The Boyfriend List (17 page)

By now, you know everything about Jackson Clarke, probably way more than anyone on earth wants to hear. This is all I have to add:

I still think about him every day.

When I see him, my heart jumps up in my chest.

I long for him to talk to me, and whenever he even says hello, I feel a thousand times worse than I did before.

I wish he was dead.

I wish he still liked me.

When I got home from talking to Shiv, Hutch was on my deck. Again. Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, he
helps my dad greenhouse the southern deck. Especially now that the weather’s good, the two of them are always huddled together over a peony bush or a broken window-pane, the boom box blasting cassette tapes of Hutch’s retro metal.

The sunlight was starting to fade; it was maybe six o’clock. “Hey, Hutch. Hey, Dad,” I called, waving as I came down the dock. The two of them were staring up at the greenhouse, which I had to admit was coming together. “You guys taking a break?”

My dad had taken to hiding Popsicles in the way-back of the freezer, so that he and I could get enough calories in the macrobiotic nightmare of our life. I popped inside and got one for me, one for my dad and one for Hutch, too (my mother was out, needless to say). Then the three of us sat on the edge of the deck, leaning forward so the Popsicles didn’t melt on our clothes, watching the boats sail across the lake.

I actually felt happy for the first time since Jackson broke up with me.

Now don’t go getting excited that I’ll suddenly notice Hutch in the soft pink light of the sunset and fall in love. He’s
not
the love of my life, and no, we
haven’t
been destined to get together ever since those gummy bears back in fourth grade, just because that’s what happens in movies.
¹
And don’t go thinking he and I become best
friends in a
Breakfast Club
sort of way, either,
²
with me realizing he’s got a heart of gold under the Iron Maiden motorcycle jacket, and him realizing that I’m not the slut everyone thinks I am. Yes, that happens onscreen. But forget it. This is real life. He creeps me out. We have nothing in common besides leprosy.

“Roo, good to see you looking cheerful,” said my dad. “Isn’t it nice to see her cheerful, John? It’s been taking her a while to process her feelings about the breakup with Jackson. He was her first serious boyfriend, you know.”

“You’re better off without that guy,” said Hutch, his mouth full of Popsicle.

“You think so?” I said. “I don’t.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Huh?”

“Not a nice guy, Roo. He’s mean inside.”

“Why do you say that?”

Then Hutch told this story. I’m not sure why he told it, except that he and my dad had been doing some heavy manly rocker bonding. Or maybe he felt sorry for me, even though I was such a bitch to him most of the time. Hutch said that he and Jackson had been friends in sixth grade—the year when, at Tate, you start moving from room to room for each class instead of staying all day in one place with one teacher. Jackson was a year ahead, but they had gym together, and French, and the same free
periods—so they started hanging out. As a sixth grader, Hutch was friends with all the cool seventh-grade boys: Kyle, Matt, Jackson and a few others. They played kick-ball after school. They had their own table in the refectory. They made a lot of noise in the hallways. Jackson and Hutch were friends in particular: Hutch used to ride his bike over to Jackson’s house on weekends, and Jackson stayed at Hutch’s when his parents had to go to Tokyo on business one week. When the two of them were bored in class, they’d write funny rhymes about the teachers and stick them in each other’s mail cubbies.

That kind of thing. That’s the one he recited for us. Anyway, summer came, and Hutch went off traveling for most of it with his family, and when he got back in seventh (when Jackson was in eighth), he found himself frozen out. “I got zits over the summer,” he said to me and my dad, staring down at his Popsicle stick. “I looked like hell, and I was still completely short. And they’d all been to sports camp together while I’d been away.

“First week of school, I trailed after them, sitting on one end of our table, not much part of the talk. Still showing up for kickball. Something seemed off, but I couldn’t tell what. These guys were my friends, you know?

“Then one day, I wrote a rhyme about Mr. Krell—remember, the middle-school gym teacher? And I stuck it in Jackson’s cubby like we did the year before.”
³

“Oh man,” said my dad. “I can see it coming. Children can be so cruel.”

“I got my same note back with something scrawled across the top in Jackson’s writing,” Hutch went on. “‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’” He stood up and tossed his Popsicle stick in the trash can.

“That’s all it said?” I asked.

“‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’”

“Wow.”

“He never talked to me again. Like we’d never been friends. Like we’d never even met. And when Kyle and those guys filled my locker with ball bearings in eighth,
⁴
and they poured out all over the floor-Jackson didn’t say a word. Just stood there, changing his shirt like nothing was even happening.”

“Jackson would never do that,” I said.

“Well, he did. Who knows?” Hutch shrugged. “He might have put the bearings in himself.”

“No way.”

“I’m just telling you what happened.”

“He’s not like that anymore,” I said. “If he ever was.”

“Dream on,” said Hutch. And then, like he was singing: “Dream on!”

“Dream on!”
⁵
squeaked my dad, in a stupid rock ‘n’ roll falsetto.

Hutch joined him, and they kept squealing “dream on” like stuck pigs until, simultaneously, they yelled, “Dream-a make-a dream come true!”
⁶
They both sang, and stopped for a little air-guitar duet.

With this additional evidence of (1) Hutch’s creepy tendency to make references to antique heavy metal songs that no one else knows about and (2) my dad actually knowing them and liking it and (3) a complete lack of dignity on both their parts, the moment was over. No more sharing was going to happen. My dad hit Play on the old cassette deck, and the entire dock of houseboats was bombarded with retro metal.

Was Jackson truly the kind of guy who would fill someone’s locker with ball bearings? Or even just stand there, saying nothing, when his friends were humiliating someone? Had he really written “Joke’s long over. Loser”
on that poem? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Hutch could invent.

But it didn’t seem like the guy I knew, either.

Maybe Jackson had done those things but wasn’t that way anymore. We all grow up and regret the mean things we did in middle school.

Or maybe I never knew him that well in the first place.

I grabbed my bike, rode to the nearest store (ten blocks) and bought two large bunches of basil, a box of pasta, walnuts and a wedge of Parmesan cheese. Then I boiled noodles and made pesto sauce in our blender, before my mom got back to tell me it wasn’t macrobiotic.

The next morning, in the Jeep, I asked Meghan if she wanted to go to the movies. I felt like I was inviting her on a date. A Woody Allen festival was playing at the Variety.

“Can I bring Bick?” she asked, honking her horn at some idiot driving an SUV.

“No. I think it’s a girl thing.” I didn’t want to be a third wheel with Meghan and her boyfriend.

“We’re supposed to go over to Steve’s house and shoot pool on Saturday.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t want to go. Those guys are always drinking beer and nobody talks to me,” she said. And then to the drive-thru window: “Two vanilla cappuccinos, grande.” And then to me: “It’s not that fun. I usually go out on the porch by myself, actually.”

“So blow him off.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. We paid for the cappuccinos and she pulled out into traffic. “Yeah. Okay. I can see him Friday.”

“It’s a plan, then?”

“Uh-huh.”

We might be friends.

My mom decided to go on tour with her one-woman show.
¹
The producer said she could still book it, even though the Seattle run had ended in October, so
Elaine Oliver: Twist and Shout
would be going around the country starting the end of next month (June). My dad was upset, but my mom said, “Kevin, I have to give the public what it wants. Besides, we can use the money to go on vacation in August.”

“You can’t leave Roo.”

“Oh, she’s a big girl.”

“She’s a
teenage
girl. She needs her mother around.”

“Dad, I’m standing right here.”

“Will you miss me, Roo?” asked my mom.

“She will!” cried my dad. “Even if she won’t admit it.”

“Not that much,” I said. “You should go.”

“She can come with me, Kevin. After finals.”

There was no way I was spending the summer watching
Twist and Shout
every night and living in hotel rooms. “It’ll be fun,” my mom went on. “I’m going to San Francisco in July.”

“Elaine.”

“Kevin.”

“Elaine.”

“What? It’ll be good for her. She’s never been anywhere except summer camp.”

“Didn’t we go over this before?” sighed my dad. “We decided you wouldn’t go on tour unless I could go with you, and Roo could stay with Grandma Suzette.” (Grandma Suzette, my father’s mother, lives nearby. But she was scheduled for foot surgery, so I couldn’t stay with her.)

“I changed my mind,” snapped my mom. “I refuse to stay here and watch you greenhouse every weekend when gay men all across the nation are clamoring to see my show. They even have Elaine Oliver T-shirts in San Francisco; some fans sent me a photograph.”

“That was three years ago.”

“Which is why it’s time to go back.”

“Dad,” I whispered, loud enough for Mom to hear. “When she’s gone, we can eat anything we want.”

“Two months is a long time,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

“It’s done,” snapped my mother. “Ricki booked it yesterday.”

My dad stormed out and spent the rest of the evening hammering away on the greenhouse.

I had no interest in going on tour with my mother. Zero. None. To my way of thinking, it would be a complete waste; she’d be yapping in my ear all the time, feeding me tofu, demanding that I bond with her and never listening to a word I say. I’d have to see her show every night, and have theater managers pinch my cheeks and say, “Oh, Ruby! I’ve heard all about you. It seems like only yesterday your mother was doing that bit about your first menstrual period!” We’d sit in hotel rooms, night after night, watching television, when we could be sitting on the dock in the warm air. I’d miss swimming in the lake, and biking across town, and Meghan had said something about taking me out in her family’s motorboat. I’d miss the painting class I’d signed up for. I’d even miss seeing my father’s garden bloom, and the bumblebees that practically surround our houseboat every summer.

But then, one afternoon, I was coming out of Mr. Wallace’s office after meeting with him about my final H&P paper. I had stopped in the hallway to put my stuff in my backpack, and a voice I recognized said, “Ruby Oliver. Long time.”

It was Gideon Van Deusen. Him with his lovely hairy eyebrows. Back from his cross-country tour.

He was wearing a peace sign T-shirt and a beaded belt. Sunglasses. His hair was longer than last time I’d seen him. He sat down on the bench next to me. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What, no ‘Nice to see you, Gideon’? No, ‘How you been, Gideon?’ Just ‘What are you doing here?’ That’s no kind of greeting.”

“Oh. Um. Sorry, I—” How could I be such a jerk?

“I’m teasing you, Ruby,” he said, laughing. “I need an extra recommendation for Evergreen from Mr. Wallace. There’s this advanced-level history class I want to take and they’re making me get one.”

“When did you get back?”

“Last week. Didn’t Nora tell you?”

I looked down at the floor.

“Or are you two still in a snit?” Gideon smiled.

“Me and almost everyone, actually.”

“She wrote me something like that in an e-mail. But Nora misses you. I know she does.”

“I doubt it.”

“She didn’t say anything directly,” Gideon admitted. “She’s just home a lot, lounging around. Messing with her Instamatic. Shooting baskets in the driveway by herself. Kim and Cricket are all in love, you know. Always out with the boys.”

“Yeah, I know.” I had honestly never thought about what Nora was doing when the rest of us were out with our boyfriends.

“You should call her.”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

We sat there for a minute. I fiddled with the zipper on my backpack.

“I was in Big Sur last month,” Gideon said, finally. “You know where that is? South of San Francisco, along the coast. They have hot springs there, hot water bubbling up from underground, and you go in without any clothes, men and women together, lounging around naked with steam rising up.
²
And I’m learning to surf.”

“Cool.”

“You need a wet suit that far north. It’s cold. But I kept at it and now I can stand up and catch a wave pretty damn good, if I say so myself.”

“Wow.”

“You would love it. You’re a swimmer, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’d be good at it. You have that upper-body strength. Then I drove up to San Francisco,” he went on. “And I heard some awesome bands. You been there?”

“No.”

“It’s amazing. The wildest people walking through the streets. Men in drag. I did an open-mike night with my guitar at this coffeehouse. I pretty much sucked, but I got out in front of people and actually sang, can you believe it?”

“Good for you, rock star.”

“Well.” He laughed. “I felt like a goofball. But hey, I’m never seeing any of those people again, so what the hell?”

“Exactly.” It was very un-Tommy Hazard, getting up and singing badly in front of a crowd, but somehow it made me like Gideon even more.

“I never would have done something like that at Tate,” he said. “When I was here, my whole world was just sports, and parties, and refectory gossip. The Tate universe.”

“Yeah.” I knew all about the Tate universe.

“I’m serious,” Gideon said. “Chinese food like you’ve never eaten. Architecture. Landscapes. Before I came west, I was in the desert in Arizona. I saw the Great Lakes. I hiked some of the Appalachian Trail.”

Mr. Wallace cracked his door and stuck his head out into the hallway. “Van Deusen!” he cried, his face lighting up. “Slumming, are you?” He ushered Gideon in.

I was late for my next class, but I walked there slowly. Thinking about Gideon, naked in the hot spring.

And about San Francisco.

People in general are bad apologizers. Even my dad is—for all his talk about forgiveness. He doesn’t say sorry. He grabs my mom from behind and starts kissing her neck.

“Kevin, I’m still mad at you,” she complains.

“Oh, but you smell good,” he whispers into her throat.

“Kevin!”

“No one smells as good as you,” he moans, or some other ridiculousness, and before long she says, “Fine. Come look at this thing I bought today,” or something like that.

Mom is even worse. She sulks and pouts and storms around the house banging pots and pans, and then after a couple of hours she starts acting like everything’s okay again, and Dad and I are supposed to know that she’s over whatever it was and not to mention it again.

Other people apologize and don’t mean it. “Sorry, but you shouldn’t have …” or “Sorry, but I just didn’t…” They apologize while telling you that they were right all along, which is the opposite of an actual apology.

I am definitely a bad apologizer. I talk too much. I leave the whole thing until way too late, and then I babble on, and end up not saying what I mean and starting whatever argument it was over again. It never comes out right.

Well, truth be told, I usually still think the other person was wrong, and that’s probably why.

The next Thursday, Doctor Z looked down at the list and asked me about Noel. “It was only a rumor,” I said. “About me and him. One of forty-eight rumors, by this point.”

“He’s the one you held hands with at the party?”

“Yeah. He stands on the other side of the studio in Painting Elective now. I never even talk to him.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even think he likes girls.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a mystery.”

“You don’t have feelings for him?”

“It doesn’t matter, even if I did. I told him to fuck off. It’s not like he’d ever talk to me again.”

Doctor Z paused in her know-it-all way, like she was
waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. “Why is he on your list?” she finally asked.

“Do we even need the list anymore?” I asked back. “I mean, what are we going to talk about once it’s finished?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

Silence.

“So why
is
he on your list?” she finally asked.

The thing is, I liked Noel. He was interesting. He was different. He was outside the Tate universe, at least a little bit. When he took me home after the Spring Fling and held my hand at the party, it felt good. I liked talking to him.

The Sunday after Meghan and I went to the Woody Allen festival,
³
I dug my watercolor paints out of the very bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t think I had used them on my own since seventh grade. I got a piece of white paper and folded it in half. “How am I sorry?” I wrote in purple watercolor. “Let me count the ways …”

And inside, I wrote:

1. Like a shark who ate a license plate by mistake.
   

2. Like a movie star caught without her makeup.
   

3. Like a lady with a fancy hairdo, in the rain without an umbrella.
   

4. Like a cat who rolled in jam.
   

5. Like a hungry raccoon that ate its young by mistake.
   

6. Like a neurotic teenage girl, traumatized by recent
   social debacles, who doesn’t know a friend when he looks her in the eye, and gives her a ride home, and offers to ruin his reputation for her.
   

I painted a tiny picture of each person/animal with deep remorse on its face. The last one was me, down in the bottom corner.

It took me a couple of hours, but it looked pretty good when I was done—although the raccoon and the cat were pretty similar, and the rain didn’t seem very rainy. I blew off my Bio/Sex Ed lab, Geometry worksheet and Brit Lit reading to finish it.

The next morning, I put it in Noel’s mail cubby, feeling embarrassed, but also rather well adjusted, if I do say so myself.

I figured I wouldn’t see him until Painting in the afternoon, and I had no idea what to say to him when I did, or whether I should try to put my easel next to his, or what. But I actually got in line right behind him at lunchtime,
⁴
and he was in the middle of negotiating with the lunch lady about whether she’d be willing to put his slice of pizza in the microwave (she was claiming it was hot enough; he was saying it was cold), and he barely even looked at me, and I almost turned around and snuck back out the door of the refectory—but then he reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and held it all the while
he was doing this monologue about the difference in texture between cold mozzarella and hot, while the lunch lady looked at him with murder in her eyes.

He lost the argument, let go of my hand with a final squeeze, took his chilly pizza and went out into the dining hall to sit with a table of freshman girls I’d never noticed before.

I felt like I was walking on air.