Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  Before I walked in, I took a deep breath. “Keep it together,” I whispered to myself. As I walked into the room, everyone immediately shut up. “Hey, does anyone want to watch a real movie?” I asked, trying to sound like what had happened was no big deal. “Something fun and uplifting, like a John Hughes one?”

  No one answered. Instead they just stared at me like I was one of those actresses that kept showing up on the cover of the tabloids because of public freak-outs.

  Okay, so maybe it was a bigger deal than I had thought.

  I sat down and picked up a container of Twizzlers. “Don’t tell me you guys haven’t figured out that what Josh put together was just his way of taking out all his anger and frustration on us popular people because he’s such a geek.”

  “What do you mean ‘us’?” asked Lola. “We look fine. You’re the one who comes off as a bitch.”

  I shoved a stick of licorice into my mouth as fast as I could. “Well, that’s just because he’s secretly in love with me and he finally got it through his thick head that I was never going to feel that way about him,” I replied with my mouth full.

  “You always think everyone’s in love with you,” said Hannah accusingly. “But they’re so not. I mean, look at Asher—you keep saying how you guys were going out for two years but the truth is you barely ever saw him.”

  Even though it was full of licorice, I couldn’t stop my mouth from opening, which meant some of it fell out. I couldn’t believe of all people, Hannah—the person who was always nagging me about whether we were best friends or best best friends—would talk to me like that.

  “Yeah,” agreed Lola. “And if we’re being really honest here, the only reason you were—note the past tense, please—the most popular girl in school is because you happened to be dating the most popular guy in school.”

  I picked the licorice off my shirt and put it in a napkin. “That’s so not true!” I cried. I looked around at everyone. “Right?”

  No one would look me in the eye.

  “Right?” I asked again.

  All I got in response were some coughs.

  “I can’t believe you guys are going to let some total geek control you like this,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s not a geek,” said Lola. “Maybe you’re the geek.”

  If I hadn’t had such good manners, I would’ve punched her in the nose right in front of everyone. Or at least ripped her new blouse.

  “At least he doesn’t sit there and pass judgment on people for what they’re wearing, and who they date, and what kind of car they drive,” added Hannah.

  What had gotten into her? “Okay, well, then if I’m so horrible, what are all you guys doing here?” I demanded.

  “Because you always serve good party food?” asked Robbie Shapiro, who could’ve stood to lose a pound or ten.

  “And because there was nothing else going on tonight?” suggested Lisa Eaton.

  I stared out at the people who, until ten minutes ago, I had considered my friends. I couldn’t believe they could just turn on a dime like that. “So what are you saying?” I asked, my voice shaking. “That you guys think I’m as hideous as the documentary makes me out to be? That none of you want to be my friend anymore?” I bit the inside of my cheek. Even though I hadn’t been able to control myself earlier, there was no way I was going to start crying again.

  Instead of everyone quickly saying “What are you talking about—of course not! Of course we’re your friends!” which is what you would’ve thought they would’ve said to the most popular girl in school, they were all quiet.

  Except for Lola. “The camera doesn’t lie,” she said with a shrug.

  So much for not crying, I thought as the tears started rolling down my face. “Well, then maybe you should all leave,” I managed to get out.

  I didn’t have to ask twice. They got up so fast and started for the door you would’ve thought the In-N-Out burger party truck had just pulled up outside.

  Hannah and Lola hung back. Thank God they had come to their senses and remembered they were my best friends. As I turned to them, for the first time in what felt like forever, I allowed myself to smile.

  They, however, weren’t smiling. “You know, after seeing Josh’s documentary, it makes me wonder what else you’ve said about us when we’re not around,” said Hannah. I hadn’t seen her this PO’d since her father’s secretary had forgotten to mail her Princeton application and she missed the early-admission cut-off date.

  “And I don’t know who died and made you in charge of everything,” said Lola. “Listening to you up there, you’d think that we were just your dumb backup singers or something.”

  “You know, if it weren’t for Amy taking pity on you all those years ago, you’d still be wearing ugly clothes and eating lunch by yourself,” said Hannah.

  “And instead of spending your time shopping, you’d be . . . volunteering at cat shelters,” added Lola.

  “Sometimes I wonder if Lola and I made the right decision when we chose sides that day,” said Hannah. “Amy may have her issues, but somehow I doubt stabbing her so-called best friends in the back on film is one of them. Come on, Lola, let’s go.”

  As the two of them stomped out of my house, I sank down into the couch and began to really cry, but not before grabbing every half-filled bowl of popcorn, chips, and pretzels to keep me company now that I was officially friendless.

  I didn’t stop crying all weekend, except for the fifty or so times I called Lola and Hannah to apologize, but it didn’t even matter because they didn’t pick up. The only person who called or e-mailed me was Josh, but I just deleted all of his messages without listening to or reading them. I couldn’t believe I had been such a fool for thinking we were friends—all he cared about was getting into USC and it didn’t matter who he hurt in the process. In fact, he’d probably do really well in Hollywood for that very reason. What made me even madder about the situation was that I found myself missing him. Hannah was right—even though Josh wasn’t my boyfriend, I had spent more time with him in the last month than I had with Asher in the last year.

  But how could you miss someone you hated? Because I did hate Josh Rosen. More than anything.

  And yet I also really missed talking to him on the phone, singing Neil Diamond songs with him and eating his fries.

  The whole situation was so confusing that I had to stay in bed all weekend. The only time I felt better was when I was lying down with the covers over my head. Daddy was in Napa Valley on a wine-country tour with Amber and I was all alone anyway, so I didn’t have to deal with anyone asking me what was wrong. When Monday rolled around, I still wasn’t ready to face people, so I told Daddy I was sick and needed to stay home from school. As he had a big meeting that morning, he was too busy to check and see if I was lying when I said I had a 105-degree fever, so I spent the day researching boarding schools online.

  But on Tuesday I knew I couldn’t put off the inevitable anymore.

  Usually the week before a major school social event, all conversation centers around dresses and after-parties. Except when the most popular girl in school has been thrown off her throne and kicked to the curb. Then it’s about her. Or, rather, me.

  No one said anything to my face, but I could hear the whispers and giggles as I walked the halls between classes. Not even Ashley and Britney Turner would talk to me. I didn’t even bother going into the cafeteria during lunch. Instead I went to the girls’ bathroom. Luckily there was a nice, big handicapped stall for me to hang out in as I ate my protein bar and read through all the boarding-school info I had printed out.

  Maybe all this time alone is a good thing, I thought as I read about the Bradberry School for Girls in the boonies of Massachusetts. Back when I was popular and everyone wanted to hang out with me 24/7, I was always annoyed that I never had any downtime. Now that I had no one to hang out with, this was the perfect opportunity to really get to know myself. To catch up on all the classics that had been collecting dust on my boo
kshelf, like Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives, because I was busy spending my time reading magazines to figure what to wear to all the parties I used to go to. To find a hobby that I could do alone since I no longer had any geeks in my life to fix up. Maybe I would follow in Josh’s mom’s footsteps and look into something at the Learning Annex. I could even teach my own class and call it “How to Go On After Your Entire Life Has Been Blown to Bits and You’re Officially a Loser Again.” Plus, with all this extra time,I could work on my college essays since there was no way I would submit the documentary.

  As I studied a photo of a bunch of pasty girls playing field hockey and tried to imagine myself as one of them (the little plaid skirts were pretty cute), I heard the door to the bathroom open. A moment later the smell of spicy vanilla filled the room.

  Just when I had thought it couldn’t get any worse, it had. I knew that perfume as well as I knew my own: it was Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanilla Passion Eau de Toilette and I used to smell it on Amy Loubalu’s mother when she drove us to the mall. Now it was Amy’s signature scent, much like Princess by Vera Wang was mine.

  I listened to Amy brush her teeth (she was one of those always-brush-and-floss-after-every-meal people, which drove me bonkers) and wondered how I was going to get out of the bathroom without her seeing me other than crawling through the ceiling like you saw people do in movies.

  After the water stopped, I stood up and crept up to the door, where I watched through the crack as she carefully dried her toothbrush before putting it back into its holder. I guess I hadn’t locked the door all the way, because a moment later it opened and I went crashing through it and landed on my butt.

  To her credit, Amy didn’t start laughing like I probably would’ve done. “Are you okay?” she said as she came over and tried to help me up.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, trying to scramble to my feet. I walked over to the mirror and started fixing my hair, as if falling on my butt was part of my lunchtime exercise routine.

  She looked at me, then stood in front of the other mirror and started putting on lip gloss. It reminded me of when we’d hang out at Sephora and make ourselves up. Thankfully, as we’d gotten older we’d both gotten a little better at it and no longer looked like circus clowns.

  “I heard what happened with the documentary,” she finally said.

  I stopped applying my own lip gloss and turned to her. “I guess you probably thought I deserved it.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, yeah, as far as I’m concerned you took the Michael Rosenberg thing a little too seriously—”

  “You know how difficult it is for me to let things go,” I interrupted.

  “But, Dylan, that was eighth grade. And you never even had the decency to confront me about it. You just stopped talking to me completely.”

  “You know how much confrontation scares me,” I retorted.

  “But you were my best best friend,” she said.

  As I looked at her, all the guilt I had never let myself feel for the way that I had acted came rushing to the surface. “I know,” I said quietly. “And you were my mine.”

  She looked at me like she was waiting for me to tell her I was sorry, which I should’ve done right then and there, but it was like my mouth had been Krazy Glued shut.

  “Anyway, it’s too bad that no one got to see the real version,” she said.

  I turned away from the mirror. “What do you mean ‘real version’?”

  “Ari told me and Whitney in history yesterday morning that the version you saw was an earlier one that Steven had put together. Apparently, when Josh saw it, he freaked out because he thought it was too much like a bad reality show,” Amy explained. “So I guess he did another version, but he brought the old one to the party that night by mistake.”

  “So in the real one I’m not this evil person who’s a spoiled brat?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I heard there’s a moment when you’re yelling at a guy with a cane in a crosswalk that I can’t imagine you’d want in there, but other than that, it sounds like Josh made you out to be . . . human. Just like the rest of us.” She looked down at the floor. “Even the ones who go out with the guy who their best friend has a crush on because they’re going through a desperate-for-attention phase because their dad just told the family that he’s moving out,” she said softly.

  I had forgotten that Amy had been going to therapy ever since seventh grade and always talked like that. “Now that I think about it, holding a grudge for four years over a guy like that seems really dumb,” I said. “I mean, if he were someone super hot and cool maybe, but seeing that it was Michael Rosenberg—”

  “You know, I saw him at the movies recently and he’s so not as cute as he was back then,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  I guess it was a good thing I hadn’t spent much time trying to track him down as a potential Fall Fling date. We both went back to fixing our hair and it felt like old times. So much so that I had almost forgotten that she was going to Fall Fling with my ex-boyfriend. Once I remembered, I could feel myself revving up inside to have a fit, but it was like those times when my car wouldn’t start: the gears of the engine were turning and turning, but then . . . nothing. Just some sputtering. It was as if all my drama-queen tendencies had dried up. Especially when I remembered that even though Asher had been my boyfriend, he really hadn’t been my boyfriend for about a year.

  “I heard you’re going to Fall Fling with Asher,” I finally said.

  I saw her look at me to see whether I was about to freak out.

  “That’s cool,” I continued. “He’s a good guy. Most of the time, that is. Not when he’s dumping people right before school dances with no warning or explanation, but he’s got his moments of niceness.”

  She shrugged. “He was the only one who asked me and I figured it would be nice to go to one of those things before I graduated.”

  “Yeah, I never did understand why you’re never there,” I replied. I had figured that it was because she was dating twenty-five-year-old talent agents and that would look really creepy.

  “Because no one ever asks me.”

  “Really?” I asked as I took out my mascara. I don’t know why I was bothering—I had been crying so much over the last few days my eyes were so puffy you couldn’t even see them.

  She nodded and then reached in her bag for a pack of gum. “Do you want a piece?” she asked, holding it out.

  “Thanks,” I said. I had also forgotten that when Amy wasn’t stealing people’s boyfriends, she was very generous.

  “You should be going with Josh, then,” I joked as I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. “He’s never been to one, either.”

  She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, too. “That’s who I wanted to go with, but he didn’t ask.”

  I glanced over at her to see if she was joking, but the look on her face was dead serious.

  “There was a point where he was coming to Mani’s every day after school a few weeks ago and I thought he might, but he didn’t.”

  Wait a minute—that week when Josh was going to see his crush every day but couldn’t talk to her . . .

  It couldn’t be.

  Could it?

  Oh. My. God. It was Amy that Josh had had a crush on all this time! No wonder he wouldn’t tell me who it was. I couldn’t believe that out of everyone at Castle Heights, it was her that Josh was crushing on. Granted, maybe the last few minutes had made it so that she was no longer my archenemy, but back when he and I were friends, he didn’t know that. I could only wonder what else I’d find out he had done behind my back.

  “Anyway, I’m not going with Asher anymore,” she said, cleaning out her purse. I had forgotten what a neat freak she was.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “He texted me the other night and said that he had just heard that Rebecca Jenkins and Mark Wolcott had broken up, and because he had been wantin
g to go out with her since freshman year, he wanted to jump on it.”

  “I can’t believe that!” I said. “What a jerk.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay. I wasn’t that into going with him anyway. Since I had already gotten a dress, I called Josh last night to see if he wanted to go. But he said that even though you weren’t talking to him at the moment, you guys had made plans to hang out that night and he didn’t feel comfortable breaking them until he checked with you. Except that you wouldn’t return any of his calls or e-mails.”

  I couldn’t believe it—my best friend had a crush on my ex-best friend, and because he was such a good friend, he would’ve given up the opportunity to go to Fall Fling with his dream girl and stay home with me watching old movies because I didn’t have a date.

  Josh wasn’t the geek here—I was.

  “He’s a really good guy,” Amy said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “He really is.”

  Too bad I had screwed everything up.

  As far as I was concerned, just because I wasn’t going to Fall Fling didn’t mean I couldn’t wear one of the three dresses I’d already bought, even if the only place I was going that night was Pinkberry. Maybe I looked ridiculous ordering a quart of frozen yogurt with raspberries and coconut while wearing a black minidress with fake leopard-fur cuffs and black patent-leather stiletto heels, especially since it was pouring rain, but I liked to think of myself as an example for all the other girls who didn’t have dates that night. Even if we didn’t have dates, or weren’t invited out, that didn’t mean we needed to stay home all night in yoga pants and stained sweatshirts feeling sorry for ourselves.

  That being said, I had to admit I was feeling sorry for myself. Not because of Fall Fling, but because I had called and texted Josh a bunch of times and now he was the one who wouldn’t return my messages. Given how I had acted, I couldn’t say I blamed him, but, still, I really missed him. Eating Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Specials by myself was getting boring, and without Josh’s tenor voice, “Song Sung Blue” didn’t sound as good with just my soprano one. But most importantly I just missed talking to him. Even if he always had to compare everything to a movie, our conversations had always left me with something to think about. As I turned on Sunset Boulevard to go home, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to finish off my senior year friendless when Neil Diamond’s “Cherry, Cherry” came on the radio. At first, hearing it just made me more sad, remembering that night when Josh drove me home from the UCLA party, but as I started singing—softly at first, but soon louder and louder (it really is my favorite Neil song)—it filled me with courage. At the next light I pulled an illegal U-ey and drove toward Hollywood. The Universe really must have supported me in what I was about to do because I had all green lights the entire way, and before I knew it I was in front of Josh’s house. Unfortunately the only parking space I could find was two blocks away, so by the time I made it to the house, I looked like a drowned rat. Or, rather, a drowned leopard.