The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You

 

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About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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For Erin and Liz

Because you're never alone when you're part of a trio

 

acknowledgments

a top-ten list of thank-yous

1. My Family:
For your love, your encouragement, and your understanding that I will miss holidays when I'm breaking a story.

2. The Harbor Family:
Teddy, Elizabert, J-Tho, Kiddo, Hailo, V-Luu, Brig, Nic, KB1, KB2, Gnat, Magic JJ, Abby Fabby Funk, Monks, and Lady Bon Bon—my super friends, who put up with being incessantly nicknamed. Thank you again and always, for absolutely everything.
I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?

3. Laura Zats:
My agent and my champion, who got this book immediately. Thank you for pushing me to be nerdier and for believing that I could juggle three manuscripts at the same time. You make me a stronger writer and a stronger person. I could not be more thankful for you. I owe you a beer and a hug.

4. Sylvan Creekmore:
The coolest editor in the world, who changed my life in the span of one e-mail (and every e-mail since). I can't thank you enough for making this book possible. Beer and hugs for you, too!

5. Everyone at St. Martin's Press, especially Michelle and Karen:
For believing in me and this book and for guiding me through the mess that was achieving my greatest dream.

6. The Sweet 16s:
The sweetest and most talented group of people on the Internet. I can't believe how lucky I am to be debuting alongside of you all.

7. The Harleys (Mellissa, Rich, Aidan, and Spencer):
For your amazing support and insta-love.

8. Brandon, Sylvia, and the overlords:
For being on my team for so many years.

9. Erin:
My best friend and first fangirl whose rants about the X-Men proved to be quite useful. Thank you for bringing me mugs of tea and reminding me to eat, for reading YA when you really didn't want to, and for introducing me to
Saga
. You're the world's best lying cat.

10. My students:
This book started as a love letter to my students. Without their enthusiasm for sharing their fandoms with their school librarian, the Messina Academy would be unpopulated. Endless thanks to every Bee and Falcon who stopped at my desk to talk about
Doctor Who, Star Wars,
Marvel, DC,
Lord of the Rings,
and
Harry Potter
. Thank you for handing me books that you loved and reminding me that stories change lives. You all make my job a blessing.

And none for Gretchen Wieners.

 

There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her: they never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them.

—William Shakespeare,
Much Ado About Nothing,
I.i

 

1

Ben West spent
summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.

Seriously.

Hovering over his upper lip—possibly glued there—was a bushy monstrosity that shouted,
“Look out, senior class, I'm gonna tie some chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy Roosevelt. Bully!”

I blindly swatted at Harper with my comic book, trying to alert her to the fact that there was a mustachioed moron attempting to blend in with the other people entering campus.

“I know I should have made flash cards for the poems that Cline assigned,” she said, elbowing me back hard, both acknowledging that she wasn't blind and that she hated when I interrupted her monologues about the summer reading list. “But I found Mrs. Bergman's sociolinguistics syllabus on the U of O website and I'm sure she'll use the same one here.”

The mustache twitched an attempt at freedom, edging away from West's ferrety nose as he tried to shove past a group of nervous freshmen. It might have been looking at me and Harper, but its owner was doing everything possible to ignore us, the planter box we were sitting on, and anything else that might have been east of the wrought iron gate.

“So,” Harper continued, louder than necessary considering we were sitting two inches apart, “I thought I'd get a head start. But now I'm afraid that we were supposed to memorize the poems for Cline. He never responded to my emails.”

Pushing my comic aside, I braced my hands against the brick ledge. The mustache was daring me to say something. Harper could hear it, too, as evidenced by her staring up at the sun and muttering, “Or you could, you know, not do this.”

“Hey, West,” I called, ignoring the clucks of protest coming from my left. “I'm pretty sure your milk mustache curdled. Do you need a napkin?”

Ben West lurched to a stop, one foot inside of the gate. Even on the first day of school, he hadn't managed to find a clean uniform. His polo was a series of baggy wrinkles, half-tucked into a pair of dingy khakis. He turned his head. If the mustache had been able to give me the finger, it would have. Instead, it watched me with its curlicue fists raised on either side of West's thin mouth.

“Hey, Harper,” he said. He cut his eyes at me and grumbled, “Trixie.”

I leaned back, offering the slowest of slow claps. “Great job, West. You have correctly named us. I, however, may need to change your mantle. Do you prefer Yosemite Sam or Doc Holliday? I definitely think it should be cowboy related.”

“Isn't it inhumane to make the freshmen walk past you?” he asked me, pushing the ratty brown hair out of his eyes. “Or is it some kind of ritual hazing?”

“Gotta scare them straight.” I gestured to my blond associate. “Besides, I've got Harper to soften the blow. It's like good cop, bad cop.”

“It is nothing like good cop, bad cop. We're waiting for Meg,” Harper said, flushing under the smattering of freckles across her cheeks as she turned back to the parking lot, undoubtedly trying to escape to the special place in her head where pop quizzes—and student council vice presidents—lived. She removed her headband and then pushed it back in place until she once again looked like Sleeping Beauty in pink glasses and khakis. Whereas I continued to look like I'd slept on my ponytail.

Which I had because it is cruel to start school on a Wednesday.

“Is it heavy?” I asked Ben, waving at his mustache. “Like weight training for your face? Or are you trying to compensate for your narrow shoulders?”

He gave a halfhearted leer at my polo. “I could ask the same thing of your bra.”

My arms flew automatically to cover my chest, but I seemed to be able to conjure only the consonants of the curses I wanted to hurl at him. In his usual show of bad form, West took this as some sort of victory.

“As you were,” he said, jumping back into the line of uniforms on their way to the main building. He passed too close to Kenneth Pollack, who shoved him hard into the main gate, growling, “Watch it, nerd.”

“School for geniuses, Kenneth,” Harper called. “We're all nerds.”

Kenneth flipped her off absentmindedly as West righted himself and darted past Mike Shepherd into the main building.

“Brute,” Harper said under her breath.

I scuffed the planter box with the heels of my mandatory Mary Janes. “I'm off my game. My brain is still on summer vacation. I totally left myself open to that cheap trick.”

“I was referring to Kenneth, not Ben.” She frowned. “But, yes, you should have known better. Ben's been using that bra line since fourth grade.”

As a rule, I refused to admit when Harper was right before eight in the morning. It would lead to a full day of her gloating. I hopped off the planter and scooped up my messenger bag, shoving my comic inside.

“Come on. I'm over waiting for Meg. She's undoubtedly choosing hair care over punctuality. Again.”

Harper slid bonelessly to her feet, sighing with enough force to slump her shoulders as she followed me through the front gate and up the stairs. The sunlight refracted against her pale hair every time her neck swiveled to look behind us. Without my massive aviator sunglasses, I was sure I would have been blinded by the glare.

“What's with you?” I asked, kicking a stray pebble out of the way.

“What? Nothing.” Her head snapped back to attention, knocking her glasses askew. She quickly straightened them with two trembling hands. “Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe senior year might be a good time for you to end your war with Ben. You'd have more time to study and read comics and…”

Unlike the tardy Meg, Harper was tall enough that I could look at her without craning my neck downward. It made it easier to level her with a droll stare. Sometimes, it's better to save one's wit and just let the stupidity of a thought do the talking.

She rolled her eyes and clucked again, breezing past me to open the door.

“Or not,” she said, swinging the door open and letting me slip past her. “Year ten of
Watson v. West
starts now. But if one of you brings up the day he pushed you off the monkey bars, I am taking custody of Meg and we are going to sit with the yearbook staff during lunch.”

“I accept those terms.” I grinned. “Now help me think of historical figures with mustaches. Hitler and Stalin are entirely too obvious. I need to brainstorm before we get homework.”

*   *   *

Messina Academy for the Gifted—the Mess—was the only nondenominational private school in a fifty-mile radius. At some point in the mid-seventies a bunch of disgruntled academics from the local university had taken over a foundering Jesuit school, turned the chapel into the state's first high school computer lab, and started only letting in students who passed the three-hour entrance exam.

From the outside the Mess seemed like any other private high school—four hundred kids in uniforms whose tuition had one too many zeroes. But inside we were even weirder than the poor saps at the Catholic school across town. Sure, we had sports and proms and cliques, but we also had electives devoted to the physics of
Star Trek
and the chemistry of emotions.