Dating on the Dork Side

Chapter 1-3

I showed her to Rhino. “I think that’s good luck.”

He held out a finger, and the ladybug clambered over to him.

“It’s a real one, too,” he said, “not one of those heinous Asian beetle imposters.” The ladybug preened, testing her wings, then took flight, a tiny spot of red against a blue September sky.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.” Rhino turned to me. “What about you? Are you flying away home or can you stay a while? Need help with calculus yet?”

Thanks to Rhino and my pride, I’d managed to cling to the accelerated math track. Unlike Rhino, who raced through mathematics the way some kids leveled up in video games, I had to claw my way past each new theorem and function. The only upside was that once I understood something, I could almost always explain it. That I was the most requested math tutor in school was an irony not lost on me. Or Rhino, for that matter.

“Maybe by the end of the week,” I said. “You’re on my speed dial.”

“In that case, stay. The Twins are playing tonight.”

I didn’t know why he thought that would tempt me. Baseball bored me, and Rhino knew that. I opened my mouth, not so much in response, but to tell him about that afternoon in the tutoring room. About Jason, and the wiki. Then, in my mind’s eye, I saw my name in the recently-accessed list and a fierce flush flooded my cheeks.

“What?” Rhino asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.

I never blushed around him. Well, almost never. Rhino could help me hack into the site, but that would also mean he could read about me on The Hotties of Troy. Was it worth it?

I shook my head, both in answer to his question and my own.

“Nothing,” I said.

If I didn’t get anywhere with it at home, I’d log in tomorrow from the tutoring room. There was no need to involve Rhino at all, no need to expose him to what were sure to be unflattering remarks about me.

If I knew one thing about myself, it was this: I was no Hottie of Troy.

“Okay, then, Ladybug, fly away home.” He turned back to his printouts.

Rhino was not a touchy-feely kind of guy. His self-containment was legend and his personal space sacred. That he let me inside his bubble, close enough to pluck an insect from his hair, said a lot. I still wasn’t getting a hug from the deal.

I waved as I left, but with his head down, his focus on baseball stats, Rhino didn’t see me. I walked home, equally focused on the wiki.

I couldn’t remember the website address. I couldn’t find it in Google either. Someone had made sure that search engines didn’t pick up the site. I shut my eyes, trying to visualize the address field. It was like a test, and I was good at those. Wiki, I thought; that was part of it. The rest were letters. Initials. T-H-O-T?

All I got was a blank page. Then I smiled and swapped numeral 0 for the letter O, and I was in!

I glanced over my shoulder. My room was at the opposite end of the house from the driveway. Any minute, Dad could pull up, walk in, and be up the stairs before I realized it. I eased my bedroom door closed. A girl couldn’t have too much privacy, especially when she was about to hack into a website called The Hotties of Troy.

Back at my desk, my fingers shook so hard that the first time I tried the login, I messed it up. I tried again, hoping Jason hadn’t gone all security-conscious since that afternoon.

He hadn’t. For several heartbeats, I stared at the girl wiki in all its chauvinistic glory. Enough time had passed that my name no longer came up on the recently-accessed list. And let’s face it, no way would I pop up in any kind of hottie list. I used the box at the top of the page to search for myself.

My name appeared, and all I had to do was click on it to get to my page. I pushed away from my desk again, cracked the door, just an inch, and listened hard. Then I rushed back, clicked on my name, and hid my face in my hands.

I had all of four entries, two from last spring and two from today.

Admin: She always smells good.

Oh. Well. Let’s hear it for hygiene.

Adm*n: She smells f**king fantastic.

Okay, really good hygiene.

jasona: UR rite. She smells like a chick should ... not all perfumey and fake. And bro, she was totally checking me out in the tutoring room today. I’m going to have to fail something this year, get some up close academic help, if ya know what I mean.

Only someone with an ego the size of Jason’s would assume any girl who glanced at him was checking him out.

Adm*n: Dude, how’s failing this year different from any other year?

I snorted, starting to like this Adm*n with an asterisk guy. I clicked on the home page again, but then I sat back in my chair and thought: What now? I felt like I should tell someone. The principal? Ms. Pendergast?

Or maybe the person who had the most at stake in all this, the one who topped every list, recently-accessed, recently-updated, hottest of the hot: the one and only … Elle Emerson.

I clicked over to her page and read the first comment:

jasona: Bro, totally hot, but completely lethal. I don’t have any pics from today’s cheerleading practice cuz she tossed my phone into the bleachers and I lost the battery.

Well, that explained why Jason had been in the tutoring room, using a computer instead of his phone. And that was Elle, all right. She had all the intelligence and ambition of a Hillary Clinton packed into the body of a Victoria’s Secret model. Elle was student council president, star performer in the debate club, captain of the cheerleading squad, and when I say she ruled the school, I mean she literally Ruled. The. School. No one crossed Elle and escaped unscathed.

More comments littered her page, way more than my measly four. There seemed to be nothing about Elle that wasn’t being discussed. Her class schedule was posted, along with a list of her favorite school lunch entrees. Someone who called himself mchottie pointed out that Elle hadn’t eaten broccoli since sixth grade, when it got stuck in her braces. Another boy disagreed. He’d witnessed her eating it with cheese sauce on a baked potato at Wendy’s last year.

That led to a thread about her eating habits in general. Things went downhill when someone started a debate about whether Elle might be a secret scarf ’n’ barfer. They took an even more disgusting turn when several boys volunteered to hold her ponytail the next time she puked, especially if they could perform this act of gallantry in the girls’ locker room.

i don’t know, one boy added.

she’s really not that special. have u ever tried to make out w her? girl is totally made of ice.

Adm*n had stepped in at that point, which was good. I guess. But why couldn’t he have stopped things sooner? And why did these boys think it was okay to talk about girls like this in the first place?

I clicked on Elle’s photo page next. It took forever to load, thanks to endless pictures of her: at parties, at last year’s prom, in the center of an epic cheerleading pyramid collapse, adjusting her bra strap in front of school this very morning.

Wow. These guys were dedicated. Total creepers, but dedicated.

Elle needed to know about this, but I wasn’t sure how to tell her. Except for surviving three years of French with Madame Bourg-Schmidt (who was also Señora Bourg-Schmidt, the Spanish teacher) together, we barely knew each other. But thanks to French club, I did have her email address.

I opened my mail program and started typing.

Elle,

This is going to sound strange, but I think you should look at this website. Log in using jasona and theab.

Camy

I included the website address, started to click send, then went back and added my last name, just in case she had no idea who I was. I waited, wondering if the seismic boom of her anger would shake my windows. Then I wondered how often she even looked at her email. I could be in for a long wait.

Nothing was lamer than checking email every five seconds, so I made my bed and stacked my new textbooks on the shelf next to the desk. When my mail program chimed, the calculus book slipped from my fingers and thudded on the floor.

Her message contained two words:

K. Thanks.

That was it? No seismic boom? No anger? No … nothing? A thought crept into my mind. Maybe everyone else in school already knew about the wiki and I’d just walked into a world of humiliation.

I closed my email program, then shoved my feet against the desk. My chair careened backward into the wall and I’d hoped the jolt would knock some belated sense into me. All it did was give me a headache. Then I went downstairs, pretending I hadn’t just committed the first social blunder of the school year.