Dating on the Dork Side

Chapter 2-2

“Yes,” I said, my voice catching.

“Will you?” she added.

She’d picked up on my hesitation. Really, it wasn’t like I thought the wiki was okay. It was awful with a capital A. I could imagine Dad’s reaction to my name on that site, or worse, my post-modern, ultra-feminist mom’s. (Not that either of them needed to know about it.) But still, a girl like Elle Emerson could take on half the boys in our senior class and survive. For someone like me it was a much bigger risk. I could lose the tiny speck of popularity I’d managed to carve out for myself.

Of course, if I went against Elle, I’d lose that anyway.

“I’ll do it,” I told her at last, blowing out a breath afterward.

“Good. Thanks. And, hey, ask Pendergast for the tutoring room this Friday. Tell her we need the space for a homecoming project.”

“Sure, easy.”

Name-dropping Elle would get us the room and the privacy she wanted. Ms. P would be all, “Oh, Elle is such a good influence on everyone. She’ll draw you out of your shell.”

Barf.

“Oh, and Camy?”

“Yeah?”

“This is a secret. You can’t tell anyone about this.”

“Of course.”

“I mean no one. You haven’t, have you?”

“N-no.”

“Not even Rhino?”

“No, not yet.”

“Not ever. Got it? I don’t want any boys knowing about this.”

I almost said, “Rhino’s not a boy,” but I stopped myself in time. What I meant was, Rhino wasn’t an Olympia High asswad or whatever word Elle was using for them.

“I haven’t seen any comments on there that sound like him,” I said.

“I don’t care. There’s something very wrong about this site and about these guys.”

I laughed. “Come on, Elle, this is Rhino we’re talking about.”

Silence stretched between us, long and hollow. A muted cheer came from the television downstairs. When Elle didn’t speak, I broke the silence with, “I think the Twins just hit a home run.”

“And if I have my way, none of these guys will be making it to first base for a very long time.”

“Including Gavin?” The question left my mouth before I could reel it back in.

Elle coughed. “Let’s not go there. But, yeah, I’m willing to make a sacrifice or two to set things right. What is it the guys say? Take one for the team? How about you?”

We both knew I didn’t have an A-list boyfriend to sacrifice. But the truth was, I understood what she was asking, and what it would mean. Rhino wasn’t some guy I’d been going out with for a few months. We’d grown up together. We had a sixth sense about each other. We were the kind of friends who finished each other’s sentences. Still, I saw Elle’s point. I also saw, all wrapped up in the pretty package of helping, a threat.

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell Rhino.”

How do you know your day is going to be bizarre? When the queen of Olympia High sidles up to you … and sniffs. Twenty minutes before first bell the next morning, that was exactly what Elle Emerson did.

“Damn, girl,” she said. “You do smell good.” She lowered her voice an octave and, in a dead-on impression of Jason, added, “Like a chick should.” Then she rolled her eyes. “Seriously, though, what do you use?”

I shrugged. “Burt’s Bees, a little Suave, some organic stuff my mom bought me.”

The downside to living with Dad: He didn’t see the need for more than one kind of product, of any sort. Like plain ChapStick was going to cut it, even for me.

“So?” She nodded toward my binder.

I glanced up and down the hallway. Over Elle’s shoulder, I caught sight of Gavin, star quarterback to Elle’s head cheerleader, the other half of their perfect couple.

Elle tapped on the notebook, demanding my attention. “So?” she said again.

I sucked in a breath and banished Gavin from my mind. “We have a list, minus two.”

By ten o’clock the previous night, I’d scoured all the pages of the wiki and had:

A definitive list of the Hotties of Troy, every last girl, including myself, who had a page on the site. A list of perpetrators, minus the identities of Admin and Adm*n. A whole new perspective on a large number of my classmates.I slipped Elle both lists. “I think,” I told her, “that the admin IDs are two different guys, and I’m guessing that they might have regular IDs as well, but unless they slip up—”

“Don’t worry. We rattle these guys enough, and I’m sure they’ll slip up. In fact, I’m counting on it.”

Down the hallway, Gavin was leaning against a locker. Jason was standing in front of him, hands swooping through the air, a mock windup and a pitch, last night’s Twins game on instant replay. Neither boy looked all that rattle-able.

“You get the tutoring room for Friday?” Elle punched something into her phone, her attention half on me and half on the screen.

“Pendergast wants to know what we’re doing, but yeah, we got the room.”

She flicked a hand through her hair, brushing aside such mundane annoyances as teachers. “We might have bigger problems if everyone shows. It’s going to be crowded, and—” She narrowed her eyes and took in the hallway and the students around us. “Pull out your calc book,” she said in an undertone. “Pretend to be helping me.”

I almost laughed out loud at that. “Blind leading the blind,” I told her.

We huddled against my locker, book open, me with a pencil so I could pretend to walk her through a problem.

“That many girls in one place could look suspicious,” she continued a moment later. “These guys aren’t stupid.”

Down the hallway, Jason was fading back to catch a phantom fly ball, complete with play-by-play (“Back … back …”).

“Okay, most of these guys aren’t stupid,” Elle conceded. “Anyway, do you know how to project what’s on the computer onto a screen?”

I nodded. “Easy.”

“Can you do that in the tutoring room?” Her voice held an edge.

Again, I nodded.

She pulled out her phone and started tapping. “I’m sending you links to some of the juicier comments I found on the wiki. Some of these guys really have a way with words.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “We might have to do the hard sell, and we have to be ready.”

Not that I knew what the hard sell was, but a roomful of girls, plus a way to project the wiki up on a screen? Well, even I could figure that much out.

“Oh, thanks, Camy,” Elle gushed, her words high-pitched and sudden. “You’re a lifesaver.” She slammed my math book shut and shoved it back at me. Then she whirled, facing a newcomer to our little group. “Hey, Aiden. What’s up?”

My heart thudded against my chest. Between Elle and the distraction of Gavin down the hall, I hadn’t heard or seen Aiden Tuttle approach. He frowned at Elle, the crease between his eyebrows deepening when his eyes landed on me.

“Student council,” he said. “We need to meet before Friday, to hash out some stuff for homecoming, things like that.”

They stood in front of my locker, trapping me there. I started to pull out the binder I needed for that day’s block of classes, then decided it was more fun to eavesdrop.

“It’s Tuesday,” she said, her voice all honey and homicide. “And we’re meeting tomorrow. Soon enough for you?”

“I’m talking about you and me, without the others.”

“Oh, you mean vice president.” Elle slipped the pencil from my hand and pointed at Aiden. “To president?” She pointed to herself.

In that moment, when the light left his eyes and his lips went thin, a thought struck me. He might be the mastermind behind the wiki. After all, Aiden Tuttle excelled at school: in the academic decathlon, in cross country, and at being a jerk. He was, in fact, the worst combination: a guy with all the brains of Einstein and all the charm of a Neanderthal.

I slid a glance toward Elle, but if she was thinking the same thing, it didn’t register in her expression.

“I’ll be in my office after school and before cheer practice,” she said.

Everyone knew Elle’s “office” was the third row of bleachers next to the football field on sunny days. When it rained, she commandeered the stairwell next to the lobby.

She tapped Aiden’s shoulder with the eraser. “I’ll be sure to pencil you in.”

“You do that.” He pushed his glasses up then, which might have been a reflex, except he used his middle finger.

Elle stared at him until he really had no other choice than to turn and leave. Aiden never glanced over his shoulder, but he walked like he knew we were watching him, steps slow, neck rigid.

“I swear, if I could,” Elle said, her eyes still locked on Aiden. “I’d have surveillance on that kid, twenty-four seven.”

“You don’t suppose he’s the one behind the—” I began.

“Yeah, I do.”

I felt the air shift around me. Near the end of the hall, I caught sight of Rhino. He was slouching toward homeroom, gaze on nothing in particular, but I swore he saw me talking to Elle.

“How much do you know about hacking?” Elle asked.

“Not much. Just what I’ve picked up from my dad.” I stole another look down the hall. “And Rhino. We could always—”

She arched a brow. “Do we really need to have the Rhino conversation again?”

I sighed. “I searched, but I still can’t tell who set up the site. Maybe we should just tell someone,” I suggested. “Pendergast, the principal?”

Elle whirled on me. “And why would we do that?”

“Because what they’re doing is wrong?”

“Right. Agreed. But telling on them is the least effective thing we could do.” Elle shook her head. “No one will really do anything about it. The boys will just get angry. They’ll be even more obnoxious, and they won’t learn a thing, either. I want to take them down myself, in a way they won’t forget.”

Even if she had to take the rest of us with her.

“You’re not tired of it?” she added.

“Of what?”

Just because I happened to have four little comments on the wiki didn’t mean I was a full-fledged member of the Hotties of Troy. I wanted to tell Elle: Welcome to my world. The place where you were just a means to an end, whether it be a better GPA, an easy A on a group project, or an object of ridicule. Even Rhino’s baseball statistician mystique went only so far. He’d taken more than one tumble over someone’s outstretched foot, resulting in a face plant on the cafeteria floor.

After a moment, Elle said, “It’s just...” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze unfocused. “The way these guys treat girls. It’s really disgusting.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“And?” she prompted.

“Okay.”

“Great. We’ll need a PowerPoint presentation by Friday, so … I mean, could you please put a presentation together by the end of the week? I want to do some techno-whiz stuff, but you’re better at that than I am.”

I stifled a laugh. “A PowerPoint presentation?”

“Yeah.” She grinned. “Trust me, it’ll be great. I’ll text you later.”

Elle left then, gliding effortlessly into the pre-bell crowd, as if a red carpet was perpetually rolled out at her feet. No one ever stuck a foot into her path, but no one was beneath her notice either, from the loners to the stoners to the lowly freshmen; she had a smile or a nod for everyone. Except for today.

Today she walked right past Jason and Gavin without acknowledging either of them. Gavin stared after her, looking a little confused. He surveyed the hall as if that would help him pinpoint the source of Elle’s distraction. His gaze fell on me, and my cheeks burned.

No matter how hard I tried, even the barest glance from him sent me back to eighth grade. It always reminded me that whatever I’d done back then, it had made him refuse to speak to me for three whole years. And now? Somehow I had his complete attention. Then Jason stepped in front of him, blocking my view.

I gathered the rest of my books and shut my locker. By the time I looked back, Gavin was gone.