The Boyfriend List Page 5

  And nobody cared, because they thought I deserved it.

  Two weeks ag o, back when I had a life and friends and a boyfriend, I had ended up eating lunch with Meghan against my will. She blindsided me at the salad bar, looking unbearably cute in what must have been Bick’s crew T-shirt and a pair of old corduroys.7 “Ruby Oliver, are you deaf? I’ve been calling your name from our table for ages!”

  Sticking out her lower lip in that pouty way she has that makes all the other girls love to hate her,8 Meghan had pointed to a table filled with seniors.9 Prime refectory real estate, right by the windows. Meghan is the only sophomore who eats there every day. Actually, she’s the only sophomore who ever eats there, partly because she has no friends in her own year, but mainly because she’s been Bick’s girlfriend since last summer.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t hear.”

  “Come sit with us,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me to her table. I looked around for Jackson, Cricket, Kim and Nora and waved an “I can’t help it, she’s a madwoman” wave at them from across the room.

  “Bick, this is my friend Ruby that I carpool,” Meghan said, sitting on Bick’s lap so I could have her seat. “You know, the one I always talk about.”

  I smiled and nodded—but inside, I cringed.

  “Hey,” Bick said. He flashed his smile at me, then leaned back into a discussion of some party Billy Alexander was having next week. Meghan whispered in my ear from her spot on his lap, pointing the seniors out like they were trophies she was proud of winning. “Debra, Billy, April, Molly, the Whipper, Steve.”

  Of course, I already knew who all of them were.

  For a second, I felt bad for Meghan. These people weren’t her friends. Not really. Except for Bick, I could see that they basically pretended she wasn’t there.

  I wasn’t her friend either. Most of the time, I was annoyed that Meghan even existed. And here she was, dragging me over to meet her boyfriend, like the two of us were so close. Was I really “the one” she always talked about?

  Carpool was different. I gave Meghan gas money every month, and she agreed to show up on time. It was a business relationship. We’d sing along to the radio and make up stupid lyrics, mostly. Sometimes we’d try on each other’s lip gloss or copy each other’s math homework. I’d bring these oatmeal cookies my dad used to make (before my mom went macrobiotic) and we’d eat them for breakfast.

  I only knew about her shrink and her dead dad because she was very up-front about it and probably told everybody she knew. She’d bring it up at 8 a.m., while we were swinging through the Starbucks drive-thru window on our way to school—the same way she’d talk about her singing lessons or where Bick took her on Saturday night. She had never been over to my house or anything.10

  I choked down my salad as fast as I could. Meghan and Bick started tickling each other. A few of the senior girls rolled their eyes and stood up to leave. I took their cue and got up myself.

  I hooked up with Kim and Nora on the quad, where I gave them a blow-by-blow of the whole weird lunch. We speculated about whether Meghan was still a virgin.

  Two weeks later, not even Meghan was talking to me.

  I took my raisin salad over to the table where Hutch sat listening to his headphones. We didn’t speak. I read my H&P homework while I ate.

  1 Leper: Leprosy is a supercontagious disease that rots your body so badly that bits of you actually fall off. In the Tate Prep universe, a leper is someone with no friends.

  2 I know there are people who don’t have access to clean water and toothpaste and that my life is super privileged. Mr. Wallace talks a lot about poverty and the way it’s a cycle of problems that stop people from being able to get or keep high-paying jobs; they can’t clean up and dress up to get the job that they could do if they only had it—that kind of thing.

  But this was not the case with John Hutchinson aka Hutch. He lives in a huge house in a gated community; I know, because it’s right near Jackson’s house, and I’d see him go by sometimes, his mom driving a Mercedes.

  He was choosing to have dirty hair.

  3 For your edification, I related the Nora/Hutch conversation to my dad, and he explained it: Hutch was quoting a line from a 1980 song by a metal group called AC/DC. The scene of my dad singing this song (he knew all the lyrics) and playing air guitar is just too horrible to describe, so I’ll leave it to your imagination.

  4 That was so Hutch. His heavy-metal quote is not even heavy metal that other metal people are listening to, so there’s literally no one in his entire generation who could possibly have a clue. He’s into retro metal.

  5 More on that later. Right now, I just want to say again: Never throw anything away in a school garbage can that you want to keep secret. Never.

  6 Re: the lacrosse girls. The ones in my grade form kind of a sporty clique that I’ve never been part of. Maybe because I swim in the fall, and most of them play soccer. Or because I’m goalie, so I’m not out on the field with them. Or because (now) I’m a famous leper/slut. Anyway, they’re nice, but they’re serious; they’re on leadership committees and honor rolls. Not a lot of opposite-sex action is going on. They just don’t make me laugh, and I don’t make them laugh either.

  They’re very team-spirity.

  7 Bick: His real name is Travis Schumacher. But have you ever seen the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro? Scariest thing ever. De Niro plays a kind of sad, likable psychopath named Travis Bickle. If you ever hear people going, “You talkin’ to ME?” they’re imitating Taxi Driver. Anyway, Travis Schumacher… Travis Bickle … Bickle… Bick. There you go.

  8 Some more complaints against Meghan:

  1. She’s always rubbing the back of her neck and moistening her lips with her tongue like she’s in a porn video (not that I’ve ever seen one). Whatever. It’s practically indecent, and very annoying, and boys seem to like it. At least, they stare at her when she does it, even if she’s only asking them about a homework assignment.

  2. When people are sitting around in a hot tub (a very Seattle thing to do at parties), she’s always in a bikini. The rest of us wear T-shirts and boxers.

  3. When we were reading Othello for Brit Lit, our teacher was trying to point out to us that it’s basically impossible to know anything for sure and certain, and asked if there was anything anyone in class felt we absolutely knew for sure. Meghan was the only one who raised her hand and this is what she said: “I know my boyfriend loves me.”

  9 I don’t think the senior girls like her much either. They eat lunch with her, but you never see her leaving with any of them, or sitting with any of them on the quad unless Bick is there too. After all, Meghan is a sophomore making time with the punk-rock-loving, rugby-playing, crew-rowing spiky-haired seniorness of Bick—and in a school as small as Tate, that seriously reduces the number of old-enough, hot-enough potential boyfriends for the senior girls.

  10 Except for one time, when her Jeep broke down just as she was dropping me off. She came in and called the tow truck. After that, she went into our bathroom, did whatever in there, came out and asked me, “Where’s your bathtub?”

  She seemed almost freaked out when I told her we didn’t have one. Just the shower. I mean, it’s a houseboat. There’s not a lot of room—hello? Kim, Nora, Jackson and Cricket have been in my bathroom a million times and none of them ever said anything about it, and Meghan’s comment definitely gave me one of those moments that I have every now and again at Tate, where I think: I am not the same as these rich people.

  But after the weirdness of that one interaction died down, it was actually okay having Meghan over. We watched some goofy stuff on after-school TV until her mom picked her up.

  4. Gideon (but it was just from afar.)

  Gideon Van Deusen is Nora’s older brother. He graduated already and took a year off, driving around the country visiting unusual places like the world’s only corn palace and the museum of surgical science. Then he’s going to Evergreen, deferred admission.


  I liked him starting in sixth grade, when he was in ninth. He had intense eyes. It began when I was over at Nora’s house playing video games. Gideon must not have had anything better to do, because he was hanging around with us. He told a funny story about how the week before, his youth group leader from church brought in two loaves of banana bread for everyone to eat. One loaf was nice-fluffy and sweet; the other was all sunk in and weighed like a pound. The leader said the second one had been made with the exact same ingredients as the first—only they were put together in the wrong order. He told the kids that the wrong order made the whole banana bread taste gross, and it was the same thing with sex. If you had sex before marriage, you had done it in the wrong order. And you would turn out gross. But if you did everything in the right order, meaning not having sex until your wedding night, you came out wonderful, fluffy and sweet. Angel material. So all the boys and girls should save themselves for marriage.

  I thought this story was exotic because (1) my family doesn’t go to church, and before Gideon told this story I hadn’t even realized that Nora’s family did, and (2) when Nora went into the kitchen to get us all some pop, Gideon told me that he liked the gross, heavy banana bread better.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you have to think for yourself,” he said. “You can’t believe everything people tell you.”

  “But did it really taste better?” I wanted to know.

  “Not really,” he said. “Politically.”

  “Okay, but did it at least taste kind of good? Or were you faking?”

  “That’s not the point, Roo. You know that.” He said it like he had confidence in my understanding.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  It was then that I decided that Gideon was fascinating, and wrote “Ruby loves GVD” on the bottom of my sneaker that same night. I started tracing over it with a purple Magic Marker, whenever I was bored in class. Within a week, it had become this nice lettering that looked like calligraphy.

  Then one day, I put my feet up on the chair in front of me during assembly.1 Nora saw the sole of my shoe. “You mean GVD, Gideon, my brother?” she cried.

  I blushed.

  “Ag! I can’t believe you like my brother!”

  “She loves him,” squealed Kim, grabbing my foot and turning it so she could see. “That’s what she wrote.”

  “Don’t angst, I swear I won’t tell,” promised Nora.

  “I won’t tell either,” added Kim.2

  “But since when do you like him?”

  “No, since when does she love him?”

  “He’s a nice guy.” I yanked my foot away.

  “Nice doesn’t make you love someone,” said Kim.

  “Ugh,” said Nora. “He’s gross.”

  “He’s different,” I said. “He wants to be a musician.”3

  “You think he’s cute?” asked Nora, wrinkling her nose in disbelief.

  Of course I did. He was—and is—incredibly cute in a messy, rebellious way. “Not really,” I said.

  “His eyebrows grow together.”

  I loved his eyebrows. I still love his eyebrows. “It’s more his personality,” I said, feeling stupid.

  “And he never cleans his room. There’s mold growing around up there.”

  He was unusual, I wanted to say. He had better things to do than be tidy. “Don’t tell!” I begged.

  Nora shook her head like I had revealed an interest in bug collecting, rather than her brother. “I said I wouldn’t.”

  But of course she did. Or at least, she hinted. That very afternoon, as I was heading across the quad to the library, Gideon caught up to me. “Roo, I hear there’s something on your shoe that I should see,” he said.

  “What?”

  “On your shoe.”

  “There isn’t anything.”

  “I think there is.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Come on, let me see it.”

  “No!”

  “Please?”

  “It’s nothing, leave me alone.”

  He tackled me, laughing, and I fell onto the grass, squealing, completely embarrassed, oh, the horror, having never told a boy I liked him, ever in my life, smelling his Coca-Cola smell, laughing and almost crying and worrying that he would notice I didn’t have any boobs yet and that my sneaker was stinky.

  As soon as he saw what was written on the bottom of my shoe, though, Gideon’s face changed. I don’t think he knew what it would say, just that it would be something about him. And here is the reason that I still like Gideon Van Deusen, with his lovely hairy eyebrows: He didn’t laugh, or tease me, or tell me to get away. He sat up very seriously, and said, “Roo, that’s so sweet. I’m flattered.”

  “It’s only a doodle,” I said, looking down at the grass.

  “No, it’s nice. I’d much rather it was you writing about me on your shoe than that annoying Katarina.”

  “Really?” Katarina was considered adorable by almost everyone.

  “Sure,” he said. “Write on your shoe all you want. Write a whole book. Fine by me: I’d be famous!”

  He slung his backpack over one shoulder, and was gone.

  I didn’t speak to Nora for a week.4 Then she said she was sorry, and I got over it.

  Nothing else ever happened between Gideon and me.

  I’d see him at the Van Deusens’ house. My heart would thump.

  He’d say, “Hi, Roo,” and be too busy to ever say much else.

  But I still think about Gideon. I wonder if he was lonesome driving across the country on his own. I think of him playing guitar out on a wide prairie by a campfire, or learning to surf off the coast of Big Sur. I asked Doctor Z if it was psychologically questionable to like a boy three years older who will never, ever like you back.5 Or to still think about a boy who has never even touched you, except for that tackle on the grass.

  “It’s normal to have fantasies, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Doctor Z.

  “It doesn’t feel normal,” I said. “I thought about him even with Jackson.”

  “When you and Jackson were out together?”

  “No. When I was alone.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Just what it would be like, if he liked me.”

  “What would it be like?”

  “Like everything was easy,” I said, after a minute. “Like everything was simple.”

  “Life isn’t simple, Ruby.”

  “But it would be,” I said, “if I…” I found I didn’t know what to say.

  “Did it feel simple with Jackson? When you first liked each other?”

  “For about a month,” I said. “Then it got complicated.”

  “A month isn’t very long.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it was a good month.”

  Jackson Clarke put a tiny dead frog in my mail cubby near the end of eighth grade. I knew it was him because Cricket saw him walking away with a small, dripping Ziploc bag. We couldn’t figure out if the frog was meant to be mean (and if so, why would he single me out?)—or if he had a crush on me, and this was his idea of a gift (maybe he was a science dork?).

  He was a grade ahead of us, so I had never thought much about him until then. We didn’t have classes together. His face was square and freckled, his hair dark brown and inclined to curl if he didn’t keep it short. His eyes crinkled up when he laughed. He was tall and had a raspy voice. And he was obviously an asshole. My cubby smelled like frog for three days. I wondered if he had done it on a dare.

  I felt sad for the frog and buried it under a bush outside the main building. In fact, the whole episode kind of shattered me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I looked at Jackson in the hallways, trying to gauge whether he hated me, or liked me, or was even thinking about me. But he never looked my way.

  Summer came, and fall again—but Jackson wasn’t in school. We heard his dad had business in Tokyo, and had moved the whole family there for a year. Jackson would go to schoo
l in Japan. I didn’t think about it much—until he came back, first day of sophomore year.

  I love the start of the school year. I think about what clothes to wear. I use a nice black pen in my fresh, new narrow-ruled notebooks. I crack the spines on my books. Everyone looks different, and everyone’s the same. Jackson was like four inches taller than he had been (which was already pretty tall), and he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said something in Japanese. I saw him laughing with a bunch of other juniors in the hallway as I walked in the door, and suddenly—I knew I liked him. The sun came through the window and lit up his hair. He had a bandage around his wrist like he had sprained it. His backpack was at his feet, looking new and stiff.

  I think I had liked him all year, while he was away.

  In movies, there are always misunderstandings before the hero and heroine get together. He seems like he hates her, she thinks she hates him, he maybe courts her a little, they connect for a moment, then she misunderstands something and hates him again for most of the movie, despite various appealing things he does to try to win her. Or it’s the other way around, he seems like he hates her because he misunderstands something she did.

  And then it turns out they were wrong. They love each other madly. And that’s the end.6

  Well, I know I watch too many movies. I should be working with my dad in the garden or helping the needy or getting a little fresh air. But I fully expected that if romance ever did come my way, it would only be after a long stretch of hints and confusions and tiny gestures and retreats; or even after a stretch of full-out dislike, which would suddenly morph into true love when all parties least expected it. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t expecting violins and sunsets and roses, at least not in any great numbers. I just figured on a little drama.

  But no. When it came to me and Jackson, everything was easy right from the beginning. So easy, it almost didn’t seem like romance.

  It was the middle that was difficult.