The Boyfriend List Read online

(Never acted on them before? How long had this been going on?)

  “Please don’t be mad. It’s not like we could even help it. It’s like fate.”

  “Um-hum.” My parents were eyeballing me now, tilting their heads as if to say, “This is family dinnertime, could you get back to the table?”

  “Really,” said Kim. “I’ve never felt like this before. I think he’s the one. He’s like Tommy Hazard.”

  “Why were you guys talking about me?” I asked.

  “Jackson meant well, Roo, you have to believe that. He’s not the kind of guy to ever cheat on anyone. He needed an ear, he was so confused.”

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “Please don’t be mad,” she said. “When you find your Tommy Hazard, you’ll understand. I honestly couldn’t help it.”

  I hung up the phone.

  That night, I had my first panic attack, in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I felt hot, and then cold. I was sweating and when I put my hand on my chest I could feel my heart thumping like it was going to leap out of my skin. I lay down on the floor in my pajamas and looked at the ceiling and tried to breathe. There were black mildew spots up there I had never noticed.

  1 Seriously, seriously annoying—and it wasn’t getting any better. In February, she went macrobiotic, and ever since then had been running around our kitchen chopping tofu and steaming brown rice and talking about how the green top leaves of the carrot were good for the top of the body and the orange root of the carrot was good for the lower half of the body.

  Dinner at our house became entirely inedible. There I’d be, stirring a mess of tofu and carrot around and wishing for French fries—or at least spaghetti with pesto sauce, like we used to have—and my mother would get on my case about whether I hated my thighs and thought I was fat, because it seemed neurotic to her that I wasn’t eating this perfectly good dinner, and “Kevin, did you notice that Roo isn’t eating, and maybe she’s getting anorexic?”

  Later, when she was on the phone or had gone to bed, my dad and I would sit together and eat bowls of breakfast cereal, we were so hungry.

  2 What about this Sky character whose name is at the front of the chapter, you are wondering?

  Sky was the first boy who really seemed to like me, and I liked him back. I met him at a swim meet (he went to Saint Augustine’s) and I gave him my e-mail. He started sending me a lot of instant messages, funny jokes and flirtatious questions, like what movie star would I want to have babies with. He asked me out to pizza, and my dad drove me in to the University District and dropped me off. It was pretty fun. We got jumbo-size Cokes and played Ms. Pac-Man on the machine in the foyer. He held my hand afterward. But the next day I saw him in the mall with his arm around another girl. I asked around and found out he had had the same girlfriend for like three months.

  I sent him an IM: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He wrote back: “Not yet, but I’m hoping! Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I switched off the computer and never talked to him again.

  Liar.

  3 “Roo. The old parental units were gravely disappointed you weren’t able to attend our wondrous chili feast. Although we were all somewhat remorseful, the chili did flow, and how! It went round and round and was consumed with grunting and smacking sounds of delight, until all that remained was a bowl containing an amount of chili that would be disgraceful to give to a pygmy shrew as an after-dinner snack. Missed you. Jackson.”

  And: “I am writing this at Kyle’s house. We are d-r-u-n-k because his mom gave us wine at dinner. Trivia: Guess who has a toothbrush that permanently lives at Kyle’s house? Answer: Me, silly! Good night, good night, from your woozy, bad-handwritin’ man, Jackson.”

  I can’t throw them out, somehow. I know I should.

  4 It is so mean to tell someone you “need to talk” but then refuse to say what about. If you ever want to dump someone, or even just tell the person something important, don’t go saying you “need to talk.” Just talk and be done with it.

  5 What was he saying? Were we breaking up, or not? The vagueness made the whole thing even worse than it already was.

  6 The next day, Nora pointed out to me that this is a trend. The breaker-upper always says that he wants to be friends, and tries to get the break-upee to commit to undying friendship immediately after he has just made her feel like she wants to crawl into a hole and die. I guess he asks so he doesn’t feel guilty. And the girl says yes, because it’s a little less like being broken up with, if the boy still wants the connection of being friends.

  9. Michael (but I so didn’t want to.)

  You might count Michael Malone as my first kiss. Technically, maybe, he was.

  But officially, he wasn’t at all.

  Everyone else I’ve ever heard of had kissed at least someone by the end of seventh grade.1 But not me. Then the summer after seventh, I went back to Camp Rainier, the same camp where I had dreamt about Ben Moi for four straight weeks—only this year, instead of singing and going on nature hikes and doing crafts projects with yarn, all anybody did was play Spin the Bottle.2 Girls Twelve/Thirteen was right next door to Boys Twelve/Thirteen, and after lights-out, we’d grab a flashlight and troop over to a woodsy clearing a short way off. The boys would all be wearing jeans and T-shirts (what did they sleep in, I wondered?), but we girls would go in our nightgowns, because it seemed cuter and more adventurous. Plus, it was too much bother to change.

  Ben Moi wasn’t at camp, much to the disappointment of nearly every girl who’d been there the previous summer. But there was a pack of reasonably interesting, if woefully short, boys—maybe eight who showed up for Spin the Bottle on a regular basis. And twelve of us girls.3 The way the game worked was this:4

  Everyone sat in a circle. In the middle was an empty plastic pop bottle, resting on a big atlas someone had borrowed from the camp’s small library of nature-related books. A boy would spin the bottle, and when it came to rest, it would be pointing at a girl. If it pointed at a boy, he got a redo. Sometimes, if he didn’t want the girl he got, he’d claim it was pointing at a boy sitting next to her, and redo. Or the bottle would skid off the atlas, and he’d redo. Or, he wouldn’t get a good spin, and he’d redo. Or, the girl he got would claim there was some kind of technicality that made his spin invalid (because she didn’t want to kiss him), and he’d have to redo.

  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. O
ne 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 w
ent 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.”