Revenge of the Geek

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

ALSO BY PIPER BANKS

Geek High
Geek Abroad
Summer of the Geek

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, November 2010

Copyright ©Whitney Gaskell, 2010

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCAREGISTRADA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Banks, Piper. Revenge of the geek/Piper Banks. p. cm. Summary: With her boyfriend, Dex, in Maine and her friends facing their own issues, Miranda Bloom, girl genius, befriends Nora, a shy new student, but soon Nora’s relentless imitation of Miranda threatens to ruin junior year at Geek High.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47792-2

[1. High schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Stepfamilies—Fiction. 5. Genius—Fiction. 6. Florida—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.G2128Rev 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2010028770

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Sam

Chapter One

“J
ust try them on, Miranda,”Hannah, my stepsister, ordered me. She sounded like an army general sending troops into battle. Except that we weren’t on a battlefield. It was even worse than war—we were at the mall.

Hannah had dragged me from one end of the Orange Cove Mall to the other, stopping in nearly every store we passed. We were now in J.Crew, and I was drooping with exhaustion.

“Why bother trying them on? They’re my size,”I said, double-checking the tag on a pair of skinny jeans. Then I saw the price. “These jeans cost eighty dollars!”

“So?”

“Why would anyone spend eighty dollars on a pair of jeans? That’s insane. I could get these at Target for twenty bucks.”

Hannah looked at me with a pitying expression. “No, you couldn’t. Now go try them on.”

I sighed. There was no point in arguing with her. I turned toward the dressing room.

“Wait,”Hannah said. She handed over a huge pile of clothes—skirts, pants, tops. It looked like she’d gotten one of everything in the store. “Try these on, too.”

“What? All of these?”I asked, reeling under the weight of the clothing.

“All of them,”Hannah said. She checked her watch. “And you’d better hurry. If you keep wasting time, we’re never going to make the movie.”

Defeated, I headed to the dressing room.

“Show me everything you try on,”Hannah called after me.

The next half hour was sheer hell. I know some girls love trying on clothes and think of shopping as a hobby. I am not one of those girls. Pulling countless shirts over my head and wriggling into an endless series of pants caused me to become light-headed.

“I think I need a Coke,”I complained to Hannah on one of my frequent trips out of the dressing room to model an outfit for her. “My blood sugar is low.”

Hannah was unmoved. “You haven’t tried on the dark-washed denim pencil skirt yet.”

“Seriously, I can’t try on one more thing. I’m going to pass out from hunger.”

“The denim pencil skirt,”Hannah ordered. “I told you: we’re making over your wardrobe.”

“Why does it matter? They’re just clothes.”

Hannah looked truly shocked. “Clothes always matter,”she said. “Now go try on the denim pencil skirt!”

Forty minutes later we left J.Crew with bags so heavy that the thin, ropy straps felt as if they were about to cut through my fingers. I was wrung out. I mentally calculated how much money I’d spent that day—it was at least half the money I’d saved that summer working as an au pair to Amelia, a ten-year-old music prodigy. My dad had offered to chip in for new school clothes, but since he’d just bought me a car—an ugly used car, but I wasn’t complaining—I felt guilty asking him for money.

Hannah seemed oddly energized after our shopping expedition. “Oh, my gosh, just think of how much better you’re going to look this year,”she said as we made our way toward the food court.

Hannah was so beautiful that heads were swiveling as we walked by. She had a really pretty face, set off by platinum blond hair that swished across her shoulders. She was also very thin and very petite. I always felt freakishly tall and gangly when I stood next to her, like a clumsy giraffe towering over a dainty gazelle.

“Gee, thanks,”I said. I didn’t think my old wardrobe was
that
bad. Maybe I wasn’t a fashion plate, but my clothes were unobjectionable. Jeans, T-shirts—that sort of thing.

“No problem,”Hannah said, missing my sarcasm. “I bet your friends at school won’t even recognize you.”

Hannah and I were the same age—we were both sixteen and going into our junior year—but we attended different high schools. Hannah went to Orange Cove High. I went to the Notting Hill Independent School for Gifted Children, which was better known as Geek High. Most of the kids at Geek High had a special talent. For example, I could solve math problems—even complex ones—in my head. Growing up, my rather unflattering nickname had been the Human Calculator. And I didn’t even want to be a mathematician. I wanted to be a writer.

“I don’t think skinny jeans are going to mask my true identity,”I said.

“Just you wait. People will see you in a whole new light,”Hannah promised.

I didn’t believe that for one moment. The thing about going to Geek High was that most of the kids really did care more about their studies than what their classmates were wearing. Besides, why would I want to be seen in a different light? I had lots of friends at school. Okay, sure, I had some enemies, too—like awful Felicity Glen and her toady Morgan Simpson. Felicity had mocked me endlessly over the years for my boyish figure and boring clothes. But I was pretty sure that if she couldn’t make fun of my clothes, she’d just find something else to ridicule. Like my too-large nose or my wavy hair that frizzed when it was humid. Considering that I lived in South Florida, that was pretty much all the time.

Hannah paused outside a shoe store to examine the contents of the store window.

“Can we please get something to eat? I’m starving,”I complained.

“You’re always starving,”Hannah replied. She whipped out her pink cell phone and began scrolling through her messages.

“Emmett’s here,”she said.

“Here in the mall?”

Hannah nodded. “Over at the Gap. He wants to meet us for lunch.”She punched a rapid succession of buttons on her phone. “I’m telling him to meet us at the food court.”

“Great,”I said, my heart sinking.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Emmett. I did. In fact, once upon a time, I’d liked him way too much. Emmett was a year ahead of me at Geek High. He was nice, an academic superstar—his specialty was science—and absolutely gorgeous. I’d had a secret crush on him for years. But Emmett had taken one look at Hannah and become instantly smitten with my stepsister. I’d been devastated at the time, but was long over it by now. For one thing, Hannah and Emmett did make an adorable couple. And, for another, I’d fallen pretty hard myself for someone else.

Dex McConnell, boyfriend extraordinaire. He really was great. Smart, bitingly funny, and very handsome, if—like me—you happen to like redheads. Dex was also an amazing surfer and had been the star player on the Orange Cove lacrosse team. Had been, as in past tense. Four days earlier Dex had left our small town of Orange Cove to go to boarding school in Maine on a lacrosse scholarship. It was an amazing opportunity for Dex, but I missed him so much that my stomach curled over on itself whenever I thought of him.

I was pretty sure Hannah had proposed this shopping trip to distract me, and so far it had been working, mostly because my I’m-stuck-in-a-shopping-mall misery was, for the time being, drowning out my missing-Dex-so-much-it-hurts misery. But that was before I found out I was going to be hanging out with Hannah and Emmett. Nothing makes you feel more alone than playing third wheel to a happy couple.

“He’s meeting us by Big Top Pizza,”Hannah announced, pocketing her cell phone. “Not that I’d eat the pizza there. Gag.”

“Why?”

“Tiffany’s boyfriend Geoff’s older brother used to work at Big Top Pizza. He said that they once had a cockroach fall into the vat of pizza sauce, and their manager wouldn’t let them throw out the sauce,”Hannah said. “So they kept using it on the pizzas. And, get this—when they reached the bottom of the pan of sauce, the cockroach was
missing
. So it must have ended up on one of the pizzas.”

“Ewww,”I said.

“I know, right? Ever since I heard that, I refuse to eat there,”Hannah said.

I tried not to think of how many hundreds of slices I’d eaten at Big Top Pizza over the years. I’d always viewed a slice of their pizza as my reward for withstanding the horrors of the mall.

“Um, Hannah?”

“Yes?”

“How long have you known about the cockroach pizza?”

Hannah tossed her hair back as she considered. “I’m not sure. Maybe a year or two?”

“A
year
or
two
?”

“I think. Why does it matter?”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it before? It’s information I would really liked to have had,”I said.

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. It never occurred to me to tell you. Look, there’s Emmett.”

Emmett was standing in line at the now-notorious pizzeria. He was tall—even taller than me—with broad shoulders, blond hair, and eyes the color of the ocean. He smiled when he saw us approaching.

“Do either of you want a slice?”he asked.

“No way,”Hannah and I said in unison.

“And neither do you,”I added.

Emmett looked confused.

“Just trust me,”I said. “Let’s go to Sunshine Burger instead.”I shot Hannah a sidelong look. “You don’t know anyone who worked there, do you?”