The Nerdy and the Dirty

by B. T. Gottfred

  I waited a moment to see if he had more to say. He didn’t. So I nodded again. He then reached down to his side and placed three books on the table between us.

  He said, “My publisher continues to send me their contemporary fiction despite my well-stated position that they have no value. But I understand that some of the books are very popular with teens these days, and perhaps if I allowed you to read them, you would have a better grasp of your peers’ limited thinking.”

  My father was still disparaging the books and teenagers as a whole, but I considered this a major breakthrough in my relationship with my dad. He was giving me permission to try and be normal! Maybe it was because he realized I was not a genius like him, but at this moment, not even that bothered me. “Thanks, Dad.”

  He nodded, stood, and disappeared back into his basement office. I took his cereal bowl to the sink and then took the books he gave me to my room. I began reading at once, choosing author Forest Jackson’s If Only Girls Weren’t Everything I Wanted I’d Have Nothing to Do with Them. I liked the long title and I knew it was being made into a movie. Reading a book before the film is released might prove to have social currency. Yet only fifty pages in, I knew reading this book would be more than just a talking point. The main character’s name was Theodore. He was very intelligent and verbally eloquent and very appealing! His only flaw was that he didn’t know how to talk to girls! This book was about me! I wasn’t a misfit-outcast with no redeeming qualities. I was just like the lead character in a book that had sold millions of copies and would be made into a major motion picture!

  I only stopped reading, briefly, when my computer beeped with an email. It was from Robert. He had sent me some funny YouTube clips. They weren’t that funny, but that’s not what was important. It was a signal the life I liked so much only a few days ago was back even though I’d been sure it was gone forever.

  Then he sent me another email, telling me he had sent a suggestion on Facebook that Allison Wray and I become friends. My powers of self-empowerment had returned and were coursing through my body! Maybe my life would be even better than it had ever been before.

  (Evil Benny opened his mouth, but I said, “Not listening to you!” And he went away.)

  Now that Robert had connected Allison and me, it was my turn to help him become friends with Penelope. After we got back from the family trip to Wisconsin, I’d probably have to call her and ask to meet. Secretly, obviously, so Paul didn’t find out (and beat me up) and also so Robert didn’t find out (and discover she wasn’t really my friend). And then I’d have to plead with Penelope to at least pretend to be interested in Robert so that he could, again, be my best friend and so that Allison Wray, my dream girl, could be my real girl.

  I was sure by then, I’d be back to being my disciplined and evolved self and not be distracted from my extraordinary destiny by something so small as what Penelope Lupo smelled like.

  18

  pen

  On the drive up to Wild Wolf lake, I texted Paul fifteen thousand times. I’m not exaggerating. He finally just said, I love you but we need this time apart. It made me wish I was dead, but what could I do but survive this week in the woods with my mother and then go back and promise to be an amazing (and mute) good Catholic girlfriend who still gave him blow jobs in his car? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. NOTHING.

  * * *

  Anyway, the lake is a five-and-a-half-hour drive into middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin. Outside the resort, there’s only white people, trees, snow, fishing shops, and more white people. And me. Me with my black hair, my black clothes, and my skin so dark olive most people think I should be deported. When we stop for gas on these trips, the men think I’m going to steal something and the women think I’m going to steal their men.

  But the resort itself isn’t bad. Twenty-seven cabins on the edge of the lake with a lodge in the middle. Nature so pure it almost gets me high. Cross-country trails for miles (that I never use, but still). Deep, epically soft couches in front of huge fires. And endless comfort food during mealtimes at the lodge. (I indulge in the homemade soups and freshly baked breads; my mom devours the multitude of breaded and fried meats.)

  We always stay in cabin 13 because it’s closest to the dining room entrance, which is fine with me because the far cabins are a little too close to the endless forest, which I remain convinced contains animals that could eat me and ghosts that could do worse.

  * * *

  My mom had brought a bag for me. She didn’t do a terrible job. Packed my skirts even though she thinks I’m an idiot for dressing up to go to dinner at a place that has dead fish stuffed on the walls.

  Mom also made a trip to Barnes & Noble and bought the next ten books on my Amazon wish list. (It’s this secret peace offering we have. First: She acts nuts. Then: Without admitting she acted nuts, she goes and buys me stuff. Last: I forget she acted nuts.)

  After we had unpacked, my mom took a nap in her bedroom. I started a fire and grabbed one of the new books, only then I decided I’d rather reread the last Millie Dragon novel on my phone. Zelda Zowie, the author, is my favorite writer—probably my favorite anything—in the universe.

  Millie Dragon is a high school chick in Los Angeles who can see another dimension where all her classmates are haunted by demons. What makes it different than all the other YA supernatural crap out there is that Millie isn’t trying to be a monster-fighting hero nor is she waiting to have her existence validated with the love of some brooding yet sensitive dude. She basically decided the only way to help her friends is to tell them there are these demons they can’t see that follow them around trying to control their lives. She tells them that the demons can’t be killed but that the demons can be made less dangerous if you learn to talk to them. Her friends think she’s crazy, but Millie cares more about telling the truth than what other people think of her. (Basically the opposite of me, I guess.) Yeah, when I explain the books it makes it sound like a simple metaphor, but that’s why Zelda Zowie is a brilliant novelist and I can’t even get a C-plus in English class.

  Whatever. The books are great. I don’t care if you believe me. The sixth book comes out on Christmas, and that means, for that day at least, I’ll be able to forget about getting dumped and having a shitty life.

  * * *

  When I was showering before dinner, I thought about masturbating because I have this weird enjoyment of getting off under hot water when it’s super cold outside. But then I remembered I was trying to become a different person now and so instead I just killed time layering my mascara until I was full-throttle emo-goth. My mom, now awake and whining that it was taking me forever to get dressed, took one look at me and said, “I’m too hungry to care if you look like you’re about to kill yourself.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  * * *

  The Wild Wolf lodge is more than just the dining room. In the very front, when you first enter, is an office and small shop with stuff like shampoo and stupid souvenirs. Then off to the right is a big room with Ping-Pong and pool tables, out-of-date video games like Donkey Kong, and a giant mounted seven-foot bear on its hind legs. Not just the head, the whole body. (Like even the penis. Yeah. Really.) Why a family resort thinks a stuffed dead animal is an okay thing to have in a game room, I don’t know. Oh, they call this room the Bear Room. Very creative of them. There are also some stairs to a loft that has a cable-less television. It has a DVD player now, which is futuristic compared with the VHS player they had up through eighth grade. During the summer, when more families with younger kids visit, I think the Bear Room must get a lot of use. But it’s always empty when my mom and I come during winter break. At least empty enough that last year Paul and I got half naked in the TV loft.

  The dining room, to the left of the office, has just as much 1960s wood paneling as everything else except the panoramic windows overlooking the lake make you feel like you are floating above the ground. Like you’re on a spaceship hovering above an alien ice planet. I’m not
going to lie: It’s awesome, and even during the worst weeks stuck up here with my mom, that view almost always makes me feel like the trip was worth it. Yeah.

  * * *

  So all this was routine, right? Driving up to bumblefuck Wisconsin, unpacking, reading while my mom slept, walking over to the lodge for our first dinner of the vacation. No Paul this year, which sucked for a bunch of different reasons, but I had come up here without Paul my whole life before two years ago, so it wasn’t that different. It was almost cool that I kept growing older yet this trippy Wild Wolf Resort was like a time machine back to when I was a kid.

  Yeah, right, so routine. The same. Year after year after year. Comfortable sort of. Predictable of course. Yeah, all that.

  And …

  Yeah …

  Right …

  I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS!

  I follow my mom into the dining room, toward our two-person table against the window, and I’m not even thinking about looking anywhere but outside that awesome window—honestly, it’s better than any drug I’ve ever done—but then I get this knot in my gut, like I should look across the dining room. That there’s someone here other than just middle-aged couples from suburban Milwaukee.

  So I look. And I’m like, for that first second, “Oh, hey, there’s two kids here this year.” Unusual, but not impossible. There was a boy named Kip that came during my fourth- and fifth-grade years and it was sorta fun. (He was cute but I was ten and when you’re ten you don’t think about doing anything other than playing Ping-Pong but he moved to New Jersey or somewhere and I never saw him again.)

  SO YEAH, UNUSUAL BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.

  You want to know what IS fucking impossible? That he would be here. No, no, more than that. Any other student from Riverbend? That would and should have been impossible.

  But Benedict FUCKING Pendleton?

  That he would be here was like frogs falling from the sky or dead people rising from their graves or … no, no, again, still doesn’t work, because all that crap people have imagined before so even those things can’t even compare to the incomprehensible presence of this social-misfit kid here at Wild Wolf Resort. Because this kid was, sort of, directly responsible for me spending two days locked up in religious jail, responsible for me getting dumped by my one and only boyfriend ever, and responsible for ruining my life. Right?

  Because this kid, this Benedict, was BY FAR my most bizarre sexual fantasy obsession and I’ve had a lot of bizarre sexual fantasy obsessions. A LOT.

  And now he was here at a resort where there is nothing for me to do … except obsess about him more.

  19

  BENEDICT

  My sister complained the entire drive up to Wild Wolf Resort. “I want to be on a beach,” Elizabeth would say. “I want to be somewhere warm,” she’d say. “This is going to be the worst vacation ever.” My mom (who drove because my dad is a very unskilled driver) tried to say things like “Keep an open mind” and “This is very important to your dad.”

  My father, who has the superpower to not get sick while reading books in the car, ignored both of them for the first three hours and twenty minutes. His ability to ignore distractions might be another superpower of his. (I use superpower not literally. Obviously.) But then, after another extended rant by Elizabeth that “life isn’t fair,” my dad closed his book, turned to the backseat, and said to my sister, “At this exact moment, a young child somewhere on our planet is being beaten to death by a metal rod. The last unconscious thoughts of this child, before it stops breathing, will be, ‘Why did my mother bring me into this world if she hates me so much?’ This child, if it weren’t dead, would agree with you, Elizabeth, that life is not fair.”

  This shut my sister up for the rest of the ride.

  * * *

  In my sister’s defense, the resort itself was rather archaic. No one with my father’s bank account and without his nostalgia would come here. I feared the cabins and lodge might collapse after the next heavy snowfall. No one even bothered to plow the roads down to the pavement and my mother slid the Mercedes SUV into a snowbank as we parked at cabin 1. Our housing was on the edge of the forest, and the trees and growth surrounding it appeared primed to swallow it whole once spring arrived. All this being stated, I must say that once we stepped outside, the fresh, cold air delivered an intense rush of adrenaline into my lungs that I’ve never experienced before. It made me wish I could yell like a face-painted warrior in a movie where the men wear kilts and carry swords bigger than their legs. My father would never approve of such a thing, but even the urge to do it was exhilarating.

  By the time the four of us had unpacked, it was time to go to dinner. My sister got back in the car, thinking we would drive the quarter mile down to the lodge. But my father instead started walking along the lake without a word. I held open the car door until Elizabeth reluctantly followed him. The wind coming off the frozen lake did put an unpleasant chill into my bones and my feet were rather wet from the snow by the time we arrived at the lodge. I would never complain, obviously, but I was starting to long for the Four Seasons on Maui, where the only season was warm.

  * * *

  The lodge, though just as dated inside as out, did provide much-appreciated relief from the cold. The dining room provided an inviting view of the lake that was so calming they should sell videos of it to people who want to stare at serene nature scenes.

  After we ordered, my mom read through the brochure the front desk had provided. The list of activities were: fish in the snow, walk in the snow, ski in the snow, and snowmobile in the snow. Elizabeth could not contain a whine, and though usually I would have enjoyed witnessing my father’s disapproval of my usually perfect sister, someone was entering the dining hall that, at first sight, looked remarkably like Penelope Lupo.

  Only when this person looked back at me with the same sort of astonished recognition did I realize that, however improbably, this was not a girl who looked like her, it was Penelope Lupo herself.

  “She’s pretty,” my mom said.

  “She’s actually not,” I whispered even though I could not stop staring at her.

  “She looks more out of place than I do,” Elizabeth said.

  “Her name’s Penelope. She’s in my class at Riverbend.”

  “I don’t know how you can say she’s not pretty, Benedict. I think she’s very pretty,” my mom said.

  “She’s also way too cool for you,” my sister said.

  “Elizabeth. Remember, you’re supposed to be helping your brother.”

  I said, “She has a big scar on her cheek, a nose ring, and poor taste in clothing. Her eyes are too close together. She dyes her hair. She’s too skinny. Also, she’s not very smart.”

  “Benedict, don’t say things like that.”

  “But, Mom, you were the one who was insisting she was pretty. I was explaining why she isn’t.”

  My dad, who had been looking at the menu during the entire Penelope discussion, turned and said, loudly enough that I’m sure Penelope could hear him, “Benedict’s right. She’s not attractive.” I hated that my dad said this even though he was agreeing with me. Then he said, “What’s the name of the girl you showed me on your phone?”

  “Allison Wray.”

  My father added, “Allison is much better suited for you. This girl here is obviously from a broken home and will have certain developmental issues because of it.”

  “Samuel,” my mom said, with a look toward my father. She didn’t like when he said things like that out loud, even if he was right. I think Penelope could tell we were talking about her because she changed seats with her mom so that she faced away from us.

  Despite this, and despite my not finding her attractive and despite my father surely being correct about her, I could not help myself from looking toward Penelope for the entire meal.

  20

  Pen

  “Penelope, that handsome boy keeps looking at you,” my mom said.

  “He’s not handsom
e.” My crazy mom finding Benedict attractive only made me feel more freaky about my freaky fantasies.

  She said, “How do you know? You’re not looking at him.”

  “We go to high school together.”

  “He must be very popular with the girls.”

  “He’s a fucking dork, Mom.”

  “Penelope! Watch your language.”

  “He’s a dork. Okay? Like the biggest dork in school.”

  “Oh, I just don’t understand how that’s possible. He looks like a young Warren Beatty.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. But I think he likes you.”

  “He doesn’t. Trust me.”

  She said, “No boy looks toward a girl the way that boy is looking toward you unless he likes you.”

  And, shit, I had to turn. I don’t, I just don’t—WHY DO I HAVE TO LOOK?—but I did and my mom was right, he was blasting those gray eyeballs of his at me like he was some starving animal. That would make me his prey. Which is so dumb to think but it also turns me on because I am losing my mind.

  Benedict didn’t even look away when I looked at him. What kind of person doesn’t look away when someone looks at them? I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned away from him again. You know what else my mom was right about? And I would NEVER admit this to her or ANYONE, but, crap, the kid really was handsome. Like, let’s say I walked into the Wild Wolf dining room but I wasn’t from Riverbend, Illinois. Instead I was from Madison or somewhere. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had no idea what Benedict was like. Didn’t know he was such a social nightmare. A robot. The Tin Man. Like this was the first time I had ever seen the kid in my life. You know what I would think? He’s hot. That wavy hair. Those wide shoulders. Those stupid metal-gray eyes that don’t blink. Hot. Like objectively hot. Not like Paul is hot. No, Paul is hot because he knows how to dress, and he can get stubble, and he’s so, I don’t know, cool. But Benedict would be hot like … because he just looks like a guy who doesn’t know he’s hot, who doesn’t give a crap about dressing cool or being cool, or about anything other than just existing. Now, I know Benedict’s not that. I know he’s not. I know he probably should be on meds he’s so awkward. But if I didn’t know that, my mom would have been right. That he’s handsome and every girl at The Bend should be in love with him.