That Girl, Darcy

by James Ramos

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A Pride and Prejudice Story

"All your favorite characters are here, but somehow it feels like you're meeting them for the very first time. I adored James Ramos's That Girl, Darcy." - Heidi Doxey, author of Liam Darcy, I Loathe You

“Love. You can’t tell when you’ll catch it or who you’ll fall for. But once it happens, it’ll change everything for you.”

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED that geeky guys never get to date the pretty girls. 

Elliott Bennett is entering his senior year and finding a girlfriend is the last thing on his mind. That is, until Darcy Fitzwilliam moves into the only mansion in the neighborhood. When Elliott meets Darcy at a party, he finds out that she isn’t into skateboarding (which he lives for), she hates science fiction (which he loves), and she thinks his friends are a pack of morons (which, honestly, might be half true)—and yet, there’s something irritatingly intriguing about her. 

This gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice retelling brings back all the original characters in a quirky modern day setting that holds true to the original story while bringing new humor and misunderstandings. 

That Girl, Darcy is a Teen High School Romance.

Release date: October 22, 2015

Publisher: Future House

Print pages: 342

Sample

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a typical summer day in Phoenix, Arizona, can be lumped into one of two categories: hot or flame-broiled. Today it was only hot, and so I had spent most of it skating around town with some friends and my cousin Jake. My neighbor Lucas had come along to “document our exploits,” as he called it, which really just meant he’d be filming everything with his old camcorder.

By midday, with the sun directly overhead and the palm trees swaying gently in the dry breeze, we found ourselves at the empty skate park that was nestled between the local library and, incidentally, our high school. The billboard at the entrance of the driveway read, “Welcome, incoming freshmen and returning students! Registration now open.”

I decided to unveil the trick I’d been working at for days now—the kickflip frontside nose blunt. I had nailed it after six tries last weekend, and now Lucas was eager to capture it.

“I’m thinking about throwing another party,” Lucas said absently as he busied himself setting up the shot.

“You just threw a party,” I said. Two weekends ago, in fact. It had been, for lack of a better word, epic. Just like all of Lucas’s parties.

“Elliott, what’s your point?” he asked.

Liam, one of my friends, skidded to a halt with an eager gleam in his eyes. “I’m game.”

“You’re always game,” said Liam’s brother Kyle.

“As long as there are girls there,” amended Liam.

“True,” Kyle conceded.

“Here we go . . .” I muttered, mostly to myself. Liam was only a year younger than Kyle, but the two could pass for twins. Both were the same height with the same jittery manner about them. They had the annoying habit of finishing each other’s sentences, and they were always bickering back and forth, usually about things that didn’t matter. The only subject they ever seemed to agree on was girls.

It was the common consensus among my friends that unless you were dating somebody, you were failing at life. The pursuit of a significant other—or a “hot date” as they called it—took precedence over all else, including but not limited to friends, work, and school. Especially school. Kyle was choosing which colleges to apply to based on which one he thought had the cutest girls, and Liam had purposefully failed a class once because some girl he liked had failed the same class, only she’d done it on accident.

I ignored them both and turned back to Lucas. “Why exactly do you want to throw another party?”

He laughed. “Do I really need a reason? Summer’s over; school starts Monday—this is senior year. Do you realize this is the last summer we’ll have like this?”

“He’s got a point,” added Liam. “And, no offense guys, but I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one still holding onto his V-card around here.”

“Whatever. Are we recording?” I tossed my board down. I didn’t want to think about girls or my V-card or school or whatever happened after school. It was barely August. I still had nine whole months to worry about all of that.

Lucas took his position and activated his camera, business as usual. “Yes we are!”

“Good.” I shoved off, skating in a wide arc, looping around to come straight at the rail, kicking faster and faster, building speed. I crouched low, my back foot on the tail of the board. The rail rushed forward to meet me. This was it. I had it this time; I knew it. A week’s worth of bruised shins and bleeding knees had led to this moment. At the last possible second, I slapped the tail of the board down and leapt into the air, dragging the nose forward with my front foot. Up and up I soared, over the rail, my board underneath me. A flick of my foot, and the board twirled, just like it was supposed to.

It was then, in midair, at the apex of my kickflip, Liam called out urgently. “Guys! Look!”

I jerked my head up, panic freezing me in my tracks.

The only problem was, my tracks happened to be in the air.

I came down hard, smacking my shins into the rail and scraping them both as I folded in a jumble of limbs. My board skidded off down the pavement, and the next thing I knew I was laying on my back, staring up at the pure blue sky with my body aching and my legs probably bleeding again.

“Daaang!” Kyle and Liam said in unison. I heard the rushing of feet coming toward me, and I was met with four faces peering down at me.

“You alright, bro?” Lucas asked.

Kyle leaned in. “Anything broken?”

“Should we call your mom?” Liam offered.

“Or your dad?” Kyle added.

“No, don’t call his dad!” Liam warned.

Lucas shoved the others aside and glared down at me. “What the heck happened, dude? You totally had that in the bag!”

Jake reached down and pulled me up by the collar. I massaged my head, still dazed.

“That happened . . .” said Liam. He was nodding in the other direction, and we all turned to see what he was looking at. She was walking down the street, toward the library. A girl with black hair and huge eyes that by chance met mine at that exact moment. Beside her was another girl, this one smaller and with a curly blonde ponytail. I had never seen either of them before.

Lucas smirked. “I’m definitely having a party now.”

“Who are they?” asked Kyle, watching the girls with a starry-eyed expression. Neither of them were paying us any attention, instead making their way toward the library parking lot.

“I don’t know,” answered Liam, “but I totally call dibs.”

Unassisted, I managed to drag myself to my feet. “You can’t call dibs on a person,” I said.

Liam was undeterred. “There are two of them, you know; you can call dibs too.”

I rolled my eyes while Lucas dusted imaginary dirt from his pants and flipped his camera closed.

“Well, losers,” he announced, “see you on the flip side.” With that he followed after the girls.

“Wait, where are you going?” asked Kyle.

“Where do you think?” Lucas called back.

He continued on, walking with confident pep. We just looked on as he started jogging briskly to catch up to the girls as they reached the parking lot.

“He’s crazy,” said Jake, the first words out of his mouth in nearly an hour.

I could only shake my head. “You’re telling me. And I’m fine, by the way.” I limped to fetch my board and came back to join the others as they pretended not to watch Lucas. He caught up with the girls, and they stopped. The black-haired girl had her arms crossed, and while I couldn’t quite make out her expression, it didn’t look inviting. The blonde seemed eager to meet him, even shaking his hand. At one point, Lucas gestured back to where we were huddled, causing Kyle and Liam to quickly disperse, suddenly preoccupied with their longboards.

Finally the meeting was over, and the girls went their separate way while Lucas came strolling back to us, grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

“Well?” demanded Kyle the second he was within earshot. “Who were they?”

“More importantly, were they hot?” asked Liam.

“Or single?” asked Kyle.

“Or both?” Liam looked hopeful.

Lucas shrugged and gave them a sly grin. “All I’ll say is this: I was definitely impressed. If you want to know more than that, you’ll just have to be at my party tonight, won’t you?”

I frowned. “Tonight? Dude, it’s already almost two o’clock!”

“Yes it is, which means I need to go make some phone calls. You guys in?”

“Definitely!” said Liam and Kyle at the same time.

Jake glanced at me. I sighed and nodded. “Sure, we’ll be there.”

Lucas laughed. “Perfect. Later. I’ve got a party to plan.”

He kicked up his board and skated away. Kyle and Liam followed him.

“You sure you’re alright?” Jake asked. I turned to see my cousin studying me. Jake was good at picking up on the subtleties.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

He gave me a scrutinizing eye. “You sure?”

“Yes, dude, I’m sure. Let’s go.”

I picked up my board, too sore to ride it just yet. Unlike Kyle and Liam, I couldn’t really care less about either of the girls. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, and I wasn’t in a hurry to change that. So by the time I was halfway home, I had just about forgotten them completely.

* * *

I got to my house and made a beeline for the fridge. My dad was sitting at the kitchen table with his entire face obscured by the newspaper in his hands. Dad sort of reminded me of Santa Claus—if Santa Claus was brown, had a shorter beard, and was perpetually unsmiling. He was still in his navy blue suit and brown oxfords. I never understood how he could just hang out in dress clothes like that. I also didn’t get why he religiously read the newspaper when the internet existed, but at least I could appreciate his respect for the written word.

“The circus is back in town, I see,” he said when I came in. “Where are the rest of the clowns?”

“Very funny.” Dad prided himself on his wit, which he called dry—although I think sardonic would have been the more appropriate word. “How was work?”

He huffed. “We weren’t robbed, unfortunately.”

“Darn it,” I said in mock disappointment. Dad worked for a bank, the same bank he’d worked for since as far back as I could remember. And as far back as I could remember he’d always complained about how they never paid him enough, especially since he usually had to work Saturdays, like today. Once when I was twelve I’d asked him why he didn’t just get a different job, and he’d laughed and said he couldn’t afford to leave the one he had. He’d then explained to me that this was the definition of irony.

“You’re limping,” he said, somehow noticing this without having looked up from the paper. “Did you get into a fight with the hooligans at the park? What did you break this time?”

I reached into the fridge and pulled out a gallon of orange juice. “Yep, a good old fashioned melee. I bruised three ribs and knocked out all of my front teeth.”

“Have your mother make you a smoothie,” Dad said as he switched pages. “And she’ll put you in the blender too if she catches you in her refrigerator with dirty hands.”

As if on cue Mom popped in from the backyard. She had her blonde-gray hair pulled into a ponytail and was wearing tattered sweatpants, a yellow shirt with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows, and the biggest, ugliest pair of hot pink Crocs I had ever seen. Her gardening gloves were covered in what I hoped was dirt and not manure. Her face was flushed pink from exhaustion. She’d decided to give gardening a go, and although she’d planted everything from cilantro to lettuce, it was only the tomatoes that seemed to be doing anything, and they were still in little cups lining the window over the sink. I was fairly certain this was neither the season nor the environment for plants to thrive.

“There you are, sweetheart!” she said, breathing heavily. “How was skating?”

“Fine, I guess.”

She pulled the gloves off and kicked out of the hideous Crocs. “Somebody’s bought the Manor,” she announced gleefully.

The Manor was what people called the house on the other side of the golf course and park that lay smack dab in the middle of our community. It was the biggest residence on the block, bigger than all the others on this side of town. I sometimes wondered why someone had built such a huge place here. It didn’t belong, like a sedan in a parking lot full of smart cars. It had been empty since before we’d moved in. Every once in a while someone would come to take a look at it, but so far there’d been no buyers.

“Wonder who was dumb enough to do that,” I said.

“Elliott!” Mom swatted at me. “They’re moving in right now. Why don’t you mosey on over and introduce yourself? I’m sure they could use some help with all those boxes.”

I peeked out the window and squinted out across the field, where I could just make out people coming in and out of the house, dragging boxes and furniture out of a U-Haul.

“I think if they can afford the Manor they can afford to hire movers,” I said with a laugh.

“You’re such an introvert,” Mom sighed, resting her hands on her hips. “Who’s to say there isn’t a pretty girl over there?”

“Who’s to say there is?” I scoffed. “Besides, I have plans tonight.”

Dad arched an eyebrow. “Do those plans happen to include figuring out what you’ll be doing this time next year?”

Mom washed her hands at the sink. I shuffled past her to pluck a glass from the cupboard. “I don’t plan that far ahead.”

“We know, but perhaps you should,” Dad said.

I groaned. I knew exactly where this conversation was headed. It was the same one we’d been having since junior year ended. If it had just been me and Dad, this conversation would already be over. He wasn’t the type to beat a dead horse. But Mom was exactly that type. Not only would she beat a dead horse, she would drag that dead horse until it came back to life, then she would hop on and ride it to death all over again.

“Your father’s got a point,” Mom said from behind me. “You can’t expect to spend the rest of your life working at some bookstore.”

“The Cranny is not just some bookstore, it’s a haven for those with a thirst for literature, an oasis of words and—”

“This isn’t a game, Elliott,” Mom interrupted. “You’re about to graduate. You’ve got to have some sort of plan, some sort of goal, or else you’ll end up drifting through life and never accomplishing anything meaningful.”

I poured my juice and chugged the entire glass. What if I wanted to drift? What if I didn’t want to have a plan, or set goals, or achieve something meaningful? Who said I was obligated to do any of that? Was it a rule written somewhere? Was there some contractual agreement that said I had to plot out my entire life course at the tender age of seventeen?

I didn’t say any of that aloud like I wanted to. Instead I dumped my glass in the sink, said “I’ll get right on that,” and hurried to the sanctuary of my room before either of my parents could continue their rant.

My room, as always, was a mess. Books were strewn all over the place, giving it the feel of a library after a tornado had hit. One of the perks of working for a bookstore was the discount. I had a few bookshelves, but they were all full. I’d resorted to stacking books on top of them, and soon those stacks had migrated to the floor. The other night I’d tried organizing them, but had gotten bored after fifteen minutes and given up. I scooped up a pile that included Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. I was stumbling over H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine when I got a call from Mark, one of my classmates who worked at the Cranny with me.

“I’m performing at the homecoming dance,” he said excitedly. “You have to come. I already talked to the guys about it and everyone else is down.”

I was glad he couldn’t see my facial expression over the phone. Mark played the guitar and wrote his own songs, but he did both terribly. None of us had the heart to tell him flat out that he sucked, and he probably wouldn’t believe us anyway. He was convinced that he was the next Jeff Buckley.

“I dunno,” I said reluctantly, “I may have to work.”

“You don’t. I already checked.”

Nice. “I’ll get back to you.” I had no intention of going to the homecoming dance; I’d gone last year and I didn’t see the point. But I wasn’t in the mood to tell Mark no, either. He was like an annoying younger brother, even though we were the same age.

But he was a cool guy, once you got past the annoying part. We’d met at a comic book store downtown a few years ago, and we had almost identical tastes in superheroes, which, in my book, was a surefire friendship starter.

“By the way,” I said, “Lucas is having a party tonight. Are you coming?”

“Another one?”

“That’s what I said.”

There was a long pause. “Can I bring my guitar?”

“I’d ask Lucas.” Hopefully Lucas would have the good sense to ban any and all musical performances from Mark.

When I got off the phone I went to the bathroom across the hall and started the shower. While I waited for the water to cool down, I took off my clothes and inspected myself in the mirror. The fall hadn’t done any lasting damage; there was an oblong bruise just under my left knee, but no cuts or scrapes. I was somewhat disappointed. The scars I did have—some crisscrossing my forearm, a few on my shins—were stories, proof of the work I’d done to nail a trick.

Fortunately, despite my lack of new scars, the rest of me told a better story. After spending the better part of two years looking like Slender Man—all stringy arms and legs ending with hands and feet that looked like they belonged on someone else’s body, which were topped with a pencil neck and a bulbous head—my body had finally decided to stop embarrassing me and fill out a little. I was still lanky, but I was lean now, not doughy. The veins in my arms and hands were more pronounced. My stomach was flat, and while you couldn’t exactly wash your dirty laundry on my abs, it beat having a paunch.

I showered, wrapped myself in a towel and shaved—I didn’t have a heroic jawline, but things were at least symmetrical. I only nicked myself once. After I dried off I went back to my room, opened my dresser drawers and stood there like it was really a question as to what I was going to put on. The bulk of my wardrobe could be summed up with two items: jeans and graphic T-shirts, nearly all of which were branded with something science-fiction related. Quite simply put, I was a geek. I knew more about fictional galaxies than I did real ones. I could quote A New Hope in its entirety from memory. A model of the USS Enterprise sat on my desk, and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey dangled from my ceiling. Somewhere in my closet was a Podracer, and my walls were adorned with more Ralph McQuarrie art than George Lucas’s office. Mom liked to tell me that I’d never see a girl in my room with all this stuff in here. She was already wrong about that, just like she was wrong in assuming that my having a girl in my room meant we were doing anything.

I settled on a navy shirt with two clashing lightsabers on the front, pulled on a pair of black jeans I found on the floor and slipped into a beaten pair of sneakers. Then, in case it was cooler out tonight, I put on a gray button-up.

The sun was setting by the time the others showed up at my place a few hours later. Together we started for Lucas’s house at the other end of my neighborhood. By this time both Kyle and Liam had worked themselves into a craze. They were like sharks in a feeding frenzy, except there were no fish to be found and neither of these sharks would know what to do with a fish if they caught one.

“So who gets first crack at the new girls?” Liam blurted as he practically skipped down the curb. I assumed he’d showered too because he didn’t stink anymore. Instead, he smelled like he’d emptied at least half a bottle of aftershave on himself. The scent was a mixture of burnt wood and motor oil. I had to keep a few feet between us to keep from gagging. “I think, in all fairness,” he went on, “it should be me, because I thought of it.”

Liam had recently discovered James Dean, and was now styling himself a greaser. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans—501’s, the same pants Dean wore, as he was quick to point out.

“I think it should be first come first serve,” countered Kyle. “That’s fair.”

Kyle was much more sensible when it came to his fragrances. I didn’t smell him at all, but I couldn’t help noticing that his loud yellow-green shirt looked like it’d been woven at a nuclear power plant.

Yes, we were a fashionable bunch.

The brothers both paused, waiting for either Jake or myself to throw in our two cents. Jake, who was trailing slightly behind, said nothing.

“Come on, guys,” I said. “We all know who’ll be noticed first.”

That shut them up. But only for a moment.

“It is hard to compete with Mr. Abercrombie tagging along,” Liam begrudgingly admitted, pointedly glancing back at Jake.

“Sure is,” Kyle added. “Why don’t you hide that pretty little face of yours for tonight, Cheekbones? Give the rest of us a fighting chance.”

Jake shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at the rocks on the curb. “I’m no more likely to meet a girl tonight than either of you,” he muttered.

Liam scoffed. “How’s that? Did tall, dark, and handsome fall out of fashion or something?”

“Loud and annoying did,” I interjected.

I looked over at Jake. I couldn’t quite argue with either Kyle or Liam as far as Jake was concerned. He did look like an Abercrombie model. The funny thing about being mixed is that you never know what the gene pool’s going to create. Jake’s parents were Native American and French, and he seemed to have won the genetic lottery and inherited the best of both combined worlds. He was just under six feet tall, with golden skin and dirty blonde hair that he had this quirky habit of flicking or running a hand through when he was nervous. He also had green eyes and a face that looked like it had been carefully sculpted from some rock, all sharp jaw and dimples. He rarely got a zit, and his teeth were nearly perfect and whiter than they had any right to be, which was hard to tell seeing as his mouth was closed most of the time. He looked at everyone and everything with the same perpetual look of innocence on his face, like the world was completely new to him. He wore his khaki skinny jeans, white V-neck T-shirt and black canvas sneakers with a casual, I-look-great-but-I’m-not-trying-to air about him.

Being his cousin, I’d never noticed anything different about Jake until freshman year, when he’d been voted Mr. Photogenic in the yearbook superlatives. Then I began to realize that what I saw when I looked at my cousin was vastly different from what other people saw. Jake became “the gorgeous one,” or “the dreamy one,” and all of a sudden I’d gained a flock of “friends” eager to grill me about my cousin. That type of attention would ordinarily get to someone’s head pretty quickly. But not Jake. Jake was good. He couldn’t stand the attention, and gradually the fanfare faded, until his looks were just another fact of life and nothing to get excited about.

Even though I was mixed as well, I was nowhere near as impressive a specimen. I was, for all intents and purposes, average. Average height, eyes that people sometimes said were nice, a nose that wasn’t anything special, and hair that I didn’t bother paying attention to even when it wasn’t crammed underneath a beanie. I was plain. And I had no problem with that. Let someone else be special, that’s the way I saw things. I was just fine being left alone to my own devices.

I could hear the party well before I could see it. The second we stepped onto Lucas’s block, Liam and Kyle took off, doing an odd hurrying-but-trying-not-to-look-like-it sort of walk, abandoning Jake and me in a rush. There was a small group of five or six people standing around on Lucas’s front lawn. He, as I expected, was at its center. The rest of the festivities were taking place out back, and from the sound of it, it was quite the carnival.

“Nervous?” I asked Jake as we slowly made our way across the street toward the house. Once, when we were six, he’d gotten lost in a crowd at IKEA. It had taken us fifteen minutes to find him, and ever since then Jake tended to avoid crowds, even though he claims the incident had no lasting effects.

He shook a lock of hair from his brow and plunged his hands even deeper into his pockets. “Of course not.”

That meant yes. I didn’t pry. For Jake, parties meant attention, which he didn’t seem to know how to handle. He was a wallflower, and we were walking right into a beehive. I was all too familiar with his way of dealing with things. So I knew not to question when he slowed to a stop a few feet from Lucas’s lawn, staring at the ground in front of him. He had to prepare himself before joining in, and I made a mental note to keep a close eye on him and be ready to leave the moment he needed to.

I went over to Lucas’s circle and when he spotted me he raised his hands and yelled. “Now it’s a party!”

He reached out and pulled me right into the center of the gathering. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Standing next to Lucas was one of the girls from earlier, the blonde one with the ponytail. She was rocking on the balls of her feet, nursing a drink in a styrofoam cup. Up close I could see why Lucas had been impressed. She was radiant, with a charming, giddy face and excitable blue eyes. She wore a white shirt with a sequined smiley face across her chest, and multicolor sneakers that looked like she’d dropped a birthday cake on them.

“This is Bridget,” Lucas announced. “Bridget, this is Elliott, my brother from another.”

Bridget waved and flashed me the widest smile I had ever seen.

Something happened then that I never would have guessed in a million years. It was several things, really, but they happened all at once in what I before. . .