The Boyfriend List

Most of the game was taken up with redos. When the bottle finally pointed at a girl, and everyone agreed it was official, the couple would go off a short ways into the dark woods and have “Seven Minutes in Heaven.”⁵ While they were doing this, the rule was that everyone had to stay seated in the circle—but we all tried as hard as we could to see what was going on out there, and anyone who could see anything would report back to everyone else in a loud voice.

Then the couple would come back to the circle, sometimes holding hands, and then it would be the next boy’s turn.

The only girls in our cabin who didn’t go on these moonlit adventures were a skinny girl who rocked back and forth in her chair and mumbled things to herself, a fourteen-year-old who was completely angry at being in the Twelve/Thirteen cabin and wouldn’t speak to any of us and a girl who spent all her time reading books like Misty of Chincoteague and talking about how she wished she was at horse camp instead.

I pretty much had to play, to avoid becoming a leper, but I was terrified. I had no idea what people were doing during the Seven Minutes. Kissing, I figured, but seven minutes was a really long time (we had a stopwatch) and how long could you kiss for? Would you stand up, or sit down on a log or something? Would you hug? If so, where would you put your hands? And I had boobs, but I didn’t normally wear a bra under my nightgown, and what if the boy tried to feel my boobs with no bra? Would he think that was weird? Or would he think it was weird if I was wearing a bra underneath my nightgown? Plus, I had good reasons not to want to kiss any of the boys we played Spin the Bottle with. Two of them were obnoxious. Three were physically repulsive. One was cute but extremely short, and I couldn’t figure out how it would work if I had to kiss him because he’d have to stand on tiptoe. That left two acceptably cute boys—but one of them my friend Gracia liked (so he was off-limits), and the other had called me four-eyes (so I knew he didn’t want to kiss me).

For the first week of camp, I managed to avoid kissing anybody by claiming a redo every time a bottle pointed to me. Then, I begged Gracia to help me by claiming redos or saying the bottle was pointing at someone else. She agreed, and I stayed unkissed—until the third week, when I told some other girls about how Gracia had failed the pencil test, where you stick a pencil under your boob and see if the fold of your boob will hold it up. You fail if the pencil stays.⁶

Gracia’s boobs were big, and her pencil stayed, and of course she was furious that I told everyone.⁷ But instead of yelling, she just contradicted me when I claimed a redo that night.

“Roo, it’s pointing right at you,” she said. “Why are you always saying redos? Are you scared or something?”

“No,” I said. “But look at the bottle. It’s practically off the atlas.”

“It’s still pointing at you,” Gracia said loudly.

Everyone looked at Michael Malone, one of the three physically repulsive boys, and the current spinner of the bottle. Michael shrugged. “It seemed like a decent spin to me,” he said.

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!” someone chanted from the other side of the circle.

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!” some others echoed back.

“Go on, Ruby,” said Gracia, bitterly. “Don’t be such a baby.”

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!”

This Malone character was probably a perfectly acceptable physical specimen to some people. I mean, I’m a perfectly acceptable physical specimen, but I know I grossed out that boy who called me four-eyes, plus Adam Cox, and probably a number of other people I don’t even know about. It’s just a matter of taste, and I’m sure he was a decent-looking boy by objective standards. But he disgusted me in the following ways:

He had too much saliva and always seemed to be sucking it back before it spilled out of his mouth accidentally.

His legs were quite hairy already, and his knee, covered with black hair, would stick out of a hole in his jeans. It looked like a dead animal.

He had pimples, which I didn’t much mind on lots of kids, but he had some on the back of his neck that bothered me.

His nose turned up at the front in a way that I know a lot of the girls thought was cute, but frankly, I found it piggy.

I walked into the depths of the dark forest with this piggy, dead-animal, pimply saliva boy.

“Oooh, oooh! Michael and Roo!”

We got to a big tree and Michael ducked behind it.

“Oooh, oooh! Michael and Roo!”

I knew everyone could see me through the dark in my white nightgown, so I stepped behind the tree as well, staying as far away from Michael as I could manage. He put his big, cold hand on my shoulder, puckered up and pushed his lips against mine, waggling his head around, like in the movies.

I waggled my head back.

Our mouths weren’t even open, and there was too much spit.

I didn’t want to touch his pimply neck, so I put my hands on the outside edge of his shoulders. He smelled okay, like toothpaste, but when I opened my eyes for a second I saw that big piggy nose right next to my face.

Basically, it was like going to the dentist. Something unpleasant was happening around my mouth, someone else’s face was too close to mine, and the best thing to do was to shut my eyes, breathe through my nose and think about something else. Was my mother sending me a care package? Would she remember I didn’t like potato chips with ridges in them? What color would I glaze my pottery mug in arts and crafts tomorrow?

After what seemed like seven hours, someone yelled, “Time’s up!” and Michael pulled away. “You’re a good kisser,” he whispered, and I felt relieved, even though when I thought about it I knew it couldn’t possibly be true because I had been thinking about pottery and potato chips, waggling my head occasionally and wishing it was over. But at least he wouldn’t go telling his friends I was disgusting.

I managed to get out of playing Spin the Bottle after that. With Gracia mad at me, I became a bit of a leper anyway, so the pressure was off. The next night, I said I was tired, and nobody yanked me out of bed and made me go. I avoided looking Michael in the eye, worked on my pottery and counted the days (ten) until I could go home.

I didn’t kiss anyone else for a year and a half.

I was still a very inexperienced kisser when things started up with Jackson, but once we started going together, kissing became such a normal part of my day that I didn’t even think about it—except that I stopped chewing bubble gum and started chewing mint. Jackson felt me up a lot too. I bought two new bras that clasped in front, so he could open them more easily.

But that’s all. It never occurred to me to do anything more. Jackson seemed happy. He never tried to get his hand down my pants or even take my shirt all the way off.

So imagine my feelings. It was Monday morning—thirteen days after Kim and Jackson got together. I had had the panic attacks, started seeing Doctor Z and become a leper thanks to the Spring Fling debacle and the Xerox horror (don’t worry, you’ll find out all about them soon enough).

I was walking up the steps to school, minding my own business, having done nothing all weekend except watch movies on video with my mother, and Katarina called my name, which she hardly ever does. She was full of news. At her party that weekend⁸ she and Heidi had walked into the guest room and found Kim and Jackson on the sofa with all their clothes off. Heidi was devastated. Katarina and Ariel were so mad at Kim. Could I believe the nerve? It was so uncool to do that at a party where Heidi was, like she had no feelings at all—and right after Jackson had broken up with me, too.⁹

“They were naked?” I said, almost choking.

“Completely. His thing was out and everything!” Katarina said. “I think I might have even seen it! Of course,” she added, “you don’t need my description of that.” ¹⁰

“What did they do when you came in?”

“We shut the door again, right away,” said Katarina, shrugging. “And like an hour later they came out. Everyone kind of laughed about it, except Heidi was crying in my hot tub and Ariel had to drive her home.¹¹ Anyway, I thought you’d want to know.”¹²

“Thanks,” I said.¹³

Katarina hiked her backpack over her shoulder and headed off in the direction of the gym. I stood there, watching her go.

Why did I say thanks, just then? Stuff about Kim and Jackson pressing their naked bodies together was the last thing I wanted to hear.

Naked, naked, naked.

My heart was pounding. I was having trouble breathing. I sat down on the steps and tried to take a deep breath and think about a peaceful meadow and butterflies flitting about happily.

It didn’t help.

I jumped up and ran after Katarina. “Listen, don’t tell me that stuff anymore,” I said, when I caught up with her.

“What?” she said, looking shocked.

“You’re acting like you’re being so nice and informative, but you’re making other people feel like crap.”

“Don’t get all upset about it.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “If you stopped to think for one second, wouldn’t you guess that telling me about Kim and Jackson would make me insane? That it would poison my whole day and possibly my entire future life with horrible images of nude bodies and penises that I don’t want to think about?”

Katarina sighed. “Don’t jump all over me ’cause Jackson broke up with you,” she said. “It’s not my fault.”

“It’s your fault I have to think about the two of them naked,” I yelled. “Just leave me off your penis information list from now on.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “You can be sure I will.”

She turned and went into the gym.

I felt like an asshole.

But hey: My heart rate was normal, and my lungs felt free and clear.

I took a deep breath.

1 Well, except for Finn Murphy. Kim was his first—and he was fifteen when that happened.

“You devirginized him!” shouted Cricket, when Kim told us about Finn, back in October.

“He started it,” Kim giggled. “It wasn’t me doing anything to him.”

“But you were his first! He’ll remember you his whole life,” laughed Cricket. “Blueberry’s first kiss.”

“Was he good?” Nora wanted to know.

“Hey,” interrupted Cricket. “If he doesn’t know how to kiss yet, I can help you. Because Kaleb was like the worst kisser ever. He slobbered all over me and stuck his tongue in way too far.”

“Gross. What did you do?” I asked.

“I trained him!” giggled Cricket. “Only I didn’t complete the program because he dumped me before I could finish.”

“What was the training?”

“Oh, it was a whole regime,” said Cricket. “Kissing boot camp.”

“Did you tell him he was a bad kisser?”

“No. You have to be subtle. Like, I held on to his head to prevent him jamming his tongue down my throat, grabbing his ears almost. And I tried to kiss him lying down on a couch, so I could be on top. You get a lot less slobber that way.”

“Oh, my god, he must have been awful,” said Nora.

“You cannot imagine the horror.” Cricket rolled her eyes dramatically.

“What else?”

“I kissed his neck a lot, but you can’t go on like that forever. Eventually the lips have to get involved.”

“What else?”

“I can’t tell you,” snickered Cricket. “It’s private. Anyway, I want to hear about the stud-muffin.”

“Oh, he was good right out of the starting gate,” said Nora. “We know that already.”

“Is that true?” I asked Kim.

Kim nodded with a smug, happy look on her face. “No training required. He’s a natural talent.”2 I exaggerate, of course. We went on hikes and did plenty of yarn projects. What I mean is, all we thought about was Spin the Bottle. No one cared about Capture the Flag, or the Rainier Mountain Singers, or woodland safety, or anything else we had been interested in the year before.3 What were the non-Spin the Bottle boys doing? Were they just not interested? Were they totally invulnerable to peer pressure? And why does it seem like there are always more girls than boys in these situations? Girls are always having to dance with each other, or they like the same boy, or they went out with the same boy. Just once, I’d like to see a situation where there were too many boys.4 Oh. That situation with too many boys? I have seen it. It was my actual life at the end of sophomore year. And it was not pretty.

Be careful what you wish for, because getting it can be a complete debacle.5 At the camp Kim and Nora went to (“too expensive,” said my father; “too establishment,” said my mother), these were two separate games. Spin the Bottle was just for kissing, and you did it right in front of everyone. And Seven Minutes in Heaven started with people picking names out of a hat and then they went into a closet for the seven minutes. So not only did I have my first kiss with Michael Malone, who grossed me out—if we had been playing the game right, it never would have happened.6 I completely fail the pencil test, now. My pencil stays right up there, tucked beneath my boob. But that summer, my chest was only just starting to grow, so my pencil fell on the floor.7 I wonder if I should look her up on the Internet and send her an e-mail: “Dear Gracia Rodriguez. I am sorry I told everyone about you and the pencil test. My own boobs are now saggy and I feel your pain. I never should have done it. Please forgive me, Ruby Oliver.”8 What party? Further proof of my leprosy.

Not only that, she told me about it as if I wouldn’t even be remotely hurt at not being invited. Like it was a matter of course that I wouldn’t even have known about it! Ag.

She should have broken it to me gently. I had only been a leper for nine days. It’s not like I was used to it yet.9 What business did Heidi have being devastated about Jackson and Kim? By this point it had been six months since their two-month thing. And even if Heidi was carrying a torch, which I guess she’s entitled to do, why would Katarina bother telling me about it? It only made me feel even worse, if that was humanly possible. There was Heidi, all upset about a boy she went with ages ago, with all these friends supporting her and being angry on her behalf. And here’s me, the really injured party, and no one worrying at all.10 What? She thought I’d seen Jackson’s thing, as in penis thing? And she thought I’d like to hear that she thinks I’ve seen it?

I swear, I have no understanding of other human beings. Being a leper suits me perfectly, if my only other choice is being friends with Katarina.11 Heidi must have seen it! Otherwise, why would Katarina think I had seen it? She must think penis viewing is the norm for Jackson’s girlfriends.12 So Jackson was getting naked with Heidi and with Kim. But not with me.13 Why not with me? Did he not like me as much as those other girls? Was I less attractive than them? Ruby Oliver, not the kind of girl you’d want touching your penis. Ruby Oliver, not exciting enough to try and get her pants off. Ruby Oliver, good enough to kiss, but not good enough to get naked with.

It just kills me.

Not that I wanted to, but why not me?

10. Angelo (but it was just one date.)

Here is why I’m now a leper. I went to the Spring Fling with Jackson, even though he broke up with me before it and was already going out with Kim. So sue me. My ex-boyfriend that I was madly in love with wanted to take me to a dance, and it was only the second formal dance I was going to with a boy, and I had already bought a dress, and who knows? Maybe he’d see me in it and realize he made a big mistake. Really, I think almost any girl in my shoes would have done the same.

Here’s the other formal dance I had been to: Homecoming at Garfield High, which is the public school we always drive past on the way to the Chinese restaurant my dad likes the best. I went because my mom’s friend Juana (the playwright with the thirteen dogs and four ex-husbands) has a son who goes to Garfield: Angelo.¹ He’s a year older than me. I had only met him three or four times before, at Juana’s dinner parties. I think he spends a lot of time at his father’s house, so he’s hardly ever at Juana’s when my mom and I go over there.

Angelo seemed all right. He had big brown eyes and curly black hair; sort of a flat, round face. Serene. He dressed kind of hip-hop, which no one does at Tate.

At the dinner parties, we generally got up from the table early and watched TV. He never said too much, probably because Juana is always talk-talk-talking, and also because no one can ever hear at her house anyway, what with all the barking going on.

So Garfield was having a homecoming dance, and I guess Angelo needed a date, which is a little odd because the school has like 1500 students and he’s definitely not bad-looking. He didn’t even call me and ask directly. Juana called my mother, and my mother asked me if I’d want to go to this thing with Angelo.

I said yes. Not because of Angelo. Because I wanted to go to a dance.

But why was he asking?

Maybe Angelo was such a loser no one at Garfield would go with him. Or maybe he was gay and didn’t want to take a girl at all, and Juana thought she was helping him out when really she just had no idea. Or maybe my mother had told Juana I was unpopular with boys, and so she was making him take me out of pity. Or maybe he was madly in love with some girl Juana didn’t like, and I was supposed to distract him?²

My mom told me he’d pick me up at eight and not to have so much angst—but I worried for the whole two weeks before the dance. I had used my babysitting money to buy a yellow silk dress from the 1950s, with spaghetti straps—but what if I got all dressed up and he never actually showed? What if he really didn’t want to take me, and started being mean, or left me to go off with someone else? What if this was a Stephen King situation?³

My mother told me to stop being so insecure. My father asked me sixteen times if I wanted to talk about my feelings of insecurity.

The day of the dance, Angelo arrived on time, wearing a blue suit. He brought me a corsage of yellow roses. My dad took pictures. Juana was driving us, and she acted all hokey, like she was a chauffeur. There were two terriers and a big hairy mutt in the backseat, so we all three sat in the front, squashed in. Juana didn’t make us wear the seat belt.

The dance was in the gym, with the lights down low and decorations everywhere. Angelo and I didn’t say much. He got me a cup of fruit punch. A lot of the girls were wearing narrow black gowns and high heels. I felt virginal and young and goofy in my yellow dress with the wide skirt. We danced, and the music was good, and we even slow-danced, which was strange and awkward and nice—holding hands and swaying back and forth.

But the whole thing went on too long. By 8:45, we had danced, stood around, drunk punch, slow-danced, stood around. We had talked to his friends, but the music was too loud to have a real conversation. What else was there to do? We danced some more. Went outside and got some fresh air. I was basically bored from 8:45 until 10:30, when Juana came to pick us up. I sat on his lap on the ride home, since now there was a border collie, a fat Labrador and a mean-looking Doberman in the back.

That was it. I didn’t see Angelo again until the next dinner party his mom had. We watched TV, as usual.

Strangely, this anxiety-producing and ultimately boring experience did not lessen my interest in going to another formal dance. I would definitely have gone to the Spring Fling later on in my freshman year, only no one asked me, and I was excited that Jackson was taking me this year. Although I ended up lying to him once again because he never issued a formal invitation. To the formal! I mean, aren’t you supposed to ask formally if you’re taking someone to a formal? Pete asked Cricket. Bick asked Meghan. Finn asked Kim. Nora asked Jackson’s friend Matt. Hello? Are my expectations unreasonable? I don’t think so.

But Jackson just assumed we were going. The dance was announced on Friday, three weeks ahead. I figured he’d wait a few days, maybe ask me on Monday, so as not to make a big deal of it. That’s what I would have done if I was asking him.⁴ So I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And a week passed, and he hadn’t asked me. Cricket and Kim and Nora went shopping for dresses, and I went with them. I tried stuff on, then said I was planning to make the rounds of the vintage stores the next day with my mother.

But I didn’t.

Finally, halfway through the second week and five days before we broke up, Jackson and I were talking with Matt and Nora at lunch. “Hey, Roo,” Jackson said. “After the Fling would you want to have people over to party on your dock? Because the miniyacht stops nearby.”

“Oh, um, sure,” I said.

And that’s how I knew we were going. I went out and bought a dress, and ended up borrowing $85 from my mother so I could get this great seventies silver wrap thing I found at Zelda’s Closet, and to pay it off I was going to have to babysit fourteen hours for this kid who barfs on me nearly every time I go over there.

Then Jackson broke up with me, and after I had been crying and crying alone in my room, I saw the corner of that dress poking out of my closet and it made me cry even harder, because there was nowhere to wear it, and I’d be paying it off for at least a month, and I couldn’t believe he let me get excited about the dance and buy a dress, when he was going to dump me.

My parents could hear me sobbing though our paper-thin walls. Mom kept knocking on the door. “Roo, come out here and have dinner with us. I made tofu with diced cauliflower!”

“Elaine,” my dad said, “let her have her privacy.”

“She’s been in there for two hours, Kevin.”

“Roo?” asked my dad. “Don’t you want to share? Maybe we can help.”

“She’s not going to talk to us. Get with it. She’s a teenager. The best we can hope for is to get some protein into her.”

“Sweetie, do you want to talk to just me? Mom doesn’t have to come in.”

“Kevin!”

“Elaine, you know you make things worse. Maybe you should stay out of this one.”

“Ruby,” squawked my mom. “If it’s a girl thing, you know I’m here for you.”

And so on. And so on. I finally put my headphones on to block out the noise.

Tuesday night,⁵ my parents took me to a dinner party at Juana’s. She lives in this ramshackle house that is so covered with dog hair you have to wear old jeans when you go, and definitely no black, because you will be insanely furry when you leave. My mom made me go. I wanted to stay home and stare at the phone hoping Jackson would call, but she said I had to socialize.

It was one of the first warm days of spring, and Angelo was out on Juana’s front lawn throwing sticks for seven dogs at once. He had this system of three sticks in rotation, so he was throwing constantly. The dogs were going berserk. He was taller than the last time I saw him, and he’d let his hair grow out, so you could see the curls. He was wearing an oversize football jersey and baggy jeans. “Ruby’s suffering from a broken heart,” my mother announced. “Her boyfriend dumped her. Angelo, you cheer her up. Roo—help him throw the sticks.”

“Elaine!” snapped my dad. “When will you learn to give the girl some privacy?”

“People shouldn’t have secrets,” my mom said. “Besides, he probably already knows. I told Juana everything on the phone.”

“Elaine!”

“What?” My mother put her hand on her chest as if to proclaim innocence. “She’s my oldest friend!”

“Hey, Roo,” said Angelo. “I’ve got a system going on. Check it out.”

“See?” said my mom. “He wants her to help him. Go on, Roo. We’ll see you inside.”

They went up the steps, my dad muttering at my mother in a low voice.

Angelo and I threw sticks for a while. My hands got covered with dog slime. We didn’t say much, but he did show me how the little mutt named Skipperdee would never drop a stick unless you picked her up and squeezed her. Whenever she brought one back he’d scoop her up with his left hand and squeeze her under his arm while throwing another stick with his right to get the other dogs out of the way; she’d drop the stick, he’d pick it up with his right, put her down with his left, throw the stick and she’d be off again. Also, he had a system of throwing two sticks at the same time, so that the smaller dogs would have a chance against the Labradors, who went for it hardcore.

After a while we went in for dinner. My dad and I ate until our stomachs were sticking way far out, because Juana is a great cook and we’d been eating the macrobiotic-sludge-and-breakfast-cereal diet for weeks.⁶ My mother ate a lot, too, bare-faced acting as if fried plantains, spiced shrimp (which I didn’t eat), vegetable jambalaya and ice cream with sugared pecans were all part of her normal regime.

“Roo doesn’t have a date for the big dance Saturday night,” my mother said, as we were all eating dessert on Juana’s porch while the dogs roamed around peeing on the grass. “It’s on a boat. And she has the most beautiful dress. But no date.”

“Mom!” I wanted to die.

“Angelo could take her,” Juana said, picking up my mother’s cue. “He’s not doing anything Saturday.”

“Mom!” (This, from Angelo.)

“What, honey?” said Juana. “You could take Ruby to her dance. She went with you to homecoming last year. I bet it would be fun.”

I looked at Angelo, sure he was thinking what a nightmare it would be to be trapped on a boat with a bunch of prep school kids he didn’t even know. “Sure,” he said, smiling. “Sounds good.”

“Oh. Um. Thanks.”

“I should wear a suit, right?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Okay. What time?”

“Eight-thirty. The boat leaves at nine.”

“No, no, Roo,” interrupted my mother. “You two should go to dinner first. It’s Roo’s treat.”

Angelo laughed and gave me a look, like “Ag! Our moms are such freaks.” But he said “All right”—and would I like to get Italian, because he’d heard of a good place?

“I’ll loan you two the station wagon,” said Juana.

“I’ll pick you up at seven,” said Angelo.

So: I had a date for the Spring Fling, even though I got it in the most embarrassing possible way.

I felt a tiny bit more cheerful all day Wednesday.

Until Kim called Wednesday night with the news about her and Jackson.

From then on, my head felt clogged, like I had a cold, and my chest felt hard and hollow inside. I was in a daze. Literally, everything looked blurry, and my throat was so closed up I could barely talk. Fortunately, Nora and Cricket were still friends with me then, so at lunch both days I got Nora (who had her license) to drive me off-campus for French fries, so I wouldn’t have to sit with Kim, or see Jackson in the refectory.

Cricket and Nora basically took the attitude that everything would settle down once I got over the shock. Nora made me some cupcakes and put her arm around me a lot. She framed a photo she had taken of her and me at a lacrosse game. Cricket talked loudly about other subjects and cut cartoons out of the New Yorker and put them in my mail cubby. They were happy for Kim, and sorry for me, and they figured I’d be too shattered to deal for a week or two—and then we’d all go back to normal.

But I couldn’t even look at Kim, I felt so betrayed. I avoided her even though it meant changing my seat in almost all my classes. More and more every hour, I stopped feeling the sadness I was supposedly going to get over—and started feeling angry. Even though she had been “nice” about the whole thing, and told me herself on the phone, and never kissed him until he had dumped me—I just didn’t think she had been nice at all, really. I thought she was a conniving, lying, man-stealing bitch, and I hoped she would fall in a volcano and die a horrible lava death.⁷

But I kept my mouth shut and tried to retain what little dignity I had left.

The Friday afternoon before the dance, I came out of lacrosse practice and there was no one to drive me home. Jackson had picked me up every week before, and I was in such a tangle of misery I hadn’t even thought to ask anyone in the locker room for a ride. I was the last one to leave, and I went outside and realized I was the only one still there.

I called home from the pay phone. My dad said he’d come pick me up, but it’s a forty-minute drive at rush hour, so I sat down on my backpack and tried to do my French homework as the sky grew darker. I wrote about four sentences before I started to cry.

I just sat there, tears going down my cheeks, not even covering my face.

Then Jackson’s Dodge pulled up in front of the gym. I felt like an idiot, crying there all by myself—although I have to admit, a tiny part of me thought maybe he’d be deeply moved by how shattered I was and realize I was the girl for him after all. I looked down at my French notebook and tried to get my breathing still. Jackson stopped the car, got out and leaned against the hood.

“Hey, Roo, I was hoping to catch you,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you have a ride? I can take you home, if you want.”

“My dad’s coming. He’s running late.”

“How you doing?”

“Pretty good,” I lied.

“Can we talk?” He sat down next to me, leaning his back against the red brick of the gymnasium.

“Sure. What about?”

“I’m worried about you. I haven’t seen you around all week.”⁸

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what Nora says.”

“Let me speak for myself, okay?”

“And Kim is shattered you won’t talk to her.”

“Poor baby.” My voice was bitter.

“Roo, don’t get mean. I’m checking to make sure you’re okay. I really care about you.”

“Right.”

“You do know that, don’t you? I hope you’re okay with all of this.”

“And if I’m not okay, what are you gonna do about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We were pretty close. It’s hard on me to see you like this.”

“Poor you.”

“Listen, we can still go to the Spring Fling, if you want. I’d like that, actually. Can we go to the dance?”

“You aren’t going with Kim?”

“She has to go out of town with her family. She left this afternoon.”

“Won’t she be mad?”

“No. She thinks it might cheer you up. She’s completely sorry she upset you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We’d go as friends,” Jackson added.

“I understood that, thank you.”

“Aw, don’t be sarcastic with me. Let me take you out. You can wear your dress. For old times’ sake.”⁹

Well, it went on like this for a while longer. The short of it is that I said yes, never even thinking about Angelo, or Kim, or what anyone would say—only thinking about how Jackson still had some feelings for me, would love me again in my silver dress, and how we would stand in the moonlight, looking over the railing at the light playing across the dark water.

1 “But wait!” you careful readers are saying. Weren’t you talking about Angelo way back on your first visit to Doctor Z? What does he have to do with anything?2 Doctor Z adds the following: “Maybe he liked you and wanted to go to the dance with you, but felt too shy to ask?”

I swear to God I never thought of that.3 Stephen King wrote this freaked-out book called Carrie about a loser girl who gets asked to the prom by the most popular guy in school, only to find out it’s a massive prank when they dump a bucket of pig’s blood all over her. It was also a movie.4 Why didn’t you ask him?” said Doctor Z.

“Ag.” I moaned. “I always know what you’re going to say.”

“Then we’re making progress,” she said.5 It was on Wednesday that I found out about Kim and Jackson, so at this point I was in the dark.6 I thought maybe heartbreak would make me lose my appetite, like it always does to heroines of books, and then I could waste away tragically to nothing and Jackson would see me and I’d be pale and haunted-looking, and he’d realize that he never should have hurt me like that. But no. It turned out my stomach has no idea what’s going on in my heart and I could eat just like normal, if only there was normal food in my house to eat.7 The above paragraph is the product of nearly four months of twice-weekly therapy. Expressing feelings! Yay! Even when saying what you feel makes you sound vindictive and grudge-holding and cranky!8 You know what? At the time, I thought he was being sensitive—but now, it pisses me off. Where does Jackson get off acting all sympathetic and trying to comfort me when he’s the entire reason I’m unhappy? What is that about? It actually seems kind of sick. Here’s the entry I would have made in The Boy Book if only I still had friends to write it with: Breaking Up with Someone: A Few Tips for Boys.

1. If you shatter someone by dumping her, and you’re not going to get back together with her ever, don’t go following her around to act all concerned about her welfare. Unless you’re divorcing and leaving her with three kids. Just leave her alone unless she wants to talk to you. You can’t comfort her. You are the bad guy. Just accept it and try not to be such a jerk with your next girlfriend.

2. Don’t go wearing the jeans she thinks you look hot in until you’re well sure she’s over you.

3. Don’t tell her she looks pretty.

4. Don’t lead her into temptation.9 Just what he said about tennis with Heidi! Plus, our “old times” were only six days ago at this point! But I notice these things only in hindsight. At the time, I was oblivious.

11. Shiv (but it was just one kiss.)

You could call Shiv Neel my first official boyfriend. He was definitely my first voluntary kiss—and the word “girlfriend” was certainly mentioned by him, in reference to me. But he was my boyfriend for less than twenty-four hours, so although it was common knowledge all over school that we were going out, I’m not sure he counts. Anyway, if he was my boyfriend, it’s pretty pitiful—because just like Jackson, he dumped me and I had no idea it was coming.

Is this my pattern for life, to be always dumped with no warning?¹

Here’s what happened. Last year in November, Shiv and I were assigned to do a scene in Drama Elective together. We had to work on it for homework, so we met a few times in an empty classroom during lunch to rehearse. Shiv was (and is) an Indian American boy with a big nose and the most enormous black eyes you’ve ever seen. I was fascinated by his eyes. He’s quite popular—friends with Pete (Cricket’s boyfriend, as of Valentine’s Day) and this guy Billy Krespin. He plays rugby and basketball, and this year he’s going out with Ariel Oliveri. I was glad to do a scene with him. I’d always thought he was cute.

Blah blah blah: All the details of our conversations, and the clever notes about when to schedule rehearsals, and the time we spilled pop all over the teacher’s desk, and the time he put his arm around me at assembly (but in the dark so no one could see)—none of that is important. What’s important is that one day, he stopped reading his lines, threw his script on the floor, looked into my eyes and said, “Roo, let me ask you something. Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me, then. Really put his arms around me and kissed me. It went through my body like he had flipped some electrical switch and lit me up. His skin was so warm, and he was suddenly so beautiful, and I thought, Oh, this is what all the hype is about—because I certainly hadn’t felt anything like this with Michael Malone in the woods in my nightgown. We kissed for the rest of lunch period, leaning against the closed classroom door so no one would be able to interrupt us.

Girlfriend! I was somebody’s girlfriend! And beautiful, popular, good-kisser Shiv, on top of it all!

Okay, so I’m completely undignified. As soon as school got out, I ran up to Kim, Nora and Cricket on the quad and told them the news. They were completely surprised and excited: Cricket was even jumping up and down. “Shiv! Ag!” she yelled.

“He’s fine,” said Nora, giggling.

“Have you seen him in his rugby uniform? He has some serious legs,” said Kim.

“How did it happen?” Cricket wanted to know.

I told all.

They wanted to know more.

“What did it feel like?”

Electricity.

“What did he smell like?”

Nutmeg.

“What did he taste like?”

I don’t know. Person.

“Did he lick your ear?”

No. Gross! (Laughter.)

“Did you grab his butt?”

“Cricket!”

“I would have grabbed his butt.”

(More laughter.) “I’m not up to butts,” I said. “That’s way too advanced.”

“Not down the pants!” she yelled. “On top of the pants.”

“Even so. Butt-grabbing on a first kiss is a bit much.”

“Oh, I think you can get a nice handful even before the first kiss,” said Cricket. (Raucous laughter.)

“You’re just going to reach over and squeeze?” I asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Please. You’re all talk.”

“No. I would completely do it. On top of the pants, mind you.”

And so on.

The next day, I got to school wearing like four times as much lip gloss as usual and Shiv was in the hall, standing next to his mail cubby. “Hey, Shiv,” I said to him.

He turned around and walked away.

In Poetry, he didn’t look at me.

At lunch in the refectory, he didn’t talk to me or sit anywhere near me, but Cricket, Kim and Nora had told all the girls about what happened, so I was pretty busy fielding gossipy questions from Heidi, Ariel, Katarina and the like, so I didn’t really have time to think about it much.

In Drama, Shiv and I had to perform our scene.

“What did you think?” I said, after.

“It was okay,” said Shiv, his eyes on the ground. Then he grabbed his backpack and left.

After school, I saw him heading for the bus. “Shiv, wait up!” I called.

He kept walking.

By this point, it was obvious he had changed his mind. I felt like an idiot. Had I been a rotten kisser during our session against the door? (This was certainly possible, as I had so little experience.)

Maybe I smelled bad?

Or had there been a booger hanging out of my nose when we stopped kissing?

What could I have done to make him stop liking me?

I thought about it all the time, but I never found out. I felt like a complete loser. I liked him so much, and now he seemed to hate me, and there was no way to turn it around. I was completely helpless.

I never really talked with him again, except to say hi in the halls.

When I told her about Shiv, Doctor Z thought I should ask him what happened. Well, she never says anything quite that directly. What she really said was “Is there a way you could find out?”

“No.”

Silence. She was wearing that poncho again.

“Well,” I said, after a minute, “I guess I could ask him. But I’d rather die than do that.”

More silence. It really is a horrible poncho.

“I don’t care, anyway.”

Even more silence. Who buys this woman’s clothes?

“Well, I guess maybe I kind of do,” I went on. “I mean, I do. I liked him, I wanted to kiss him again, we had a good time together. And the whole thing was humiliating. Everyone knowing we were going out, and then with us breaking up so fast after—I felt like people were talking about me.”

“Can you ask him?”

I ignored her question. “And this is my life, getting dumped with no warning. Or liking people who don’t like me back, or who don’t like me enough, or not as much as they like someone else. You have the list in front of you: Hutch dumped me for Ariel, Gideon never liked me back, Ben didn’t know I was alive, Sky had another girlfriend.”

“Story of your life?”

“Exactly. Why is that? I wish I could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”

“Just one kiss” is never just one kiss. The one with Shiv changed my whole idea about kissing. And when I went to the dance with Jackson, there was “just one kiss”—but it made everything even worse than it was before.

You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.

After Jackson asked me to the dance, I had a lot of phone calls to make.

First, I had to call up Angelo and tell him not to take me. I was super nervous. I had never called him before, and here I was canceling on him. But he was nice about it. “That’s cool,” he said. “If he’s your boyfriend, you should go with him.”

“I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend,” I said.

“Whatever. You should do what you gotta do.”

“Okay.” There was a weird silence. “There’s a party on the dock by my house after,” I said, feeling guilty. “Around eleven. You should swing by if you’re around.”

“Sure,” said Angelo, though I was sure he was only being polite.

“You shouldn’t go,” said Cricket when I called her. “It’s way too complicated.”

“It’s just as friends,” I said.

“Still.”

“Kim told him to take me.”

“But that’s Kim. She feels bad about everything.”

“Yeah? She doesn’t act like it.”

“Trust me,” said Cricket. “She does.”

“I’m still going,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“You shouldn’t go,” said Nora when she called me.

“I know, but I so want to,” I said. “I have that dress.”

“You could wear that dress with Angelo,” she said.

“I want to go with Jackson. I was always supposed to go with Jackson, he asked me a long time ago.”

“Not exactly,” she reminded me.

“But still.”

“It’s your funeral,” she said. “Maybe you should come to dinner with me and Matt, to keep it all under control.”

Matt added two more onto his reservation, and we all had dinner at the top of the Space Needle, which is this restaurant inside an old World’s Fair building that turns around and around so you get a 360-degree view by the time you finish your dinner. They didn’t have any vegetarian food, so I ate three side dishes: creamed spinach, mashed potatoes and a salad. Then we drove to the pier in two separate cars, and got on the miniyacht just as it was pulling out.

Here’s what I remember from the dance: Cricket looked beautiful, in a pink dress with her sleek blond hair piled on top of her head. Nora looked sexy, showing off her great boobs in a low-cut black thing. She took pictures of us all with her Instamatic.

Jackson touched my hand when we were dancing and told me I was pretty. There was hardly anywhere to sit down. When the band played a slow song, Jackson asked me to dance, and put his cheek against mine as we did. Then he suggested we go upstairs and get some air.

I didn’t have a coat. It was freezing on deck. He put his arm around me to keep me warm. It was the first time we were alone all evening. We were standing in the moonlight, looking over the railing at the lake, watching the light play across the dark water, like I’d imagined. Jackson was talking about some anime movie he’d seen.

I wasn’t listening.

I was looking at his mouth and feeling his warm hand against my chilly shoulder.

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do what I did: I put my hand on his neck and kissed him.

He kissed me back.

I thought: This is right. I forgive everything. He wants me again. We’ll be together.

Then he pushed me away. “Ruby,” Jackson said in a strange, loud, public voice. “What are you doing? That’s not how it is, now. We’re here as friends. You know I’m with Kim.”

I looked across the deck. Standing there, looking at us—Heidi Sussman and Finn Murphy. Jackson pushed past them and ran down a set of steps.

As soon as I was alone on the deck of the boat, I had a panic attack. Heidi and Finn had disappeared, and there was no one out there except Meghan and some seniors, down at the other end, plus one couple who had their tongues down each other’s throats. I felt so dizzy I had to hold on to the railing to stand up, my heart was hammering, my breath was coming in tiny gasps; I felt like there was no oxygen, and I broke out in a sweat, even though it was freezing. Eventually I staggered over to a bench.

Noel came out and sat next to me. He’s the boy from Painting Elective who sent me that carnation with the goofy rhyme on Valentine’s Day. “How do I love thee? As high as pigs can fly.” He was wearing a tuxedo, which no other boys were doing (they wore suits), and he lit a cigarette with an old-fashioned silver lighter.

This Noel is one of those not-quite-friends-with-every-body people who never seems like he’s being serious. He’s very ironic about Tate and everything it stands for (preppy white lacrosse players driving BMWs), but he’s got a lot of confidence and no one gives him any crap. His shaggy blond hair sticks out in a ridiculous way that I think probably requires hair gel. His left eyebrow is pierced. That night, his combat boots were sticking out under his tux, big steel toes glinting in the moonlight.

If Noel has girlfriends, he has them out of school. He came to the dance alone, which almost no one could get away with, but Noel is such a man of ironic distance that he pulled it off and no one thought he was a leper.

“Hey, Ruby,” he said, sinking down next to me on the bench near the ship’s railing. “I hear there’s a party at your house, and now your boyfriend’s in a twist over something and you don’t even have a ride to your own fête. Can that be true, or is it a load of Tate gossip?”

I couldn’t believe I’d let Jackson tell people that party was still on. He’d probably invited half the junior and sophomore classes. “How do you know I don’t have a ride?” I asked. (Would Jackson really leave without me?)

“Are you kidding?” Noel scrunched up his nose and took a drag off his cigarette. “It’s all over the boat.”

“Ag. Well, then I’m sure no one’s coming to my house.”

“You better believe they are. Five people asked me if I was going. Ariel Oliveri. Katarina Dolgen. It’s going to be a scene.”

“Oh, no.”

“If I’m invited, I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Of course you’re invited. I—I haven’t had the best week. Jackson told everybody about it. It was his idea.”

Noel smiled. “That’s okay. I know. I keep up on my Ruby Oliver news.”

I was so grateful, I felt like Noel was a knight in shining armor. He gave me his jacket to wear and hustled me into his car. We drove back to my house and my parents had set out coolers full of soft drinks down on the end of the dock where the boats are—plus a bunch of folding chairs and some candles in paper bags, which looked so pretty. People were already standing around when I arrived: Matt and Nora (who said she was tired and had her mom pick her up right after I got there)²; Ariel and Shiv; Katarina and Kyle; a bunch of junior friends of Jackson’s; Shep “Cabbie” Cabot and a senior girl with big boobs; some sophomores I knew from lacrosse. Finn and Heidi came a little while later. Cricket³ and Pete never showed.

It was a beautiful night, I was the hostess of a party full of popular people wearing gorgeous clothes; there was a boy in a tux by my side. It should have been great.

Instead, I was shattered.

Someone handed me a beer. I don’t remember who. I’d never really had more than a couple of sips before that, or maybe a little wine at one of my mom’s opening night parties—but I drank the whole can. And I’d like to blame what happened next on that—only I can’t, because as Doctor Z says, I am in charge of myself.

Here’s a list of semi-beer-induced bad things that happened at the dock party, and I admit that three of them are my own stupid fault:

One: I held hands with Noel. I grabbed it on purpose when Finn and Heidi arrived. I felt like I wanted protection. He kept holding it for a while, and I liked it. But I felt weird about it the next day. I hadn’t meant to be flirtatious.⁴

Two: It soon became clear that the story Heidi was spreading around about what she saw on the boat did not involve Jackson kissing me back—which he did for at least twenty seconds, I swear. Heidi’s story⁵ involved Jackson being a faithful saint who was only doing a favor taking a poor, rejected four-eyed ex to a dance when she had no other date, but then she (me) made this huge unwanted pass at him and he had to push her (me) away, in order to remain true to the no-butt bitch he was currently dating (Kim), which of course he would, because even though he couldn’t really care about her (Kim), he was still such an excellent guy.⁶

Three: Angelo Martinez showed up! I never in a zillion years thought he would, even though I invited him. But there I was, talking to Noel and feeling dizzy from the beer and also annoyed that all these people were more than happy to drink my parents’ pop and stand on our dock while slavering over my multiple rejections and humiliations. I was trying to explain to Noel how I didn’t ever want to talk about Jackson again and did he think Jackson still liked me? when I glanced over at Katarina and who was she talking to but Angelo! He was wearing chinos and a sweatshirt—and he was holding a corsage.

“Hi,” I said, walking over.

“Hi,” he said.

“Is this your new boyfriend, Roo?” asked Katarina.

Angelo ignored her, and handed me the corsage in its clear plastic box. Yellow roses, like at Homecoming. “I paid for it in advance,” he said, “before you called. So I figured, why not pick it up and bring it over?”

“Thanks.”

“I hope your boyfriend won’t mind.” Angelo opened the box for me and lifted out the flowers. I looked down at the pink carnations from Jackson, sagging but still pinned to the strap of my dress.

I ripped them off and stamped them into the ground with the heel of my silver shoe. “He won’t mind,” I said, “I can promise you that.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed Angelo on the cheek. “These flowers are just what I needed tonight,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

“No problem,” he said, and then he bent down and kissed my cheek, only a little closer to the mouth than a normal cheek kiss. A jolt went down my spine.

“Roo, what the hell?”

I turned, and there was Jackson, striding down the length of the dock with his tie loosened. The smashed carnations. The kiss. He had seen it all.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, stepping back from Angelo.

“Who’s this guy?”

“We weren’t—”

“I can’t believe you!”

“Me?”

“I was coming back to talk,” Jackson said under his breath, his lips close to my ear. “I’ve been driving all over, thinking about things. I came back, because I felt bad about what happened on the boat.” He was sweating. I had no idea what to say. “I thought you cared about me,” Jackson went on. “But obviously none of it ever meant anything.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe you’re here, making out with some guy.”

“Jackson!”

He turned around and stomped back to his car.

When I turned around, Angelo was gone too.

Four: My mom found a beer can. “Roo, how did this get here? I’m so disappointed in you; don’t you know some of your friends are driving? blah blah blah.” Not even important in the grand scheme of things, except that I had to listen to an endless lecture when I was frankly in no condition to deal.

So there I was, my mom yelling at me, Heidi talking crap about me, weirded out by the Noel dynamic, Angelo probably mad at me, Jackson thinking I was cheating on him/getting over him too quickly/generally skanky—and you’d think things couldn’t get worse, but ha! It’s my life. Things can always get worse.

Five: I was standing in front of our house getting lectured by Elaine Oliver, who gives loud and obnoxious monologues for a living and was therefore on a tremendous and highly dramatic rant, when Meghan came walking down the dock. The other kids were still partying like thirty yards away, down where the boats were. I had seen Meghan briefly at the dance, and she looked stunning in a black strapless dress and a string of pearls around her neck. Very different from her usual scruffy prepster look. “Hi, Mrs. Oliver,” she said, polite as can be.

“Meghan, how nice to see you!” My mom suddenly turned on the charm. “Did you have fun at the Spring Fling?”

“Yes,” she said. “I dropped Bick off and I’m just getting back. I saw the candles. Roo, are you having a party?”

“Sure,” said my mother, all hostessy. You would never believe this was the same woman who only seconds before was screaming that I was an “inconsiderate recklessly endangering illegal party monster” about beer that I didn’t even buy. “Would you like a pop?” Mom said to Meghan. “Your dress is beautiful, sweetie.”

“Thanks.”

My mom walked over to one of the coolers to get a drink.

“Roo, how come you didn’t invite me?” Meghan asked, as soon as my mother was out of earshot.

“What?”

“To your party.” Her voice was hurt. “Did you think I wouldn’t know about it? I live practically next door.”

To tell the truth, I simply hadn’t thought of it. Sure, Meghan drove me to school every day. Sure, we’d talk about stuff and get drive-thru Starbucks, and borrow money off each other, and sing along to the radio—but I never thought of her as my friend. I guess I figured she’d be off at some party with Bick and the Whipper and a bunch of seniors, and she wouldn’t care what my crew of sophomores and juniors were up to.

“I—I meant to,” I stammered. “It was an accident. Jackson did everything. I didn’t have much to do with it.”

“Are you mad at me about something?” Meghan asked. “I thought we were friends.”

“I forgot to invite Noel, too,” I said. “He wasn’t mad. He just came along. Please don’t take it personally.”

“I’d never have a party and not invite you,” Meghan said. “We go to school together every single day. We’re neighbors.” She was shivering, her skinny arms looking cold and raw against her black silk dress.

“Here’s your pop, Meghan,” my mother said, coming back with an icy can. “I hope ginger ale is okay; it’s all we had left. I looked for a Coke, but I couldn’t find one, so you’re stuck with the unpopular drink.”

“Perfect,” said Meghan, smiling sweetly at my mom. “I’m an unpopular girl. Do you mind if I take it with me? I’m completely tired. I should be getting home.”

I went inside to the bathroom and had another panic attack.

Monday after the dance, no one would talk to me. Meghan didn’t show up to drive me to school, so my mom eventually took me. Kim was back from her family’s weekend trip, and I could feel her and Jackson ignoring me from miles away.

I tried to talk to Cricket and Nora, but Cricket just said, “Later, okay, Roo? We’ve got stuff to do,” and the two of them went off toward the refectory and then avoided me the rest of the day. Katarina and her set were pleasant enough, but I could tell they wanted to know what was going on with Angelo and Jackson so they could spread it around, so I tried not to get into conversations with them.

The only person who was nice to me was Noel. We had Painting Elective together, and he walked with me across the quad afterward, barefaced lighting up a cigarette with his paint-covered hands, even though any teacher could have seen him at any time.

“Thanks for the ride Saturday,” I said.

“At your service.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

“Someone else would have given you a lift.”

“Maybe.”

“You were having a party, Roo.”

“I guess.”

“You’re like the warrior princess of the Tate universe,” said Noel. He lowered his voice to sound like a TV announcer: “No matter what they said about her. No matter what people thought! Ruby Oliver was undaunted. She gave parties, she kissed other people’s boyfriends, she held hands with strange men. In her magical silver dress, she kicked the asses of one and all who dared to stand in her way….”

I laughed. “Then why do I feel like a leper?”

“The warrior princess was covered with the strange green spots of leprosy,” Noel went on in his announcer voice, “but that did not diminish her charms nor impair her miraculous kung fu and painting abilities.”

I kickboxed the air in front of me. “Tcha!”

“Seriously,” said Noel. “You’re not afraid to be seen with me? After what people are saying?”

“What do you mean?”

“At least three people have asked me if we’re going out now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Cricket asked what I thought of the Dalí poster in your bedroom.”⁷

“She did?”

“And Nora asked if we were an item.”

“Nora? Why wouldn’t she ask me?”

“And Josh asked if I was ‘doing you’ behind Jackson’s back all along.”

“Josh is a moron.”

“Yeah, but he’s asking what people want to know.” He sucked on the butt of his cigarette and then stubbed it out on the bottom of his combat boot. I wondered if Noel had seen me sort of kissing Angelo, and guessed he probably hadn’t. But he would hear about it soon enough, that was for sure.

I stared at Noel. He was delicate, underweight, wearing a leather coat.

He looked me in the eye. “I don’t mind if they’re saying that stuff,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I wondered if he had held my hand because he liked me—or because he was being nice. I wondered if he liked girls at all. It was hard to tell with Noel, the way it was hard to tell when he was serious or when he was joking. Like he was on the cross-country team, but he never seemed to care about winning or not winning, the way Jackson did. And he smoked cigarettes, but was otherwise a straight-edge; no beer, no drugs, no meat, no toxins. He even drank carrot juice.

He was a disorienting person.

“I’ll tell them whatever you want me to,” he went on. “Nothing ever happened. Or we’ve been together since Christmas. Or I fondled your digits against your will. Or we had an incredible one-night stand. Whatever you want me to say. I don’t give a crap what Cricket and Nora think. Or Jackson Clarke, even if he is bigger than me. They’re a bunch of Tate idiots, anyway.”

“Those people are my friends, Noel,” I said, suddenly feeling defensive.

“Some friends.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, if those are your friends you’ve got no need for enemies.”

“There’s just a misunderstanding. It’ll all blow over.”

Noel shook his head. “You think better of this scene than I do, Ruby. Don’t you see how fake those girls are? Let it go. Have a laugh about it when you’re older. Forget that junk.”

I wanted to believe him, to skip off to some punk-rock hangout and develop ironic distance and start over in a universe where it didn’t matter what any of these people thought about me. But I couldn’t.

I just loved them.

“Trust me,” he said. “You don’t need Jackson Clarke or Cricket McCall to have a life.”

I’m not ironic. I’m—whatever the opposite of ironic is. Oversensitive. Overly sincere.

“Why are you following me around, Noel?” I said. “Fuck off.”

Not surprisingly, I had another panic attack shortly after this Noel situation, and on Tuesday I pretended I was sick and stayed home all day, eating jelly candies and reading a mystery novel. Actually, since I didn’t know what a panic attack was yet, I figured I was probably dying of some heart attack/lung disorder horror, but I told my mom I had a bad headache and cramps. She let me stay home, and then fussed over me for the first two hours, bringing me muscle-relaxant teas and hot water bottles while popping back and forth to the desk in the living room where she was doing her freelance copyediting. Finally, finally, she had to go out to a meeting and I was able to take a shower, have a good cry and eat the pound of spearmint jelly candies I knew my dad had hidden in his office.

Wednesday I went to school and flunked a math test I’d forgotten about. Kim called me a slut under her breath in H&P, and Mr. Wallace heard her and gave a lecture on the negative effects of labels, and how words like that serve to limit women’s sexual expression, and how there’s a whole history of words that basically mean slut⁸ and yet there are no equivalent epithets for men whatsoever, and didn’t that say something about how women are viewed in our culture? He said a more accurate term could be: “a girl who’s using sexuality in an attempt to gain approval from the opposite sex….” Or, if you look at it a different way, “a liberated, open girl who likes boys and feels comfortable expressing affection, but is misunderstood.” Blah blah blah.

I’m sure he meant well, but I wanted to call Kim a megaslut right back and not think about it anymore.

I let three easy shots in when we played Nightingale Girls’ School (I play goalie), and the whole lacrosse team was annoyed with me. And then after the game, I agreed to go to the movies with Cabbie, this rugby player I barely know who randomly showed up to watch girls’ lacrosse—and who probably only asked me out because he’s heard I’m a slut, thanks to Mr. Wallace’s epic discussion of that word, its historical context and its linguistic precursors, which had been the sole topic in the refectory and on the quad for the rest of the school day.

I don’t know why I said yes. I didn’t want to go out with him, really.

But I didn’t want to stay home on Friday night, either.

I thought I was putting on a pretty good face at dinner that night with my parents. Just sitting there, pushing my brown rice around the plate like usual. But then I had the fifth panic attack, right there at the dinner table, and that was when my mom decided I was surely becoming anorexic, my father was certain I was suicidal and my mother made Meghan’s mom come over and then called Juana and then called Doctor Z.⁹

I started therapy the next day, finished writing the first draft of the Boyfriend List Friday morning—and then threw it in the trash at school like the mental patient that I am.

Monday morning, I got to school late because I took the bus (Meghan hadn’t shown up since the Spring Fling party) and found a Xerox in my mail cubby. It was a grayed-out copy of the pretty, cream-colored stationery my grandmother bought me, with Ruby Denise Oliver across the top. The paper had been crumpled and then pressed flat again on the glass of a photocopier.

It was my first draft of the boyfriend list for Doctor Z, out of order, with arrows drawn all over, names crossed out, names squeezed in, some silly doodles.

I looked at the wall of mail cubbies. The same Xerox was still sticking out of about ten mailboxes in the sophomore section, and a few more in the junior and senior sections—but it was clear that most people had already picked up their mail. I grabbed the few that were left and stuffed them in my backpack. And then yet again, my heart started hammering and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was I going to die of a heart attack out of sheer humiliation? I stumbled over to the girls’ bathroom and sat down on the floor, wheezing and staring at the list. Horror.

Who had done this? Why?

Finn. Hutch. Gideon. Chase. Shiv. Jackson. Noel. Cabbie. All of them were Tate boys, though Chase and Gideon were long gone. Then Adam. Ben. Tommy. Sky. Michael. Angelo. Billy. No one would know who they were.

Except there was an Adam Bishop who took Painting Elective. And Ben Ambromowitz was a sophomore I knew from swimming. And Tommy Parrish had gone out with Cricket in ninth grade. Sky Whipple (the Whipper) was captain of the crew team. Michael Sherwood was in my Geometry class. Chase Hilgendorf was a cute freshman lots of girls had their eyes on. And Billy Alexander was a senior friend of Bick’s—or there was Billy Krespin, my Bio/Sex Ed lab partner.

Except for Angelo and Gideon, every single one of these names looked like the name of a boy who currently went to Tate.

What would people think?

That it was a list of boys I planned to sink my slutty claws into.

That it was a list of boys I already had sunk my slutty claws into.

That by putting the boys in order, I was somehow rating them. How good-looking they were; how good they were at kissing; how good they were in bed.

Whatever the interpretation, the list made it seem like I was basically a man-eater, chewing my way through Tate’s hunky population without so much as a batted eye for the poor, vulnerable girlfriends whose hearts were breaking right and left.

Anyone could have pulled the list out of the trash on Friday, but Kim was the only person who would have Xeroxed it.

I skipped first period and pretty much hid in the bathroom. Then I forced myself to go to class—Drama Elective. I could see the Xerox sticking out of some people’s binders as we stumbled through a reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, sitting in a circle and changing parts whenever the drama teacher noticed people getting too restless. Later, in the hallways, I could hear whispers as I went by.

Tommy Parrish and Ben Ambromowitz gave me weird looks.

The Whipper pinched my butt in the hallway.

Cabbie and Billy Alexander talked crap about me where I could easily overhear.

Ariel, because she’s dating Shiv, slammed into me so hard in the refectory line that my shoulder got bruised. “Ooh,” she said loudly, “I guess I wasn’t thinking about other people’s feelings.”

Michael from Geometry leered and waggled his eyebrows, then passed me a note that said, “You’re on my list too.”

Chase Hilgendorf said hi to me in the hall, then cracked up laughing.

In class, Finn growled at me under his breath: “You’ve made everything worse, you know.”

“What?” I asked.

“Why would you go and do that?” he whispered. “You know what Kim’s like when she’s mad.”

“I didn’t write it for everyone to see,” I started to say—but he turned away from me and wouldn’t talk anymore.

It went on like this all week. I went from being just a leper to being a leper and a famous slut.¹⁰ By Friday, the girls’ bathroom in the main building had a ton of anti-Roo graffiti.

“Who does Ruby Oliver think she is?” (This in Kim’s writing.)

“Mata Hari.”

“Pamela Anderson.”

“God’s gift to the male sex.”

“Ruby Oliver is a _____ (fill in the blank).”

“Lousy friend.”

“Fantasist.”

“Slut.” (Kim again.)

“Ho. Remember? We can’t say slut anymore.”

“Trollop.” (Kim.)

“Hussy.”

“Tart.”

“Chippie.”

“What is that boyfriend list? Your interpretation here.”

“Guys she’s blown, in order of size.”

“I hear she goes on her knees behind the gymnasium.”

“Guys she’s done, in order of conquest.”

“Guys she’s done behind other girls’ backs.” (Kim.)

“Do you think she really did Noel DuBoise? Who has he gone out with, anyway?”

“Do you think she really did Hutch? Gross.”

“Maybe he’s an acquired taste.”

And in Nora’s round printing: “Come on, ladies. She may be a lousy friend, but doesn’t everyone make lists of boys they think are cute? That’s probably all it is.”

“I hope she’s using birth control.”

“I heard she might have an STD.”

“Do you think she gave it to Billy A? He’s so hot.”

“Billy Alexander keeps condoms in his back pocket.”

“So does Cabbie.”

“Big deal if she did Cabbie. Hasn’t everybody done him by now?”

“It’s still skanky.”

I tried to wash it all off with a wet paper towel, but you could still read it with no trouble, especially the parts in black Magic Marker. I borrowed a scrub brush and some spray cleaner from the janitor’s closet and was down on my knees trying to get it off when Kim came in.

It was the first time I’d seen her alone since she started going out with Jackson. She ignored me and started putting her hair up with a barrette.

“You made that Xerox, didn’t you?” I said.

“What if I did? People should know what kind of person you are.”

“And did you start all this on the wall?”

“No.” She kept fixing her hair.

“You didn’t?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I know your writing, Kim.”

“So why are you asking me, then?”

“It was a list I had to make for my shrink, okay? I have to see a therapist now, and she made me write a list.” Kim was quiet. “I’m all screwed up.”

“Tell me about it.” Her voice was sarcastic.

“I’m losing my mind,” I said. “Because my best friend stole my boyfriend. I trusted her and she stabbed me in the back.”

“I didn’t steal him. It was fate.”

“How is that different from stealing? Enlighten me.”

“We’re in love,” she said hotly.

“You were supposed to be my friend.”

“I told you, we never meant for it to happen. It’s one of those things that’s meant to be.”

“Then what was he doing with me at the Spring Fling?”

“He was trying to be nice, Roo. He told me all about it.”

“That’s what he says.”

“I trust him,” said Kim. “I know exactly what went on. It’s you I can’t trust.”

“Me?” The wet scrub brush had dropped into my lap and was soaking water into my cords, but I didn’t care. “What did I ever do to make you not trust me?”

“I could never trust you with Finn,” she spat out. “You were always flirting with him.”

“I never even talked to him,” I said.

“No, you gave him looks, and batted those eyelashes, and crossed those legs of yours in your fishnets, and avoided him, like if you talked to him for one minute he was sure to fall madly in love with you.”

“What?”

“I saw you at the Halloween party. What you two were like when you were alone together.”

“We were never alone!”

“Well, it sure looked like something. He went on and on about how funny you were, after. How he was a jaguar/Freddy Krueger or something.”

“Freddy Krueger kitty cat.”

“Whatever. Like an in-joke.”

“He was a panther, anyway.”

“That’s not the point. You were all over him.”

“I was not.”

“Ever since then. Or even before that. You two move around each other like there’s some big secret between you that no one else knows about. He was always asking about you.”

“Kim! Nothing happened.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I don’t want him anymore anyway. But you should think about what kind of friend you are before you go around saying I stole your boyfriend.” She zipped her backpack shut with a sudden noise. “Take a look at yourself, Ruby,” she said, heading for the door. “I may be a bitch, making that Xerox, but if it makes you think at all about how you act, how you cross lines and kiss people you shouldn’t kiss, and flirt around all over the place without considering how other people feel—then I’m glad I did it.”

And she was gone.

My dad always wants me to empathize with other people. Consider their positions, work on forgiveness. And now that this whole debacle is nearly four months behind me, I do think Kim was right about me and Finn. Not that he has a thing for me, not that I have a thing for him, not that we did anything wrong, exactly—but I did stay out of his way because I somehow thought I was capable of stealing Kim’s boyfriend, like there was something underground there; and he did give me looks, especially when I wore fishnets, and I did like it. The whole dynamic between us was not what it should be if he was dating my best friend. I mean, I put him on the list—even though nothing even remotely romantic ever happened between us. That must mean something.

So I was wrong. About that. And I stopped wearing the fishnets.

Kim believes in fate; she believes Tommy Hazard is out there somewhere waiting to be her one and only; and now she believes Jackson is it. Him. Her Tommy Hazard. She believes he didn’t kiss me back, or come back to the Spring Fling party with the idea of getting back together with me—because she wants him to be the perfect guy she’s always been looking for. I couldn’t have been that cranked about Jackson if I was flirting with Finn, she thinks—and she was half angry with me about the Finn thing anyway, which made it all the easier to justify starting up with Jackson.

Kim plays by the rules. She spends all this time being a good person, doing charity stuff, getting good grades and being the nice overachiever the Doctors Yamamoto want her to be. When someone (me) doesn’t live up to her standards, she dishes out what she thinks they deserve. And she thought I deserved the Xerox.

If I’d ever told my mother about what happened with the boyfriend list (which I never did), she would have said that Kim is a double-crossing backbiter. Then she’d have said I should vent my rage, forget all about Kim, get on with it and go eat some soy-based product.

My dad tells me to forgive.

My mom tells me to forget.

But I don’t want to do either. Just because I understand where Kim was coming from doesn’t mean that I think what she did was right.

And I can’t forget her. We go to school together.

The Monday morning after my confrontation with Kim in the girls’ bathroom, I was waiting at the bus stop near my house, reading the comics page of the Times and drinking juice from a carton—when Meghan’s Jeep pulled up to the curb. “Your mom said I’d find you here,” she said, leaning over to yell out the passenger window. “Get in.”

I got in. She stepped on the gas.

We drove in silence for about ten minutes, until she pulled into the Starbucks drive-thru and ordered our usual vanilla cappuccinos. “My treat.”

“How come?”

Meghan looked at me. “You had a bad week.”

“Yeah. I’m having a bad life.”

“And you paid me gas money in advance,” she said. “So now I owe you, since I didn’t drive you.”

Meghan turned on the radio and we sang stupid songs together at the top of our lungs until we got to school.

1 Doctor Z: “You’re here in therapy to look at your behavior patterns. Recognizing them is the first step toward changing them, if you desire.”

Me: “But it’s not a behavior pattern. It’s something other people are doing to me.”

Annoying silence from Doctor Z.

Me: “Seeing that it’s a pattern isn’t going to help. The No Warning part is about how there’s no warning. I can’t see it coming, so what can I do about it?”

Doctor Z: More silence. Even more annoying, if that’s possible.

Me: “Why aren’t you talking?”

Her: “I want to let you draw your own conclusions.”2 Because she was mad at me on Kim’s account and was basically never going to talk to me again.3 Ditto.4 All right. Maybe I had. In fact, I certainly had. He was cute. I wanted some attention. I wanted to feel like less of a loser. This admission, courtesy of yet an other therapy session with Doctor Z.5 Which I found out by blatantly listening in on a conversation she and Ariel were having.6 In H&P, Mr. Wallace is always talking about how the media “spins” the facts one way or another, depending on political agendas. Like a Democratic newspaper would emphasize how much the former President Clinton did for the economy, while a Republican paper might focus on how he never seemed to keep it in his pants. Heidi put her own spin on the Jackson/Roo drama, probably because she still likes Jackson. No one ever asked me for my spin, except for Doctor Z—but here it is, anyhow:

Jackson was cheating on Kim when he asked Roo to the dance, because Jackson still likes Roo; they went out for six months, after all. He slow-danced with Roo and made her feel all sexy. He took her out for a moonlit walk on the deck of the boat. He put his arm around her, not like friends at all. He was being romantic, dammit! And he kissed her back when she kissed him, because the whole kissing thing was what he’d wanted all along.

Then he changed his tune when he got caught.7 It’s a painting by this surrealist artist named Salvador Dalí who had the most amazingly strange mustache. It’s called Soft Watch at Moment of First Explosion and it shows this almost gloopy-looking pocket watch, really huge, which is self-destructing. I love it.8 Trollop! Hussy! Tart! Chippie!9 Which, now that I think of it, means that Angelo almost certainly knows I’m a severe neurotic with anxiety problems, since my mom told Juana and Juana probably told him. Not that he’d ever speak to me again, anyway, after what happened.10 The only person who said anything even semidirectly to me was Nora, when I asked her if she was mad at me about the Xerox, and she said “Give me some credit, already,” as if she didn’t believe whatever was being said about it. But she was furious about my kissing Jackson when he belonged to Kim and breaking the Rules for Dating in a Small School—so it wasn’t like she was lending me any support.

12. Billy (but he didn’t call.)

Four weeks and 8.5 therapy sessions after the Xerox went around school.

“Billy was this boy who said he’d call me last summer but he didn’t call,” I told Doctor Z. “I kissed him at a party in July. Everyone was wearing togas. You know, made from sheets. His had daisies and ducklings all over it. I think he goes to Sullivan.”

“You kissed him? Or he kissed you?” she wanted to know.

“He kissed me. We were waiting in line for the bathroom. It was a dark hallway.”

“Then what?”

“He squeezed my boob through like eight layers of folded blue sheet. It was my first boob squeeze, but I’m not sure it should count.”

“Because of the sheets?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I gave him my number, and he never called. I waited by the phone like an idiot, too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, what I want to know is, why do you ask a girl for her number and then not call? To me, the hard part would be asking for the number, or leaning in to kiss someone you’ve hardly met when you’re wearing a sheet covered in little yellow duckies. After you’ve done those things, you know she’ll go out with you if you call. So why not call?”

Doctor Z didn’t say anything. She doesn’t say anything a lot of the time.

“Unless you suddenly find her disgusting or stupid or something,” I went on, “and only ask for her number because you already kissed her, so you think you have to. But actually, Billy didn’t have to. I would have been perfectly happy to have a toga-party kissing escapade and leave it at that! It was only once he said he’d call that I wanted him to call, and then there I was, running home to check my messages, and there weren’t any.¹ It was all so dumb.”

“How long did this go on for?”

“Two weeks. After two weeks I figured he was never calling.”

“Ruby,” said Doctor Z. “I’m going to say something to you, and if you feel it’s not accurate, say so and we’ll move on. But it is time to be frank. From my observation, you have a lot of passive patterns in place right now that aren’t making you happy.”

Translation from therapy-speak: I sit around too much, waiting for people to do stuff and angsting about stuff they’ve done, without doing anything myself. I could have gotten Billy’s number at the party, could have called him, could have made it happen, if I’d wanted it. I could have made up with Meghan just by calling her and apologizing, but I sat there at the bus stop every morning, letting her be angry, until she felt sorry for me and gave me a ride. I could have called Cricket and Nora. I could have told Jackson the truth more, could have insisted we watch something other than boring anime movies. Slept in instead of watching cross-country meets on Saturday mornings. Refused to hang around with Matt all the time. Could have not answered the phone, if Jackson called at five p.m. when he said he’d call in the morning. Could have asked him to the dance. Could have taken off his damn pants myself, if I wanted them off. “Go on,” I said to Doctor Z.

“I want to ask, do you see any common pattern between your behavior and your mother’s?”

What? My mother was the least passive person I knew. “Elaine Oliver! Feel the Noise! Express your rage!” I shouted. “Are you kidding?”

“Both of you are excellent talkers, that is certainly true,” said Doctor Z.

I had never thought of myself as being like my mom that way. Did Doctor Z really think I was an excellent talker? Was I an excellent talker? Hmmm. Ruby Oliver, excellent talker. “Why do you think she’s passive?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

Ag. How come these shrinks won’t give you the answers when they know them already? “Um,” I said, excellent talking ability rapidly deteriorating.

Silence.

I thought as hard as I could. Nothing.

“Didn’t you tell me a story about a taco suit?” Doctor Z prompted.

“Yeah.”

“And a macrobiotic diet?”

“Uh-huh.”

We sat there for another minute.

“Do you think there’s any kind of power struggle going on in your home?” she finally asked.

“Maybe. Yeah.”

“What’s the dynamic that you see?”

I had a rush of memories. My mom: shredding tissues and sitting by the phone the time my dad went on a business trip and didn’t call. My mom: spending a weekend at a plant show, bored out of her mind. My mom: going to that Halloween party in the same dumb silly hat as last year after wasting her entire day on the taco. My mom: cleaning the house while my dad ran a 10K with some friends, then having a two-hour fight with him over interpretations of the mayor’s education policy, which she doesn’t actually care about that much. My mom: going macrobiotic after my father made plans to spend every weekend greenhousing the southern deck, when she wanted to go on day hikes and take a family vacation. My mom: not on tour right now with her latest one-woman show, because Dad couldn’t go with her.

My mom, always “expressing her rage,” but never really getting her way.

She does a thousand tiny things she hopes he’ll appreciate—clipping articles from the paper, putting a vase of flowers on his desk, leaving notes whenever she goes out—but he doesn’t fully see them, unless she points them out. And she never stops doing them, and never stops being angry that he doesn’t appreciate her enough.

The all-about-your-mom analysis was true—but also very annoying. I kind of hate it when Doctor Z is right, especially when it makes me a cliché: Ruby Oliver, repeating her mother’s patterns. Still, I decided to ask Shiv Neel what happened last year. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, once I had told the story in therapy: how we’d flirted for weeks during our Drama rehearsals, how he put his warm arm around me in assembly, how we kissed in the empty classroom, how beautiful his eyes were, how good it felt to be his girlfriend, even if it was only for an afternoon.

And then—how he disappeared on me.

Shiv is popular. I knew I’d never get him alone in the refectory or on the quad. He’s always surrounded by the adoring Ariel or a bunch of loud rugby players. But he’s also on the Sophomore Committee, which is Tate’s round-table way of having a class president/vice president/treasurer, etc.—and that meant he stayed late on Wednesdays.

I skipped lacrosse practice and waited after school until his meeting was over, reading a book outside the classroom door. My hands were soaked with sweat, I was so nervous, but I took deep breaths and didn’t have a panic attack. He came out. I stood. “Hey, Shiv, do you have a minute?”

“I guess,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Well, you probably know Jackson dumped me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, um, I—can we go somewhere?” Two brainy-looking committee members were standing right next to us in the hall.

“Okay.” Shiv shrugged as if he didn’t care what we did.

“I don’t mean go somewhere go somewhere,” I said, remembering that he surely thought I was a slut, and after all, last time the two of us had been alone we’d been all over each other. “I mean, outside on the steps.”

“I got it.” He looked at me like I was an idiot. We went outside and sat down.

I looked at my shoes. They were scuffed.

I fiddled with my fingernails, and chewed on one of them a bit.

I got out my pencil, and tapped it on my knee.

“Roo,” said Shiv. “I don’t have all day.”

“Okay. Do you remember you once asked me to be your girlfriend?”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“But then, somehow, it never happened?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I, well—I wondered why you changed your mind. I’m not mad or anything. Only, I’m trying to figure stuff out, since the Jackson thing, and I know it wasn’t a big deal, and maybe you don’t want to explain, but I’ve been thinking about it, I guess, and …” Blah blah blah. I went on for some ridiculous amount of time, sounding completely lame and saying “like” just about every other word.

Eventually, finally, I got it all said and shut up so he could answer.

“Roo, you were laughing at me,” Shiv said, looking down at his own shoes now. “I heard you on the quad.”

“What?”

“I heard you, with Cricket and Kim and those guys, cracking up over what a jerk you thought I was.”

“That’s not true!”

“I was there.”

“I didn’t.”

“You yelled ‘Gross!’” he said. “I know I’m not wrong. And you were laughing all over the place, like I was some big joke.”

“Ag!” I said. “That’s not how it happened.”

“And something about I smelled like nutmeg? Like you were disgusted by kissing an Indian or something.” His voice was bitter. “I wasn’t going to go out with you after that. I didn’t even want to look at you for months.”

“Nutmeg is good, Shiv,” I said. “Nutmeg smells good.”

“You made me feel like a loser, Roo,” he said. “Like a complete outsider.”

Shiv, the golden, the popular, the perfect. Saying this to me.

“I didn’t say what you thought I said,” I whispered. “At least, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant.”

“Okay, then,” he said.

“I liked you. They were asking me what it was like to kiss you. That’s all. It’s how girls are, together. No one said anything bad.”

“All right.”

“The gross thing was about ear licking. Cricket asked if we did ear licking, and I’d never heard of it before.”

He laughed a little. “I guess that’s nice to know.”

“All this time I thought it was something wrong with me that made you stop talking to me,” I said.

“It was,” he pointed out.

“I mean with my kissing, or my body, or my personality.”

“It was your personality.”

“Oh.” I tried to crack a smile. “But it was a mistake. Please believe me. I would never say that stuff about you.”²

“Yeah, okay.”

“The Indian thing is not a thing. I mean …”

“I got it, Roo.”

“I’m all messed up now.”

“Yeah, well. I’m all messed up too,” he said. “But thanks for the explanation.”

He hiked his bag over his shoulder and walked down to the parking lot without offering me a ride.

1 I swear, I am the only person at Tate who doesn’t have a cell phone. Even the fifth graders have them.2 When I think about it, this is both true and not true. I have talked a lot of trash about people. Meghan. Hutch. Katarina. I really have. But throughout this whole horror, I never said one mean thing about Kim, Cricket or Nora to anyone, even when all that stuff was up on the bathroom wall.

So am I a bad person or a good person?

13. Jackson (Yes, okay, he was my boyfriend. Don’t ask me any more about it.)

By now, you know everything about Jackson Clarke, probably way more than anyone on earth wants to hear. This is all I have to add:

I still think about him every day.

When I see him, my heart jumps up in my chest.

I long for him to talk to me, and whenever he even says hello, I feel a thousand times worse than I did before.

I wish he was dead.

I wish he still liked me.

When I got home from talking to Shiv, Hutch was on my deck. Again. Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, he helps my dad greenhouse the southern deck. Especially now that the weather’s good, the two of them are always huddled together over a peony bush or a broken window-pane, the boom box blasting cassette tapes of Hutch’s retro metal.

The sunlight was starting to fade; it was maybe six o’clock. “Hey, Hutch. Hey, Dad,” I called, waving as I came down the dock. The two of them were staring up at the greenhouse, which I had to admit was coming together. “You guys taking a break?”

My dad had taken to hiding Popsicles in the way-back of the freezer, so that he and I could get enough calories in the macrobiotic nightmare of our life. I popped inside and got one for me, one for my dad and one for Hutch, too (my mother was out, needless to say). Then the three of us sat on the edge of the deck, leaning forward so the Popsicles didn’t melt on our clothes, watching the boats sail across the lake.

I actually felt happy for the first time since Jackson broke up with me.

Now don’t go getting excited that I’ll suddenly notice Hutch in the soft pink light of the sunset and fall in love. He’s not the love of my life, and no, we haven’t been destined to get together ever since those gummy bears back in fourth grade, just because that’s what happens in movies.¹ And don’t go thinking he and I become best friends in a Breakfast Club sort of way, either,² with me realizing he’s got a heart of gold under the Iron Maiden motorcycle jacket, and him realizing that I’m not the slut everyone thinks I am. Yes, that happens onscreen. But forget it. This is real life. He creeps me out. We have nothing in common besides leprosy.

“Roo, good to see you looking cheerful,” said my dad. “Isn’t it nice to see her cheerful, John? It’s been taking her a while to process her feelings about the breakup with Jackson. He was her first serious boyfriend, you know.”

“You’re better off without that guy,” said Hutch, his mouth full of Popsicle.

“You think so?” I said. “I don’t.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Huh?”

“Not a nice guy, Roo. He’s mean inside.”

“Why do you say that?”

Then Hutch told this story. I’m not sure why he told it, except that he and my dad had been doing some heavy manly rocker bonding. Or maybe he felt sorry for me, even though I was such a bitch to him most of the time. Hutch said that he and Jackson had been friends in sixth grade—the year when, at Tate, you start moving from room to room for each class instead of staying all day in one place with one teacher. Jackson was a year ahead, but they had gym together, and French, and the same free periods—so they started hanging out. As a sixth grader, Hutch was friends with all the cool seventh-grade boys: Kyle, Matt, Jackson and a few others. They played kick-ball after school. They had their own table in the refectory. They made a lot of noise in the hallways. Jackson and Hutch were friends in particular: Hutch used to ride his bike over to Jackson’s house on weekends, and Jackson stayed at Hutch’s when his parents had to go to Tokyo on business one week. When the two of them were bored in class, they’d write funny rhymes about the teachers and stick them in each other’s mail cubbies.Mean Madame Long,

I know I got the answers wrong.

You can sit me on the bench,

You can call me “stupid wench,”

You can raise a giant stench,

But I can’t remember French.

That kind of thing. That’s the one he recited for us. Anyway, summer came, and Hutch went off traveling for most of it with his family, and when he got back in seventh (when Jackson was in eighth), he found himself frozen out. “I got zits over the summer,” he said to me and my dad, staring down at his Popsicle stick. “I looked like hell, and I was still completely short. And they’d all been to sports camp together while I’d been away.

“First week of school, I trailed after them, sitting on one end of our table, not much part of the talk. Still showing up for kickball. Something seemed off, but I couldn’t tell what. These guys were my friends, you know?

“Then one day, I wrote a rhyme about Mr. Krell—remember, the middle-school gym teacher? And I stuck it in Jackson’s cubby like we did the year before.”³

“Oh man,” said my dad. “I can see it coming. Children can be so cruel.”

“I got my same note back with something scrawled across the top in Jackson’s writing,” Hutch went on. “‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’” He stood up and tossed his Popsicle stick in the trash can.

“That’s all it said?” I asked.

“‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’”

“Wow.”

“He never talked to me again. Like we’d never been friends. Like we’d never even met. And when Kyle and those guys filled my locker with ball bearings in eighth,⁴ and they poured out all over the floor-Jackson didn’t say a word. Just stood there, changing his shirt like nothing was even happening.”

“Jackson would never do that,” I said.

“Well, he did. Who knows?” Hutch shrugged. “He might have put the bearings in himself.”

“No way.”

“I’m just telling you what happened.”

“He’s not like that anymore,” I said. “If he ever was.”

“Dream on,” said Hutch. And then, like he was singing: “Dream on!”

“Dream on!”⁵ squeaked my dad, in a stupid rock ‘n’ roll falsetto.

Hutch joined him, and they kept squealing “dream on” like stuck pigs until, simultaneously, they yelled, “Dream-a make-a dream come true!”⁶ They both sang, and stopped for a little air-guitar duet.

With this additional evidence of (1) Hutch’s creepy tendency to make references to antique heavy metal songs that no one else knows about and (2) my dad actually knowing them and liking it and (3) a complete lack of dignity on both their parts, the moment was over. No more sharing was going to happen. My dad hit Play on the old cassette deck, and the entire dock of houseboats was bombarded with retro metal.

Was Jackson truly the kind of guy who would fill someone’s locker with ball bearings? Or even just stand there, saying nothing, when his friends were humiliating someone? Had he really written “Joke’s long over. Loser” on that poem? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Hutch could invent.

But it didn’t seem like the guy I knew, either.

Maybe Jackson had done those things but wasn’t that way anymore. We all grow up and regret the mean things we did in middle school.

Or maybe I never knew him that well in the first place.

I grabbed my bike, rode to the nearest store (ten blocks) and bought two large bunches of basil, a box of pasta, walnuts and a wedge of Parmesan cheese. Then I boiled noodles and made pesto sauce in our blender, before my mom got back to tell me it wasn’t macrobiotic.

The next morning, in the Jeep, I asked Meghan if she wanted to go to the movies. I felt like I was inviting her on a date. A Woody Allen festival was playing at the Variety.

“Can I bring Bick?” she asked, honking her horn at some idiot driving an SUV.

“No. I think it’s a girl thing.” I didn’t want to be a third wheel with Meghan and her boyfriend.

“We’re supposed to go over to Steve’s house and shoot pool on Saturday.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t want to go. Those guys are always drinking beer and nobody talks to me,” she said. And then to the drive-thru window: “Two vanilla cappuccinos, grande.” And then to me: “It’s not that fun. I usually go out on the porch by myself, actually.”

“So blow him off.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. We paid for the cappuccinos and she pulled out into traffic. “Yeah. Okay. I can see him Friday.”

“It’s a plan, then?”

“Uh-huh.”

We might be friends.

1 Movies where the apparently hopeless dorky guy who’s been there all along eventually gets the girl: The Wedding Singer. Dumb and Dumber. When Harry Met Sally. There’s Something About Mary. Beauty and the Beast. While You Were Sleeping. Revenge of the Nerds. Lots of Woody Allen movies.2 The Breakfast Club: Movie where popular kids and lepers all get detention together and learn to appreciate each other’s inner beauty and personal differences.3 A couple of days after this conversation, I asked Hutch what the Krell rhyme was, Mr. Krell being this enthusiastic blond man with pink cheeks who really was a most tempting subject for ridicule. Hutch still remembers it, so here it is:

Mister Krell, oh, how you smell!

I think it must be aftershave!

The smell gets stronger every day.

Our gym is sinking in a wave

Of Krell’s old smelly aftershave.

Mr. Krell, why don’t you wait,

And wear that stuff out on a date?4 A locker full of heavy metal. Ha ha ha.5 Dream On: I asked my dad. It’s a song by Aerosmith, from way back when they didn’t have any wrinkles.6 That’s what it sounded like.

14. Noel (but it was just a rumor.)

My mom decided to go on tour with her one-woman show.¹ The producer said she could still book it, even though the Seattle run had ended in October, so Elaine Oliver: Twist and Shout would be going around the country starting the end of next month (June). My dad was upset, but my mom said, “Kevin, I have to give the public what it wants. Besides, we can use the money to go on vacation in August.”

“You can’t leave Roo.”

“Oh, she’s a big girl.”

“She’s a teenage girl. She needs her mother around.”

“Dad, I’m standing right here.”

“Will you miss me, Roo?” asked my mom.

“She will!” cried my dad. “Even if she won’t admit it.”

“Not that much,” I said. “You should go.”

“She can come with me, Kevin. After finals.”

There was no way I was spending the summer watching Twist and Shout every night and living in hotel rooms. “It’ll be fun,” my mom went on. “I’m going to San Francisco in July.”

“Elaine.”

“Kevin.”

“Elaine.”

“What? It’ll be good for her. She’s never been anywhere except summer camp.”

“Didn’t we go over this before?” sighed my dad. “We decided you wouldn’t go on tour unless I could go with you, and Roo could stay with Grandma Suzette.” (Grandma Suzette, my father’s mother, lives nearby. But she was scheduled for foot surgery, so I couldn’t stay with her.)

“I changed my mind,” snapped my mom. “I refuse to stay here and watch you greenhouse every weekend when gay men all across the nation are clamoring to see my show. They even have Elaine Oliver T-shirts in San Francisco; some fans sent me a photograph.”

“That was three years ago.”

“Which is why it’s time to go back.”

“Dad,” I whispered, loud enough for Mom to hear. “When she’s gone, we can eat anything we want.”

“Two months is a long time,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

“It’s done,” snapped my mother. “Ricki booked it yesterday.”

My dad stormed out and spent the rest of the evening hammering away on the greenhouse.

I had no interest in going on tour with my mother. Zero. None. To my way of thinking, it would be a complete waste; she’d be yapping in my ear all the time, feeding me tofu, demanding that I bond with her and never listening to a word I say. I’d have to see her show every night, and have theater managers pinch my cheeks and say, “Oh, Ruby! I’ve heard all about you. It seems like only yesterday your mother was doing that bit about your first menstrual period!” We’d sit in hotel rooms, night after night, watching television, when we could be sitting on the dock in the warm air. I’d miss swimming in the lake, and biking across town, and Meghan had said something about taking me out in her family’s motorboat. I’d miss the painting class I’d signed up for. I’d even miss seeing my father’s garden bloom, and the bumblebees that practically surround our houseboat every summer.

But then, one afternoon, I was coming out of Mr. Wallace’s office after meeting with him about my final H&P paper. I had stopped in the hallway to put my stuff in my backpack, and a voice I recognized said, “Ruby Oliver. Long time.”

It was Gideon Van Deusen. Him with his lovely hairy eyebrows. Back from his cross-country tour.

He was wearing a peace sign T-shirt and a beaded belt. Sunglasses. His hair was longer than last time I’d seen him. He sat down on the bench next to me. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What, no ‘Nice to see you, Gideon’? No, ‘How you been, Gideon?’ Just ‘What are you doing here?’ That’s no kind of greeting.”

“Oh. Um. Sorry, I—” How could I be such a jerk?

“I’m teasing you, Ruby,” he said, laughing. “I need an extra recommendation for Evergreen from Mr. Wallace. There’s this advanced-level history class I want to take and they’re making me get one.”

“When did you get back?”

“Last week. Didn’t Nora tell you?”

I looked down at the floor.

“Or are you two still in a snit?” Gideon smiled.

“Me and almost everyone, actually.”

“She wrote me something like that in an e-mail. But Nora misses you. I know she does.”

“I doubt it.”

“She didn’t say anything directly,” Gideon admitted. “She’s just home a lot, lounging around. Messing with her Instamatic. Shooting baskets in the driveway by herself. Kim and Cricket are all in love, you know. Always out with the boys.”

“Yeah, I know.” I had honestly never thought about what Nora was doing when the rest of us were out with our boyfriends.

“You should call her.”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

We sat there for a minute. I fiddled with the zipper on my backpack.

“I was in Big Sur last month,” Gideon said, finally. “You know where that is? South of San Francisco, along the coast. They have hot springs there, hot water bubbling up from underground, and you go in without any clothes, men and women together, lounging around naked with steam rising up.² And I’m learning to surf.”

“Cool.”

“You need a wet suit that far north. It’s cold. But I kept at it and now I can stand up and catch a wave pretty damn good, if I say so myself.”

“Wow.”

“You would love it. You’re a swimmer, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’d be good at it. You have that upper-body strength. Then I drove up to San Francisco,” he went on. “And I heard some awesome bands. You been there?”

“No.”

“It’s amazing. The wildest people walking through the streets. Men in drag. I did an open-mike night with my guitar at this coffeehouse. I pretty much sucked, but I got out in front of people and actually sang, can you believe it?”

“Good for you, rock star.”

“Well.” He laughed. “I felt like a goofball. But hey, I’m never seeing any of those people again, so what the hell?”

“Exactly.” It was very un-Tommy Hazard, getting up and singing badly in front of a crowd, but somehow it made me like Gideon even more.

“I never would have done something like that at Tate,” he said. “When I was here, my whole world was just sports, and parties, and refectory gossip. The Tate universe.”

“Yeah.” I knew all about the Tate universe.

“I’m serious,” Gideon said. “Chinese food like you’ve never eaten. Architecture. Landscapes. Before I came west, I was in the desert in Arizona. I saw the Great Lakes. I hiked some of the Appalachian Trail.”

Mr. Wallace cracked his door and stuck his head out into the hallway. “Van Deusen!” he cried, his face lighting up. “Slumming, are you?” He ushered Gideon in.

I was late for my next class, but I walked there slowly. Thinking about Gideon, naked in the hot spring.

And about San Francisco.

People in general are bad apologizers. Even my dad is—for all his talk about forgiveness. He doesn’t say sorry. He grabs my mom from behind and starts kissing her neck.

“Kevin, I’m still mad at you,” she complains.

“Oh, but you smell good,” he whispers into her throat.

“Kevin!”

“No one smells as good as you,” he moans, or some other ridiculousness, and before long she says, “Fine. Come look at this thing I bought today,” or something like that.

Mom is even worse. She sulks and pouts and storms around the house banging pots and pans, and then after a couple of hours she starts acting like everything’s okay again, and Dad and I are supposed to know that she’s over whatever it was and not to mention it again.

Other people apologize and don’t mean it. “Sorry, but you shouldn’t have …” or “Sorry, but I just didn’t…” They apologize while telling you that they were right all along, which is the opposite of an actual apology.

I am definitely a bad apologizer. I talk too much. I leave the whole thing until way too late, and then I babble on, and end up not saying what I mean and starting whatever argument it was over again. It never comes out right.

Well, truth be told, I usually still think the other person was wrong, and that’s probably why.

The next Thursday, Doctor Z looked down at the list and asked me about Noel. “It was only a rumor,” I said. “About me and him. One of forty-eight rumors, by this point.”

“He’s the one you held hands with at the party?”

“Yeah. He stands on the other side of the studio in Painting Elective now. I never even talk to him.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even think he likes girls.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a mystery.”

“You don’t have feelings for him?”

“It doesn’t matter, even if I did. I told him to fuck off. It’s not like he’d ever talk to me again.”

Doctor Z paused in her know-it-all way, like she was waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. “Why is he on your list?” she finally asked.

“Do we even need the list anymore?” I asked back. “I mean, what are we going to talk about once it’s finished?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

Silence.

“So why is he on your list?” she finally asked.

The thing is, I liked Noel. He was interesting. He was different. He was outside the Tate universe, at least a little bit. When he took me home after the Spring Fling and held my hand at the party, it felt good. I liked talking to him.

The Sunday after Meghan and I went to the Woody Allen festival,³ I dug my watercolor paints out of the very bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t think I had used them on my own since seventh grade. I got a piece of white paper and folded it in half. “How am I sorry?” I wrote in purple watercolor. “Let me count the ways …”

And inside, I wrote:

Like a shark who ate a license plate by mistake.

Like a movie star caught without her makeup.

Like a lady with a fancy hairdo, in the rain without an umbrella.

Like a cat who rolled in jam.

Like a hungry raccoon that ate its young by mistake.

Like a neurotic teenage girl, traumatized by recent social debacles, who doesn’t know a friend when he looks her in the eye, and gives her a ride home, and offers to ruin his reputation for her.

I painted a tiny picture of each person/animal with deep remorse on its face. The last one was me, down in the bottom corner.

It took me a couple of hours, but it looked pretty good when I was done—although the raccoon and the cat were pretty similar, and the rain didn’t seem very rainy. I blew off my Bio/Sex Ed lab, Geometry worksheet and Brit Lit reading to finish it.

The next morning, I put it in Noel’s mail cubby, feeling embarrassed, but also rather well adjusted, if I do say so myself.

I figured I wouldn’t see him until Painting in the afternoon, and I had no idea what to say to him when I did, or whether I should try to put my easel next to his, or what. But I actually got in line right behind him at lunchtime,⁴ and he was in the middle of negotiating with the lunch lady about whether she’d be willing to put his slice of pizza in the microwave (she was claiming it was hot enough; he was saying it was cold), and he barely even looked at me, and I almost turned around and snuck back out the door of the refectory—but then he reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and held it all the while he was doing this monologue about the difference in texture between cold mozzarella and hot, while the lunch lady looked at him with murder in her eyes.

He lost the argument, let go of my hand with a final squeeze, took his chilly pizza and went out into the dining hall to sit with a table of freshman girls I’d never noticed before.

I felt like I was walking on air.

1 The part about Noel is at the end of the chapter. I have to write down this other important stuff first.2 The next minute of the conversation is not written down with any accuracy. I wasn’t paying attention, because I was too busy picturing Gideon naked in a hot spring full of steam.3 The movie we saw, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, involves a superenormous breast chasing people across the countryside. They finally capture it in a giant bra.4 I’d been lying low, generally. No fishnets. No wild clothes. At lunch, I was sitting with Meghan and the seniors. Most of the older kids ignored me, except for Bick, who was pretty cool. But I was definitely still a leper. Hutch and I did say hi in the halls now, and the girls from lacrosse were perfectly civil, like if I had a question about schoolwork, or practice or something. But that was it.

15. Cabbie (but I’m undecided.)

It seems weird to me now that Cabbie is even on the Boyfriend List, although it’s true we went on an actual date and there was even physical contact of a strangely advanced nature.

I’ve already pretty much forgotten about him. I’m certainly not undecided about him anymore. Shep Cabot is out, finished, kaput—and the heading of this chapter should more accurately read: “Cabbie (but it was just a grope.)”

Cabbie is a junior. He plays rugby and he’s cute in a meaty sort of way. He’s not my type. Too big. Too manly manly. He caught up with me after a lacrosse game a couple of days after the Spring Fling and asked me to the movies. Out of the blue. Right before my first appointment with Doctor Z. My guess is, he’d heard I was easy¹ thanks to Mr. Wallace’s well-publicized antislut lecture in H&P, and he figured he could get some if he paid for my movie ticket.²

I didn’t much care why he was asking me out.

I didn’t want to sit home on Friday night.

I wanted Jackson to see me with someone else—like he had with Angelo—and feel jealous, and want me back.

I wanted not to care if Jackson wanted me back or not, because I had a new guy who was bigger and more popular and played rugby.

And once I didn’t care and was off with the new guy, Jackson would suddenly love me—wouldn’t he?

And then I could care again and we’d live happily ever after.³

I said yes, and Cabbie picked me up in a BMW around seven p.m. on Friday night. He came in, briefly, and shook my dad’s hand and called him sir. We drove to the University District, where there are a couple of movie theaters, and parked in an expensive lot. “Can’t leave this baby on the street,” said Cabbie, chuckling, as he locked the doors. We walked a couple of blocks in the chilly air, talking about lacrosse and rugby.

“We’re playing Sullivan on Tuesday,” said Cabbie. “You should come to the game.”

“That could be cool.”

“Coach is such a hard-ass. He’s making us run three miles before practice.”

“We run three for lacrosse, too.”

“Really, the girls?”

“Really.”

“I’m starting this season, which is cool.”

“Awesome.”

We went into the theater. He bought the tickets. I paid for popcorn and pop. It was some action special-effects movie, not my thing, but all right.

About a quarter into it, Cabbie put his arm around me, and seconds later, he dangled his right hand down over my shoulder and squeezed my boob! We hadn’t held hands, or kissed, or anything. We’d hardly even had a conversation before that night—but he went straight for the boob squeeze as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

I was in shock. I sat there, letting him squeeze it.

It felt kind of good.

He was watching the movie like it wasn’t even happening, but also moving his fingers around every now and then, stroking my boob absentmindedly.

Should I shift my body so his hand was more shoulder height? Or take his hand and hold it so it couldn’t go roaming around my chest? Or actively move his arm back to his lap? Or get up to go to the bathroom and hope the gropefest wouldn’t start up again when I got back? Or pitch a fit and get all indignant?

It really did feel kind of good. He seemed to know what he was doing in the boob department. The longer I sat there and thought about it, the longer it seemed weird to start objecting.

He ended up feeling my boob for the whole movie! He ate popcorn with his left hand and got lucky with his right. It started to feel kind of lopsided, for the right one to get literally an hour and a half’s worth of attention and the left one to be all on its lonesome. I barely knew what the movie was about, because I was thinking about my boob the whole time. My boob, being stroked by a near-complete stranger, a big meaty rugby player.

When eight days before, it had been all Jackson’s.

Was I really a slut, like Kim said? This made four boys within one week I’d had some kind of physical contact with.⁴

Or did I actually like Cabbie? Could this be the start of a new thing?

Maybe not.

And then again, maybe.

The movie ended. Cabbie stretched, took his hand off me and stood up. “Wanna get some pizza?”

“Sure.”

We went to a place up the street. We split a cheese pie. He told me he doesn’t eat vegetables, ever. He talked about his “buddies” from rugby and how he wants to go to Penn and be a lawyer, like his dad. He asked me about my family, and I did my usual riff. He said his mother likes to garden.

Cabbie had everything a girl is supposed to look for in a boy. He was sporty, cute, popular, friendly, rich. He might even have been smart, though I couldn’t tell for sure.

But I was bored. Just making conversation, not really talking.

I think I want a guy who eats vegetables.

And who isn’t so normal.

He was just a muffin, you know?

The check took forever to come, and when it finally did, I insisted on paying half, even though I was still broke from buying that silver dress.

He drove me home and I hopped out of the car like a jackrabbit. If he thought I was a slut, who knows what he was expecting in a dark BMW, late on a Friday night? Especially after all that boob squeezing. “That was fun,” I lied, slamming the car door. “You don’t have to walk me in.”

“Later,” he said, looking surprised.

Sunday evening I called him up. “Hey, Cabbie,” I said, when he got to the phone. “I want to tell you, um, I can’t go to that rugby game on Tuesday.”

“That’s cool. We play all the time. There’s another game on Friday.”

“Yeah, well. I mean, I’m kind of still getting over Jackson.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s cool.”

“All right. Well, sorry about that.”

“No big deal. See you around.”

“See you.”

We hung up. I felt relieved. Although if I could have had a purely boob-squeezing relationship with him, maybe I would have done that. You know, like sitting in movie theaters once or twice a week having my boobs groped, with no obligation to kiss his meaty face or have boring conversations with the guy.

But that was impossible, so we were better off apart.

The next day was the day Kim Xeroxed the Boyfriend List and put it in everyone’s mail cubbies. My life was sucking in all the ways I’ve already detailed, and on top of it all I heard Cabbie saying to Billy Alexander, “Yeah, I felt her up. But I don’t know, she’s kind of skanky. I’m not so interested. What about you?”

“Don’t look at me, man,” Billy said.

“Come on, you can tell me.”

“I’m serious man, I didn’t touch her.”

“Nice tits, though, am I right?”⁵

“Sure.”

“Was it Billy Krespin, then, do you think?” asked Cabbie.

“Could be. Why don’t you ask him?”

And that was that. You know the rest.

The good thing about the whole Cabbie episode was that I realized I might actually like having my body touched by somebody other than Jackson. I mean, being felt up⁶ is pretty intimate, and before going out with Cabbie I thought I’d never want to do anything like that with anyone ever again.

It did feel good, I can’t lie about that.

Maybe I won’t be heartbroken forever.

Doctor Z and I are done with the list. Now we just have conversations. She gave me another homework assignment, which was to make a drawing of my family, and I ended up making this little diorama of our houseboat, using an old shoe box. It came out pretty cool. I had this little cutout of my mom waving her arms, and one of my dad hugging a peony bush, and one of me, wearing fishnets.

I’ve started wearing the fishnets again.

Doctor Z thinks it’s a healthy expression of my sexuality.

I just think they look good.

Other than that, I tell her about my life. I haven’t had any more panic attacks, although sometimes my heart races and I do a little deep breathing. “Do I get a clean bill of health now?” I asked her.

“What do you think?” Ag. She really does make me insane with that kind of question.

“Um. I don’t know.”

“Would you like a clean bill of health?”

I sighed. “I don’t want to be a mental patient forever.”

“Are you saying you’d like to stop therapy, Ruby?”

“Um.”

“You don’t have to stop until you want to. We can do this as long as you like.”

“Don’t you get bored, listening to my problems?”

“No.”

“You probably have a bunch of anorexics and sex addicts who are a lot more interesting.”

“It’s not your job to entertain me, Ruby.”

True enough. That’s why therapists are different from friends. You don’t have to make them like you.

So I kept going.

I guess I like it.

School is over now. Jackson and Kim are still together. He doesn’t seem to have realized he loves me. In fact, he seems to have forgotten everything that happened. Neither of them spoke to me the rest of the year except for Jackson saying hello when absolutely necessary—and I still had the Beth-Ann-Courtney-Heidi-Kim radar all through the very last day of finals, stupid as that is. People still whispered about me in the hall, but no one wrote anything more on the bathroom wall. I kept my head down. I hung out with Noel in Painting Elective and ate lunch with Meghan. Once, after a game, I went for ice cream with a crowd of girls from the lacrosse team. I haven’t been back to the B&O.

You might think that Heidi started going with Finn the stud-muffin, since he took her to the Spring Fling as a Kim replacement. But it didn’t work out that way. Heidi’s now dating Tommy Parrish, who used to go out with Cricket.

Ariel and Shiv are still together, but I heard her in the locker room saying she thought Steve Buchannon (Bick’s friend) was completely hot. Cricket and Pete split up. Pete started going out with Katarina—until Katarina made out with the Whipper at yet another party I wasn’t invited to, and Pete got mad and broke up with her. So now she’s going out with Cabbie. And Pete is going out with Courtney. And Finn is going out with Beth. Cricket started dating Billy Alexander, which I’m sure she’s cranked about since she’s lusted for him ever since that one time he drove her home from that basketball game. But he also just graduated, and I don’t know the whole story, because we don’t talk.

It’s still the Tate universe.

I ran into Nora in the University District right after school ended. I had been shopping for a bathing suit, and I had just left the store when she called my name from across the street. I showed her what I’d bought. She liked it.

We talked about tan lines, and how the bathing suits that make nice tan lines aren’t the ones you look good in, somehow. She said her boobs get squashed flat or pushed up, and why wasn’t there a bathing suit that made boobs just look normal? You would think scientists and fashion designers could have figured that out by now.

It was good to see her. She wasn’t up to much, she said. Watching TV. Hanging out with Gideon a little. Her mom had bought her a new camera, a real one where you have to adjust everything.

I felt like guilting her for cutting me out all spring, but I thought about something Doctor Z said, which was that sometimes it’s a good idea to think about what you want from a situation, and try to get it, rather than just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head. And I realized I was glad Nora was talking to me, finally—and I didn’t want to mess it up. So I said, “Hey, I love your brother again.”

“He’s got a girlfriend,” she said. “Diana. She’s a poet.”

“I know,” I answered, although I didn’t really. “But he just does it for me, anyhow.”

She laughed. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

“I’m through with boys for the moment, anyway,” I said. “Too dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, it can get ugly out there.”

“Uh-huh. I think it’s better as a spectator sport.”

“What, dating?”

“Uh-huh.” Nora scratched her neck. “It’s just so messy, you know, all that stuff with you and Kim and Heidi and—”

“I got you.”

“I just feel like, I’d rather shoot baskets, or something,” she went on. “Even read a book. I mean, not that there’s anyone I’m into, anyway.”

“The problem is,” I joked, “our school is too damn small. Remember how we wrote that in The Boy Book? Any decent boy was used up ages ago.”

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “Sometimes I feel like a leper.”

That surprised me almost as much as Shiv Neel, golden boy, thinking we were all laughing at him because he was Indian.

Like even the people at the center of the Tate universe feel like they’re on the outside.

Nora said she was late, hoisted her bag over her shoulder and waved goodbye. I watched her go down the street and get into her car.

Maybe I’ll give her a call later in the summer, when the whole debacle is a bit more behind us.

Maybe.

I slept over at Meghan’s house a couple of nights in June. She has a huge bathroom all to herself and two twin beds and a collection of like forty different perfumes. I found out she’s still a virgin, though she lets Bick go down on her.⁷

My dad is still working on the greenhouse. It’s coming along.

Here is what I think about these days: Jackson. Pitiful, but true. The ceramic frogs are still sitting on my dresser, with a photograph of the two of us holding hands out on my deck. I think he may not be the nicest person, really. He’s not the person I thought he was. Some days, I’m mad at him, actually—which I wasn’t before. For the bad presents, and the forgotten phone calls, for the stupid anime movies. And for Kim. But that happens in waves, on certain days. The other days, I think about the lollipop-tasting experiment, and kissing in my kitty-cat suit—and I feel like I lost something.

I’d probably still take him back, if he showed up at my door like in the movies.

He’s Jackson Clarke.

It’s just how I feel.

I think about Cricket and Nora. And how much I used to laugh. And how I’d go into the refectory in the morning and they’d be sitting there, drinking tea (Cricket) and Diet Coke (Nora) and goofing around (Kim was always late), and how that was the best part of my day, most days—and how it’ll never happen again.

And of course, I think about Kim. It’s so weird that I used to have a best friend and now I don’t. I have a drawer full of pictures of her. The red vintage jacket she bought me for my birthday is hanging in my closet, and the book about Salvador Dalí I borrowed is sitting on my desk. I’ve got The Boy Book on the shelf in my bedroom where it’s always been, a big, ratty notebook with our handwriting all over it. I even thought about photocopying it and mailing it to her as a kind of reproach. Or maybe as a gesture of friendship. I’m not sure which.

But I didn’t.

I still automatically pick up the phone to call her when something happens that’s worth talking about, then remember and put the phone down again without dialing. Sometimes I call Meghan instead—but most of the time, I don’t call anyone. Doctor Z told me I’m going through a “grieving process,” and that all these behaviors are natural.

I told her that phrases like “grieving process” make me gag.

She laughed and said it’s still a process and it’s still grieving, whatever I want to call it.

I said let’s call it Reginald. “I’m doing Reginald today,” I say now, when I’m feeling like I have no friends.

I think about Angelo, too, which is deeply perverse because he probably doesn’t ever want to talk to me again (subject of much therapy discussion). My family went to dinner at Juana’s again in May, but he wasn’t there. He sort of lives in a different universe—not the Tate universe—and I wonder sometimes what it’s like. Why he asked me to the Homecoming dance. Why he came to the party and brought me that corsage. What he thinks of that dog-filled house. What he does after school. Whether he’s thinking about college. What he looks like without a shirt.

I think about books. I read through a stack of paperback mystery novels from the public library when the term ended, and then I read some books from Brit Lit that I blew off during the year. I watch too many movies. I think I’ve seen all the Woody Allens now.

I think about getting a job. No more babysitting. I hate it. Maybe I could help out at the Woodland Park Zoo for a few bucks an hour. Or at the library.

I think about getting my driver’s license. Not that I’d have a car, but I could take the Honda on weekends, maybe. My birthday is in August. I’ll be sixteen.

I think about turning sixteen, and how I won’t have a party like I always thought I would, with my friends all sleeping over and being silly and eating cake.

I probably think too much.

In early July, I got on my first ever airplane and went to join my mom in San Francisco, where she’s doing her show. I didn’t want to go, I said I’d rather rot than hang out with her all summer, and my dad made a lot more fuss about her being selfish and how that wasn’t how they’d agreed to run their marriage—but in the end, she went—and I realized I wanted to go too. I wanted to see some men in drag and some general California stuff and just go somewhere where the air smells different. I called her up when she was in Los Angeles and asked if I could come meet her in San Francisco. It was funny. I didn’t think I’d be as glad to see her as I was when she picked me up at the airport. When we’re done here, we’re going to Chicago and Minneapolis.

Don’t get me wrong. Elaine Oliver is driving me nuts, because I have to share her hotel room and she is so full of self-importance, what with an audience clapping for her every night, that she’s damn near impossible to deal with—but she’s given up the macrobiotic thing and she took me to five different Chinese restaurants for lunch, all in one week. They have an amazing Chinatown here. It feels like you’re in a different country.

When she’s doing her show, I stay in the hotel and write on her laptop—which is the stuff you’re reading now. Or I mess around with my watercolors. Or read more mysteries. Then I fall asleep and she comes home and calls my dad and moans about how much she misses him, which wakes me up. And then I talk to her while she takes off all her makeup.

In the daytime, we go do tourist stuff. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, rode a streetcar, toured Alcatraz. We walked through the Castro district, where someone asked my mom for an autograph.

Last Monday, the day when theaters are dark, we rented a car and drove down the coast to see Big Sur. I drove part of the way, and when my mother commented eight times about how fast I was changing lanes and had I checked whether I was going the speed limit, I told her to please be quiet for at least fifteen minutes and see if we stayed alive. And she did.

At one point we stopped and took a picnic down to the beach. It was cold, and sand got in our potato salad, but we stayed anyway. There were surfers in the water, looking like seals in their wet suits, sailing into shore on huge waves. We watched them for like an hour.

Tommy Hazard would have loved it.

I loved it.

I was out of the Tate universe, standing on the edge of the sea.

1 Doctor Z: “Is it impossible that he liked you as a person and just wanted to go to the movies with you?”

Me: “Yes.”2 And he was right! Ag.3 Complete idiocy. I know.4 In case you don’t remember: Jackson, Noel, Angelo and Cabbie.5 I wanted to kill him. Telling another guy how he squeezed my boob! What a sleazy gross thing to say. But now, I think it’s not so different from what I told my friends about Shiv and Jackson, and what I know about Kaleb and Finn and Pete.6 Or actually down, in this case, given that his hand was coming from over my shoulder.7 Me: “You let him? Isn’t that supposed to be fun for you?”

Her: “It’s supposed to be, but I get bored.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know, it’s just boring. Maybe he’s not very good at it.”

“What’s it like?”

“Not much. Not like in the sex-ed books. I think about other stuff while he’s doing it.”

“Why bother, then?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It’s something to do. I think it makes him feel like a sex god.”

“Maybe you could train him. So he’d get better at it.”

“Maybe. I hate to burst his little sex god bubble. He seems so proud of himself, after.”

After the Adam “debacle” in chapter one, Roo and Kim begin a notebook called The Boy Book in which they write down everything they know about boys. Have you ever started a book like this on your own or with your friends? Do you think it would be useful? What information would you include?

On page 41, Ruby spills her guts to Kim about Finn. Is this smart? Are there circumstances in which it’s better to keep your mouth shut? Has something like this ever happened to you—you tried to do the right thing and it backfired?

Ruby gives three examples of the way love works in the movies. In her example on page 64, the couples hate each other half the time but still get together in the end. In her example on page 65, the couple breaks up, but then the man realizes that he loves the woman and can’t exist without her, and they get back together and live happily ever after. And on page 198, the hopeless dorky guy who’s been there all along eventually gets the girl. Do you agree with Ruby that these happy endings don’t happen in real life? Pick one of the movies mentioned and discuss it. Does the romantic situation in the movie ring true? Can you think of other movies, books, or television shows that would fit on Ruby’s lists?

Ruby discovers that dating Jackson isn’t the way she thought dating was supposed to be. Have you ever discovered that your ideas about something were wrong? How was the reality different from what you had imagined?

In chapter six, Kim and Ruby invent the perfect boyfriend and name him Tommy Hazard. Do you have your own Tommy Hazard? Are there hazards in creating a “perfect” boyfriend?

After stealing Jackson, Kim tells Ruby, “When you find your Tommy Hazard you’ll understand. I honestly couldn’t help it.” Do you agree with Kim’s justification of her behavior? Does she do the right thing?

Even though Noel has become Roo’s only ally, she turns on him on page 176 after he says, “… if those are your friends you’ve got no need for enemies.” Why does this upset Ruby so much? Do you think Noel is right? Why is Ruby not yet ready to give up her old life, even though it has become the source of such pain?

When Kim calls Ruby a slut in class, Mr. Wallace gives a lecture on the negative effects of labels and points out that “there are no equivalent epithets for men whatsoever, and didn’t that say something about how women are viewed in our culture?” (page 177). What does it say? Can you give examples of the negative effects of labels, from real life or from movies, music, television shows, or books?

Ruby ends the book by saying, “I was out of the Tate universe, standing on the edge of the sea” (page 229). What does she mean by this? Is she really out of the Tate universe? Is this a satisfying ending? Do you believe that Ruby is in a better place now than when the book began? What do you think is next for her?

in her own words

a conversation with e. lockhart

Q. Where did you get the idea for The Boyfriend List? Did you have a boyfriend list?

A. In high school, I used to keep a list of all the boys I ever kissed. There were little hearts dotting the is and everything! But when I looked for it some fifteen years after graduating, the list had disappeared.

I hoped it hadn’t fallen into the wrong hands.

And there was an idea.

It was quite a difficult book to structure, in the end. After all, a list is not a story, and with the list structure I had to tell Roo’s story completely out of order—flashing back to her middle school years, forward to events of sophomore year, forward again to shrink appointments in which the events were discussed four months after they happened, etc.

Q. Readers often wonder how much an author is her main character. Are there any similarities between you and Ruby? Did you ever lose a friend over a boy?

A. All the events of the story are fictional. The element closest to true is Jackson’s note-writing style. My first serious boyfriend used to write me notes like that and leave them in my mail cubby.

I used to live in Seattle, and the locations are largely real—the B&O Espresso, the U. District, etc. But Ruby’s parents, her houseboat, her school, her various obsessions and interests—those are imaginary.

How am I like Roo? As a teenager, I was definitely a thrift-store maven. In both high school and college I was a scholarship kid surrounded by very wealthy people. I also have Roo’s tendency to hyperanalyze small human interactions.

Yes, I have lost friends over boys—and boys to friends. I wanted to write about heartbreak on more than one level—the heartbreak of losing a friend as well as the heartbreak of losing a boyfriend.

Q. “Tommy Hazard” has struck a chord with many readers. Did you have a Tommy Hazard? What was he like?

A. Tommy was actually an afterthought. I had a chapter that was too long and wanted to break it up, which meant I needed another boy—and I wanted to do something different than what I’d done in the other chapters.

I’ve been a little sad that so many girls love Tommy so much. Hello!?! Tommy Hazard and Prince Charming—neither one exists! You can’t hold out for them or you will be sad and disappointed. Or you’ll end up being the kind of girl (like Kim) who snatches other people’s boyfriends because she’s deluding herself that she’s found perfection. Real boyfriends are real people. With flaws and often without glamour.

Q. The footnotes are a fun way to convey information. Where did you get the idea to use them? How did you decide what to put in them?

A. I’ve always liked footnotes. I trained to be an academic (I have a PhD in English literature) and I loved putting huge rambling asides in my footnotes while my central argument went on unimpeded by whatever tidbit had distracted my attention. I also love David Foster Wallace’s essays, in which he uses copious and often hilarious footnotes. So I wanted to try using them to convey the inside of a teenage girl’s mind.

How did I decide what to put in them? I wrote like a zillion and then my editor helped me figure out which ones were boring.

Q. Jackson is horrible at giving gifts. What is the best gift you’ve ever received from a boy? The worst?

A. The worst: Well, the half-carnation on Valentine’s Day really did happen to me, my senior year of high school. But the worst gift ever was a USED OFFICE TELEPHONE (with several lines, etc.) that my boyfriend shoved, UNWRAPPED, under my pillow on Valentine’s Day.

I already had a telephone.

This one involved wood veneer.

It was a random thing he found in the junk room of his office!

The best: There was a guy in college who later became my boyfriend. He graduated two or three years before me, and every now and then he used to just send me a letter, chatting about stuff. On my birthday one year, he sent me this tiny pin made out of a dead fish. It was a good-looking little fish, and it had been varnished or something, and mounted on a pin. I wouldn’t wear it now, but at the time it seemed hilarious and punk rock and pretty all at the same time. It was small and it was a surprise, and I could tell he’d thought about my taste (questionable as it may have been). It worked much better than a dozen roses.

Q. Ruby loves movies, and the novel has fun movie references sprinkled throughout. What is your all-time top ten movie list?

A. I can’t put them in order. Too stressful! But here’s the list:

Gregory’s Girl

Repo Man

Annie Hall

Grease

His Girl Friday

Bringing Up Baby

Cabaret

Moulin Rouge

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Singin’ in the Rain

Q. This is your first novel for teenagers. Was there anything surprising about the process of writing it? Did you learn anything new?

A. I had a terrific amount of fun writing this book, but writing it was not so different from writing for adults or for younger kids, both of which I’ve done. I just try to write the best story I can.

Q. What were your favorite books as a teenager? Did any books or writers influence you while you were writing this book?

A. I read all the great early young adult authors when I was twelve and thirteen: Paul Zindel, S. E. Hinton, Judy Blume, M. E. Kerr. But I was more of a drama girl in high school and didn’t read as much as I had in junior high. I fell back in love with books in college, reading great nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens, Austen, and the Brontës.

Writing The Boyfriend List, I was influenced by Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which is about this guy who’s always making lists and mix tapes. He goes back and visits his major old girlfriends to try to figure out what went wrong with his current relationship. I loved Hornby’s book—it’s tremendously clever and engaging—but parts of it didn’t ring true for me. I thought there might be something fresh I could do with a similar concept.

Q. What is your writing process?

A. I write every weekday morning at my computer in my home office. A plump cat or two for company. More coffee than is good for me. I wear pajamas and look rather unattractive. I do not answer the phone, I do not clean the house, I check my e-mail only as a reward for doing my job. Sometimes I offer myself other ridiculous little rewards for writing—like: I can go out to the drugstore and buy toothpaste if I write two pages! It is borderline psychotic.

Q. What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

A. Go to college. Read as many books as you can. Try to get an internship at a publishing house or magazine. And write. It is very easy to say you are a writer and not write. But if you actually write stuff—then you are a writer, whether published or not.

The Boy Book • E. Lockhart • 978-0-385-73208-6

It’s the beginning of Ruby Oliver’s junior year at Tate Prep, and things are not off to a good start. But the year turns out to be full of surprises—along with many difficult decisions—that help Ruby see that there is indeed life outside the Tate universe.

Fly on the Wall • E. Lockhart • 978-0-385-73281-9

At the Manhattan School for Art and Music, where everyone is “different” and everyone is “special,” Gretchen Yee feels ordinary. One day, Gretchen wishes she could be a fly on the wall in the boys’ locker room—just to learn more about guys. (What are they really like? What do they really talk about?) This is the story of how that wish comes true.

Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything: The Jealousy Book Edited by Marissa Walsh • 978-0-385-73317-5

We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt that pang. It’s hard to stop the green-eyed monster once it rears its ugly head. In this collection of short stories, essays, and one poem, thirteen writers share their visions of jealousy.

Girl, 15, Charming but Insane • Sue Limb 978-0-385-73215-4

With her hilariously active imagination, Jess Jordan has a tendency to complicate her life, but now, as she’s finally getting closer to her crush, she’s determined to keep things under control. Readers will fall in love with Sue Limb’s insanely optimistic heroine.

Counting Stars

David Almond

978-0-440-41826-9

With stories that shimmer and vibrate in the bright heat of memory, David Almond creates a glowing mosaic of his life growing up in a large, loving Catholic family in northeastern England.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Ann Brashares

978-0-385-73058-7

Over a few bags of cheese puffs, four girls decide to form a sisterhood and take the vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The next morning, they say goodbye. And then the journey of the Pants, and the most memorable summer of their lives, begin.

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Ann Brashares

978-0-385-73105-8

With a bit of last summer’s sand in the pockets, the Traveling Pants and the Sisterhood who wears them—Lena, Tibby, Bridget, and Carmen—embark on their second summer together.

Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Ann Brashares

978-0-385-72935-2

It’s the summer before the Sisterhood departs for college … their last real summer together before they head off to start their grown-up lives. It’s the time when they need the Pants the most.

Walking Naked

Alyssa Brugman

978-0-440-23832-4

Megan Tuw has always been popular. But when she’s thrown into detention with Perdita Wiguiggan, the most unpopular “freak” in school, Megan finds herself slowly drawn into an almost-friendship. Then Megan faces a choice: Perdita or the group?

Keeper of the Night

Kimberly Willis Holt

978-0-553-49441-9

Living on the island of Guam, a place lush with memories and tradition, young Isabel struggles to protect her family and cope with growing up after her mother’s suicide.

The Lightkeeper’s Daughter

Iain Lawrence

978-0-385-73127-0

Imagine growing up on a tiny island with no one but your family. For Squid McCrae, returning to the island after three years away unleashes a storm of bittersweet memories, revelations, and accusations surrounding her brother’s death.

Lord of the Nutcracker Men

Iain Lawrence

978-0-440-41812-2

In 1914, Johnny’s father leaves England to fight the Germans in France. With each carved wooden soldier he sends home, the brutality of war becomes more apparent. Soon Johnny fears that his war games foretell real battles and that he controls his father’s fate.

Gathering Blue

Lois Lowry

978-0-440-22949-0

Lamed and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously taken to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.

The Giver

Lois Lowry

978-0-440-23768-6

Jonas’s world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices, until Jonas is given an opportunity that will change his world forever.

Harmony

Rita Murphy

978-0-440-22923-0

Power is coursing through Harmony—the power to affect the universe with her energy. This is a frightening gift for a girl who has always hated being different, and Harmony must decide whether to hide her abilities or embrace the consequences—good and bad—of her full strength.

Published by Delacorte Press

an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

a division of Random House, Inc.

New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2005 by E. Lockhart

All rights reserved.

Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

www.randomhouse.com/teachers

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

Lockhart, E.

The boyfriend list : (15 guys, 11 shrink appointments,

4 ceramic frogs and me, Ruby Oliver) / E. Lockhart.

p. cm.

Summary: A Seattle fifteen-year-old explains some of the reasons for her recent

panic attacks, including breaking up with her boyfriend, losing all her girlfriends,

tensions between her performance-artist mother and her father, and more.

[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.

3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.

6. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L79757Bo 2005

[Fic]—dc22

2004006691

eISBN: 978-0-307-51480-6

September 2006

v3.0

Table of Contents

Adam (but he doesn’t count.)

Finn (but people just thought so.)

Hutch (but I’d rather not think about it.)

Gideon (but it was just from afar.)

Ben (but he didn’t know.)

Tommy (but it was impossible.)

Chase (but it was all in his mind.)

Sky (but he had someone else.)

Michael (but I so didn’t want to.)

Angelo (but it was just one date.)

Shiv (but it was just one kiss.)

Billy (but he didn’t call.)

Jackson (yes, okay, he was my boyfriend. Don’t ask me any more about it.)

Noel (but it was just a rumor.)

Cabbie (but I’m undecided.)