Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  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 was 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 n
ever 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.”

  I walked back over to him. “Yeah, let’s talk a little more about this documentary thing. Are we talking MTV-reality-series-like?” Maybe I could end up getting a deal there for my show. Maybe even a talk show. People were always telling me I was like a younger version of Oprah.

  “No. I’m thinking more hard-hitting than that. More in the vein of something Barbara Koppel would do. Or the Maysles brothers.”

  “Do they go to our school, too?” I asked.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone would be so rude, but it almost looked like he cringed when I asked that.

  “No, they don’t go to our school,” he replied with a sigh. “They’re only two of the most important documentarians in the history of documentaries.”

  “If it’s a pair of brothers and then that Barbara person, that’s three,” corrected Hannah. It was stuff like that that explained why she was in AP classes and me and Lola weren’t.

  “I stand corrected,” Geek Boy said. “So can I get your number?” he asked, holding out a notepad and one of the dozen pens from his knapsack.

  I wrote down my phone number and handed it back to him. “This weekend’s kind of jammed but call me and we’ll set something up.”

  “Great,” he said with a smile. His hair might have been a lost cause, but he had very straight teeth. He held out his hand, which looked like a waterlogged prune. “I look forward to working with you.”

  I tried not to cringe as I shook it. “Uh huh. See you around,” I said as I started walking away.

  Poor guy. Between the fact that he looked like a drowned gopher and the fact that I had had my fingers crossed behind my back when I had agreed, I almost felt bad for him.

  chapter two: josh

  It’s funny how when something’s meant to be, all these things happen to just make them . . . well, be. Like in Knocked Up, when Seth Rogen gets Katherine Heigl pregnant—first it seems like they’d never make it as a couple and then they end up realizing they do love each other even though he’s a schlub and she’s gorgeous.

  And like with the documentary.

  Flashback to the night before the purse-in-the-fountain incident. Me and my best friend, Steven Blecher, were hanging out at this coffeehouse called Java the Hut on Vine Street in Hollywood, where Quentin and Judd (that’s Tarantino, as in Pulp Fiction and Apatow, as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the above-mentioned Knocked Up) have been known to stop in when they’re editing movies at one of the various postproduction places in the area. Quentin and I are buds. Okay, well, I met him once when he spoke at our school’s Film Society, so maybe we’re not best friends, but we have exchanged dialogue.

  As Steven bickered via IM with some kid at NYU film school that he met in a MySpace group devoted to Steven Spielberg about where Jaws had been shot, I worked on my essay for my USC application. “Do you think I should tell them that my dream is to become the Woody Allen of the twenty-first century, or do you think they’ll get that when they watch Andy Hull?” I asked Steven. Because the competition to get into the film school was insane, the week before I had decided I’d submit a short film with my application. My plan was to make one called Andy Hull, which I saw as being similar to Annie Hall—Woody’s 1977 masterpiece—but instead of being about a nerdy, neurotic middle-aged guy, it would be about a nerdy, neurotic teenage girl. I even had my leading lady picked out—Diane Lowenstein, a girl who my friend Ari had gone to theater camp with the summer before.

  “Dude, I told you to bag that Andy Hull idea,” Steven said as he broke off a huge chunk of my brownie. “It’s lame.” Steven’s a bit on the tubby side. My mom’s always on me to lighten up on the sugar, but honestly, as far as I’m concerned, it’s preparation for later when I’m doing night shoots and need a quick pick-me-up. “If you’re going to blatantly rip off a movie that’s already been made, at least find some Japanese horror one no one’s seen instead of something so mainstream.”

  I shook my head. “That’s way too 2005.” I sighed and tipped my chair back. “I just need to face it—I’m undergoing my first official creative block. I feel like Nicolas Cage in Adaptation when he couldn’t write the script.”

  I would have done anything for Quentin to walk in at that moment so I could ask him what he did when he was blocked creatively, but I had no such luck. Instead I had to wait a full twenty-four hours, until I ran into Dylan. If you had told me even a week before that Dylan Schoenfield of all people would have ended up being my muse, I would have laughed in your face. Not only is she spoiled and stuck-up, but she’s also über-popular. Like Best Dressed/ Homecoming Queen/Miss February in “The Girls of Castle Heights Calendar” popular. Like Dylan-Has-2,028-Friends-on-MySpace popular.

  Me? I have 612. And most are fellow movie buffs. I suffer from the opposite problem: not many people at Castle Heights know who I am. It’s not like I’m some weird loner who wears a Black Flag T-shirt and trench coat and army boots—I mean, I have friends, like the guys in the Film Society and Russian Club—but I’m a film geek. And proud of it, I might say. I already know that I’ll be quoted in the articles about me in Film Threat ten years from now as saying that I didn’t come into my own until my twenties, and I’m fine with that. Everyone knows that every artist who’s any good wasn’t popular in high school. Take Tim (that’s Burton, as in Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice)—I highly doubt he was prom king at his high school.

  To me, the idea of doing a documentary about cool kids in high school was as original as it got. Sure, it had been done, but everyone knew that even though Laguna Beach was quote-unquote reality television, it was about as real as the idea of me getting crowned homecoming king that fall. My documentary—which, during the drive home from The Dell that day I had decided would be called The View from the Top of Castle Heights—would be a no-holds-barred look at the beautiful people. The good, the bad, the ugly—no one and nothing would be spared in my quest for the truth of what really went on behind the velvet ropes that led to Castle Heights’ cool crowd. And because we were talking about popularity in glitzy, sunny Los Angeles rather than, say, gray, rainy Portland, Oregon,
it would be even more intriguing to audiences.

  After saving Dylan’s bag—and getting zero thanks, which shouldn’t have been much of a surprise since she walked around acting as if life was a movie that had been written as a starring vehicle for her while the rest of us were just supporting characters—I went home and put together a killer proposal for the documentary. Block gone, as my fingers flew across the keyboard I felt like how Woody must have felt when he came up with the idea for Annie Hall; or Quentin, when he came up with the idea for Pulp Fiction; or Martin, when he came up with the idea for Taxi Driver. (That’s Martin as in Martin Scorsese, another one of my favorite directors.)

  After letting it sit for a day, and doing a rewrite on Thursday night, I stopped at the post office after school on Friday afternoon and mailed off my application—I even splurged and spent a little extra to get delivery confirmation—and then I went to work at Good Buys, where I’m a member of the Geek Gang and fix people’s computers. I don’t like to advertise this because if the people at Good Buys ever found out I’d most likely be fired, but I’m a film geek rather than a computer one. Obviously I know that you can’t go wrong with pushing control/alt/delete all at once, which is how I usually try to solve a problem, but if that doesn’t fix it that’s when I call Microsoft or Mac’s help line. To my credit, it’s not like I pretended to know a lot during my interview, but Raymond, my boss (a budding filmmaker himself), said that I was the only person he had ever met who knew the little-known fact that Quentin collected board games that were based on old TV shows such as The Dukes of Hazzard and I Dream of Jeannie. How exactly that came up in conversation I don’t remember, but I do know that it got me the job.

  “I assume you’re aware that Spike Jonze started out in documentaries before he did Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Agent Rosen?” Raymond asked that afternoon as he tinkered with a laptop that had an “I Love My Spoiled Rotten Cat” sticker on the front. The store was relatively empty, even though we were running one of our Just-Because-It’s-Friday-Get- 60-Percent-Off sales. We’re the white-trash cousin to Best Buy and Circuit City. We don’t carry any of the fancy Japanese name-brand electronics like Sony or Toshiba—most of our stuff comes from Kuala Lumpur or Pakistan, and from the number of customer complaints we receive, it’s built to last for approximately six weeks.