I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl

by Gretchen McNeil

  Usually the sparse, barely personalized nature of this room didn’t bother me, but for some reason it felt utterly barren today. For the first time since I was twelve, I wanted my stuff. Something bright and fun and me in the room. Maybe I had something in my bag? I yanked my patchwork tote off the plush carpet and dumped its contents unceremoniously on the bed.

  Everything tumbled out onto the pristine duvet cover: textbooks, my iPad and laptop, pens and pencils, scientific calculator, a pack of gum, the tube of sparkling pink lip gloss I’d adopted as Trixie, a dozen brightly colored leftover flyers from this morning, a couple of tampons whose wrappers had seen better days, and a candy-apple-red flash drive.

  Flash drive? That’s right. A gift from Spencer the day after Jesse dumped me. I’d completely forgotten about it in the midst of all the manic pixie mayhem.

  I snatched it off the comforter and examined it for clues as to its contents. Nothing scrawled on its flat surface. No labels or numbers other than the gigabyte capacity. What had Spencer put on it?

  I reached for my laptop and lifted the clamshell case, sparking the screen to life. I was about to plug the flash drive into my USB port, when my browser window, which was open to my email in-box, refreshed itself and I found myself staring at a message from Toile Jeffries.

  Fibonacci’s balls.

  I dropped the flash drive onto my bed and opened the email with a shaky hand. I was expecting to see an angry rant, accusing me of stealing Jesse from her or something equally as dramatic, but instead, I found myself staring at the cartoon image of a white rabbit.

  It wore a cowboy hat with an Old West gun holster slung around its waist. The rabbit had been Photoshopped onto the front steps of Fullerton Hills High School. A hoedown song played as a short animation clip kicked in. The rabbit winked and with a cheeky smirk on his face, planted one three-fingered hand on his hip and outstretched the other, giving an exaggerated thumbs-up. Above him, bright green letters scrolled across the screen as if painted by a brush, spelling out “‘Jesse James’ Sullivan,” and below, “He’ll clean up our school!”

  Toile’s newest campaign strategy was quintessential manic pixie. Adorable cartoon character, fun Photoshopping, even referring to Jesse as a classic Old West outlaw (which made no sense, but whatever) was all in line with her quirk.

  Barf.

  I mean, it was cute. And as it looped back to the beginning and replayed itself, I actually found myself bopping along to the old-timey music. Which was bad. If it was sticking in my head after just two plays, how many Fullerton Hills students would remember it come election day?

  I paused the animation, staring at that smirking bunny. Toile had blind copied me on this email, so it was impossible to know how many people it had gone out to. But factoring in her status as the new kid at school and Jesse’s relative lack of friends and contacts, I had to assume, for the moment at least, that the damage was minimal. Still, people might forward the email, spreading it far beyond its initial reach. And that could be a problem.

  I hadn’t considered using the internet for Gabe’s campaign: it felt too conventional. And email seemed like an especially weak avenue. A quick Google search gave me an impressive statistic on the internet usage of the average teen: 92 percent of high school students went online daily, and nearly three-quarters of them used a smartphone to access the internet at any time of day or night. Not only that, but a staggering 71 percent of teens used multiple social networking websites, with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as the overwhelming favorites.

  Facebook, which Toile didn’t use.

  That was my opening.

  I grabbed a notebook from my bag and quickly sketched out a plan of attack:

  (1) Build up social media networks.

  (2) Friend everyone I could find at school.

  (3) Carpet bomb sites with an ad campaign teasing our secret candidate.

  The first two steps were relatively simple, though time-consuming. I already had Facebook and Instagram accounts, but my list of friends on each was basically limited to Gabe, Spencer, my mom, and Jesse. I’d refused to answer friend requests from anyone at school, ignoring them for years, but that was Beatrice, and this was Trixie. Time to network.

  I quickly changed the name on my Facebook profile from Beatrice Maria Estrella Giovannini to Beatrice “Trixie” Giovannini, and opened my friend request page. Thankfully, Facebook had kept all of them for me, dozens and dozens, which I quickly accepted, scrolling through without even looking at who I was approving. Next, I skimmed through the “People You May Know” section and added anyone who went to Fullerton Hills, or whose multiple friends in common included a majority of my classmates. Finally, I started opening the friends lists of my new connections, perving through and adding all potential Fullerton Hills students.

  It took forever, and after doing the same for Instagram and Snapchat, I broke for dinner. While my dad related the not particularly exciting details of his workday, I contemplated the more complicated third step of my plan.

  If I created an animated cartoon gopher, I’d be viewed as a copycat. Besides, I didn’t want to explicitly reveal who our secret candidate was. Not yet. So I needed something catchy and fun, but still mysterious.

  What would be totally original and capture people’s attention? I wasn’t an artist. Not at all. Nor was I particularly proficient in animation, though I could probably string some images together in iMovie if I needed to. But what?

  I needed to play to my strengths. What was I good at?

  Math.

  Math.

  More math.

  I sat up straight in my chair, Sheri’s meat loaf forgotten. The formula I’d made for Jesse. That was it.

  “Bea, are you okay?” Sheri asked, interrupting my dad, who was still rambling full throttle about depositions and mediation agreements.

  “Do you still have those paper flowers?” I asked, knowing full well she did. “The ones you used in your scrapbooks.”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  “Can I borrow a few?”

  Her face lit up. She was pleased that I’d taken an interest in something she liked or, more probably and also more pathetically, happy that someone needed her for something. “As many as you like. They should be in my supply drawer in the office.”

  “Is this, uh, for a school project?” my dad asked, attempting to be parental.

  “Kind of.” I stood up and bussed my plate to the counter. “More like an extracurricular activity.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “But it won’t interfere with your classes or homework, will it?”

  Seriously? I’d done just fine at high school without him taking an interest in my studies. “I have a weighted four-point-eight grade point average. I think I’ll be fine.”

  Back in my room armed with a stash of brightly pigmented paper daisies in a variety of color combinations, I got to work. I needed a formula, and the first thing that came to mind was the general theory of curvilinear coordinates.

  Which was created by the mathematician Gabriel Lamé.

  And while I knew that no one else would ever get the joke (except possibly Michael Torres, although he completely lacked imagination in that regard), it made me smile.

  A few quick tweaks (and substantial mathematical liberties) later, I had a working model.

  I was pretty sure Lamé had just rolled over in his grave, but the formula didn’t really need to make sense—it wasn’t like I was actually plotting a superellipse—it just had to be eye-catching. In this case, g and m were thinly veiled references to Gabriel Muñoz, the number one candidate, while Fullerton Hills High School and ASB president were easily recognizable.

  This was so going to work.

  I grabbed a black marker and wrote the first part in the center of one flower, then grabbed another and added a few more symbols, and so on and so forth until I had twelve different flowers showing the progression, as if someone was writing them out. Then, in order, I snapped a photo of each with m
y phone. Some creative photo editing and a little color correction to make them pop, and I was ready to load them into iMovie.

  An hour later, I had my final product. Matched with the “Mahna Mahna” song from an old Muppets sketch my mom used to play for me when I was a kid, I had twenty seconds of what looked like stop-motion animation, building out the formula, and one final flower that said, “Who’s the #1 candidate? Find out tomorrow!”

  Ready for upload.

  I logged into Facebook and saw that, in addition to all the people whose invitations I had accepted, I had four more, plus a ton of people had accepted my requests.

  Who knew my manic pixie Trixie would be such a hit at school? I was practically popular.

  Each new contact got a post on their timeline with my animation. Then I posted to Instagram and Snapchat, tagging as many people as I could.

  It was almost eleven o’clock when I finally closed my computer.

  If that didn’t beat Toile at her own game, nothing would.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  BY THE NEXT morning, I had the entire student body of Fullerton Hills whipped into a frenzy. The “surprise” candidate was all anyone could talk about, and it was all because of Trixie.

  I estimated Trixie’s social media outreach at 737 Fullerton Hills students. Almost half the student body. And it made me feel kind of badass.

  In less than a week, I’d gone from the nameless Math Girl to someone with a hundred Facebook friends and dozens of Instagram reposts. People knew my name, said “hi” to me in the hallways. They were even copying my mismatched shoes. It was as if I’d been reborn.

  And now I was going to use that newfound notoriety to get Gabe elected ASB president.

  The plan was simple. During the election assembly, I’d take the microphone and unveil the surprise candidate, ushering onto the stage Gabe, who would then give a charming, utterly adorable speech that would win the hearts and votes of the entire audience and propel him to victory. Seemed like a total no-brainer to me.

  To Spencer? Not so much.

  “Don’t you think you went a little overboard?” he asked as we wove through the hallways on our way to the assembly.

  A group of underclassmen I didn’t recognize passed us, and one of the guys pointed at me. “We got you, Trixie!”

  I smiled, big and shiny, though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Thanks!” Then I turned back to Spencer. “What do you mean?”

  Spencer shrugged, shoving his phone into his jeans pocket. “You’re trying to get Gabe elected, right? Not Trixie.”

  I hated the fact that he spoke about Trixie as if she was someone else. “I’m not running for ASB president.”

  “I know,” he said with a tight smile. “That’s my point.”

  “Feeling you, Trix!” someone yelled from down the hall.

  “Thank you!” I called. “Are you accusing me of something, Spencer Preuss-Katt?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Bea.”

  I stopped short. “Trixie.”

  “Bea,” he said emphatically. “And I’m not accusing you of anything. I know you’re trying to get Gabe elected. But that formula came from you, from Math Girl, not from Gabe. Don’t you think people will get confused?”

  “I put his initials in the formula!” I threw up my hands. “People would have to be idiots not to get it.”

  “And what about all these people?” he said, gesturing to a group of girls who had just waved at me from down the corridor. “Why do you think they’re screaming your name in the halls?”

  I rolled my eyes. “They love Trixie. What can I say? She’s a hit.”

  Spencer sighed. “I just think maybe this whole election thing has gotten out of hand. You wanted to get Jesse back, fine. Whatever. But now you’ve got Gabe actually excited by the idea of being ASB president. He’s already submitted the article detailing his rise from nobody to school president.”

  “I know,” I said. “Isn’t it great?”

  “Only if it works.”

  “It’ll work.” My plans always worked.

  “I just think,” Spencer said with a weary sigh, “you need to take a look at why you’re doing all this. What do you really want?”

  My friends’ happiness, a strong submission to MIT, rubbing Toile’s face in it.

  “Is it really about Jesse?” he continued. “Or do you just want to beat Toile?”

  Before I could respond, I felt a tap on my arm and turned around to find Michael Torres’s glowering face. “We need to talk.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  He ignored me, shifting his glare to Spencer. “In private.”

  Spencer arched an eyebrow but didn’t say anything, just pointed at the water fountain on the other side of the hall. “I’ll be over there.”

  Michael Torres waited until he was out of earshot before he dropped his voice. “I just want you to know that when you lose the election tomorrow, it’s all because of me.”

  “Seriously?” I blurted out. This was completely ridiculous.

  “Yes.”

  “For once in your life, Michael Torres, please listen to the words that are coming out of my mouth. I was joking yesterday. I am not running for ASB president.”

  He laughed. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth!”

  “Sure it is.” He smiled knowingly. “So you won’t mind that I told every single person I’ve crossed paths with in the last two days that they shouldn’t vote for you because you’re a big fake.”

  I could not for one second imagine anyone at Fullerton Hills taking Michael Torres’s advice on anything. In fact, they’d be more likely to do the exact opposite.

  I caught my breath. We got you, Trix! Feeling you, Trix! Those were cries of support from people I didn’t even know. Could Michael Torres’s plan have backfired so horrifically that he’d actually convinced people to vote for me?

  “Oh no,” I said out loud.

  “Exactly,” Michael Torres said, misinterpreting. “And if you’re ever at MIT—visiting, of course—be sure to look me up.” Then he turned and scurried down the hall.

  “Bea, we’re going to be late.” Spencer took my arm and guided me toward the back door to the theater. “What was that all about?”

  I looked up at him, a cold wave of panic washing over me. “People might think I’m the secret candidate running for president.”

  “Duh, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Cassilyn mentioned it last night after you left. She thought it was weird that, and I quote, ‘that geek said Trixie was running for president,’ since Gabe was running too and she thought you were friends.”

  Michael Torres’s unpopularity had counterbalanced Gabe’s newfound popularity. This was not good.

  “I had no idea what she was talking about,” Spencer continued, “but I told her you weren’t even running. Thank God your name isn’t on the ballot.”

  “Yeah,” I said, forcing a laugh. “Thank God.”

  We ducked into the stage door for the theater, where I was supposed to meet Gabe before the assembly. No damage had been done yet. Gabe had Cassilyn and her friends on his side, plus we were about to get a microphone and the rapt attention of the entire Fullerton Hills student body.

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said, more to myself than to Spencer.

  “If you say so,” he muttered.

  I stepped around Spencer’s tall frame and peered around the backstage curtains, looking for Gabe. I wanted to make sure his speech was spot-on. The wings were filled with potential candidates. Most of them held crumpled-up pages in their hands and were rehearsing their speeches in mumbly voices as they wandered in aimless circles, while a few chatted among themselves, nervous small talk in hushed tones, eyes flitting around to see who was watching.

  I was still searching for Gabe when I saw Toile and Jesse emerge from behind one of the tall black curtains at the back of the stage. Toile eased the sleeve of her dress back up to her shoulder as Je
sse pawed at her waist. Then he pulled her body into his, wrapping his free arm around her back as he kissed her.

  Right there. Backstage at the theater in front of all the candidates, less than twenty-four hours after he’d tried to kiss me in his car.

  Rage was an emotion I tried to keep under wraps. I’d seen what it had done to my parents—continued to do to them, in fact—and it was one more of those irrational, unpredictable emotions I wanted nothing to do with. They made you do stupid things, things you regretted.

  Things like what I was about to do.

  “Kiss me,” I said to Spencer.

  Beside me, I felt his body go rigid. “What?”

  No time. I had to make a statement, needed to show Jesse that I didn’t care. Without thinking, I reached up and grabbed Spencer on either side of his face, pulled him down, and kissed him.

  It should have felt like kissing my brother, if I’d had a brother. I mean, that’s how I’d always imagined kissing Spencer would be. Well, no, not that I’d imagined it in a romantic-fantasy kind of way, but he’s a guy and I’m a girl and we’d been hanging out for a couple of years, so it was really only natural at least once in all that time a fleeting thought would cross my mind about his lips meeting mine. And yeah, I’d always thought it would be brief, closed-mouthed, and entirely clinical. Which was why I could do things like hang out with him alone in his studio without it getting awkward or tense.

  But as I stood there backstage, pressing my face into his, I felt something else. Something weird and strange and kind of uncomfortable was simmering inside of me, and when Spencer’s tongue flicked across my lips and his arm slipped around my back, I shivered.

  “What the hell is this?” Gabe said.

  Spencer’s arm fell away and I pulled back. “Nothing.” My voice sounded shaky.

  Kurt stood beside him. “That didn’t look like nothing.”

  I felt my skin growing hot as a blush deepened. “I was just trying to . . .” I was about to say make Jesse jealous because, you know, it was the truth, but it sounded so painfully pathetic, I stumbled over the words.