The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (2 page)

In short, we were the smart kid school, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters minus the mutant abilities—unless you counted the polyglots and concert violinists as mutants, which wouldn't be entirely unfair. The Mess was where parents stuck their prodigy kids when they didn't want them attempting nuclear fission in the garage or going off to college at twelve.

The school handbook included a lengthy list of regulations, the first of which was a gag rule against any discussion of the results of your entrance exam—to keep IQ-based bullying to a minimum. Legend had it that Mess kids used to walk around with their IQ numbers pinned to their uniforms so they could only associate with “their own kind.” Since that sounded like the beginning of a
Battle Royale
kind of dystopia, no one complained about the gag rule. It was bad enough that they publicly ranked us once a month.

Senior year was not going to be a picnic. Just because we'd spent last year prepping our college applications did not mean that we got to slack now, as proven by my schedule: Calculus, Russian literature, Programming Languages, the Economics of the Third World, and—my first class of the day—the History of the American Immigrant.

Meg had opted out of the American Immigrant class, insisting that having to do any in-class discussions of the
Joy Luck Club
would end in her crying her mascara off and calling her grandmothers to apologize for being an ungrateful second-generation child. This left me and Harper without our usual third seat to save. I settled into a desk in the center of the room and took off my sunglasses, stuffing them into the front pocket of my bag and resuming blending in with the rest of the khaki-pants-and-white-polo-clad members of the senior class.

Our teacher, Mr. Cline, started ticking off the roll sheet. The whiteboard behind him had his name scrawled lopsided across it like a poorly thought out marquee.

“Cornell Aaron?” he read, his pencil poised to make checkmarks.

Over the sound of Harper's heart going pitter-pat next to me, a familiar voice said, “Here.”

I peeked over my shoulder and saw Cornell sitting a few seats behind Harper, his arm raised in the air. If you went in for that young Lando Calrissian, future-prom-king kind of thing—which Harper did—Cornell Aaron was pretty much perfect, from his shaved head to his penny loafers. He spotted me and waved.

I waved back and turned around. Harper tried to shrink in her seat.

“You look kind of greenish,” I whispered to her.

“It's nothing.”

“Nothing, huh?” I asked under my breath. “Nothing sure got taller over the summer.”

“Shut up,” she hissed back.

As Mr. Cline continued reciting the names of our classmates, I looked around the room, waiting to see an unfamiliar face. TV and movies would lead you to believe that the first day of school was the day a handsome stranger walked in, possibly in a leather jacket or harboring some kind of deep dark secret, like an abusive family or fangs.

But there were no handsome strangers. Mike Shepherd was sitting in the front of the room, picking at a zit with a vacant expression. Brad Hertz and Nick Conrad were already passing notes back and forth. Mary-Anne France was putting on more lip gloss than was medically advisable.

“Beatrice Watson?” Mr. Cline read.

“Trixie,” I corrected automatically.

Call me vain, but being called Beatrice made my skin crawl. I don't care how much my parents had loved my great-grandmother. I had nothing but respect for GG Bea, who had been a pilot and liked to refer to Amelia Earhart as “Eleanor Roosevelt's girlfriend,” but that didn't change the fact that Beatrice was a terrible name.

“Trix, not recommended for kids,” Ben West said loudly from somewhere behind me.

I craned around in my seat, leaning into the aisle so that I could see him from around the girl sitting between us. It was hard to focus on his face with that thing under his nose, but I managed, focusing instead on the mop of unbrushed hair on his forehead.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

He scoffed and his mustache spazzed out. “Through the door, Trix. Did you climb in through the window? I would have paid to see that.”

“Ben West?” Mr. Cline asked, ignoring us.

West half-raised his hand in a limp salute. “Right here, friend.”

“Yes, thank you.” Mr. Cline frowned before gesturing to the pile of textbooks dwarfing his desk. “Please come check out a textbook and return to your seats.”

There was a screeching of chairs as the class swarmed toward the front. The girl behind me shoved her way forward, getting trapped in the traffic jam. I watched as Cornell stood to the side, letting Harper sneak past him. She thanked him breathlessly.

I considered, not for the first or last time, how much easier life would have been if one of them had been born with a backbone. They'd been doing this awkward flirt shuffle since freshman year after an incident involving a pepperoni getting stuck in Harper's hair and Cornell gently retrieving it. Ever since then, it'd been all furtive glances and Harper sighing and Cornell being extragentlemanly whenever she was around.

I'd considered locking them in a closet together when we'd been roped into helping the yearbook staff the year before, but Meg pointed out that it would have been “inappropriate” to barricade our best friend in a closet by piling a bunch of desks in front of it. I still stood by the fact that it totally would have worked and I wouldn't have spent all summer listening to Harper muse about what Cornell was doing at his summer internship in Washington, DC.

“If a look could knock someone up,” Ben West muttered behind me, “Harper would be blown up with Cornell's triplets.”

I didn't turn around. I was busy throwing up in my mouth. “That is the worst thing anyone has ever said out loud.”

He grinned. “That's not even the worst thing I've said in the last half hour.”

“Which proves that you continue to excel at being an awful person,” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder. I couldn't stop myself from giggle-snorting at his old-timey mustache again. “Seriously, West. The mustache? You look like Mario. You just need a plunger and a self-fertilizing hermaphroditic dinosaur.”

I pushed forward, fighting against the tide of people holding the weighty tome that was to be our textbook for the semester. It was a college-level text and didn't even include the extra academic articles and novels we'd be covering. I took a moment to wonder whether or not I should have taken the British Imperialism class with Meg.

“I will take that as a compliment,” West said, following behind me. “Mario is a hero. Saving princesses and clearing pipes? The man deserves a medal.”

“You deserve a straightjacket. Or a muzzle. Possibly both. You could do it up Hannibal Lecter style and save us all the trouble. You could pay someone to wheel you from class to class.”

“How many name drops can you get in to one insult? It's like you aren't even trying. I could easily compare you to—”

I spun to face him again and tilted my chin up so that I wasn't staring straight into the jut of his Adam's apple. “A summer's day?”

“Dry and unpleasant?” he said, twirling the end of his mustache nefariously. The sound of the whiskers crunching together was awful. “I could see that. It doesn't capture the full scope, though. Maybe a summer's day in Death Valley with nothing but yogurt to drink? And a swarm of wasps.”

“You always go one too far.” I sighed. “I can actually hear you scraping the bottom of the barrel of your limited intellect.”

We got to the front of the room and Harper bumped me with her arm, throwing me a warning look that pointed out that I should stop sniping at Ben West. Scowling at her, I scooped up a book and shoved past West on my way back to my seat.

Most of the new senior class at the Mess had started at Aragon Prep, Messina's warm and squishy sister school. From kindergarten to eighth grade, Aragon had spent countless hours teaching all of us how to socialize with our peers and have fun with our education. And then the Mess spent four years making us forget all of that crap and get ready to go to college and/or take over the world.

That's why the class list was posted constantly. Outside of the attendance office, locked in a Poly(methyl methacrylate)—Plexiglas—case, the class lists were posted in order of rank on the first of every month. Just to keep the student body with a healthy—and occasionally nervous-breakdown-inducing—sense of competition.

I had done the Rank Tango with Ben West throughout junior year. One month, I'd be third, then he'd replace me. He'd managed a 103 percent in Statistical Anomalies—beating me by one percent—and I'd stayed firmly stuck at number four for the rest of the year.

We'd been playing this game for as long as I could remember. Despite the lazy insults and his nonstop blathering on, Ben West was always there to sweep a victory away from me. When I won the geography bee in third grade, he'd won the spelling bee. When I'd trounced him at kickball, he'd wiped the four square court with me.

And that didn't even include the incident with the monkey bars.

All I wanted was one win that he couldn't take away from me. If I could dethrone him from the number three spot in our class—Cornell and Harper were one and two, respectively—and stay there until graduation, I would be able to dance out of the Mess with no regrets. A decade of battles with Ben West would be worth it if I won the war.

I retrieved a pencil and my Spider-Man binder from my bag. Flipping the binder open to the first fresh sheet of sweet-smelling college-ruled notebook paper, I dated the top right-hand corner. T-minus 179 days until graduation.

“‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she with silent lips,” shouted Mr. Cline, his voice suddenly booming with theatrical intensity. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'”

He looked around the room with narrowed eyes, breathing heavily.

“This is the promise of ‘The New Colossus,'” he said in a reverential whisper. “Written by whom, Miss France?”

Mary-Anne cocked her head at him. “Emma Lazarus.”

“Correct,” he roared, spinning to the whiteboard to scrawl the name under his own. “Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew from Portugal. The voice of the disenfranchised immigrant!”

As he started listing the accomplishments of Emma Lazarus and the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, my pencil flew over the notebook paper. We hadn't even opened the textbook and I was already a page of notes in.

Just a normal first day at the Mess.

 

To:
Messina Academy Students

From:
Administrative Services

Subject:
Salutations!

 

 

Welcome pupils, new and old, to the Messina Academy for the Gifted.

 

As you enter this morning with your proverbial clean slate, you may note some changes to our institution. Thanks to a generous donation from the Donnelly family, we have secured a second mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization capabilities.…

 

2

“Where were you
this morning?” Harper asked the second Meg was within earshot of us in the cafeteria. “We waited for you out front.”

Meg set her tray down on our table, smoothing her pleated skirt as she sat down. As expected, her glossy black hair had been meticulously curled.

Like short women across the globe, Meg looked like she would be harmless, but she was a pocket-sized ball of fury when you crossed her. We'd called her Pikachu through most of our time at Aragon Prep until the day she started sobbing and told us that it made her sound fat. We'd given up on nicknames that day. And discovered a sync in our menstrual cycles.

“My parents made a huge deal about this being my last first day of high school,” she said airily. “There was breakfast with my grandparents and a Skype conversation with my brother. It was a nice thought, but it put me totally behind schedule. Sometimes, they care too much.”

“You should try being an only child,” I said, laughing. “It's like that every day.”

“Pretty much,” Harper said.

“I don't know how the two of you survive,” Meg said. “Did I miss anything important before the bell?”

“Cornell and Harper continue to try to make out with each other via telepathy,” I said, stabbing my fork into the wilted lettuce that the Mess cafeteria mockingly called a salad.

Harper squawked, spewing chicken nugget breading onto the table. Meg covered her plate as Harper flapped her hands, blindly searching for a napkin.

“Untrue.” Harper coughed. “That's not what happened at all.”

Meg wasn't convinced but she seemed to weigh her options and come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth seeing if Harper would actually lay an egg if we kept talking about Cornell.

“Anything else?”

I scanned around the cafeteria and found West sitting on the other side of the room with Cornell and the Donnelly twins. I pointed at him and Meg clasped her hands to her face, sucking in a gasp.

“What is that on Ben's face?”

“Exactly,” I said, shoving a forkful of salad into my mouth. “Good luck eating your chicken nuggets after that.”

“Is it real?” she asked.

“I'm not entirely sure.” I cringed as I spotted West shoving pizza under the flap of hair. “I considered trying to rip it off of him during first period, but I'm afraid that I'd disturb the family of mice living in it. I wonder what he's doing with the politicos. Doesn't he normally run with the Dungeons & Dragons crowd?”

“Mike Shepherd kicked him out last year,” Meg said. “He's on the student council now.”