Geek Charming (23 page)

Mimi wasn’t big on working hard, so I didn’t have to ask her twice. “Ahh . . . that feels good,” she said as she plopped down next to me in the booth. “My bunions are killing me.”

“Now, Josh, I want you to pretend that Mimi here is your crush and I want you to have a conversation with her.”

“Awww—I like that. No one’s had a crush on me in a long time,” Mimi said.

Maybe it was the wart on the right side of her nose, or the fact that up close, her white beehive had a bluish tint to it, but Josh looked like he had just swallowed an undercooked fry.

“Go on,” I said. “You’re an artist—you’re supposed to have a good imagination.”

“I’m not sure what the point of this is,” he replied.

That was the thing about guys—they always had to be able to see the point of something. It drove me nuts. “The
point
is that this way I’ll be able to coach you.”

“I’m assuming that you’re not going to let Mimi get back to work until I agree to do this.” He sighed.

“That’s okay—I got time. It’s almost time for my break anyway,” said Mimi, who I could have sworn had just come
back
from her break since she reeked of cigarette smoke.

“Just give it a try,” I said, shaking my phone in case something was wrong with the vibrating thingie that was preventing me from getting any texts.

Josh sat up straight in his seat. “Hi, Mimi,” he mumbled.

“Okay, Rule number 432:
no mumbling
,” I said. “You want to project
confidence
when you talk to a girl—like you have no doubt that she’s been waiting her entire life to be asked out by you. Plus, you don’t want her to think you’re doing it just so she’ll lean forward so you can look down her shirt. Oh, and try to throw in a compliment right away if you can.”

“Hi, Mimi,” he said loudly, as if he were the worst actor on earth. “You look very nice today. I like that pig brooch you’re wearing. The rhinestones make it very elegant.”

Mimi and I looked at each other. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, kid,” she said.

“Tell me about it.” I sighed.

As the manager walked by, he gave Mimi a dirty look. “I think I gotta get back to work,” she muttered.

“Thanks for your help,” I replied as she walked away. I turned to Josh. “Okay, Rule number 512: assume that the person you’re talking to isn’t hard of hearing and that English is their first language. Just try to be
natural
.” Maybe
I
should become a director. Or better yet, maybe I could become a makeover/dating coach and write a best-selling book and end up on
Oprah
and then teach a course at the Learning Annex. Forget just focusing on Castle Heights—geeks all over the world should be given the opportunity to take advantage of my knowledge!

“Okay, okay, natural, be natural. I can do that,” he said as he sat up straighter. He was close to hopeless with this stuff, but the way he was trying was really sweet. Geeky, but sweet.

To help him out, I gave him a big smile, the kind I usually reserved for the rare occasions when Asher and I were hanging out alone.

“You have a really great smile,” he said quietly, responding with one of his own.

I could feel my face getting warm. I hadn’t realized that when Josh looked at someone, he really
looked
at someone. Asher, on the other hand, was usually looking at his phone or the television when he looked at me. “Thanks,” I said. “Dr. Fleischman, my orthodontist, was voted Best Orthodontist three years in a row by
Los Angeles
magazine.”

“How was that?” he said.

“Huh?”

“The compliment. It didn’t come off too smarmy, did it?” he asked, a worried look on his face.

I felt like someone had dumped a glass of ice water on me. So he had been
acting
. Of course. I knew that. “Oh. No. It was good,” I said. “Very believable-sounding.”

“Cool,” he said, relieved. “So what do I do after that?”

I sat up straight and fluffed my hair. “Well, then you just . . . keep being natural. Be yourself.”

“That’s it?
That’s
the secret to talking to girls? Just act natural and be myself?” he asked doubtfully.

“Well, yeah.” I shrugged. “But be your
real
self—the self you are when we’re hanging out and you’re talking about Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantula—”

“Tarantino,” he corrected.

“Whatever. Him. Be
that
guy—the guy who, even though he’s really nice, also knows that he deserves to take up space on the planet just as much as the next person.” By this time he had taken out a pad and pen was taking notes. “And—”

“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.