The Loser's Guide to Life and Love (5 page)

“Great,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Gay'be'!”
he says—whatever that means.

As Worf and his posse walk away, Quark reluctantly picks up his pile of fifteen DVDs, and smiles one last time at Scout as he walks toward the exit.

“Yes, well,” he says, still smiling over his shoulder
at Scout. “Thanks again.”

“My pleasure.” Scout beams back.

BAM!
Quark misses the door by a mile and plows straight into the plate-glass window. He hits it with such force that the DVDs fly out of his arms like a flock of birds.

I burst out laughing. Meanwhile, Quark stoops over to pick up the DVDs and manages to bang his head into the window again.

Scout glowers at me and then scrambles to Quark's side to lend a helping hand. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Jeez, Quark,” I say. “Since when did you start using your melon as a wrecking ball?”

Quark chooses to ignore this.

“Thank you so much,” he says instead to Scout, as she piles DVDs into his waiting arms. “May I also compliment you on having such beautiful windows. They are the cleanest, most beautiful windows I have ever seen in a business establishment. I mean that sincerely.”

As this point, I am nearly DEAD with sympathetic embarrassment for Quark.

What's sympathetic embarrassment? you ask. You know how some husbands start suffering from morning sickness when their wives get pregnant? That's called sympathetic pregnancy. Well, sympathetic embarrassment is when you start feeling the extreme social pain someone else SHOULD be feeling for himself because
he's done something stupid. Such as crashing into a plate-glass window twice, for example.

“McIff!” Ali barks.

I am, as always, all ears when it comes to Ali.

“Help your boy out to his car.”

I sketch Ali a quick salute and do as I am bid.

“What is with you?” I ask Quark as we walk back through the parking lot.

His mouth is pressed into a thin line. He doesn't answer.

“You look like you just swallowed your lips, Quark,” I point out.

He still doesn't say anything—just unlocks his trunk and dumps all those great screwball comedies (from the 1930s) inside.

“Hey! Careful with the merchandise there, pal!” I warn.

Quark slams the trunk shut.

“Screwball comedies?” I say. “What was that all about? If I didn't know you better, I'd say you had a thing for Scout! Ha! Ha! You and Scout!”

Quark bends over to get into my face. His cheeks are blotchy and his nose is red, besides which it is starting to swell.

“Shut up, Ed,” he says. “Just shut the bloody hell up. And by the way, you can find your own damn ride home!”

Shaken, I walk back into Reel Life.

“Is Quark okay?” Scout asks.

“I honestly don't know,” I say.

Scout chews on her lower lip thoughtfully as she stares out at the parking lot. “He's a good guy, isn't he.”

“He is,” I say, “although I'm sorry if he bugged you, Scout. Neither Quark nor I get out much, which makes us both act like dorks when we're in public.”

“Relax.” Scout laughs. “He didn't annoy me at all. In fact, I enjoyed talking to him.”

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Here's the thing. Quark
is
strange. There's just no getting around that fact. And I
do
give him a pretty bad time because that's the only way I have of keeping his Mr. Wizard weirdness from making me crazy. Still, underneath the goofiness, Quark is a truly decent person. One of the best. And I would have felt really, really bad if Scout, without knowing what a good guy he is, had turned Quark into a joke behind his back.

 

I'm just getting ready to go on my ten p.m. break when Ellie walks through the door, looking as fresh as flowers.

Well, maybe not flowers. That's the kind of clichéd and stale comparison that English teachers like to humiliate their students for making. But Ellie does look fresh. And beautiful, too, with straight and shining hair falling long down her back.

Suddenly I can see the two of us in a movie together.

Quickly I touch my hair. I'm sure you'll be relieved to learn it's still there.

“
Alô
, Ellie,” I say with a big Brazilian smile. “
Como vai?
”

I can't believe it. Her blue eyes actually a) brighten and b) widen with delighted surprise. For the record, this is the sort of reaction that Ed never gets.

“Sergio! I was hoping you'd be here tonight!” Ellie glances around until she spies Scout. “Hey, Scout!” Ellie calls over the heads of customers while waving enthusiastically.

Scout, who looks like she's just swallowed a large dish of stewed prunes, returns Ellie's greeting with the sort of small, stiff wave favored by members of the British royal family.

“Isn't she the best?” Ellie asks, turning her blue gaze on me again.

“The best,” I agree. Then dropping my voice, I add, “And so are you.”

Ellie (who turns an attractive shade of shell pink) smiles shyly at me.

Okay. I can feel it. I am totally losing my head.

“Say something in Portuguese for me, Sergio,” Ellie says.

I start counting, rolling my r's like crazy so that they sound just like big, wild waves crashing over movie stars making out on the beach.

Ellie's smile broadens. “What are you saying, Sergio? It sounds so…romantic. Is it?”

“Yes,” I say. “It's a love poem about—”

“Numbers,” says Scout as she walks up behind me. “Brazilians love doing math so much, they write romantic poems about numbers. Isn't that right,
Sergio?
”

I feel like a balloon after the air has just whooshed out of it. “
Sim
,” I say. “That is very true. My people love math. We cannot help ourselves.”

Ellie looks totally confused but manages to rally. “Oh. That's really interesting. I love learning interesting things about other cultures. Don't you, Scout?”

“Sim,”
says Scout, glaring at me.

Just then Ali whistles for me like he's Captain von Trapp and I am one of his sissy sons in a sailor suit.

“Sir!”

“Go on break,” he orders. “Scout, baby, I need you over here.”

“Gotta run,” says Scout.
“Adeus.”

“Do you want to go on break with me?” I ask Ellie. Full of smiles for Sergio, she nods.

 

I buy Ellie and me some Snelgrove's ice cream at Squirrel Brothers next door. She orders burnt almond fudge in a waffle cone, which happens to be Scout's favorite too. Together we sit at a café table outside and stare at the sky.

“There sure are a lot of stars out tonight,” she says. “I've noticed that you don't usually see this many here because of all the city lights. At home there are stars to spare.”

Did I just hear a touch of loneliness in her voice?

“Do you miss home?” I ask.

She looks at me and smiles brightly. “No.”

I look at her, not sure if she's telling me the truth.

“What about you, Sergio?” Ellie asks. “Do you miss Brazil?”

I squirm a little. “I don't remember that much about it, to tell you the truth.”

She looks disappointed, and the very last thing I want to do right now is disappoint this girl.

“I do, however, remember the rain forests that shelter a rich and varied bird population,” I say.

“Oh, I love birds! I love the music they make!” Ellie says. “Tell me about the birds, Sergio.”

I look at the sky above. “See all those stars up there?
Well, in Brazil there are as many birds as there are stars.”

“Birds like stars,” Ellie breathes.

“Yes, only they're all different colors. Green and pink and peacock blue with tail feathers that stream out behind them so that they look like—” I draw a blank.

“Like
shooting
stars.” Ellie finishes my simile for me.

“Exactly! Like shooting stars.”

“Imagine,” she whispers. “Birds like singing shooting stars.”

And here's the thing. I really can imagine it just the way I said it—bright jungle skies filled with birds swirling around and around like shooting stars, green and pink and peacock blue.

Ellie and I look straight into each other's eyes. We don't say words.

We don't need to.

He was counting.
Counting
, if you please. With a
stupid
grin on his face. Pretending that he was doing something very sophisticated, very romantic—such as reciting poetry.

Not just poetry. Love-with-a-capital-L poetry.

So here's my question. Will any boy ever be remotely tempted to recite love poetry to me? Or will I always be treated just like “one of the guys”?

A girl like Ellie, on the other hand, with her blond hair and velvety skin, inspires love poetry even when it isn't actually love poetry. Even when it's just ordinal numbers in Portuguese recited over the checkout desk at a movie rental store.

Things are always different for girls like Ellie. Girls
like Ellie never sit in their rooms late at night reading romances on the sly. They get to live romances.

I want to hate Ellie. Really and truly I do. With all my heart. In fact, I want to make hating Ellie my latest hobby. That way whenever I have to list my hobbies on a resume, I can put “creative writing, playing soccer, watching screwball comedies, and hating Ellie” in the space provided below. I can raise hating Ellie to the level of high art. I can be the founder and president of the Ellie Un-Fan Club populated by average-looking girls like me. We can get together on a monthly basis and think of mean things to do to Ellie's shining, perfect hair when she's asleep.

Only I don't hate Ellie. Not at all.

How could I? I'm on her radar screen even though she's gorgeous and I'm not. She walks into Reel Life and immediately acknowledges me even before she says hello to Ed/Sergio. The truth is she's nice.

Besides, I don't think it's in my nature to hate people, even when they deserve to be hated. I can even give you a specific example.

Last year my grandfather, who is a very prominent bone doctor and former church leader here in Salt Lake City, got his twenty-three-year-old nurse pregnant.

Oh! Oops!

Being an honorable man, he thought it only right to divorce his wife of forty years (my grandmother) and
marry the nurse (my stepgrandmother—she's the one with dollar signs in her eyes) so that the poor baby (my half aunt) would have a first name (Samantha) and a last name (Arrington).

Of course everybody in the entire extended family has stopped speaking to him. Hating Grandpa has become a family obligation. We've begun having family reunions just so we can all get together and play horseshoes and volleyball while hating our grandfather the Adulterer.

And I do hate what he did. I hate it with all my heart. How can a supposedly smart person give up so much for sex, and then pretend to himself and everyone else afterward that it wasn't really about the sex?

Only as it turns out I don't hate him.

I can't forget how he took me fishing on the Provo River when I was a little girl and how he taught me stupid songs about burping. I can't forget how he played card games with me when all the other grown-ups were too busy talking and how HE was the one who could always get splinters out of my bare feet and gum out of my hair without hurting me.

And I won't forget how he still comes to my soccer games, even though he has to sit in different bleachers from the rest of my family.

Love.

Who needs it?

Birds like stars.

I'm just lying here in bed, thinking about how amazing it is that I actually said something like that to a beautiful girl without sounding pathetic. But then I guess Ed didn't really say those words. Sergio did.

Man, I just love being Sergio.

I look out the window by my bed one more time before rolling over to go to sleep. Birds like stars. Even the moon reminds me of a bird tonight. A fat white swan, paddling slowly across a murky lake of sky, silent and full of secrets.