Counting to D (3 page)

“I’m sure.”

“You know, I also have AP Chem this afternoon. I might be willing to refrain from chastising your lackluster language skills if you concede to be my new lab partner.”

I could feel my cheeks burning. “Okay.”

“Sweet.” Nate stood up and gestured toward the door. I walked with him out into the hall. “Haroon’s a good guy, but he spends so much time writing computer code, sometimes he forgets to bathe.” He sniffed the air. “You, on the other hand, smell
magnifique.
I’ve definitely traded up.”

I
followed Nate into the cafeteria and wasn’t surprised to see him head toward Lissa’s table. I relaxed a little when I saw that the three guys sitting with her all had normal-colored hair. One of them was even wearing an argyle sweater. Apparently, Nate and Lissa were just everyday nerds with bizarre hairstyles.

Nate paused shortly before we got to the table. “Quick, what’s the square root of five thousand three hundred and twenty-nine?”

“Seventy-three, why?”

“My friends are kind of competitive sometimes. And you are in Baby Spanish. Five AP classes as an underclassman more than makes up for it in my book, but I don’t want Graham to bite your head off.”

I raised an eyebrow at Nate. Was he kidding? A nerd was a nerd, right? Except that I sort of wasn’t. I didn’t want to lie or anything, but well…

“Meet the Brain Trust.” Nate lifted his hand and gestured around the table. “This is Haroon, Lissa, Miles, and Graham.”

“Hey.” Lissa looked up from the same sci-fi book she’d been reading in physics and smiled.

I sat down and pulled a PB&J out of my backpack. A stocky guy with curly chestnut hair leaned across the table and whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “Nate, that’s a girl.”

I blushed, which only emboldened the guy. “Are you a real girl or only a pretend girl like Lissa?”

“I have a uterus. Is that real enough?”

Lissa rolled her eyes and shot me a smile. “Excuse Miles. He has the social graces of an orangutan.”

Nate sat next to me and shifted the conversation away from reproductive organs. “Sam just moved here from San Diego. She’s taking AP US History, AP Calculus, AP Physics, AP Chemistry, AP Art History…” The other students at the table nodded in approval. “Spanish, and — wait for it — sophomore English.”

Miles’s eyes popped out of his head. “You’re a sophomore? No freakin’ way.”

“Way.” I took a bite of my sandwich.

Lissa pinched Miles’s cheeks and cooed at him in a baby voice. “Looks like you’re not the baby brain anymore, Miley.”

“Miles is a junior,” Nate explained to me. “And he has the maturity of a second grader.”

The guy in the argyle sweater, Graham, slapped Miles on the back. “We let him sit here because he’s the only junior taking four AP classes. But now that there’s a sophomore in five, maybe it’s time for him to move along.”

Miles’s face fell. He clutched at a piece of soggy pizza and glanced past Nate at the rest of the cafeteria. Was he serious? How competitive were Nate’s friends? Nate spun in his chair, scanned the other students, and shuddered. “Relax, Miles, we’re not that cruel. We can have two baby brains this year.”

Miles breathed an audible sigh of relief. Graham’s beady eyes bore into me. I silently chewed my sandwich, wondering how soon I’d need to look for a new lunch table.

As promised, Nate evicted Haroon from his lab table that afternoon in chemistry. Haroon didn’t act as offended as I would have been. He just shrugged and wandered over to sit by Miles.

Nate pulled out his lab notebook and slid it across the table. “Girls always have better handwriting than guys. Do you want to be the scribe?”

I pushed it back. “Sorry, buddy, but my handwriting is atrocious. I am a fabulous pipetter though. Just tell me what to do.” Nate dutifully read the instructions without asking questions I didn’t want to answer, and I set to work determining the oxidation state of nitrogen.

Lissa and Nate both seemed friendly enough, but lunch had been weird. I got the sense that Nate’s friends were almost afraid of each other. I measured out a milliliter of Hydroxylamine hydrochloride and tried not to think about how much I missed Gabby and Arden. “So what’s up with this Brain Trust thing?”

Nate pushed his bangs to the side, exposing his left eye. “This school has sixteen hundred students, but the same thirty kids have been in every single one of my classes since freshman year. I know there are other people in the halls and in the cafeteria. I know other classes are taking place in the other rooms in this building. But after a while, those unknown fifteen hundred and seventy students start to disappear.”

“So why are you five better than these twenty-five?” I glanced around the room wondering if Gabby and Arden were somehow hiding at the next lab table over. I didn’t see them anywhere.

“You caught that with Miles? It’s nothing really. He’s just kind of a spaz sometimes, so he’s easy to pick on. We aren’t really as vindictive as Graham comes across.” He gestured to the rest of the room. “When your entire world’s this small, it’s easy to get kind of competitive sometimes, you know? But I am friends with all of these people.”

“So the Brain Trust is like a competition for who can be the nerdiest nerd?”

“Sort of.” He filled a beaker with water and rested it over the Bunsen burner. “I know it probably sounds really shallow and elitist, but it’s more of just an acknowledgment that none of us fits in anywhere else. Like with Miles — he’s not just a junior; he’s a super immature junior. But he’s taking all these advanced senior classes. So we let him hang out with us and tease him about being a baby.”

“And I’m a sophomore.”

“So obviously, you have no choice but to add to Miles’s insecurities. And if you can put Graham in his place a bit too, nobody is going to complain. That guy really does have an ego problem.”

I’d wanted to pass as normal. Acing geometry, intro biology, and study hall would have been really easy, even if I couldn’t read any of the textbooks. And I probably could have conned a few ordinary sophomores into thinking I was just like them. But things hadn’t worked out as planned. I was the school’s newest baby brain, and oddly there were people who seemed excited by my presence. Now all I had to do was make sure these ultra-competitive new friends of mine never found out the rest of my secrets.

I conference-called Gabby and Arden as soon as I got home.

“So tell us everything,” Arden said. “How was your first day?”

“Are you the queen of normal yet?” Gabby asked.

“Normal, not so much. I’ve still got five APs, plus English and Spanish.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to be normal with a schedule like that.” I could hear Gabby eating something as she talked. “So what are the other nerds like?”

“The same kids are in all of my APs. They’re almost all seniors. They seem kind of competitive, always wanting to prove who’s the smartest and crap like that.”

“So basically, you’re saying you ditched us, moved to Portland, and now you’re the most popular girl in the school.”

“Gabby,” Arden squealed. I fell back on my bed, relishing the sound of my friends’ squabbling.

“So,” Gabby continued. “Are any of these seniors in all your classes cute? I mean if you’re suddenly the most popular girl in Portland, you’ve got to take advantage.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. There’s this one guy, Nate. He helped show me around the school and invited me to sit at his lunch table and stuff.”

“That’s got to be good. Is he cute?” Arden suddenly seemed interested too.

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes and pictured Nate’s dark eyes and perfect smile. He was definitely cute. “But there’s more. He’s in five of my classes, including Spanish.”

“Don’t you need at least two years of a foreign language to graduate? And three to get into a respectable college?” Arden stated the obvious. “Why is there a senior in Beginning Spanish?”

“Because he took AP French last year and can’t stop himself from learning even more.”

“OMG, Sam, he’s perfect for you. When’s the wedding? Can I be a bridesmaid?”

“Gabby, not helping.”

“Sorry, you know we love you.”

I sighed and opened my calculus book. I pored over numbers mentally while I attempted to explain verbally. “Nate’s cute, and he was friendly and everything. I’m just nervous. I mean, these seniors are crazy cutthroat about their brainiac competitions. How long can I sit next to this guy in Spanish before he figures out I’m not exactly well-rounded? And what’s going to happen to me when he does?”

Arden answered, “Sam, open your eyes and face reality. You used to be the smartest freak show in San Diego, and now you’re the smartest freak show in Portland. And your failure to understand that pesky little thing called the alphabet has nothing to do with it. If this guy has any intelligence at all, he’s going to see that. And he’s going to keep on seeing that, even after he learns how much you suck at Spanish.”

“Do you really think so?”

“We know so,” Gabby answered. “And speaking of Spanish, how is it going?” I knew she was referring to the fact that she wasn’t around anymore to help me with my homework.

“It’s fine,” I lied.

Gabby sighed. “I’m glad your new life is almost as fabulous as you, and I’m thrilled that you’re all charged up for your new chem lab partner. But now that you’ve moved, I have to do my geometry homework myself. I should probably go.”

After Gabby hung up, Arden asked, “So Portland’s really not so bad?”

“If you lived in the apartment above me, I’d probably like it.”

“I’m sitting on the fire escape right now. It kills me that I can’t climb down to your bedroom.”

My MP3 player lay on the bed beside me. I slid my index finger across the screen, pulling up the menu. I had a lot of homework to do. I should have hung up and said goodbye, but I didn’t want to. “Hey, Arden, you got
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
from your grandma for your birthday, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m supposed to read
Macbeth
for English, but the audio version I found has a super nasally reader that’s really distracting.”

“
Macbeth
has witches. After
Midsummer
, it’s totally my favorite Shakespeare. Hold on a sec. I’ll go find my book.”

As Arden started reading, I picked up my pencil and finished my math homework. Her words engulfed me like a warm hug. If Arden lived in this crazy town, I was sure the Brain Trust would welcome her with open arms. Maybe that meant that somewhere in this city, I’d find a new best friend to read me to sleep each night, but I would have rather just kept the one I had.

N
ate had been right about the same students being in all the AP classes. The next day I counted. Calculus was my largest class, with forty-two students, and physics was the smallest with nineteen. There were a few students who only appeared in two or three of my classes. So the total number between my five AP classes was actually fifty-eight, not thirty.

Spanish was just Nate and me and thirty-one random freshmen. Then there was English, non-honors, regular old bonehead English. Thirty-four students who had never even heard of the Brain Trust. Thirty-four kids who had no idea who I was, what I could and couldn’t do, or why I mattered. Needless to say, I hated English.

To make matters worse, the teacher was the basketball coach. Half the kids in class wore letter jackets everywhere they went. They all loved Mr. Donavan. They hung around his desk until the bell rang, discussing their chances of beating Jefferson in the upcoming game. I didn’t get it.

Once the bell rang and all the jocks settled into their seats, I expected Mr. Donavan to lead us in a discussion on
Macbeth
, maybe even give us a writing assignment. I probably should have been nervous about this, since my writing skills were even worse than my reading ability, but after Arden had finished reading it to me the night before, we stayed up late into the night talking about lies, ambition, and corruption. There were at least half a dozen paper topics floating in my mind, crashing against all the numbers that held regular residence. I knew I’d rock at a heated class discussion.

But since Mr. Donavan was a
cool
teacher, he didn’t assign any papers. Instead, he broke us up into small groups to discuss the reading amongst ourselves. I was stuck with a skinny blond girl wearing designer everything and a tall, muscular guy in a letterman’s jacket. Kaitlyn and Eli. They both looked like they’d walked right off the set of a teen movie, Mr. and Mrs. All American.

Nate, Lissa, and the rest of the overly competitive seniors made me nervous, but at least they were competing in something I was good at. These idol-like sophomores were way worse. My heart raced, and my palms got sweaty as I pulled my desk toward theirs. I reminded myself these weren’t the same beautiful teenagers that had teased me constantly back in San Diego. Unconvinced, I wondered what I’d do without Gabby there to stand up for me.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and forced myself to breathe. Eli flipped through the book without looking at any of the words. “So what’s the deal with this Macduff guy?”

“He’s the Thane of Fife,” I said while Kaitlyn focused on her cuticles.

“The what of what?” Eli ran his fingers through his curly brown hair. “I hate Shakespeare. None of this makes any sense.”

“The Thane of Fife.
Thane
basically means ‘lord’ in old-timey Scottish. Macbeth starts out the Thane of Glamis but is elevated to the Thane of Cawdor after the original Thane of Cawdor is found a traitor. The Thane of Cawdor is second in line to the crown. So Lady Macbeth, wanting to be queen, decides to kill the king, making Macbeth the new king.”

“Yeah, I get that part, but who’s Macduff?”

“He’s the Thane of Fife, another nobleman. He isn’t in the direct line for the throne, or at least he’s far enough down the line that a lot of people would have to die for him to become king.”

Eli leaned forward slightly, silently indicated he was listening, and possibly even learning, so I continued.