Geek Charming (24 page)

Well, not me, of course—
I
wasn’t going to be staying home. Since I was a senior and there were only a few more opportunities for me to get dressed up and be crowned with a rhinestone tiara, there was no way I was going to miss Fall Fling. While I wasn’t allowed to pig out times a hundred, I
was
allowed to do it times twenty-five. So on my way home, I stopped at Sprinkles for cupcakes, Whole Foods for Nutty Chocolate Surprise trail mix, and the Pinkberry in Westwood for a large green-tea-flavored yogurt with chocolate chips and coconut.

“I know!” I said to Lola and Hannah an hour later as the three of us sat in my bedroom and I licked the white buttercream icing off a cupcake. “I’ll tell Nima that
he
can take me.” Nima Ghedami had had a crush on me since sixth grade, even back when I looked like Jewish Ugly Betty. For a while he was putting poems in my locker by poets with weird names like Rumi and Hafiz who used the word
soul
twenty times a poem. Maybe Nima was a little strange, but with his dark hair and dark eyes, he was so the opposite of Asher, who looked like a Ken: The Surfer Version doll, that it would allow me to make a very dramatic statement at the dance about the fact that I wasn’t kidding when I said I was over him. Fall Fling problem solved, I threw the icingless cupcake in the garbage as I no longer needed to pig out.

Lola shook her head as she took a swig of the tea she carried around with her that her mother’s acupuncturist had said would make her boobs grow. “Too late. I heard this morning that he’s going with Asie Khohadiffin.”

Calling on the five-second rule, I fished the cupcake out of the garbage. “Oh,” I said as I finished it. “That’s okay. I should probably go with someone who’s removed from the whole Ramp crowd anyway.” I grabbed another cupcake out of the box and started in on the icing. “I’m sick of these dumb high-school guys—I need an older man. Like someone in college.”

“I bet my cousin Ira would take you,” said Hannah. “Technically, he’s not in college at the moment because he had to take a leave of absence from San Diego State when he had his nervous breakdown, but my mom told me the other day that he’s doing so well that they’re now giving him weekend passes off the psych ward.”

Lola shot her a look like
she,
and not Ira, was the crazy one.

“Well, he
is
nineteen,” Hannah said defensively. “That’s older.”

I took another bite of the cupcake. “Hannah, I love you, but I’m so not in the mood for jokes at the moment.” I should have started doing squats to try to burn off the calories, but I was too depressed. Instead I flopped back on my bed. “Seriously, what am I going to do?” I said to the ceiling.

“You could go with Josh,” suggested Lola.

I sat up and looked at her. “Um, hello? Did I not just say this wasn’t the time for jokes?”

“I’m not joking,” she said. “He’s totally your friend boy.”

“Omigod, he’s
so
not!” I squealed. A “friend boy” was someone with whom there was no physical stuff, but it was obvious you were on the path to becoming a couple. “He’s definitely just a brofriend,” I insisted. That was someone with whom there was no chance of it ever going past the friend stage.

“Whatever it is,” said Hannah, “you guys are together like twenty-four/seven.”

“I told you—that’s because we’re
working
together. It’s
business
.”

Both of them gave me a skeptical look.

“And you made him over,” said Lola.

“Okay, fine, so he’s become one of my very close friends,” I admitted.

“But he’s not one of your closest close friends, right?” Hannah asked anxiously.

“Of course not,” I assured her. “Anyway, I can’t go to a social event with him where there’s physical contact involved. He may look a lot better postmakeover, but he’s still, you know,
Josh
.”

“I think he’s cool,” said Lola with a shrug.

I looked at her with disbelief. “Um, hi, but weren’t you the one who sat there at the nail salon and told me I needed to be careful or else I’d be branded with a scarlet
G
for ‘geek’?”

She shrugged and got up and went to my closet. “I changed my mind,” she said as she started going through my things for stuff to borrow. “Geeks are the new jocks. I just read it in
Seventeen
.” She looked away. “And his friends aren’t as bad as I thought, either.”

I threw the now-empty cupcake wrapper away. “Omigod—I
knew
it!” I squealed. “You totally have a crush on Steven.”

Lola turned around. “Ew! I do not!” she squealed.

“You so do,” I said, reaching for my Sidekick to see if news had spread yet about the breakup. “You should go with him to Fall Fling—not the Guz.”

“That’s
so
not happening,” she replied.

“Ari’s not that bad, either,” added Hannah. “Do you know that he knows every single word of every single song in
Grease
? Isn’t that amazing?”

“Fascinating,” I replied.
Not
. “Anyway, even if I did want to go with Josh to Fall Fling, he’s asking someone else,” I announced.

“Who?” asked Hannah.

“I don’t know. He won’t tell me.”

“Huh. Good for him,” Lola replied, coming back to the bed with my favorite jeans and a cute cardigan I had borrowed from Hannah a few months ago. “I hope whoever she is, she says yes. He deserves to be happy.”

I looked up from my Sidekick. She looked totally sincere.

My phone buzzed. As I looked at the screen, one condolence text after another started to appear. I couldn’t tell if the reason my heart was beating so fast was because of all the sugar I had eaten in the last hour, or because I realized that if I didn’t get moving, I was going to be the only one without a date for Fall Fling.

 

Like I said, for whatever reason, I seem to be a crisis magnet. Maybe it’s because the Universe knows I’m super strong and can handle whatever comes my way. At any rate, over the next few days I had to deal with
two
crises: finding a date for Fall Fling
and
finding a costume for Lisa Eaton’s party.

By the time I arrived at school the next morning, the halls were buzzing with the fact that I was back to being just Dylan instead of Dylan-and-Asher. Not wanting to get a reputation as one of those girls who trashes her exes, I refused to comment on the situation as I made my way to English class. No one actually
asked
me for a comment, but still, if they had, I wouldn’t have given one.

Did u bring your camera?
I texted Josh during class while Mrs. Collett droned on about
The Great Gatsby
. Frankly, I didn’t know what all the big fuss was about—that lady Daisy in it was so annoying. Talk about a drama queen.

Yeah. Why?
he texted back.

B/c I was thinking it might be fun to film me during lunch today now that I’m single . . . u know, when all the guys start hitting me up for Fall Fling,
I typed back.

 

“Okay, so today we have a very special episode of the documentary,” I said into the camera later as I sat on The Ramp during lunch. Thankfully Asher was nowhere to be found. Lola said it was because he and his friends had gotten permission from Coach Shelburn to leave campus during lunch to go to McDonald’s because they had just won their seventh straight soccer game in a row, but I think it was because he was too emotionally devastated to have to see me. “As everyone now knows, Asher and I are no longer ‘Asher and I,’” I continued as Lola filed her nails and Hannah prepped her for SATs even though she had already gotten 2300 on them last time around. “Which means that I am now free to go to Fall Fling with another guy. As you can imagine, being the most popular girl in school, I’m sure I’m going to be flooded with invites by guys who have been wanting to go out with me for years but haven’t been able to because I was taken. So I thought that would be nice to get on camera.”

“What would be nice to get on camera?” Steven asked.

“Me being asked out!” I replied.

“Oh. Okay,” he said.

“So now we’ll just sit here and see who comes up to me,” I announced, looking around The Ramp. There was Rob Rosen—he’d definitely come up. And so would Brandon Moglen—he’d had a crush on me for ages. And Huck Hirsch would, too, even though there was some buzz that he might be gay.

“Got it,” Josh said.

We sat there for a minute, but no one came up.

“Hey, do you think this is going to take long?” Steven asked. “Because I think my blood sugar’s falling and if we’re going to be here a while I should probably get some protein in me.”

“You’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Everyone’s still eating. Once they’re done they’ll come up.”

The guys nodded.

 

Ten minutes later, everyone was done eating—even Hannah, who’s the slowest eater on the planet—and still no one had come up.

“They’re obviously a little intimidated,” I explained to the camera.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Lola said, without looking up from her magazine.

I turned to her. “What? They are. They’re just getting their nerve up.” I got up and walked close to the camera. “Sometimes it takes guys a while to talk to girls they like. RIGHT, JOSH?”

He backed up, knocking into Ari, who tripped on one of the cords and went down.

“Omigod, Ari, are you all right?” asked Hannah as she rushed over to him.

“I think so,” Ari replied.

Just then Drew Anderson got up from his seat. “Look, there’s Drew—he’s been crushing on me forever. Hey, Drew!” I called out, waving my hands.

He turned and looked at me. “Oh, hey, Dylan.”

“Come here for a second,” I ordered.

He walked over, looking at the camera warily like it was going to tackle him to the ground. Drew wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer—having been on the varsity football team since he was a freshman, he had been hit in the head a few times—but he was cute. In fact, in the right light (like not a lot of light) he was even cuter than Asher.

I twirled a lock of hair around my finger and smiled at him. “So Fall Fling is coming up,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah, it’s in a few weeks.”

I gave the camera a smile before turning back to him. “So do you have a date?” I asked.

“Well, I was going with Jenny Frankel, but once she heard I had only asked her because Paula Lyons said no, she dumped me for Mark Roberts.”

“How interesting.” I moved a little closer to him. “So you may have heard—Asher and I broke up yesterday.”

He moved back a step. “You did?”

“Um,
yeah
,” I replied. “It’s only, like,
the
biggest thing everyone’s talking about today.”

“Oh. Not in remedial reading they weren’t. They were talking about that sophomore Jackson Posner who announced he wants to get a sex-change operation after college,” Drew said.

“Yeah, well, anyway, so because Asher and I broke up, he’s no longer my date,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that. You must be bummed. Asher’s a rad guy.”

I turned to Josh. “You can edit that line out later.” Turning back to Drew, I smiled. “Soooo . . . if
you
don’t have a date . . . and
I
don’t have a date—”

He looked very confused. “Wait, is this a word problem? Because I’m not very good at those ’cause of my dyslexia.”

“Never mind.” I sighed. “Well, it was nice talking to you,” I said, pushing him off to the side.

I looked around the cafeteria. “Okay, who else is there?”

 

It turned out there wasn’t anyone.

I could not believe that I, Dylan Schoenfield, the most popular girl at Castle Heights High School, could not find
one
guy in the senior class to go with to Fall Fling. I must have been even more intimidating than I thought. Not only that, but it used to be that when I walked down the hall from one class to another, people would clear a path. They still did that for Asher, but now I got jostled just like everyone else. Which is beyond rude because I bruise very easily.

But that wasn’t even the worst part.

The
worst
part was that all the girls in school were treating me different. Instead of kissing my butt, which is what they had been doing ever since Asher and I started dating, they started treating me like I was normal or something. Like one of the crowd. Instead of “Dylan! Hiiiii!” which is what most of them used to do, now I just got “Oh, hey.”

Maybe it was just because, now that I was single, they felt more threatened by me than usual, but for someone who’s as sensitive as I am, being treated like that was hard to take.

At least I could count on Lola and Hannah.

“So what are we doing after school?” I asked the next afternoon after lunch as we stood in front of the bathroom mirrors doing our daily postlunch makeup reapplications.

The two of them looked at each other. “Oh. I have plans,” said Lola guiltily.

“Me, too,” added Hannah, even more guiltily.

I stopped applying my eye shadow. “Plans doing what?” I asked. “We never make plans without running it by each other.”

“Dentist,” said Lola.

“Doctor,” said Hannah.

I put my eyelash curler down on the sink. “Okay, what’s going on here?”

Lola stopped applying her eyeliner and sighed. “Okay, we were planning on going over to Montana Avenue to go Fall Fling dress shopping.”

“Without me?” I cried.

Lola shrugged. “You already bought three dresses.”

“And you don’t even have a date,” Hannah added.

Talk about stabbing someone with a fork and twisting it.

“
Yet
,” I corrected, jabbing the curler at her reflection in the mirror. “I don’t have a date
yet
. But I will. Very soon. Anyway, it’s shopping—we never go shopping by ourselves! That’s, like, prime bonding time!”