#nerdherd

EM Magazine published some photos that were taken in Nashville last year in the summer. This photoshoot was just us fans having fun. So proud of these girls. (I did the makeup and marks).

Lyra Dawson sat looking blankly at the computer screen wondering when her life had turned into such a downward spiral. She’d gone to a great college, admittedly racking up a good bit of student loans, and gotten a great degree in a field that was constantly growing – so getting a good decent paying job should have been a piece of cake. And wouldn’t you know it, just as she’d been a bright eye graduated with a freshly printed diploma her world came to a crashing halt. Her grandmother had gotten sick – well she’d been sick for years just had never bothered to tell her only grandchild of the fact. Or that she’d racked up a huge amount of medical debt that her health insurance couldn’t cover. Or that the bank was close to foreclosing on the house. The only thing the bank hadn’t threatened to take was the jeep because it had been paid off, and her grandmother’s life. No, the disease had done that.

So Lyra was stuck with a pile of student loans and medical debt from her grandmother. Even though it had been a terrible time, she still had her good biochemistry degree right?  Only labs wanted experience to hire you on. And not just a little, every application she filled out the requirements were five years of experience. That was when it had started spiraling out of control. Luckily she had eventually gotten hired on in a lab, just shy of a year after graduating from college. The paycheck wasn’t as high as she wished but it was enough to steadily pay off the debt she was in – you know for the next foreseeable future—and afforded her enough to pay rent on a dated trailer that had frankly seen much better days.

Vega Labs mostly responsible for synthesis food for astronauts on long space voyages as well as a couple of other space-related projects – Lyra wasn’t an engineer so she wasn’t really sure what they did, to be honest. She had focused on her own projects which were biologically engineering plants so they could be grown in harsh environments – like on another planet for instance. She was on a team with three other guys, who were complete nerds but at least they were easy to work with and she got along well with them. The project supervisor, however, made her nervous and she couldn’t exactly place her finger on why he did. He was about ten years her senior and handsome for a man in his mid-thirties and he had always been respectful and professional at work. Just something about him gave her the vibes as she called it, that feeling of unease and alarm.

Lyra was brought out of her depressing thoughts by the noise of the nerd herd entering the lab. Her three lab partners; Fargo, Renji, and Cal or the nerds as she affectionately called them, greeted her cheerfully and set a big steaming cup of coffee and a small bag on her desk.

“I don’t care what other girls think,” she sighed happily taking a big gulp of the hot coffee. “Y’all would make great husbands.”

“Yea,” Fargo drawled, flopping down in his desk chair. “That’s why we are swimming in dates.”

“I told you I’d marry you in a heartbeat,” Cal said from the opposite side of Lyra. “You just keep turning me down.”

“You don’t get your honey from where you get your money,” Renji said, quoting Lyra – since it was something she said repeatedly.  

She just smiled at them in return. She liked the easy banter that passed between them. It made for a less stressful environment and made the day pass by faster. In truth, they were her only friends. When she had first gotten the job at Vega Labs it meant moving across the world to the small desert town of Oasis Springs. Lyra had tried keeping in touch with her college and hometown friends but after the first year, it went from chatting every other day, to weekly chats to once in a blue moon text. Everyone had just drifted apart in their own little worlds. Which didn’t bother her, she was actually relieved by it because she didn’t have to pretend everything was okay. The nerds just knew her from when she hired in on the project, which meant they didn’t know about her huge amount of debt or her family. Just that she’d been a recent college graduate and moved into town. All of their project members where transplants except for their supervisor. So it was really easy to be a normal person around the guys.

The town, which Lyra thought barely constituted of a town, was only a small strip of buildings that housed the town hall and courthouses, the police department, grocery store, a dinner, and a thrift store. The buildings were old and had seen better days and the whole town had been on the verge of becoming a ghost town until a military base had been built about thirty miles outside of town in the desert. This brought new life into the town, then Vega Labs followed opening not long after the military base had been finished. So the once diminishing town was now thriving once more, there had even been some news of a bowling alley opening up.

Lyra opened the brown paper sack with the dinner’s logo on it and inhaled the warm fresh scent of cinnamon and sugar. The nerds had brought her a giant cinnamon roll that the local dinner was famous for and it was still hot too. They must have had to get there right at opening to get one – the thought made her pause. As she crunched the top of the bag she looked up from her desk and eyed the guys. “Why does this feel like a setup?” she asked, suddenly suspicious of their motives.

“Well,” Renji drawled. He looked over at Cal, who in turn looked at Fargo. The three were roommates as well as best friends. And Fargo was the easiest to bully into telling the truth. So she turned her eyes on him and waited…3…2...1.

“Because it is!” he broke, “Geek con is this Saturday. You know it’s my turn to take the weekend shift and I was kind of hoping you’d do it.”

“Nice going,” Cal remarked, “You were supposed to butter her up more. Not just blurt it all out.” All three guys turned to her expectantly. The way they looked at her reminded her of children who wanted their mom to agree to a weekend sleepover.

“Fine…” she sighed. It’s not like she had anything better to do. No boyfriend, or social life to speak of really. Besides she could use all the overtime she could get. “But I expect to be paid in cinnamon rolls and coffee for the next two weeks.”

“Anything you say!” Fargo exclaimed, coming to hug her.

She waved him away and went back to her pastry. “Yea, yea. Just make sure you’re all caught up when you leave tomorrow.”