The Boyfriend List Read online

  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 w
hen 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 s
o 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.