by Nina Beck
This Girl Isn’t Shy, She’s Spectacular
Nina Beck
For Eric, Michael, Ted, and Chris, who make and keep me sane.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Letters
THE GIRL WITHOUT A PERSONALITY
THE BOY WITHOUT A PLAN
#1 TRY TO CHANGE
D TRIES TO CHANGE TOO, BUT KEEPS THE SAME HAIRCUT
#2 STAY OUT ALL NIGHT
D TRIES TO STAY IN ALL NIGHT
#3 DO SOMETHING THAT IS DEFINITELY A BAD IDEA
D DECIDES SOME THINGS ARE JUST BAD IDEAS, AND GOES HOME EARLY
#4 GO WITH THE FLOW
#5 STAY AWAY FROM DRAMA
#6 MAKE NEW FRIENDS
D TRIES TO FIGURE OUT WHICH FRIENDS HE COULD LOSE
#7 ASK A BOY OUT
D CHANGES HIS MIND AND TRIES TO ASK SAMANTHA OUT
SAMANTHA LETS OTHERS FIND HER A DATE (SINCE SHE OBVIOUSLY CAN’T GET HER OWN) (GOOD WORK, D)
D BECOMES A STALKER. THIS IS NEW FOR HIM
#8 LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH THINGS IN A MORE PRODUCTIVE MANNER
SAM GETS MORE DATES THAN D CAN HANDLE
SAMANTHA TRIES TO GET BUSY
D TRIES TO KEEP SAM FROM GETTING BUSY
#9 LEARN TO SPEAK AN EXOTIC NEW LANGUAGE AND VISIT AN EXOTIC NEW PLACE
D LEARNS THAT HE DOESN’T LIKE LATIN EITHER
ONE TOO MANY
D LEARNS THE SUBTLE ART OF LICKING HIS WOUNDS
#10 LOCK LIPS WITH SOMEONE SPECIAL
D…
#11 FIND SOMETHING TO DREAM ABOUT
D IS AFRAID OF SUCKING
#12 FALL IN LOVE
D RESOLVES TO FALL IN LUST, OR DEEP-LIKE, OR HAVE A CRUSH (ON SOMEONE NOT DUMB) (AND NOT DRUNK)
#13 DRESS FOR SUCCESS
D AVOIDS DRAMA
#14 GO TO A SCHOOL DANCE
D ATTENDS MORE SCHOOL-SANCTIONED FUNCTIONS
#15 FIND THE RIGHT GUY
Author Note
Also by Nina Beck
Copyright
THE GIRL WITHOUT A PERSONALITY
The first three years of high school at the all-girls New Horizons had made it easy for Samantha Owens to be perfect.
The classes were interesting enough, but the best part was that there was absolutely nothing there to distract Sam from her perfect grades, her perfect behavior, and her perfect attendance record. That is, until a girl named Riley Swain showed up and made Sam feel like there was so much she was missing by trying to be “perfect.” So, when Sam had received this rejection letter…where her idol told her that her story lacked passion and that she should try writing from experience (ugh! She did…her sample could have been an autobiography!), she didn’t lose hope. She would get into the program, she would write a new sample, an even better sample…and she would stop trying to be perfect—it didn’t serve her nearly as well as she had hoped it would.
So, Sam had called her parents and told them she wanted to come home—and they were so excited, they picked her up the next weekend. New Horizons was a school with a specialized program for teens who were overweight or had eating disorders, but Samantha had never been either since freshman year. Her mother called it “baby fat” and often asked Sam if she wanted to come home, but by then Sam didn’t want to leave the friends she’d made at NH. Nor, if she were to be honest, did she want to give up the safety of the school she had become used to.
Now that she realized that safety = boring, she wanted to hit her head against the white wooden desk she sat at in her old bedroom in New York City. Instead she pulled out her notebook and began creating a list. She had tacked the rejection letter from the writing program to the wall above her desk. Sam chewed on the cap of her pen while she studied the signature of her (once) idol, Pete Bryant.
She shook her head sharply and then bent over her note-book and wrote, in her perfect scrawl, Things I Have Not Done.
Sam heard a knock at her door and she quickly tore the list out of her notebook, folded it in quarters, and stuck it in her back pocket while calling to either one of her parents to come in.
Sam’s mother peeked her head in around the door. “Can I come in?”
“Absolutely,” Sam said, turning around in her chair as her mother walked into her room. Sam’s mother was beautiful; she had red hair like Sam, but her mother’s was a darker shade and she didn’t suffer from freckles the way Sam did. She was elegant and nice and everyone who met her—from the guy at the grocery store on the corner of their block to the nurse at the doctor’s office—thought Sam’s mother was charming.
Sam’s mother stood in the middle of the room, looking around, grimacing. Sam followed her line of vision and took in the pink walls with light purple paw prints stamped onto the wall, the fluffy curtains, and the pink-striped bedspread. Things that were absolutely perfect for eighth-grade Sam but that as a senior in high school just didn’t work.
“It never bothered me before, because I spent most of my time at school,” Sam said.
“Well, now that you’re home again”—Sam’s mother shot her a brilliant smile—“we should really do something about this.”
“I’m only home for a few more months,” Sam said, turning back around in her chair. It was like her mother refused to believe that she was attending college. She looked up at the rejection letter above her desk and sighed.
“Sam,” her mother said, walking up behind her, her eyes fixed on the rejection letter. “I know you’re really disappointed.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Sam, you’ve been talking about this school for years. You’ve been talking about Pete Bryant since you were little.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Sam said, not knowing what to say. She felt like crying. She was overwhelmed by the idea that she had tried as hard as she could and it wasn’t good enough.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Sam’s mother said.
“I didn’t make a mistake, Mom. I want to go there. I want to write.”
“I mean him, sweetheart.”
“Oh,” Sam said.
“So you still want to go, you still want to reapply?” Sam’s mother sounded both happy and sad.
“Yes, I’m going to write a new sample and see if they won’t reconsider. If that doesn’t work…”
She didn’t want to say it, but she knew what it meant. Going somewhere else for at least a semester and then reapplying, with no assurances that she would ever get in. Sam’s mother leaned over and gave Sam a kiss on the forehead and then, with a quick hair ruffle, left her alone with her thoughts.
Sam pulled out the list and added: I never got into the writing program at UCLA.
This was the year that Samantha would do everything she hadn’t gotten around to in the past three years of being Miss Perfect. This was the year that Samantha would figure out who she was. And then get everything she wanted.
THE BOY WITHOUT A PLAN
Later that same night, or rather in the morning, Michael D. Hammond III (“D” for short) was returning to his Upper East Side apartment, or rather crawling back to it, with a girl who was very, very intoxicated.
She (because D still couldn’t remember what her name was…Allison? Amy? Cleo?) had him trapped against the limestone face of his apartment building, while the doorman just inside the double doors did his best to avert his eyes, which was hard to do when Allison-Amy-Cleo was trying to have sex with D right there on the sidewalk. Thankfully it was a cold night out, and there weren’t a lot of passersby.
“Sweetheart,” D said, in the droll way that he had.
“Ohhhhhh! Did I ever mention how hot your accent is
?” she asked, lifting her head from the crook of his neck.
D chuckled; she was an idiot.
“Yes, sweetheart, you mentioned it.”
“It makes me want to just eat you up!” And with that, she turned her head and bit his shoulder. Quite hard, or hard enough that D yelped a little—in a very unmasculine way—and had to hold AAC away from him, his hands on her shoulders lest she want to take another bite.
She growled at him, in a way that was obviously something she thought was sexy, but the sight she made: disheveled, her hair everywhere, her eyeliner smeared into dark bruiselike circles under her eyes, and just a hint of red lipstick (more on her teeth than on her lips) (and damn, it would be on his shirt) made the sexy image quite impossible. He wondered about rabies shots.
D sighed. When did this start getting old?
“Why don’t you invite me up?” AAC asked, reaching out a finger and dragging it lazily down the front of D’s shirt.
D watched the red nail run down the front of his white tailored shirt until it hit his belt buckle, and linger there meaningfully until D removed it and looked at AAC.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, darling.”
AAC, who had been aiming for Best Sexpot Under 21 five minutes ago, quickly shifted from a mewling face to an angry one. “You’re going to just leave me out here? You brought me all the way uptown? For what?”
And because she was about to make a real scene, one that D was sure his father would hear about, and because she was right—she was far away from home and more than a little drunk, who knew what she’d do to a poor hapless cabdriver if he let her go like this?—he nodded.
“You’re right, I apologize for being thoughtless. Would you please accompany me upstairs? I’ll make us some coffee and then call you a car.”
“Coffee, eh?” she said, smiling again, and pulling out her compact from her bag and checking her makeup. She must have been drunker than D realized, because she squinted into the mirror, smiled broadly at her reflection, and then snapped it shut again. “I’d love to, Michael.”
“Call me D,” he said.
“D,” she said, then giggled, then snorted. D walked her inside, the doorman opening the door, shooting him a smirky glance. D nodded as he practically dragged her by the arm past the concierge’s marble desk and toward the elevator. When he got her into it, she slumped lazily against the wall.
“Will I meet your parents?”
“Hardly,” D said, trying to check his collar for red lipstick.
“You don’t want me to meet your parents?” AAC wailed, life flowing back into her.
“Of course I do,” D said, standing there as he adjusted his collar in the blurry reflection of the back of the elevator doors. “It’s just that they are hardly ever here and if they were, I could hardly introduce you.”
For some reason, whether she misunderstood or didn’t hear, AAC nodded and smiled at D, wrapping her arms around him. D pushed her hands away gently, but they just kept coming! It was like the girl was an octopus. D made a mental note not to leave any more parties with drunk girls.
It’s just that AAC hadn’t appeared nearly so drunk (or messy) at the party. D made another mental note not to drink so much himself, or at least not let himself get so sober so quickly after leaving.
The elevator opened up into the penthouse apartment and D walked across the foyer as AAC followed, slower, oohing and aahing about the place that D mostly enjoyed alone—his father having another apartment of his own several blocks away. AAC dropped into the settee in the middle of the foyer as D pulled out his phone to call for a car.
“How do you take your coffee?” D asked, turning back toward AAC, who had already fallen asleep on the settee.
“Of course,” he said. “Probably better this way.” He walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and, untwisting the cap, slammed the fridge shut with the back of his foot as he turned to walk away.
D guzzled his water as he walked back into the foyer, and then, spotting a drooling AAC, walked past her into his bedroom. He checked his text messages and then sent one to his best friend, Riley Swain.
>I will never drink again.
Two minutes later he received a text back that said:
>You’re drunk or you would never make such a ridiculous claim.
He wrote back:
>Duly noted.
Just as he was putting away his cell, AAC stumbled into his room, mumbling D’s name under her breath. She sat, in the middle of the floor, and D—perhaps not for the first time that night—felt a little ashamed and really annoyed at himself for what he had let his life become.
“Is this your room?” she asked. She looked up at him, tilted her head, and then lurched over and threw up. D jumped back, barely avoiding the projectile vomit. “Can I call you Michael?”
“No,” D said, looking at the mess AAC had made on his floor.
D picked up his phone again, dialed, and then said into the receiver, “I need to cancel that car, but have it here at seven A.M.” Then he carried AAC into a spare bedroom to sleep it off. When she was comfortably situated, still fully clothed, she fell into a deep, still sleep and began snoring. Loudly.
That left D alone with the mess that was his life and the mess that was his rug. He had to clean up both, all on his own.
He let this sink in as he cleaned up the rug the best he could, then jumped into the shower. When he was done, he drank another bottle of water and sat at the desk in the living room. On the desk there were two piles. One was several inches high, a pile of applications that had not yet been filled out. The other was just two sheets of paper, an acceptance letter from his father’s alma mater and a note from his father’s secretary saying that he needed to sign the forms she had already filled out for him and send them back to her.
D picked up the acceptance letter and crumpled it in his hands. He didn’t want the life his father offered, but never made an attempt to have a different life. His father had called him to his study a few weeks ago and told him that he needed to do something, and if he couldn’t figure it out on his own—he would be happy to figure it out for D.
D could hear AAC’s snores reverberating through the apartment and, with a slight shake of the head, decided that he’d had enough of screwing up his life. He’d try; he’d be better. He’d fix things.
He pulled a sheet of paper out of the drawer and began writing a list of all the things he’d done in the past four years that were messing up his life, one mistake at a time. His eye on the applications, he swore he wouldn’t get involved with any more girls until he finished those applications and told his father that he wouldn’t be attending his school.
This was the year that D would figure out what he was really made of. And didn’t do anything he wanted to do.
#1 TRY TO CHANGE
Samantha sat right on the edge of Central Park, facing Columbus Circle. She had texted Riley to let her know she was sitting “behind the big monument thing” and she began people watching. People were rushing across the walkway; nobody but Samantha was really sitting, probably because it was too chilly in late January to be sitting outside in the middle of Manhattan. But there she was.
She watched the cabdrivers fly around the circle and listened as couples chatted on their way to the Time Warner Center.
She loved the park—she didn’t even mind the city that surrounded it.
Riley walked up next to Sam and kicked her shoe lightly with her own. “I’m not going to even tell you how difficult it was to get here! I had to take the subway!”
Sam faked a little gasp that made Riley purse her lips. Sam always admired the way that Riley held herself. She was her own person and never really cared what others thought about her. At least that’s the impression she gave off. She was pretty, but Sam knew it was her personality that really attracted everyone around her. It was very much “I am who I am, and you’ll love me anyway.”
Sam wished she were mo
re like that. Sam even wished she had Riley’s sense of fashion—like today, for instance, Riley was wearing a long black Anne coat, with two overlarge buttons keeping it closed at her chest; it had a childlike look to it, but coupled with perfect 1950s-style makeup and knee-high boots, she looked like she just stepped out of a magazine. Sam sighed at her own jeans and bubble jacket, but stood up and walked with her toward the shopping center and up to the second-floor bookstore anyway.
“I haven’t had a café latte in, like, forever,” Riley said as they stood in line together. “But then I lost four pounds.”
“That’s great?” Sam said.
“No, I think I only lost it in my bazongas, which means none of my bras feel right, and so I need to gain it back,” Riley said, ordering a café latte and pointing at a muffin behind the glass. The girl behind the counter placed this next to Sam’s tea and rang them up together. Riley waved away Sam’s money when she took out her wallet.
“You know,” Sam said, carrying her tea away from the counter and spotting a table in the cramped little café space, “you could always think of it as a reason to buy new clothes.”
Riley stopped with the muffin halfway to her mouth. “Damn, you’re right.” She put the muffin down. “Did they teach you that at NH? I don’t remember that.”
“They didn’t exactly tie in healthy eating habits with new clothing, no. But they said a lot of ‘Eat a balanced diet of healthy food, blah, blah, blah.’”
“But I want a muffin!” Riley cried, looking sadly at her now-untouched muffin.
“You don’t have to be perfect. Just try to eat better on a regular basis,” Sam said.
“You don’t have to be perfect?” Riley asked. “My Sam is saying you don’t have to be perfect?”
Sam frowned. “Yeah, that’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Muffins?”
“No, being perfect.”
“Yes, well, it is very difficult,” Riley said, fluffing her hair. Sam smiled at her friend.
