Geek Charming - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Palmer grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and graduated from Boston University before she hit the road for Hollywood. Starting as an assistant in the television literary department of the William Morris Agency, she quickly moved up the ranks and spent the next decade as a literary agent, producer, and television network executive at Lifetime Television, where she developed over one hundred scripts and oversaw the production of over thirty of the cable network's original movies. In 2001, she remembered that she had originally intended to spend her life either as a writer or a toll booth collector (so she could indulge her penchant for spending her days alone reading), but as there are no toll roads in southern California, she decided to give the writing thing a try. Since then, she's written everything from screenplays to essays to a novel to a preschool guide. Although she's constantly threatening to move, she currently resides in New York City.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

chapter one: dylan

chapter two: josh

chapter three: dylan

chapter four: josh

chapter five: dylan

chapter six: josh

chapter seven: dylan

chapter eight: josh

chapter nine: dylan

chapter ten: josh

chapter eleven: dylan

chapter twelve: josh

chapter thirteen: dylan

Special Excerpt from The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

The deal

“I guess I don’t have a choice.” I sighed. “Meet me on The Ramp at lunch on Monday and you can start then. But I’m telling you I don’t care what my father says—if I see that you’re trying to make me look bad, the deal’s off. Got it?”

“Got it,” he replied, nibbling away on the black side of the cookie.

“And don’t think that this means that all of a sudden we’re like friends, or anything,” I said. “It’s strictly business. Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Asher and I are super serious, so if you were thinking of using this documentary thing as a way to, you know, hit on me or anything, it’s not going to work.”

“Don’t worry,” Geek Boy said. “Like you said, it’s strictly business. But who knows—maybe this’ll be the start of a long and rewarding working relationship.”

Sheesh—someone was taking this movie stuff way too seriously. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said as he stood up and put out his hand. “So we have a deal?”

I put mine out as well. “I guess so.”

As I walked him to what he called the Neilmobile (Hello? Can you get cheesier than that?) I tried to look at the bright side of things: helping Geek Boy fulfill his dream of getting into USC film school had to balance out whatever bad karma I may have had.

Not that I had any, of course.

BOOKS BY ROBIN PALMER

Cindy Ella

Geek Charming

Little Miss Red

Wicked Jealous

The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

FOR YOUNGER READERS

Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 1: Girl vs. Superstar

Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 2: Sealed with a Kiss

Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 3: Vote for Me!

Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 4: Take My Advice

Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 5: For Better or for Worse

SPEAK

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Published by speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (usa) Inc., 2008

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION Data
Palmer, robin, 1969-
Geek charming / by robin Palmer.
p. cm.
summary: rich, spoiled, and popular high school senior Dylan is coerced into doing a
documentary film with josh, one of the school’s geeks, who leads her
to realize that the world does not revolve around her.

ISBN: 9781101019887

the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To the real Amy Loubalu,
For restoring my sanity on a daily basis

Acknowledgments

With special thanks to:

Jennifer Bonnell—the world’s best editor and midwife—for getting me the way she does, and for always making me laugh through the pain of the contractions.

Eileen Kreit at Puffin for being such an enthusiastic cheerleader.

My agent, Kate Lee, for everything else.

And New York City, which became my new home while writing this.

chapter one: dylan

One day as I was watching Oprah, waiting for her to get to her “Favorite Things for Spring” segment (she has the cutest taste in accessories), I heard this self-help guru guy say that the word for crisis in Chinese is actually two words: danger and opportunity.

The reason I looked up from Vogue when the guru said this is because I have one of those lives where there’s always a crisis going on. Like 24/7. My best friend, Lola Leighton, says that I’m just a drama queen and that they’re not real crises, like, say, the kind she would’ve had to deal with if her parents hadn’t adopted her from the orphanage in China. Okay, yes, when you put it in that context, I guess Lola’s right. But since I live in Beverly Hills and not a third-world country, my crises and the crises of nonadopted kids are bound to be different, you know?

Take, for instance, the time I was driving home from the Justin Timberlake concert at the Staples Center and I was all by myself because I had a huge fight with my boyfriend Asher after I caught him staring at Amy Loubalu’s boobs like seven times that night even though he swears he wasn’t, and my BMW conked out on the 405 freeway at midnight and I had to wait an hour for Triple A to arrive. Now, that, in my book, is a crisis—especially since I was wearing a miniskirt and tank top because it was a million degrees out. I mean, if a serial killer who liked girls with long blonde hair and blue eyes had driven by at that moment, I would’ve been dead meat. The only “opportunity” there was the opportunity to be chopped up into a million little pieces.

As far as I’m concerned, sometimes a crisis is just a crisis. Like what happened last week with my Serge Sanchez bag. Yet another crisis—and the only opportunity there was to see what $1,200 worth of red leather would look like after it dried out. (FYI, it turns out that it doesn’t look so bad—sort of a cross between my two favorite nail polishes, OPI’s I’m Not Really A Waitress and Essie’s Scarlett O’Hara.)

It was Tuesday afternoon and I was at The Dell, which is a huge outdoor mall on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood that my dad happens to own, with Lola and Hannah Mornell, our other best friend. The day before I had seen these absolutely darling J.Crew red gingham ballet flats that I just had to have because I knew they’d look so cute with my black capris and a white shirt I had bought the week before. Very 1960s movie-starlet-ish, which was going to be my new look for fall. So I had gotten the shoes (plus two dresses, some tank tops, a cashmere hoodie, and some lip gloss) and the three of us were hanging out in front of the fountain deciding whether we should go to Urth Caffé for sugar-free iced vanilla lattes or Pinkberry for frozen yogurt when the Crisis-with-a-capital-C occurred.

“Omigod, Dylan,” said Hannah as she clipped a tortoiseshell barrette onto her short auburn bob. Hannah is...