The Boyfriend List Page 15

  “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 sitt
ing 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?”