Dating on the Dork Side

Chapter 1 I’VE HAD ELEVEN YEARS to think about this (twelve if you count kindergarten), and if you ask me, the first day of school should come with a checklist: Your best guy friend manages to wear matching socks?A good sign. Your homeroom teacher turns out to be a drama king?Proceed with caution; hilarity may ensue, but so may humiliation. You find a jock in the tutoring room?A sign of the apocalypse. On my last first day of school, I counted the minutes to the final bell, then took the stairs to the tutoring room on the third floor two at a time. I paused at the threshold and sucked in a breath. The monitors inside the room, at least the ones that I could see, were spotless. I had new pencils sharpened to deadly points. My notebooks were filled with blank pages and promise. Everything was still first-day fresh. Through the open windows came the wondrous sounds of the Olympia High School football team warming up. “O-L-Y-M-P-I-A!” Anything was still possible. “Switch!” Coach Cutter’s voice, amplified by the megaphone, rode the breeze through the windows. The trip seemed to soften all the hard edges, making him sound like someone you might actually want to talk to. “O-L-Y-M-P-I-A!” the siren song came again. I loved it when jocks spelled. I loved the first day of school. I really, really loved my view of the football field from the windows of the tutoring room. But Jason “The Ab” Abernathy was ruining all of it. Jason was one of those A-list jocks you’d hope would only exist in stereotypes, the kind with big muscles, a small brain, and a long list of downtrodden victims. He was captain of the baseball team, but in the fall, he also headed up the Yell Club, probably because it put him up close and personal with the private parts of Olympia High’s varsity cheerleaders. Or maybe I was being unfair. Maybe Jason truly had loads of school spirit demanding to be unleashed. I took in the sight of him in the tutoring room, his tall frame hunched over a computer, typing something with a slow, two finger hunt and peck. Why didn’t he just use a smartphone, like everyone else in this century? I thought about leaving. It would be easy to turn around and slink away. But without my skybox view I’d have to hang off the chain link fence and watch football practice like some sort of fangirl. That was dance team/pom squad territory. I was so not pom squad. I was so not dance team, either. Plus, in my ancient jeans, a vintage Star Wars t-shirt, and wrists full of bracelets that had started life as string, I wouldn’t exactly blend in. So I inched into the room. Just in case, I pulled one of those deadly pencils from my book bag. “Uh, hi,” I tried. Tried and, I might add, failed. My voice barely reached my own ears. Except for a muted peck, peck, peck, Jason remained motionless, his eyes still locked on the screen. Outside, the football team moved from stretching to speed drills as I took a few more steps into the room. The newly waxed floor felt slick beneath my Chuck Taylors. I drew in a breath and said, “Hello?” Jason jumped. If he’d been going for a fly ball, he would’ve caught it. Not that we get a lot of those in the tutoring room. My heart rate doubled when he crashed back into his chair, his hands fumbling over the keyboard. That’s when he tried it: the screen switch. I know a few computer geeks (my best friend Rhino, my dad) and I’ve witnessed more than my fair share of screen switches. One minute, the swimsuit model is there; the next, poof! She’s a spreadsheet detailing the mechanical specifications of the Millennium Falcon. Jason might be a gifted athlete; he might have some amazing batting average, but he couldn’t pull off a screen switch to save his life. Whatever he’d been looking at was still on the screen. He went straight into full panic clicking mode, until at last, his finger landed on the computer’s power button. “Don’t—” I said. “Huh?” Too late. The monitor shimmered and turned black. I sighed. “Never mind.” “Sorry, I was just—” Jason pointed at the screen like I could somehow figure out the rest. Then his expression changed. He lifted one eyebrow and started studying me, like he’d never really seen me before. That might have made sense except he’d sat behind me in homeroom all last year. And the year before that. “Do you need tutoring?” I asked. “Do I ... what?” “Do you need tutoring? Help with schoolwork?” I waved a hand at the computer lab and then the side area with the long tables and individual carrels for studying. “It’s what I do.” “That’s okay.” He pushed back his chair. “I was just leaving.” But when he reached me, he halted, his blue-eyed gaze raining down on the top of my head. I had to crane my neck to look up at him. I wondered where the safer view was. His pecs? Or his face? “Tutoring,” he said, like he was trying out a new word in a foreign language. Outside of homeroom, I’d never stood this close to Jason before. It was almost like we were having a moment, except he was an A-list jock and I was an A-list … nothing. “I might have to try that,” he added. And then, as if the situation wasn’t already strange enough, he leaned in closer and inhaled. Deeply. It was almost as if he was sniffing me. Then he was off, charging down the corridor, body slamming the lockers on one side of the hallway, then the other, morphing back into the athlete that half the school loved—and the other half feared. When I turned back to the room the space felt oddly vacant, as though Jason had taken something crucial with him when he left. But I had what I wanted now: a blissfully empty room. Strange as it sounds, I like tutoring. I started in middle school as a homework buddy for the little kids at Olympia Elementary three days a week. It was fun. Then, the year my parents’ marriage got rocky, it felt almost like compensation for the little brother or sister I’d probably never have. When my group kept acing all their spelling tests, the guidance counselor suggested peer tutoring as the next logical step. But there was one more reason I liked spending time in the tutoring room. In those first weeks of school, when it was too early for anyone to need serious help with their schoolwork, it was mostly just me and the sights and sounds of football practice. Those were the moments I lived for. Up there, I was free to watch as long as I liked. And watch I did. I focused my gaze on quarterback Gavin Madison warming up his arm. He looked good this year. Oh, who was I kidding? He looked good every year. When he launched a pass to one of the wide receivers, my fingertips tingled in anticipation, as if the ball were headed straight for me. That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Once upon a time, I’d played in the same youth football league as Gavin. My body still remembered how it felt to reach for the ball, to grasp it and tuck it in tight, to run with it down the field. But my football career had ended in eighth grade at the bottom of a pile-up. I sighed and resisted the urge to touch the scars on my knee. As much as I was enjoying the view, something gnawed at me. Instead of admiring Gavin’s form, the spin he gave the ball, or—okay, I’ll admit it—the way he looked in those tight football pants, I turned toward Jason’s blank monitor. It was like a dare, just sitting there, taunting me. With a click and the fizz of static, I turned on the computer. The more I thought about it, the stranger Jason’s appearance in the tutoring room seemed. I mean, really—jock + tutoring room + first day of school? The combination didn’t add up. It was like he’d brought a negative integer into the equation. At least, that was what my friend Rhino, the math genius, might say. Surely Jason hadn’t felt an overwhelming urge to start a research project on the first day of school. So why else would he have sought out a computer? A few unsavory options entered my mind. Did I really want to get an eyeful of cheerleader types modeling their Spankies, or whatever skeevy fantasy tripped that boy’s trigger? What if it was worse? What if I got caught looking at something that could get us both in trouble? The first option was a definite possibility; the second, not so much. Sure, Rhino had hacked the school’s firewall. He could do the same to the grading system if, through some bizarre twist in the space/time/school continuum, he ever needed to. But he was not only good at math, he was a techno-genius. I was pretty sure something like that was beyond the abilities of anyone nicknamed The Ab. That didn’t stop me from checking the browser’s history files. The listing was short: the school home page, this year’s open gym schedule, the Minnesota High School Athletic League. Those last two made sense. Jason was an athlete. Maybe they’d changed something about high school baseball rules over the summer. According to Rhino (who knew everything about the sport), Jason was devoted to the game. I was about to give up when a final site caught my eye. The Hotties of Troy. True, the mascot for Olympia High was a Trojan warrior. But pulling up a website called The Hotties of Troy on a school computer? I knew better than that. I did it anyway. All I got for my daring was a login screen. But one with a familiar name in the user ID field: jasona. Oh, it was just too tempting. My fingers itched to try, and I quickly filled in the password field. Baseball? Cheerleader? I even tried the old standby: password. Nothing. Then the obvious hit me. I typed theab. Bingo. I squeezed my eyes half shut, finger over the mouse to close everything … just in case. When nothing raunchy happened, I opened my eyes all the way, feeling a bit of pride swell in my chest. Hacking? It was kind of fun. The site appeared to be the sort of place where a group of people contributed information, a wiki: a living, breathing (well, virtually) encyclopedia. The sidebar contained a list of pages: recently updated, most-accessed, hottest of the hot. Every single page was labeled with a girl’s name. A girl who went to Olympia High, which made her, I guessed, a Hottie of Troy. So, what we had here was a living, breathing girl encyclopedia? Of all the chauvinistic, sexist, and utterly stupid things. Stunned, I sat back, not sure what to do. I clicked the home icon. The main page contained instructions for the computer illiterate and a general chat board, with messages like: bro, Call of Duty throwdown tonite at teh abs Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a brain trust. Returning to the home page refreshed the sidebar as well. The girls’ names rippled and changed position. At that moment a new one popped up on the recently-accessed list. Camy Cavanaugh I’m pretty sure my heart stopped. For several seconds I sat, frozen, until footfalls in the hallway yanked me back to reality. Matching Jason’s earlier panic, I minimized the browser and brought up Excel. The footsteps got closer, a clipped stab against the linoleum. A teacher, I guessed. I plugged a fake formula into the spreadsheet. It took every ounce of willpower not to look at the wiki, not to click the Camy Cavanaugh page, not to see what someone had written about me. I hit right click and closed the browser just as Ms. Pendergast and her deadly sharpened high heels clip clopped into the room. She glanced around, a small frown on her face. It was as if her super-secret teacher sense had alerted her that, just minutes before, a jock had invaded the tutoring area, one focused on hotties instead of academic assistance. One who maybe had been looking at a page named after me?