Geek Charming Read Online Free PDF Page A

right under the Hollywood sign, which is obviously a terrific example of foreshadowing in terms of my future. Ever since Dad left Mom two years before for one of his actress clients (he’s an entertainment attorney, which means along with agents and managers, he negotiates deals for actors) and shafted Mom in the divorce, money has been really tight.
    Our house is cool—built in 1923, with a lot of built-in bookcases for my DVDs. I like it better on this side of town because when you’re a director, it’s very important to keep it real and stay in touch with the regular Joe moviegoing public, and Hollywood, with its mix of ethnic groups and high crime rate, is a lot more real than snooty Brentwood. Plus, there’s a great used-record store down the street on Franklin Avenue where Quentin has been known to pop in from time to time.
    After I settled myself on the wicker couch that Mom had gotten at the Rose Bowl flea market a few weeks earlier (ever since the divorce she’s been on a nothing-should-match-in-order-to-reflect-the-randomness-of-life kick) I called Dylan. Let me rephrase that: I called the number that Dylan had given me. An old woman answered, who, when I asked to speak to Dylan, started screaming in Russian and hung up on me. So I called back, and this time a man answered.
    “Hi, is Dylan there?” I asked.
    “Who?” he demanded.
    “Dylan. Dylan Schoenfield?”
    “You have wrong number,” the man boomed.
    “Um, are you sure?” I asked.
    “Who this?” he demanded.
    “This is Josh Rosen. I’m a classmate of Dylan’s.”
    “I tell you—no Dylan here! Now you never call here again!” he said, slamming the phone down.
    Forget my promise to Raymond that I was going to make the documentary of my generation. At this point there wasn’t going to be a documentary.
    Amy Loubalu never would’ve done anything as cruel as give me the wrong number after I risked my life for her (which, by the way, I would have gladly done, no questions asked). In fact, I bet Amy would’ve let me take her out for a Jamba Juice in return.
     
    “I can’t believe you’re really going to do this,” said my friend Ari on Monday during lunch as he, Steven, and I sat at our usual table in the far right corner of the cafeteria near the garbage bins. Tall and thin with receding brown hair and black-rimmed glasses, Ari’s a dead ringer for Steven Soderbergh, the guy who directed Ocean’s Eleven, not to mention Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen . I took a picture of the two of them together when Steven gave a Film Society talk and they look like they could be father and son.
    I stood up and straightened my own glasses. Even though I had stopped at LensCrafters on Saturday, my frames were still crooked from when I risked my life to save Dylan’s bag. If I wasn’t such a good guy, I would’ve built the cost of the repairs into the budget. “What do you mean you can’t believe I’m going to do this? Of course I’m going to do this!” I pointed to the latest issue of Filmmaker magazine that he had been flipping through. “You think anyone in there would let a little thing like a wrong number stop them? Would Spielberg ever have considered ending E.T. any other way than Henry Thomas putting E.T. in the basket of his bike and riding off?”
    “Dude, I think you need a passport to go over there,” said Steven, who was busy texting some girl named Amber who lived in Kansas whom he had met in a MySpace group for The Simpsons . So far he had ignored her requests for a picture (the picture on his page was of Homer), and who knew if she’d still be interested in him once he did send one. His hope was that girls in the Midwest liked tubby guys with blond hair that tended to get greasy within an hour of washing it.
    I stood there looking at my two friends and sighed. I had had a feeling I’d run up against this, and had luckily written a script for it over the weekend. “Okay, listen up: just this summer we were talking