idea was still fresh. I’d struggled a bit with not wanting it to all be too convenient—would the mother and daughter really just happen to end up sitting next to each other on an airplane? What were the odds? But then I decided to solve the problem by having the mother notice the girl in the waiting area prior to the flight and feel an immediate, almost haunting connection to her. So the biological mother arranges to switch seats to be next to the girl once the flight takes off.

As I read the story over, I could see the potential. This was exactly the sort of fiction piece they ran in
The Ampersand
. It was poignant and intriguing, and it had a plot. A good plot, I thought. In fact, I even started to feel a little excited at the potential.

I have to be fearless, I told myself.
Fearless
.

And then I dug out my laptop and set it up on my desk. If I was going to edit and type the story up by tomorrow, I had a lot of work to do.

My mom called just before dinner. I’d already been working for a few hours, so I was ready to take a break. Plus, I hadn’t talked to my mom in over a week.

“Hello, darling, it’s me,”Sadie said. My mother had always insisted that I call her by her name. It was part of the weirdness that was Sadie. “What’s going down?”

“What’s going down?”I repeated. “Are you trying to be hip again? Because if so, you should really give it up. You’re too old to be hip.”

“Bite your tongue. I am the embodiment of hip,”Sadie said. “As you would be, if you’d come to live with me in the bustling metropolis of London, instead of staying in that tiny hick town.”

“I like this tiny hick town,”I said.

“Tell me all of your news,”Sadie said. “And don’t leave anything out.”

“Well, something actually did happen today,”I said, hesitating. It was hard admitting my very first
Ampersand
assignment was a failure.

“What? Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Your stepmother had a horrible reaction to her monthly BOTOX injection and her face is now swollen up like a Cabbage Patch Kid’s,”Sadie said with enthusiasm. Sadie and Peyton had never gotten along very well. “Or she finally decided to start eating carbohydrates, and immediately swelled up to the size of a baby whale.”

“No. Not even close,”I said.

“Don’t keep me in suspense,”Sadie said.

I told Sadie all about how the profile I’d written wasn’t going to make it into
The Ampersand
, how Candace was annoyed with me for not disclosing that I knew Dex, and how I was planning to submit a short story for the newly open fiction spot in the magazine.

“So if I can convince Candace to read my short story, who knows? Maybe she’ll like it,”I said.

“That’s a wonderful idea, darling. But how did your editor find out that you and Dex are dating? Did you tell her?”Sadie asked.

“No. My friend Nora told her. Accidentally,”I added quickly.

“Hmmm,”Sadie said.

“What?”

“People rarely do things accidentally,”Sadie said. “Who is this Nora? I don’t recognize the name.”

“That’s because you don’t know her. Nora’s new this year. She moved here from Boston,”I said.

“And why was she talking to your editor about your relationship with your boyfriend?”Sadie asked. “That sounds fishy to me.”

“It did to me, too, at first,”I admitted. “But from the way Nora tells it, I think it really did just slip out. And how could she have known it would end up getting my piece pulled?”

“Well, at the very least, I think she would have been aware that it wouldn’t make you look good. Whatever gave you the idea to profile Dex, anyway?”Sadie asked. “That wasn’t a very bright idea.”

“Actually,”I said slowly, “now that you mention it, I think Nora was the one who first suggested it.”I remembered now. It was the first time she’d come over to the beach house. I had just gotten the assignment, and was fretting that I didn’t know any athletes. And Nora had said, “Isn’t your boyfriend an athlete? Why don’t you interview him?”To Sadie, I said, “But, seriously, she was just trying to be helpful.”

“Hmmm,”Sadie said again.

“But I agreed it was a good idea. I didn’t know it was against the rules. And I couldn’t think of anything better,”I said.

“I think that’s just your nerves talking,”Sadie said. “You were anxious about doing a good job on this assignment so you’d get a better one the next time around. I keep telling you, you have to have more confidence in yourself.”

“Charlie calls it being fearless,”I said.

“That’s the perfect word. It’s the only way to go through life, darling. You have to be fearless. Just like me,”Sadie said.

It was true. My mother could be narcissistic, selfish, vain. But she was confident in herself. It was something I’d always admired about her.

Sadie continued. “I’m concerned about this Nora person.”

“Why? You’ve never met her,”I said. “You don’t know anything about her.”

“I think I do,”Sadie said. “Or I know the type. First, she talks you into focusing your article on Dex. Which, really, darling, was a truly terrible idea.”

“Yes, thank you, I’m aware of that now. Do we have to keep talking about it?”I asked.

Sadie ignored me. “And then she goes behind your back and rats you out to your editor. It sounds to me like she set you up. In fact, she reminds me of a character that appeared in one of my books. Everyone thought she was a pious young widow. And in the end she turned out to be a criminal mastermind who had murdered her husband and was getting rich blackmailing members of the aristocracy.”

“Mom,”I said, in my exasperation forgetting to call her Sadie. “First of all, we’re modern-day high school students, not members of the eighteenth-century English aristocracy. And, more important, Nora is a real person, not a character in a novel.”

“Art often imitates life, and vice versa”Sadie said darkly. “All I’m saying is that I think you should watch your back.”

“Okay,”I said.

“Promise me, darling,”Sadie insisted.

“Fine. I promise. I’ll watch my back,”I said, although I rolled my eyes heavenward. Sadie could be such a drama queen.

“And maybe you should keep your distance from this Nora girl. I’m not saying you have to cut her off entirely, but maybe just take it slowly. Don’t let her get too close too quickly,”Sadie continued.

“That’s funny. That’s almost exactly what Dex said,”I said.

“I knew I liked that boy,”Sadie said.

“There’s just one thing,”I said.

“What’s that?”

I shifted the phone from one ear to the other.

“What if Nora’s not the problem? What if I’m the problem?”I said.

“You? You’ve never been a problem. Except when you were a toddler and refused to use the potty. I thought you’d still be in diapers when you started kindergarten,”Sadie said.

“Can we please stay on topic?”I said, collapsing back on the pillows piled high against my headboard.

“Of course. What were we talking about again?”

“I was saying, what if the problem isn’t with Nora, but with me?”I asked again.

“How so?”

“I’ve been jealous of her,”I admitted. “I’ll see Nora with Charlie or Finn, and I feel . . . well, threatened, I guess. And that’s not the only time I feel jealous. It also happens with Dex. I wonder about the girls he’s meeting at his new school. I hate that I get jealous, but I can’t seem to help it.”

“It’s normal to feel jealous from time to time,”Sadie said. “And I’m certainly not a fan of repressing your feelings. If you feel the occasional twinge of jealousy, you should just acknowledge it, feel it deeply, and move on. The problem comes when you let those feelings take over too much of your life.”

“But how do you keep that from happening?”I asked.

“The thing is, I don’t think it’s all that different from what we were talking about earlier. It’s all a matter of confidence. You have to have confidence in yourself. And you have to trust your friends, that they can spend time with other people and still love and respect you. And trust that Dex cares about you even when he’s away at school.”

Sadie’s words were comforting, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I bought what she was saying. Sure, having self-confidence was a good thing. But it couldn’t change reality. If Charlie did decide to make Nora her new best friend, or if Dex decided to break up with me and start dating someone at his new school, no amount of self-confidence could change that.

“It sounds a little New Agey,”I said. “Power of positive thinking, and all that.”

“I think the power of positive thinking has been misunderstood. The idea isn’t that you can change reality by beaming your brain waves at a problem. It’s all in how
you
react to a situation. And if you react in a positive, self-loving way, well, then, that can turn things around to your advantage,”Sadie said.

I thought about this. Scarily enough, Sadie was starting to make sense to me.

Chapter Twenty-two

I
got to school early on Tuesday morning and headed straight to
The Ampersand
office. No one was there, so I dithered for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do. I’d hoped I could hand my short story to Candace in person, so that I could express my enthusiasm to her. But I also wanted to make sure she got the story as soon as possible, and I knew that she checked her mail folder in
The Ampersand
office throughout the day. Finally, I decided it was better to get it into her hands quickly, and then hopefully I’d see her at some point during the day—in between classes, or maybe at lunch—and I’d be able to talk to her then. So I wrote a brief note of explanation, paper clipped it to the short story, and stuck it in Candace’s mailbox.

Nora wasn’t in lit class that day. I wondered whether she was home sick, and sent her a text message checking up on her. This wasn’t exactly keeping the distance my mother had advocated, but I thought a text message was pretty harmless.

“Where’s Nora?”Charlie asked when I saw her in physics. The table next to ours, which Nora usually occupied, was empty. Finn wasn’t there either, but I’d already seen him at school that morning—it was hard to miss the tall guy with the Mohawk—and so I figured he was just running late, as usual.

“I don’t know. I sent her a text earlier, but she never responded,”I said.

“I hope she’s okay,”Charlie said.

“I’m sure she’s fine,”I said. I hesitated, but then remembered what Sadie had said about having enough self-confidence to trust my friends. “You know, you hurt my feelings yesterday.”

“I did?”Charlie looked surprised. “When? How?”

“When you and Nora made plans to meet at Grounded right in front of me and didn’t invite me along, too,”I said.

“I’m sorry, Miranda,”Charlie said. And she really did look sorry, too. “You’re right; that wasn’t very cool. I just . . .”She stopped and looked down at her hands.

“What?”I asked.

Charlie gestured for me to lean closer, so that we could talk privately, without Tate Metcalf overhearing.

“I think I just got carried away that someone else was excited about the idea of Finn and I getting together,”Charlie whispered.

I sat back. “Charlie!”I said at full volume. “How can you think I wouldn’t be excited about that?”

“Shhhhh,”Charlie said, making frantic throat-slashing gestures.

“Sorry,”I said. I leaned back in so I could whisper. “I am completely supportive of you guys getting together. I just don’t think you should play games.”

“Even if games are what works?”Charlie asked.

I shrugged. “You already know what I think about that,”I said.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to Nora about it,”Charlie said.

“Because she’ll just agree with you, no matter what?”I said.

“Is that what you think of her?”Charlie asked, looking surprised. “That she’ll just go along with whatever I say?”

“Yeah, maybe,”I said, shrugging.

“That’s pretty harsh, Miranda,”Charlie said. She frowned.

Before I could respond, Finn came in. He was walking oddly, dipping down low into each long step.

“What are you doing?”I asked.

“I’m trying out a new walk,”Finn announced. “What do you think? Is it better than my old walk?”

“It’s finally happened: Finn has lost his mind,”Charlie said.

“How does Chaddy-boy walk? Wait, let me guess.”Finn let his face slacken into a dumb, glazed expression and slumped down so that his arms were dragging on the ground, baboon style.