Because Perry wants to get into Columbia, he has pretty much always played by the rules. He understands that he needs to get good grades and that obtaining a recommendation by doing an internship at his father’s law firm is very important. He works his butt off most of the time, but he’s still a teenager and, therefore, wants to do fun things once in a while. That’s why he belongs to a band. And even though many teenagers look forward to their senior prom, Perry and his friends have other plans for that night — they’ve finally lined up a gig at a club in New York City! Unfortunately for Perry, his dad doesn’t care. His dad wants him to bring Gobija [the foreign exchange student who has been staying with their family] to prom.
If Gobija had been the teen movie stereotype — hot and anxious to date a geeky American boy — Perry might have been happy about this arrangement. Since she was dorky and standoffish, though, Perry was looking forward to the end of her stay and tried his best to weasel his way out of this date. It was rather obvious that things went a bit differently than expected since the book opened with Perry saying, “You shot me!” The bad news is that, after the initial teaser, I had to go back to the beginning of the story to find out how the heck he got shot. The good news is that the story moved so quickly that I got back to the wild ride before too long.