Geek Charming (28 page)

But on Thursday I was forced to have a life experience.

“Pizza or turkey pot pie?” demanded Harriet, the lunch lady with the three stray hairs on her chin, when I stood in line in the cafeteria debating between pizza that looked like it had been run over by a truck and left under hot lights for three days and something that looked like cream-of-mushroom soup.

“I’m still deciding,” I replied.

“Hey, Josh?”

I turned and felt the blood drain from my face. Amy was standing there with her grilled cheese sandwich and carrots.

“Hey, Amy,” I mumbled, unconsciously patting my pocket for my phantom inhaler. “How are you?” It was like that scene in
Annie Hall
that had made Dylan cry—the one when Alvy and Annie ran into each other at the movie theater; that horrible feeling of seeing someone you had once loved who no longer loved you.

“I’m good. I haven’t seen you at Mani’s recently.”

I continued staring at my lunch choices. “Yeah, I’ve been kind of busy with . . . stuff and other stuff,” I said to the pizza. “You know, stuff like that.” With a vocabulary like that, Dylan was right: I should stick to directing other people’s scripts rather than writing my own.

She nodded. “Well, I was just going to say, if you had a sec I wanted to talk to you about something.”

I looked at Amy like she had just told me she was pregnant and I was the baby daddy. What could she possibly have to say to me? “Hi, Josh, I just wanted to tell you that, unlike you, Asher isn’t a wuss and has the guts to ask someone to a dance, which is why I’m going to Fall Fling with him and not you”?

“C’mon, kid, it’s not an SAT question—pizza or turkey pot pie?” demanded Harriet again.

I ignored Harriet “Uh, yeah, sure, but can we do it some other time?” I said to Amy. “I need to eat and then . . . go set up the chairs for the mock revolution we’re having in Russian class.” It was a good thing I was in the make-believe business and could therefore come up with such an authentic-sounding excuse on the spot.

Again, it was probably my imagination, but like that night in the kitchen at Lisa’s party, her face fell and some of the glow dimmed. “Yeah, seeing that, you know, we both go to school here, I’m sure we’ll run into each other at some point,” I said.

“I’m going to make your decision for you,” said Harriet. “You want pizza.”

I stopped and turned to see not only Harriet looking annoyed, but a line full of hungry students. “Okay,” I said meekly before turning back to Amy.

“So maybe I’ll see you around,” Amy said. “Or maybe not.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I tried to think of something else to say, but I had obviously used up all my words. When I got home I was going to check on WebMD to see if there was a name for the syndrome where you rambled on and on when you were nervous.

“Bye, Josh.”

“Bye, Amy.”

As she walked away, Harriet slid my pizza toward me, clucking her tongue. “Maybe next time, Romeo,” she said.

Yeah, maybe. But probably not.

 

“Dude, what’s your problem?” Steven asked on Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in my living room getting ready to watch the rough cut that he had edited together of the footage we had so far. “Just go up to her and see what she wants. Maybe she’s heard how awesome the doc is and wants to invest in our next one so she can get a producer credit and come to the Sundance Film Festival with us.”

“I just feel so stupid,” I admitted. “I just keep wondering what would have happened if I had asked her before Asher did . . . ”

Steven held up the DVD. “Listen, my friend, once you see this, you’re going to forget all that and instead just focus on your career and the fact that DreamWorks and Paramount and every other studio in town will be
begging
you to leave USC early and come make movies for them.”

I sighed. Maybe Steven was right—if I swore off love now and made the decision to put all my energy into my career now, not only would it save me a lot of heartache, but it would probably earn me a few extra Oscars. Plus, I felt like I had been neglecting the documentary the last few days because I had been too busy replaying the scene with Amy in the kitchen at the party over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done differently so that she would be going to Fall Fling with me and not Asher.

 

After we watched the cut, I was silent.

“Awesome, right?” he said, shoveling sunflower seeds into his mouth. “So awesome that you’re speechless.”

“No, I’m speechless because it’s so . . .
wrong
.” He had made Dylan out to be a completely self-involved, spoiled brat. In almost every scene she was yelling at someone, or fixing her makeup, or checking out her hair in the mirror. Granted she did do that stuff more than your average person, but it wasn’t
all
she did. “What do you think we’re doing here?” I demanded angrily.

He sat back and let out a huge burp. “What do you mean?”

I opened up the disk drive and yanked out the DVD so hard it almost went flying across the room. “This isn’t supposed to be the Beverly Hills version of
Cops
,” I said angrily. “This is supposed to be a fair and balanced documentary.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but, dude, that’s so
boring
. Listen, I sat here and watched all the footage, and frankly, it was like watching paint dry. People don’t want to see that the most popular girl in school is actually a decent human being—they want to see drama, and backstabbing, and meltdowns. That’s what
sells
. Have you never seen reality TV?”

“But I’m not trying to sell this—I’m using it to get into college.”

“Yeah, but come on, given the choice, USC would rather admit students who are going to graduate and go on to make blockbusters—not do-good documentaries that play at some small film festival in Washington state to an audience of seven. The blockbuster people are the ones that’ll give them big donations later on in life. Like to build indoor swimming pools and stuff.”

“I don’t
care
about having a stupid swimming pool in my name!” I retorted.

He shrugged. “If you make enough blockbusters, maybe you could build an entire gym.”

“Okay, that is so off point!” I yelled. “And what about the stuff from the ZBT party after she threw up—how did you get that? And why does it look like it was taken from five miles away?”

He smiled proudly. “I know—isn’t it great? I had Ari do it when you were running around looking for paper towels. Listen, I know this is your movie and all, but I also knew that you’d be seriously bummed later on if we passed that stuff up. Because I’m your co-executive producer, I did you a huge favor.”

“But you make her out to be a total diva!”

He shrugged. “Hey, there’s some do-good stuff in there that shows her in a decent light,” he said defensively.

“Like what?”

“Like . . . that shot where she’s petting the puppy on Robertson Boulevard while she’s holding all those shopping bags? Audiences
love
watching people be nice to animals—especially puppies.
Huge
crowd-pleaser. And when she gave the homeless guy at The Dell a dollar? Talk about giving back to the world.”

“Yeah, but what about that shot of her I got when I was leaving her house that night after the UCLA party?” I asked. “The one where she’s standing at the front door waving and the way that the moonlight hits her makes her look so small and frail and sad, like a character out of a French film? I can’t believe you left that out.”

“Bo-ring,” said Steven.

I put the DVD in its case. “Look, I know Dylan can be a little . . . difficult at times—”

“Like that day she freaked out on me when we were shooting her at the nail place and she asked me to bring her a bottle that was pale pink and it turned out there were about seventy-five pale pinks to choose from, so I grabbed five of them and none of them were the right one?” he replied. “Dude, you’re so lucky I restrained myself from including that in the cut because, I’m telling you, people would so despise her if they saw that—”

“Come on, give her a break—she had major PMS that day.”

He laughed. “Hey, Mr. Fair and Balanced Documentary Filmmaker, what happened to telling the truth?
That’s
the truth. Just like the puppy part is the truth.”

Maybe I had lost my objectivity over the course of filming. But I had found that this popularity thing and, more importantly, Dylan, wasn’t black and white. It was gray. I

knew that underneath the shiny blonde hair and designer clothes and brand-new BMW was a girl who still thought of herself as that curly-haired, metal-mouthed fifth grader who wore the wrong jeans and carried the wrong backpack and had a poster of a kitten hanging from a tree that said HANG IN THERE on her bedroom wall. I knew that when she was stressed out, she ate a lot, and that she hated to be left alone in her house. I knew that Indian food made her burp a ton, and that she hummed sappy love songs, like the kind you’d hear at the dentist, while she ate, always off-key. I knew that part of why she was putting off doing her college essays was that she had no clue as to what she wanted to be when she grew up. And that her biggest fear was that she wasn’t good at anything other than shopping. And that she was just as confused as the rest of us when it came to muddling through Life 101. That’s what I wanted to show with this documentary—that at the end of the day, there really
wasn’t
all that much difference between prom queens and film geeks. That we were all just people.

I stood up and pointed toward the door. “Okay, I’m the director here—not you. So can you please leave so I can get to work?”

He shrugged. “Fine,” he said as he stood up. “Be that way.” He walked to the door. “Maybe me and Ari will just do our
own
documentary.”

I didn’t even reply. I just sat down at my desk, cracked my neck, and pulled up iMovie on my computer so I could get to work. I just knew there was a way to strike a balance in this documentary. Kind of like Annie in
Annie Hall
—sure, she was neurotic and annoying, but she was also funny and cute. Dylan was my Annie, and I would work day and night if needed to show the world how deep and multilayered she was. Okay, maybe deep and multilayered was pushing it. I could at least show that while she had her moments, she wasn’t a drama-queen diva 24/7.

chapter eleven:
dylan

That Saturday night was the first one since eighth grade when I didn’t have plans. Ever since the Halloween party Lola and Hannah had been calling me less and less often and whenever I asked them what they were doing I’d get a guilty-sounding “Uh . . . nothing.” It was like overnight it had gone from DylanLolaandHannah to just LolaandHannah. I was still sitting on The Ramp with them, but just last night I had had a horrible nightmare where I was physically removed from our table by members of the football team and Amy Loubalu took my place.

Rather than sit at home, morbidly depressed, I decided to be productive and go through all the photos I had of me and Asher, as well as the pictures of me in my various princess and queen crowns, and think back on how things used to be before tragedy had struck my life.

After a half hour of sniffling and wiping my nose on the sleeve of Daddy’s Northwestern sweatshirt while flipping through pictures of what I had
thought
were good times, but now realized weren’t (like me standing on the beach in Malibu rubbing my head after Asher had inadvertently hit me on the head with his surfboard, or me with a big smile on my face hugging him from behind while he leaned away from me and sent a text, or me sitting on his lap next to Lola’s pool while he stared at Lola’s sister in her bikini), I wiped my nose for the last time and turned off the “Dylan-N-Asher 4ever” playlist I had going on my iPod.

“What am I doing?” I said aloud. “Asher’s a loser.”

I had seen too many movies about how you were supposed to act after a breakup. The truth was, I wasn’t that broken up about it. He
was
a loser, and it was time to stop wallowing. No more moping for me—I was moving on.

I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hey, Josh,” I said.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Where are you?” I asked. Wherever he was, it was super loud.

“Outside the New Beverly with Raymond getting tickets for the Spielberg double feature.”

“That sounds . . . fun,” I said. I started cutting out Asher’s face from the previously framed pictures of the two of us that had been all around my bedroom.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” I sighed. “Just hanging out. Alone. By myself.”

“Oh.”

I waited for him to say something else but he didn’t. “Well, I’ll let you get back to having fun with Raymond,” I finally said. “While I just sit here and hang out. Alone. By myself.”

I thought I heard him sigh, but I’m sure it was just my imagination. “Do you want to come meet us?” he finally asked.

“That would be great,” I said brightly. “Hey, what movies are they showing?” Not even bothering to change out of my sweats, I shoved my feet into my sneakers and grabbed my bag. Ever since the Halloween party, my interest in fashion had dropped drastically, which, according to most magazines, was a telltale sign of depression. I did, however, grab a baseball cap from the top of my closet since I hadn’t washed my hair in two days.

“
Jaws
and
Duel
,” he replied.

“Never heard of them. Do you think I’ll like them?”

“No,” he said doubtfully.

“Oh. Well, are there any cute boys there?”

“I’m pretty sure the answer to that is negative,” he replied.

“That’s okay. I should probably take a break from guys for a while anyway,” I said, switching handbags to match my sweats. I may have been depressed, but I wasn’t suicidal.

“That sounds like a good idea. I’ll see you in a little while.”