Revenge of the Geek (14 page)

“What she means is that the entire Orange Cove High School already knows I’m a loser who can’t get a date, so I don’t have a lot to lose,”Leo translated for me.

“You have to stop talking about yourself that way,”Hannah chided him. “Remember, the image you portray to the outside world is very important. If you start truly believing that you’re an attractive, successful, likeable guy, other people will start seeing you that way.”

Leo rolled his eyes. “Believing that I’m Brad Pitt isn’t going to magically turn me into Brad Pitt.”

“Maybe not. But you don’t have to be Brad Pitt to find love,”Hannah told him.

Hannah was actually making sense to me. I wondered if I should be worried.

“Were you finally able to fix your Web site?”I asked Hannah.

“No. But it actually turned out to be a good thing. People thought it was really funny, especially the part about being a
loser at love
and
too ugly to find a date
. Word got around, and we started to get some clients because of it,”Hannah said.

“People want to hire a matchmaking service that calls them ugly losers?”I asked.

Hannah shrugged. “I guess people found the honesty refreshing. Anyway, we decided that since a lot of our clients are, um,”—she gave Leo another furtive glance—“appearance challenged, we’d expand our services to offer them makeovers. You know, counsel them on how to look better, dress better, feel better about themselves. After we’re done with Leo’s intake video, Avery and I are going to take him to get his hair cut.”

“What? But I don’t want to get my hair cut. I like my hair like this,”Leo said. He covered his head with both hands, as though to ward off a surprise attack.

“You have to get it cut,”Avery told him bossily. “No girl is going to want to date you with those sideburns. Total Loserville.”

“So you’re not mad at Finn anymore?”I asked Hannah.

Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, no. I’m still mad at him. In fact, one of these days I’ll get him back for what he did.”

There was something menacing in the way Hannah said this.

“You didn’t happen to say anything to Phoebe about Finn, did you?”I asked. “Something that would make her break up with him?”

“No. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Maybe I should, though,”Hannah said thoughtfully. “Maybe I should tell her that you told me he’s obsessed with feet. Or that he collects Madame Alexander Dolls. Which do you think would freak her out more?”

“Hannah!”I said.

“It’s just a thought,”she said.

“It’s a bad thought. And don’t drag me into your revenge plots,”I said. “Besides, the reason I asked is that Finn and Phoebe broke up.”

“They did? Really?”Hannah tapped a thoughtful fingernail against her clipboard. “So Finn’s on the market? Maybe I could hook him up with one of my clients. Does he have a problem with severe overbites?”

Meanwhile, Avery and Leo were still arguing about his hair.

“But the sideburns are my signature look. And it took me forever to grow them out,”Leo said, clearly not ready to give in on this point.

“So?”Avery said, clearly not moved. “You can always grow them out again. But trust me, you’ll look so much better without those things. You can’t go around with your head looking like a Chia Pet.”

“If I’m going to find a girlfriend, shouldn’t she like me for who I am and not what I look like?”Leo asked.

Avery gave him a patronizing smile. “If you could find a girl who liked you for who you are, you wouldn’t need us. We’re going to turn you into someone new. Someone better.”

Leo looked so miserable, I decided I had to intervene on his behalf.

“Hannah, can I talk to you for a minute? Alone?”I asked.

Hannah glanced at her watch—clearly she didn’t think there was any time to be wasted before she bullied Leo into getting a haircut—but finally she acquiesced.

“Okay,”she said. “But make it quick.”

Hannah and I headed out to the back deck, with Willow tagging along behind us. The deck was raised on stilts, and offered a gorgeous view of the Atlantic Ocean. Willow stuck her nose out between the railings and stared longingly at the sandpipers darting along at the water’s edge.

As soon as the glass door was shut behind her, Hannah said, “What’s up?”

“I don’t think you should bully that poor kid into cutting off his sideburns if he doesn’t want to,”I said.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a person. With feelings. And it isn’t cool to keep talking about him like he’s some sort of a freakish loser,”I said. “He seems like a perfectly nice kid.”

“I don’t think he’s a freakish loser. That’s how he sees himself,”Hannah said.

“How do you know?”

“He came to us after seeing our Web site. Remember?
Are you a loser at love? Are you too unattractive to find a date?
If he didn’t think those things about himself, he wouldn’t have hired us,”Hannah pointed out.

“It’s one thing for him to have low self-esteem. It’s another thing for you to make him feel even worse about himself,”I argued.

“That’s just it—we’re trying to help him feel
better
about himself,”Hannah said.

“By telling him he needs to have a makeover?”I asked.

“Yes. The problem with you, Miranda, is that you’re too idealistic. You think people should always be judged on who they are, not what they look like,”Hannah said.

“What’s wrong with that?”I asked.

“It’s not realistic. The truth is, looks do matter. And people do judge you on what you look like. Take you, for example,”Hannah said.

“What about me?”I asked, instantly wary.

“Remember how you used to dress? All you used to wear were boring T-shirts and ratty old jeans. Then I took you shopping, and we got you some cute new clothes, and you look like an entirely different person,”Hannah said.

“I don’t know about the
entirely different
part,”I said.

“Trust me, you do. And look at the effect it’s having on your life. You told me that witchy girl you go to school with wanted to say something mean to you about your appearance, but couldn’t come up with anything,”Hannah said. “And look at your friend Nora.”

“Nora? What about her?”I asked, startled.

“She’s started dressing like you.”

“She has?”

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed? I noticed it the other day when she was over here. She totally copied that outfit you have. You know, the cute tunic with the spaghetti straps over the skinny-leg jeans. The top was exactly the same as yours, only she had it in green instead. I remember seeing it at the store, but I thought blue was a better color on you,”Hannah said.

“No, I hadn’t noticed,”I said, completely bewildered. “But I have no fashion sense. Why would anyone copy what I wear?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. You may not have any fashion sense, but you
look
like you do, thanks to me. So everyone who sees you thinks that you’ve got great style. And then they want to copy you. Or at least Nora does,”Hannah said.

“But isn’t it sort of weird that she’d copy me like that?”I asked. The idea made me vaguely uneasy.

“No. I mean, it might be sort of psycho if she bought all of the exact same clothes as you. But if she’s just copying a piece or two, that’s not so weird. You know what they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery,”Hannah said.

Hannah’s cell phone rang, and she tapped her Bluetooth on. “Match Made matchmaking, Hannah Moore speaking. Yes, that’s right. Hold one minute, please.”Hannah looked at me. “Are we done, Miranda? This is a client calling.”

“Yeah, we’re done,”I said.

I hadn’t succeeded in talking Hannah into leaving Leo’s hair alone. But, after all, it was his head. If he didn’t want his hair cut, he was going to have to stand firm.

But Hannah’s comments about Nora wearing the same clothes as me worried me. The long tunic tank top wasn’t the first item of clothing Nora had copied from me; she’d also bought an identical plaid halter top. And maybe there were other things she’d copied, as well, without my noticing. I never did pay much attention to what people were wearing. For all I knew, Nora
could
have bought all the exact same clothes I had. Which would be really creepy.

But no
, I thought, and shook off this thought. Why was my mind jumping to such nasty places? If Nora and I had some of the same clothes, it was just a coincidence. Orange Cove was a small town, with a limited number of places to shop.

I thought I knew what was going on. I was still feeling a little jealous about how well Nora had been getting along with Charlie and Finn that afternoon. In fact, it wasn’t the only time I’d been feeling flashes of jealousy lately. I’d also been jealous of Tabitha for getting the fiction assignment for
The Ampersand,
and I’d worried unnecessarily about Dex being invited to a study group, for no other reason than that the person who’d issued the invitation happened to be a girl.

I have to stop being so jealous
, I told myself sternly, as I headed back inside the beach house. There was a reason they called jealousy the green-eyed monster. As soon as you let it loose, it started to rampage out of control, insidiously causing you to question everyone and everything around you.

“Come on, Willow,”I called out. She was still at the deck fence, only now she’d wedged her entire head and neck through the railings to get a better look at the birds below. Willow panicked when she tried to turn to look back at me and realized that the fence post was in her way. When she finally freed herself, she looked sheepish as she trotted past me into the house.

In the kitchen, Leo was still on his stool, but the white sheet that had been tacked up behind him was now wrapped around his shoulders. Avery was standing over Leo, brandishing electric clippers in one hand while keeping a firm grip on Leo’s chin with her free hand. She looked intently down at him, while turning his chin from side to side.

“What are you doing to him?”I asked.

Avery and Leo both looked up at me. And as soon as they did, I could see exactly what she’d been doing to him: in our absence, one of Leo’s sideburns had been shaved off.

“I’m making him look better,”Avery said.

I considered trying to help Leo—insisting that he had the right to wear his sideburns however he chose, and that she should let him go immediately. But then I remembered what Hannah had said about how I was too idealistic, and that maybe Leo really would be happier once the ridiculous sideburns were gone. Besides, he couldn’t walk around with one sideburn short and the other long.

So I just said, “Oh.”

Avery refocused her attention on Leo’s hair. She picked up a pair of scissors and snipped them menacingly. “I think an inch or two overall would make a big difference,”she said.

“An inch or
two
? But my hair’s only about two and a half inches long!”Leo said nervously. “Can’t I at least go to a professional barber?”

“Why? I can totally do this. Besides, if you’re ever going to have a relationship, you’re going to need to work on your trust issues,”Avery said.

Recognizing a lost cause, I grabbed an apple and headed off to my room to give my
Ampersand
piece one final read through.

Chapter Fifteen

D
ex was in brighter spirits that night. He’d gotten a B-plus on his first homework assignment in European history.

“Now if I could just figure out my trig homework, I’d be golden,”Dex said.

“Too bad you don’t know anyone who’s good at math. Especially a girlfriend willing to help you out,”I said.

“I didn’t even think of that. Can you help me?”

“Sure. Just give me the problems, and we’ll go through each one step-by-step,”I suggested.

“Have I ever told you that you’re the best girlfriend ever?”Dex asked.

“Yes. But I’m always open to hearing it again,”I said.

The truth was, I was glad to have the distraction. I’d been feeling off all afternoon, ever since leaving Grounded. But an hour spent walking Dex through the complexities of trigonometry had the effect of clearing my mind. After we hung up—and I was pleased by how reluctant Dex seemed to say good-bye to me—Charlie called me on my cell phone.

“Hey. I wanted to make sure you were okay,”she said. “You were so quiet this afternoon. You didn’t seem like your usual self.”

“What do you mean?”I asked. I’d been sitting at my desk while I Skyped with Dex, but now I moved over to my bed, sitting cross-legged on top of the blue-and-green bedspread. Willow stood, tail wagging, and mashed her head down on the edge of the bed so I could stroke her nose.

“I feel like I spent the whole time we were at Grounded talking to Nora,”Charlie said.

You did spend the whole time talking to Nora. I was completely superfluous to the conversation
, I wanted to say. But then, remembering my resolution to squelch such jealous thoughts, I instead said, “I guess I was just off in my own little world.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”Charlie offered.

“No, nothing like that. I think I’m just nervous about my article for
The Ampersand
. I’m handing it in tomorrow,”I said. This wasn’t a complete lie. I thought I’d done a good job with it, but I was nervous about how Candace would respond. I had the feeling that she read all of
The Ampersand
pieces with a very critical eye.