Tall, Dark, and Nerdy
High School Billionaire #1
Maggie Dallen
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Audible Love
About the Author
Chapter One
Liv
Any second now the bomb would go off.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Vance?” Oliver’s voice came through my headphones.
I shook my head, my eyes darting to the countdown clock in the corner of the screen, my finger twitching over the key, one stroke and I’d either win the game or kill us all.
“Time’s running out,” Oliver said.
“Not. Helping.” I blew out a short breath and one of the brown frizzy curls dangling in my eyes went flying.
Oliver kept his mouth shut. It was all up to me. Three…two…
I clicked the key and held my breath.
“Ouch,” Oliver groaned as both of our avatars went up in smoke.
I sighed. Wonderful. Dead again. And here I thought my day couldn’t get any worse after being dumped by my boyfriend of six months. I clicked the button to reset the game. “Back to square one.”
He made a sound of agreement. We’d been playing for hours but there was no way we’d stop until we passed this level. “This game is brutal.”
“Tell me about it.” Every death meant going back to the beginning; there were no fail-safes here. Only endless hours wasted. “Why do we keep playing this game?”
“I have no idea.” From his end of the line I could hear shuffling sounds as Oliver no doubt took this reprieve from life and death situations to make a snack or something. I glared at the screen as I tried to imagine him in his boarding school dorm room rather than the bedroom I’d spent so much time in.
However he’d arranged it, there was no doubt his room would be cleaner than mine. Many things might have changed this year but I highly doubted that his neat freak tendencies were among them. I eyed my own all-too-familiar bedroom, which still sported the same Harry Potter posters from grade school. The bright blue hand-knitted cape I’d worn to school today topped a mountain of discarded clothes, and Oliver’s manga collection, which I’d inherited, was in serious danger of spilling out of the overstuffed bookshelf.
I’d told him there wouldn’t be enough room for his comics and mine. But apparently he didn’t trust his even neat-freakier mom not to toss them all while he was gone in some sort of empty nest cleaning frenzy.
“Does your room have a microwave?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
I shrugged out of habit, even though he obviously couldn’t see me. “Just curious. How do you make that nasty popped pork rinds stuff you like so much?”
“I don’t.”
I straightened. “You stopped eating that crap?”
He made a noise that I took to be yes as he ate.
“See?” I said with a sigh. “You and I are already growing apart.”
He groaned, because yes, this might have been the tenth time on this particular call that I’d brought it up. I couldn’t help it. Ever since I’d left him in his then-empty dorm room in Manhattan to pile back into his dad’s car and head home, I’d been wallowing in a funk. My theory? There was no way we wouldn’t grow apart if he went off to this fancy-pants boarding school for our senior year of high school while I stayed in our Podunk little Pennsylvania town for another year.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said.
I let out a huff of amusement. Him calling me names like that was oddly reassuring, and I was pretty sure he knew it judging by how often he’d been insulting me lately. Just him calling me by my last name gave me the warm fuzzies these days. Ever since grade school we’d been calling one another by our last names—Vance and Jackson. Everyone else called me Liv or Olivia—bleck, I hated my full name—but only Oliver called me Vance, just like I was the only one who referred to him as Jackson. I sighed loudly into the phone. Two months of separation from my bestie and it was these little things that made me miss him even now when we were talking.
I could hear him munching on something—something that apparently was not pork rinds. Which was a good thing. All those preservatives would be the death of him one day if he kept eating them on a daily basis. That’s what my mom would say, anyway. She was always trying the latest “it” diet and buying Shape magazines. My mom was always the first to try out new weight-loss trends, and I almost always leapt on board once she paved the way. It was only fair that she be the guinea pig since it was her set of genes that were responsible for my never-ending battle with thigh bulge and belly pudge.
My father might have been the one who abandoned us to start a new family with one of the young nurses in his practice, but my mother was the one who’d cursed me with cellulite. Sometimes it was a toss-up for who I resented more.
Kidding. Totally kidding. My mom was the bomb, albeit mildly crazy in the health department. Just like Oliver’s mother was a saint among women…when she wasn’t trying to spray you with Pledge to make sure you didn’t bring dirt into her house. Our moms had been best friends since before we were born, which was how Oliver and I had become besties at birth, basically.
“Is your roommate there?” I asked.
“No.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Probably a party or something. I didn’t ask.”
I chewed on that for a moment as Oliver chewed on his non-pork-related snack. “Do you want to be out partying?”
The chewing noises stopped. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m playing the world’s hardest video game with you.”
I stood up to stretch. “Yes, but you don’t have to, you know that, right?”
“Seriously, Vance? Not this again.”
“It’s Friday night, Jackson. I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re just saying,” he said. “You know how I know? You’ve said it at least three thousand times in the last two months.”
“I don’t want to hold you back.”
“I know.” Exasperation laced his tone, but there was no way I could just let it go, even though I knew trying to get him to go out and mingle on his own was a lost cause. If left to his own devices, Oliver would never leave his room. He’d either get lost in a video game, a comic, or one of his latest coding projects. Without me in his life, there was a very good chance he would have turned into some sort of basement-dwelling troll every weekend of our high school career.
And now that I wasn’t there to drag him out of his room? Well, I still considered it my duty as his best friend to make sure he put himself out there. Particularly with the ladies, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink.
Oliver had finally escaped the small-minded, fishbowl nightmare that was Harmon High; he ought to be out making friends who’d appreciate him as much as I did. He should be meeting girls who wouldn’t laugh at him just because he didn’t play sports or say things like ‘yo’ and ‘bro.’ Oliver should be out having adventures in the big city, and not spending every free minute talking to me as if nothing had changed. I might’ve still been stuck in Harmon for another year, but that didn’t mean he had to wait for me before he enjoyed the perks of his new life.
“You should be out having fun,” I said, my tone firm.
“This is fun.”
“We just killed ourselves three times in a row,”
I pointed out.
“But we had fun while doing it, didn’t we?”
Staring at the screen where our characters’ bodies lay mutilated, I relented with a sigh. “Yeah, we totally had fun.”
“Then I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” he said. I could practically see him now. His dark hair was probably overgrown because he never remembered to get a haircut, and he’d be fidgeting with his glasses as he sat back down at his computer so we could start another game.
I heaved another sigh and blurted out the pathetic truth. “I hope you didn’t stay home to play video games on a Friday night because you feel sorry for me.”
He snickered a bit, and I could hear his smile when he answered. “Why would I feel sorry for you?”
“Uh, because I got dumped today?”
“Oh yeah, that.”
I straightened in my seat. “Oh yeah, that?” I repeated with disdain. “You could show a little sympathy for me here, Jackson.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to pity you,” he said, repeating my words from earlier. This was the problem when dealing with a smarty-pants. Oliver tended to remember stuff. He remembered everything. For better or for worse.
“I don’t want pity,” I clarified. “But I do want sympathy.”
He sighed. “You have my sympathy. However, I might point out that you were talking about potentially breaking up with Stuart only last week—”
“But I didn’t.”
“And you’ve mentioned on more than one occasion that his halitosis has made intimacy an issue—”
“You are the only person who uses the word halitosis. Why can’t you just say rank breath like everyone else in the world?”
“Not to mention,” he continued. “You admitted less than two hours ago that the breakup was probably for the best.”
I growled in annoyance as I got up from my desk and headed to the kitchen for those tasteless, low-calorie cardboard “treats” my mom had gotten us to snack on. Listening to Oliver eat was making me hungry. “Fine. I might not be heartbroken, but I think a little sympathy and kindness are still in order.”
“Fine,” he said, amusement tingeing his voice. “You have my deepest condolences on your split from the guy with rank breath.”
My lips twitched up against my will at his use of the phrase. Oliver was one of those guys who just didn’t talk like everyone else. I mean, he didn’t speak Klingon or anything, but he had this way of talking that was slightly more eloquent, more mature maybe, than the average high school senior. It probably had some correlation to the fact that he’d gotten a perfect score on the English portion of the SATs. FYI, he also got a perfect score on the math section.
My best friend was smart. Like, wicked smart.
“Seriously, though,” he added, the amusement fading from his tone. “Are you going to be all right?”
I nodded and then remembered that he couldn’t see it. “Yeah. I’ll be fine. It’s just a bummer, that’s all.”
“You’re going to miss him?” Oliver’s voice sounded stilted. Awkward. Not unusual for Oliver, who didn’t exactly excel at boy talk. But, since he was my one and only friend, he was stuck talking about boys. For better or for worse.
Before you get the wrong idea about me being just as introverted as Oliver—I wasn’t. I’d tried to make other friends; I’d just never met anyone else in our tiny town who I clicked with the way I always had with Oliver. His story was pretty much the same—it wasn’t like either of us was morally opposed to making other friends, it was just that neither of us seemed to be any good at it.
I hoped for both our sakes that this inability to make friends in Harmon could be attributed to the tiny population and the small-town mentality that seemed to think the only way to fit in meant having to fit the mold.
I pursed my lips as I considered the contents of the fridge. I think we all knew the cardboard treats weren’t going to cut it tonight.
“Well?” Oliver prompted. “Are you going to miss him?”
“I’m going to miss having a boyfriend,” I said with a sigh. That was the truth. I’d liked having a boyfriend, especially with Oliver out of the picture. He’d been someone to do things with on the weekends, and someone to chat with in the halls. Stuart’s table had provided a surefire place to sit at in the cafeteria…not to mention an automatic date to homecoming. I let out another pathetic sigh and my gaze darted between a bowl of fruit and a little white box filled with yummy, fried Chinese goodness.
“But you’re not going to miss him,” Oliver said. He was nothing if not persistent.
He was also dense. I mean, a genius, but still dense sometimes. Stuart might not have won any awards for his looks...or his personality, for that matter. And he would have categorically failed when it came to his kissing skills. But that didn’t make being dumped weeks before the biggest dance of the semester any easier to bear. And it definitely didn’t help that he’d done it first. Now I’d look even more pathetic than ever at school because I’d been dumped by bad-breath Stu.
But try explaining all that to Oliver—a guy who’d not only escaped the prison-like confines of Harmon High, but who’d never cared all that much what our classmates thought of him even when he went there.
“I am going to miss Stuart, in a weird sort of way.” I reached for a carton of leftover Chinese takeout and straightened. “He was the best boyfriend I ever had.”
There was a brief pause after that grand statement. “Vance, he was the only boyfriend you’ve ever had.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s what makes it so sad, you know?”
“No,” he said, his voice dry. “I don’t know.”
He was right, he probably couldn’t understand. After all, he’d never had a girlfriend. Not because he wasn’t attractive. He was. At least, I thought so. But the dopes at our high school—his former high school—hadn’t been able to look beyond the fact that he was…well, let’s face it. He was a nerd. Not just because he was smart, but because he was socially awkward in a way that put every character of The Big Bang Theory to shame. Not even a handsome face could outweigh the fact that Oliver had zero game. He was way too straightforward at the best of times, but most of the time he just didn’t interact with others. Except for me, of course. I was sort of Oliver’s personal translator to the world at large.
He might have had to tutor me through calculus last year, but sometimes, like right now, it fell on me to explain the obvious stuff, like high school relationships.
“He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss…” I waved a hand as I searched for the right words. “Getting over your first love is serious business.”
“He was your first love?” His voice was so sharp I almost dropped the container of food.
“Well…”
“Liv Vance,” he said in that deep voice he’d developed sometime when I wasn’t paying attention over the last couple years.
“Yes?”
“Were you or were you not in love with Stuart Hall?”
I paused, trying to remember how I’d felt six months ago when Stuart had first asked me out. I’d been excited, but mainly because a boy had asked me out. And my emotions had gone downhill from there. Excitement had led to curiosity—especially with the kissing part—but then I’d discovered that I didn’t really like kissing Stuart, so then I was just sort of anxious about being alone with him—
“Vance, this should not be a difficult question to answer.”
He was right, of course. It wasn’t difficult. “No,” I said with a sigh. “I never loved him.”
There was a long silence on his end as I climbed the stairs back to my bedroom. “But you still have to feel sorry for me. As my best friend, you’re legally obligated to indulge my wallowing after my first breakup.”
“Fair enough,” he said, making me grin. That was one of the things I loved best about Oliver. He was so easy to get along with, even when I made up arbitrary rules of friendship.
“What’s the time
frame on wallowing these days?” he asked idly.
“Umm.” I hopped onto my bed and dug into the leftovers. “Seventy-two hours.”
He sighed, but I just knew he was smiling. “Sounds like we’re in for a long weekend.”
“Mmm,” I agreed with a mouthful of food. “Get ready for some hardcore pity partying.”
“Maybe we should party for your pity in person,” he said.
I froze mid-bite, but I recovered quickly. “That’s some sweet alliteration, bro.”
He gave a snort of amusement but didn’t say anything. He was waiting for a response to his suggestion.
Here’s the thing—I’d been trying really hard to give Oliver some space since he’d gone off to his boarding school. Physical space, I mean. We still talked or texted about ten times a day. But I’d been trying to stay away so he could make new friends and start a new life. Much as I missed him, this was good for him for so many reasons. Not the least of which was that he was finally surrounded by people who not only appreciated his genius, but understood it. He was going to school with a bunch of other gifted people, and most of them were probably as rich as he was. And yeah, the boy was rich.
Or at least, he would be very soon.
Long story short? My genius best friend created an app…and it was huge. Like Snapchat-meets-Twitter levels of popularity, and it happened crazy fast. One minute he was a somewhat normal high school teenager, and the next he was in the public eye as the world—and mega social media corporations—took notice.
With the rise in popularity of his app, called Love Quiz, the financial offers started coming their way. Oliver had saved up a nice little chunk of change already thanks to some advertisers, but nothing compared to the fortune they’d get when they officially sold to one of the tech giants. At this point, it was clearly just a matter of time before the sale to Telecor was a done deal, and his parents thought it would be best for Oliver to get out of our tiny town with its limited opportunities and take advantage of all that the big city and this elite private school had to offer. So, they’d splurged for the hoity-toity boarding school, with its world-class security and high-powered alumni.
Tall, Dark, and Nerdy: High School Billionaire #1 Page 1
