Dating on the Dork Side

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

I FOUND DAD in the kitchen, staring into our refrigerator. He did that sometimes, like he expected the food to parade out and prepare itself. Even so, he was a pretty decent cook, a pretty decent housekeeper, and all around a pretty decent dad. Of course, these days, he did a lot of the mom stuff too.

After the divorce, Mom moved to Iowa City to accept a teaching position at the university there. My summer visit with her had ended two weeks ago. When I got back to Minnesota, the sight of extra gray in Dad’s hair had startled me. When had that happened? It had always been thick and nearly black. We shared that, the same dark, unruly hair and matching dark eyes.

“Hey, Cams,” he said after I’d tapped on the fridge door. “What about fried egg sandwiches for dinner?”

One of the great things about living with Dad was all the dad-type food. In Iowa with my mom this summer, it’d been all vegan, all the time. If I snuck out to get a cheeseburger, I had to bring along one of those travel toothbrushes so Mom wouldn’t smell my evil, carnivorous ways on my breath.

“So, how was the first day of school?” Dad asked, piling the butter and cheese slices on top of the egg carton.

“Okay,” I said. Well, except for the whole girl wiki part of it, but it was probably best not to get into that.

“I got an email from your mom,” he said, maybe a little too casually.

“Oh?” It wasn’t completely weird that Mom would email Dad. They had me in common, after all. And they were pretending to have the friendliest divorce in the history of the world.

Dad unloaded the food onto the counter. “You know those writing samples you did over the summer?”

While I was in Iowa City, I took a teen writing course while Mom taught summer school. That way, she’d told me, I could experience “an authentic workshop environment” (group humiliation is fun!) and “real college student life” (with my mom three feet away!) while “exploring my issues about the divorce” (no comment!). I’d told Mom, more than once, that I had no issues about the divorce. To which she always said, “Nonsense.”

Dad turned up the heat under the frying pan. “She showed the samples to one of her colleagues, who was impressed,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice. “You might have a lock on getting into Iowa.”

“Wow,” I managed.

“I’ve never doubted it.” He cracked one egg, then another into the pan. The whites sizzled and buttery steam floated in the air, making everything smell warm and rich. I pressed a hand against my stomach to keep it from growling and rolling over on itself. I’d applied to just two colleges: University of Iowa, where I could be near Mom, and the University of Minnesota, where I could be near Dad.

Sometimes I pondered what would happen if both schools accepted me and I had to choose between them. I missed my mom when I was with my dad. But I missed my dad when I was with my mom. I didn’t want to deal with all that, not now, so I set two places at the table, then opened the fridge.

“Orange juice or milk?” I asked.

“You decide.”

My decision. Right. I hesitated long enough that Dad, on his way to the table with the frying pan, rolled his eyes at me. He doubled back, pulled the OJ from the fridge, and plunked it down on the table like a centerpiece. I sat across from him, sopping up egg yolk with the crust of my toast, pretending we could go on like this forever.

After dinner, I loaded the dishwasher so Dad could watch the Twins game. Back in my room, I ignored my laptop for a good five minutes. It helped that I had a text from Rhino. It read:

Your boyfriend is about to take the mound if you want to come over for the rest of the game.

One time, just one time, I had mentioned that the Minnesota Twins relief pitcher was kind of cute, and Rhino had teased me about it ever since. The downside to having a guy as a best friend? Talking about other boys, cute boys, any boys, was off-limits. Rhino had been working this particular joke since May, and it was getting old. I deleted the text and switched to email.

All I had was a message from my mom, recapping what Dad had told me earlier. She signed off with:

Love you and see you soon. (Like on campus next fall!)

Mom had a way of making difficult problems all the more impossible. The second I closed her email, a new one popped up, this one from Elle. My hand froze on the mouse. For a moment, I just sat there. Then, I opened it.

Camy,

Sorry about earlier. I was dealing with ... a problem. I think it has something to do with what you sent me. Don’t want to do this in email. Call me.

She listed her number. In the seconds before I picked up my phone, the obvious, and most embarrassing, scenario flashed through my mind. The cheer squad gathered round, hands clamped over their mouths, giggles stifled, my voice broadcast on speaker, saying all sorts of stupid things.

But that wasn’t Elle’s style. At least, not that I’d ever seen. I wouldn’t put it past a few girls in her crowd to do something like that (I’m talking about you, Clarissa Delacroix) but Elle didn’t usually rule through intimidation or mortification. I woke up my cell phone and dialed.

“Hey,” Elle said. “Great. You called. This is going to sound dumb, but you know how some of us went on that student trip to Greece this summer?”

Oh, of course. Some of us went to Greece, some of us went to Iowa City. Therein lay the difference.

Elle took a breath. “Anyway, we were at the beach, following local custom, and apparently some asshat snapped a cell phone pic.”

“Wait. Explain ‘local custom’.”

“You might say we forgot our bikini tops.”

No bikini tops + cell phone. The only answer to that equation was: Oh. My. God.

“Oh,” was all I managed to get out.

“Anyway, I think it has to be Aiden, since he was the only guy from Olympia on the trip, but really? It could’ve been someone from Prairie Stone, or anybody. Now I think Jason has the photo. Click over to my f*******: page. It’s all there.”

I waited a beat, then another, wondering when Elle would figure out the obvious, and astoundingly humiliating, fact.

“Hang on,” she said a moment later. “I’ll friend you.”

It took only five seconds, but it felt like five hours.

Sure, I had a page on f*******: and maybe thirty friends. Ten of those were family. And yeah, your dad reading your f*******: entries is So. Not. Fun. But Elle? I clicked through and joined her nearly six hundred friends.

Jason had posted five comments in a row on her wall, things like:

Can we see more of you?

And:

Wow, no tan lines.

“He didn’t do anything helpful, like post the photo and tag you, did he?” I asked.

“Not that I can see. But if this gets out, there goes ... everything. I swear, if I lose homecoming court over this, he’s dead. I’ll make sure he doesn’t play baseball in the spring, one way or another.”

“Do you think he’s sending the picture around?” I asked.

“Maybe, but I was wondering about the link you sent me.”

“The wiki?”

“Could it be on there?”

“I didn’t see anything like it on your photo page,” I said, then rushed to add, “I hope you don’t mind. I was trying to figure out what it was.”

Elle laughed. “No worries. I’m doing the same thing. What is it, anyway?”

“Technically, it’s a wiki. You know, like Wikipedia? It’s supposed to be a place where a group can share knowledge.”

“Talk about an over-share.”

I logged in to the wiki and took another look around. If I wanted to hide something, where would I do it? Not somewhere obvious, like Hottest of the Hot.

On the main page, I tried a link I hadn’t before, one called Site Statistics. I’d figured it led to some dull readout on site use. I was both right and wrong. Below a table detailing time of visits, length of visits, and so on, I saw a few more links. I picked the one with the most boring label: Disclaimer.

Another login screen popped up.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What? Did you find something?”

“I think so. It looks like there’s a second layer of security.”

“Huh?”

“I have to log in again. I’m hoping whoever set up the site gave Jason access to this page. Hang on.”

I set the phone down to type in Jason’s information. The screen dissolved, or seemed to. All I could see was a shaky image of bright sunlight, immaculate white sand, a blue, blue sea, various shades of suntanned skin … and not a whole lot of bikini tops.

Not that you could tell, really. This wasn’t the sort of photo that would destroy Elle’s career as student council president—or her eventual run for the U.S. Congress. You probably couldn’t tell it was her without prior warning. But still …

“Hey,” I said to Elle. “Found it.” I directed her to the link and waited.

“Balls,” she said, then fell quiet.

“It looks like Aiden posted it, from what I can see.” Fewer comments littered this page. Someone controlled this site, maybe even removed messages when things got out of hand. Add in that second layer of security, and we definitely weren’t dealing with an amateur.

“Can we delete it?” Elle asked.

“I think so, but the question is, do we want to? We’re logged in as Jason. Someone might ask him why he pulled the photo.”

Static buzzed on the connection. I drew a breath and waited for Elle to speak.

“I like the way you think,” she said at last. “Even before all this, the guys in this school needed to be taken down a notch … or twenty. Remember that prom deal Jason started last year?”

Remember? Kind of. I hadn’t attended a dance, or paid too much attention to them, since a traumatic experience with Clarissa in the eighth grade. But rumors had gone around for weeks last spring. For fifty dollars (or an unspecified s****l act) you, too, could have an A-list jock as your prom date.

“I wasn’t really involved,” I told Elle.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t miss anything.” She paused. “The guys in our school are tools. But it’s more than that. It’s their whole attitude. They have some serious entitlement issues.”

I couldn’t disagree. After all, Jason now thought he had the right to sniff me whenever he pleased.

“I mean, honestly,” Elle continued. “The Hotties of Troy? Is that supposed to be some play on Helen of Troy? They want Greek? I’ll be more than happy to make their lives a freaking Greek tragedy.”

I snorted at that.

“You want to help?” she asked.

“Do I what?”

“Want to help. I could use it.”

A chill zipped down my spine and I sat up straighter. I could hear it in her voice: Elle had a plan. “What do you need?”

“A list of all the girls with a page on the site. And we need our target list too. Do you think you can find the names of every guy who’s posted a comment?”

“It could take a while,” I said. “Whoever set up the site was probably smart enough not to give Jason administrative rights.”

“Yeah, clearly not an i***t. But can you do it?”

“I might miss one or two.”

“I already have a good idea who the culprits are,” Elle said. “I’d like to make sure, though.”

“You know,” I said, wondering how to approach this subject, “Gavin Madison will be on that list.”

Elle and Gavin had been a couple since last year’s prom. And no, it hadn’t been a pay-to-date swap, but the real deal.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“He hasn’t said anything bad.” From what I’d seen so far, Gavin’s posts were downright mild-mannered; polite, even.

“Here’s the thing,” Elle said. Her voice grew intense. “Every boy who’s ever logged in to the wiki is guilty. There are no innocent bystanders here.”

I nodded, not that Elle could see me.

“So, do you think you can do it?” she asked.