Nerd Camp (2 page)

“I got him,” said his dad.

His mom nodded. “Congratulations on your engagement.”

“Thanks.” His dad patted Gabe on the head. “Say goodbye to your mom.”

There was a lull in passersby, and Gabe was getting a pretty good look at Zack, who had spiky dark hair and was pressing buttons on a cell phone. It was hard to pull his focus away, but Gabe did. He gave his mom a hug and said, “Bye, Mom. See you on Sunday.” Then he turned to his dad. “Let's go.”

The two of them made their way through the crowd. Despite all his excitement and all the mental lists he'd compiled of things he could talk about with his new stepbrother, face to face with him, Gabe found himself suddenly nervous and speechless.

“Gabe,” said his dad, “this is my soon-to-be new wife, Carla.”

Carla extended her hand to shake Gabe's and gave him a smile that looked even nicer in person than it did in the pictures his dad had shown him—Gabe thought it could get her a role in a toothpaste commercial. She was also a lot taller and thinner than his own mom.
I couldn't make the mistake of thinking
she's
pregnant
, Gabe thought.

“Hello, Gabe!” said Carla. “I've been looking forward to meeting you!”

“Hi,” Gabe said. He had mostly been looking forward to meeting Zack, but he didn't say so.

“This is Zack,” Carla said.

Zack didn't look up from the phone he was using. “Hang on,” he said.

“Zack,” Carla said with a sigh. “Put your phone away and meet Gabe.”

“Hang
on
,” Zack said. He typed quickly into the phone's keypad, pressed send, and then closed up the phone and stuck it into his back pocket. Only then did he look up and seem to notice Gabe. “Hey.”

“Hi,” said Gabe.

“Sorry. I had to text back.”

“That's your phone?” Gabe asked.

“Yeah. I know, it's kind of old. But the two-year contract is up in June, so I'll get a new one then. A couple of my friends have iPhones, but I don't really want one. I think they're overrated.”

Gabe didn't know what to say, so he just said, “Yeah. Totally.” A few kids in his class had their own cell phones, but his mom said he wasn't allowed to have one until high school, and that was fine with him. It wasn't like he talked to his friends on the phone. But now he wished he had one or at least knew about the technology in the latest models, so that he could have said an actual sentence to Zack.
Do people even say “totally”?
he thought. He wondered who Zack was text messaging now. Wouldn't everyone he knew be in school?

“What's your cell number?” Zack asked. “I'll missed-call you, and then you'll have mine.”

“I don't have one,” he admitted. There went his first opportunity to become best friends.

“Zack is only allowed to have one because there are no pay phones at the skate park,” Carla said to Gabe. “And it's supposed to be for emergencies only,” she added with a sigh that showed she had given up on Zack's following that rule.

“You two guys have a lot of things in common,” said Gabe's dad cheerily. But before he could begin to say what, exactly, those things were, Carla tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to her watch. “Oh, right,” said Gabe's dad. “We'd better get to the subway. Cake tasting at eleven.”

Gabe's dad and Carla took off, hand in hand, down the crowded corridor. Zack started following them, and Gabe hurried to keep up with Zack.

“What's your bag from?” Zack asked.

Gabe glanced down at his duffel bag as he walked. He figured Zack was asking
where
he had gotten the bag because of the logo on the side, which had an open book and said,
ALL-STAR READERS 2010
. But instead of saying that his library gave it to him because he read eight books in the summer of 2010 (he actually read more than that, but you only needed to read eight to get the duffel bag), he told Zack what he used the bag for: “Swimming.”

“Oh, cool,” said Zack. “I like swimming, but I'm not on a team. I think swim practice is during the spring and the summer, and that's when I surf and go to the skate park, and this summer I'm going to take guitar lessons, too. And then in two summers, when I'm twelve, my mom will
finally
let me
go to sleepaway camp, or at least that's what she says.”

“I might go to sleepaway camp this summer,” Gabe said. He decided, just for now, to leave out that the sleepaway camp was the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment, and that the reason he wasn't sure yet was because he was waiting to find out how he scored on a special test to see if he got in.

“Dude, I am so jealous. You've
got
to go. Nothing is cooler than sleepaway camp. My friend went last summer and told me all these
awesome
stories about stuff he did with his camp friends.”

Once again, Gabe found himself wondering how to respond to his brother. He had mentally compiled a whole list of funny stories to tell Zack—about the time his friend spilled lemonade on his pants right before his Math Fair presentation, and about how he and some students in Wings, his school's gifted program, made a fully functional robot and then had it roll into the teacher's lounge and say, “I come in peace”—but he had a feeling Zack wouldn't find any of them awesome. Gabe's stomach sank like it had the time he'd realized he'd written a whole book report without remembering to indent for new paragraphs. Like all his hard work was somehow wrong.

The four of them reached the subway entrance turnstiles, and Gabe's dad pulled out a MetroCard. “You remember how to do this, Gabe?” he asked.

Gabe nodded. He had only ridden the subway a few times before, and not since he last visited his dad a few months ago. But he didn't want Zack to think he knew nothing about
anything
.

“I'll go through first,” said his dad, “and then pass my card back to you so you can use it too.” He stepped up to the turnstile and swiped the card through quickly and smoothly. The little screen said go $18.50
REMAINING,
and his dad walked through. Then he passed the card back.

Gabe put down his duffel bag and swiped the card through, fast. He walked confidently forward, but the turnstile didn't move. He looked at the screen: It was blank.

“You had it upside down. Try again,” Carla said gently, in the same tone his teacher would use when a student called a word an adverb when it was really an adjective.

Gabe looked at the MetroCard and felt his face turn red. The way he had swiped it, the black magnetic strip didn't even go through the reader. Thinking about how dumb it was that he could probably program that magnetic strip but could
not run it through the machine properly, he swiped it again. Again, the turnstile arm wouldn't budge.
PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE.
He swiped again, as he was told.
PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE.

“Do it a little slower,” his dad replied.

Gabe could feel a line building up behind him and hear people sighing and shifting, impatient.

He swiped the card slowly.
PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE
. He did it once more, quicker this time, and finally, the screen read go
$16.25 REMAINING
. Relieved, Gabe rushed through. “Here,” he said to Zack, extending his dad's MetroCard over the turnstile.

“I've got my own,” said Zack.

Gabe felt dumb again as he handed the card back to his dad and watched Zack walk easily through on his first swipe.

“Don't forget your bag, dear,” Carla said. She held up Gabe's duffel from the other side of the turnstile.

“Oh, yeah. Whoops!” Gabe grabbed it quickly, so that Zack couldn't get a closer look at the logo. “Oh, man,” he muttered.

“I know how you feel,” Zack said as they all rushed to the subway platform and caught a train.

Gabe sat down next to his dad and Carla, but then he realized that Zack was going to stay standing, so he jumped back up.

“The other day, I went surfing with my dad in the morning,” Zack continued, “and then we hit all this traffic on the way back from Malibu. So I was late for school, which normally would be great, but that day I missed an assembly that was actually really fun. And then we had a test in science that I totally forgot about,” he said, “so I probably flunked it. And then I bought a
Diet
Coke instead of a regular one during lunch and didn't realize it until I already opened it and took a sip.”

The subway started moving with a jolt, and Gabe grabbed on to the pole Zack was holding. He felt his heart beating faster and his blood running through his body, like he was coming alive with the train. Despite all that stuff about surfing and flunking tests, he had finally found something he and his brother had in common! “I
hate
Diet Coke,” he said.

“It tastes like puke,” said Zack.

Gabe grinned. He knew tons about puke. “Did you know that cows throw up, chew the vomit in their mouths, and then swallow it again?”

“That's nasty,” Zack said excitedly.

The subway stopped, and a woman gave the two boys a look of disgust. “Thanks for ruining my appetite,” she said before gathering her bags and walking off the train.

Gabe and Zack looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Then they cracked up.

“You're welcome!” Zack called after her.

Gabe glanced at his dad and Carla to see if they were paying attention. When he saw that they were involved in a conversation and there was no way he could get in trouble, he took his hand off the pole to cup his mouth and shout at the woman. “Flies eat their vomit too!”

Zack, still laughing, said, “Awesome.”

Gabe stumbled backward as the train started moving again, but he got his footing before falling over. “Whee!” he said, which made Zack laugh harder.

“You're funny,” Zack said, and Gabe was so happy, he thought he might burst right there on the subway. “Do those animals really eat their puke?”

“Yeah. I read about it in a book called
Grossology
, which is all gross science facts.”

“That sounds like a cool book.”

“It is! What's your favorite book? I have three: one for fiction, one for nonfiction, and one that's kind of in between. I also really like poems—” Gabe cut himself off when he noticed that Zack's expression had gone from
cool
to
boring
to
what's wrong with this guy?

“Reading's boring,” Zack said.

“Some books are boring,” Gabe said, even though he could only think of two books he'd ever found boring, and one of those was his social studies textbook, which he thought was actually two fifths boring and three fifths interesting. “But some books are really good, like the
Grossology
one.”

Zack shrugged. “So do you just, like, read all the time?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” said Gabe. “I mean, I read sometimes, but not all the time.”

Zack laughed. “There's this kid in my class who's so weird. One time, the teacher asked him what he did over the weekend, and he said his friend came over and they read books. Isn't that weird?”

Gabe crinkled his nose. “Really weird,” he said, even though he and Ashley did that all the time, and even though
last weekend he went to Eric's house just to help him solve all the logic problems in the brainteaser book he'd gotten for his birthday.

“Yeah, this kid's a real nerd,” Zack said. “He goes to the gifted program and everything. And get this. He's on a math team.” Zack looked at Gabe, waiting for him to laugh. “Math's not a sport! What do you do on a math team? Run around solving math problems?”

Gabe swallowed. “I know someone who's on a math team,” he said with a shrug. “It doesn't seem that weird. And this guy's really cool.”

Zack shook his head. “That's not possible. You can't be on a math team
and
be cool. Math team, gifted program, hanging out and reading—all those things automatically make you a geek.”

Gabe took off his glasses, rubbed his eye with his palm, and put them back on.
I'm three-for-three
, he thought, instantly ashamed. He'd been called a geek before by some kids at school, but it never bothered him like this. He didn't really care what those people thought about him—he never even thought about it—because he had lots of friends. It wasn't like he was Paul Hefferberger, who smelled bad and
kept a plastic lightsaber in his backpack, or Margie Smith, who never had anyone to talk to except the cat stickers on her lunchbox. But this wasn't just someone at school, this was his
new brother
. And he didn't want his own brother—the brother he'd been hoping for forever—thinking he was like Paul or Margie. He wanted Zack to like him. “So, being a geek is bad?” he asked.

Zack cracked up. “Dude, you are so funny! Get this. This kid in my class, he's such a nerd that he wants to keep going to school over the
summer
. So he's going to this special nerd camp. That must be the most boringest place in the world. A whole camp of geeks doing geeky things.” He shook his head. “Just picture that!”

Gabe thought about his application to the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment and how anxious he was to hear if he'd gotten in. “I can picture it,” he said. Then, worried that the truth might somehow become visible—like his brain would start glowing through his skull or something—Gabe added, “Why would anyone want to
learn
things over the summer?”

“Because they're nerds,” Zack said with a pitying but knowing shake of his head. “There better not be a lot of nerds
at my new school here in New York. My mom made me go with her to look at it yesterday, and it seemed okay. I'm sure there'll be cool people for me to be friends with.”