Geek Charming

by Palmer, Robin

  That day, I discovered firsthand the power of the second glance. After third period, as I walked from Russian to English, senior girls who hadn’t ever looked at me let alone talked to me over the last four years did a double take. Then, after fourth period, as I walked to lunch, Ashley Turner actually said hello to me. And I knew it was me because she said “Hey, Josh” rather than just “Hey,” which could’ve meant that she was talking to Dinshaw Muzbar, who was right beside me. With her clonelike looks, Ashley wasn’t my type, but still. Premakeover, the only interaction I had had with her was when she snapped, “Hey, watch it!” when I almost smacked her in the nose with the door as I was coming out of the nurse’s office one afternoon because I had forgotten my inhaler and thought the dizzy spells I was having might have been early-warning signs of a brain tumor.

  “Wow, Dylan, you weren’t kidding,” said Lola as I walked up onto The Ramp with the guys and our gear.

  “Weren’t kidding about what?” I asked as we started unpacking our equipment.

  “About the fact that you’re actually cute,” said Hannah with amazement. Realizing what had just come out of her mouth, she reached out and patted my shoulder. “Not that you looked, you know, bad before,” she said quickly. During the time I had been filming the girls, I had come to realize that while Hannah was first-tier popular, she—unlike Dylan or Lola—wanted to be liked by everyone, even us nonpopular folk.

  Lola snorted as she took out her mirror to do a hair-and-makeup check. She, on the other hand, didn’t care if anyone liked her. “Yeah, anyway, you look good.” She pointed at my stomach. “And if you started going to the gym, you’d look even better.”

  Steven patted his own extra poundage. “You know, Lola, some chicks dig a guy with a little extra junk in the trunk. More of us to love.”

  Lola stopped applying lip gloss and cringed, but I could see the slightest smile on her lips. Strangely enough, she seemed to have a soft spot for Steven, of all people. She acted like she couldn’t stand him, but ever since the frat party she’d been laughing at his jokes more and more. “Okay, that joke wasn’t funny the first time around, so I don’t know why you’d think it was funny now.”

  He shrugged and started unwrapping a Milky Way.

  Dylan finished brushing her hair and flipped her head back up, looking like a poster girl for a shampoo commercial. “Didn’t I do a great job?” she asked the girls.

  Hannah nodded and pointed at Ari, who was in the corner trying to untangle himself from the power cords he had managed to wrap around his legs. “Maybe you could do a makeover on Ari, too,” she whispered. “He’s got no muscles, and he’ll probably be bald by the time he’s twenty-five, and he slouches, but other than that, I’ve been thinking he’s got some potential. Plus, he’s got a really nice singing voice. We sang some show tunes together at the frat party.”

  Steven and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Maybe this documentary wouldn’t just get me into film school—maybe it could also get Ari a girlfriend as well.

  Dylan cringed as Ari tripped on the cable and fell flat on his face. “I’ll think about it.” She looked over at me. “Are we ready?”

  I looked over at Ari, who was feeling around on the ground for his glasses. “Yeah, let’s just start,” I said, picking up the camera. “So, I was thinking . . . maybe today you could tell us a bit about the perils of popularity. The dark side.”

  Lola rolled her eyes. “You sound like a promo for one of those TV newsmagazine shows.”

  Dylan shook her head. “Hmm . . . let’s see . . . well, because you’re on everyone’s radar, there’s the fact that you can’t really afford to repeat outfits that often.”

  “Hey, Josh,” said Lisa Eaton as she walked by, flashing me a smile. “You’re coming to my party on Friday night, right?”

  I put down the camera. “Oh, hey, Lisa. Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  “Cool,” she said, her smile broadening. “See you then.”

  I brought the camera back up to my face. “Okay, so that’s one bad thing. What else?”

  “Well, there’s the fact that—” Dylan started to say.

  “Hey, Josh,” Shannon Hall called as she walked by. “I love your new glasses. Very nerd chic,” she said with a wink.

  I put the camera down. “Thanks, Shannon,” I said with a smile. I had to admit, it was pretty cool getting this kind of attention. Who knew that a new T-shirt, glasses, and a haircut could do wonders for your social life?

  I brought the camera back up to my face, but after ten more minutes of being interrupted by “Hey, Josh”s, Dylan had had it.

  “Okay, I’m done for today,” she said, gathering up her stuff.

  “But we barely got anything!” I replied.

  “That’s because you’re so busy chit-chatting with every girl that walks by!”

  “Someone sounds a little jealous,” said Steven under his breath.

  “As if,” she replied. “This has nothing to do with being jealous. I’m just trying to be a professional here and he’s, like, not paying any attention to me—I mean to the movie—which is so not like him.” She stood up. “Come on, girls, let’s go.”

  “I think I’m going to hang,” said Lola, who was huddled with Steven over his iPod, going through his music library.

  “Fine. Come on, Hannah.”

  Hannah looked up from where she was sitting with Ari, running lines with him from the Macbeth musical he was auditioning for. “I think I’m going to stay, too. That is, if it’s okay,” she said anxiously.

  I zoomed in on Dylan’s face. She looked like she had just been told they were out of fries at Du-par’s. “Suit yourself,” she said, walking away. “I’m going to go hang out with Asher.”

  Except that when she walked over to Asher’s table and tried to nuzzle up to him, he ignored her and just kept talking to his buddies. I put the camera down. I had no idea what to do. This makeover was Dylan’s idea, but it was like she was mad at me that it had worked. Should I try to talk to her about it? Or should I just let her calm down?

  Unfortunately, I realized that she was the person who I’d probably ask for advice on this kind of thing.

  As I watched her walk down The Ramp, I saw Amy Loubalu. And then I saw her smile. And then I saw her wave.

  After looking over my shoulder to make sure it was meant for me, I waved back.

  Wow. This makeover thing was powerful.

  I was waiting for Dylan by her locker when she got out of her last-period French class.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said as she opened it. The top shelf looked like something out of a beauty-supply store—cans of hair stuff, makeup, nail-polish remover, cotton balls. She had also hung up a small rod across the width so she could hang some clothes.

  “Look, about what happened at lunch,” I began.

  “What about it?” she said, changing her red shoes that I had discovered were called ballet flats to the same pair in black.

  “I’m sorry if I did anything to upset you,” I said. Steven had told me that his dad used that line all the time with his mom and it always worked.

  “You didn’t do anything to upset me,” she huffed, sounding very much like I had done something to upset her, as she slammed her locker and started walking toward the exit.

  I followed her. I could see we weren’t getting anywhere. “Okay, you know how there’s always that scene in movies where the two main characters get into a fight and then the one main character goes to apologize, and the other one says ‘What? You have nothing to apologize for,’ but, really, you can tell on their face that actually, the other main character has a lot to apologize for, but the thing is, he or she doesn’t know what it is because the other main character won’t tell him? Or her. Sometimes it’s a her, but usually it’s a him.”

  As we got outside, I took out my new Ray-Ban sunglasses she had bought for me and put them on. “And then the next act of the movie is all about the tension of the two of them
pretending everything’s fine, but it’s really not?”

  She shrugged as she walked toward her car. “Yeah? So?”

  I put my hand on her shoulder to stop her. “Well, I don’t want that to be a scene in this movie. I mean, I don’t want that to happen with us.” I fiddled with the inhaler in my coat pocket. “Because you’ve been really great to me, and if I did anything this afternoon to upset you, I’m sorry.”

  She looked at me and a small smile came over her face. “Thanks. I appreciate that.” She fiddled with her keys. “See, it’s just that I’ve seen situations where people have these huge transformations and suddenly become popular overnight and totally dis their friends.” She looked up. “And it’s really not cool.”

  I nodded. “I agree. I’d never do anything like that.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t think you would. Now, don’t you have to go stalk your crush?” she asked.

  I patted my pocket for the inhaler again. And then there was the scene in the movie where the hero was forced to summon up his courage and face the dragon. Granted, Amy Loubalu was a beautiful dragon, but still, this wasn’t going to be easy.

  If you show up where someone works, it’s a good idea to actually talk to them, because if not, like Dylan said, you come off like a stalker. Which is what I was starting to look like after my third straight afternoon at Mani’s Bakery.

  Mani’s was very healthy—sugar-free, fruit-juice-sweetened cookies, wheat-free cakes, that kind of stuff. And judging by all the yoga-mat bags and laptops, it was a big hangout for yoga people and screenwriters. But then again, anyplace in L.A. that was on the cheap side and offered free coffee refills was a hangout for screenwriters.

  As I walked in, I saw her behind the counter, wearing her gray Mani’s T-shirt, which on anyone else would’ve looked drab and ugly but, on her, managed to make her violet eyes even more gorgeous. As nonchalantly as possible, I took a hit off my inhaler before jamming it back into my pocket and making my way to what I liked to think had become “my” table and throwing my backpack down on a chair.

  “Oh, hey, Amy,” I said as I sat down, as if seeing her here was the weirdest coincidence in the world. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?” she asked as she put down a pot of tea next to a woman in her twenties with dreadlocks wearing a T-shirt that said REALITY’S OVERRATED.

  “I’m good. Just thought I’d get a coffee and get a little work done on my English paper.”

  “Two-percent-vanilla latte?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Yeah. Thanks.” I couldn’t believe she remembered. That had to be a good sign.

  “So are you not working at Good Buys anymore?” she asked as she brought my latte over. Amy had come in there once about a year ago with her mother and Raymond and I had spent a good fifteen minutes explaining all the different kinds of USB cables to them even though it technically wasn’t in our jurisdiction, which made Carl, whose jurisdiction it was in, very ticked off.

  “No. I am. Why?” I looked at the latte. Just like she had the other two times I had been there that week, she had made a heart with the foam.

  She shrugged. “It’s just that you’ve been here the last few afternoons.”

  “Oh. They switched my schedule around.” Or rather I had asked them to switch my schedule around so that instead of coming in at four, I came in at five so I could go to Mani’s and stalk. “And, uh, I have to work on this English paper. It’s a very hard English paper.”

  “I’ll let you concentrate on it, then,” she said as she took a sugar container from the next table where a guy with a goatee was writing poetry in a Moleskine notebook—really bad poetry from what I could tell because he was saying it out loud as he wrote—and put it on mine.

  “Oh. Okay,” I mumbled.

  Which, of course, was impossible. Not when the most beautiful girl in the world was less than five feet from me at all times, her smile lighting up the room as she joked with the Rastafarian at the table across the room, and played peekaboo with the baby to my right. All I could do was read the same paragraph of Madame Bovary over and over. For all I knew, it was in the original French.

  “Hey, did you get a haircut?” she asked later as she brought me over my third latte.

  “Me? Oh, um, yeah,” I mumbled, trying to get my leg to stop shaking. I didn’t know if it was nerves or restless leg syndrome, something I had recently read about on WebMD. After shopping and Du-par’s, Dylan had dragged me to a fancy salon over in Beverly Hills where an Italian guy named Miki had gone on for a good two minutes about how Supercuts had ruined America before taking his scissors to my head.

  “It looks good. You can really see your eyes now,” she said with a smile.

  I felt like my heart was going to ricochet right out of my chest and land in the plate of brown rice and veggies that the yogini in front of me was eating.

  “And that green hoodie really brings out the green in them,” she added.

  She knew I had green eyes! Knowing what color someone’s eyes were had to be a good sign. It meant she was actually paying attention when she looked at me. I wondered if there were any documented cases of people throwing up from happiness. “AreyougoingtoLisaEaton’spartythisSaturday?” I blurted out.

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath and arranged myself into what I hoped was a cool-looking slouch. “Are you, um, planning on going to Lisa Eaton’s Halloween party this Saturday night?”

  “No, I’m not friends with her, so I wasn’t invited,” Amy replied as she started filling the cinnamon container.

  “I don’t think it’s an invitation thing,” I said. “I heard it’s going to be a big blowout, so it sounds like pretty much anyone can go. Not like you’re just anyone . . . I mean, you’re definitely someone . . . ” I willed myself to shut up but my mouth just kept moving. “You know, someone in an anyone kind of way . . . ” What did that even mean?

  “Are you going?” she asked, waving good-bye to what could only be a screenwriter due to his misbuttoned oxford, laptop, and the look on his face of a mole who had been forced out into daylight.

  I nodded. “Yeah. For the documentary.”

  “I keep meaning to ask you how that’s going.”

  “I think I’ve gotten some great stuff,” I replied. “It seems to have become focused primarily on Dylan, which wasn’t my original intention, but every day my vision for it becomes clearer. It’s almost like watching a Polaroid develop—you know how at first it’s all hazy, but as time goes by, the picture gets sharper?”

  She nodded.

  It felt incredible to be understood. I started to relax. “Well, it’s kind of like that.” Talking about my work was no problem. Talking about social stuff, especially with a beautiful girl involved—big problem.

  “It seems like you and Dylan have become really close,” she said.

  Uh-oh. Knowing that Amy was Dylan’s archenemy, as least from Dylan’s point of view, this was a tough one. “Well, she’s definitely got strong opinions about things. But she’s not as bad as I thought.”

  “Uh-huh,” Amy said. What did that mean? Was it uh-huh-you’re-so-kidding-yourself or uh-huh-because-I’m-so-nice-I’m-going-to-let-that-slide? It was hard trying to decipher every word and facial expression when you were talking to someone you liked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe I will go.”

  “Cool,” I said. I tried to look like I didn’t care one way or another what she did, but if I had been a theater nerd like Ari, I would’ve broken out into song and started dancing around the room. “And, uh, if you go, I guess that means I’ll probably see you there.” Okay, could I be any more of a geek?

  “Probably,” she replied.

  My Sidekick beeped. I looked down to see a text from Raymond: 911 at Mrs. S’s house ASAP. “Not again,” I said with a sigh.

  “What?”

  “Just a work thing. I should go,” I said, gathering my stuff up and throwing some money down on the table. “See you at school.”<
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  “Do you want your latte to go?” she called after me.

  “No, that’s okay,” I called back. Who needed caffeine when you were energized by love?

  “Okay. See you later,” she replied, giving me one last high-wattage smile.

  The thrill of semiconvincing Amy to go to the party was quickly replaced by panic as I walked out to my car. What was I doing asking her to go to somewhere where I knew I’d be?! And if she did come, she’d probably expect me to at least say hello to her if not have a conversation with her. Which, of course, as evidenced by what had just happened, would be a disaster.

  I took out my inhaler and squirted. I know I had promised Dylan I’d ease up, but now was not the time.

  When it was time for my next review at work, I was asking for a raise if only because of how much time I had spent with Mrs. Spivakovsky. Mrs. S called every other week to say her soft drive—which I was constantly reminding her was called a hard drive—was broken again. In the ten service calls I had made to her house over the last year, not once had it been broken—every time it turned out to just not have been turned on. It wasn’t that Mrs. Spivakovsky was an idiot—in fact, back in Russia she had been a physicist—she was just lonely and wanted company. Her husband had died six months earlier and now it was just her and Gorky, her twelve-year-old Chihuahua who had cataracts in one eye. Not that she and Mr. Spivakovsky had communicated all that much. Every time I had been there when he was alive, he was watching chess matches on the Russian community cable station and ignoring her constant stream of chatter. I usually didn’t mind going, though, especially because she always had homemade baklava waiting.

  As I was parking the Geekmobile, my phone rang. “Hey, Dylan. What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I’m bored,” she replied with a sigh. Over the last few weeks I had become Dylan’s go-to person when she was bored, which, from the number of calls I received, was twice an hour. I could tell by the sound of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” blending with the hiss of water in the background that she was at The Dell in front of the fountain.