Ricky takes his eyes off the road and studies me for a second. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’re on the rebound, dude. From what you told me, it sounds like you and this girl don’t have anything in common. You’re just bouncing off Cassidy to the first easy thing that comes along. And I really can’t see you dating this girl. She’s the exact opposite of Cassidy.”
“Dude,” I say. “You couldn’t be more wrong. For one thing, she’s not the exact opposite of Cassidy. The exact opposite of Cassidy would have black hair and brown eyes. And for another thing, I don’t have any interest at all in dating Aimee. None.”
“Then what are you having lunch with her for?”
“Moral support. This girl needs it. She lets her family run all over her. You can see it in her eyes. It’s like she doesn’t think she’s important enough to even stand up for herself.”
“So what are you gonna do, give her a makeover like in the movies where they turn the nerd girl into a raging hottie?”
“No. It’s not about trying to turn her into a hottie. She could never be a hottie. She doesn’t have the attitude—that inner positive charge. You can tell by just looking at her slouchy little duck-footed walk. A real authentic hottie has a completely different way of standing and walking—shoulders back, tits out, ass swaggering. She has to know she’s hot to be hot.
“There’s, like, this whole training process. First off, the other girls fall all over themselves trying to hang out with her. Then she has dudes straggling after her like puppy dogs everywhere she goes, and on top of that, at probably about the age of twelve, she realizes even grown men can’t keep their eyes in their sockets every time she walks by.
“I’m telling you—you could take Aimee’s glasses off, put some bounce in her hair, and stick her in a short red skirt that shows everything but her bo-bo and she’s still going to walk around with her shoulders slouched and a look in her eyes like the world’s getting ready to punch her in the mouth.”
“So what are you going to do, save her soul?”
“Maybe. You never know.”
Chapter 20
A lot of people might consider Algebra II with Mr. Aster—a.k.a. Mr. Asterhole—the most boring place on earth, but my theory is that boredom is only for boring people with no imagination. Sure, if I actually paid attention to Mr. Asterhole’s monotone drone, then I’d be bored too, but there’s not much chance of that.
One of my favorite diversions is Motojet. The motojet is like this sleek silver dirt bike, only it can fly and has these cool machine guns and rocket launchers. When you need some speed, you just kick in the jets and vrooooom! You’re gone.
It’s like I have a whole video game in my head, and instead of sitting in algebra class, I’m out saving the universe, or at least my high school. I don’t know how many times I’ve rescued Cassidy from terrorists and gangsters and evil warlords. Of course, every once in a while, I wreck in some spectacular way, the motojet swooping down out of the evening sky, clipping the top of a water tower, and then smashing out the football stadium lights right before I go flipping end over end across the field in front of the whole student body.
And when I finally roll to a stop against the goal post, you should see the girls running over, bawling their eyes out, to where I lie in an awesome, crumpled, smoldering heap. Even my mom is there. “Don’t worry,” I tell them as the dust settles around my fractured body. “I’m all right. Everything’s fabuloso!”
Today, my motojet mission keeps getting interrupted by thoughts of Aimee. I can’t believe I almost forgot about meeting her for lunch. Now, instead of Motojet, I play a movie in my head of Aimee standing alone outside the cafeteria door, checking her watch, looking at all the people who aren’t me pass her by.
Sutter, I say to myself, you cannot disappoint this girl.
Finally, class ends. I gather up my backpack and start for the door, planning to get to the cafeteria pronto so that Aimee doesn’t even have to wait a second. It’s not that easy, though. Before I can escape, Mr. Asterhole calls me to his desk.
“Have a seat,” he says, pointing at the desk directly in front of his desk. “Mr. Keely, I seem to have noticed that once again you didn’t turn in your Monday homework.”
“It was a bad weekend,” I tell him, and he’s like, “Yes, well, you seem to have a lot of those.” With Mr. Asterhole, everything seems to be some way. It never just is.
Unfortunately, instead of yelling at me or something, he decides it seems like a good time to quiz me about what he talked about in class today. Needless to say, I don’t do very well, so he starts in on how it seems that I didn’t listen adequately in class. I check the clock, thinking maybe I can still get to the cafeteria at the same time Aimee does.
But Mr. Asterhole isn’t finished. Now he’s going on about how he has my best interests at heart and how if I fail that means he fails. It seems to him that, to have any hope at all of succeeding in college, I need to have at least a basic understanding of what he’s trying to teach me in this class.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. I’ve been meaning to get my act together, I explain. I’m really going to put the nose to the old grindstone for the rest of the semester. You’d think that would be good enough for Mr. Asterhole, but no, he’s got to go and lay out a problem for me to try my hand at, just to see how bad I am. Which, as it turns out, is pretty bad.