Geek Charming (27 page)

Sitting on the couch where I had left her, stuffing her face with M&M’s, Dylan looked like the star of
Prom Queen Massacre.
The half of her tiara that was left was tangled in her hair and swinging back and forth as big mascaragloppy black tears fell down her face.

“There you are,” she said with her mouth full between hiccupy sobs.

“What happened?” I asked as I glanced around at the pockets of people staring at her and whispering.

She held out the dish of M&M’s. “Do . . . you . . . want . . . some?” she hiccuped.

“I think I’m good,” I answered.

She grabbed another handful and shoved them in her mouth. “Can . . . we . . . go . . . now?”

“Sure,” I said. I turned to Ari, who had the camera rolling. “Put that down,” I hissed.

“Dude, but this is
awesome
,” Steven whispered back. “This is exactly what we need to give this thing some life. Otherwise it’s yawn city.” When it came to movies, Steven was all about gross-out scenes and car crashes.

“No—keep it going,” Dylan ordered as she stood up and stepped out into the middle of the room. “I’ve given my
life
to this high school,” she said, reaching down the front of her dress to snake out part of her tiara, “and to now be pushed aside like a carton of soy milk with an expired date?
That’s
the thanks I get for being such a great role model?” she yelled.

“That’s what you get for being so snobby,” someone called out.

It was so quiet you could’ve heard a DVD drop.

She whipped around. “Who said that?” she snapped.

A bunch of masked faces stared back at her, many of them trying not to laugh.

“We go to one of the best schools in the city,” she continued. “You would’ve thought that kids here would have been taught some manners. But no!”

“Dylan, are you okay?” I asked.

“Of
course
I’m okay!” she yelled with as much dignity as someone wearing a ripped, Coke-stained prom dress and half of a broken tiara could muster.

I grabbed the camera from Ari. “Come on, Dylan,” I said, leading her toward the front door. As we walked, she clutched my hand so hard my circulation was cut off. No one said anything, but I could feel a hundred eyeballs on my back. At that moment I really wished I had had my inhaler. Not for me, but to give to Dylan. Although I’m sure she would have thought that was disgusting.

Right before we got to the door, I heard her dress rip even more. “I think I have a pair of sweats in the car,” I whispered.

She squeezed my hand ever harder. “Thanks,” she whispered back. You had to give the girl some credit—even though everyone was looking at her and trying not to laugh, she managed to keep her head high.

The minute we got outside she plopped down on the porch swing and began crying again.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” I asked.

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Are you thinking of telling me now, or do you want to wait until next week?”

She wiped her nose with her dress. “Asher just asked someone to Fall Fling,” she hiccuped.

Ouch. That was a bummer. I could only imagine how I would’ve felt if I had found out that Amy had gotten asked. Then again, it
was
Asher. And he
was
the most popular guy in school—of course he was going to snag a date. Unlike, say, me. “I’m sure that must suck, but didn’t you sort of expect that was going to happen?” I asked gently.

She turned to me and burst into tears again. “I didn’t expect him to ask Amy Loubalu!” she wailed.

My heart stopped. I didn’t have to wonder how I’d feel if Amy got asked—the answer was devastated. “He asked Amy Loubalu?”

“
Yessss
,” she cried, rubbing her face on my shoulder to wipe away her tears and leaving black skid marks.

I patted her on the arm. I felt like the scene in the movie
About Last Night
starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore where Demi Moore’s roommate, played by Elizabeth Perkins, sits there consoling her after Rob Lowe breaks up with her. Except Dylan and I weren’t roommates, and I wasn’t a girl.

I
did
know what it felt like to have your heart broken, though.

She looked up at me. “You’re such a good friend.” She sniffled.

“I am?” I asked, still mechanically patting her arm.

“Yeah. You look like
you’re
going to start crying, too, to support me.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a real bummer,” I replied. A
real
bummer. Like the worst-possible-thing-I-could-have-ever-imagined-happened-level bummer.

Du-par’s is good for your everyday run-of-the-mill burgers, but for special occasions—happy or sad—then a trip to The Apple Pan is worth the drive.

Not surprisingly, Dylan had never been to The Apple Pan. From the outside it wasn’t much to look at—it looked like a ramshackle shack. And with its scratched wood floors and ripped vinyl seats it wasn’t much to look at inside either, but so what? It had incredible hickory burgers with barbeque sauce and the world’s best banana-cream pie. That was the problem with this city—everyone judged people, places, and things by their outsides rather than their insides. I was under the impression that Amy was different, but if she was going to Fall Fling with Asher, obviously she wasn’t. Sure, she may have thought I had nice eyes, or good taste in movies, but at the end of the day she was probably just like every other girl who had grown up reading fairy tales and wanted to go off into the sunset with a Surfer Ken doll-looking prince rather than a four-eyed film geek. It didn’t matter that I could list the title and year of every Woody Allen movie or the soundtrack listings of Quentin Tarantino’s films. Living in L.A., I was always going to come up short next to guys like Asher.

“The first movie I make when I get out of film school as part of my three-picture deal with Warner is going to be an
anti
-fairy tale,” I announced as I dragged a fry through some barbeque sauce. I was so depressed I couldn’t muster up enough energy to make one of my special dipping concoctions.

“What are you talking about?” asked Dylan as she wiped barbeque sauce off her still-dangling tiara. Most of the UCLA students who were chowing down around us were also dressed for costume parties, so we didn’t look too out of place. We were, however, the only morbidly depressed ones.

“Nothing. Never mind,” I said glumly.

“I can’t believe that out of all the girls at Castle Heights, Asher had to ask Amy,” she said for what had to be the third time in five minutes.

“Tell me about it,” I said with a sigh.

“I mean, he
knows
how I feel about her—”

“Yeah, how
do
you feel about her?” I asked, dragging another fry through the sauce.

She put her burger down. “Well, I hate her.”

“Yeah, that part I know. But what exactly happened with you guys?”

As she tipped her chocolate milk shake back, a glop of ice cream fell on her dress, but by this time she was such a mess that she didn’t even try to wipe it off. Instead she just picked the glop up and put it in her mouth. “Michael Rosenberg is what happened with us.”

I shifted in the booth so that the couple dressed in salt-and-pepper costumes two booths away making out weren’t in my sightline. It was too depressing to see people who were in love at the moment. “Who’s Michael Rosenberg?”

“A guy who goes to Buckley,” Dylan explained, attempting to use her straw as a fork and now eating her shake. “She stole him away from me in eighth grade.”

“What happened?” Salt and Pepper were now going at it big-time, so I angled myself in my seat again.

“What happened was that after talking to him for fifteen minutes at Kate Lieberstein’s bat mitzvah, I fell madly in love with him and became obsessed with getting him to be my boyfriend,” she replied. She hid her face in her hands and opened her fingers so one eye was peeking out. “I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but I even used Daddy’s credit card to buy an e-book called
Love Spells by Larissa
on Amazon.”

“
Love Spells by Larissa
?” I repeated, trying not to laugh.

She smiled. “Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” I said, almost laughing.

“But you’re about to laugh,” she said.

“No I’m not,” I lied, about to laugh.

“Well, obviously it didn’t work, because instead of asking
me
out, he asked
her
out. Total waste of twenty-two ninety-five.”

At that, I let myself laugh. “Did she say yes?”

“Oh yeah. And they dated all spring and summer until the beginning of freshman year. It wasn’t like they saw each other in person a lot because Michael spent the summer on a teen tour in Israel, but still—everyone knew they were together.”

Salt and Pepper were now almost lying down in the booth. I wanted to scream
Get a room!
but I didn’t. “Did she know that you had liked him?”

Dylan started in on my fries. “Did she know?! She was the one who made me download the e-book!”

“Oh.” This didn’t sound like the Amy I knew, but I guess everyone had their dark side. “Well, did you try and talk to her about it?”

She starting mixing the barbeque sauce with some mayonnaise and nodded. I was glad one of us was able to still function. “Yup. And she told me that because I had only talked to him for fifteen minutes, it wasn’t like he and I had been in a relationship or anything and that I was overreacting. But here’s the thing: when you’ve met your soul mate, it doesn’t matter if you talk to them for fifteen or fifteen
hundred
minutes—you just immediately know.”

I sighed. That’s how it had been in the kitchen that night—within five seconds of our conversation, I had just
known
that Amy was the girl I was supposed to spend my life with. “But you always used to say that Asher was your soul mate,” I said. “In fact, I think I have it on tape a few times.”

“Yeah, well, we won’t be using that footage.” She shrugged. “He was—at least until he broke up with me the other day—but that’s only because Amy had stolen Michael away from me. If she hadn’t, then Michael would’ve been my soul mate and I wouldn’t have had to settle for Asher.”

Salt and Pepper finally got up to leave. Salt’s lipstick was smeared to the point where she looked like ketchup had exploded on her. “Is that how it works?” I asked. “Soul mates are based on availability? Like back before Netflix, when you still had to go to Blockbuster and if they were out of
Godfather II
, then you’d just have to settle for
Herbie Rides Again
?”

She took another handful of my fries. “Kind of. Omigod—with my crisis, I didn’t even get a chance to ask you what happened with your crush! So did you ask her?”

I shook my head.

“How come?”

“I . . . didn’t get a chance.” Not
entirely
a lie. If Amy hadn’t walked away and we had stood there for another ten days, maybe I would’ve screwed up the courage to go through with it.

“That’s too bad. Are you going to do it on Monday?”

“I think she might already be going with someone else,” I replied.

“You
think
she’s going with someone else, or you
know
?”

“I think I know.”

She shook her head. “That’s not good enough. You have to find out for sure.” She reached for my hand. “You have to do it, Josh. You have to take a risk. I may have just been betrayed and humiliated in front of the entire senior class because I took a chance on love and then lost everything in the breakup, but that doesn’t have to be your story.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re a
great
guy and any girl would be lucky to be your date for Fall Fling. I mean, I’d go with you, but like we talked about earlier, I just don’t think of you like that.”

I slumped down in the booth. “I don’t know—the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I even want to go. It’s just a stupid school dance. Plus, I think I remember reading that
Rocky
’s playing at the New Beverly that night—”

She shook her head. “I just don’t get it. When it comes to movies, and going after your dreams, you’re totally fearless. But when it comes to girls? Total wimp.”

I slumped down farther. She wasn’t wrong.

“Seriously, Josh. Don’t be such a geek—just ask her out already.”

“But I am a geek,” I corrected.

She shook her head. “No—you
were
a geek, once upon a time, but now you’re not. Okay, remember that scene in
Say Anything
when John Cusack calls the girl up and asks her out?”

“You’ve seen
Say Anything
?” I asked, shocked.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I’ve seen
Say Anything
. Everyone’s seen it. It’s only on HBO like every other hour.”

“Cameron Crowe is one of the greats.” I sighed. It was obvious from the raw authenticity of all his movies—from
Say Anything
to
Almost Famous
and everything in between—that he had intimate knowledge of what it was like to pine away for girls and be rejected.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, be him—be John Cusack and just do it,” she pleaded. “I can’t know for sure, because you won’t tell me who it is, but I have a feeling that because of your good judge of character, whoever this girl is, she’s probably really nice and sweet and would love to go with you.”

If she only knew. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she’d do to me if she found out I was in love with the enemy.

 

The next week at school I went to any length to avoid Amy, even ducking into the janitor’s closet on Wednesday between fourth and fifth period. I hadn’t had a chance to replace my inhaler yet, but steering clear of Amy had drastically lessened any risk of asthma attacks.

Maybe I
was
a wimp. But so what? I was an artist—I was allowed to be wimpy, and moody, and stuff like that. I didn’t need to have different life experiences, like dates and school dances and girlfriends, in order to make my art—reading about it would be enough.