And if a guy comes up to you and stands too close—it might mean A) he's interested in you, instead of C) he’s trying to intimidate you by violating your personal space and you have every right to shove him away.
Luckily, Seventeen also wrote a "Rev Up Your Flirting Skills” article to remedy my near-hopeless situation. Lori made me read it. Three times.
Lori took a stealth glance at Trevor. "He's alone. This is the perfect time to ask him.”
“I don’t even know if Trevor likes me."
Which was my major problem. Trevor seemed interested in me during physics when he turned around at his desk to talk to me. Half the time he offered up some pointless trivia or made observations on my handwriting. He’d grab the pencil out of my hand and doodle comics on my assignment. Guys don't do that sort of thing unless they want your attention.
But at lunchtime, I morphed into the invisible woman. He didn’t look at my table. He never spoke to me. Instead, he spent most of his time trying to get attention from Theresa Davidson, reigning popularity queen. He and his friends sat at the table next to hers and he’d do things like flip Cheetos onto her table. Theresa and her friends pretended to be annoyed about this, but they weren’t.
If it were anyone else that Trevor was flirting with, I would have accepted the fact that I had a rival and I would have tried harder. But Theresa and I had a history of bad blood. Back when I was a kid, we lived in an apartment in a rundown section of DC, and I was kind of a fighter. Not a gang member or anything; it's just that you had to be tough to get left alone. Now that I think about it, I guess I did get in a couple of fights in the beginning of sixth grade, because that's what convinced Mom that we needed to move back to Morgantown, West Virginia. She wanted a better environment for me. We’ve lived with my grandmother, my abuela, ever since.
Before I moved, my friend Armando told me, "I’ve been the new kid lots of times. What you need to do is figure out who the biggest bully is and take him on right away. You take on the bully, and it don't even matter whether you win or not because everybody knows you got guts and you don’t back down. They'll respect you, and you’ll fit in.”
When I made my entrance into my new school, I instantly pegged Theresa as the biggest bully. After all, the entire sixth grade seemed to hover around her, waiting to do her bidding. So there was this unfortunate incident where she cut in front of me in the lunch line and I pushed her, causing her to stumble into a cafeteria garbage can.
Apparently that's not the best way to make friends at your new school. And this is the main reason I never take advice from guys anymore. They just live in different worlds.
Even though I apologized, Theresa and her friends never forgave me. They loved to remind everyone that I lived in a run-down neighborhood, that I walked to school instead of driving my own car, that I didn’t wear designer clothes— there are so many ways to rub in being poor. I retaliated in the only way that wouldn't get me kicked out of school. I got straight A's so I could look down at them for being stupid. I probably owe all my high school honor roll achievements to Theresa and the Cliquistas. Oh, and that’s another way I retaliated. I called them the Cliquistas. It’s not my fault the name stuck.
Well, maybe it was my fault, but still, I refuse to feel guilty about it.
I looked over at Trevor's head, still bent over his books. So did he like me or Theresa? Maybe his throwing Cheetos at her wasn’t really flirting. After all, I'd throw a lot of stuff at her if I thought I could get away with it. Besides, Trevor was in honors classes and Theresa's grades were much closer to mid-alphabet. How could he like someone who reveled in her own mediocrity? Then again, if he liked me, why did he always ignore me at lunch?
“He likes you,” Lori said. "You’re smart and gorgeous. For heaven's sake, you look like Kari Kingsley. How many people can say that?”
"Me and Kari Kingsley."
“Right. So turn on some of the celebrity charm and go talk to him."
I raised my eyebrow at her. I wasn't sure whether she meant to be ironic or not.
You know how they say everyone has a twin somewhere in the world, a person chance has formed to be their mirror image? Mine happens to be rock star Kari Kingsley. Our faces are eerily identical. In all the pictures of her that I'd studied, I’d only been able to see two differences: Her nose was sharper than mine, and she had blond hair. Mine is brown. But even that wasn’t a true difference; her hair is bleached. Natural blondes don't have our olive-toned skin and dark brown eyes.
I'd think we were twins separated by birth, but Kari Kingsley is twenty-one and I'm eighteen, plus I'm pretty sure my mom would have remembered giving birth to twins and then losing one somewhere along the way.
When Kari's first album came out and her face popped up everywhere, I thought I was lucky to resemble her. She’s beautiful, confident, and oozes sultriness. But then she opened her mouth and started speaking to reporters.
While walking down the red carpet on the way to the Grammys, a reporter asked her what she was doing to be green. She gave a dazzling smile and replied, "Nothing. I don’t really celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.”
During the MTV awards she put in a plug for the ethical treatment of animals: “It's so important we all remember that animals are people too.”
Really? How many of us lick ourselves clean?
On Good Morning America, while talking about the reasons role models shouldn’t smoke, she said, "Cigarettes can kill you, and that really changes your life.”
I suppose so.
That’s when it became a lot less fun to look like a celebrity. Her gaffes were instantly put on YouTube and half the senior class’s Facebook pages.
Suddenly I was stupid by association.
I looked at Lori and tilted my chin down. "I’m supposed to turn on some of Kari's celebrity charm? I could tell him I wish I had some pickup lines, but my family doesn't own a truck.”
She gave my arm a shove. "You know what I mean. Go bat your eyelashes at him.”
I have never batted my eyelashes at anyone. Suddenly I wondered if that was part of the problem. Perhaps Trevor didn't realize I liked him. I couldn’t blame him for flirting with Theresa if he didn’t think I was interested.
I opened the magazine and looked at the flirting article again. I went over the bullet points in my mind. Maybe they would work. After all, highly trained professionals who understood the male psyche wrote these sorts of articles.
Trevor pushed his chair away from the table and went and stood by the Roman and Greek history section.
Flirting tip number one: Don't stay in a group. A guy may feel like he can't approach you because of your friends.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I stood up and followed him. He didn’t take his eyes off the books in front of him, which made tip number two hard to do: Gaze at him from head to toe, then flash him your brightest smile. I decided to go on to tip three: Smooth a wrinkle from his shirt or playfully tug on a piece of clothing.
I reached over and smoothed out the material on Trevor’s shoulder, which must have startled him. He jumped about two feet.
"Sheesh, Alexia. What are you doing?”
I froze. I couldn’t very well tell him I was flirting with him. "Um . . . you had a bug on your shoulder, a big one. I brushed it off.”
“Oh.” He looked around on the floor to check if anything was crawling away and took a tentative step backward. “These books have been sitting here so long they probably have spider colonies living in the bindings.”