Dating on the Dork Side

by Charity Tahmaseb

  Middle school had quickly demolished what was left of those wispy fantasies. I was never going to be popular enough to make it into the homecoming court. I’d even convinced myself that it didn’t matter. But I still didn’t see the point of treating school like it was a jail sentence.

  Things could be worse. Much, much worse.

  And today, they were. Because standing in Rhino’s garage was … Jason. Yes, that Jason, the one with the stupid nickname. For a second I considered Mr. Dawson’s opening lecture in Advanced Earth Sciences that morning. He’d talked about the Butterfly Effect, the theory that an insect flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle could cause a tornado thousands of miles away.

  I stared, open-mouthed, and couldn’t help wondering: Just how big would a butterfly’s wings need to be to make the jocktastic Jason appear both in the tutoring room and in my nerdy best friend’s garage on the same afternoon? In most cases, pretty freakin’ huge, I thought. But in this case, you had to account for Darren.

  To really understand Rhino, and why Jason “The Ab” Abernathy might be standing next to him, you don’t need to know much about earth science, but you do need to know a little about Rhino’s family. It was Rhino’s older brother Darren who defined the Rineholds. Darren, the superstar athlete who’d led Olympia High to not one, but two state baseball championships.

  If you took everything that was Darren and held it up like a photograph, Rhino would be the negative. He was dark where his brother was light. He shined in ways most people didn’t notice. The saddest part? Hardly anyone could see Rhino for the amazing person he was because they kept expecting to see Darren instead.

  No matter how different the brothers were, there was one sacred thing that connected Rhino to Darren, and both of them to Jason. That thing was baseball. I always wondered if Rhino loved the game the way I love football. Maybe he simply loved his brother. For the record, Darren is pretty cool.

  Whatever the reason, Rhino started keeping team stats when he was just a seven-year-old tag-along and Darren was a Gopher League All-Star. When his big brother joined the middle school and then the high school team, Rhino followed with his scorebook. After Darren graduated four years ago, Rhino kept at it. He can do things with statistics that make my brain hurt.

  Over the years, Rhino and Jason developed an odd sort of friendship. At first, I cringed whenever I saw them together, certain Rhino was being set up for a massive fall. But then I figured it out. There’s one thing I know about athletes: they’re superstitious. As long as Rhino was the one keeping track of RBIs and extra bases, then Jason would no more body slam him into a locker than toss out his own pair of lucky socks.

  That afternoon, the two of them were huddled over a card table strewn with printouts from Rhino’s computer. Neither boy noticed me standing there in the driveway. And standing there.

  At last, I tried, “Uh, hi?” because that had worked so well in the tutoring room.

  They both jerked back. Rhino recovered first.

  “Hey, Cams,” he said. “Jason stopped by to pick up a pair of Darren’s old cleats and we decided to look over the stats for the incoming freshmen.”

  “State,” Jason added. “We want to go to state.” He didn’t sound all that pumped about the prospect. Jason gave the printouts another look, stroked his chin like he was considering something earth-shattering, then he said to Rhino, “See ya, bro.”

  They did that fist bump thing boys do, then Jason wandered down the driveway, a haphazard path that put him close enough that he could—I swear I’m not making this up—sniff me. Again.

  It was getting kind of creepy.

  Jason’s SUV belched to life, the engine loud, the blast from the stereo even louder. He felt the need to leave a patch of burnt rubber behind as he rumbled down the street.

  “So,” I said to Rhino once the exhaust had cleared. “You guys.” I crossed my fingers. “Like this now? BFFs? I bet you’re planning to room together in college next year. He’s probably penciled you in as best man at his wedding already.”

  “Shut up,” he said in typical Rhino fashion. “You are aware that I would never attend any school that would accept the likes of The Ab, right? Besides, there isn’t a girl on the planet dumb enough to marry him.”

  Rhino might be a genius, but he didn’t know much about girls. Just one day into the school year and Jason already had a posse of freshman flirts following him through the cafeteria. I thought of the girls in my own class. The shy ones he never noticed, the popular ones he both flattered and tormented.

  There was something about The Ab, though. He was big and goofy, with dark blond hair and slightly darker eyebrows, which, combined with those killer blue eyes, was actually kind of cute. I’d never crushed on him, but I knew plenty of girls who had.

  “Last first day of school?” I asked, just to get a rise out of Rhino.

  “Four years too late.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. “Come on, did you really want to go off to college without me?”

  He didn’t smile, but his eyes narrowed in a squint that I knew, from years of studying his face, was affection. That squint was also, in part, how he’d gotten his nickname. I should mention that his parents did give him a perfectly normal first name. It’s Ben. But back in grade school, before glasses, Rhino squinted all the time. And his nose? Well, he still hasn't grown all the way into it, though it was looking more Romanesque. He’s kind of grumpy too, if not actually wrinkled like a rhinoceros. And when he charges? Even I get out of his way.

  The nickname fit, so it stuck.

  Just then, something tiny and red flashed in his tangled hair.

  “Hold still,” I told him.

  I stepped closer, just a breath away from him, and went up on tiptoes. I parted the strands with my finger, half expecting to find that Amazonian butterfly, but a ladybug crawled onto my nail instead.

  I showed her to Rhino. “I think that’s good luck.”

  He held out a finger, and the ladybug clambered over to him.

  “It’s a real one, too,” he said, “not one of those heinous Asian beetle imposters.” The ladybug preened, testing her wings, then took flight, a tiny spot of red against a blue September sky.

  “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.” Rhino turned to me. “What about you? Are you flying away home or can you stay a while? Need help with calculus yet?”

  Thanks to Rhino and my pride, I’d managed to cling to the accelerated math track. Unlike Rhino, who raced through mathematics the way some kids leveled up in video games, I had to claw my way past each new theorem and function. The only upside was that once I understood something, I could almost always explain it. That I was the most requested math tutor in school was an irony not lost on me. Or Rhino, for that matter.

  “Maybe by the end of the week,” I said. “You’re on my speed dial.”

  “In that case, stay. The Twins are playing tonight.”

  I didn’t know why he thought that would tempt me. Baseball bored me, and Rhino knew that. I opened my mouth, not so much in response, but to tell him about that afternoon in the tutoring room. About Jason, and the wiki. Then, in my mind’s eye, I saw my name in the recently-accessed list and a fierce flush flooded my cheeks.

  “What?” Rhino asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.

  I never blushed around him. Well, almost never. Rhino could help me hack into the site, but that would also mean he could read about me on The Hotties of Troy. Was it worth it?

  I shook my head, both in answer to his question and my own.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  If I didn’t get anywhere with it at home, I’d log in tomorrow from the tutoring room. There was no need to involve Rhino at all, no need to expose him to what were sure to be unflattering remarks about me.

  If I knew one thing about myself, it was this: I was no Hottie of Troy.

  “Okay, then, Ladybug, fly away home.” He turned back to his printouts.

  Rhino was not a touchy-feely kind of
guy. His self-containment was legend and his personal space sacred. That he let me inside his bubble, close enough to pluck an insect from his hair, said a lot. I still wasn’t getting a hug from the deal.

  I waved as I left, but with his head down, his focus on baseball stats, Rhino didn’t see me. I walked home, equally focused on the wiki.

  I couldn’t remember the website address. I couldn’t find it in Google either. Someone had made sure that search engines didn’t pick up the site. I shut my eyes, trying to visualize the address field. It was like a test, and I was good at those. Wiki, I thought; that was part of it. The rest were letters. Initials. T-H-O-T?

  All I got was a blank page. Then I smiled and swapped numeral 0 for the letter O, and I was in!

  I glanced over my shoulder. My room was at the opposite end of the house from the driveway. Any minute, Dad could pull up, walk in, and be up the stairs before I realized it. I eased my bedroom door closed. A girl couldn’t have too much privacy, especially when she was about to hack into a website called The Hotties of Troy.

  Back at my desk, my fingers shook so hard that the first time I tried the login, I messed it up. I tried again, hoping Jason hadn’t gone all security-conscious since that afternoon.

  He hadn’t. For several heartbeats, I stared at the girl wiki in all its chauvinistic glory. Enough time had passed that my name no longer came up on the recently-accessed list. And let’s face it, no way would I pop up in any kind of hottie list. I used the box at the top of the page to search for myself.

  My name appeared, and all I had to do was click on it to get to my page. I pushed away from my desk again, cracked the door, just an inch, and listened hard. Then I rushed back, clicked on my name, and hid my face in my hands.

  I had all of four entries, two from last spring and two from today.

  Admin: She always smells good.

  Oh. Well. Let’s hear it for hygiene.

  Adm*n: She smells f**king fantastic.

  Okay, really good hygiene.

  jasona: UR rite. She smells like a chick should ... not all perfumey and fake. And bro, she was totally checking me out in the tutoring room today. I’m going to have to fail something this year, get some up close academic help, if ya know what I mean.

  Only someone with an ego the size of Jason’s would assume any girl who glanced at him was checking him out.

  Adm*n: Dude, how’s failing this year different from any other year?

  I snorted, starting to like this Adm*n with an asterisk guy. I clicked on the home page again, but then I sat back in my chair and thought: What now? I felt like I should tell someone. The principal? Ms. Pendergast?

  Or maybe the person who had the most at stake in all this, the one who topped every list, recently-accessed, recently-updated, hottest of the hot: the one and only … Elle Emerson.

  I clicked over to her page and read the first comment:

  jasona: Bro, totally hot, but completely lethal. I don’t have any pics from today’s cheerleading practice cuz she tossed my phone into the bleachers and I lost the battery.

  Well, that explained why Jason had been in the tutoring room, using a computer instead of his phone. And that was Elle, all right. She had all the intelligence and ambition of a Hillary Clinton packed into the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. Elle was student council president, star performer in the debate club, captain of the cheerleading squad, and when I say she ruled the school, I mean she literally Ruled. The. School. No one crossed Elle and escaped unscathed.

  More comments littered her page, way more than my measly four. There seemed to be nothing about Elle that wasn’t being discussed. Her class schedule was posted, along with a list of her favorite school lunch entrees. Someone who called himself mchottie pointed out that Elle hadn’t eaten broccoli since sixth grade, when it got stuck in her braces. Another boy disagreed. He’d witnessed her eating it with cheese sauce on a baked potato at Wendy’s last year.

  That led to a thread about her eating habits in general. Things went downhill when someone started a debate about whether Elle might be a secret scarf ’n’ barfer. They took an even more disgusting turn when several boys volunteered to hold her ponytail the next time she puked, especially if they could perform this act of gallantry in the girls’ locker room.

  i don’t know, one boy added.

  she’s really not that special. have u ever tried to make out w her? girl is totally made of ice.

  Adm*n had stepped in at that point, which was good. I guess. But why couldn’t he have stopped things sooner? And why did these boys think it was okay to talk about girls like this in the first place?

  I clicked on Elle’s photo page next. It took forever to load, thanks to endless pictures of her: at parties, at last year’s prom, in the center of an epic cheerleading pyramid collapse, adjusting her bra strap in front of school this very morning.

  Wow. These guys were dedicated. Total creepers, but dedicated.

  Elle needed to know about this, but I wasn’t sure how to tell her. Except for surviving three years of French with Madame Bourg-Schmidt (who was also Señora Bourg-Schmidt, the Spanish teacher) together, we barely knew each other. But thanks to French club, I did have her email address.

  I opened my mail program and started typing.

  Elle,

  This is going to sound strange, but I think you should look at this website. Log in using jasona and theab.

  Camy

  I included the website address, started to click send, then went back and added my last name, just in case she had no idea who I was. I waited, wondering if the seismic boom of her anger would shake my windows. Then I wondered how often she even looked at her email. I could be in for a long wait.

  Nothing was lamer than checking email every five seconds, so I made my bed and stacked my new textbooks on the shelf next to the desk. When my mail program chimed, the calculus book slipped from my fingers and thudded on the floor.

  Her message contained two words:

  K. Thanks.

  That was it? No seismic boom? No anger? No … nothing? A thought crept into my mind. Maybe everyone else in school already knew about the wiki and I’d just walked into a world of humiliation.

  I closed my email program, then shoved my feet against the desk. My chair careened backward into the wall and I’d hoped the jolt would knock some belated sense into me. All it did was give me a headache. Then I went downstairs, pretending I hadn’t just committed the first social blunder of the school year.

  Chapter 2

  I FOUND DAD in the kitchen, staring into our refrigerator. He did that sometimes, like he expected the food to parade out and prepare itself. Even so, he was a pretty decent cook, a pretty decent housekeeper, and all around a pretty decent dad. Of course, these days, he did a lot of the mom stuff too.

  After the divorce, Mom moved to Iowa City to accept a teaching position at the university there. My summer visit with her had ended two weeks ago. When I got back to Minnesota, the sight of extra gray in Dad’s hair had startled me. When had that happened? It had always been thick and nearly black. We shared that, the same dark, unruly hair and matching dark eyes.

  “Hey, Cams,” he said after I’d tapped on the fridge door. “What about fried egg sandwiches for dinner?”

  One of the great things about living with Dad was all the dad-type food. In Iowa with my mom this summer, it’d been all vegan, all the time. If I snuck out to get a cheeseburger, I had to bring along one of those travel toothbrushes so Mom wouldn’t smell my evil, carnivorous ways on my breath.

  “So, how was the first day of school?” Dad asked, piling the butter and cheese slices on top of the egg carton.

  “Okay,” I said. Well, except for the whole girl wiki part of it, but it was probably best not to get into that.

  “I got an email from your mom,” he said, maybe a little too casually.

  “Oh?” It wasn’t completely weird that Mom would email Dad. They had me in common, after all. And they were pretending to h
ave the friendliest divorce in the history of the world.

  Dad unloaded the food onto the counter. “You know those writing samples you did over the summer?”

  While I was in Iowa City, I took a teen writing course while Mom taught summer school. That way, she’d told me, I could experience “an authentic workshop environment” (group humiliation is fun!) and “real college student life” (with my mom three feet away!) while “exploring my issues about the divorce” (no comment!). I’d told Mom, more than once, that I had no issues about the divorce. To which she always said, “Nonsense.”

  Dad turned up the heat under the frying pan. “She showed the samples to one of her colleagues, who was impressed,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice. “You might have a lock on getting into Iowa.”

  “Wow,” I managed.

  “I’ve never doubted it.” He cracked one egg, then another into the pan. The whites sizzled and buttery steam floated in the air, making everything smell warm and rich. I pressed a hand against my stomach to keep it from growling and rolling over on itself. I’d applied to just two colleges: University of Iowa, where I could be near Mom, and the University of Minnesota, where I could be near Dad.

  Sometimes I pondered what would happen if both schools accepted me and I had to choose between them. I missed my mom when I was with my dad. But I missed my dad when I was with my mom. I didn’t want to deal with all that, not now, so I set two places at the table, then opened the fridge.

  “Orange juice or milk?” I asked.