The Boyfriend List (16 page)

“I hope she’s using birth control.”

“I heard she might have an STD.”

“Do you think she gave it to Billy A? He’s so hot.”

“Billy Alexander keeps condoms in his back pocket.”

“So does Cabbie.”

“Big deal if she did Cabbie. Hasn’t everybody done him by now?”

“It’s still skanky.”

I tried to wash it all off with a wet paper towel, but you could still read it with no trouble, especially the parts in black Magic Marker. I borrowed a scrub brush and some spray cleaner from the janitor’s closet and was down on my knees trying to get it off when Kim came in.

It was the first time I’d seen her alone since she started going out with Jackson. She ignored me and started putting her hair up with a barrette.

“You made that Xerox, didn’t you?” I said.

“What if I did? People should know what kind of person you are.”

“And did you start all this on the wall?”

“No.” She kept fixing her hair.

“You didn’t?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I know your writing, Kim.”

“So why are you asking me, then?”

“It was a list I had to make for my shrink, okay? I have to see a therapist now, and she made me write a list.” Kim was quiet. “I’m all screwed up.”

“Tell me about it.” Her voice was sarcastic.

“I’m losing my mind,” I said. “Because my best friend stole my boyfriend. I trusted her and she stabbed me in the back.”

“I didn’t steal him. It was fate.”

“How is that different from stealing? Enlighten me.”

“We’re in love,” she said hotly.

“You were supposed to be my friend.”

“I told you, we never meant for it to happen. It’s one of those things that’s meant to be.”

“Then what was he doing with me at the Spring Fling?”

“He was trying to be nice, Roo. He told me all about it.”

“That’s what
he
says.”

“I trust him,” said Kim. “I know exactly what went on. It’s you I can’t trust.”

“Me?” The wet scrub brush had dropped into my lap and was soaking water into my cords, but I didn’t care. “What did I ever do to make you not trust me?”

“I could never trust you with Finn,” she spat out. “You were always flirting with him.”

“I never even talked to him,” I said.

“No, you gave him looks, and batted those eyelashes, and crossed those legs of yours in your fishnets, and avoided him, like if you talked to him for one minute he was sure to fall madly in love with you.”

“What?”

“I saw you at the Halloween party. What you two were like when you were alone together.”

“We were never alone!”

“Well, it sure looked like something. He went on and on about how funny you were, after. How he was a jaguar/Freddy Krueger or something.”

“Freddy Krueger kitty cat.”

“Whatever. Like an in-joke.”

“He was a panther, anyway.”

“That’s not the point. You were all over him.”

“I was not.”

“Ever since then. Or even before that. You two move around each other like there’s some big secret between you that no one else knows about. He was always asking about you.”

“Kim! Nothing happened.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I don’t want him anymore anyway. But you should think about what kind of friend you are before you go around saying I stole your boyfriend.” She zipped her backpack shut with a sudden noise. “Take a look at yourself, Ruby,” she said, heading for the door. “I may be a bitch, making that Xerox, but if it makes you think at all about how you act, how you cross lines and kiss people you shouldn’t kiss, and flirt around all over the place without considering how other people feel—then I’m glad I did it.”

And she was gone.

My dad always wants me to empathize with other people. Consider their positions, work on forgiveness. And now that this whole debacle is nearly four months behind me, I do think Kim was right about me and Finn. Not that he has a thing for me, not that I have a thing for him, not that we did anything wrong, exactly—but I did stay out of his way because I somehow thought I was capable of stealing Kim’s boyfriend, like there was something underground there; and he did give me looks, especially when I wore fishnets, and I did like it. The whole dynamic between us was not what it should be if he was dating my
best friend. I mean, I put him on the list—even though nothing even remotely romantic ever happened between us. That
must mean
something.

So I was wrong. About that. And I stopped wearing the fishnets.

Kim believes in fate; she believes Tommy Hazard is out there somewhere waiting to be her one and only; and now she believes Jackson is it. Him. Her Tommy Hazard. She believes he didn’t kiss me back, or come back to the Spring Fling party with the idea of getting back together with me—because she wants him to be the perfect guy she’s always been looking for. I couldn’t have been that cranked about Jackson if I was flirting with Finn, she thinks—and she was half angry with me about the Finn thing anyway, which made it all the easier to justify starting up with Jackson.

Kim plays by the rules. She spends all this time being a good person, doing charity stuff, getting good grades and being the nice overachiever the Doctors Yamamoto want her to be. When someone (me) doesn’t live up to her standards, she dishes out what she thinks they deserve. And she thought I deserved the Xerox.

If I’d ever told my mother about what happened with the boyfriend list (which I never did), she would have said that Kim is a double-crossing backbiter. Then she’d have said I should vent my rage, forget all about Kim, get on with it and go eat some soy-based product.

My dad tells me to forgive.

My mom tells me to forget.

But I don’t want to do either. Just because I understand
where Kim was coming from doesn’t mean that I think what she did was right.

And I can’t forget her. We go to school together.

The Monday morning after my confrontation with Kim in the girls’ bathroom, I was waiting at the bus stop near my house, reading the comics page of the
Times
and drinking juice from a carton—when Meghan’s Jeep pulled up to the curb. “Your mom said I’d find you here,” she said, leaning over to yell out the passenger window. “Get in.”

I got in. She stepped on the gas.

We drove in silence for about ten minutes, until she pulled into the Starbucks drive-thru and ordered our usual vanilla cappuccinos. “My treat.”

“How come?”

Meghan looked at me. “You had a bad week.”

“Yeah. I’m having a bad life.”

“And you paid me gas money in advance,” she said. “So now I owe you, since I didn’t drive you.”

Meghan turned on the radio and we sang stupid songs together at the top of our lungs until we got to school.

Four weeks and 8.5 therapy sessions after the Xerox went around school.

“Billy was this boy who said he’d call me last summer but he didn’t call,” I told Doctor Z. “I kissed him at a party in July. Everyone was wearing togas. You know, made from sheets. His had daisies and ducklings all over it. I think he goes to Sullivan.”

“You kissed him? Or he kissed you?” she wanted to know.

“He kissed me. We were waiting in line for the bathroom. It was a dark hallway.”

“Then what?”

“He squeezed my boob through like eight layers of
folded blue sheet. It was my first boob squeeze, but I’m not sure it should count.”

“Because of the sheets?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I gave him my number, and he never called. I waited by the phone like an idiot, too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, what I want to know is, why do you ask a girl for her number and then not call? To me, the hard part would be asking for the number, or leaning in to kiss someone you’ve hardly met when you’re wearing a sheet covered in little yellow duckies. After you’ve done those things, you know she’ll go out with you if you call. So why not call?”

Doctor Z didn’t say anything. She doesn’t say anything a lot of the time.

“Unless you suddenly find her disgusting or stupid or something,” I went on, “and only ask for her number because you already kissed her, so you think you
have to.
But actually, Billy didn’t have to. I would have been perfectly happy to have a toga-party kissing escapade and leave it at that! It was only once he said he’d call that I wanted him to call, and then there I was, running home to check my messages, and there weren’t any.
¹
It was all so dumb.”

“How long did this go on for?”

“Two weeks. After two weeks I figured he was never calling.”

“Ruby,” said Doctor Z. “I’m going to say something to
you, and if you feel it’s not accurate, say so and we’ll move on. But it is time to be frank. From my observation, you have a lot of passive patterns in place right now that aren’t making you happy.”

Translation from therapy-speak: I sit around too much, waiting for people to do stuff and angsting about stuff they’ve done, without doing anything myself. I could have gotten Billy’s number at the party, could have called him, could have made it happen, if I’d wanted it. I could have made up with Meghan just by calling her and apologizing, but I sat there at the bus stop every morning, letting her be angry, until she felt sorry for me and gave me a ride. I could have called Cricket and Nora. I could have told Jackson the truth more, could have insisted we watch something other than boring anime movies. Slept in instead of watching cross-country meets on Saturday mornings. Refused to hang around with Matt all the time. Could have not answered the phone, if Jackson called at five p.m. when he said he’d call in the morning. Could have asked him to the dance. Could have taken off his damn pants myself, if I wanted them off. “Go on,” I said to Doctor Z.

“I want to ask, do you see any common pattern between your behavior and your mother’s?”

What? My mother was the least passive person I knew.
“Elaine Oliver! Feel the Noise!
Express your rage!” I shouted. “Are you kidding?”

“Both of you are excellent talkers, that is certainly true,” said Doctor Z.

I had never thought of myself as being like my mom that way. Did Doctor Z really think I was an excellent talker?
Was
I an excellent talker? Hmmm. Ruby Oliver, excellent talker. “Why do you think she’s passive?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

Ag. How come these shrinks won’t give you the answers when they know them already? “Um,” I said, excellent talking ability rapidly deteriorating.

Silence.

I thought as hard as I could. Nothing.

“Didn’t you tell me a story about a taco suit?” Doctor Z prompted.

“Yeah.”

“And a macrobiotic diet?”

“Uh-huh.”

We sat there for another minute.

“Do you think there’s any kind of power struggle going on in your home?” she finally asked.

“Maybe. Yeah.”

“What’s the dynamic that you see?”

I had a rush of memories. My mom: shredding tissues and sitting by the phone the time my dad went on a business trip and didn’t call. My mom: spending a weekend at a plant show, bored out of her mind. My mom: going to that Halloween party in the same dumb silly hat as last year after wasting her entire day on the taco. My mom: cleaning the house while my dad ran a 10K with some friends, then having a two-hour fight with him over
interpretations of the mayor’s education policy, which she doesn’t actually care about
that
much. My mom: going macrobiotic after my father made plans to spend every weekend greenhousing the southern deck, when she wanted to go on day hikes and take a family vacation. My mom: not on tour right now with her latest one-woman show, because Dad couldn’t go with her.

My mom, always “expressing her rage,” but never really getting her way.

She does a thousand tiny things she hopes he’ll appreciate—clipping articles from the paper, putting a vase of flowers on his desk, leaving notes whenever she goes out—but he doesn’t fully see them, unless she points them out. And she never stops doing them, and never stops being angry that he doesn’t appreciate her enough.

The all-about-your-mom analysis was true—but also very annoying. I kind of hate it when Doctor Z is right, especially when it makes me a cliché: Ruby Oliver, repeating her mother’s patterns. Still, I decided to ask Shiv Neel what happened last year. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, once I had told the story in therapy: how we’d flirted for weeks during our Drama rehearsals, how he put his warm arm around me in assembly, how we kissed in the empty classroom, how beautiful his eyes were, how good it felt to be his girlfriend, even if it was only for an afternoon.

And then—how he disappeared on me.

Shiv is popular. I knew I’d never get him alone in the refectory or on the quad. He’s always surrounded by the
adoring Ariel or a bunch of loud rugby players. But he’s also on the Sophomore Committee, which is Tate’s round-table way of having a class president/vice president/treasurer, etc.—and that meant he stayed late on Wednesdays.

I skipped lacrosse practice and waited after school until his meeting was over, reading a book outside the classroom door. My hands were soaked with sweat, I was so nervous, but I took deep breaths and didn’t have a panic attack. He came out. I stood. “Hey, Shiv, do you have a minute?”

“I guess,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Well, you probably know Jackson dumped me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, um, I—can we go somewhere?” Two brainy-looking committee members were standing right next to us in the hall.

“Okay.” Shiv shrugged as if he didn’t care what we did.

“I don’t mean
go somewhere
go somewhere,” I said, remembering that he surely thought I was a slut, and after all, last time the two of us had been alone we’d been all over each other. “I mean, outside on the steps.”

“I got it.” He looked at me like I was an idiot. We went outside and sat down.

I looked at my shoes. They were scuffed.

I fiddled with my fingernails, and chewed on one of them a bit.

I got out my pencil, and tapped it on my knee.

“Roo,” said Shiv. “I don’t have all day.”

“Okay. Do you remember you once asked me to be your girlfriend?”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“But then, somehow, it never happened?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I, well—I wondered why you changed your mind. I’m not mad or anything. Only, I’m trying to figure stuff out, since the Jackson thing, and I know it wasn’t a big deal, and maybe you don’t want to explain, but I’ve been thinking about it, I guess, and …” Blah blah blah. I went on for some ridiculous amount of time, sounding completely lame and saying “like” just about every other word.

Eventually, finally, I got it all said and shut up so he could answer.

“Roo, you were laughing at me,” Shiv said, looking down at his own shoes now. “I heard you on the quad.”

“What?”

“I heard you, with Cricket and Kim and those guys, cracking up over what a jerk you thought I was.”

“That’s not true!”

“I was there.”

“I didn’t.”

“You yelled ‘Gross!’” he said. “I know I’m not wrong. And you were laughing all over the place, like I was some big joke.”

“Ag!” I said. “That’s not how it happened.”

“And something about I smelled like nutmeg? Like you were disgusted by kissing an Indian or something.” His voice was bitter. “I wasn’t going to go out with you after that. I didn’t even want to look at you for months.”

“Nutmeg is good, Shiv,” I said. “Nutmeg smells good.”

“You made me feel like a loser, Roo,” he said. “Like a complete outsider.”

Shiv, the golden, the popular, the perfect. Saying this to me.

“I didn’t say what you thought I said,” I whispered. “At least, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant.”

“Okay, then,” he said.

“I liked you. They were asking me what it was like to kiss you. That’s all. It’s how girls are, together. No one said anything bad.”

“All right.”

“The gross thing was about ear licking. Cricket asked if we did ear licking, and I’d never heard of it before.”

He laughed a little. “I guess that’s nice to know.”

“All this time I thought it was something wrong with me that made you stop talking to me,” I said.

“It was,” he pointed out.

“I mean with my kissing, or my body, or my personality.”

“It was your personality.”

“Oh.” I tried to crack a smile. “But it was a mistake. Please believe me. I would never say that stuff about you.”
²

“Yeah, okay.”

“The Indian thing is not a thing. I mean …”

“I got it, Roo.”

“I’m all messed up now.”

“Yeah, well. I’m all messed up too,” he said. “But thanks for the explanation.”

He hiked his bag over his shoulder and walked down to the parking lot without offering me a ride.