A Catastrophe of Nerdish Proportions Read Free

weeks,” I confessed.
    â€œDon’t you mean yo-yo dieting?” she said.
    â€œNah, 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.”
    â€œDiets, 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.
    â€œAw, you can’t give up on yourself, Mo,” Beanpole said. “Remember, you’re all you’ve got.”
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œEspecially,” 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.
    â€œAachoo!” 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