Once Upon a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

  After that I did what anyone in my situation would do—I started freaking out and threatening to sue until Hannah pointed out that not only did I not have a reason to sue because the whole thing was my own fault, but since my dad owns The Dell, I’d be suing him and that probably wouldn’t go over very well. When I realized Hannah had a point, I did the next best thing that someone in my position would do—I started looking around for a guy to jump into the fountain to fish it out for me. Not to sound full of myself or anything, but getting guys to help me out with stuff is never a problem, whether it be trig homework or opening my locker, which is always getting jammed due to the fact that I like to keep a few different ocharset=UTF-8its in there at all times in case I have a fashion mood change. The only problem is that most of the guys you find at a mall at 4 P.M. on a weekday are either old or gay, so the chances of one of them agreeing to jump into a fountain fully clothed to fish out a handbag aren’t so good, even when you start screaming that there’s a reward at stake.

  I’m sure I was causing quite a scene, but it’s not like you could blame me. I mean, if you had put yourself on the wait list at Barneys New York a year earlier for the Serge Sanchez Jaime bag and then used all your Sweet Sixteen booty to buy it, you’d be freaking out, too. Not only was it the bag of choice for every celeb who had been on the cover of US Weekly or People over the last few months, but I—Dylan Frances Schoenfield—was the only nonstarlet high school girl in all of L.A. who had scored one so far.

  “Miss. Miss. MISS!” I heard someone say as I sat there on the edge of the fountain with my head between my legs trying to get my breathing back to normal.

  My head popped up. “What?!” I snapped.

  In front of me was a pimply-faced security guard, dressed in overalls and a straw hat to go along with the whole “Dell” theme. Everyone who worked at The Dell—from the parking-garage people to the bathroom attendants—were forced to dress up like farmers or milk-maids. Ridiculous, I know. You can thank my dad for that. I tried to talk him out of it because not only is it corny, but farming and shopping—unless it’s for eggs—don’t really go together, but Daddy says that if you want to succeed at something, you have to have a gimmick. He may be a genius when it comes to real estate, but the truth is he’s kind of a geek. I mean, I love him to death but he’s utterly hopeless when it comes to being creative—especially if it happens to be fashion-related. In fact, after my mom died a few years ago, I had to take over her job of picking out which shirt and tie he should wear with his suit in the morning. I’m not complaining, though. Sharing my incredible talent for color coordinating and accessorizing with the man whose name is on my Amex card is the least I can do.

  “Uh, you’re gonna have to quiet down or else I’m going to have to remove you from the property,” Farmer Security Guard mumbled.

  “Excuse me, but my father happens to own this property,” I shot back.

  “He does?”

  “Yes. He does. I’m Dylan Schoenfield, daughter of Alan Schoenfield of Schoenfield Properties.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “Then I guess it’s okay,” he said, shuffling away.

  I turned toward the fountain to get an update on my bag and saw it bobbing along in time to Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” that was blasting over the sound system. Another one of Daddy’s gimmicks was to have the spray of the fountain synchronized to the music, like you see at the hotels in Las Vegas. I just hoped that it didn’t switch to something with a really fast beat or else I’d never get my bag back.

  “My poor bag!” I cried as Hannah and Lola stood on each side of me and patted my shoulders. I couldn’t remember being this devastated since the time Asher blew off my Sweet Sixteen dinner for a Lakers game. “What am I going to do, you guys?” I panicked as a brown-haired guy with thick-framed glasses walked toward us.

  “Get your dad to buy you a new one?” asked Lola.

  The guy was so busy trying to juggle his knapsack, doughnut, and Coke that he tripped on Lola’s Marc Jacobs bag, which she had bought with her Sweet Sixteen money, and fell flat on his face right in front of me.

  For a few seconds he didn’t move.

  “Are you all right?” I asked while watching with horror as my bag bobbed around in the fountain.

  When I didn’t hear a response, I tore my eyes away from the fountain and looked down at him. Because of the glare of the sun, it was hard to see if his body was rising and falling with his breath.

  “Um, hello?” I said.

  Nothing.

  I started to get scared that maybe he had broken his neck and died instantly, which would not have been good because not only would his parents probably sue Lola’s parents but they’d probably also try to sue my dad as well. Daddy likes to say that suing is what people do for fun in L.A.

  As Hannah ran to the edge of the fountain and reached her arm toward the bag (as if that was going to do anything), I watched with horror as it got caught on a water jet and started whipping around like it was in a T-ball tournament. Extending my foot, I carefully poked the guy with my shoe. Obviously if he was dead it wouldn’t matter if I did it carefully or uncarefully, but I was raised to be polite and courteous. “Excuse me, but ARE. YOU. ALL. RIGHT?” I yelled as if he were deaf and non-English-speaking.

  Still nothing.

  This was now officially terrifying—both the idea that I might be a witness to an accidental murder and the fact that my Sweet Sixteen booty was about to go down the drain. Literally. “Omigod! Omigod!” I shrieked. “Someone call an ambulance!” I announced to the mallgoers before turning to Lola. “And you—be a best friend and go help Hannah try and get my bag. Now, please.”

  Lola stopped examining her own bag for scuffs and rolled her eyes before getting off the fountain ledge and slowly walking over to the other side of the fountain. Unfortunately, unlike Hannah, who was being productive—she had somehow gotten hold of a pole from one of the mall cart people and was using it like a fishing pole to try to rescue my bag—Lola just stood there and scratched the side of her nose as she watched. I’m not one to talk bad about people, but sometimes I couldn’t believe how selfish and self-centered Lola could be.

  “Ooooffff,” the maybe-dead guy finally said as he reached up and put his hands over his ears.

  “Oh, thank God.” I sighed. Even though my bag had moved on to being shot up in the air like a cannonball (not a good sign), I was relieved he was alive (good sign).

  A moment later the guy struggled to his feet and slowly started bending his arms and legs like one of those puppets with the strings that Marta, our housekeeper, once brought back for me from one of her trips to visit her family in El Salvador.

  “Did you break anything?” I asked anxiously as my bag made a graceful arc in the air before plummeting back down.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, wincing as he wiggled his fingers.

  Up close I could see that he was around our age, and that he was wearing a T-shirt that said GEEK GANG. I don’t mean to be mean or anything, but why someone like him would choose to wear a shirt that announced such a thing to the entire free world when it was obvious just looking at him that he was a geek was beyond me.

  I looked back at the fountain. Just as it seemed that Hannah had hooked the strap of the bag with her pseudo fishing pole, the pole slipped out of her hand and started floating away and the bag began to slowly sink.

  “If you’re okay, then I need you to do me a huge, huge, HUGE favor,” I demanded as the guy crouched down on the ground.

  “My inhaler! Where’s my inhaler?” I heard him mumbling over and over as he rifled through the spilled contents of his knapsack, which included about twenty different pens, some magazine called Fade In, and a copy of the Hollywood Reporter.

  “Your what?” I demanded.

  “My inhaler. I have really bad asthma,” he replied nervously.

  Great. Just what I needed—another crisis.

  “Here it is,” he said. After he took a hit, his sh
oulders moved down from around his ears to their proper location. “Okay. Much better. Sorry, were you saying something?” he asked as we both stood up.

  Was anyone other than Hannah able to get out of themselves for just one minute? I pointed at the fountain. “I need you to climb in there and get my bag. Like this very second.”

  He put his now-crooked glasses back on to get a better look. It took everything in me not to reach over and push his shaggy brown hair off his face. Didn’t he realize the whole emo look was so 2006?

  “You’re kidding, right?” he said.

  “Hmm . . . let me think about that . . . um, no!” I yelled.

  “Do you realize what kind of diseases a person could get in there?” he asked. “In addition to leptospirosis, there’s shingellosis, and—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I read about it on WebMD,” he said defensively. He took another hit off the inhaler. “Plus, I’m susceptible to inner-ear infections, so I have to be careful not to get water in my ear.”

  By this time Lola had decided to be a friend and was putting her flirting skills to good use by going up to all the cart guys to see if they’d help, but from all the head shaking it was obvious that there was no mall community spirit in this bunch. I made a mental note to tell Daddy to send a mallwide memo talking about the importance of coming together in times of crisis to help people out.

  “It’s only like two feet deep in there!” I exclaimed. “It’s not like I’m asking you to go deep-sea diving in the Bahamas. Please,” I begged. “I’ll give you . . . a hundred dollars.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I really can’t help you.” He crouched back down to put his stuff back in his knapsack. “Just ask them to shut down the fountain until you can get it out,” he said.

  “I don’t have time for that!” I cried. As Christina was replaced by Gwen Stefani singing “I’m Just a Girl,” my bag rose from the dead and started a wild modern dance solo in the air. “Can’t you see this is an emergency?! What about two hundred?”

  He shook his head. “Really, I can’t. They canceled our health insurance because my mom didn’t pay the bill for the last three months; so I’m trying really hard to not get sick right now. Which is kind of hard, because I don’t have a very strong immune system to begin with—my mom thinks it’s because I was three weeks premature.”

  I thought about explaining to him that there were these things called tanning salons and maybe if he got some sun and lost the Pillsbury Doughboy look, he wouldn’t get sick because the sun is very helpful for colds and diseases, but since I was in the middle of watching my status go from It-Bag Girl to No-Bag Girl, I didn’t have time to be giving out advice to strangers.

  I turned toward the fountain for an update. The solo was over and my bag was back to sinking. Lola couldn’t even get the T-Mobile cart guy—who had a massive crush on her—to come over and help.

  I grabbed Geek Boy by the shoulders. “Please—you’ve got to help me. I’ll do anything. I’ll even—” I was about to say let you take me out on a date, but then I thought better of it. “Be your friend on Facebook. Please—just tell me what it will take to make you go get my bag!”

  As he took another squirt of the inhaler, his eyes bugged out and a huge smile came over his face. “I’ll do it if you let me film you and your friends,” he said.

  “Eww!” I squealed. “What are you—some kind of pervert? That’s totally disgusting!”

  “No—I mean make a documentary about you! I’ve been trying to think of something to send in with my essay for my USC film school application and this is perfect. You know, like an ‘inner workings of the in crowd at Castle Heights High’ type of thing.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Wait a second—how’d you know I go to Castle Heights?” Maybe this guy didn’t just happen to walk by me—maybe he was stalking me. Not to sound stuck-up or anything, but I have been known to have that effect on guys.

  “Because I go there, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you, a junior?” I asked.

  “No,” he scoffed. “I’m a senior. Like you.”

  “Did you just transfer there or something?”

  “No. I’ve been there all four years. We had Spanish together freshman year.”

  I couldn’t remember ever having seen him before in my life. Which wasn’t so surprising, I guess, seeing that none of the geeks ever came within fifty feet of The Ramp in the cafeteria, where my friends and I sat.

  Hannah walked up to me, her barrette hanging off the edge of her bob and her shirt soaked. “Okay, I know we’re best best friends and all, but I’m done trying to help.” She pointed at Lola, who was now twirling a lock of her hair around her finger as she threw back her head and laughed at something the T-Mobile guy was saying to her. “Especially since she hasn’t helped at all.”

  I leaned over the fountain as far as I could without falling in, but I couldn’t even see the bag anymore. I turned to the geek. “Okay! Okay! It’s a deal! Now go,” I demanded.

  “Really?” he asked.

  I yanked the inhaler out of his hand and started pushing him toward the fountain. “Yes. Go! Go!”

  Celine Dion started singing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, and the bag rose from the dead yet again. Every time Celine hit a high note and sent a jet of water up into the sky, Geek Boy ran for cover behind the marble centerpiece like a duck in one of those amusement-park games. If I hadn’t been so worried about my bag, the whole thing would have been hysterical.

  By this time a huge crowd had gathered behind me to watch. “What a dork. Too bad we don’t have a video camera—this would make an awesome YouTube video,” said Lola.

  “Sure, if you’re into making bad karma for yourself, it would be,” sniffed Hannah.

  “It’s amazing how some people totally lose their sense of humor when they’re PMSing,” snapped Lola.

  “Um, hi, ladies? This is so not the time for catfights, okay? This is about me and my bag.” It was rare that I made it all about me, but if there was ever a time, this was obviously the case. I mean, now that I had experienced how incredible the feeling of the leather from the Serge Sanchez felt against the skin of my arm, it wasn’t like I could go back to a regular old Marc Jacobs bag or something like that. That would be like being content with a soft-serve cone from the mall after having tasted Häagen-Dazs. Not that I ever touched the stuff myself.

  A huge cheer went up as Geek Boy finally caught the bag like a football and held it over his head in triumph as he walked toward us like an ocean liner sailing on the sea. “Here,” he panted as he thrust my waterlogged bag into my arms after stepping out of the fountain. Judging from the way his face resembled a tomato, this seemed to be the biggest workout he had gotten in years. “Where’s. My. Inhaler?” he gasped.

  “Here it is,” I said, picking it up from the ledge of the fountain and exchanging it for the bag. Other than the bag weighing about five extra pounds because of the water, it looked salvageable—especially when the guys at Arturo’s Shoe Fix got their hands on it. But once I unzipped it, I could feel my face pale. “Oh no,” I whispered. I could care less about whether or not my lip gloss was ruined, or if my wallet was wet, or if my pack of gum was all soggy, but as I pushed the buttons on my Weight Watchers points calculator and the screen remained blank, I could feel my heart start to race to the point where I wished I had my own inhaler.

  I looked at him. “My calculator. It’s ruined.”

  He took another hit off the inhaler. “So go to Good Buys and buy another one,” he replied. “You’ll get a great deal—especially with the Just-Because-It’s-Wednesday sale going on.” Good Buys was this cheesy electronics store in the mall. I kept telling Daddy that it was so not in line with The Dell’s reputation for excellence, but he just ignored me.

  “It’s not a regular calculator—it’s my Weight Watchers points calculator!”

  He looked at me like I wa
s crazy. “But you’re so skinny. You don’t need Weight Watchers. You need to gain weight.”

  I couldn’t believe he would say something so rude. “Of course I don’t need Weight Watchers,” I replied. “And the reason I don’t need it is because of this,” I said, pointing to the calculator.

  “I’ll never understand girls. Oh, and you’re welcome,” he said as he started ringing out his T-shirt, exposing his squishy fish-belly-white gut.

  Lola cringed. “Ew, dude—can we watch the nudity, please?”

  “Welcome for what?” I asked.

  “Getting your bag for you?” he replied.

  “Oh. Right. Thank you.” I threw in a just-bleached smile. “I very much appreciate it.”

  Now that the crisis was officially over, everyone went back to shopping.

  “So here’s what I’m thinking in terms of the documentary,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “The documentary. The one you said I could make in return for getting your bag.”

  “Oh, that one—right,” I replied. “Hey, can we talk about it tomorrow? This whole thing has been super traumatic and I think I need to go home and lie down. Come on, girls,” I said to Hannah and Lola, who were now sitting on the edge of the fountain with their faces toward the sun.

  As the three of us started walking toward the parking garage, Lola kept trying to edge out Hannah with her hip so that she’d walk just the teensiest bit behind us instead of next to me. So rude, I know, but I didn’t like to get involved in their drama. While the three of us were BFFs, I was definitely the glue that held us together. Being the person that everyone liked the best could be exhausting at times.

  “Okay, but I don’t have your e-mail address. Or your phone number!” Geek Boy shouted. “I think we should schedule a preproduction meeting for some time over the weekend to talk about the logistics and how filming is going to work. I mean, obviously we could do more of a guerrilla-style type look and style, but while I was in the fountain I was thinking the look for this should be more polished. I’m thinking how Alek Keshishian did the Madonna documentary Truth or Dare back in ’91. Even though we don’t have a lot of time to prep, I’d like to make the most of the time we do have.”