Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  “And this is Daddy’s office,” she said, leading me into a room that was almost the size of our school library.

  “Wow,” I whispered as I swept the camera across the room, getting footage of the crème de la crème of electronics—computers, stereo, another large-screen TV. I was in heaven. “I feel like I’m at work. Except all this stuff is top-of-the-line rather than the crap we sell.” I walked over and zoomed in on one of the framed pictures on the mahogany credenza. “This isn’t you, is it?” I asked. The girl in the picture was about nine and had hair so curly she looked like she had stuck her finger in a light socket. Plus, the lenses on her glasses weren’t Coke-bottle thick—they were more like gallon-size-Martinelli’s-apple-juice-bottle thick.

  “Don’t film that!” she yelped, pushing the camera out of the way so hard I almost dropped it. I felt like one of those paparazzi you hear about that get beat up by actors. She grabbed the picture—and the two others next to it that were just as bad, if not worse—and opened a drawer and threw them in there. “They’re from a very, very long time ago. For some reason Daddy insists on keeping them up there.”

  Jeez—talk about an awkward phase. I put the camera back up to my face. “Wow. You sure were . . .”

  She folded her hands in front of her chest and turned away. “Hideous? Disgusting? Beyond ugly?” she offered.

  “Actually, I was going to say you were kind of . . . I don’t know . . . cute. In, you know, a nerdy way,” I replied.

  “No I wasn’t,” she said firmly.

  “Okay. You weren’t,” I agreed. Like I said, I didn’t have a lot—scratch that—I didn’t have any experience with girls, but I had seen enough movies to know that sometimes the only thing to do was agree with them no matter what they said.

  She opened up the drawer and grabbed one of the other school pictures, where she had a mouthful of metal and a haircut that made her resemble a hobbit, and examined it before looking up at the camera. “Really? You think I was cute?” she asked.

  “Um—” What to say and not get my nose broken?

  “If you thought I was cute then, that would be the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. I mean, Daddy says he thinks I was cute back then, but he has to say that because he’s, you know, my dad.”

  I looked at the picture again. The phrase a face only a father could love should have been stamped on the bottom.

  “So do you?” she asked.

  “Do I what?” I asked back as I started examining the computer monitor as if I had never seen one before.

  “Do you think I was cute back then?”

  I turned to her and put the camera in front of my face.

  “Nuh-uh,” she said, taking it out of my hands. “I want to see your face when you answer.”

  Great. “Well, obviously you, you know, went from being a duckling—not an ugly duckling, mind you, more like an . . . awkward duckling—to a swan since then,” I explained, “and, uh, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that you look a lot better now, but, you weren’t, you know . . . hideous or anything like that back then.”

  “I thought you said I was cute.”

  “I did.”

  “But just a second ago you said I ‘wasn’t hideous,’ which is a lot different than ‘cute.’”

  Asher may have been a jerk, but I was overcome with a rush of sympathy for the guy. Did he have to go through this stuff on a regular basis? No wonder he liked to spend his weekends at Ultimate Fighting championships and other places where there weren’t a lot of girls. “Hey, did you ever think about joining the Debate Team?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Okay, I’d like to amend my original statement: how about, you were cute in an awkward way?”

  She thought about it and then nodded. “I guess that’s better than nothing,” she said. “You look kind of tired.”

  That was the understatement of the year. Trying to avoid the minefield of talking about a girl’s looks with her was harder than calculus. “Tired? Or kind of tired?” I teased.

  “Ha. Ha. Come on, I’ll walk you out,” she said.

  Before she turned off the light I took one more glance at Dylan: The Early Years. It was nice to know that like Quentin when he worked at a video store, everyone had to start somewhere.

  chapter seven: dylan

  The week after the ZBT frat party, something weird started to happen: whenever I was sitting at my desk at home trying to avoid doing my French homework, or stuck in traffic on Wilshire Boulevard on my way to Pilates, instead of texting or calling Lola or Hannah, like I usually did, I found myself texting or calling . . . Josh.

  In fact, that’s what I was doing the following Thursday afternoon when I was with Lola and Hannah, at Kathy’s Nail Salon, getting our weekly mani/pedis and he was at work.

  Josh: OK, best on-screen couples who also are/ were offscreen couples. Go.

  We had recently started playing this game where one of us threw out a subject, and the one to come up with an answer that couldn’t be topped won.

  Me: Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt

  Josh: Woody Allen & Diane Keaton

  Me: Ernie & Bert

  Josh: ????

  Me: From Sesame Street!

  Josh: I know that—but I thought it was a given that they had to be HUMAN and not made out of felt!

  This made me crack up to the point where I smeared my right pointer finger, which caused Kathy, my manicurist, to not only give me a dirty look, but start chattering in Vietnamese to the rest of the manicurists, who then all gave me dirty looks.

  “Are you texting with Josh again?” asked Lola as Ashley, her manicurist, painted her nails with the same dark color she always wore.

  I nodded, careful to sit still as Rachel applied topcoat to my toes. Even though all of the manicurists were Vietnamese, they all had super-American-sounding names.

  “So are you guys like totally BFF now?” said Hannah anxiously as Miriam applied a pale pink to her nails. Hannah could be so neurotic sometimes. Frankly, that’s why I found it so refreshing to talk to Josh. He listened to me, but he also didn’t let me get away with things. See, when you’re the most popular girl in school, a lot of what you hear is “Omigod, Dylan—you are so right.” Especially from people who shall remain nameless, like Hannah. Now, I am right a lot of the time, but I’m also human. Sometimes I say things without really thinking about them and they’re not right—in fact, sometimes they’re downright stupid. Josh had no problem challenging me—like with the Ernie and Bert thing.

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s just business.”

  The two of them looked at each other.

  “What?” I said.

  Lola shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just that . . . ” She sighed. “Oh, never mind,” she said as she picked up a magazine (almost smearing her freshly painted nails) before Miriam yelled at her in Vietnamese and snatched it away from her.

  I hated when Lola did that sigh/“Oh, never mind” combination. Talk about passive-aggressive. At least that’s what Hannah had said it was when we were talking about it one night on the phone.

  “Uh, yes, mind. Spill it,” I demanded.

  She looked at me. “Well, people are . . . talking.”

  “Who’s talking about what?”

  “People on The Ramp. About how geek-friendly you’ve become recently.”

  I turned to Hannah. “Is this true?”

  She nodded.

  “Look, I’m saying this because I’m your best best friend—” Lola started to say.

  “Best friend,” Hannah corrected. “We decided we’re all equally best friends.”

  “Well, we were, until Josh came into the picture. Anyway, all I want to say is that with Fall Fling coming up, and with Dakota amping up Operation Prom Queen by blogging about the marine she dated last summer—”

  “Did you read that last entry, by the way?” Hannah asked. “It’s like totally R-rated.”

  “—I’d just be careful,” Lola went on. />
  “Obviously, being nice to people from every clique is important because you want to get as many votes as possible,” explained Hannah, whose father was on the Beverly Hills City Council, “but you don’t want to identify too much with Josh and those guys.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because of your past,” said Lola. “You know, how you yourself used to be a geek.” She made sure to say the last part just a little bit louder than necessary.

  At this, all the manicurists looked up from the various hands and feet they were polishing and looked at me in amazement. My hands started to get clammy. I hadn’t even thought about that.

  “You don’t want anyone to think you’ve had some sort of psychotic break and are regressing,” said Hannah, whose mother was a shrink.

  “As if,” I said defensively. My phone buzzed and I looked down. So see u at 7? said the text from Josh. Last night he had told me that his mom was going to be cooking a bunch of dishes she had learned in her Introduction to Indian Cooking class at the Learning Annex, and when I told him how much I loved Indian food—despite the fact that many of the dishes used cream and were therefore high in fat—he had invited me over. All day I had been looking forward to a home-cooked meal. If you were popular, people automatically assumed that you had plans 24/7, but the truth was that most nights I ended up nuking a Lean Cuisine and eating it by myself while I watched TV.

  Yeah, see u then, I typed back. Maybe I was spending too much time with Josh—especially since I had a boyfriend and all—but I couldn’t not go to dinner at his house. That would just be rude.

  Plus, I was starved.

  As I was standing in front of my walk-in closet trying to put together the perfect home-cooked Indian meal outfit—which, when your closet is as big as mine isn’t all that easy—Asher called.

  “Hey, babe,” I said as I flopped down on my bed and almost slid off onto the floor. After reading about some model’s trip to Morocco in Teen Vogue, I had recently redecorated my bedroom in a very colorful Moroccan fashion with a silk tapestry as a bedspread. It was gorgeous, but it was super slippery. I couldn’t even remember the last time Asher had called me on his own rather than returning one of my calls. Maybe all the thinking I had been doing about how Josh was such a better conversationalist had worked in a reverse-psychology way.

  “Hey,” Asher replied. “What up?”

  Why couldn’t he say “what’s up?” like normal people? More and more, I found myself annoyed by lots of little things about him. For example, the way he didn’t even bother to pop a breath mint after eating Mexican food if he knew we were going to make out. Or how he moved his lips when he was reading. Or how he’d pick at his toenails when we were watching TV at my house and then not wash his hands before we ate sushi. Josh was a geek, but Asher was just gross. That being said, I was still totally in love with him. How could I not be, seeing that he was cute, and popular, and . . . cute, and . . . popular. Obviously, he had a lot of other great qualities as well, but I couldn’t talk to him, look for an outfit, and think of them all at the same time. I sat up and started making an “absolutely not” and a “maybe” pile of outfits. “Nothing. Just, uh, doing my French homework.” Not that he would’ve even cared, but it didn’t seem necessary to let him know I was going to Josh’s for dinner.

  “Oh. Then I should probably let you get back to it,” Asher said, sounding relieved.

  I walked over to one of my two full-length mirrors and held up a black caftan embroidered with pink stitching before deciding it wouldn’t work for dinner, as Morocco and India were very different countries. (I think.) “It’s okay. I can talk for a few minutes. How are you?”

  “Fine. There was something I wanted to talk to you about, but it can wait, since you’re busy and all.”

  “What is it?” I asked, sitting/sliding back down on my bed and examining my pedicure. I was so lucky I could pull off lilac—on a lot of girls, it made them look like they had been dead for a half hour, but on me it looked just great.

  “Nothing. We’ll talk about it some other time. You should get back to French.”

  Okay, things were now officially weird. First, calling me on his own rather than returning one of mine, and now turning into the homework police? It was like he had been body-snatched.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah. No worries, mon.” That was another thing that drove me nuts—the “mon” thing. I mean, with blond hair and blue eyes he wasn’t exactly Jamaican. Plus I was his girlfriend, not a smelly guy. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Later.” Click.

  “Bye,” I said to the air.

  As I put on a pink-and-blue embroidered silk tunic, I thought about calling Hannah or Lola and telling them about what just happened with Asher, but what had happened earlier at the nail place had me feeling weird. Like Asher said, I was sure it was nothing and everything was fine, but still—when you’re a famous and powerful couple, people just love to start all kinds of rumors about how you’re breaking up. Just look at all the tabloids. There was no way that Asher and I could break up. Seeing that we were like royalty at Castle Heights, that would’ve devastated the other students.

  Beachwood Canyon—the part of town where Josh lived—was actually kind of cute. Well, “cute” in a funky, boho, let’s-slum-it-because-we’re-so-cool Hollywood way rather than in an everything-matches-just-perfectly Beverly Hills way, which is more my style, but still. All the houses were little, like something out of a fairy tale.

  “Oh my—Dylan, honey, you really didn’t have to do this,” Josh’s mom you-must-call-me-Sandy said as the three of us stood in the kitchen checking out the dessert spread I had brought.

  “I wasn’t sure if, you know, you were a pie person, or a cupcake person, or a frozen-yogurt person, so I decided it would be best to get a variety of stuff,” I replied. While it had seemed like a good idea at the time, I could see now that I may have gone a bit overboard.

  “Well, I’m just going to have to try a little of everything,” Sandy said. “Not like I need it,” she added, patting her stomach, which was just the teensiest bit poochy. That’s what seems to happen to women in their forties no matter how many times a week they do Pilates. I was so not looking forward to that. “Shoot—I forgot to get Rolaids!” She turned to me. “Ever since Josh was born, I’ve had stomach problems. My gastroenterologist says I’m crazy, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that he was premature.” She turned to Josh. “Honey, can you do me a favor and run to the drugstore and get some for me?”

  Josh paled. “You mean, leave you guys alone?”

  She put her arm around me. “Sure—it’ll give Dylan and me some time to get to know each other. You know, some girl time.”

  I started to get nervous, too. Sandy seemed nice enough, but what if she started asking me parentlike questions, like whether I had ever smoked marijuana (I hadn’t) or used birth control (not an issue because I was still a virgin). “Come on,” she said, picking up a tray of samosas, which were like Indian knishes, and leading me toward the living room. “The dal’s not going to be done for another twenty minutes, so let’s go sit and chat.”

  Josh grabbed my arm and leaned in. “If she starts getting really embarrassing, just tell her you have to go to the bathroom and stay in there until I get back,” he whispered.

  I nodded as Sandy continued to lead me out of the kitchen. Once in the living room, I took the red-and-black paisley couch while she settled into an electric-blue rocking chair with a pink cushion. At first I wondered whether maybe she was color-blind because there was an awful lot of color going on in the room, but strangely enough, it worked.

  I pointed at the rocking chair. “What an interesting color combination,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “I got the chair at the Fairfax flea market and the fabric at the Rose Bowl swap meet.” Josh had mentioned Sandy’s obsession with flea markets.

  “You mean you made this?” I asked, impressed, as I nibbled at my sam
osa.

  She nodded proudly. “Yes, I did. That Introduction to Upholstering class I took at the Learning Annex was worth every penny.” She pointed at the couch. “I got that at the Santa Monica flea market. Don’t worry—I made sure to have it de-flea’d.”

  Was it my imagination or were the backs of my legs starting to itch?

  Although I had worried that, as a mother of a geek, Sandy might wear mom jeans and have a bad perm and no sense of humor, it turned out that she was so cool. Most of my friends’ moms were so busy with shopping and charity events that I knew them about as well as I knew Juan, the barista at the Starbucks I stopped at every morning on my way to school. Within five minutes of sitting with her, Sandy had told me her entire life story—how, like me, she had grown up in Beverly Hills before she went to UCLA and married Josh’s father, who was a law-school student, and became a Brentwood housewife until Josh’s dad came home one night and told her he was leaving her for Amber. And how she then had found herself with almost no money and had to move here, but soon discovered she was a lot happier than when she had been rich even if she couldn’t afford to shop at Saks anymore. It was a very inspirational story, like something you’d see on a Lifetime Television Original Movie.

  “So what about you, Dylan?” Sandy asked as she rocked in the chair. “What kind of life do you envision for yourself in the years to come?”

  Wow. This family was really into the deeper questions of life.

  “Um, you know, I guess I sort of see myself having the life you had—not this part, but the Brentwood part,” I replied. “You know, the part with the credit cards.”

  She laughed. “Well, if that’s what you want, then I hope you get it. However, I just want you to know that sometimes when you get close to them, you find that things are a lot different than they look from the outside.”

  Like Josh, I thought as I reached for another samosa. So what if people were gossiping about my friendship with Josh? Geekiness wasn’t a communicable disease like mono. Maybe geeks didn’t have a lot of fashion sense, or social skills, but they were people, too, and they had as much of a right to be at Castle Heights as I did. In fact, maybe I would make that my platform for my prom campaign: trying to bridge the gap between the geeks and the popular kids. I’d be an ambassador, like those actresses who travel to third-world countries and adopt babies. Plus, I myself was a living, breathing example that geekiness was something that could be outgrown and overcome. I mean, if anyone was qualified to help the geeks of the world mainstream into a regular social life, it was me.