Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  “Hold on a second, let me finish,” he said.

  “Josh, you don’t need to write this down.”

  He looked up. “Oh. Sorry.”

  “And don’t say sorry all the time.”

  He looked down at his sneakers.

  “And don’t be the guy who looks down at his sneakers all the time because that’s totally not sexy,” I continued. “Sexy is telling a girl she’s got a great smile and having it come out like you really mean it rather than just a line.” Until that came out of my mouth, I hadn’t realized how true that was. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything that came out of Asher’s mouth sounded like a line. And not even well-written lines.

  Josh flipped up his hoodie hood and started pulling the strings so hard I worried he was going to strangle himself. “I don’t want you to think . . . I mean, you do have a great smile . . .” he mumbled as his face disappeared. “But, you know, with Asher and all, I didn’t want you to think I was being, you know, inappropriate by saying something like that . . .” All I could see now were his eyes. “So I . . . you know what? I’m just going to shut up now,” he mumbled, slumping down even farther in the booth.

  “No. I get it,” I said, mumbling myself. Why was I so flustered? It wasn’t like I liked Josh or anything. I mean, yes, I liked him, but I didn’t like him like him. I liked Asher. I was in love with Asher. Well, I was in love with the Asher from sophomore year when we started going out, back when he treated me like a girlfriend rather than one of those impulse accessory buys from a cheesy store at the mall that ends up in the back of your closet after one wearing.

  My phone buzzed. Yeah, wee need to talk, it said. Like I said, Asher wasn’t much on spelling. I could feel my stomach tighten. I pointed at Josh’s plate. “If you’re done, I should probably get going,” I said.

  “Sure,” he replied, throwing down some cash and taking off his hood. “Thanks for the tutoring.”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied with a smile that I knew was fake-looking, but I couldn’t help it. For some reason the last few minutes had weirded me out. “I have a feeling you’ll do just fine.”

  And as a group of freshmen-age girls gave Josh not just a second look, but a third and a fourth one as well, as we walked toward the parking lot, I knew I was so right.

  When I got into the car and called Asher, he said that he wanted to talk in person rather than on the phone. Asking me to meet him at the Pinkberry on Beverly Drive, I knew, due to my heightened woman’s intuition, was not a good sign. You only met in public places if you were afraid someone was going to freak out on you.

  Like always, Pinkberry was packed with postworkout women and nannies with screaming kids in strollers. And Asher, reading a text on his Treo with his lips moving.

  “Hey, babe,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. The fact that he was so cute made it really hard to remember all the bad things about him.

  “Hey,” he said, unwrapping them and moving away from me as if I had a 103-degree fever and had just sneezed in his face.

  I pointed at his yogurt, which was covered with crushed Oreos. “That looks good,” I said.

  He took a big spoonful as a little blonde girl wearing a princess costume at the table next to us smacked her baby brother on the head with her plastic wand and her exhausted-looking mother typed away on her BlackBerry. “It is,” Asher said as he took another spoonful.

  I waited for him to offer to buy me one, or at least give me a bite, but he didn’t. Instead he picked up his Treo again.

  I sighed. “So you said you wanted to talk to me about something?”

  “Yeah. Hold on one sec, though,” he said as he texted. After he was done, he put the phone down and took a crumpled and smudged piece of paper out of his pocket and put it on the table. “Okay, so listen,” he said, glancing down at it and smoothing it out, “I’ve been doing a lot of”—he squinted—“thinking. And while you’re a great girl, and you’re pretty, and you’ve got a hot body—”

  “Thanks, babe,” I said, smiling as I reached over and started stroking his arm. Asher may have had trouble communicating, but when he wanted to, he could be very sweet.

  “—but I think it’s oven,” he said, looking down at the paper.

  “Huh?”

  He squinted. “Sorry—I mean over. I think it’s over.”

  “What’s over?” I asked, snuggling closer to him.

  As he scooted his chair away from me, my arm slipped and my elbow landed in his yogurt.

  “Oh great,” he grumbled. “There goes half my yogurt. And I was starved.”

  “What’s over?” I asked again, wiping my elbow with a napkin.

  He looked at me. “We are.”

  The lightbulb went on in my head. “Excuse me, but are you breaking up with me?” I fumed. The little blonde girl stared at me with her mouth open.

  “Yeah. We’ve only got a few more months of school left and I just want to play the field, see what else is out there.” He glanced down at his cheat sheet. “I’m feeling too tied down.”

  “Okay. A) It’s only the fall so we’ve got like a million more months of school left, and Two) How can you feel tied down?” I cried. “We barely even text, let alone hang out together anymore! Ever since the documentary started we haven’t hung out together once!”

  He ate a spoonful of yogurt. “Yeah, but it’s like even when you’re not there, you’re always there. In my space, mon. It’s like I can’t breathe. Look how close to me you are right now!”

  I scooted my chair back. “Fine. Is that better?”

  He scooted his own chair back and picked up the Treo and checked the screen.

  I yanked the phone out of his hand. “But what about Fall Fling?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s only three weeks away!”

  He shrugged. “You still have some time to find another date. Hey, can I have my phone back, please?”

  Dazed, I put it down on the table. “But . . . you’re my boyfriend. And the plan was to go to college, and then after graduating from college, we were going to move in together, and then three years after that you were going to propose, and then a year after that we were going to get married at the Hotel Bel-Air, and then two years later we’d have our first kid—a boy, hopefully—and then two years after that we’d have our second kid, a girl, and then forty-six years later we’d celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary with a huge party at the Hotel Bel-Air again!”

  He looked at me like I was insane. “What are you talking about?”

  “That was the plan!” I cried. “You’re screwing up the plan!”

  “I want a plan,” the little blonde girl whined.

  He stood up. “You’re the one who’s screwed up. I don’t even know where I’m going to college yet, let alone if I want to be married to someone for fifty years.” He patted me on the arm. “Look, you’re a great girl—you’ll find someone else in no time. I know—why don’t you go out with that Josh guy? He’s not looking so bad lately.”

  “I don’t want to go out with Josh!” I yelled. “I want to go out with you! And what about Lisa Eaton’s Halloween party? Now I can’t go as a nurse.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you were going to be a doctor. Doctor and nurse go together, Asher,” I hissed.

  “I want to be a nurse,” the girl whined, starting to cry, while her mother yakked away on her cell phone.

  I whipped my head around and glared at her. “You’re already a princess,” I snapped.

  Asher gathered up his wallet and keys, and crumpled up his pathetic breakup script. “So you’ll go as something else. Wear your cheerleader uniform from last year. You always looked way hot in that.”

  “I want to be a cheerleader,” the girl screamed while her mother continued to talk on the phone.

  “I’m not going as a cheerleader,” I fumed. “That’s so . . . predictable.”

  He shook his head. “You know, I gotta tell you,
Dyl, maybe if you spent less time worrying about what you were going to wear to things, this could have worked out.”

  I couldn’t believe the nerve of him. Not only was he criticizing me for wanting to sit in the same zip code as him, but now he was all up in my grill about my interest in fashion? “Fine,” I said as I stood up. “It’s over, then. Oh, and by the way? I’ll have you know that I’ve been spending a lot of time questioning whether this was working, too.” Yanking his phone out of his hand, I shoved it in the half-full yogurt container. “So I’d like to go on record that I broke up with you first. Even if it was only in my own mind!”

  I stomped to the door and turned back to look at him, but he was more concerned about cleaning his phone than about the bombshell I had just dropped on him. However, the little girl was staring at me.

  And then she stuck out her tongue at me.

  So I did what any mature high-school senior who had just been publicly humiliated in a yogurt store would do—before sailing through the door, I stuck mine out at her.

  As far as I’m concerned there are three situations where a girl is allowed to eat whatever she wants: when she’s PMSing, after the series finale of a television show that changed the course of history such as The O.C., and when she’s been broken up with. And if the breakup happens only three short weeks before a major school social event? Then she gets to eat whatever she wants times a hundred, especially because chances are she’ll be staying home that night so it doesn’t matter how much weight she’ll gain from pigging out.

  Well, not me, of course—I wasn’t going to be staying home. Since I was a senior and there were only a few more opportunities for me to get dressed up and be crowned with a rhinestone tiara, there was no way I was going to miss Fall Fling. While I wasn’t allowed to pig out times a hundred, I was allowed to do it times twenty-five. So on my way home, I stopped at Sprinkles for cupcakes, Whole Foods for Nutty Chocolate Surprise trail mix, and the Pinkberry in Westwood for a large green-tea-flavored yogurt with chocolate chips and coconut.

  “I know!” I said to Lola and Hannah an hour later as the three of us sat in my bedroom and I licked the white buttercream icing off a cupcake. “I’ll tell Nima that he can take me.” Nima Ghedami had had a crush on me since sixth grade, even back when I looked like Jewish Ugly Betty. For a while he was putting poems in my locker by poets with weird names like Rumi and Hafiz who used the word soul twenty times a poem. Maybe Nima was a little strange, but with his dark hair and dark eyes, he was so the opposite of Asher, who looked like a Ken: The Surfer Version doll, that it would allow me to make a very dramatic statement at the dance about the fact that I wasn’t kidding when I said I was over him. Fall Fling problem solved, I threw the icingless cupcake in the garbage as I no longer needed to pig out.

  Lola shook her head as she took a swig of the tea she carried around with her that her mother’s acupuncturist had said would make her boobs grow. “Too late. I heard this morning that he’s going with Asie Khohadiffin.”

  Calling on the five-second rule, I fished the cupcake out of the garbage. “Oh,” I said as I finished it. “That’s okay. I should probably go with someone who’s removed from the whole Ramp crowd anyway.” I grabbed another cupcake out of the box and started in on the icing. “I’m sick of these dumb high-school guys—I need an older man. Like someone in college.”

  “I bet my cousin Ira would take you,” said Hannah. “Technically, he’s not in college at the moment because he had to take a leave of absence from San Diego State when he had his nervous breakdown, but my mom told me the other day that he’s doing so well that they’re now giving him weekend passes off the psych ward.”

  Lola shot her a look like she, and not Ira, was the crazy one.

  “Well, he is nineteen,” Hannah said defensively. “That’s older.”

  I took another bite of the cupcake. “Hannah, I love you, but I’m so not in the mood for jokes at the moment.” I should have started doing squats to try to burn off the calories, but I was too depressed. Instead I flopped back on my bed. “Seriously, what am I going to do?” I said to the ceiling.

  “You could go with Josh,” suggested Lola.

  I sat up and looked at her. “Um, hello? Did I not just say this wasn’t the time for jokes?”

  “I’m not joking,” she said. “He’s totally your friend boy.”

  “Omigod, he’s so not!” I squealed. A “friend boy” was someone with whom there was no physical stuff, but it was obvious you were on the path to becoming a couple. “He’s definitely just a brofriend,” I insisted. That was someone with whom there was no chance of it ever going past the friend stage.

  “Whatever it is,” said Hannah, “you guys are together like twenty-four/seven.”

  “I told you—that’s because we’re working together. It’s business.”

  Both of them gave me a skeptical look.

  “And you made him over,” said Lola.

  “Okay, fine, so he’s become one of my very close friends,” I admitted.

  “But he’s not one of your closest close friends, right?” Hannah asked anxiously.

  “Of course not,” I assured her. “Anyway, I can’t go to a social event with him where there’s physical contact involved. He may look a lot better postmakeover, but he’s still, you know, Josh.”

  “I think he’s cool,” said Lola with a shrug.

  I looked at her with disbelief. “Um, hi, but weren’t you the one who sat there at the nail salon and told me I needed to be careful or else I’d be branded with a scarlet G for ‘geek’?”

  She shrugged and got up and went to my closet. “I changed my mind,” she said as she started going through my things for stuff to borrow. “Geeks are the new jocks. I just read it in Seventeen.” She looked away. “And his friends aren’t as bad as I thought, either.”

  I threw the now-empty cupcake wrapper away. “Omigod—I knew it!” I squealed. “You totally have a crush on Steven.”

  Lola turned around. “Ew! I do not!” she squealed.

  “You so do,” I said, reaching for my Sidekick to see if news had spread yet about the breakup. “You should go with him to Fall Fling—not the Guz.”

  “That’s so not happening,” she replied.

  “Ari’s not that bad, either,” added Hannah. “Do you know that he knows every single word of every single song in Grease? Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Fascinating,” I replied. Not. “Anyway, even if I did want to go with Josh to Fall Fling, he’s asking someone else,” I announced.

  “Who?” asked Hannah.

  “I don’t know. He won’t tell me.”

  “Huh. Good for him,” Lola replied, coming back to the bed with my favorite jeans and a cute cardigan I had borrowed from Hannah a few months ago. “I hope whoever she is, she says yes. He deserves to be happy.”

  I looked up from my Sidekick. She looked totally sincere.

  My phone buzzed. As I looked at the screen, one condolence text after another started to appear. I couldn’t tell if the reason my heart was beating so fast was because of all the sugar I had eaten in the last hour, or because I realized that if I didn’t get moving, I was going to be the only one without a date for Fall Fling.

  Like I said, for whatever reason, I seem to be a crisis magnet. Maybe it’s because the Universe knows I’m super strong and can handle whatever comes my way. At any rate, over the next few days I had to deal with two crises: finding a date for Fall Fling and finding a costume for Lisa Eaton’s party.

  By the time I arrived at school the next morning, the halls were buzzing with the fact that I was back to being just Dylan instead of Dylan-and-Asher. Not wanting to get a reputation as one of those girls who trashes her exes, I refused to comment on the situation as I made my way to English class. No one actually asked me for a comment, but still, if they had, I wouldn’t have given one.

  Did u bring your camera? I texted Josh during class while Mrs. Collett droned on about The Great Gatsby. Frankly, I didn’t
know what all the big fuss was about—that lady Daisy in it was so annoying. Talk about a drama queen.

  Yeah. Why? he texted back.

  B/c I was thinking it might be fun to film me during lunch today now that I’m single . . . u know, when all the guys start hitting me up for Fall Fling, I typed back.

  “Okay, so today we have a very special episode of the documentary,” I said into the camera later as I sat on The Ramp during lunch. Thankfully Asher was nowhere to be found. Lola said it was because he and his friends had gotten permission from Coach Shelburn to leave campus during lunch to go to McDonald’s because they had just won their seventh straight soccer game in a row, but I think it was because he was too emotionally devastated to have to see me. “As everyone now knows, Asher and I are no longer ‘Asher and I,’” I continued as Lola filed her nails and Hannah prepped her for SATs even though she had already gotten 2300 on them last time around. “Which means that I am now free to go to Fall Fling with another guy. As you can imagine, being the most popular girl in school, I’m sure I’m going to be flooded with invites by guys who have been wanting to go out with me for years but haven’t been able to because I was taken. So I thought that would be nice to get on camera.”

  “What would be nice to get on camera?” Steven asked.

  “Me being asked out!” I replied.

  “Oh. Okay,” he said.

  “So now we’ll just sit here and see who comes up to me,” I announced, looking around The Ramp. There was Rob Rosen—he’d definitely come up. And so would Brandon Moglen—he’d had a crush on me for ages. And Huck Hirsch would, too, even though there was some buzz that he might be gay.

  “Got it,” Josh said.

  We sat there for a minute, but no one came up.

  “Hey, do you think this is going to take long?” Steven asked. “Because I think my blood sugar’s falling and if we’re going to be here a while I should probably get some protein in me.”