Free Pwned by Shannen Camp

snatching up the few cards I had managed to collect.
    “You’re a smart person,” Cannon said without a hint of sarcasm.
    “Yeah , me and my one set of matching cards,” I joked.
    “I mean it. I know you pretend to be dumb so you can be a cheerleader, but you’re smart deep down.”
    I stopped short at his words, looking into his intelligent blue eyes that were identical to mine. It was weird to hear someone so young saying things so grown-up. All of the other nine-year-olds I had ever encountered were busy whining about what toys they got, or not wanting to go to bed when adults told them to.
    Cannon didn’t ever whine ; he kept to himself and silently observed the world around him, picking up the details and storing them somewhere in his massive brain.
    “Would your friends be mad at you if they knew you were smart?” he asked, sounding almost like a child for the first time ever due to the simplicity of a question that actually resonated quite deeply with me.
    I heaved a sigh, thinking about my answer rather than just throwing out a quick joke to gloss over the question.
    “They wouldn’t be mad. They don’t hate smart people. It’s just not my role,” I explained with a shrug, realizing as I spoke how pathetic the truth really was.
    “Is that why they can’t know about the video games?” he asked seriously. “Match,” he added.
    “Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
    “That doesn’t make sense,” said my genius little brother who understood everything.
    I guess I forgot the fact that he was only nine, sometimes, and didn’t understand the complexities of making and keeping friends.
    “You’ll understand when you’re older,” I said, trying not to be condescending , since I knew that was Cannon’s biggest pet peeve.
    “I don’t think I will,” he a nswered seriously.
    We both stared at the cards laid out before us for a long time and I suspected neither of us were actually looking for patterns anymore. We needed a good excuse to be introspective for a while.
    “Reagan?” Cannon finally asked after our long silence.
    “Yeah?”
    “Do I need to stop being smart if I want to make friends?” he asked in his small, little boy voice.
    I looked at him with a sad smile—a boy so much younger than me, who still seemed to know so much more.
    “Not if you want to make good friends. ”
    +++
    I couldn’t sleep that night thinking about what Cannon had said. I wondered if Zane and Tawny would be as accepting of my nerdiness as Cannon seemed to think they should be. Somehow I doubted it, but I had a small glimmer of hope in the back of my mind that because they had gotten to know me as “cool cheerleading Reagan,” they could look past any nerdy obsessions I might have. Maybe they would shrug them off as some weird quirk I possessed, like Tawny’s constant posing.
    Maybe my small glimmer of hope was more like a fading memory of hope. After all, Tawny’s posin g was cute. My gaming was just . . . well . . . weird. Either way, I couldn’t sleep and felt like I should go talk to Zane again, since my last midnight talk with him didn’t exactly go as well as I had hoped.
    I snuck out the same way I had before and drove to his house, trying to go over what I would say to him in my head. It wasn’t like I was going to tell him I had the plague or something. I was just going to say, “Hey I have some hobbies that most people would consider slightly less than cool. What about you?”
    How wrong could it go, right?
    Feeling pretty good about the situation, I parked my car in front of his house, and then noticed something wrong with his normally empty street.
    Tawny’s red sports car was parked at the curb , right behind  Zane’s black truck. I stayed completely still in my car for a moment, turning off the lights and killing the engine as I stared at it.
    “Maybe they’re getting ready to pull another prank on Parker,” I thought aloud, sounding even less convincing out loud than I had in my head.
    I