The Boyfriend List Read online

  “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 teacher
s 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.