Geek Charming (5 page)

As I made my way across the cafeteria again, I had to admit to myself that maybe I was just the
slightest
bit nervous. Even though I had just given the guys that rousing pep talk about how this could be the very thing that changed our lives, the truth is I’m not big on being the center of attention, which is what tends to happen when kids have the nerve to venture out of their normal cafeteria seating areas. At work or in the Film Society or the Russian Club, I’m fine—in fact, if there were an alternate universe made up entirely of geeks at Castle Heights, there’d be a good chance I’d win Most Popular—but when I’m around normal people I tend to go one of two ways: I either clam up completely or I can’t stop talking. Neither is all that attractive.

As I stood in front of The Ramp, I craned my neck to watch as Dylan held court over Hannah Mornell, Lola Leighton, and a bunch of other popular girls. From the way she was stabbing her fork in the air, I could see she was up in arms about something. Was that girl ever not in diva mode? Probably had to do with one of her credit cards being mistakenly declined or something like that.

Knowing it was important to let the talent know who was in charge ASAP (i.e., me), I cleared my throat. “Dylan?” I squeaked. I had been hoping for something a little more booming and authoritative.

“Take two,” I murmured. “Hi, Dylan?” I said a little louder, netting me some astonished looks from the table of not-Ramp-worthy-but-semipopular girls to my right. I felt like Romeo calling up to Juliet, but instead of a ruffled shirt and tights, I was wearing Converse high-tops and an
Apocalypse Now
T-shirt.

Still oblivious, Dylan was now passing her bag—the one that I had saved from drowning—around the table for everyone to examine. “Arturo said that if I had gotten it out of the water two minutes earlier,” she was saying, “he could’ve gotten it so that it looked new again rather than only as good as new, but that guy who got it out for me was just
so
slow!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I risk my life by going into unchlorinated water and
this
was the thanks I get—being given a wrong number and called “slow”?! Who did Dylan Schoenfield think she was? The princess of Castle Heights High or something?

“Okay, just calm down,” I murmured to myself as I reached into my pocket for my inhaler. “Calm down and
focus
.” After a quick prayer to my spiritual directors (Woody, Quentin, Martin), I began my slow ascent up The Ramp.

You know those dreams where you look down and realize you’re buck naked? Yeah, well, that’s how I felt. Once everyone on The Ramp realized that someone Uncool had entered a Cool Zone, all conversations ground to a halt. And it didn’t help things when I tripped on my untied sneaker lace and my arm landed in Debra Resnicoff’s burger and fries.

“Hey, isn’t that that geek guy from the fountain?” I heard Lola say.

“Where?” Dylan asked.

“Right there. Wiping ketchup off his arm.”

“Omigod. It is,” Dylan replied.

As I turned to look at them, I saw Dylan quickly bury her head in a magazine.

I walked over and stood in front of her. “Hi, Dylan,” I said.

She looked up from the magazine. “Oh,
hey
, James,” she said, trying to sound surprised but doing a horrible job. “How
are
you?!” It was a good thing this was a documentary and not a regular movie because the girl couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.

“It’s Josh,” I corrected. “And I’m okay,” I replied, wiping the last bit of ketchup off my elbow with my finger. Not seeing a napkin anywhere, I stuck it in my mouth.

“Eww,” Dylan said. “that’s
disgusting
.”

From the looks on the other girls’ faces, it seemed they felt the same way. My face was so hot I felt like half of it had melted down my neck, which I’m sure was due to the high altitude of The Ramp rather than nerves or anything like that. “So, uh, it seems that when you wrote your number down the other day, you messed up on a few numbers or something.” I had decided that the best way to approach this was by not accusing her of being a jerk.

“I did? Huh. How weird,” she said as Lola and Hannah started giggling.

“Yeah,” I replied. I could feel myself starting to sweat. Definitely the altitude. “Honest mistake, I’m sure. Anyway, even though I then tried every configuration of the numbers that I could come up with, I couldn’t get you.”

“Okay, listen,” Dylan said. “I talked it over with my friends and my boyfriend this weekend—you
do
know I’ve been going out with Asher Ellis since sophomore year, right?”

I nodded.

“And I don’t think the documentary thing is a good idea, so I’m not going to do it.”

“What?! Why not?” I tried not to panic, but my voice came out sounding like I was on helium.

“Well, frankly,
I
don’t have a problem with it because, you know, everyone’s always saying I’m super photogenic and even if the camera puts fifteen pounds on me I’ll still look okay, but other people”—she looked at Lola—“are worried that because you’re not in the same crowd as us—”

“Try
no
crowd,” interjected Lola.

“—you may be using this as an opportunity to get back at those of us who are cool,” Dylan continued. “Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, kind of like that stupid movie from the eighties that’s always on cable—” Lola said.

“
Revenge of the Nerds
,” Hannah finished.

I couldn’t believe this—I knew Dylan was stuck-up, but I hadn’t realized anyone could be so cruel. Did she not know what it felt like to have a dream? And did she not realize that at this very moment she was in the midst of squashing mine underneath her shoe?

“Excuse me for one second, please,” I said as I marched to the corner of The Ramp and took out my inhaler. “Stay calm,” I said to myself as I breathed in. All great films hit road bumps on their way to getting made. There was no reason to get worried.

I marched back. “It’s not my intention to make you look bad,” I assured her. “Like all the best documentaries, it’s going to be really fair and balanced—I swear,” I promised. Great. Now I would have to work extra hard to make sure it was fair and balanced.

“Yeah, well, I still don’t think it’s a good idea. But thanks for asking,” she said as she picked up the magazine again and started flipping through it.

Okay, so maybe there
was
a reason to worry. “But . . . you promised,” I said. I could feel the back of my neck start to itch, which often happened when things didn’t go the way I had written them in the imaginary movie that was continuously playing in my head. According to WebMD, that was one of the main symptoms of seborrheic keratosis, which was a thickening of the skin from age. I really hoped it wasn’t that.

“Well, now I’m un-promising.” She shrugged without looking up.

“But . . . you can’t,” I said.

She looked up. “Oh, really? Why?” she asked, her eyes blazing. Dylan was
not
someone who was used to being told what she could and couldn’t do.

I thought about it. “Well . . . because.” Apparently my A’s in English for having such a way with words didn’t translate into conversations with popular people.

“I think we should ask Asher about this,” she said. “Asher!” she yelled to the table of surfer-looking dudes next to her.

I reminded myself to keep breathing. While Asher and I were probably around the same weight, he’s about five inches taller than me. He’s got that typical L.A. surfer-dude look—blond hair that’s on the longish side and a year-round tan. Either he was hard of hearing, or he was ignoring her.

“Asher!” she yelled again.

“What?” he finally said.

“Come here for a second,” she ordered.

“Why?”

“Because I need to ask you something, babe.”

My neck was now itching
bad.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. “But what about my USC application?” I panicked. “I already sent it off with a proposal for the documentary.”

“Maybe you could just do a documentary about the uncool kids,” suggested Hannah helpfully.

“Or better yet,” said Dylan, “why don’t you do a documentary about my archenemy? You could call it
Girls Who Try and Steal Other Girls’ Boyfriends
?” She picked up her fork and jabbed it toward the middle of the cafeteria. “I’m sure
some
people would just
love
the attention.”

I looked over to see what Dylan was scowling at, and it suddenly became even more difficult for me to breathe. Walking—no,
swaying
—across the cafeteria floor was Amy Loubalu. As she walked toward her table with her hamburger (I loved a girl who wasn’t afraid to eat meat), every guy on The Ramp stared. Including Asher. You’d think that the beautiful/nice combination would have earned Amy a prime seat on The Ramp, but the truth was she didn’t have a lot of friends. I didn’t meet her until high school, but I heard that she had been one of the most popular girls at Curtis, the junior high she went to. At the start of sophomore year a rumor started going around that Amy was dating a twenty-five-year-old talent agent, which I found hard to believe, and by that summer, her reputation had made it so that her only real friend was Whitney Lewin.

By now Asher had finished watching the Amy Loubalu show and was standing over Dylan’s shoulder, picking the tomatoes out of her barely touched salad. “What is it?” he asked, annoyed.

“This is the guy who wants to do a movie based on my life,” Dylan replied.

Oh, please. That movie had already been done. It was called
Clueless
.

“It’s a documentary. About popularity,” I explained.

“Sounds cool.” He shrugged as he started to walk back to his table.

“He’s got a lot on his mind,” said Dylan.

If I were him, I’d be trying to figure out how to break up with her.

“Listen,” she said. “I just don’t feel comfortable doing this.”

“But—” I began.

“But what?” she snapped.

Here was my chance to stand up for myself. To give the speech the hero in a movie gives where at the end of it there’s applause because he’s touched everyone’s souls, changed their lives, and made them look at life in a different way.

“Nothing,” I said, starting toward the stairs.

“But I’ll be back,” I whispered. Somehow it didn’t have the same impact as when Arnold said it in
The Terminator.

As I walked back down The Ramp, I tried to hold my head high but it was difficult. It was one thing to wimp out around Amy Loubalu, but it was another to watch my dream of becoming the most acclaimed director of my generation go up in smoke because Dylan Schoenfield had no sense of right or wrong.

chapter three:
dylan

Random Fact number 210 you should know about me: unless they come in shopping bags that say Fred Segal or Kitson, I’m not big on surprises. In fact, it’s more like the opposite: I prefer routine. For instance, if I open the fridge and see a bunch of Weight Watchers strawberry-banana and key-lime nonfat yogurts rolling around instead of a nice, even row of vanillas (my breakfast every morning for the last two years), I start to get a little anxious.

So you can imagine how I felt when I got home on Friday at 5:30—after stopping at Fred Segal for a quick jog-through to start scoping out possible dresses for the Fall Fling formal in November (six weeks away, but it’s never too early to start preparing)—and Daddy’s car was in the circular driveway of our Spanish-style house. This was so not part of the routine I was used to. Daddy’s a workaholic and never leaves the office before 8:30, even on Christmas Eve. What was even more weird was that parked right behind his black Jaguar was a beat-up old blue Volvo that not only looked like it hadn’t been through a car wash in years, but had a
Neil Diamond
bumper sticker on it. In case you don’t know who Neil Diamond is—not that you could be blamed seeing that he’s super old and was popular way back in the
seventies
—he’s this dorky singer who, from the pictures of him on Daddy’s CDs, is obsessed with sequins and rhinestones.

Parking my red BMW behind the Volvo, I made my way toward the house.
“Hola,
José!” I sang. He’s our gardener, who’s married to Marta, our housekeeper.

He looked up from where he was pruning some roses. “
Hola
, Miss Dylan,” he yelled back. Our house is on an acre of land—huge for L.A. standards—so José’s a very busy guy.

I felt very lucky that I was exposed to so many different cultures living in L.A. Between José and Marta, who were from El Salvador, Kathy, my Vietnamese manicurist, and Zora, the Bulgarian woman who waxed my eyebrows, I was one of the most well-rounded people I knew.

“Daddy?” I yelled as I stashed my Fred Segal bags in the front hall closet. I must have this disease that makes it impossible for me to walk out of a store without buying at least a T-shirt.

“We’re in the family room,” he yelled back.

I figured the other half of “we” had to be whoever the Neil Diamond-loving person was. Maybe one of Daddy’s fraternity brothers from Northwestern back in the day who now worked for Greenpeace or one of those other annoying organizations that stalked poor innocent people like myself when all we wanted was to get some frozen yogurt at Pinkberry. Those people
always
drove beat-up Volvos.

As I walked into the room, I stopped short. I
wish
it had been a friend of Daddy’s. It wasn’t—it was none other than that Geek Boy James or Joe or Josh or whatever his name was. The one who got my purse out of the fountain the week before and thought I owed him my firstborn child because of it. I couldn’t believe it—I had already told him I wasn’t interested in doing his dumb movie. What part of
no
did he not understand? Talk about not letting something go.

I thought I was going to throw up. Not just because Geek Boy was in my house, but because he and Daddy were sitting on the black suede couch watching a baseball game surrounded by corned-beef and pastrami sandwiches, pickles, knishes, and black-and-white cookies from Nate ’n Al’s, my most favorite delicatessen back before I gave up carbs my freshman year.