Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  “Here’s what Josh and I think would be fair: for the next month, Josh will get to film you and your friends one day a week at school during lunch, one afternoon a week after school, and one Friday or Saturday night. And while you won’t have final cut, you will retain the right to give notes on the rough cut of the film so that you’re not unfairly or unflatteringly portrayed.”

  I let go of his neck and stood up. “You’re serious?!” I squeaked.

  I could see Josh cringe as he started munching away on the parsley. I couldn’t believe it—my father, the man who loved me more than anything, the man who ate small real estate developers for breakfast—had totally sold me down the river just because Geek Boy reminded him of what it was like to grow up poor and listen to some jumpsuitwearing singer.

  “As a heart attack,” he replied.

  “You know I hate when you joke about that,” I said.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry. But, yes, I’m serious,” he said as he hoisted himself out of his seat. “So serious that if I find out that you don’t cooperate, you’re not going to that dance you’ve been talking about.”

  “What?! But I have to go—I’m the Leaf Queen!”

  Josh was halfway through a snort when I whipped my head toward him.

  “Is something funny?” I asked in an icy tone.

  The snort changed into a coughing fit.

  “I guess not,” he said when he was done. “It just, you know . . . sounds funny. Like something you’d buy at Home Depot or somewhere like that.”

  I glared at him.

  “Or not,” he added.

  “The Leaf Queen is a very important tradition at Castle Heights,” I explained. “Nine out of the last ten Leaf Queens have gone on to be prom queens. Everyone except for Adriana Castelli and that’s because she happened to be in rehab at the time. And just today I saw the greatest dress. It’s pale pink with—”

  “Well, the only place you’re going to be wearing that dress is here in the house if you don’t let Josh make his documentary,” said Daddy. “So I’ll leave you kids to figure out the details.” He stopped in front of Josh and put out his hand. “Nice meeting you, Josh. Good luck with your project. I’m very impressed with your drive.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Schoenfield,” Geek Boy said as he shook it. “I really appreciate your offer to sponsor it and, you know, pay for the film and stuff like that.”

  “Daddy, you’re paying for this?!”

  He shrugged. “Why not? It’s a tax write-off. See you kids later.”

  As soon as he left the room, I flopped down on the other end of the couch, which made Geek Boy move even farther into his corner, as if he were afraid of getting cooties.

  I was so mad I wanted to scream. “I can’t believe you came over to tell on me,” I said. “What are you, seven?”

  “I came over here to try and talk things out with you,” he said defensively, “but you weren’t here, and so we started talking, and before I knew it, the Nate ’n Al’s guy was here.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t stand parent kids.”

  “Huh?”

  “Parent kids—kids who suck up to parents.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t suck up to them—they just always seem to really like me. In fact, back in third grade, when I was best friends with Toby Wasserman—”

  I put up my hand to stop him. “Okay, halt. Listen, while I’d really like to play This Is Your Life with you, I don’t have the time right now. So three days a week for one month—” I started counting on my fingers. “That’s—”

  “Twelve days,” he said. “No, wait—actually, because October is a long month, it’ll actually be fourteen days, because it’s a month with five weeks rather than—”

  I put up my hand once more. “Okay, halt again. If we’re going to be working together, which it looks like we are, you’re going to have to stop with the Wikipedia stuff.”

  “Fine,” he mumbled, reaching for a piece of white of a black-and-white.

  “Although I’m impressed,” I said.

  “You are?” he asked, surprised, as he chewed away.

  I got up and went to my purse for another piece of gum. “I mean, pretending to love Neil Diamond just to bond with my dad? That’s pretty genius. How’d you find out about that anyway?”

  “Huh?”

  “How’d you know he’s a Neil lover?” I asked as I shoved another two pieces in my mouth.

  “I didn’t. When I rang the doorbell your dad answered and he saw my bumper sticker.”

  “Yeah, but how’d you know to put the bumper sticker on?” Holding my nose, I picked up the rest of the black-and-white with a napkin and threw it in the bag of garbage. It was bad enough I was going to have to do this stupid thing—I certainly wasn’t going to risk gaining weight as well. I sat back down on the couch.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean you don’t actually like Neil Diamond.”

  He was quiet.

  “Omigod—you do like Neil Diamond. By any chance, are you aware of the fact that you’re the only one under fifty who would ever admit that?”

  He shrugged. “If you take the time to listen, his lyrics are pretty amazing. Almost on par with Bob Dylan or Neil Young. ‘I Am . . . I Said’? That’s as deep as it gets.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but ‘I am, I said/To no one there/ And no one heard at all/Not even the chair’? How is a chair supposed to hear? It’s a chair!”

  “Oh. So you’re familiar with Neil’s lyrics?” he asked, surprised.

  “Of course I’m familiar with them,” I replied. “It’s all my parents played in the car when we used to go on road trips when I was little.” After Mom died, Daddy stopped listening to Neil because he said it reminded him too much of her, but unfortunately the damage had been done—all the lyrics to songs like “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “Song Sung Blue,” and “Sweet Caroline” were permanently etched in my brain. I’m sure when I go into therapy in my twenties I’d be spending a few sessions on how it had traumatized me.

  “Cool. I haven’t thought too much about the score yet, and obviously with our limited budget, we wouldn’t be able to license one of his songs,” he said, “but my friend Steven’s older brother Jason knows the cousin of one the guys in Super Diamond, and maybe we’d be able to get them to give us one of their songs cheap.”

  I gave him a look.

  “Or not,” he added. “Look, Dylan, I know you don’t want to do this, but I think I’ve come up with a way to make it worth your while.”

  I gave him a doubtful look. “How?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and if you want to submit the documentary with your college applications, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. As long as I get proper credit.”

  At this news, my ears perked up. “Huh. Do you think they’d let me submit that instead of writing an essay?”

  “They might.”

  The one thing that had been keeping me up nights—other than what I was going to wear to Fall Fling and why Asher preferred to spend his Saturday nights watching grown men beat up on each other at Ultimate Fighting championships rather than with me—were my college essays. I may have been a lot of things—not least of all super popular, charming, and the fashion icon of Castle Heights—but “good student” wasn’t in the top ten answers to “Who Is Dylan Schoenfield?” While Hannah was on the any-college-as-long-as-it’s-Ivy track and Lola was set on going to one of those artsy colleges back east where you couldn’t tell the difference between the boys and the girls, I had accepted that I would go somewhere local like UC Santa Cruz or Santa Barbara, where Asher would spend most of his time surfing and I’d major in art history because then I’d have something to talk about at cocktail parties when I got older. But even though they weren’t that difficult (all you needed was to maintain a GPA of 2.5 and a tan), you did need to write an essay, which wasn’t on my list of fun things to do.

  “Well, seeing that not going to Fall Fling isn’t a
n option, I guess I don’t have a choice.” I sighed. “Meet me on The Ramp at lunch on Monday and you can start then. But I’m telling you, I don’t care what my father says—if I see that you’re trying to make me look bad, the deal’s off. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he replied, nibbling away on the black side of another cookie.

  “And don’t think that this means that all of a sudden we’re like friends, or anything,” I said. “It’s strictly business. Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Asher and I are super serious, so if you were thinking of using this documentary thing as a way to, you know, hit on me or anything, it’s not going to work.”

  “Don’t worry,” Geek Boy said. “Like you said, it’s strictly business. But who knows—maybe this’ll be the start of a long and rewarding working relationship and we’ll be Woody and Jean Doumanian.”

  “Huh?”

  “Woody Allen and his producing partner,” he explained.

  Woody Allen . . . the name sounded vaguely familiar. “Does he go to our school?”

  Geek Boy looked like he was going to throw up all the deli food he had just eaten. “Woody Allen was only the greatest director of the twentieth century.”

  “So he’s dead now?” I asked.

  “No. He’s still alive. It’s just that his movies aren’t as good as they used to be. They’re decent, because he’s Woody, but nothing like his classics.”

  “Oh.”

  “Annie Hall? Manhattan?”

  I shrugged.

  “Hannah and Her Sisters?” he asked with disbelief.

  “Hannah doesn’t have any sisters. She’s got an older brother, Warren. He goes to Stanford.”

  “It’s the name of one of Woody’s movies,” he explained.

  “Oh.” I shrugged. “Never saw it.”

  He continued looking queasy and sighed.

  Sheesh—someone was taking this movie stuff way too seriously. “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said as he stood up and put out his hand. “So we have a deal?”

  I put mine out as well. “I guess so.”

  As I walked him to what he called the Neilmobile (Hello? Can you get cheesier than that?) I tried to look at the bright side of things: helping Geek Boy fulfill his dream of getting into USC film school had to balance out whatever bad karma I may have had.

  Not that I had any, of course.

  chapter four: josh

  I don’t know who was more excited about the documentary—Steven or my mom.

  “Dude, you’re so right—the more I think about it, the more I realize this thing is totally going to change our lives,” said Steven that Saturday afternoon as the two of us sat on the kitchen floor unraveling the cables for the microphones we’d be using on Monday.

  “Yeah,” I said glumly. “If we survive it.” Already I had received a three-page single-spaced e-mail from Dylan about the documentary. There needed to be a makeup and wardrobe budget (yeah, right); I couldn’t shoot her if she was PMSing and therefore retaining water (whatever that meant); she had approval over which of her friends were on camera—the list went on and on. We hadn’t even started and she was making the biggest stars in Hollywood look easygoing. “Forget about getting it done,” I said. “I’ll be happy if I can just stop her from texting me every five minutes with yet another demand. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea—”

  “Dude! What are you talking about?! This is what we’ve been waiting for,” Steven said as he wiped the sweat off his face with the vintage Sundance Film Festival ’02 T-shirt he had scored on eBay. “The chance to let all those popular girls see what they’ve been missing by dating jocks.”

  “He’s right, honey,” said Mom as she fixed him a plate of brown rice and veggies even though we had stopped at In-N-Out Burger less than an hour before on our way back from the rental place. “Your father was a jock and look how that turned out.” Dad had been on the tennis team at UCLA, which is where they met.

  “Everyone knows that it’s always the unpopular guys who end up with the best chicks,” announced Steven.

  “Yeah, in, like, a John Hughes movie,” I replied.

  “Or a Woody Allen one,” Mom added.

  She did have a point.

  Steven stood up and walked over to the baby-blue linoleum table that Mom had gotten at the Santa Monica flea market right after we moved. If Mom wasn’t at the Learning Annex, she was at a flea market. “Look at Spielberg, dude—are you going to sit there and tell me that even though she’s pushing fifty, Kate Capshaw isn’t still a total fox? No offense about the age thing, Sandy.” Mom liked my friends to call her by her first name—something about putting everyone on an even playing field. At forty-five, Mom was still looking pretty good herself. In fact, ever since she had stopped straightening her brown hair and let it grow so that it was now long and curly, she looked more like a poet (yet another Learning Annex course) and less like a lady who spent her days lunching, which is what she used to do before the divorce.

  “No offense taken, Steven,” said Mom. “In fact, just last night I was reading that perimenopause is when women really begin to step into their sexual power.”

  “Mom.” I blushed. “Please. We have company.”

  That was another by-product of the divorce: really open communication. That part I could’ve done without sometimes.

  “Once you go nerd, you don’t go back,” Steven said.

  “It’s true,” said my mom, who had recently started dating an accountant named Larry from the Intro to Persian Mystic Poetry class she had taken a few months earlier. “I can’t begin to explain the difference when you’re with someone who’s taken the time to read The Female Body: An Owner’s Manual—”

  “Okay, moving on,” I said, in hopes of stopping her before she embarrassed me a lot rather than her usual little. It was great to see Mom happy again after those last few years with Dad, but in my opinion, she was taking this rediscover-your-inner-self thing a little too seriously. “All I care about is getting the footage so I can get into USC and hopefully get a scholarship. I’m not in this for dates.” At least not with Dylan or any of her equally stuck-up friends. Now, Amy Loubalu—that was another story. Amy was as perfect as the cinematography in The Godfather. The way her brown hair swung just so when she walked. And her eyes, which were on the violet side of blue, a color so unique that even the Crayola people wouldn’t have been able to come up with a name for it. And her incredible organizational skills—the way she made sure to use the same color pen for whatever notebook she was writing in, so that everything about English was red, and physics was green, and—

  “Josh? What do you think?” I heard my mom say.

  “Huh?” Whenever Amy popped into my head—which was more and more often since she had changed lockers and was now four down from me—I tended to lose track of time.

  “I asked if you wanted me to take you to Loehmann’s and get you a few new pairs of slacks, now that your social circle is going to be widening so much,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom, but I think I’ll be fine in jeans.” The only person I knew who wore “slacks” was my eighty-five-year-old grandfather in Scottsdale, Arizona.

  Just then my phone buzzed. When I picked it up, there was yet another text from Dylan. Trying to get in to see my colorist to get my roots done today but if not will have to hold off on shooting till I do.

  And by the time I was done dealing with Dylan, I was going to feel like I was eighty-five.

  I like to think of myself as a pretty calm, cool, and collected guy—think George Clooney circa Out of Sight, without the movie-star looks—but by the time third period rolled around that Monday, I had already gone through an entire roll of Tums.

  “Here,” Steven whispered from the desk next to me in calculus, holding out a box of Mike and Ikes. “Have some of these. They’ll settle your stomach.”

  “No, thanks,” I whispered back. “I think they’ll just make me throw up,” I said. Maybe it was better to just dream of one day becom
ing a director instead of actually becoming a director.

  By lunch, my upset stomach had been joined by a buzzing in my head. “Maybe we should hold off on starting until I go to the doctor and get an MRI,” I announced to the guys as we stood at the entrance of the cafeteria with all our gear, which included two video cameras, two booms, and a handful of lights. “I might have a brain tumor.”

  “Maybe you’re just wimping out,” replied Steven as he hoisted the boom from one arm to another, almost decapitating Sloane Simons in the process.

  “Or maybe it’s MS,” I added. “It says on WebMD that ringing in the head is also a symptom of MS.”

  “Or maybe you’re just wimping out,” said Steven.

  “You know, studies have shown that high levels of stress can indeed manifest into all sorts of diseases,” argued Ari as he laid the cables on the ground. I could always depend on Ari to back me up on medical issues.

  Steven pointed to my inhaler, which I had been holding in my hand like a good-luck charm all day. “Just take another hit off that thing and let’s get on with it already.”

  I did as I was told and immediately felt better. “So are we ready?”

  “I was born ready,” said Steven.

  “You were born to get your butt kicked,” replied Ari. “Josh, maybe Hannah Mornell was right—maybe a look at unpopularity would be more interesting.”

  I shook my head and stood up tall, which was a rare occurrence seeing that slumping was my default mode. “No. This is our opportunity to make a difference, like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men when they exposed Watergate. Or Sally Field as Norma Rae in Norma Rae when she got better working conditions for the factory workers.” I stood up even taller. “We’ve come too far—we can’t turn back now.”

  “We haven’t even started,” corrected Ari.

  “We’re starting right now,” I said. “Come on.”