Geek Charming

Table of Contents

 

“I guess I don’t have a choice.” I sighed. “Meet me on The Ramp at lunch on Monday and you can start then. But I’m telling you I don’t care what my father says—if I see that you’re trying to make me look bad, the deal’s off. Got it?”

“Got it,” he replied, nibbling away on the black side of the cookie.

“And don’t think that this means that all of a sudden we’re like friends, or anything,” I said. “It’s strictly business. Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Asher and I are super serious, so if you were thinking of using this documentary thing as a way to, you know,
hit on me
or anything, it’s not going to work.”

“Don’t worry,” Geek Boy said. “Like you said, it’s strictly business. But who knows—maybe this’ll be the start of a long and rewarding working relationship.”

Sheesh—
someone
was taking this movie stuff
way
too seriously. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said as he stood up and put out his hand. “So we have a deal?”

I put mine out as well. “I guess so.”

As I walked him to what he called the Neilmobile (Hello? Can you
get
cheesier than that?) I tried to look at the bright side of things: helping Geek Boy fulfill his dream of getting into USC film school had to balance out whatever bad karma I may have had.

Not that I had any, of course.

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Published by speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (usa) Inc., 2008

Copyright © robin Palmer, 2008 all rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION Data
Palmer, robin, 1969-
Geek charming / by robin Palmer.
p. cm.
summary: rich, spoiled, and popular high school senior Dylan is coerced into doing a
documentary film with josh, one of the school’s geeks, who leads her
to realize that the world does not revolve around her.

eISBN : 978-1-101-01988-7

the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To the real Amy Loubalu,
For restoring my sanity on a daily basis

Acknowledgments

With special thanks to:

Jennifer Bonnell—the world’s best editor and midwife—for getting me the way she does, and for always making me laugh through the pain of the contractions.

Eileen Kreit at Puffin for being such an enthusiastic cheerleader.

My agent, Kate Lee, for everything else.

And New York City, which became my new home while writing this.

chapter one:
dylan

One day as I was watching
Oprah
, waiting for her to get to her “Favorite Things for Spring” segment (she has
the
cutest taste in accessories), I heard this self-help guru guy say that the word for
crisis
in Chinese is actually two words:
danger
and
opportunity
.

The reason I looked up from
Vogue
when the guru said this is because I have one of those lives where there’s always a crisis going on. Like 24/7. My best friend, Lola Leighton, says that I’m just a drama queen and that they’re not
real
crises, like, say, the kind she would’ve had to deal with if her parents hadn’t adopted her from the orphanage in China. Okay, yes, when you put it in that context, I guess Lola’s right. But since I live in Beverly Hills and not a third-world country, my crises and the crises of nonadopted kids are bound to be different, you know?

Take, for instance, the time I was driving home from the Justin Timberlake concert at the Staples Center and I was all by myself because I had a huge fight with my boyfriend Asher after I caught him staring at Amy Loubalu’s boobs like
seven
times that night even though he swears he wasn’t, and my BMW conked out on the 405 freeway at midnight and I had to wait an
hour
for Triple A to arrive. Now, that, in my book, is a crisis—especially since I was wearing a miniskirt and tank top because it was a million degrees out. I mean, if a serial killer who liked girls with long blonde hair and blue eyes had driven by at that moment, I would’ve been dead meat. The only “opportunity” there was the opportunity to be chopped up into a million little pieces.

As far as I’m concerned, sometimes a crisis is just a crisis. Like what happened last week with my Serge Sanchez bag. Yet
another
crisis—and the only opportunity there was to see what $1,200 worth of red leather would look like after it dried out. (FYI, it turns out that it doesn’t look so bad—sort of a cross between my two favorite nail polishes, OPI’s I’m Not Really A Waitress and Essie’s Scarlett O’Hara.)

It was Tuesday afternoon and I was at The Dell, which is a huge outdoor mall on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood that my dad happens to own, with Lola and Hannah Mornell, our other best friend. The day before I had seen these absolutely
darling
J.Crew red gingham ballet flats that I just had to have because I knew they’d look so cute with my black capris and a white shirt I had bought the week before. Very 1960s movie-starlet-ish, which was going to be my new look for fall. So I had gotten the shoes (plus two dresses, some tank tops, a cashmere hoodie, and some lip gloss) and the three of us were hanging out in front of the fountain deciding whether we should go to Urth Caffé for sugar-free iced vanilla lattes or Pinkberry for frozen yogurt when the Crisis-with-a-capital-C occurred.

“Omigod, Dylan,” said Hannah as she clipped a tortoiseshell barrette onto her short auburn bob. Hannah is incredibly preppy for L.A. standards. While I may buy something from J.Crew occasionally, like the ballet flats, almost her entire wardrobe is from there. B-o-r-i-n-g, if you ask me, but I do believe in freedom of speech in fashion choices, so whatever. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you who Jennifer Bonnell saw at Pinkberry on Sunday afternoon!”

“Who?” I asked, with my face tipped up to the sun as I tried to get some fall rays.

“Amy Loubalu.”

“So?” I said.

“So,” said Hannah, “she just
happened
to be talking to Asher.”

My head snapped down so fast I’m surprised I didn’t break my neck.

This is when the Crisis began.

“She is
so Single White Female
-ing me!” I cried.
Single White Female
was a movie I once saw on HBO about this woman whose roommate starts dressing like her, and gets the same haircut, and then steals her boyfriend and
kills him
.

Lola rolled her brown eyes as she put on some lip gloss. “Um, excuse me but she looks nothing like you. If anything, she looks like me.”

“Um, don’t take this the wrong way, but if you haven’t noticed, you’re Asian,” I said.

“Yeah, but we both have long dark hair,” she replied.

“She has a point,” added Hannah.

Okay, so maybe Amy didn’t
look
like me, since I’m blonde and she’s brunette, but she was obviously trying to copy me by stealing Asher away from me. People like to say that when people copy you, it’s supposed to be flattering, but I don’t see it that way. Frankly, I find it very lazy. I’ve worked very hard to be the most popular girl in the senior class at Castle Heights High and it’s not fair for some girl to think she can just ride on my coattails.

As I continued going off on Amy in front of the fountain, I was waving my arms a lot, which is what I tend to do when I go into what Lola calls DQM (Drama Queen Mode). Just then my Serge Sanchez bag—which had been hanging on my right arm like it always was because I was terrified of having it stolen—went flying into the fountain. Apparently my arms had gotten really strong from Pilates because it’s not like the bag just sort of plopped over the edge so I could easily fish it out. It went soaring all the way into the middle, and since it’s such a huge fountain, there was no way I could get it out myself.

After that I did what anyone in my situation would do—I started freaking out and threatening to sue until Hannah pointed out that not only did I not have a reason to sue because the whole thing was my own fault, but since my dad owns The Dell, I’d be suing him and that probably wouldn’t go over very well. When I realized Hannah had a point, I did the next best thing that someone in my position would do—I started looking around for a guy to jump into the fountain to fish it out for me. Not to sound full of myself or anything, but getting guys to help me out with stuff is never a problem, whether it be trig homework or opening my locker, which is always getting jammed due to the fact that I like to keep a few different outfits in there at all times in case I have a fashion mood change. The only problem is that most of the guys you find at a mall at 4 P.M. on a weekday are either old or gay, so the chances of one of them agreeing to jump into a fountain fully clothed to fish out a handbag aren’t so good, even when you start screaming that there’s a reward at stake.