King Dork Approximately (28 page)

So, it was “boobies,” not “boobs.” Euphemisms make the world go round.

“So,” the Female Robot was saying, still in a whisper, looking
around. “You have the hots for Pammelah. Am I right? Am I right?” She raised and lowered her eyebrows rapidly.

I didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“You do or you don’t,” she said. “Or do you like Blossom van Kinkle? Because Pamm was worried you might. That would be so sad. But come on, who do you like, Blossom or Pammelah? You can tell me, I won’t tell.” The Robot poked me in the ribs, mouthing the two names with that question mark still on her face, Blossom, Pammelah, Blossom, Pammelah …

Now, look, see, this is actually one of the hardest and easiest questions there is, best answered by Sam Hellerman once when I asked if he had the hots for Celeste Fletcher. “I have the hots for everybody,” he had said. And so do I, for pretty much every girl I see who is even slightly in the ballpark of halfway decent and who hasn’t given me any reason to dislike her actively—and even then, I’d probably still have “the hots” for her. You can’t control “the hots.” You don’t say, like, oh, I would ordinarily like this girl’s ass, but now that I know she’s a Republican or likes the Doors then I suddenly don’t. It doesn’t work like that, at least not for me. And it’s true the other way too: things like accomplishments or abilities don’t much matter like people seem to think they should. “Well, Gwendolyn, now that I know you came in second in the spelling bee, I suddenly inexplicably want to ramone you.” No, not so much. An ass is an ass is an ass. You either like it or you don’t, and spelling bees don’t enter into it, so to speak. But honestly? I usually do like it.

Because my standards are … generous. I just like girls. In general. Not just their asses, don’t get me wrong here: their tits, too, and, I mean, pretty much all that stuff they got. Is that so wrong? Because I know some people think it is wrong
somehow, but what are you supposed to do about it if it’s, you know, the case? Just pretend it’s not “the case,” I guess. So okay, I’ll pretend if you want. But as the Robot might whisper:
It’s still the case
. I even got turned on by the Robot’s bony ass when she was half sitting on me in Little Big Tom’s truck. Her WHR and BWR wouldn’t get the Sam Hellerman seal of approval, I can tell you that right now: I’m pretty sure both would be not all that far from 1.0. But I don’t see how anyone could deny that there were “hots” during that uncomfortable drive in the truck. Sometimes “the hots” just happen.

Now, of course, out of the enormous field of people for whom you might have “the hots,” the number of them with whom you will ever actually have an opportunity to express your “hots” is going to be a whole lot smaller, and sometimes, sadly, it could even be zero. I happen to think I haven’t done too badly there, in view of my considerable limitations. But maybe what the question “Do you have the hots” for someone really means is something like: “Do you feel you can get away with making an attempt to express your ‘hots’ in the context of this particular person?” And the ones where you want to express your “hots” but don’t feel you can get away with it? Well, those right there are your “secret hots,” really probably the overwhelming majority of all the world’s “hots,” let’s be honest.

Well, I mean, basically, I’m not an idiot: I knew I was being offered Pammelah on a silver platter here, in a plan obviously cooked up between the two of them, good cop/oblivious cop style, if o. means what I think it does. In other words, it seemed like something I could probably definitely get away with. So whatever “hots” I had for Pammelah, it didn’t look like they’d have to be “secret hots.” And I was, frankly, getting pretty tired of secret hots. Pammelah was no Celeste Fletcher, and Blossom
van Kinkle was the hotter of the two by a wide margin, but I wasn’t being offered any sort of deal concerning them. And the one I was being offered was pretty cute and quite sexy, far beyond what I could have reasonably expected to “go” with on my credentials alone. The Robot was right: she had the “boobies like boys like,” and even her WHR wasn’t too bad. She did exhibit some unusual behavior, and maybe the crazy eyes. But she was available, available as they come. There was no doubt that she was the smart one to say I had the hots for, and it wasn’t even all that untrue.

Yet somehow, despite having what can only be described as a “sure thing” on my hands, I found the prospect of actually following the Robot’s crystal clear, step-by-step instructions in real life to be extremely daunting. I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. And I also found I couldn’t manage to will myself to know what to say to the Robot about the matter either.

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

“You know,” said the Female Robot, “you don’t know more often than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

I knew.

Later on, on the bus back from the Slut Heaven game, while Pammelah was “otherwise occupied,” Roberta the F. R. asked me what kind of girls I liked, and when I said I didn’t know she shook her head and said “Oh, Thomas, oh, Thomas …” But then she added:

“Who’s the girl in the song?”

After some confusion, I realized she was talking about the little bit of lyrics she had seen in my notebook way back after
our first “pep band” experience, the beginning of the “King Dork Strikes Again” work-very-much-in-progress.

“You say she’s your ‘dear,’ ” said the Robot, remembering pretty well.

I didn’t see any reason not to tell her about Celeste Fletcher and how we used to be, kind of … close. She was incredulous.

“Celeste?” she said. “Going-Out-with-Todd-Dante Celeste? That’s your ex?”

Well, now, “ex” was maybe pushing things, if she meant ex-girlfriend, which she did. I’d made out with Celeste Fletcher a couple times, signed her tits once, got a drugged-up hand job from her in the hospital—at least, I think I did—and managed casually as if by accident to touch her ass a few times thereafter. Not the deepest or most “meaningful” relationship in the history of the battle of the sexes by any stretch. And if you had ever called her my girlfriend in her presence she’d have hit you with a tire iron. I mean, if she’d happened to be holding a tire iron at the time. I doubt she’d actually make the effort to go out and find a tire iron just to hit you with if she didn’t already have one. But she’d be mad.

Anyway, I suppose I said I didn’t know in the “yes” way rather than in the “no” way.

The Robot was staring at me in awe. Celeste Fletcher had clawed her way to the upper midrange of the Clearview girl hierarchy, and Todd Dante was a big-deal football or basketball
guy, worshipped by one and all among the general population of the school, which, as I’ve noted, tilted heavily normal. Sam Hellerman had explained that a guy could raise his stock dramatically among females if they saw him associated with pretty girls, particularly those above their own status. It seemed to be what was happening here. I guess merely being the “ex” of someone who is the not-yet-“ex” of a popular sports guy confers a little of the sports guy’s allure. Chalk up another one to Sam Hellerman and the Hellerman tapes. They were running around four–zip, by my calculations.

When Pammelah returned from the front of the bus, the Robot moved to make room for her next to me, but not before doing some hurried whispering directly into Pammelah’s ear. Telling her about Celeste Fletcher? I imagine so, because Pammelah’s off-kilter eyes instantly began to take on the same look of astonishment and awe.

Meanwhile, I was thinking: I’ve got the chance and I ought to take it. And the way I saw it, there was no reason this whole thing couldn’t be accomplished without resorting to the terrifyingly extreme tactic of exchanging actual words.

So I tentatively put the very edge of my hand so it was just touching Pammelah’s leg. Her hand found mine. And, in secret, hidden underneath our two pressed-together thighs, my slender one and her quite a bit more substantial one, we rubbed our fingers all over each other the whole way, while the Robot chattered on and on and the kids on the bus sang “On, Wisconsin, suck my johnson.…”

It was a nice moment.

“What’s the song about?” the Robot said at one point.

“I think it’s about getting a blow job from the University of Wisconsin at Madison,” I said.

“No,
your
song!” she said, and her eyes added: “Idiot.”

What
was
my song about?

“I don’t know,” I said. But I gave her the look that says: “I think it’s about how it’s difficult to explain how hard it is to figure out how to go about trying to express how difficult to explain everything is.”

Sam Hellerman had advised, in the aftermath of the Jeans Skirt Girl operation, that the best way to kiss a girl the first time is, contrary to popular belief, just to zoom in and do it with little preamble. Talk to her first, of course, to ensure her comfort with you, but don’t waste time trying to “set it up.” Just do it. And whatever you do, don’t ask if it’s okay. Girls, apparently, hate it when a guy goes “I really want to kiss you, would that be all right?” and they instantly lose respect for any guy who does it.

“Just make eye contact and lean into her,” he had said. “And if you can organize it so you can push her up against a wall as you do it, they love that too.” Kind of tragic, if so, when you think about how the Aladdin Arcade had had no available walls. Or maybe it was not tragedy but merely poor organizational skills.

So meanwhile, I was still thinking. I was sure I could organize things better than that.

I waited for my moment, and when circumstances allowed, I pushed Pammelah Something up against the wall—well, the shelves really—of the band room, made contact with her eyes, and then made contact with her mouth. Well, what can I say? It was maybe a bit awkward because of her being bigger than me. But it was kissing a girl and it went as well as it could have, in my estimation, except for this one part halfway through where I started to wonder if I was failing to be interesting enough in
there and to worry that my tongue may have, in fact, overstayed its welcome and to consider the possibility that my best course of action might well be to cut my losses and run from the room sobbing, never to be heard from again. But then she looked at me and said, I kid you not, “Mm, I’d like another one of those.” Essentially, Pammelah Something (whose actual last name had turned out to be Shumway, of all things) responded with wild passion, just as the Robot had hinted and as Sam Hellerman had confidently predicted. And I had to hand it to the Robot on another matter as well, concerning the ass-grabbio: it was a pretty good butt, if not, perhaps, literally the “best in the west.”

So that, my dear friends, is how your illustrious narrator, through no fault of his own and largely by accident, wound up with a girlfriend. And they said it couldn’t be done.

I didn’t even have to ask her, in so many words, to “go.” Which I’m glad about, because the practice runs in my head hadn’t gone well. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible to say “Do you want to go?” and have it not sound sarcastic, no matter how hard you try. But in the event, the kiss (Hellermanian method, against-the-shelves variation) was all it took. We were going.

And that’s how Pammelah Shumway wound up in the red beanbag in the Celeste Fletcher spot at our band practice, looking all sexy, calling me “sweetie,” and asking if I was going to “play her song.” By “her song” she meant the half-finished “King Dork Strikes Again,” though she didn’t know it by that
title. I’m afraid I must admit that the title under which she knew it was “Pamm’s Song.” This is because, after hearing the Robot refer to it a few times, she had said:

“Is it about me?”

The look I gave her was one of surprise mingled with indignation and slight amusement at this presumptuous question. I’m not so cavalier with my songs, young lady, if “cavalier” means what I think it does. My songs are sacred. But Pammelah Shumway, being just about the worst face-reader I’ve ever come across in a lifetime of making people try to read my face, had taken that as a solid yes. Then, well, I guess I just kind of ran with it, because I didn’t know what else to do. And I was staring at her breasts, which distracted me at the crucial moment when I might have figured out a way to say “No, it isn’t, actually.” Not that I’m convinced there would have been one, practically speaking.

So I guess I am pretty cavalier with my songs after all.

But that brings us to the other matter, that of Pammelah Shumway’s sexiness. Almost as soon as we had reached the state of “going,” she had started dressing better, by which I mean sluttier. The skirts got shorter, the shirts got tighter and lower, and the shoes got higher. Sam Hellerman was fairly—and in another sense kind of unfairly—critical of Pammelah’s WHR, but he was encouraging about this development. It shows that she cares enough about you to try to look good for you and to make you look good in front of other men, raising your status accordingly, he said. Well, all due snickers and snorts to that other “men” bit aside, of course I liked it. I mean, that was the point, wasn’t it? Liking things about each other, I mean?

As for what she liked about me, well, honestly, I can’t help you there. All I had to go on was stuff the Robot had said, that she liked my eyes, my hair, and my supposed resemblance
to the kid on
Malcolm in the Middle
, and that she thought I was “cute and funny.” She liked my teeth. I kid you not, there was apparently something intoxicating about them, something that couldn’t be put into words. In fact, I’d pardon you for wondering if this whole thing might not have been a slow-building, meticulously planned Make-out/Fake-out. I had that thought myself but had rejected it for two reasons: (a) Pammelah Shumway, though moving up in the world of sexiness, to be sure, was nowhere near high-status enough to attempt a classic Make-out/Fake-out on me, especially since I was, as far as anybody at Clearview knew, in a neutral zone between normalcy and decency, and a fellow “pep band” member to boot; and (b) the Robot, whatever else she was, was unquestionably genuine. Everything she was, and every waking thought she had, was voluminously documented, in a form that would be simply impossible to fake.