Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  Ouch. That was a bummer. I could only imagine how I would’ve felt if I had found out that Amy had gotten asked. Then again, it was Asher. And he was the most popular guy in school—of course he was going to snag a date. Unlike, say, me. “I’m sure that must suck, but didn’t you sort of expect that was going to happen?” I asked gently.

  She turned to me and burst into tears again. “I didn’t expect him to ask Amy Loubalu!” she wailed.

  My heart stopped. I didn’t have to wonder how I’d feel if Amy got asked—the answer was devastated. “He asked Amy Loubalu?”

  “Yessss,” she cried, rubbing her face on my shoulder to wipe away her tears and leaving black skid marks.

  I patted her on the arm. I felt like the scene in the movie About Last Night starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore where Demi Moore’s roommate, played by Elizabeth Perkins, sits there consoling her after Rob Lowe breaks up with her. Except Dylan and I weren’t roommates, and I wasn’t a girl.

  I did know what it felt like to have your heart broken, though.

  She looked up at me. “You’re such a good friend.” She sniffled.

  “I am?” I asked, still mechanically patting her arm.

  “Yeah. You look like you’re going to start crying, too, to support me.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s a real bummer,” I replied. A real bummer. Like the worst-possible-thing-I-could-have-ever-imagined-happened-level bummer.

  Du-par’s is good for your everyday run-of-the-mill burgers, but for special occasions—happy or sad—then a trip to The Apple Pan is worth the drive.

  Not surprisingly, Dylan had never been to The Apple Pan. From the outside it wasn’t much to look at—it looked like a ramshackle shack. And with its scratched wood floors and ripped vinyl seats it wasn’t much to look at inside either, but so what? It had incredible hickory burgers with barbeque sauce and the world’s best banana-cream pie. That was the problem with this city—everyone judged people, places, and things by their outsides rather than their insides. I was under the impression that Amy was different, but if she was going to Fall Fling with Asher, obviously she wasn’t. Sure, she may have thought I had nice eyes, or good taste in movies, but at the end of the day she was probably just like every other girl who had grown up reading fairy tales and wanted to go off into the sunset with a Surfer Ken doll-looking prince rather than a four-eyed film geek. It didn’t matter that I could list the title and year of every Woody Allen movie or the soundtrack listings of Quentin Tarantino’s films. Living in L.A., I was always going to come up short next to guys like Asher.

  “The first movie I make when I get out of film school as part of my three-picture deal with Warner is going to be an anti-fairy tale,” I announced as I dragged a fry through some barbeque sauce. I was so depressed I couldn’t muster up enough energy to make one of my special dipping concoctions.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Dylan as she wiped barbeque sauce off her still-dangling tiara. Most of the UCLA students who were chowing down around us were also dressed for costume parties, so we didn’t look too out of place. We were, however, the only morbidly depressed ones.

  “Nothing. Never mind,” I said glumly.

  “I can’t believe that out of all the girls at Castle Heights, Asher had to ask Amy,” she said for what had to be the third time in five minutes.

  “Tell me about it,” I said with a sigh.

  “I mean, he knows how I feel about her—”

  “Yeah, how do you feel about her?” I asked, dragging another fry through the sauce.

  She put her burger down. “Well, I hate her.”

  “Yeah, that part I know. But what exactly happened with you guys?”

  As she tipped her chocolate milk shake back, a glop of ice cream fell on her dress, but by this time she was such a mess that she didn’t even try to wipe it off. Instead she just picked the glop up and put it in her mouth. “Michael Rosenberg is what happened with us.”

  I shifted in the booth so that the couple dressed in salt-and-pepper costumes two booths away making out weren’t in my sightline. It was too depressing to see people who were in love at the moment. “Who’s Michael Rosenberg?”

  “A guy who goes to Buckley,” Dylan explained, attempting to use her straw as a fork and now eating her shake. “She stole him away from me in eighth grade.”

  “What happened?” Salt and Pepper were now going at it big-time, so I angled myself in my seat again.

  “What happened was that after talking to him for fifteen minutes at Kate Lieberstein’s bat mitzvah, I fell madly in love with him and became obsessed with getting him to be my boyfriend,” she replied. She hid her face in her hands and opened her fingers so one eye was peeking out. “I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but I even used Daddy’s credit card to buy an e-book called Love Spells by Larissa on Amazon.”

  “Love Spells by Larissa?” I repeated, trying not to laugh.

  She smiled. “Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing,” I said, almost laughing.

  “But you’re about to laugh,” she said.

  “No I’m not,” I lied, about to laugh.

  “Well, obviously it didn’t work, because instead of asking me out, he asked her out. Total waste of twenty-two ninety-five.”

  At that, I let myself laugh. “Did she say yes?”

  “Oh yeah. And they dated all spring and summer until the beginning of freshman year. It wasn’t like they saw each other in person a lot because Michael spent the summer on a teen tour in Israel, but still—everyone knew they were together.”

  Salt and Pepper were now almost lying down in the booth. I wanted to scream Get a room! but I didn’t. “Did she know that you had liked him?”

  Dylan started in on my fries. “Did she know?! She was the one who made me download the e-book!”

  “Oh.” This didn’t sound like the Amy I knew, but I guess everyone had their dark side. “Well, did you try and talk to her about it?”

  She starting mixing the barbeque sauce with some mayonnaise and nodded. I was glad one of us was able to still function. “Yup. And she told me that because I had only talked to him for fifteen minutes, it wasn’t like he and I had been in a relationship or anything and that I was overreacting. But here’s the thing: when you’ve met your soul mate, it doesn’t matter if you talk to them for fifteen or fifteen hundred minutes—you just immediately know.”

  I sighed. That’s how it had been in the kitchen that night—within five seconds of our conversation, I had just known that Amy was the girl I was supposed to spend my life with. “But you always used to say that Asher was your soul mate,” I said. “In fact, I think I have it on tape a few times.”

  “Yeah, well, we won’t be using that footage.” She shrugged. “He was—at least until he broke up with me the other day—but that’s only because Amy had stolen Michael away from me. If she hadn’t, then Michael would’ve been my soul mate and I wouldn’t have had to settle for Asher.”

  Salt and Pepper finally got up to leave. Salt’s lipstick was smeared to the point where she looked like ketchup had exploded on her. “Is that how it works?” I asked. “Soul mates are based on availability? Like back before Netflix, when you still had to go to Blockbuster and if they were out of Godfather II, then you’d just have to settle for Herbie Rides Again?”

  She took another handful of my fries. “Kind of. Omigod—with my crisis, I didn’t even get a chance to ask you what happened with your crush! So did you ask her?”

  I shook my head.

  “How come?”

  “I . . . didn’t get a chance.” Not entirely a lie. If Amy hadn’t walked away and we had stood there for another ten days, maybe I would’ve screwed up the courage to go through with it.

  “That’s too bad. Are you going to do it on Monday?”

  “I think she might already be going with someone else,” I replied.

  “You think she’s going with someone else, or you know?”

  “I think I know.”r />
  She shook her head. “That’s not good enough. You have to find out for sure.” She reached for my hand. “You have to do it, Josh. You have to take a risk. I may have just been betrayed and humiliated in front of the entire senior class because I took a chance on love and then lost everything in the breakup, but that doesn’t have to be your story.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re a great guy and any girl would be lucky to be your date for Fall Fling. I mean, I’d go with you, but like we talked about earlier, I just don’t think of you like that.”

  I slumped down in the booth. “I don’t know—the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I even want to go. It’s just a stupid school dance. Plus, I think I remember reading that Rocky’s playing at the New Beverly that night—”

  She shook her head. “I just don’t get it. When it comes to movies, and going after your dreams, you’re totally fearless. But when it comes to girls? Total wimp.”

  I slumped down farther. She wasn’t wrong.

  “Seriously, Josh. Don’t be such a geek—just ask her out already.”

  “But I am a geek,” I corrected.

  She shook her head. “No—you were a geek, once upon a time, but now you’re not. Okay, remember that scene in Say Anything when John Cusack calls the girl up and asks her out?”

  “You’ve seen Say Anything?” I asked, shocked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course I’ve seen Say Anything. Everyone’s seen it. It’s only on HBO like every other hour.”

  “Cameron Crowe is one of the greats.” I sighed. It was obvious from the raw authenticity of all his movies—from Say Anything to Almost Famous and everything in between—that he had intimate knowledge of what it was like to pine away for girls and be rejected.

  “Yeah, whatever. Anyway, be him—be John Cusack and just do it,” she pleaded. “I can’t know for sure, because you won’t tell me who it is, but I have a feeling that because of your good judge of character, whoever this girl is, she’s probably really nice and sweet and would love to go with you.”

  If she only knew. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she’d do to me if she found out I was in love with the enemy.

  The next week at school I went to any length to avoid Amy, even ducking into the janitor’s closet on Wednesday between fourth and fifth period. I hadn’t had a chance to replace my inhaler yet, but steering clear of Amy had drastically lessened any risk of asthma attacks.

  Maybe I was a wimp. But so what? I was an artist—I was allowed to be wimpy, and moody, and stuff like that. I didn’t need to have different life experiences, like dates and school dances and girlfriends, in order to make my art—reading about it would be enough.

  But on Thursday I was forced to have a life experience.

  “Pizza or turkey pot pie?” demanded Harriet, the lunch lady with the three stray hairs on her chin, when I stood in line in the cafeteria debating between pizza that looked like it had been run over by a truck and left under hot lights for three days and something that looked like cream-of-mushroom soup.

  “I’m still deciding,” I replied.

  “Hey, Josh?”

  I turned and felt the blood drain from my face. Amy was standing there with her grilled cheese sandwich and carrots.

  “Hey, Amy,” I mumbled, unconsciously patting my pocket for my phantom inhaler. “How are you?” It was like that scene in Annie Hall that had made Dylan cry—the one when Alvy and Annie ran into each other at the movie theater; that horrible feeling of seeing someone you had once loved who no longer loved you.

  “I’m good. I haven’t seen you at Mani’s recently.”

  I continued staring at my lunch choices. “Yeah, I’ve been kind of busy with . . . stuff and other stuff,” I said to the pizza. “You know, stuff like that.” With a vocabulary like that, Dylan was right: I should stick to directing other people’s scripts rather than writing my own.

  She nodded. “Well, I was just going to say, if you had a sec I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  I looked at Amy like she had just told me she was pregnant and I was the baby daddy. What could she possibly have to say to me? “Hi, Josh, I just wanted to tell you that, unlike you, Asher isn’t a wuss and has the guts to ask someone to a dance, which is why I’m going to Fall Fling with him and not you”?

  “C’mon, kid, it’s not an SAT question—pizza or turkey pot pie?” demanded Harriet again.

  I ignored Harriet “Uh, yeah, sure, but can we do it some other time?” I said to Amy. “I need to eat and then . . . go set up the chairs for the mock revolution we’re having in Russian class.” It was a good thing I was in the make-believe business and could therefore come up with such an authentic-sounding excuse on the spot.

  Again, it was probably my imagination, but like that night in the kitchen at Lisa’s party, her face fell and some of the glow dimmed. “Yeah, seeing that, you know, we both go to school here, I’m sure we’ll run into each other at some point,” I said.

  “I’m going to make your decision for you,” said Harriet. “You want pizza.”

  I stopped and turned to see not only Harriet looking annoyed, but a line full of hungry students. “Okay,” I said meekly before turning back to Amy.

  “So maybe I’ll see you around,” Amy said. “Or maybe not.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” I tried to think of something else to say, but I had obviously used up all my words. When I got home I was going to check on WebMD to see if there was a name for the syndrome where you rambled on and on when you were nervous.

  “Bye, Josh.”

  “Bye, Amy.”

  As she walked away, Harriet slid my pizza toward me, clucking her tongue. “Maybe next time, Romeo,” she said.

  Yeah, maybe. But probably not.

  “Dude, what’s your problem?” Steven asked on Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in my living room getting ready to watch the rough cut that he had edited together of the footage we had so far. “Just go up to her and see what she wants. Maybe she’s heard how awesome the doc is and wants to invest in our next one so she can get a producer credit and come to the Sundance Film Festival with us.”

  “I just feel so stupid,” I admitted. “I just keep wondering what would have happened if I had asked her before Asher did . . . ”

  Steven held up the DVD. “Listen, my friend, once you see this, you’re going to forget all that and instead just focus on your career and the fact that DreamWorks and Paramount and every other studio in town will be begging you to leave USC early and come make movies for them.”

  I sighed. Maybe Steven was right—if I swore off love now and made the decision to put all my energy into my career now, not only would it save me a lot of heartache, but it would probably earn me a few extra Oscars. Plus, I felt like I had been neglecting the documentary the last few days because I had been too busy replaying the scene with Amy in the kitchen at the party over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done differently so that she would be going to Fall Fling with me and not Asher.

  After we watched the cut, I was silent.

  “Awesome, right?” he said, shoveling sunflower seeds into his mouth. “So awesome that you’re speechless.”

  “No, I’m speechless because it’s so . . . wrong.” He had made Dylan out to be a completely self-involved, spoiled brat. In almost every scene she was yelling at someone, or fixing her makeup, or checking out her hair in the mirror. Granted she did do that stuff more than your average person, but it wasn’t all she did. “What do you think we’re doing here?” I demanded angrily.

  He sat back and let out a huge burp. “What do you mean?”

  I opened up the disk drive and yanked out the DVD so hard it almost went flying across the room. “This isn’t supposed to be the Beverly Hills version of Cops,” I said angrily. “This is supposed to be a fair and balanced documentary.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but, dude, that’s so boring. Listen, I sat here and watched all the footage, and frankly, it was like watching paint dry
. People don’t want to see that the most popular girl in school is actually a decent human being—they want to see drama, and backstabbing, and meltdowns. That’s what sells. Have you never seen reality TV?”

  “But I’m not trying to sell this—I’m using it to get into college.”

  “Yeah, but come on, given the choice, USC would rather admit students who are going to graduate and go on to make blockbusters—not do-good documentaries that play at some small film festival in Washington state to an audience of seven. The blockbuster people are the ones that’ll give them big donations later on in life. Like to build indoor swimming pools and stuff.”

  “I don’t care about having a stupid swimming pool in my name!” I retorted.

  He shrugged. “If you make enough blockbusters, maybe you could build an entire gym.”

  “Okay, that is so off point!” I yelled. “And what about the stuff from the ZBT party after she threw up—how did you get that? And why does it look like it was taken from five miles away?”

  He smiled proudly. “I know—isn’t it great? I had Ari do it when you were running around looking for paper towels. Listen, I know this is your movie and all, but I also knew that you’d be seriously bummed later on if we passed that stuff up. Because I’m your co-executive producer, I did you a huge favor.”

  “But you make her out to be a total diva!”

  He shrugged. “Hey, there’s some do-good stuff in there that shows her in a decent light,” he said defensively.

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . that shot where she’s petting the puppy on Robertson Boulevard while she’s holding all those shopping bags? Audiences love watching people be nice to animals—especially puppies. Huge crowd-pleaser. And when she gave the homeless guy at The Dell a dollar? Talk about giving back to the world.”

  “Yeah, but what about that shot of her I got when I was leaving her house that night after the UCLA party?” I asked. “The one where she’s standing at the front door waving and the way that the moonlight hits her makes her look so small and frail and sad, like a character out of a French film? I can’t believe you left that out.”