COCO: Oh, we’d get the tux all right—and maybe fit in a small makeover. Liam’s honestly not, uh, bad-looking … but his hair could use a bit of an update.
HUTCH: So Emma Rajpur was coming to the prom. And Avery hadn’t asked Jake to go with her, which meant she must have been really committed to this whole no-dating thing, which was just kind of … well. It was what it was.
Editor’s Note: Jake had nothing to do with “this whole no-dating thing.” I didn’t want to go to prom with Jake. But there was someone I thought I might want to … No, never mind. I made a decision and I’m sticking to it.
COACH KELLY, tennis coach at San Anselmo Prep: There are no official rules that expressly prohibit romantic relationships between athletic teammates at San Anselmo Prep. I know this because I’ve spent the past year trying my hardest to institute that exact rule.
PRINCIPAL PATEL, principal of San Anselmo Prep: No, I have absolutely no plans to attempt to place restrictions upon students’ dating lives through rules in the student handbook. Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how many parents at this school are lawyers? Wait—don’t put that part in.
COACH KELLY: When Avery Dennis asked out Nils Hendqvist, it almost ended my teaching career.
Editor’s Note: I had no idea I had inflicted such turmoil. I really should have stepped up my game during Teacher Appreciation Week. At the very least, I should have gotten Coach Kelly a Starbucks gift card or something.
COCO: Nils is a very, like, compact guy, I guess you would say? He’s barely taller than Avery and almost as blond as she is.
HUTCH: Once again, AD was dating an athlete. Most might assume an obsession with physical fitness—the search for the prototypical “hot bod,” if you will—but I knew AD better than that. No, this was about something that lurked far beneath a toned rectus abdominis muscle. This was about AD’s insane competitive drive and lust for winning. Naturally, she’d be drawn to other competitive maniacs.
Editor’s Note: Hutch was at it again with the air quotes. Also the phrase “hot bod” coming out of Hutch’s mouth was moderately disturbing.
NILS HENDQVIST, ex-boyfriend and nationally ranked teen tennis player: Avery is a decent player, but she tends to let her emotions get the best of her. It is the biggest fault in her game.
COACH KELLY: Basically, with Dennis and Hendqvist, you see two opposing styles of play. Two different schools of thought on the game of tennis. Hendqvist is all control and precision. Dennis is all power and passion. When they started dating, it was like a lava flow met an avalanche, but instead of tempering each other, they exploded into an icy, fiery apocalypse.
NILS: Oh, you wanted to talk about the time I dated Avery? It hardly signified.
Editor’s Note: It hardly signified? Ouch.
COCO: I don’t even know how to measure how long they dated, since they broke up and got back together again like a billion times. We call it the Nils Debacle for a reason. The whole thing was a mess.
NILS: I do remember how irrational she was. I would attempt to give her pointers on the weak areas of her game—her drop shots, for example—and she would react like an insane person. Constructive criticism is essential to improvement.
AVERY: Nothing about Nils’s tennis “pointers” was constructive. He would just harangue me for my weak playing. Like he was so much better than me, which he absolutely is not. It was the worst.
COCO: They were always fighting, then Avery would dump him, but she’d ask him out again by the end of the day. Although Nils never reacted to any of it. He would look at her in this totally cool, level way and say nothing. Actually, because of all of Nils’s non-reactions, in some ways it was more like Avery was fighting with herself.
AVERY: Fighting with Nils was like fighting with a brick wall. It was maddening. He never responded. Which just made me madder and madder.
NILS: All of Avery’s faults are the same on the tennis court as in life. She cannot act from a place of logic. She cannot detach from a situation. She cannot converse rationally. She can only operate from emotion, invest too much, and scream. That is all.
HUTCH: I didn’t know what Nils was talking about. AD is an extremely logical person. Clearly, Nils had never conducted an experiment with her. Is she emotional? Sure. Can she be a bit dramatic sometimes? Yeah, maybe. But that’s only because she cares so much. She invests herself 110 percent in everything she does. And what’s so wrong with being emotional anyway? The greatest scientific discoveries in history have been spurred by passion and reason, in equal measures. And that’s AD exactly.
Editor’s Note: Wow, Hutch really has my back.
COCO: I don’t know if I’d say there was any kind of fallout from them breaking up, because the whole time they were dating, it was kind of like they were breaking up, you know?
COACH KELLY: Oh, sure, I remember when they broke up. It was right around the end of the season. Dozens of tennis balls disappeared. No confirmation, but I’m pretty sure Dennis had something to do with it.
COCO: Oh my God, how had I almost forgotten about the tennis balls?! When Avery reminded me about them, then I remembered why we called this the Nils Debacle.
HUTCH: I was on my way to English in a very crowded hallway when Nils opened his locker. Dozens and dozens of tennis balls spilled out, bouncing merrily down the hallway. It was total chaos. You’d be surprised how many tennis balls can fit in a locker. And how many freshman girls think screaming is an appropriate response to a hallway full of tennis balls. Were they scary? I still don’t get it.
NILS: No, Avery’s stunts did not amuse me. Nor upset me overmuch. A locker full of tennis balls? A testament to her juvenile nature.
Editor’s Note: If I was responsible for the tennis balls, which I’m not saying I am, I would be completely insulted.
PRINCIPAL PATEL: There was no proof whatsoever that Avery Dennis was responsible for the incident with the tennis balls. I was positive it was her, and yet, with no proof and no confession, there was nothing I could do. Avery Dennis does not crack under any amount of questioning.
NILS: Once our romantic relationship ended, we returned to an amicable working relationship as teammates, nothing more. We have been playing for San Anselmo Prep together since that time without incident.
AVERY: At least I knew exactly why I dumped Nils. He was a cold Swedish fish.
COCO: Swedish fish. That’s what she always called him when they were fighting last year. And I’d be all, “Avery, how would you feel if someone called me a Korean gochujang?” but she did not understand the analogy I was making.
NILS: The Swedish Fish in America are not even anything like the Pastellfiskar in Sweden! And Sweden has much better candies! Pastellfiskar is one of our worst candies, honestly!
Editor’s Note: Nils was more passionate about Swedish candy than he was about me. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
HUTCH: So AD and Nils were alike in some ways—competitive drive, love of tennis, etc.—but too different in their approach to relationships. What we had here were two fundamentally different temperaments.
AVERY: I really hope I don’t bump into Nils at prom. He would probably spend the whole time critiquing my dance moves and talking about how emotional I am.
HUTCH: There was a lesson here, though, if AD could see it—it doesn’t really matter if two people share surface interests. That’s not what makes a good couple. The things they need to have in common are far more fundamental.
Editor’s Note: No duh, Hutch. Almost-done-with-high-school Avery has learned at least that much.
COACH KELLY: When Dennis explained why she was asking all these questions and doing this interview, the first thing I did was beg her not to get back together with Hendqvist. The tennis season may have been over, but the two of them could manage to give me an ulcer from afar.
AVERY: I reassured Coach Kelly that was definitely not happening.
COACH KELLY: It’s an interesting id
ea, revisiting the past. But it’s just like tennis, really—you may play the same opponent again and again, but they’re never really the same. You come to the court different each time. Your opponent comes to the court different each time. That’s why the game is different each time. No matter how similar the circumstances may seem, you can’t go back. There is no way to re-create a game.
Editor’s Note: I felt like this was probably really wise, but when you’ve played as many tennis matches as I have, you really start to hate sports analogies.
HUTCH: A subtle shift had happened somewhere along the way, and I wasn’t sure where it had occurred. AD seemed less into her boyfriends. Sure, she had spoken of Jake Doe fondly, but she didn’t seem quite as obsessed as she had with her earlier romantic encounters. Why the change, though? That was the real question.
Editor’s Note: I had a hypothesis, but I sure wasn’t going to share it with Hutch. I was starting to wonder if everyone I had dated over the past couple years had just been a placeholder for the person I really wanted but didn’t know I really wanted, until it was way too late. It takes a real genius to figure out she has feelings for someone the last week of school after sitting next to him for four years.
COCO: We had now interviewed all of Avery’s ex-boyfriends but one, and if we’d learned anything, it was that maybe Avery should stay single. Not all of them were horrible, but I didn’t think any of them really got Avery. Not completely, anyway.
HUTCH: All of these guys had remembered the wrong things about AD. Her long blond hair. How pretty she is. How popular she is. No one had spent enough time talking about how smart she is, how driven, how funny, how caring. How she can be kind of despotic, but you can’t even get mad at her because she’s almost always right, and the way she wanted to do things was probably better anyway. I was glad her hair was gone. I hoped people could now see the AD I see: a brilliant, bossy, beautiful genius. Maybe it was good she had given up dating since all these clowns had seen was her hair, even if it meant … well. I thought it meant she just hadn’t found the right guy. But if AD thought it meant she was done with dating, I knew she was done. Don’t try to argue with her. You’ll lose.
AVERY: I was almost done interviewing all of my exes, and all I felt was confused. I now knew why all of my relationships had ended. But I barely knew why most of them had even started! And I certainly didn’t know what any of those relationships said about me. Worst of all, I was starting to wonder if this whole “no dating thing” had been a colossal mistake. Because all of those things Hutch had said about me made me think that maybe the ban on boyfriends wasn’t the solution I’d been looking for after all. Well, maybe interviewing Luke Murphy would bring me some brilliant insight and answer all of my questions. Before I called Luke, Hutch texted me that he had something to show me. It was the day before prom, and I was desperate to see what he’d pulled together. I drove over to meet him ASAP … only the address he’d sent me wasn’t the B of A building at all. I drove to San Francisco as fast as I could to find Hutch.
HUTCH: I realized from the very beginning my plan was kind of a Hail Mary. But I had one thing going for me: time. Not a lot of time, but enough. Bizzy Stanhope, in a classic Bond villain move, had told AD her entire evil plan before it unfolded. Logically, this made no sense. If Bizzy hadn’t said anything about the prom, everyone would have shown up at the B of A building, discovered there was no prom, and chaos would have ensued. That would have been way more diabolical.
AVERY: Hutch didn’t know Bizzy well enough to know that logic never comes into play. Besides, I knew she didn’t really want prom to be canceled, because then how could she be Prom Queen? She just wanted it moved somewhere stupid that would make me look bad. So she gave me just enough time to fix it, but poorly. Holy cow. That’s actually super diabolical. Maybe Bizzy Stanhope is a Bond villain.
HUTCH: AD said the original venue was a no-go, but I felt like I had no choice but to get someone from B of A on the phone and plead my case. It was worth a shot. I was banking on the hypothesis that Bizzy Stanhope was well known in her dad’s office, and that whomever I spoke with would understand immediately why I needed to save the prom, and they’d hopefully be able to work some scheduling magic. My hypothesis was proven to be one hundred percent accurate.
KAREN NAKAYAMA, Event Space Coordinator for the San Francisco branch of the Bank of America: It took James several tries to get me on the phone—my assistant is terrific at weeding out unknown callers—but he was relentless. But once we finally spoke and he explained the situation, I understood immediately. All of Ted’s children are famous here—especially Bizzy. This juvenile prom stunt sounds like a classic move from the Bizzy Stanhope playbook. One time she threw a burrito at one of our junior analysts.
Editor’s Note: I always forget that Hutch’s name is really James. It took me way too long to figure out who she was talking about.
CRAIG LEAMAN, junior analyst: There was no burrito. Yes, the day after the alleged burrito incident, I departed for two weeks’ paid vacation. Completely unrelated. Why do you ask?
KAREN: I had hoped I could help James out from the beginning—he was remarkably polite and articulate—and I had a feeling this was about that Avery girl he kept talking about. Now that really tugged at my heartstrings. Can you imagine? The only thing my high school boyfriend ever did for me was my Spanish homework.
HUTCH: I just told Ms. Nakayama that, uh, I needed a favor because the, uh, senior class had worked really hard this year, and, uh, prom was important to our experience. As a senior class. I wasn’t doing this for a girl. Well, I was obviously doing it for AD, I just wasn’t doing it because, well, because I thought anything would happen. She was done with guys, and when AD says she’s done with something, she’s done. I knew I had no shot. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was saving the prom, because prom is important to AD. And AD is important to me.
KAREN: Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing I could do. The space was booked, and as much as I wanted to help James out, I couldn’t.
AVERY: On the one hand, I was sort of surprised when I pulled up in front of the California Academy of Sciences, but on the other hand, I wasn’t surprised at all. Of course Hutch would solve any problem with science. But what kind of prom venue opportunities could a science academy possibly provide? I trusted Hutch, but I’m not gonna lie, I was nervous.
JUSTIN CASTILLEJO, Director of Special Events and Volunteer Services at the California Academy of Sciences: Hutch has been volunteering at the academy since he was in middle school. He’s more valuable than half our employees. I speak for everyone on the staff when I say there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for Hutch. We would move heaven and earth if he asked. And when he asked, luckily, heaven—well, space—just happened to be free.
AVERY: Hutch was waiting for me outside, looking sort of un-Hutch-like in surprisingly cool sunglasses. I could tell he was nervous. He wiped his hands on his khakis a couple times as he led me through the building, stopping, eventually, in front of the doors to the Morrison Planetarium.
HUTCH: I was freaking out. I thought the room looked pretty good—really good—but AD’s standards are crazy high in everything, and I knew her expectations would be off the charts for prom. I think I had a small cardiac episode as I pushed open the door to the planetarium.
AVERY: The first thing I saw was the night sky, a deep ink blue dotted with glittering stars. The whole ceiling of the planetarium was lit up so beautifully I could barely take my eyes off it—it felt like the stars were all around us. But that wasn’t all. There were lampposts with glowing lights ringing the room and strings of twinkling lights hanging between them. There were paintings of shadowy café scenes and Paris at night propped up against the walls. Deep blue curtains covered the tables where refreshments would be, and Hutch had somehow made an illuminated Eiffel Tower, taller than me, for taking pictures in front of. The floor had been cleared of seats, so there was space for dancing, and there was a g
iant clock painted on the dance floor, hands set permanently at twelve o’clock. It was Midnight in Paris, the prom theme I’d been dreaming of since I was a freshman, come to life. It was more beautiful than I’d ever imagined it could be. And Hutch had done it for me.
HUTCH: She didn’t say anything. For like seven minutes, she just didn’t say anything. Not a single word. It was the longest I’d heard AD be silent on a day that didn’t involve standardized testing. And then she said, in this quiet little voice that didn’t sound anything like her, “Oh, Hutch.”
AVERY: “Do you like it?” he asked, and he sounded so nervous, he almost didn’t sound like the confident Hutch I knew at all.
HUTCH: “It’s perfect,” she said, and the way she looked at me, I felt like … I felt like … Well, I felt like I finally knew how Michael Faraday must have felt when he first produced an electric current by moving a wire through a magnetic field.
AVERY: How did he do it? How was it possible? I didn’t understand. It was a miracle.
LIAM PADALECKI: I’ve pretty much run the San Anselmo Prep theater department’s tech crew single-handedly for the past four years.
MICHAEL FEELEY: Liam said what? Single-handedly?! Oh, please! Everyone knows the theater lives or dies on the success of its light plot! Liam just fannies about with a paintbrush!
Editor’s Note: I could not believe he used the phrase “fannies about.”
HUTCH: It kind of was a miracle, honestly. It was a miracle that the planetarium was free, and that they were generous enough to donate their space to the San Anselmo Prep senior class for five hours on a Saturday night. And the theater department at school did Gigi last year, so we were insanely lucky that a lot of this stuff was buried in the prop room, ready to be stolen for the greater good of the San Anselmo Prep senior class. Michael hung the lights and wired the lamps. I did any necessary construction, and then Liam painted the art scattered around the walls. Oh, and Alex sewed all of the tablecloths.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 16