Chapter 4
Griffin
“Dude, what did you do to piss Ellie off so bad?” David asks, laying on the couch tossing a basketball up in the air absentmindedly.
We’ve assumed our regular positions in my basement – David on the couch, Jack on the floor with the contents of his backpack laid out on the coffee table, and me in the oversized armchair my dad put down here when my granddad had to get a recliner with more back support.
You’d think they live here with how often the three of us are at my house. It’s because my house has “better snacks,” according to David.
David has been my next door neighbor since his family moved here when we were both two years old. Our dads started golfing together, and our moms started taking us to the park while they went. I guess you could say we didn’t really have a choice in being friends.
Jack joined us in sixth grade. Me and David were riding our bikes around the neighborhood when we saw him sitting on the curb a block over in front of a house with a “Sold” sign on it.
It was just him and his grandma, and something in the awkward one-word answers he had to every question we asked gave us the impression that he’d had a rougher time than either of us combined. He’s a year older than us, but in our same grade.
The one time we asked him about school, he mumbled something about his dad missing the deadline for kindergarten registration.
We’ve never seen his dad, and we’ve never brought it up again.
Instead, we forced him into friendship the same way me and David’s parents had forced us, and we’ve been a trio ever since.
“You’re going to drop that on your face again, and I’m not driving you to the ER when you break your nose this time,” Jack says without looking up from the homework he’s diligently doing.
“I don’t know, man,” I say, yanking my hands through my hair again, like that’ll somehow pull an answer out of my scalp. At this point, I probably look like some sort of electrocuted Jimmy Neutron.
What did I do to piss her off? When I walked into Spanish that first day, I noticed her instantly. From the moment I saw her nervously twisting a tendril of her long blonde hair, I knew I wanted to be as close to her as possible.
I could barely remember my own name to introduce myself, and the second her deep blue eyes locked onto mine, I was a total goner.
I didn’t know what or how or why, but I did know that I wasn’t going to be learning much Spanish that semester–I was much more focused on learning everything about the girl in the chair behind me.
Unfortunately, all I’ve learned so far is that she’s about as uptight as they get.
If you look up “overachiever” in the dictionary, it’s just a giant picture of Eleanor Turner, glaring disappointedly at you for not doing the extra credit.
And she’ll definitely be wearing a scowl, which is all I’ve seen her since day one.
She’s insanely smart, funny in a sort of quiet way that you don’t expect, and everyone likes her–and she seems to like everyone, myself excluded.
Which brings me back to the scowl that seems reserved for me. I might put her next to “overachiever,” but I think she’d put me next to “scum of the earth.”
David is just as loud, and Jack is just as distracting, so I don’t understand why I’m somehow the sole target of her annoyance. It seems like the harder I try to build a bridge between us, the more irritated she gets with me.
I wasn’t joking when I told her I might be the most darling gentleman in all of Larkspur. Okay, maybe I was exaggerating. Alright, I was definitely exaggerating.
But I’ve always been well liked. Old ladies love me, all my kid cousins want to hang out with “cool cousin Griff.” I have table manners, I hold the door open, I say “sir” and “ma’am”, and the smile I inherited from my dad usually wins people right over.
Eleanor Turner is apparently immune to charm–especially mine. And for some reason, I can’t stop testing the limits to see how far I can go before she cracks. I guess I found that breaking point today.
“She really laid into you,” David continues on. “For a second there I thought she might smack you upside the head.”
“You probably deserved it,” Jack muses, still laser focused on his textbook.
“I don’t understand why she gets so worked up,” I grumble, crossing my arms and slumping further into the armchair. “You bozos are just as annoying as me, but you never get yelled at.”
Snickering, David pauses his one-man game of catch and sits up to look at me with a suspicious looking glint in his eye. “Face it, she just likes us better than you. But…”
“But what?” I ask cautiously. When David gets that look, I know he’s about to say something that’s going to make my life a lot more complicated.
“But I bet you can change that. You like a challenge, and you’ve never met a chick you couldn’t get to like you.”
He’s not wrong, but Eleanor isn’t like every other girl I’ve smooth-talked. To be honest, I haven’t even tried my normal tactics on her. From the moment I met her, I knew they wouldn’t work.
This girl is different.
“Okay so what’s your point?”
“Hear me out – what if we make it interesting?”
At this, Jack finally looks up from his homework, shooting David a wary look. “Whatever you’re thinking, I’m already voting no.”
“Shut up Jack, this is a good one. Okay, what if we put money on it? Twenty bucks if you can get her to be friends with you before the end of the year. Forty if you manage it by spring break.”
He pauses for a second, clearly piecing something together in his brain. With a diabolical smile, he says, “A hundred bucks if she wants to go out with you. Like, on a date. Willingly. Without throwing something at your head.”
Jack shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Dude, no way,” I protest. “Absolutely nothing good can come of this.”
Undeterred, David argues, “C’mon Griffin, I know you want her to like you. Or to at least stop hating you.”
He’s right, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Plus, it’ll give us something to do for the rest of the year. I’m already bored out of my mind, and it’s only January. Gimme something to enjoy in class,” he says in a whiny voice, batting his eyelashes at me dramatically.
“Get that stupid look off your face,” I say as I throw a chair cushion at him. “What would your plan be after? What happens if I get her to like me? We can’t just tell her it was for a bet and thank her for being our guinea pig in our weird social experiment.”
David lays back down and resumes throwing the basketball up in the air.
“I don’t know, you know I don’t think that far ahead.
I just think it would be a win-win – I get to have fun, you have incentive to get Ellie to stop being so mean to you, and Jack gets to focus on school like the dweeb he is because we’ll be too busy to bother him. ”
“I resent that,” Jack exasperatedly sighs.
For the next few minutes, we sit in silence while we soak in David’s proposal. Every warning bell and siren in my brain is going off right now, but for some stupid reason I’m actually considering going along with it. The way I see it, there’s three outcomes here.
Outcome one, I convince Eleanor to be friends with me, but she finds out what we’re doing and drop kicks us out of the classroom window.
Outcome two, I might get what I’ve wanted since day one–to find out everything there is to know about her. As a friend, obviously.
Outcome three, which might be the worst one - it doesn’t work at all, and she keeps hating me.
I guess if continuing to hate me is the worst thing that could happen, I might as well try. All I’ve been thinking about for weeks is how to win her over–at least this gives me an excuse to try without Jack and David getting suspicious about why I want to win her over in the first place.
“Alright fine,” I say with a resigned sigh. “Twenty bucks for the end of the year, forty if it’s before spring break.
“Aaaaand?” David batting his eyelashes at me again, then quickly ducking and rolling away when I try to smack him.
“And a hundred if I can get her to go on a date with me. But only because I like it when you owe me money. Not because I want to go on a date with her.”
Jack and David both level me with a look–it’s the same look my mom gives me when I tell her I’ve cleaned my room and she knows for a fact that I’m lying. But I choose not to acknowledge that.
“And you can’t tell Eleanor this is happening.”
“Excellent,” David says with a sinister look of satisfaction. “This year just got a lot more interesting.”
As if on cue, he immediately drops the basketball directly in his face, resulting in a gush of blood from his nose.
“I’m not driving,” Jack reiterates as David lets out a string of curses.
This year did just get a lot more interesting, but I’m not going to tell him that. I’ll let David think it’s about the money all he wants. It won’t be about that for me at all. For me, it’s about the inherent need to win over the girl who probably wants to stab me with a pencil.
Right now, all I’m thinking about is blonde hair, blue eyes, and a sneaking suspicion that this is going to work out very badly for me.
***
This is not going well. Apparently there is a “chick” –David’s words, not mine–who simply refuses to like me.
I’ve been trying everything I can think of. Going out of my way to find her in the hallway just so I can give her a friendly smile, casually making it to class at the same time as her so I can hold the door open, diligently saying “howdy” and “have a nice day” every single day without fail.
I’ve even made an effort to stop goofing off in class – as much as I can anyway, I can’t help my true nature. I was born to be hilarious. Truly, they should study me in a lab.
“You’re not a comedian. You’re annoying.” At least that’s what Jack says, but what does he know? It’s not my fault he was born without a funny bone.
Anyway, the point is that none of it has made a lick of difference. It’s almost like the harder I try to befriend her, the more she seems to hate me. In the evenings, in the time between David and Jack leaving my house and going to bed, my thoughts drift to Eleanor more often than not.
I replay our interactions over and over in my head, trying to pinpoint exactly when she went from being the shy but sweet girl I met the first week of school to being a girl who probably wouldn’t save me if I started walking out in front of a bus.
Honestly, if she saw me stepping into traffic, I think she’d give me a little shove to speed things along.
As the weeks wear on, David gets increasingly smug about taking my money, and I get more and more dejected.
Spring break is next week, and I’ve made zero headway.
At this point, I’d happily pay two hundred dollars to whoever’s able to get her to stop looking at me like I’m a bug that needs to be squished.
Am I really that awful to be around? Has everyone been lying to me my whole life about how lovable I am? She doesn’t seem to have a problem with my friends. What is it about me that drives her so crazy?
There’s gotta be something I can do to change her mind.
But like my granddad used to say–I’m going to do this come hell or high water.