The Boyfriend List (13 page)

I called home from the pay phone. My dad said he’d come pick me up, but it’s a forty-minute drive at rush hour, so I sat down on my backpack and tried to do my French homework as the sky grew darker. I wrote about four sentences before I started to cry.

I just sat there, tears going down my cheeks, not even covering my face.

Then Jackson’s Dodge pulled up in front of the gym. I felt like an idiot, crying there all by myself—although I have to admit, a tiny part of me thought maybe he’d be deeply moved by how shattered I was and realize I was the girl for him after all. I looked down at my French notebook and tried to get my breathing still. Jackson stopped the car, got out and leaned against the hood.

“Hey, Roo, I was hoping to catch you,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you have a ride? I can take you home, if you want.”

“My dad’s coming. He’s running late.”

“How you doing?”

“Pretty good,” I lied.

“Can we talk?” He sat down next to me, leaning his back against the red brick of the gymnasium.

“Sure. What about?”

“I’m worried about you. I haven’t seen you around all week.”
⁸

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what Nora says.”

“Let me speak for myself, okay?”

“And Kim is shattered you won’t talk to her.”

“Poor baby.” My voice was bitter.

“Roo, don’t get mean. I’m checking to make sure you’re okay. I really care about you.”

“Right.”

“You do know that, don’t you? I hope you’re okay with all of this.”

“And if I’m not okay, what are you gonna do about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We were pretty close. It’s hard on me to see you like this.”

“Poor you.”

“Listen, we can still go to the Spring Fling, if you want. I’d like that, actually. Can we go to the dance?”

“You aren’t going with Kim?”

“She has to go out of town with her family. She left this afternoon.”

“Won’t she be mad?”

“No. She thinks it might cheer you up. She’s completely sorry she upset you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We’d go as friends,” Jackson added.

“I understood that, thank you.”

“Aw, don’t be sarcastic with me. Let me take you out. You can wear your dress. For old times’ sake.”
⁹

Well, it went on like this for a while longer. The short of it is that I said yes, never even thinking about Angelo, or Kim, or what anyone would say—only thinking about how Jackson still had some feelings for me, would love me again in my silver dress, and how we would stand in the moonlight, looking over the railing at the light playing across the dark water.

You could call Shiv Neel my first official boyfriend. He was definitely my first voluntary kiss—and the word “girlfriend” was certainly mentioned by him, in reference to me. But he was my boyfriend for less than twenty-four hours, so although it was common knowledge all over school that we were going out, I’m not sure he counts. Anyway, if he
was
my boyfriend, it’s pretty pitiful—because just like Jackson, he dumped me and I had no idea it was coming.

Is this my pattern for life, to be always dumped with no warning?
¹

Here’s what happened. Last year in November, Shiv and I were assigned to do a scene in Drama Elective together. We had to work on it for homework, so we met a few times in an empty classroom during lunch to rehearse. Shiv was (and is) an Indian American boy with a big nose and the most enormous black eyes you’ve ever seen. I was fascinated by his eyes. He’s quite popular—friends with Pete (Cricket’s boyfriend, as of Valentine’s Day) and this guy Billy Krespin. He plays rugby and basketball, and this year he’s going out with Ariel Oliveri. I was glad to do a scene with him. I’d always thought he was cute.

Blah blah blah: All the details of our conversations, and the clever notes about when to schedule rehearsals, and the time we spilled pop all over the teacher’s desk, and the time he put his arm around me at assembly (but in the dark so no one could see)—none of that is important. What’s important is that one day, he stopped reading his lines, threw his script on the floor, looked into my eyes and said, “Roo, let me ask you something. Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me, then. Really put his arms around me and kissed me. It went through my body like he had
flipped some electrical switch and lit me up. His skin was so warm, and he was suddenly so beautiful, and I thought, Oh,
this
is what all the hype is about—because I certainly hadn’t felt anything like this with Michael Malone in the woods in my nightgown. We kissed for the rest of lunch period, leaning against the closed classroom door so no one would be able to interrupt us.

Girlfriend! I was somebody’s girlfriend! And beautiful, popular, good-kisser Shiv, on top of it all!

Okay, so I’m completely undignified. As soon as school got out, I ran up to Kim, Nora and Cricket on the quad and told them the news. They were completely surprised and excited: Cricket was even jumping up and down. “Shiv! Ag!” she yelled.

“He’s
fine,
” said Nora, giggling.

“Have you seen him in his rugby uniform? He has some serious legs,” said Kim.

“How did it happen?” Cricket wanted to know.

I told all.

They wanted to know more.

“What did it feel like?”

Electricity.

“What did he smell like?”

Nutmeg.

“What did he taste like?”

I don’t know. Person.

“Did he lick your ear?”

No. Gross! (Laughter.)

“Did you grab his butt?”

“Cricket!”

“I would have grabbed his butt.”

(More laughter.) “I’m not up to butts,” I said. “That’s way too advanced.”

“Not
down
the pants!” she yelled. “On
top of
the pants.”

“Even so. Butt-grabbing on a first kiss is a bit much.”

“Oh, I think you can get a nice handful even before the first kiss,” said Cricket. (Raucous laughter.)

“You’re just going to reach over and squeeze?” I asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“Please. You’re all talk.”

“No. I would completely do it. On top of the pants, mind you.”

And so on.

The next day, I got to school wearing like four times as much lip gloss as usual and Shiv was in the hall, standing next to his mail cubby. “Hey, Shiv,” I said to him.

He turned around and walked away.

In Poetry, he didn’t look at me.

At lunch in the refectory, he didn’t talk to me or sit anywhere near me, but Cricket, Kim and Nora had told all the girls about what happened, so I was pretty busy fielding gossipy questions from Heidi, Ariel, Katarina and the like, so I didn’t really have time to think about it much.

In Drama, Shiv and I had to perform our scene.

“What did you think?” I said, after.

“It was okay,” said Shiv, his eyes on the ground. Then he grabbed his backpack and left.

After school, I saw him heading for the bus. “Shiv, wait up!” I called.

He kept walking.

By this point, it was obvious he had changed his mind. I felt like an idiot. Had I been a rotten kisser during our session against the door? (This was certainly possible, as I had so little experience.)

Maybe I smelled bad?

Or had there been a booger hanging out of my nose when we stopped kissing?

What could I have done to make him stop liking me?

I thought about it all the time, but I never found out. I felt like a complete loser. I liked him so much, and now he seemed to hate me, and there was no way to turn it around. I was completely helpless.

I never really talked with him again, except to say hi in the halls.

When I told her about Shiv, Doctor Z thought I should ask him what happened. Well, she never says anything quite that directly. What she really said was “Is there a way you could find out?”

“No.”

Silence. She was wearing that poncho again.

“Well,” I said, after a minute, “I guess I could ask him. But I’d rather die than do that.”

More silence. It really is a horrible poncho.

“I don’t care, anyway.”

Even more silence. Who buys this woman’s clothes?

“Well, I guess maybe I kind of do,” I went on. “I mean, I do. I liked him, I wanted to kiss him again, we had a
good time together. And the whole thing was humiliating. Everyone knowing we were going out, and then with us breaking up so fast after—I felt like people were talking about me.”

“Can you ask him?”

I ignored her question. “And this is my life, getting dumped with no warning. Or liking people who don’t like me back, or who don’t like me
enough,
or not as much as they like someone else. You have the list in front of you: Hutch dumped me for Ariel, Gideon never liked me back, Ben didn’t know I was alive, Sky had another girlfriend.”

“Story of your life?”

“Exactly. Why is that? I wish I could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”

“Just one kiss” is never just one kiss. The one with Shiv changed my whole idea about kissing. And when I went to the dance with Jackson, there was “just one kiss”—but it made everything even worse than it was before.

You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.

After Jackson asked me to the dance, I had a lot of phone calls to make.

First, I had to call up Angelo and tell him not to take me. I was super nervous. I had never called him before, and here I was canceling on him. But he was nice about it. “That’s cool,” he said. “If he’s your boyfriend, you should go with him.”

“I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend,” I said.

“Whatever. You should do what you gotta do.”

“Okay.” There was a weird silence. “There’s a party
on the dock by my house after,” I said, feeling guilty. “Around eleven. You should swing by if you’re around.”

“Sure,” said Angelo, though I was sure he was only being polite.

“You shouldn’t go,” said Cricket when I called her. “It’s way too complicated.”

“It’s just as friends,” I said.

“Still.”

“Kim told him to take me.”

“But that’s Kim. She feels bad about everything.”

“Yeah? She doesn’t act like it.”

“Trust me,” said Cricket. “She does.”

“I’m still going,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“You shouldn’t go,” said Nora when she called me.

“I know, but I so want to,” I said. “I have that dress.”

“You could wear that dress with Angelo,” she said.

“I want to go with Jackson. I was always supposed to go with Jackson, he asked me a long time ago.”

“Not exactly,” she reminded me.

“But still.”

“It’s your funeral,” she said. “Maybe you should come to dinner with me and Matt, to keep it all under control.”

Matt added two more onto his reservation, and we all had dinner at the top of the Space Needle, which is this restaurant inside an old World’s Fair building that turns around and around so you get a 360-degree view by the time you finish your dinner. They didn’t have any
vegetarian food, so I ate three side dishes: creamed spinach, mashed potatoes and a salad. Then we drove to the pier in two separate cars, and got on the miniyacht just as it was pulling out.

Here’s what I remember from the dance: Cricket looked beautiful, in a pink dress with her sleek blond hair piled on top of her head. Nora looked sexy, showing off her great boobs in a low-cut black thing. She took pictures of us all with her Instamatic.

Jackson touched my hand when we were dancing and told me I was pretty. There was hardly anywhere to sit down. When the band played a slow song, Jackson asked me to dance, and put his cheek against mine as we did. Then he suggested we go upstairs and get some air.