The Boyfriend List Page 4

  Anyway, the sudden glut of actual boyfriends led to many new and fascinating additions to The Boy Book, the most important of which was a list of Rules for Dating in a Small School. Here they are:

  Don’t kiss in the refectory or any other small, enclosed space. It annoys everyone. (Hello, Meghan and Bick!)

  Don’t let your boyfriend walk with his hand on your butt, either. It is even more annoying than kissing. (Meghan again.)

  If your friend has no date for Spring Fling (which is the sort of dance where you need a date, and you get a corsage, and all that) and you already have one, you must do reconnaissance work and find out who might be available to take your friend.4

  Never, ever, kiss someone else’s official boyfriend. If status is unclear, ask around and find out. Don’t necessarily believe the boy on this question. Double-check your facts.

  If your friend has already said she likes a boy, don’t you go liking him too. She’s got dibs.

  That is—unless you’re certain it is truly “meant to be.” Because if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, and who are we to stand in the way of true love, just because Tate is so stupidly small?

  Don’t ignore your friends if you’ve got a boyfriend. This school is too small for us not to notice your absence.

  Tell your friends every little detail! We promise to keep it just between us.

  I was happy for Kim. She had never had an official boyfriend before—and Finn seemed to do all the right things. He called her, he took the bus over to her house to watch movies on TV, he left her notes in her school mail cubby—the place where we usually got notices about assemblies or sports events. He also sat around on the quad with us, and at our lunch table lots of days—which meant that suddenly I was hanging around with this boy that I pretty much didn’t speak to.

  I could have started speaking to him, of course. That would have been the normal thing to do. I could have tried to make friends with him, like Nora and Cricket did. Not close friends, but goofing-around friends. Cricket called him Blueberry and wouldn’t tell him why, and Nora went with Kim to watch soccer games and took action pictures with her Instamatic. But some part of me felt scared of talking much to Finn—or of being seen with him. I could still hear Katarina’s singsong voice, “Ruby and Finn, sitting in a tree …” and it was hard to break that old habit of avoiding any seat that was open next to him.

  Also, I didn’t want Kim to think I was trying to steal her boyfriend, if rumors did start up again.

  So I was civil. I said hi, and all that, but I basically didn’t deal with him if I could avoid it—and he basically didn’t deal with me. It was easier that way.

  In late October, after Kim and Finn had been going out about six weeks, Kim nailed me on it. “Do you have a problem with Finn?” she asked me. We were eating ice cream bars and sitting on my deck. It was probably the last warmish day before the heavy Seattle rains set in for fall.

  “Not at all, he’s great,” I said.

  “Because you hardly even talk to him.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You give him the cold shoulder.”

  “I don’t mean to, Kim. I have a lot on my mind.” (I didn’t, though. It was an excuse.)

  Kim looked concerned. “Like what?”

  “Like how Mr. Wallace will never be my husband,” I joked. “I’m pining away for him, but he’s such a Marxist, he’ll never marry me.”

  “Roo.”

  “All I want is to be Mrs. Wallace and have little South African-accent babies—”

  “Roo!”

  “… and look at him in his Speedo swim trunks every morning before I go off to work, while he stays home with the kids. But he’ll never go for it.”

  “He’s already married.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s another problem. My love is unrequited. Must you add to my misery?”

  “Roo, seriously—”

  “Mr. Wallace doesn’t love me. I need some more ice cream.”

  “—what is the deal with you and Finn?”

  Now, the intelligent girl would not have told. The intelligent girl would have said, “Nothing, I swear on my life,” and started talking to Finn like a normal person.

  But me, no.

  I decided to spill my guts about this minor weirdness from second grade that clearly no one remembered except me and him. I told Kim the whole story. How we had fun looking at the wildlife book, how Katarina and Ariel teased us, how he’d save swings for me and had still given me that sweet, shrimpy look as recently as last semester.

  Kim was my best friend. I wanted her to understand why I had been so weird with Finn. I figured I could tell her everything.

  But now, I wish I hadn’t.

  1 The refectory is Tate Prep’s pompous way of saying lunchroom. Or rather, food building. The school has like eight different buildings, all around a big lawn (the quad). It’s pretty posh.

  2 Muffin: nice, pleasing, but ordinary. A perfectly fine baked good—but nothing to get too excited about. Not as festive as cake. Not as glamorous as a croissant. Not as scrumptious as a cookie.

  3 The B&O Espresso is a coffee bar. It’s like Starbucks, but with fancy cake and old Indian-print cloths on the tables. It’s walking distance from the neighborhood full of big beautiful houses where Kim lives. You can sit there as long as you want, doing homework or whatever. We go there a lot when we’re not at Cricket’s—except that everyone else goes there more than me, because Kim and Cricket and Nora can walk there or ride a bike, but I have to take the bus and transfer twice.

  4 Neither Nora nor I got asked to Spring Fling freshman year—Cricket went with Tommy Parrish and Kim went with an older guy named Steve Buchannon—and then later we found out there were perfectly decent boys who didn’t go either. We made this rule to safeguard against future such debacles.

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

  Doctor Z didn’t say anything while I told the story about Finn. She just nodded, and looked at me.

  At home, my dad is always asking me questions about stuff, wanting to know the details of all my friends and their lives. And my mom is always interrupting anything I’m talking about to tell me stories about when she was young, and how she felt just like I do—only worse. It was weird to talk and have someone listen quietly for half an hour. When I was finished, Doctor Z looked up at the clock and said it was almost time to go, anyway. “Come back Thursday,” she added, “and we’ll do number three.”

  Number three on the list is Hutch.

  I almost didn’t put him on at all. I’d rather forget the whole thing. Not that anything drastically bad happened. It’s just that Hutch has become a leper at Tate,1 and though I’m sure I’d be a better person if I was comfortable talking to all kinds of people, and if I treated everyone equally—I’m not, and I don’t. It’s sad that he’s a leper. He eats alone. He sits in the back corner of the classrooms. I’m sure he suffers unspeakable indignities in the locker rooms. And I do feel bad when people sneer at him. But he also creeps me out, like he’s gone into this zone of his own Hutch weirdness and he’s thinking his private heavy-metal thoughts and absolutely choosing not to wash his scraggly heavy-metal hair2 or brush his grayed-out heavy-metal teeth. He says bizarre things if you ever talk to him—as if he’s making in-jokes about stuff that only he could possibly understand.

  Like this: Nora sat next to him in Brit Lit. She came in one day wearing a black hoodie. She’s going through an all-black phase. Hutch went, “Nora Van Deusen. Back in black! I hit the sack.”

  “What?”

  “Back in black! I hit the sack.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind.” Hutch shook his head like Nora was the town idiot.

  “Did you say, hit the sack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As in, get in bed, hit the sack?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Hutch muttered. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “It better not b
e what you meant,” said Nora.

  “Whatever,” he said. “I’m just joking with you.”

  “It’s not a joke if nobody gets it,” Nora snapped, opening her notebook.3

  Stuff like that. He’d say things that sounded creepy, but you couldn’t figure out what he meant, so if you got mad, you seemed like an idiot. He’d appear to be quoting something, or referring to something—but he’d also know that you’d have no idea what it was—so why was he even talking if he was intentionally not communicating? He was basically talking to himself.4

  In fourth grade, Hutch was a laughing, popular boy. I didn’t know what happened, exactly, that made him change. I couldn’t remember when he switched from cool guy to leper, but in fourth he was cool and he put a huge bag of gummy bears in my mail cubby with a note. I remember feeling happy that someone so confident and golden would notice me. The note didn’t say much. Actually, all it said was “From J.H. (John Hutchinson),” and for a second I worried that he put them in the wrong cubby and they were really meant for Ariel Oliveri—who had, has and probably always will have the mail cubby next to mine. When I looked up, though, Hutch was grinning at me across the hall, so I knew they were for me. I felt weird, because we hadn’t spoken to each other very much, but I spilled some bears into my pocket and ate them very slowly over the course of the day, thinking to myself, Hutch likes me, I got a present from a boy, Hutch likes me, he gave me candy. I said it over and over and over in my mind.

  The rest of the bears I took home and hid under my pillow. They lasted a week. I’d eat them at night and think about how I sort of had a boyfriend, and how my dad would kill me if he knew I was eating candy after brushing my teeth.

  But although Hutch and I did sit by each other one day at a school assembly, and although I sent him a valentine with two extra candy hearts taped onto it on Valentine’s Day, and although we smiled at each other a bunch for several weeks in a row, we were basically too young to do anything more.

  Then one day, I noticed Ariel taking a big bag of gummy bears out of her mail cubby.

  “Are those mine?” I asked her.

  “No. See?” She showed me a card attached to the bag. It had her name on it. Hutch was smiling from the other side of the hall.

  “So he was breaking up with you?” asked Doctor Z. It was two days later, our third appointment.

  “I guess.”

  “It was hard to tell?”

  “I think he was replacing me.”

  “Oh. Were you angry?”

  “No. Why do you say angry?”

  “I thought you might be, from the way you described Hutch being a leper with gray heavy-metal teeth.”

  “I was just playing around with my vocabulary. I’m not angry.”

  “I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.”

  “I think I felt relieved. Like it was nice that he liked me, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, or talk to him, so it made me nervous whenever I was at school. When he started liking Ariel, then I didn’t have to angst about it anymore.”

  “Talking to a boy who liked you made you anxious?”

  “Doesn’t it make everyone anxious?” I asked. “Isn’t that a universal sentiment? You know, sweaty palms, shallow breathing, the symptoms of love?”

  “Maybe. But we’re talking about you. A person who has panic attacks.”

  None of my friends had spoken to me since Spring Fling. I didn’t even know why.

  Not exactly. Not really.

  I mean, it was obviously about the whole Jackson debacle, but why Cricket and Nora were on Kim’s side, I had no idea.

  On the Tuesday after my first shrink appointment, someone finally had spoken to me, and that was worse than the silent treatment. I was in line for a pop and a sandwich that I could take out back to the bench by the library when Nora came up behind me.

  I think she would have left if she had seen it was me, but her tray was on the counter and she had grabbed a bottle of juice before she realized I was standing there—so she was kind of stuck.

  “Are you mad about something?” I asked her, when the silence was more than I could bear.

  She looked at me and sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “About that Xerox?”5 I asked.

  “No. Give me some credit already.”

  “Then enlighten me.”

  Nora’s voice dripped with venom. “You can’t make out with someone else’s boyfriend, Roo,” she said. “That’s so against the rules.”

  “What?”

  “Rules for dating in a small school? You wrote them yourself.”

  “We didn’t make out,” I said. “It was only a kiss.” (This, about the Jackson debacle. It’s a long story. For now, just know that there was ex-boyfriend kissing involved, and that Jackson was now attached to Kim, making him technically off-limits.)

  “Same thing.” Nora shrugged. “He belongs to someone else.”

  “It was Jackson,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “He’s my boyfriend more than he is Kim’s.”

  “Not true.”

  “We went out for six months.”

  “Well, you’re not going out anymore.”

  “He kissed me back.”

  “You started it, Roo. People saw you.”

  “But there are circumstances!” I cried. “Can’t you think how I must have felt?”

  “I never thought you could betray one of us like that. It’s so wrong.” Nora flashed her lunch card and stepped out of the line, walking fast like she wanted to end the conversation.

  I followed. “Don’t you even want to hear my side of it?”

  “What side could you possibly have?” She flipped her hair over her shoulder and turned away.

  “So you’re dumping me as a friend? Without even talking about it?”

  “I don’t even know what kind of friend you are, anymore,” she said, turning back.

  I couldn’t believe she was saying this. After what Kim had done to me.

  “Neither does Cricket,” Nora added.

  “What?”

  “You always talk about official and unofficial,” Nora went on. “And then you just forget about it when it stands in the way of something you want. It’s like you never even think about how there’s other people, and they have feelings.”

  “What about Kim?” I was almost yelling. “What about my feelings?”

  “Kim didn’t cross any lines. She kept to the rules, completely.”

  “Says her.”

  “She did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’d never do anything like what you did. Everyone saw you kissing him. It was humiliating for her, didn’t you think of that?”

  “For her?” My throat was closing up and my vision was blurring. I felt like I was going to have another panic attack. “I have to go,” I said, and bolted out of the refectory into the fresh air, where I followed Doctor Z’s instructions and took deep, calming breaths and tried to think relaxing thoughts, even though I felt like I was going to die, right there, leaning against the rough brick of the building.

  That afternoon’s appointment with Doctor Z helped a bit, actually. I told her the Hutch story, and a little about how nobody would talk to me, and it suddenly hit me: I had become Hutch. Well, that makes it sound too dramatic (and also insane). But in the course of two weeks I had gone from reasonably popular to a bona fide leper—and when I talked, I might as well have been talking to myself, since nobody seemed to understand a thing I said.

  The next day at school, I was determined to face the refectory again. I hadn’t eaten lunch there in more than a week, but even lepers need their calories and somehow learn to stand it, eating by themselves in dark corners with their books propped up in front of them, while everyone else is joking and laughing. I couldn’t keep eating on the bench behind the library forever.

  At the salad bar, I took a long time making the same combo I always have
for lunch. Lettuce, raisins, fried Chinese noodles, baby corn, cheese, black olives, ranch dressing. I fiddled around adding things here and there until I saw Cricket, Kim, Jackson and Nora all sitting down at our regular table.

  Finn, who used to sit with us, was eating with a bunch of guys from the soccer team.

  Hutch sat in a corner wearing an iPod and looking very interested in his hamburger.

  There was a table full of boys right in front of me: Shiv (#11 on my list), Cabbie (#15), Matt (Jackson’s best friend), Kyle (another of Jackson’s friends), Pete (Cricket’s new boyfriend) and Josh (who was just obnoxious). I couldn’t bring myself to face them.

  Katarina and her set would probably tolerate me—I mean, I didn’t think they’d push me off my chair or anything—but I knew that they’d all heard Kim’s side of things, and heard her call me a slut in Mr. Wallace’s class, and that I wouldn’t exactly be welcome at their table. Plus Heidi was there, and she’s Jackson’s old girlfriend, and the last thing I wanted to face was the weird new sisterly sympathy she had started affecting (like the same man hath done us both wrong and we should share our sob stories), when less than two weeks ago she’d been completely jealous and catty because I was the girlfriend of the boy she liked.

  Beyond the sophomore/junior tables, over by the window, seniors.

  I scanned the room for people I knew from the lacrosse team, but couldn’t see anyone.6

  I could feel Kim ignoring me through the back of her head. Jackson nudged her with his shoulder and she laughed. The inside of my chest felt cold and hollow.

  I stood stupidly with my tray of raisin salad, staring at the two of them like I was looking at a train wreck in slow motion. I couldn’t move my eyes away. I felt like everyone at school could see my heart breaking, blood pouring out of my chest and sloshing down across my shoes and gushing under the tables.