Dating on the Dork Side

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

MONDAY MORNING, I threw on some jeans, an old Avengers t-shirt, and a random pair of Chucks. I stopped by Rhino’s on my way to school, hoping to get a little calculus help before the quiz. I was asking him about the Squeeze Principle when we walked into Olympia High.

His eyes narrowed, and I followed his gaze to the main lobby. Elle Emerson was standing there chatting with the chess club president, Dalton Reese. Or rather, Elle was chatting. Dalton was mostly fidgeting. He took off his glasses and put them back on so many times I thought he might break the frames.

“What the—?” Rhino said. Then he shook his head and marched forward. “Come on. He needs our help.”

“She isn’t really doing anything wrong,” I pointed out.

“That’s just it. She doesn’t have to. Jeez, Camy. Look at him.”

Now that we were closer, I could see that Dalton was sweating.

“He may be going into shock,” Rhino said.

“So this is like a medical emergency?” I said.

“It’s a humanitarian mission. Hurry.”

I followed, because that’s what I always did when Rhino charged.

“Oh, hey, Rhino,” Dalton said when we got there. “Camy.” He nodded at me.

His cheeks were already pink and getting pinker. He shook so much that he almost dropped the old-school Star Wars case that teetered on top of his books and held his prized collection of pens.

“How’s the chess club doing this year?” Rhino asked.

“G-good.” Dalton blinked a few times, as if his own voice had scared him. He looked at Elle, swallowed hard, then blinked again. “We’ve got two new freshmen and a junior who moved here from another state.”

“Hello?” Elle planted an impatient hand on one hip. No one interrupted the queen of Olympia High.

Well, almost no one interrupted the queen. To Rhino, it was like she didn’t exist.

“When are you guys meeting?” Rhino asked. “I’d like to check it out.”

In the middle of sophomore year, Rhino had dropped every extracurricular activity except baseball. Somehow, that had earned him a weird celebrity status, at least with the geekier crowd. If Ben “Rhino” Reinhold attended a chess club meeting, Dalton would score some major points.

“That would be ... awesome.” Dalton stared at Rhino, Elle completely forgotten.

Behind his serious nerd glasses was a boy-band cute face. So cute that in another dimension he might be some A-list hottie type. Then Elle touched his arm and the illusion shattered. It was just one finger, but that was enough to make Dalton jump. His Star Wars case slipped, and pens and pencils rained across the floor.

I helped Dalton chase after all his Sharpies and mechanical pencils, but by the time I grabbed the last highlighter, he had already given up and was trudging down the hall.

Rhino stepped in front of Elle then, a shield between her and Dalton. Why? I wondered. In case he decided to come back for another dose of mortification? The two of them stood there, face to face, even after Dalton had disappeared up the stairs. A few seconds of staring in silence went by, then Rhino turned his back on Elle.

“Cams,” he said. “Did you figure out that calc problem yet?”

The one we’d spent zero seconds working on? Right. I rolled my eyes.

Elle tapped Rhino’s shoulder, but he didn’t respond.

“Ben?” she said.

That worked. Rhino spun around. He stepped far enough back that she couldn’t reach him.

“It’s Rhino,” he said.

Elle made her hair do this swaying-to-one-side thing. She peeked up at him through her eyelashes after that—a look that probably turned ordinary boys into liquid.

“I like the name Ben better,” she said.

“I don’t.”

I think I’ve said it before: Rhino is no ordinary boy.

Elle might be the queen of ultra-cool at Olympia High, but Rhino was the king of anti-cool. Really, if you combined the two of them in chem lab, you’d probably blow up the entire school. Here in the lobby, it was just awkward and kind of weird for everyone.

Okay, I lie. The truth is, it was only awkward and weird for me. Rhino and Elle seemed perfectly fine with the whole deal. He wouldn’t break his death stare. She refused to stop smiling. It was almost as if they were enjoying the challenge. The three of us stood in suspended animation until the bell rang. Then I raced for my locker, leaving both of them behind.

In homeroom, Mr. Moore held up a stack of papers. When the bell rang, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are now entrusted with the first important decision of your senior experience. It will, in fact, set the tone for the entire year.”

I should probably tell you that Mr. Moore teaches Drama. He directs all the school plays. He’s an actor in the Olympia Community Theater Group too. So he never actually hands stuff out. Instead, he walks up and down the aisles and plunks things on desks with a flourish.

“It’s a tremendous responsibility,” he continued. Flourish, plunk, flourish, plunk. “You need to choose.” Flourish, plunk. “But remember, choose wisely.”

The name of every single girl in the senior class was on the paper. All of us, alphabetically. At the top of the page, the instructions stated: Circle ten.

Jason Abernathy raised his hand. “Mr. Moore?”

“Ah, Mr. Abernathy. Is there a problem?”

“Am I supposed to circle all the girls who are in love with me? ’Cause that’s way more than ten.”

“Why, Jason, I’m so glad to hear you can count that high,” Mr. Moore said.

Ouch. But The Ab only grinned.

“For those of you who prefer not to read the full instructions, you are supposed to cast your vote for—” Mr. Moore stopped talking in the middle of his sentence. He walked around his desk and pulled up the screen that covered the white board. In big block letters it said:

Homecoming Queen Candidate Vote Today!

Every year, two weeks before the homecoming game, Olympia High kicked off activities that were far more important than a mere sporting event: the OHS Homecoming Court Competition, otherwise known as (drum roll, please) The Trojan Wars.

“Like I said,” Mr. Moore added. “Choose wisely.”

Over the years the rules of the competition had morphed into a complicated set of regulations that I’m pretty sure no one understood completely any more. Mostly, though, it worked like this: Each member of the senior class nominated ten girls. The five girls who got the most votes became the contestants for homecoming queen. But once those five were chosen, it was the entire town of Olympia that had the final vote. Each girl chosen was required to come up with at least one campaign container and place it (them) in a public location. Then everyone in town dropped their votes inside the canisters.

The thing was, those votes weren’t ballots on flimsy slips of paper. No. In Olympia, Minnesota, we did our voting with cold, hard cash. Every penny counted as one vote, although crisp bills and checks were happily accepted too. One day soon, someone would probably figure out how to attach a debit card reader to the canisters.

The money raised in the contest was used for the annual senior trip at the end of the school year. Forget bake sales and car washes; the cash we collected during those two weeks made up eighty percent of our travel budget. That’s why it was important to choose the right candidates. Critical, even. All we had to do was pick the perfect combination of girls. Then, when May finally arrived, we’d roll out in luxury motor coaches, the kind with air conditioning, bathrooms and TV/DVD combos, for a week-long, all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C.

But if we picked the wrong set of girls? We’d be eating stale bologna sandwiches on a sweltering school bus before geo-caching at Bear Head Lake.

For a minute or more, most of us in homeroom just sat there. A few people bent their heads and started circling names. Everyone else glanced around. Guys studied girls. Girls studied other girls.

A creepy feeling crawled up the back of my neck. I ran my fingers over the skin there to wipe it away. I thought about who Rhino might circle. Then I gave that up and started selecting the girls I thought should represent Olympia High. You know the type—the ones no one really noticed.

I circled Tara Tanaka. She was Dalton’s co-leader in the chess club and she could kick his ass at timed games. I marked Alicia Weingeld next, the president of the French and Spanish clubs. I couldn’t leave off Prudence Laramie. She played first violin and was concertmaster for the school orchestra. Some people might call her a “big girl” but I’d never seen her hide her figure.

I’d circled nine girls with a minute to go. That creepy feeling returned. I looked up and found Jason Abernathy staring at me. I said a silent prayer of thanks to the seating chart gods that this year his desk was three rows away from mine. I so didn’t need to be sniffed at the moment.

He gave me a quirky half smile. If I’d been the kind of girl to crush on The Ab, it might have made me melt across my desk. But I wasn’t that kind of girl. I watched while he circled one last name on his list, one that was near the start of the alphabet. Then he slapped his desk and gave me a thumbs up.

I had no idea what that meant in Ab language.

I tapped my pen against the paper and tried to decide: To Elle or not to Elle? She’d end up as homecoming queen anyway. The whole school—no, the whole town—knew that, so it didn’t matter if I voted for her or not. On the other hand, who else was there? I’d already picked all the girls who really deserved it.

No, I thought. There was one more. The bell rang and I pulled my pen from the Es of Emerson fame, closer to the bottom of the list. I circled one final name: Sophie Vega.

By second block that day, news of the mass breakups had spread through the school. The boy boycott was going viral. Groups of scowling jocks prowled the halls between classes, searching for someone, anyone, to shove.

Clarissa Delacroix led the dance team down the hallway with their heads high, looking straight ahead. When Aiden Tuttle stepped into their path, they fanned out around him, like a stream around a rock. The move looked so choreographed it was like they’d practiced it for months.

My knee still ached from jogging with Dad so I took the steps to the tutoring room one at a time after school that day. I teetered a little on the third floor landing. My eyes were on my shoes, so I barely noticed the shadow at the top of the stairs. And I definitely didn’t notice the person attached to it. When I looked up, I found Gavin Madison standing between the tutoring room door and me.

As usual, the sight of him took my breath away. There was something special about him and it didn’t have anything to do with looks. Okay, it didn’t have much to do with looks. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I ever heard anyone call him cute. He had these amber-colored, tractor beam eyes, though. They could stare right through you. And his hands. I had them memorized. Even with my eyes shut, I could still see the way they held a football, or a pencil. The way they had once (only once) held my own hand.

Gavin blocked my way, and I was still too breathless to ask him to move. I looked from his eyes to his hands to his mouth. It was like there was no safe place to stare.

I could hear the sound of the football team warming up through the open door and windows behind him. The sound was hushed today. All I caught was an O, an M and an IA.

“Shouldn’t you be at practice?” I regretted the words as soon as I’d said them. What if he’d been benched because of Friday’s game?

“Coach gave me a pass.”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what a pass had to do with the tutoring room or me. Gavin was still blocking my way, and it felt like I had to say something more.

“Do you miss it? Practice, I mean?”

He grinned. “I’m missing it right now.”

I shook my head, hoping to shake the right words into it. “No, like, when you’re not down there on the field. Do you miss it?”

“Do you?”

Part of me wanted to release the answer and let it come rushing out. Yes. I miss it. Why do you think I come to every single football game? But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything else, either. Things got so quiet that I thought I could hear the rattle of shoulder pads from the football field.

“You have a customer,” Gavin said at last.

“What?”

He nodded toward the tutoring room. “I think someone needs help in there. Is it your first one of the season?”

Oh. Tutoring. Of course. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Gavin stepped to the side and headed for the stairs. “I’ll get out of your way, then.”

He was halfway down the flight of stairs before I found the nerve to say, “Gavin?”

He stopped and turned. He rested his elbow on the railing and stared through me with those eyes again.

“C-can I,” I stuttered. “I mean, did you need something?”

“It can wait.” He took the stairs like he was running a speed drill. I listened to the echo of his footsteps until I couldn’t hear them any more. I turned toward the tutoring room then, wondering who, or what, was waiting inside for me.

A boy was sitting at a desk near the back of the room, staring out the window. He had the round cheeks of a freshman and that white blond hair you see a lot of in Minnesota. I didn’t know him.

“Can I help you?”

He jumped a lot like Jason had. Maybe it was a guy thing. Then he stared at me, all huge eyes like a rabbit.

“I’m the peer tutor,” I said. “Do you need help?”

He let out a breath, then spoke so softly that I almost couldn’t hear him. “My mom says I have to get tutoring or else.”

“Or else what?”

“I can’t play video games if I don’t get at least a C in math.”

At least he was motivated. And math? I didn’t love it, but I could do it; most of it, anyway. I could probably get this kid to do it too.

“What are you working on?” I pulled up a chair across from him. “I’m Camy, by the way.”

“Byron.” He pulled his math book out of his bag and opened it to a page near the beginning.

“Ah, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally.”

“Huh?” Byron said.

“You’re working on order of operations. Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication and division, then addition and subtraction, right?”

He nodded at me but I could tell that he thought I was crazy.

“Please. Excuse. My Dear. Aunt Sally. It’s just an easier way to remember it. Get it?”

“Cool.”

He smiled and we both relaxed. For the next few minutes there was no Gavin, no wiki, no Hotties of Troy to worry about, no boy boycott, and no pervy Greek play either. Just me, a little math, and a slightly confused freshman. Right now, I thought. This was the official start of the school year.

Three minutes later, the door to the tutoring room burst open. Pom-pom fringe exploded everywhere. And the official start of the school year came crashing to a halt.

I wasn’t sure how many girls were on the pom squad. When I looked at the amount of fringe being tossed around, I decided to go with the estimate of: a lot. They looked so much alike, too. All of them in ponytails, yoga shorts, and matching tops. They filled the room, sitting on the desks and tables.

“Oh, look!” one of the girls by the windows squealed. “You can see football practice from here!”

Great. Now I’d never get rid of them.

Their leader was a girl named Lexy. When she leaned in close and gave Byron a big smile, I thought the poor kid was going to faint. Seriously.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked.

Lexy crossed the room and pulled her legs up on the windowsill. “Elle sent us,” she said.

Of course she had.

“How long did she tell you to stay?”

“I forget.” Lexy glanced out the window, and her eyes got all wide. “Ohmigosh, everyone, it’s Gavin! Come see Gavin!”

All the girls rushed forward and smashed themselves against the glass. Really, it was like someone took a gigantic vacuum cleaner, attached it to the tutoring room windows, and turned the setting to pom squad.

No wonder Elle had sent them up here. Their usual hangout (the chain link fence around the football field) was within flirting range. Although I wasn’t sure how long the barrier of glass would last. I couldn’t tutor like this.

“Excuse me,” I said to Byron, although I don’t think he heard me. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I took the stairs and walked outside as fast as my knee would let me. On the track that surrounded the football field, the cheerleaders were running through their routines. Mercedes waved at me, then she flipped herself over backward. I waved back and waited for Elle to come to her “office.” When she did, I climbed the bleachers and plopped down on the row beneath her.

“Why is the entire pom squad in my tutoring room?” I asked.

Elle checked her phone and grumbled to herself. She tapped a response before she looked at me. “Yeah?”

“Pom squad. My tutoring room.”

“If somebody isn’t watching those girls, they’ll hang off the fence and slobber all over the boys out here. That would not be good for our plan. Like it says in the Bible, their spirit is willing, but their flesh is weak.” She shook her head. “Very, very weak. And really, their spirit isn’t all that willing, either.”

“I’m trying to tutor someone,” I said.

Elle looked bored.

“He’s a freshman. I’m not sure he’ll survive.”

She snorted. “I thought about locking them in the batting cages, but that’s probably against the law.”

I looked back at the school, my gaze drawn to the third floor and the tutoring room’s long bank of windows. Pressed up against the panes were various faces. I couldn’t tell who was who, not at this distance, but a slow, sinking feeling filled me. How many times had I stood in that very spot? How many hours had I spent staring out the window, gazing at Gavin?

I glanced from the window to the football field and back again. Had Gavin seen me there, watching him? Today’s lunch rose up in my throat and my earlier conversation with Gavin rang in my head:

“When you’re not practicing, not on the field. Do you miss it?”

“Do you?”

Maybe he already knew the answer to that.

I turned back to Elle. “The pom squad?”

She stared past me at the boys on the football field. “Get me something on Lexy,” she said. “Something from the wiki that will prove to her that we’re not just being ‘big ole meany pants’.”

“She was in the meeting on Friday, wasn’t she?”

Elle cast me a world-weary look. “I swear, some of these girls lack a grasp of the obvious.”

“‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’” I quoted.

“Churchill?”

“Orwell.”

“Quote me something from The Ab, and we’ll talk pom squad.” Elle turned back to her phone. “Until then, they’re all yours.”

Dismissed, I trudged back up to the tutoring room, hoping the pom squad had decided to defy Elle and leave.

They hadn’t. I found three of the girls sharing a table with Byron.

“Still need help with math?” Without waiting for an answer, I squeezed a chair between him and the girls. “You know what?” I said to them. “Next time, why don’t you guys bring your assignments? That way you can get them done before you go home.”

“You want us to do homework instead of watching football practice?” Lexy said from her spot on the windowsill.

She was right. What kind of suggestion was that? “You can still watch practice,” I said.

The girl on my left clapped her hands together. “Isn’t Gavin just the best?” she said, and her expression went all dreamy. If she were a cartoon character, little hearts would’ve shot from her eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. We both looked toward the window. “He is.”