The Boy Book Page 4

  “Um-hmm.”

  “Do you think she’ll tell Kim?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Do you think she’ll tell Cricket? Because Cricket will tell Kim.”

  “Roo,” said Doctor Z, leaning forward a bit. “We can’t know or say what other people will do. You have to think what you want to do. What you can do to get the situation where you want it to be.”

  “I could tell Kim,” I said. “I have her e-mail.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do. Like that’s the code we set up when we wrote The Boy Book. To tell each other everything. Even after what happened. Because if it was my boyfriend writing notes to other girls, I’d want my friends to tell me.”

  “You want to uphold the rules you laid out in The Boy Book.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Only if it was me, I also couldn’t stand the suspense, thinking my faraway boyfriend might be stepping out. It would drive me certifiably insane, when probably there’d be no reason to even angst about it. I mean, Kim’s in Tokyo. There’s nothing she could even do.”

  “Are you saying maybe it isn’t very nice to tell her?”

  “I actually opened an e-mail to her today and started typing before I deleted it.”

  “It sounds like you want to tell her.”

  I was quiet for a minute. “I kind of want her to know.”

  Silence from Doctor Z.

  “Because—I guess I want her to think he still likes me. It’s like, Kim’s got all the power. She’s got Jackson, she’s got Cricket, she’s got Nora, she’s got everything. And the only thing I’ve got that she doesn’t have is this note.”

  “I see.”

  “So it’s not out of the goodness of my heart that I’d tell her. It’s actually out of the sour meanness of my soul.”

  “I don’t think you have a sour, mean soul, Ruby.”

  “You don’t?” I said. “Then I’m not sure you know me that well.”

  I didn’t tell Kim. At least, not then. What I did do when I got home is e-mail Noel the following:

  HOOTER RESCUE SQUAD UPDATE

  Mission abort! Mission abort!

  The hooters apparently want to take care of themselves and do not need our help. Besides, it has been several days, and if Cabbie hasn’t brought pictures to school, he’s probably not going to.

  Yours sincerely, in solidarity and in defense of hooters around the globe,

  Secret Hooter Agent Roo

  He wrote back ten minutes later.

  What to do with surplus Fruit Roll-Ups and art supplies?

  —SHAN (Secret Hooter Agent Noel)

  That’s what I like about guys (sometimes).

  They don’t ask you why Nora’s hooters want to take care of themselves. They don’t read between the lines and say, “What, did you and Nora have a fight?”

  They ignore that stuff, or they don’t see it at all, and start trying to figure out your next mission.

  What to Wear When You Might Be Fooling Around

  1. A shirt that buttons up the front, for obvious reasons.

  2. A front-close bra. Also for obvious reasons.

  3. Perfume, but not all over your neck. Right behind the ears and on the wrists only, because if you have it on your neck, your neck is going to taste yucky. Let us repeat: not on the neck.

  4. Lip gloss—but never dark red lip stick. Or you’ll both get covered with it.

  5. No rings. (This from Cricket. She claims it has to do with adventuring to the nether regions but refuses to elaborate for those of us who don’t know what she’s talking about.)

  6. No sneakers. They can be smelly even on the best of us, and if it gets to the point of shoes coming off, you don’t want to have to get up and go put them in the other room.

  7. And whatever you do, don’t wear a dress. Because if you’re not nether-regioning each other, but you do want to give him upper-region access, the dress is going to pose a serious impediment. Yes, you could unzip the back of it and pull it down from the top. But that is dorky. So leave the dress in the closet. P.S. Bring gum or breath mints. Not bubble gum.

  —written by Kim and Roo, with nether-region addition from Cricket. Approximate date: February, sophomore year.

  i wore a dress to school the next day. A vintage navy blue thing with roses embroidered around the bottom of the skirt. I also wore a pair of old Converse, two rings, a back-close bra, red lipstick and perfume on my neck. I chewed bubble gum.

  I was untouchable.

  I hadn’t seen Jackson except from afar since he left the birthday note in my cubby. I had written him six notes and two e-mails back, but I ripped up the notes and deleted the e-mails without sending them. Because what could I say?

  “Thanks for the birthday note”? Too formal.

  “What, are you and Kim broken up now?” Obviously desperate and semihostile.

  “I hate you I love you I hate you I love you”? True. But lame.

  Finally, I had figured out what to write. (Yes, I knew I shouldn’t write anything. I knew a mature girl would ignore his plea for forgiveness and attention. And an ethical girl wouldn’t flirt with someone else’s boyfriend.

  But I couldn’t quite do that.

  He was Jackson Clarke. It was how I felt.)

  So I wrote “Blackberry smoothies are the only kind worth drinking” and left it in his mail cubby.

  But nothing was going to happen between us. We weren’t even on speaking terms, and my outfit was all wrong on purpose.1

  I looked for Jackson in the refectory later, but either we didn’t have the same lunch on Fridays, or else he’d gone off campus. Nora said hi to me on the lunch line, and I said hi back, but I couldn’t quite look her in the eye. I had a swim team meeting after school—the first of the year—and after that, I checked my mail cubby to see if Jackson had written.

  There was a Fruit Roll-Up in there.

  My internship at the Woodland Park Zoo started on Saturday, and Anya showed me around. In the Family Farm area, from nine o’clock to eleven, I was to stand around wearing a zoo polo shirt and answering questions. She gave me a handout with the names of all the animals and information on their feeding habits. I watched a fellow intern help kids get food from the dispensers.

  The cow was named Maggie, the llamas were Laverne and Shirley, and the goats all had ridiculous names like Rasputin and Napoleon and Queen Anne. Anya said I’d do a training program the following Friday after school to learn more about Family Farm. At eleven I was supposed to report to a groundskeeper named Lewis and assist him with gardening stuff.

  Lewis was a thin, blondish man with an unfortunate skinny mustache. He had me plant flowers near the zoo entrance. He got all cranked when I told him my dad was the proprietor and sole employee of Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.

  I had a lunch break for an hour; then at two o’clock I reported back to Anya and she said that since I was a good speaker (!!) she was going to put me in a training session to be on the microphone at the Saturday-afternoon Humboldt penguin feeding. The training wouldn’t be until the following week, so Anya walked me around the rest of the zoo. We ended up in the penguin room, which was dark and cool. Penguins were waddling around and hurtling themselves into the water. Anya showed me the closet where the microphone equipment was.

  “You wheel it out on a cart and put it in this corner here,” she said, pointing. “Then when the keepers come in with the fish, you read from a script we’ll give you that tells some fun facts about the animals. I know you’re interested in penguins,” she said, giving me a look that said maybe I was just interested in penguins’ sexual orientation, “so I think this will be a rewarding part of the job for you.”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “I’m all about penguins.”

  “You have a fan,” I told my dad when I got home that evening. He and Hutch were messing around with a bunch of ugly bushes in the greenhouse on the southern side of our houseboat.


  “I have many.” Dad grinned.

  “You do not.”

  “He does,” put in Hutch. “People write him letters asking all kinds of questions.”

  “I am the Angus Young of container gardening,” said my dad.2

  “Oh, no,” cried Hutch. “You’re completely the Brian Johnson.”3

  “You think so?” asked Dad, flattered. “I don’t know. That Small Roses for Small Spaces guy is giving me a run for my money.”

  “No comparison. He’s all flash and no substance. He’s the Sammy Hagar of container gardening, if he’s anything at all.”4

  “This guy at the zoo was all over me when he found out you were my dad,” I said. “He does the plantings over there and I helped him put in some things by the front gate.”

  “Really?” My dad looked interested. “What are they planting?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t blooming yet.”

  “You don’t know what you were planting? How could you not know what you were planting?”

  I shrugged. “I planted what he gave me.”

  “Roo.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Don’t forget we’re going to Juana’s for dinner tonight.”

  Juana Martinez is my mom’s best friend. She’s a Cuban American playwright with four ex-husbands and thirteen dogs. Her son, Angelo, is a year ahead of me at school, but he goes to Garfield, which is public, so we live in different universes.

  Angelo and I have a bit of a history together. But only a little bit. There was a moment last year, in the middle of the Spring Fling Debacle, when he gave me some flowers. I kissed him on the cheek to say thank you, and he kissed me on my cheek back, and this tingle ran down my spine—but it was in the middle of a party and all kinds of badness was going on with me and Jackson (and with nearly everyone else there too), so nothing ever came of it.

  I hadn’t seen him since that night. My family had been to Juana’s for dinner, because we’re always going to Juana’s for dinner, but Angelo lives part-time with his father and he had been a junior counselor at a summer camp on one of the San Juan Islands for a couple months, plus I had traveled, so we hadn’t had to face each other yet.

  “Do I have to go?” I asked my mom, inside.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? I have a ton of homework.”

  “It’s the weekend, Roo. You can do your homework later. And I don’t want you sitting home on Saturday night. It’s bad for your psychology.”

  “Oh, like going out with my parents is any better?”

  “It’s a lot better,” said my mom. “Juana is making corn pudding for you.”

  I love Juana’s corn pudding.

  “And she just finished a new play and she thinks maybe there’s a part for me in it.”

  “That’s supposed to make me want to go?”

  She laughed. “Go for the corn pudding. Go to make your old mother happy.”

  Juana’s kitchen was an absolute maelstrom when we got there. Corn on the floor, a big fish on the counter with its eyes googling up, dishes piled in the sink and chopped herbs in small piles on the counter. “I’m getting it under control!” she yelled, wiping her face with her hand and smearing grease across her cheek. “Kevin, chop the head off the salmon, will you?” She grabbed a butcher knife and held it out.

  My dad looked aghast and started to back away.

  “I’ll do it,” said my mother, taking the knife.

  Juana kissed her on the cheek. “Slice it up the middle, too. It’ll steam in ten minutes. I’m stuffing it with leeks. The corn pudding’s in the oven. I got bread from Paradise, the kind with black olives baked in. Oh, and there’s cheese somewhere in the fridge. Kevin, if you’re scared of the salmon, you can root around in there and find the Camembert. It needs to be unwrapped so it can breathe and get to room temperature before we eat it.”

  My parents went to work in the kitchen.

  “Get yourself a pop, Roo,” said Juana. “Angelo’s down in the basement watching television.”

  I didn’t want to see the head come off of the fish. I grabbed a Coke and headed downstairs.

  Angelo was sitting on a fur-matted sofa with two Labradors and a Yorkie. He was watching some reality TV show. “Hey, hey,” he said to me, half looking up.

  He looked good—curly black hair, baggy clothes, brown skin with a bit of a tan leftover from summer camp. “Hey, hey, yourself,” I said, sitting down next to him and snapping open my drink. I would have sat farther away, but dogs were taking up half the couch.

  “This guy,” said Angelo, pointing at the television, “he’s got to crawl through a tunnel that’s a foot and a half high—and filled with cockroaches.”

  “Sick.”

  “The girl who went before him chundered when she came out,” he said. “It was brutal.”

  I looked at his profile. He has full lips and a strong nose. I thought of how the kids at summer camp must have looked up to him.

  “I’m not too bad with bugs,” I said. “But I draw the line at cockroaches.”

  He pressed his leg against mine. Just a bit, but I could feel the warmth of his thigh through his jeans.

  I wondered if I should say something about all the weirdness back in April. Because I’d been talking to Doctor Z about how to make my “relationships” with other human beings better than they are—which is completely sucky—and I felt bad because of how I had treated Angelo that night when he gave me the flowers.

  “You know that party,” I mumbled. “On our dock? I really was glad you came. It was a horrible night, and I did a lot of things I regret.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t even tell you. The repercussions were completely harsh. I know I was rude to you.”

  “De nada.”

  “What?”

  “De nada. It’s nothing.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I said. “I take French.”

  Angelo switched the channel to MTV. “No, it was all right. I started talking to this guy Shiv, you know him, yeah? We cut out after a while. Me and him and some other people drove back to his girlfriend’s house and went in the hot tub.”

  “Ariel.”

  “Yeah, that was her. They had this big tub on a deck overlooking the city, and Ariel gave me her brother’s suit to wear. So I had a posh night. Don’t sweat it.”

  Almost everyone who goes to Tate Prep (except me) has a hot tub on their decks. Rich Seattle people are way into hot tubs. But Angelo doesn’t live in the Tate Universe.

  “Oh,” I said. “Good.”

  And then I surprised myself.

  I reached over and touched Angelo’s chin. He turned to look at me, and I kissed him.

  His skin was warmer than I expected, and he put his hand on my neck and kissed me back. I was wearing a shirt that buttoned up the front, and he right away undid a couple buttons and touched my left boob. I reached my hand in and opened the front-close bra so he could get the upper-region access.

  It felt amazing. I hadn’t kissed anybody since April, and I could tell from the start that Angelo knew what he was doing.

  I didn’t think about Jackson.

  I didn’t think about Nora.

  I didn’t think about my panic attacks, or my leprosy, or how weird it was that Angelo had hung out with Shiv Neel after my party.

  I didn’t think about anything. It was better than working at the zoo.

  “Dinner!” Juana bellowed from the kitchen upstairs.

  I sprang back and squashed a Labrador (I don’t know its name) and it let out a surprised yelp. “Ag. Sorry,” I said, leaning over to pet the dog’s ear in apology.

  My naked boob brushed against its fur. I had forgotten that my whole chest was hanging out. Angelo was looking at me, laughing.

  Not what you want when a guy sees your boobs for the first time.

  I sat up as quickly as I could and wrangled my frontal equipment back into my bra, then buttoned my shirt. “We better go up,” I said.

>   “Coming!” he yelled to his mother. He stood and gestured at the stairs. “After you, my lady.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and went up to dinner.

  We had salmon with cilantro sauce (which I didn’t eat because I’m a vegetarian), corn pudding and Camembert with olive bread. There was white wine, and Angelo and I were allowed to have some. Juana and my mom discussed theater. My boobs felt like they weren’t properly arranged in my bra. One was squished off to the side and the other was halfway trapped under the underwire. My dad told everyone he was the Brian Johnson of container gardening and no one knew what he was talking about, after which he gave a long, involved history of AC/DC and the ins and outs of competition among members of the plant newsletter community.

  Dogs wandered around our legs and Juana fed them salmon off her plate. There was a raspberry tart for dessert. Juana asked how my classes were at school.

  Angelo didn’t say much.

  I didn’t say much either.

  What was all that about? I wondered, when I was finally alone in my (microscopic) bedroom.

  Why had I kissed Angelo?

  Did I like him? Did he like me?

  Had that been a thing thing, or just a thing?

  Was he going to call me?

  Was I going to call him?

  “Think about what you want from a situation,” Doctor Z is always saying, “and then try to get it.”

  She says that to get me to stop being so passive. Because I talk too much and think too much and don’t take action to get what I want. Because I blurt stuff out that might be how I feel, but that isn’t remotely conducive to decent human relations. Like with Jackson: “Why didn’t you call me?” or “Why did you talk to Heidi so long at that party?”

  Well, I had taken action, that’s for sure. Even with Jackson, whom I had kissed all the time, I had never opened my own bra. I had always waited for him to do it. Like I thought he might not be in the mood for my boobs unless he went for them himself.