The Boy Book Read online

  “Some fun facts about Humboldt penguins,” I said, my hands shaking as I held the speech in front of me. “They can swim at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, using their wings to propel them forward while steering with their webbed feet. After mating, the female lays two white eggs. Both mom and dad take turns sitting on them until they hatch, a real case of shared parenting!”

  Jackson moved around behind the girl and put his arms around her, hugging her from the back.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I skipped the whole part I was supposed to say about the Humboldts’ being endangered by commercial fishing and communicating by flipper waving. “Well,” I said, speaking as fast as I could, “you can see they’re nearly done with lunch! Thank you for visiting our Humboldt penguins today. And make sure to stop by the reticulated python feeding in the reptile house at four o’clock.”

  I stepped down from the footstool as fast as I could and started pushing the AV cart back toward the closet—but I was in such a rush I forgot to turn off the mike and unplug the equipment, so first the microphone let out a horrible screech, and then the electrical cord jerked and the rolling stand toppled over.

  Anya jumped forward and braced it, and between the two of us we got it upright again. “Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, bending down and pulling the cord out of the socket.

  Standing up, I couldn’t help looking in Jackson’s direction again.

  He was looking straight at me.

  When the crowds cleared out and we had put the AV equipment away, Anya gave me a talking-to. Blah blah blah wasn’t fully prepared, blah blah blah she knew I was nervous and it was my first time, blah blah blah maybe I needed another training session or should work another few hours for Lewis instead if I didn’t like public speaking.

  I barely listened to her.

  Jackson was seeing someone. Behind Kim’s back.

  Even after what happened last year, I never thought he would do something like this. Kim swore to me that she and Jackson had never acted on their feelings until he and I had broken up, and there was comfort in the idea that they’d stuck to the rules. That I hadn’t been a complete dupe. That I hadn’t been kissing him and thinking I was going out with him when really he was with someone else.

  That he hadn’t been bareface lying to me.

  I knew Jackson wasn’t the person I’d thought he was when we were going out. But I’d always believed what Kim said: when they got together, they’d been blindsided by love into doing something that was out of character for both of them. And all that stuff that happened during the Spring Fling debacle could be explained if you think (like my dad does) that Jackson was torn and confused by his emotions.

  But he wasn’t torn and confused now. He was watching a penguin feeding. He had a girlfriend in Tokyo who had only left town four weeks earlier and who was coming back at winter break.

  And he was out with someone else.

  When I got home, I called Nora and Meghan and told them I wasn’t going to Kyle’s party.

  Nora I had to lie to. I couldn’t tell her about seeing Jackson in the zoo, or how I’d written him back after he wrote me that note.

  I had never told her it was Jackson who invited me to Kyle’s in the first place.

  So I said I was having an attack of leprosy and had to stay home.

  Meghan I told everything. She said there was no way she was going to the party without me and invited me over to sit in her hot tub instead. So we did that, getting cans of pop and looking out at the lake while we soaked. The air was chilly, and steam rose from the tub like a tropical mist.

  I explained the whole Jackson scenario in gory detail. It was a relief to put it all into words. But as usual, Meghan’s interpretation was woefully simple. “Forget it, Roo,” she told me. “Jackson is nothing to you anymore, and Kim’s nothing to you either. Just let it go.”

  But they weren’t nothing to me. They were still huge, enormous somethings, even after all this time.

  “In my Yoga Elective,” Meghan went on, “we do all this tension release. The idea is that you surrender to the pose, whatever stretchy position you’re in, and release into it, letting go of all the stuff that’s making it hurt.”

  “But don’t you think if someone is doing something wrong to someone else, even someone you don’t like, you should say something?” I asked, hiking myself up to sit on the edge of the tub.

  “You should stay out of it,” said Meghan, taking a drink of Sprite.

  I slid back into the water and dunked my head.

  Sunday, Nora came over. We watched Hairspray on video and she told me about Kyle’s party. She went with Cricket. This was the news: Katarina scammed with Jackson’s friend Matt. Ariel and Shiv seemed to be having some fight and Nora drove Ariel home. Cricket and Heidi spent most of their time flirting with some senior guys from the basketball team, stud-muffins we’d never noticed last year.

  “Josh said something about my boobs,” reported Nora, “and Noel stood up for me.”

  “Noel was there?”

  “Noel always goes to parties, Roo. He acts like he doesn’t like them, but he always goes. He knows all those guys from cross-country.”

  She had a point. “How did he stand up for you?”

  “Told Josh to enter the twenty-first century or fuck off.”

  Score one for the Rescue Squad.

  “Have you ever seen Noel dance?” Nora asked.

  I hadn’t.

  “He’s hilarious. None of the other guys would dare dance around like that. He told me his brother took him to these gay nightclubs last summer in New York City.”

  “Yeah, he told me that, too.”

  Part of me didn’t like thinking of Nora and Noel hanging around together without me. But that is the sort of possessive jealous-lady thought I should probably stop having, so I kept quiet on that topic. “What did Josh say about your boobs?” I asked.

  “Two things of beauty are a joy forever.”1

  I smiled. “You have to admit, that’s a little bit funny.”

  “He’s such an asshole,” said Nora. “You’d think I’d have a snappy comeback by now, but I stand there like an idiot, wanting to hit someone.”

  “We should think of stuff to say. Like when guys say things to us on the streets or in the hall. So we’re prepared.”

  “Genius!” cried Nora.

  And that’s how we ended up pulling out The Boy Book, which Nora hadn’t even looked at since March, before the debacle, and starting a fresh page.

  Clever Comebacks to Catcalls

  Situation: You are walking down the hall, and someone tells you he’s so ready for that jelly. Or you are strolling down the street and some construction worker on his lunch break says, “Come on, baby, lemme see you smile.” What can you answer?

  1. Join the twenty-first century.

  2. Try to imagine how little I care.

  3. Have you had your brain checked? I think the warranty has run out.

  4. I can’t get angry at you today. It’s Be Kind to Animals Week.

  5. Didn’t I dissect you in Biology class?

  6. Did you take your medication today?

  7. I’ll try smiling—if you try being smarter.

  8. I’m curious, did your mother raise all of her children to be sexists, or did she single you out?

  And some extras, for specific situations:

  If he says, “If I could see you naked, I’d die happy,” then you say, “If I could see you naked, I’d die laughing.”

  And if he says, “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” answer, “Do not enter.”

  And if he calls down the street as you ignore him, “Hey, baby, don’t be rude!” reply, “I’m not being rude. You’re just insignificant.”

  And if he says, “Can I see you sometime?” say, “How about never? Is never good for you?”

  —written by me and Nora, after some serious Internet research.1 Approximate date: October of junior year.

  it felt great to be friends with
Nora again, even if there were subjects we couldn’t discuss. Like I wanted to ask her if Kim and Jackson had maybe broken up, and how she felt that Cricket was spending most of her time with Katarina and Heidi and those guys. I wanted to tell her I saw Jackson at the zoo, and that he’d called to invite me to Kyle’s party.

  But it was safer not to.

  The next week at school, though most of the boob comments had died down, Nora used comeback numbers four and five on Darcy Andrews and one of his cohorts, with excellent and pleasing results. And on Wednesday we went to the B&O with Meghan after sports practice and talked to Finn Murphy, who was waiting tables. We ate cake and drank espresso milk shakes, and I brought The Boy Book and we showed it to Meghan.

  “Maybe I need to have a fling,” mused Meghan, after reading the part about scamming. She sighed and rolled her eyeballs toward Finn, who was wiping down some tables on the other side of the café.

  “What’s going on with Bick?” I asked, since she had sort of brought it up.

  “Aren’t you two really serious?” put in Nora, wide-eyed.

  “We’re taking things one day at a time.”

  “Finn is cute,” said Nora, checking out his backside as he bent over a dirty table.

  “I don’t know,” mused Meghan. “Maybe if Bick and I did it, everything would go back to normal between us. He’s coming home for Thanksgiving.”

  “You’re not doing it?” Nora asked.

  “They’re just up to the nether regions,” I informed her. “Or down to them. Whatever.”

  “You should not be doing it with someone who’s on one-day-at-a-time status,” said Nora decisively. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”

  “I know, I know.” Meghan looked thoughtful. “It’s just that I want things to be how they were. You know, like last year. When life was easy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s like Bick’s a different person now. Like Harvard is changing him.”

  I took a big bite of cake. “Last year,” I told her, “you didn’t have us.”

  Six major things happened in October.

  ONE. I went with my mom for the appointment with the new, health-insurance-accepting shrink. It was in a clinic affiliated with a hospital, and the waiting room was filled with people who looked really shattered. One woman in her fifties was rocking back and forth, muttering about some chip the aliens had put in her brain. A guy with no neck was asleep and snoring, and a nervous lady in a dirty coat was touching a potted plant and staring at it like it might speak to her.

  I had an appointment for four o’clock, and we got there early and filled out some forms. Then we sat.

  The only magazine was about health care. There was a plastic coffee table, and a television was blaring at top volume up in a corner. The news was on: two abducted children and a hotel fire. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be expected to maintain any semblance of decent mental health if they had to watch that stuff before every therapy appointment.

  Mom and I waited.

  And waited.

  I read my Chemistry textbook and highlighted key concepts while she watched TV. Now and then a doctor or therapist would call out someone’s name.

  Half the time, the person wasn’t there.

  A fatally thin woman came in and folded herself into a corner seat. The sleeping man woke up and wandered out of the room even though no one had called his name.

  “Maybe we should just go,” I whispered at 4:25. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Not happening, Ruby.”

  “Please, Mom. I’ve been okay for a long time.”

  “You’re judging this place on appearances,” my mother snapped. “Besides, I already paid my copayment.”

  “But—”

  “You never have an open mind. Is it too much for me to ask you to keep an open mind?”

  I slumped back down in my seat.

  We waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  At 5:10, my mother stood up. “Come on, Roo. We’re going.”

  “What?”

  “This is disgusting,” she announced, in a typical Elaine Oliver reversal-of-policy-when-it-suits-her. “The treatment here is disrespectful and we’re wasting our time.”

  I grabbed my backpack.

  TWO. A week later, went to see the shrink my dad’s friend Greg uses.

  Doctor Acorn, or Steven, as I was supposed to call him, was thin and dry. After talking to me and my mother for forty-five minutes, and listening to her tell him that I was antisocial and didn’t seem to have friends anymore and never went anywhere and had panic attacks, he recommended that I start on Prozac and Ativan.2

  “But I haven’t had a panic thing in months,” I said.

  “That’s how we want to keep it,” he said. “Am I sensing some resistance here?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a good idea to get the baseline chemistry taken care of, then follow that up with the talk therapy.”

  “But I’m not antisocial,” I said, turning to Mom. “I slept over at Meghan’s house three nights ago.”

  “Compared to what she was before, she’s antisocial,” my mom said to Doctor Acorn. “Plus, there may be some sexual issues she wants to discuss with you. Right, Roo?”

  “Mom!”

  “Roo, you can be open with Steven. He’s heard it all before.”

  There was no way I was going to tell Doctor Acorn about my scamming with Angelo—or anything else that was going on in my life. He was like a dried-up slice of apple, without any juice left inside, and he didn’t seem like he was listening to me so much as telling me what he thought was wrong with me.

  I laid it out for my mother as soon as we left. No Doctor Acorn. No way.

  “What are we going to do?” she moaned, with her head in her hands, sitting at the dinner table later that night.

  “Stop making me see a shrink,” I yelled from my place on the couch.

  “But it’s good for you,” my mother said.

  “Mom. Vegetables are good for me. Sports activities. My job at the zoo is even good for me. But waiting for more than an hour with a bunch of madmen is not, and neither is taking drugs for problems I’m not even having.”

  “Wasn’t Doctor Z good for you?” my father asked.

  I didn’t answer him.

  THREE. Meghan called Bick on his cell and a girl answered.

  “Um, this is Meghan, is Bick around?”

  And the girl said, “Oh, yeah, Meghan! I’ve heard all about you. I’m Bick’s friend Cecily.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Hiya. Didn’t he tell you about me?”

  “No.”

  “The one from Maine, the one with the convertible?”

  “Um, I don’t think so.”

  “Bick went to get a drink—guys, do you know where Bick went?—and he left his cell on the table so I answered it. Oh my god, Holmes, you are so dead! Stop it! Oh my god, do you really go to Harvard?” Cecily was laughing, talking to some people around her, hardly even remembering she was on the phone.

  Meghan hung up.

  Bick didn’t call her back until the next day.

  FOUR. Noel, Meghan, Nora and I were supposed to go to the movies on a Saturday night. But Meghan’s mom decided she had to stay home for dinner all of a sudden, and Nora’s brother, Gideon, surprised her family by driving down from Evergreen State College, an hour or two away, so Nora wanted to stay and see him.

  I picked up Noel in the Honda. His mom wouldn’t let him drive the Vespa at night. His house was a big Victorian-style place in Madrona, and when I went inside, Mr. and Mrs. DuBoise (his mom and stepdad that he’s had for like fourteen years) were in the middle of a ginormous collaborative cooking project. The dining table was covered with vegetables chopped into tiny pieces, and Mrs. DuBoise had three open cookbooks stacked one on top of the other.

  A couple of smaller DuBoises were running underfoot. Everything smelled like frying onions.

  “We’re glad
to meet you, Ruby.” The stepdad had a booming voice and was yelling over water running in the kitchen sink. “We’ve heard all about you.”

  “I was hoping my reputation hadn’t preceded me,” I said—which sounded like a joke, but which I really meant, given the suckiness of my reputation.

  “Ha, ha!” the stepdad boomed. “All good, all good, I promise.”

  “Noel will be down in a minute,” his mother said, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’s doing something with hair gel.”3

  “No problem.”

  “Do you want a pop?”

  “Nah. I’m good.”

  “What movie are you seeing?”

  “Singin’ in the Rain,” I answered. “At that retro film place in the U District. They’re doing an all-musical weekend, and my mom said this was the one to see.”

  “You must be some girl, Ruby,” laughed his mom, “if Noel is willing to go see a musical with you.”4

  “He made fun of us last week for renting The Sound of Music,” added his stepdad. “He doesn’t even like My Fair Lady. I mean, what’s not to love about My Fair Lady?”

  “You mean, besides the fact that it’s completely sexist?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “It is. The man molds the woman into his ideal mate, changes everything about her—and she loves him for it. It completely bothers me. Shouldn’t he like her for who she is? Because by the time he realizes he loves her, he’s loving this shell of a person who has no sense of self.”

  Mrs. DuBoise laughed. “I can see why Noel likes you,” she said. “I bet you give him a run for his money.”

  “Excuse them,” said Noel, coming into the kitchen. “They’ve only just been let out of their cages.”

  “I’m sure we totally embarrassed you, honey,” said his mother, blowing him a kiss. “Just thank your stars you weren’t here to suffer through most of it.”

  “I suffered through enough,” said Noel.

  “Back by eleven!” boomed the stepdad as we went out the door.