How (Not) to Find a Boyfriend

by Allyson Valentine

  Wait, what? It’s another mad scramble as people seek out their friends. Vanessa pairs up with Simone. Geoff pairs up with some girl I don’t know. I stand on my toes and peer around for Adam. Oh to be tall! Then I see him, over by the globe, talking with Highlights.

  “Adam!” someone calls his name. I spin around. It’s the girl who dropped her planner. “Partners?” she calls out.

  No! Say no! I beg silently as I try to push through to reach him.

  “No,” he says.

  I pull in a hopeful breath.

  “I’m already partners with him,” says Highlights.

  My hopeful breath rushes back out.

  Adam’s eyes find mine, then look away. He gives the globe an abrupt spin as a hand clamps down on my shoulder. I turn to see a tall, wafer-thin girl with kinky blond hair. “Partners?” she asks.

  Why not. I nod, too flustered to speak.

  Later, when school lets out, I’m coming out of the locker room bathroom when I see Highlights with her awesome hair pulled into a ponytail. She’s sitting on a bench lacing up a pair of cleats. I walk right up to her and strike a Wonder Woman stance, my hands planted on my hips. “That was pretty crappy of you.”

  She looks up from her laces. “What?”

  I check to see if the coast is clear and lower my voice. “You knew I liked him, but you sleazed right in and got him to be your partner!”

  “Excuse me? I ‘sleazed in’?”

  “You already have a boyfriend!”

  “Get over it, Nora. It’s not like I asked him to crawl under the teacher’s desk and have sex with me. I asked him to be my partner in the biography project. Like I told you, he’s really smart, and I want to get a good grade. And, you know, you could have asked him to be your partner, but as I recall, when Harrington told us to find partners, you were busy blabbing with your cheer buddies and watching Geoff make out with himself.”

  I open my mouth to say something, but words fail me.

  Highlights slips a shin pad into her sock. “So who did you wind up with?”

  “Jolene,” I spit.

  Highlights’s eyebrows arch. “You could have done a whole lot worse. Jolene is great. She’s a history freak, and she’s very laid-back—really easy to work with.”

  She stands, shoving me aside as she piles things into her locker and slams it shut.

  “If Jolene is so great to work with, then you work with her. Let’s do a swap—I get Adam, you get Jolene. It would really mean a lot to me. Please?”

  She raises her arms over her head, tugging first one wrist, then the other, watching me as she stretches. “Why should I?”

  I am embarrassed to find myself blurting one of Mom’s standard quotes, something said by Madeleine K. Albright, the first female secretary of state. “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.”

  Highlights purses her lips. The locker room is filling up with girls from the soccer team and the volleyball team, and it sounds like Becca and Jazmine are yodeling in the bathroom stalls. A couple of Highlights’s friends stop by. She tells them she’ll meet them on the field. She watches them walk away.

  “Okay, look. There’s something you could do for me,” she says, in a super-low voice. “Phil Fulbright is your brother, right?”

  It takes me a second to respond. “Yeah. How do you know Phil?”

  She smirks. “He was my counselor at math camp two summers ago. He’s about the smartest guy I’ve ever met.”

  “Yep—that’s my brother.”

  “He brought in a paper for us to read—the one he’d just won a mathematics scholarship with. Do you know it?”

  Phil’s paper, “The Improbable Probability of Using Mathematics to Solve Social Issues”—how could I forget it? My mother required that the entire family listen while Phil read it aloud—all forty-eight pages. I’m surprised she didn’t have the thing bronzed.

  Highlights motions for me to move in close. “I’m entering the contest this year. I’d love to get a copy of that paper. It’s not like I’d steal any of it—I mean my topic will be something totally different. I’m not into plagiarism, but I’d like to look at how he structured it, and what level of detail he covered.”

  Phil wouldn’t approve. Neither would Mom. And where would I find a copy of it, anyway?

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”

  She shrugs. “Oh, well. Have fun with Jolene.” She turns to leave.

  How uncool would it be to share one of Phil’s papers? What if I got caught? And even if I was willing to do this—where would I find it? How unfair that my brother, Mr. Computer-for-a-Brain, has something Highlights wants. Something I can’t get.

  Or can I? A lightbulb, halogen bright, goes off over my head.

  “Hang on!” I chase after her. Mr. Computer-for-a-Brain will almost certainly have a copy of the paper on the computer he willed to Joshie when he left for Harvard. He’d made Joshie cross his heart and swear not to use Phil’s AP English literature paper on the Brontë sisters to bump up his kindergarten GPA. But he never made me promise not to touch his work.

  “Okay. I think I can get it. But you swear you won’t copy anything?”

  She draws a cross over her heart, her finger tracing up to down, then left to right. “I swear.”

  I offer my hand. She shakes it. “You’re on.”

  She agrees to tell Adam that she’d forgotten she and Jolene had already agreed to work together.

  Now I’ve just got to find a way to get Chelsey to agree to a date with Swordhands.

  Hah! Of course! A second lightbulb glows beside the first one. There’s probably a whole lot more on Phil’s computer than just the mathematics paper.

  I find Chelsey in the gym, stretching, with one leg up the wall. She reaches for her ankle and presses her cheek to her thigh. Krista is over talking to a rabble of Cabbage Whites. She sees me and waves.

  “Got a second?” I ask Chelsey.

  She smiles. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I was thinking about your Hamlet paper.”

  Chelsey grunts. “Hamlet. I don’t know why they have us read plays that are six hundred years old. I’ll bet somebody has written another play since then.” She sighs. “Maybe Mr. Pawlosky will let me do an interpretive dance instead.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  She frowns. “It stinks. I need good grades to get into the University of Louisville. Do you know that they’ve won fifteen National Cheerleading Association championships?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “But Hamlet is going to mess me up,” she says. “It’s a tragedy.”

  I pick a thread off Chelsey’s tank top. “You know what? I might be able to help you out.”

  I tell her about Phil’s A+ Hamlet paper. She desperately wants to see it.

  “No problem,” I say. “But there’s something I need in exchange.” And I spin a story I hope Chelsey will buy. “You see, I’m having a hard time in one of my classes, too. If my GPA tanks, I’ll get kicked off cheer. Luckily there’s a guy who’ll help me get my grades up, but he’ll only do it if you’ll go out with him for a cup of coffee.”

  Chelsey shakes her head so fast that her ponytail whips around and slaps her cheeks. “No. I hate coffee.”

  “Well, you could have tea. Or juice or something. And how about this—I’ll also throw in the Tempest paper you’re going to need to write in the spring.”

  Chelsey groans. “Is that another Shakespeare thing?”

  “Yup.”

  Chelsey’s eyebrows knit together. She chews her thumbnail and thinks out loud. “There’s no way I’m going to risk losing you on the cheer squad. No way. My boyfriend wouldn’t really need to know about the date. I guess I could drink apple juice. And I do need help with the Hamlet paper.” She squints at the ceiling. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  We agree on the time and the location of the date with Swordhands. All my swaps are in place.

  Foresight? Check. />
  Circumspection? Okay, maybe a check minus.

  Caution? What could go wrong?

  Ten

  JOSHIE’S ROOM LOOKS LIKE it was decorated by a team composed of a first-grade boy, a college math professor and Charles Darwin. Lifelike prints of tropical birds and squirmy insects decorate the comforter draped on his twin-sized bed. Math gadgets, which he collects the way other kids collect seashells or Pokémon cards, cover his low dresser: a slide rule, a wooden abacus, and calculators of assorted shapes and sizes. The scrawly little-kid artwork on his walls features a smeary oil-pastel drawing of a cheerleader who looks much like I would had I been birthed by a pair of trolls. The little set of pom-poms I made for Joshie out of paper from Mom’s shredder dangle from a hook on the back of his door.

  I enter on tiptoes, listening to Joshie and Bill downstairs laughing hysterically. They’re spending Joshie’s precious one hour of screen time watching some wildly inappropriate animated show they can only see when Mom is out of the house because she cannot tolerate the “flagrant misogyny.” I need to work fast because once the show is over he’ll be looking for me. He’s desperately hoping, now that I have my license, that I’ll drive him to Chess Kings, a kids’ club that meets Monday nights at the library.

  Curse the stupid law that allows me to drive with relatives but not with relatively hot guys!

  But there is absolutely no way I’m going to drive him to Chess Kings. Especially because once we get to the library, I know he’ll insist that I stick around.

  I ease closed the door, settle into the little wooden chair at Joshie’s kid-sized desk and turn on Phil’s computer. Today’s math fact pops up on the screen. I click it closed and fire up Word. Moving the mouse, I nearly knock over the tank filled with dead leaves, rotting wood and bugs. Lots of bugs.

  It doesn’t take long to locate the files I’m looking for, because Phil’s computer files are as organized as he is. Once, I needed to borrow a pair of socks because all mine were in the wash. His were sorted by color, within color they were sorted by type, and within type they were sorted by fabric content. What fourteen-year-old boy knows the fabric content of his socks?

  I follow the directory path Senior_Year>English>First_Semester>Papers and send the Hamlet paper to the printer. The printer comes to life with a whir and spits out pages. Then I find and print the mathematics paper. I search through Joshie’s desk drawers for a marker and some Post-it notes. I write “Chelsey” on one Post-it and “Highlights” on the other. It’s tough work getting Joshie’s little frog stapler through the thickness of the pages. I slap the Post-its onto the reports just as the door opens with a slow creak. I spin around. Copernicus greets me with a yawn. I resume breathing and quickly put away the marker and the stapler, but of course, where there is Copernicus, there is Joshie.

  “What are you doing in my room?” Joshie points a corn dog at me menacingly.

  “Nothing. Just. That’s all. Nothing. I thought you were watching TV with Bill.”

  “Dad had to get dressed for aikido.” He squints at the bug tank. “Were you playing with my insects?”

  “No! I just needed to borrow your printer. Mine is out of ink.” I gather the papers into a pile and get up to leave.

  “How come you’re printing some of Phil’s stuff?” Joshie asks.

  I stare at Joshie, then at the papers in my hand. How could he possibly know these are Phil’s?

  “‘The Improbable Probability of Using Mathematics to Solve Social Issues’ by Phil Fulbright,” Joshie reads, and I follow his outstretched corn dog to the computer screen.

  Crap on a stick!

  “Oh. That. I’m just using some of his old papers to get ideas for something I need to write for school this semester.”

  Joshie tilts his head. “Chelsey,” he says, reading the Post-it note fixed to the pages in my hand.

  “Stop that!” I hug the papers to my chest.

  “Chelsey is one of the cheerleaders,” he says. “I read it on her megaphone.”

  God! He’s like a little Sherlock Holmes!

  “Phil said I would get in big trouble if I tried to hand in one of his papers,” says Joshie.

  “He was teasing. And besides, I’m not handing these in.” Which is the truth, right? “It’s fine, Joshie.”

  Joshie strokes an imaginary mustache. “Would Mom think it was fine?”

  I don’t like where this is going. Beneath that innocent-little-kid demeanor an evil genius is at work. I hesitate. “Mom isn’t going to know.”

  Joshie shifts into a sitting position. He takes a bite of his corn dog. “If you take me to Chess Kings tonight, I won’t tell Mom.”

  “I don’t want to go to Chess Kings. I have a ton of homework. Why can’t Mom take you?”

  “Mom has to grade papers. And Dad has aikido.”

  I cannot believe I am being blackmailed by an almost-seven-year-old. I run through my options.

  Option A: Joshie tells Mom, Mom wants to know why I was printing off Phil’s papers, and the swaps with Highlights, Chelsey and Swordhands are off.

  Option B: Suffer Chess Kings with Joshie.

  I try Option C: “How about a trip to Molly Moon’s for a hot fudge sundae?”

  “Chess.”

  “How about a trip to the butterfly exhibit at the Pacific Science Center? We could go Saturday after my game.”

  We both turn toward the window at the sound of a car entering the driveway. Joshie hops off the bed. “I’m going to go say hi to Mom.”

  I slap the printouts onto the bed, making Copernicus jump. “Okay! Okay! Chess. Fine. But I’ll bring a book and hang out in the corner. I am not going to sit there and play chess with a bunch of little kids.”

  Joshie grins. He holds out the corn dog for Copernicus to take a bite. “You’ll like Chess Kings, Nora.”

  No, I won’t.

  Bill takes off for aikido. Mom, Joshie and I eat Thai food left over from a faculty luncheon in the Women’s Studies department today. Mom squeezes a lime wedge into her glass of water and laments the fate of Cherise, the coworker who’s leaving to have a baby, and in whose honor we’re eating desiccated spring rolls and gluey clumps of pad thai, a food that does not age well. “So that’s it,” she says, a resigned look on her face. “Cherise has decided that she wants to just stay at home after she has the baby and become a full-time mommy.”

  By her tone you would think Cherise was staying at home to print counterfeit money, or start a drug cartel. I can’t help offering an opinion. “It’s her choice, Mom. You need to respect that. And besides, she’ll probably come back in a few years after she figures out that hanging out with little kids isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” I shoot Joshie a look. He grins and dips a spring roll in his milk.

  Mom jabs her empty fork in our general direction. “I’ll tell you this. Cherise is a very bright woman and this stay-at-home-mommy game is one with which she will soon become bored.”

  Joshie scores huge points for a nicely crafted and well-timed interruption. “Speaking of board games, Nora and me are going to Chess Kings at the library.”

  “Nora and I,” says Mom. She plucks a wilted bean sprout out of her noodles but stops before it reaches her mouth. “Really? Nora is going with you to play chess? That’s a little surprising.”

  “I’m not going to play,” I explain. “Joshie was desperate to go, and he says he can’t go without a grown-up, so in the end I offered to take him.”

  “Nora says chess is for nerds.” Joshie spears a piece of chicken with his fork.

  “Don’t listen to Nora.”

  “Yeah, don’t listen to me. In fact, you won’t even need to talk to me, because I’ll be in the back of the room doing my homework.”

  “Nora has a paper to write,” says Joshie. I kick his shin.

  “A paper?”

  I jump up and clear my plate. “Yup. You know how it goes. School. Papers. So, Joshie, we’d better get going. God knows we don’t want to miss a thing.”
/>   Joshie sets his plate on the floor for Copernicus to clean, and we’re off.

  We arrive at the library about ten minutes before chess club is supposed to start. I wear a baseball cap with my hair tucked beneath to make myself less recognizable, just in case the library is crawling with high school students. Okay, so maybe not all chess players are nerds. Look at Adam. But there is definitely that general association. I think back to how Chelsey recoiled at the notion of a cheerleader joining chess club.

  We wander back to the community room with bright orange walls, yellow chairs and lime-green tables. I enter slowly, ready to run if I spot anyone I know.

  “Oh yeah, Nora Fulbright? Sure, I know her. Isn’t she the one that hangs out at Chess Kings on Monday nights?”

  Nora Fulbright. Nerd Cheerleader. Give me an L! Give me an O! Give me an S-E-R!

  In the Chess Kings meeting room, the small, square tables are covered with mats printed to look like chessboards. Chunky black and white plastic chess pieces are piled onto the chessboards. The room is packed with kids. A big guy with his back to us is hunched over a table. Based on the gaggle of kids watching him move pieces around the board, I suspect he’s the guy running the show. Where are all the parents?

  “You told me you couldn’t come here without a grown-up,” I growl at Joshie.

  “I forgot,” says Joshie. “But isn’t it good that you get to learn chess, too?”

  He is exasperating! I do the math. By the time I drive home, then come pick him up, I might as well just stay here and get homework done.

  I spot a Costco-sized tub of licorice on the counter. “Go grab me a piece of licorice and then watch what’s happening at that table. I’ll be right over in the corner, reading.”

  Joshie tightens his grip on my hand. “I don’t know anyone.”

  For crying out loud. I’m seven chapters behind in history. Four chapters behind in biology. I have six sets of math problems to make up. “Look, it’s almost seven o’clock. I’ll stay with you until things officially start, then you’re on your own.”

  A couple more kids file into the room. We’re raiding the licorice jar when I hear a familiar voice over by the door. I tug the brim of my hat down low.