Dating on the Dork Side

by Charity Tahmaseb

  “How much do you know about hacking?” Elle asked.

  “Not much. Just what I’ve picked up from my dad.” I stole another look down the hall. “And Rhino. We could always—”

  She arched a brow. “Do we really need to have the Rhino conversation again?”

  I sighed. “I searched, but I still can’t tell who set up the site. Maybe we should just tell someone,” I suggested. “Pendergast, the principal?”

  Elle whirled on me. “And why would we do that?”

  “Because what they’re doing is wrong?”

  “Right. Agreed. But telling on them is the least effective thing we could do.” Elle shook her head. “No one will really do anything about it. The boys will just get angry. They’ll be even more obnoxious, and they won’t learn a thing, either. I want to take them down myself, in a way they won’t forget.”

  Even if she had to take the rest of us with her.

  “You’re not tired of it?” she added.

  “Of what?”

  Just because I happened to have four little comments on the wiki didn’t mean I was a full-fledged member of the Hotties of Troy. I wanted to tell Elle: Welcome to my world. The place where you were just a means to an end, whether it be a better GPA, an easy A on a group project, or an object of ridicule. Even Rhino’s baseball statistician mystique went only so far. He’d taken more than one tumble over someone’s outstretched foot, resulting in a face plant on the cafeteria floor.

  After a moment, Elle said, “It’s just...” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze unfocused. “The way these guys treat girls. It’s really disgusting.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “And?” she prompted.

  “Okay.”

  “Great. We’ll need a PowerPoint presentation by Friday, so … I mean, could you please put a presentation together by the end of the week? I want to do some techno-whiz stuff, but you’re better at that than I am.”

  I stifled a laugh. “A PowerPoint presentation?”

  “Yeah.” She grinned. “Trust me, it’ll be great. I’ll text you later.”

  Elle left then, gliding effortlessly into the pre-bell crowd, as if a red carpet was perpetually rolled out at her feet. No one ever stuck a foot into her path, but no one was beneath her notice either, from the loners to the stoners to the lowly freshmen; she had a smile or a nod for everyone. Except for today.

  Today she walked right past Jason and Gavin without acknowledging either of them. Gavin stared after her, looking a little confused. He surveyed the hall as if that would help him pinpoint the source of Elle’s distraction. His gaze fell on me, and my cheeks burned.

  No matter how hard I tried, even the barest glance from him sent me back to eighth grade. It always reminded me that whatever I’d done back then, it had made him refuse to speak to me for three whole years. And now? Somehow I had his complete attention. Then Jason stepped in front of him, blocking my view.

  I gathered the rest of my books and shut my locker. By the time I looked back, Gavin was gone.

  Chapter 3

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON, after last block, I didn’t bother to stop at my locker. Instead, I took the stairs two at a time, hoping to find the tutoring room still empty. The varsity football team had their first game in a couple of hours. They wouldn’t be practicing today, but I didn’t discriminate; I also liked to watch JV and the ninth grade reserves. Not to mention that I needed a few extra minutes to set everything up for Elle’s big campaign.

  The first thing I saw when I walked into the room was Clarissa Delacroix standing at the window—my window—using the reflection to guide some thick-looking gloss across her lips. I’d braced myself for this. Even so, my stomach tightened.

  Back in eighth grade, for exactly five months, she’d been one of my two best friends. The thought, that she’d been neck and neck with Rhino, sparked a flash of heat across my face. Sometimes I could still feel the footprint Clarissa had left on my back during her climb up the social ladder. Sometimes I thought about getting a tattoo of one, just so I’d never forget.

  She continued to admire herself, patting a stray golden tress into place and smoothing the straps of her top against her chest. I couldn’t help noticing the color of her blouse: jade, the same rich shade as her eyes. I bit my tongue to keep from reminding her that black was really her color, the perfect match for her heart.

  Sophie Vega and a few of her crew were slouched in chairs nearby. Sophie was a pretty girl, if you could find her underneath all that hair dye and glitter. The stuff was everywhere: on her eyelids, her cheekbones, her lips. Once upon a time a warehouse full of sparkles must have exploded in her vicinity and now they were permanently embedded.

  Not that I’d say that to her face.

  Or to the face of anyone who might repeat it to her.

  The truth was, Sophie scared me. She had a reputation for being tough and in her skinny jeans and serious black boots, she definitely looked the part. I’d tutored her for a couple of weeks last spring. She’d been nice enough to me then. That still didn’t mean I felt comfortable around her.

  I slipped into the chair at the first computer. The night before, I’d saved everything I’d need on a thumb drive. I plugged that in, then reached over the monitor for the cable that would hook the computer into the overhead projector. My fingers strained, meeting nothing but air.

  “Looking for something?” Sophie had switched chairs and was now straddling one directly across from me and my monitor. In one hand, she held the cable, in the other, the remote control that turned on the projector.

  “Could I—” I began.

  “Only if you tell me why we’re really here.”

  More girls arrived, in twos and threes. The A-list girl jocks padded in, ponytails twitching. They were like caged tigers and just as dangerous. Lana Greene, their leader, raised her head as if she smelled blood in the air.

  “We have volleyball practice,” she said. “Coach Taylor will have chickens if we’re not there. This better be good.”

  “Could I?” I said again to Sophie, trying to ignore the rumble of discontent in the room. “It takes forever to warm up.”

  She handed me the cable, but clutched the remote close to her chest. “Just tell me what buttons to push. I’m good at that.”

  I bet she was. “Try the one that says On,” I suggested.

  Sophie snorted. From above, the whirr of the overhead projector made us both glance up.

  With her eyes still locked on the ceiling, she said, “You tutoring again this year?”

  I laughed, but Sophie continued to stare upward, her profile sharp and fragile, like the edge of broken glass.

  “Of course I’m going to tutor,” I said, my words rushed, in case she took my laughter the wrong way. “I’ve been tutoring, like, forever.”

  She lowered her gaze, but kept her eyes forward.

  “What classes?” I started to ask, but the door opened again. Elle crossed the threshold, and the room fell silent.

  Sophie swung around in her chair and her shoulders tensed, just slightly. Elle crossed to the desk at the front of the room and pointed behind her.

  “Chair. Now.”

  One of the cheerleaders sprang up (no, really, she sprang) and dragged a chair across the floor. She shoved the back against the door, then plopped into the seat. Meanwhile, Elle directed a few other cheerleaders to pull the shades while another looked like she was sweeping the room for covert listening devices.

  Sophie sat up straighter. From the hallway came the clang of a locker shutting. Elle sat on the desk so the skirt of her cheerleader uniform fanned out around her. She crossed one leg over the other and planted her palms on the surface behind her.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, the guys in this school are tools,” she announced. “And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m sick of it.”

  A few girls shifted in their seats. Elle gave me the tiniest of nods, my cue to start the PowerPoint presentation. I clicked
the mouse and the presentation lit up the screen just as one of the cheerleaders hit the lights. Elle, now standing to one side, fired up a laser pointer.

  The first slide contained a list of sins committed by the boys in our class through the years. The list started with bra snapping in fifth grade and ended with the prom date scandal last spring.

  “Any of this ring a bell?” she asked. “Make you the teeniest bit angry? Anyone? How many of you seriously considered paying for a date?”

  In the dark, I sensed a few involuntary arm jerks. A few fierce whispers floated in the air, but no one raised a hand.

  “And what did you think when these guys, who we’ve known since kindergarten, went over to Prairie Stone and found dates there? How many of you ended up alone at the dance?”

  This time, a chill settled over the group. Prom hadn’t really been on my radar, but I’d heard the stories of dresses bought, boutonnières ordered, and no-show dates.

  “What’s your point?” The question, sharp and angry, came from Clarissa. She’d been stood up too, and had only had a date for prom because Elle had arranged a last minute substitute, her own cousin, from Prairie Stone of all places.

  “My point.” Elle shook out her hair. “Is that the guys in this school keep their brains in their butts, and I think it’s time we did something about it.”

  Somebody snorted. I suspected Sophie, but whoever it was captured the doubt swirling in the room.

  “You don’t think we can?” Elle faced the room, hands on hips. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I have a couple of ideas. I got more than this fabulous tan in Greece this summer.”

  Here’s the thing about Elle Emerson: She was the kind of girl who could say a thing like that and you still couldn’t hate her. She pulled a slim paperback from her messenger bag and waved it for all of us to see. In the dim light, the picture on the cover blurred into something Medusa-like and a little frightening.

  “My parents made me take a few enrichment sessions on the trip,” she said, holding the book in front of her now. “Language lessons. The Classics. Those Greeks, they had some interesting ideas.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sophie said. “You went halfway around the world … for summer school?” Her voice cracked with the shock of it all.

  “A small price to pay,” Elle said. “But I’m not paying because of some turd seed and his iPhone.”

  “Wait—” Clarissa’s voice wavered, its usual strength and bitchiness masked by fear. “What happens in Greece stays in Greece, right?”

  “I guess not.” Elle tucked a lock of hair behind her ear as if to calm herself. “Photographic evidence exists.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Elle pointed to me. “Check this out.”

  I switched the view so the only thing on the screen was the Hotties of Troy login page.

  “Camy,” she added. “Will you do the honors?”

  I logged in as Jason. We’d debated about this, about giving away one of the user IDs. But we figured if any of the girls read the on-screen comments closely enough, they could guess at this piece of information. Anyway, they still wouldn’t have a password.

  “That didn’t stop me,” I’d pointed out.

  “A calculated risk. I want to prove to the girls that this site is real. To do that, they have to see you log in.” Elle had shrugged then, like the matter was settled. “Who knows? We might even get lucky and see a few live updates.”

  Now, in the tutoring room, the site’s main page flashed onto the screen, and as if Elle had custom-ordered it, a message popped up in the chat box, something about scoring beer after tonight’s football game.

  “This,” Elle said, her laser pointer skipping across the screen, “is a girl wiki.”

  “A girl who?” Sophie shifted in her chair. She hunched forward, like she was trying to get a better look.

  “A girl wiki. It’s like an online encyclopedia, only instead of articles, this one has a page of information for each girl in this room.”

  Elle crossed her arms over her chest. The light from the projector turned her blonde hair blue and cast shadows beneath her eyes. She looked truly tired of the guys at Olympia High. Murmurs rose around me.

  “Wait a minute.” Clarissa stood. She craned her neck toward me. “We’re talking every girl in this room?”

  “Yes,” Elle said, the word clipped. “Every girl.”

  “Whoa, Camy. Way to go!” Sophie crowed, raising her hand. The room erupted in laughter as my fingers grazed Sophie’s palm in what was probably the lamest high five ever. My whole face burned.

  “And this”—Elle’s voice sliced through the noise—“is our hit list.”

  My hands fumbled on the keyboard, but I managed to switch back to the PowerPoint presentation and the list of guys Elle and I had pulled together.

  Sophie relaxed, crossing one ankle over the other on a chair in front of her. “Oh, mmmm,” she purred. “I’d hit that.”

  A word rang out in the room, clear and cold. “Slut.”

  Elle shot a look into the darkness before nodding her head at Sophie. “Let me rephrase that. Think of this as our anti-hit list. Every boy here”—her laser pointer jumped over the names, highlighting each one—“has contributed to the wiki in some way. If he’s on the list, he’s a full-fledged member of the anal cranial society.”

  When some of the girls looked confused, she tried again. “They, uh, wear their sombreros on their gluteus maximi.”

  A clacking sound pulled our attention to the doorway, where cheerleader Mercedes Washington had popped up from her seat. The beads in her braids were still swinging and even the harsh light from the projector couldn’t keep her deep brown skin from glowing.

  “Oh,” she said. “You mean they’re buttheads?”

  “Exactly,” Elle said, and it was if the room got a little brighter from all the light bulbs popping on above the pom squad members’ heads.

  “Hello.” Clarissa was still standing. “Gavin’s on that list too.” This time she didn’t just sound mean; her voice was full-on cruel.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Elle tilted her chin, just slightly, in Clarissa’s direction. They were the best of frenemies, and Elle knew a power play when she saw one.

  Elle settled back on the desk, picked up the paperback and flipped through the pages like she was getting ready to tell us all a bedtime story.

  “This is Lysistrata.” She waved the book again. “It’s a Greek play by Aristophanes about this ancient girl who gets tired of all the fighting between Athens and Sparta. To get the men to end the war, she gathers all the women together from both sides and convinces them to hold a strike.”

  “So they stop going to work?” a cheerleader in the back called out.

  Elle’s eyes narrowed against the glare of the projector. “No. It’s more of a boycott.”

  One of the girls from the pom squad raised her hand. When Elle nodded at her, she began, “Like in history class? When they threw all that tea in the river?”

  Elle sighed.

  My tutoring genes kicked in before my social stupidity genes could click off. “Actually, they threw it into the harbor, and the Tea Party was a different kind of protest. But yes, the American colonists boycotted English goods, including tea. A boycott just means you refuse to buy or associate with … something.”

  At that moment I realized that every girl in the room was staring at me like I had a giant neon dork sign flashing on my forehead.

  “Okay. Uh, thanks for the clarification, Camy.” Elle said. She looked around the room, holding every girl’s gaze for a second or two. Then she went in for the kill.

  “Until the boys at our school make this right, we boycott … them.”

  The girl with the sketchy grasp of American history raised her hand again. “I still don’t get it,” she said. “We don’t buy anything from the boys, so what is it we’re supposed to stop doing?”

  Elle pressed her lips together and I s
aw her mouth the words, Oh, honey. Out loud, she said, “We stop doing it. And not just that. There will be no kissing, no hugging, no handholding. No contact of any kind.”

  Silence. Then whispers. That won’t work. They’ll find some other girls. They’ll find some ... skanks. Prairie Stone skanks.

  “But we can still hang out with the guys, right?” Clarissa began, her words pushed together in one long ramble. “I mean, if it’s just—”

  “This is stupid.” The heels of Sophie’s boots cracked against the floor one at a time. “It won’t work. Some guys will always be assholes. It’s the way the world works.”

  Elle surveyed Sophie before turning her sights on Clarissa. “So, you want to keep hanging out with these boys? Are you sure about that?”

  “It’s just a stupid website, and homecoming’s only a few—”

  “Would you like to see your page?” Elle asked.

  “Would I ... what?”

  “Like to see your page on the wiki,” Elle repeated. “Would you like to read what these wonderful specimens of the male gender have to say about you?”

  I held my breath. The previous night I’d made an awful (although Elle had called it wonderful) discovery. She’d wanted me to find more evidence of what she termed “asshattery,” so she’d asked me to concentrate on Clarissa’s page. Thanks to their on-again, off-again, who-knows-what-again relationship, our prime suspect, Aiden Tuttle, made a regular appearance there.

  At the beginning of summer, things definitely had been on again between Clarissa and Aiden. With the page littered with endless comments to each of Aiden’s posts, I had a hard time deciphering what exactly had happened. Then, as I minimized the comments, it became clear. During one of their dates, Aiden had posted live and continuous updates about his “progress” on the wiki. I stripped out the comments and sent the whole thing to Elle. Two minutes later, my cell phone rang.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Elle said, over and over again.

  “I know,” I responded, each time.