Revenge of the Geek (23 page)

Mrs. Gordon came in then, just as the bell rang. Her hair was, as usual, falling out of its sloppy bun, and as soon as she walked in the door, half of the papers she’d been carrying dropped to the floor.

“Oh, dear,”Mrs. Gordon said.

“I’ll get them for you,”Sanjiv said, bounding over to help her pick them up.

“Thank you, dear. It’s the homework you all did on the themes that arise in
Tom Sawyer
. Everyone did a wonderful job. If you wouldn’t mind handing them out, Sanjiv, I’d appreciate it,”Mrs. Gordon said brightly. “And we’ll get started on today’s topic, which is to discuss how Tom’s character evolves over the course of the book.”

Since the desks in Mrs. Gordon’s classroom were arranged in a circle, Nora and I were in full view of each other, and even though I did my best to avoid meeting her gaze—I busied myself getting my laptop out, and then began to studiously take notes—I could feel her eyes on me. Finally I gave in and glanced in Nora’s direction. She gave me a half smile and raised one hand in a meek wave. I raised my chin and looked coldly away.

Nora had messed with the wrong geek.

Charlie was harder to avoid. Our lockers were side by side, and we always sat together in the classes we had together. But I managed to avoid her until physics class. I considered moving to a different table and hoping that Mr. Forrester wouldn’t notice, but then I decided that would be childish. And besides, Nora would probably just end up taking my vacated seat, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. So I sat down in my usual seat.

“Hey,”Charlie said, plopping down next to me.

“Hi,”I said.

“Are you still not talking to me?”Charlie asked, pulling out her physics book and setting it on the table with a thud.

I glanced sideways to the right. Nora wasn’t there yet.

“I’m not not talking to you,”I said.

“You hung up on me yesterday,”Charlie pointed out.

“You weren’t being particularly supportive,”I said. “At least, not to me.”

“That’s not true. I do support you,”Charlie said.

I turned to look at her, my eyebrows arching. “Really? Because that’s not what it sounded like to me last night. It sounded like you were totally on Nora’s side, and wouldn’t even listen to what I was trying to say.”

Charlie sighed. “I just thought it would help if you heard another perspective,”she said.

“I didn’t need perspective. I needed a friend,”I said.

Before Charlie could reply to this, Finn arrived, looking grumpy. Even his Mohawk seemed extra prickly, sticking up in overly gelled spikes.

“Holla back, girlfriends,”Finn said with an edge to his voice, by way of greeting. Then he slammed his books down on his desk and slumped down in his seat.

“Hey,”Charlie and I said in unison.

“Why are you so grumpy today?”I asked.

Finn shrugged and kicked one sneaker against the leg of the table. Finally, he said, “I found out last night that Phoebe’s dating someone else. Some football player at Orange Cove High.”

Charlie’s smile died. I could tell the news that Finn was feeling jealous over Phoebe’s new boyfriend didn’t make her overjoyed.

“I’m sorry, Finn. That’s a really tough thing to find out,”I said. “So I guess that means there’s no chance you’ll be getting back together, huh?”

“What? I don’t want to get back together with her,”Finn said with surprise.

“You don’t?”Charlie asked.

“Then why are you so upset?”I asked.

“Because it means that she won the breakup. She got a new boyfriend before I got a new girlfriend,”Finn said.

“It’s not a contest,”Charlie said.

“Yes, it is. It’s totally a contest. And I lost,”Finn said. “I hate losing.”

“Hey, guys,”a voice said from behind me. I looked up to see Nora standing there. She was smiling nervously and shifting from foot to foot. “What are you all talking about?”

I turned back around, ignoring her.

Charlie looked worriedly from me to Nora and back again, and said, “Hey, Nora.”

Only Finn seemed oblivious to the tension between Nora and me. “We’re discussing the best strategy for how to beat my ex in the breakup wars.”

“Nora should be able to help you out with that. She just went through a breakup, too. Right, Nora?”I said, still not looking at her.

After an awkward pause, Nora said, “That’s right. But my ex-boyfriend and I aren’t at war. Our breakup was all very . . . mutual.”

“How convenient,”I said.

“Miranda!”Charlie said. “Look, can’t you guys just—”

But before she could finish, the bell rang. Mr. Forrester, who had been sitting behind his desk, stood and said, “Come on, everyone. You know the rules. When the bell rings, you’re to be in your seats, ready to get started. Nora, please sit down. Now.”

Nora had no choice. She took her seat at the table next to ours. Charlie gave me an exasperated look, but I ignored it. Nora was bad news. And sooner or later, Charlie would figure that out.

Chapter Twenty-five

E
mmett, Hannah, and I sat around the kitchen table at the beach house, each of us with a laptop and a copy of “Lamp Light
”
in front of us. I’d made duplicates of the short story on my way home after school.

“Nothing’s coming up under the title ‘Lamp Light,’”Hannah said. “There’s a Lamp Light company that the sell lamps—big surprise. And there’s a Lamp Light Ministries. But no short stories with that name.”

“I’m not surprised. Nora’s not stupid. If she was going to plagiarize someone else’s work, she’d definitely change the name,”I said.

I’d read the short story during lunch. Wanting to avoid both Nora and Charlie, I grabbed a few sandwiches from the lunch room, wrapped them in a paper napkin, and hid out in my car, the pages of the short story propped up against Bumblebee’s steering wheel.

I had to admit, the story was good. In fact, it was
so
good, it made me surer than ever that there was no way Nora had written it herself.

The story was about a man whose wife is leaving him. He sits in the living room of their apartment, under the light of a single lamp, and listens to the sounds of her packing up her things in the bedroom. And while he sits there, he thinks back over his life with her. He remembers their first meeting, and the first time she slid her hand into his, and their wedding night. He thinks back to the first fight they’d had as newlyweds, and the moment when he first suspects that she no longer loves him. Each flashback was short, only a sentence or two, but altogether it was incredibly powerful.

“Come on,”I said out loud when I was finished. “Who in their right mind could possibly think a high school student would be able to write this?”

But that was the problem with Geek High. All of the kids at my school were so gifted and talented, that the maturity of the piece would just be chalked up to genius. And it was also the problem with Nora Lee. For whatever reason, people seemed to instinctively trust her. No one would ever believe that such a shy, sweet girl was capable of plagiarizing someone else’s short story.

No one except me, that was.

“Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl?”Emmett asked, looking up from his laptop. “Nora’s in my Latin class. She seems harmless. Maybe a little shy, but nice enough.”

“Oh, no. Not you, too,”I said.

“Men are notoriously bad judges of character,”Hannah said.

“Hey!”Emmett said.

“It’s true,”Hannah said, patting his hand affectionately. “I should know. I’m a matchmaker. It’s why so many guys end up dating pretty girls who are entirely wrong for them. They have no judgment. They see a pretty face, and boom, that’s it. They don’t bother to look any deeper than that.”

“But I don’t think Nora is pretty,”Emmett protested.

“It doesn’t matter. The point is that your entire gender can’t be trusted with character judgments,”Hannah said.

“That’s not true. Dex is a great judge of character,”I said. It
was
true. For example, when Hannah’s friend Avery had been throwing herself at Dex, he had seen her for the vain, shallow, manipulative girl that she was. And a lot of guys wouldn’t have bothered to look past my geek-girl label.

“Miranda’s right. I’m sure some guys are that superficial. But not all of us are. Look at me. You’re gorgeous, but that’s not why I love you. I love you for who you are, not what you look like,”Emmett said.

“That is so sweet,”Hannah cooed.

Emmett laced his fingers through Hannah’s and pulled her toward him. They began to kiss.

“No, really. Don’t mind me. Just pretend I’m not even here,”I said.

Emmett and Hannah broke apart and looked up.

“What’s that?”Emmett asked. His eyes were dreamy and unfocused.

“Less smooching, more researching,”I ordered. “Come on. I know that story must be here somewhere.”

Over the next hour, our Internet searches turned up nothing. I’d even taken direct quotes from the story and Googled them, but no matter what I tried, nothing came up. Emmett went through the table of contents of various short-story anthologies on Amazon.com. Hannah continued to focus her attention on the title “Lamp Light,”although I kept catching her covertly shopping on Net-a-Porter.com.

Finally, in frustration, I typed the phrase
short story about a man whose wife is leaving him
into the Google search engine, not expecting anything to come up. And, at first, the search results didn’t seem promising. There was a link to an out-of-print Wilkie Collins novel written in the 1870s, a blog entry written by a guy who was going through a divorce, and a few e-zine articles with tips for saving a failing marriage. I scrolled through these, feeling increasingly gloomy about my chances of finding anything worthwhile, and wondering if I could have possibly been wrong after all.

Did Nora really write that amazing story?
I wondered. Because if she had, then she had beaten me fair and square. My story was good and I was proud of it, but it couldn’t compete with “Lamp Light.”That was the sort of writing I hoped to eventually mature into someday. Maybe Nora truly was a gifted writer.

And, if so, maybe I’d been wrong about her all along.

But then I hit the jackpot.

It was another blog entry, and a short one at that. The name of the blog was A Dream within a Dream—which apparently was a reference to an Edgar Allan Poe poem—and the entry was dated two years earlier:

Just read the most amazing short story called “One Afternoon
”
in this month’s issue of
The New Yorker
. It’s about a man whose wife is leaving him. He’s sitting there, impotent to stop her, and thinking back on their life together and how much he loves her. It made me cry. I’ve never heard of the author before—someone named Enzo Lowry—but I’m definitely going to look for his future work.

I stood, staring at the blog entry, hardly able to believe it.

“Gotcha,”I said.

“You found something?”Hannah asked. She’d looked up from her laptop, where she’d been browsing for shoes on Zappos for the past ten minutes.

“I think so,”I said.

Hannah pulled her chair around next to mine, and Emmett got up and stood behind us. With shaking fingers, I pulled up
The New Yorker
Web site, and typed in
One Afternoon
and
Enzo Lowry
into their search engine.

“‘One Afternoon’? That’s a stupid title. ‘Lamp Light’is much better,”Hannah said.

“Especially since there was so much imagery in the story about the lamp. How the bright light kept distracting him from his memories and bringing him into the present,”Emmett said.

This time, what I wanted was at the very top of the search results:

“One Afternoon,”Lowry, Enzo

I clicked on it, and started to read.

He sits in the green velvet chair that they bought together at the Twenty-sixth Street Flea Market, listening to her in the next room.The creak of the closet door.The dull thump as the suitcase is pulled down.The drawers sliding open.

“Oh, my gosh,”I said.

“Is that it?”Hannah asked.

“That’s it. Word for word, it’s the same story,”I said.

My heart thumping, I scrolled through the rest of the story to make sure that the trend continued. Sentence after sentence, page after page, “One Afternoon
”
was an exact duplicate of “Lamp Light
.
”Or, more to the point, “Lamp Light
”
was an exact duplicate of “One Afternoon.”

“I was right,”I said, shaking my head. “I can’t believe it. I was
right
.”

“Don’t you mean
I
was right? This was my idea, after all,”Hannah said.

“Yes. You were right. You totally nailed it,”I amended.

“See? That’s because I’m a good judge of character,”Hannah said, tossing her hair back with a satisfied swish.

“And I guess I’m not, because I really didn’t think we were going to find anything,”Emmett said.

“That’s okay, honey. You have other good qualities,”Hannah said.

“Why would she take such a risk?”Emmett wondered. “I know
The Ampersand
is just a school magazine, but even so, it’s pretty well-known. She had to know there was a chance someone would see the story and recognize it. Maybe even the author.”