The Boyfriend List (2 page)

Doctor Z laughed. “Sure. I can do that. Are you having any interesting dreams?”

“No.”

“All right, then.” We sat in silence for a bit. “Tell me something about your family.”

This was easy. I have a riff on my family. I spin into it whenever anybody asks me, because my parents are different than most of the people at Tate Prep, the school I’ve been going to since kindergarten. Tate is for rich kids, mainly. Kids whose parents buy them BMWs when they turn sixteen. The dads are plastic surgeons and lawyers and heads of department store chains and big companies. Or they work for Microsoft. The moms are lawyers too—or they do volunteer work and have great hair. Everyone lives in big houses with views and decks and hot tubs (Seattle people love hot tubs), and they take European vacations.

My folks are madmen by comparison. They send me to Tate on scholarship because “education is everything,” according to them. We live in a houseboat, which Kim and Cricket and Nora think is fun but which is actually a horror, because I have
no privacy
(none at all, because the whole house is tiny and built on an open plan, so if I want to be alone I have to go into my microscopic bedroom and shut the door and even then my mom can hear every word
I say on the telephone), and because the area in Seattle where the houseboats are is completely far from anywhere you’d want to go, and the buses run only once an hour. The other problem with the houseboat is bees. My dad runs an obscure garden tip newsletter and seed catalog from his home office:
Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.
The houseboat has a wraparound deck, and on every square inch of that thing are unusual breeds of peonies, miniature roses, lilies, you name it. If it blooms and you can grow it in a tub of dirt in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve got it. Which means we’ve also got bumblebees, all summer long, buzzing around our front door and sneaking in through the window screens whenever they can.

My mother won’t set up a bug zapper. She says we’ve got to live in harmony with them. And truthfully, none of us has ever been stung. Mom is a performance artist (and part-time-at-home copy editor, to pay the bills), which means that she does these long monologues about herself and her life and her opinions about public policy and bug zappers. She gets hysterical onstage, yelling into the microphone and doing sound effects.

She’s no longer allowed to talk about me in her shows. Not since “Ruby’s First Period” became a major part of a monologue called
Elaine Oliver: Feel the Noise!
I only found out that my personal bodily fluids were her topic on opening night, when Kim and Nora and I were all sitting in the audience together (we were twelve). I died right there, stopped breathing, turned blue and went into rigor mortis in the middle of the Empty Space Theater’s second row.

Dad had a talk with her, and she promised never to mention me onstage again.

I’ve gone through this riff a million times. It’s a good way to keep a conversation going, and a good way to prep a friend so she knows she’s not finding any BMWs or flat-screen TVs when she comes over. But it sounded different in the psychologist’s office. Doctor Z kept going “Umm-hmm” and “Oh, aha,” as I was talking, as if she was planning on writing down shrinky-type things as soon as my fifty-minute appointment was up. Stuff like: “Ruby Oliver, obsessed with getting her period, brings it up at first meeting.” Or, “Ruby Oliver, fixated on bumblebees.”

“Shows considerable anxiety about having less money than her friends.”

“Needs father’s help to stop her mother from embarrassing her.”

“First menstrual period, obviously a traumatic episode.”

“Thinking about hot tubs and privacy. Therefore, thinking about sex.”

Suddenly, the whole riff seemed weirdly revealing.

I shut up.

Doctor Z and I sat there in silence for twelve minutes. I know, because I watched the clock. I spent the time wondering if someone made that poncho for her, or she made it herself, or she actually bought it at a crafts fair. Then I looked at my low-rise jeans and the frayed edges of the 1950s bowling shirt I was wearing, and wondered if she was thinking mean stuff about my outfit too.

Finally, Doctor Z crossed her legs and said, “Why do you think you’re here, Ruby?”

“My parents are paranoid.”

“Paranoid, how?”

“They’re worried I’ll lose my mind and get anorexic or depressed. They figure therapy will head it off.”

“Do
you
think you’ll get anorexic or depressed?”

“No.”

A pause. “Then why do you think you had those panic attacks?”

“Like I told you, it was a bad week.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m still in the middle of it,” I said. “Who knows if Jackson and me are really broken up? Because just the other night he kissed me, or maybe I kissed him, and he keeps looking at me, and he came back to this party I had and was all upset about this thing that happened.”

“What?”

“Just a thing. It’s too hard to explain. And I don’t know why Cricket and Nora have stopped talking to me, but it’s suddenly like we’re not even friends anymore; and I had a fight with Noel, and I don’t know why Cabbie asked me out, or why I’m going. I think he must want something. Oh, and this other guy, Angelo—he’s probably never talking to me again—but then again, maybe he will. Basically, I’ve got no idea what’s going on in my own life. That’s why I can’t talk about it.”

I was not going to reach for that annoying box of tissues, no matter what. I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t end up crying. “Maybe it’s not a bad week,” I joked.
“Maybe it’s a bad month. But I can’t explain it—until I can explain it—and right now, I can’t.”

“Jackson is your boyfriend?” asked Doctor Z.

“Was,” I said. “Until two weeks ago. We might get back together.”

“And who is Cabbie?”

“Just some guy. Shep Cabot. We’re going out tomorrow night.”

“And Angelo?”

“Just some other guy.”

“Noel?”

“He’s just a friend.”

“That’s a lot of justs,” said Doctor Z. “And a lot of guys.”

Before you know it, she had me promising to write up the Boyfriend List. She said it would give us something to talk about next week—and that our time was up.

1
I think Doctor Z is wrong here. Official does
too
matter, because having an official boyfriend changes everything: how people treat you at school, how you feel when the phone rings, what kind of gum you chew (mint if you have a boyfriend, because you might kiss him at any moment, but bubble gum otherwise). And that leads me to this problem: How are you supposed to know when it’s official? Do you have to say “boyfriend” in front of the guy and not have him flinch? Or does
he
have to say it, as in, “This is my girlfriend, Ruby”? Does he have to meet your parents? Or hold your hand in public?
   
Meghan says, four weeks after the first kiss it’s official—but what if you break up for one of those weeks? That happened to my friend Cricket when she was going out with Tommy Parrish.
   
I was hoping there’d be a set of guidelines handed out in Sex Ed class, but Sex Ed—when I finally got to take it—was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people. Like how to tell what it means when someone forgets to call you when he said he would, or what to do when someone gropes your boob in a movie theater.
   
I think there should be a class on
that.

2
Okay, she didn’t say knitting. She said, “something creative,” some kind of hobby where I make things. But knitting is the kind of thing she meant.

3
Meghan was never exactly my friend, but she lives two blocks from me and when she got her license in December she started carpooling me to school every morning. Actually, she’s not really friends with anyone, except her boyfriend, Bick. He’s a senior. Frankly, Meghan’s a girl the other girls don’t like. When Josh Ballard pulled her pants down in eighth-grade gym class (juvenile, I know, but there you have it), she was wearing pink bikini panties and she turned around like three times in shock, showing them off, before she yanked her shorts back up. And she and Bick went into the bathroom of the bus station when we took a school trip to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and came out twenty minutes later looking hot and sweaty. Plus she just radiates sex appeal even though she’s usually wearing some old flannel shirt, which is very annoying.

4
In case you don’t know already, panic attacks are episodes where a person feels a sense of massive anxiety; she thinks she can’t breathe, her heart rate speeds up, that kind of thing. If a person has them all the time, she probably has a panic
disorder.
Important: Doctor Z says these breathing problems and heart-pounding things can also be symptoms of actual physical problems, so see a doctor, no matter what, if anything like this happens to you.

5
One of my all-time favorite words.
Debacle:
A sudden, complete, ludicrous downfall.

6
Ag! Once you start seeing a shrink, everything you say sounds dirty.

7
Thank god she let me keep my bra on; no way was I showing my boobs to the mother of my carpool driver.

Adam was this boy that I used to stare at in preschool. His hair was too long, that’s why. It stuck out behind his ears and trailed down his neck, whereas all the other five-year-old boys had bowl haircuts. I didn’t have too much hair myself—it didn’t grow fast and my mom was always trimming it with her nail scissors—so I was a little obsessed with hair.

Adam’s last name was Cox, and after I had been eyeing him for a couple of months, I named this stuffed bunny I had after him. All the grown-ups laughed when I said the bunny’s name was Cox, and I didn’t understand why.
¹

Pretty soon, Adam and I were playing together. Our parents took us to the zoo, and we’d spend time after school in the nearby playground, drawing with chalk and walking up the slide. I remember we went swimming a few times at the YMCA, and hung out in a plastic wading pool in his backyard. His cat had kittens, and I got to help name them because I came over the same morning they were born.

And that was it.

We were only five years old.

When I was old enough for kindergarten, I started at Tate Prep and he went somewhere else.

Doctor Z looked down at the Boyfriend List. She didn’t seem too impressed with my Adam Cox story. Or maybe it was the list itself she didn’t think much of—though it had taken me a lot of work to do. I started the night after our first appointment, in bed in my pajamas, writing on this thick, cream-colored stationery my grandma Suzette got me. It says Ruby Denise Oliver on the top in this great curlicue font—but I never use it, since anyone I’d want to write to has e-mail.

My first draft, I only wrote down Jackson and Cabbie. Then I added Gideon at the beginning, with a question mark next to his name. Then Michael, the guy who was my first kiss—putting him in between Gideon and Jackson.

Then I turned off my light and tried to go to sleep.

No luck.

Well, I wasn’t sleeping well lately anyway—but I lay there with this feeling that the list wasn’t finished. I
remembered that I’d told Doctor Z about Angelo already, so I turned the light back on and squeezed him in between Jackson and Cabbie.

Oh, and I had mentioned Noel to Doctor Z, too—though we were only friends. I stuck him in right after Jackson, just to have somewhere to put him. Then I rewrote the list in nice handwriting and managed to get myself to sleep—but in the middle of the night I woke up and wrote down two more boys and my History & Politics teacher.

Then I crossed them all out.

At breakfast the next morning, I jumped up from my cereal bowl and put one of them back on.

At school, the hallway by the mail cubbies suddenly seemed like an obstacle course of old crushes and rejections. Shiv Neel. Finn Murphy. Hutch (ag). All three in my face before I even got to my first class. I pulled out the list and wrote them down.

All day long, I thought about boys. (Well, even more than usual.) And the more I thought, the more I remembered.

Adam, the mermaid.

Sky, the jerk.

Ben, the golden boy.

Tommy, who surfed.

Chase, who gave me the necklace.

Billy, who squeezed my boob.

Never in a million years would I have expected the list to be anywhere near so long. But by the end of the day, there were fifteen names on there, and the list was all
scribbly-looking, with arrows zooming around to show what order the boys should really go in.

It was a mess, so during geometry I recopied it on the stationery in my best writing and threw the old one away.
²
Then I tucked it into a matching envelope to give to Doctor Z.

“Why did you stop playing with Adam?” Doctor Z wanted to know.

“I told you, I started a different school.”

“Is there something more?” she said, looking at me over those red-rimmed glasses.

“No.”

I had liked making the list, it was kind of fun. But ag. What was the point of talking about something from ten years ago that wasn’t even important? Zoo trips with Adam Cox and his mom weren’t exactly significant to my mental development.

Not that there was anything
else
I wanted to talk about.

I just wanted the panic attacks to stop.

And the hollow, sore feeling in my chest to go away.

And to feel like I could make it through lunch period without choking back tears.

And Jackson. I wanted Jackson back.

And my friends.

“Did you ever see him again?”

“Who?” I had forgotten what we were talking about.

“Adam,” said Doctor Z.

Actually, I did see Adam Cox at an “interschool mixer” two years ago, when I was in eighth grade. Tate Prep is completely small, and so are some of the other private schools in Seattle. The guidance counselors or someone else concerned with our adolescent adjustment decided to try and foster what they called “wider social opportunities for the students, outside the competitive arena of sporting events.” Translation: there was going to be a dance. Only they didn’t call it a dance, they called it an interschool mixer.

The night I saw Adam Cox again started with us all over at Cricket’s house, getting ready and eating cheese puffs. Here’s Cricket: cool and blond and wearing pastels, which is a real fake-out because she’s the most hyperactive, sarcastic girl I know. Here’s Nora: wearing a red shirt that makes her look dramatic; laughing about her boobs-puffing them out and shaking them around, so funny that she had such big ones that early. Here’s Kim: sleek, black Japanese hair almost to her waist, a bohemian peasant shirt and no makeup. Here’s me, Ruby: just discovered thrift stores, jeans and my zebra-print glasses, plus a beaded blue sweater that cost me $7.89 at a store called Zelda’s Closet.

I’m not telling you what I look like in any detail. I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine’s physical attributes: “She had piercing blue eyes and a heaving milk-white bosom blah blah,” or “She hated her frizzy hair and fat ankles blah blah, blah blah.” First of all, it’s boring. You should be able to imagine me without all the gory details
of my hairstyle or the size of my thighs. And second, it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who’s ideal—or completely shattered. Give me a break. People have
got to
be smarter than that.
³

Anyway, here’s us: Kim, Roo, Cricket and Nora. We weren’t—and aren’t—the really, really popular ones. That’s Katarina, Ariel and Heidi, girls my History & Politics teacher
⁴
would call the ruling class
⁵
of the Tate universe.
⁶
And we weren’t the bottom of the social strata either—
there’s a bunch of kids who lie low at Tate, don’t go to parties and dances, don’t act in plays or sit around on the quad on sunny days; they seem to just do their work and maybe play some sports or serve on planning committees. Nobody gossips about them.

So the four of us were
reasonably
popular—not
really, really—
but popular enough.

We started hanging around as a foursome at the start of eighth grade, although Kim and I had been friends since kindergarten, when people teased her about what was in her lunchbox (red-bean cake and tofu) and I traded because I don’t like peanut butter anyway and that’s what my mother always packed. We’ve been close ever since, and because I was Roo, she became Kanga. Then Nora joined up with us a couple of years later—giggly, bookish, tall and curvy Nora with her huge basement full of dress-up clothes and her ever-present Instamatic camera. Then bawdy, loudmouth Cricket came to school in September of eighth grade, and one day at the start of that year, we were all four sitting in the way-back of the bus on the class field trip to the natural history museum. We were fooling around and laughing and putting our feet up on the seat in front, making fortune-tellers out of folded paper and writing scandalous fortunes inside—until finally a teacher came back and yelled at us, which made us laugh even harder.

Suddenly, after that, Cricket was like our leader. Kim and I were still best friends, sleeping over at each other’s houses and talking on the phone for hours every night, but we spent a huge amount of time over at Cricket’s house, which is completely deluxe—even bigger than Kim’s, and
even fancier than Nora’s. It has six bedrooms, and a pool, and a sauna, and a hot tub, and two refrigerators. Cricket’s room has its own stereo and TV. Her mom works long hours, and Cricket’s older sister, Starling, had a car. Starting in eighth grade, we’d ride home with her after school and watch TV and splash around in Cricket’s hot tub until our parents came to pick us up before dinner.

At Cricket’s house, we did a lot of things you could only do without supervision. Nora baked batches of chocolate chip cookies and we ate them all; we sat topless in the sauna; we copied each other’s homework; we watched R-rated movies from her mom’s DVD collection; we sent instant messages to boys we thought were hot, using a secret identity.

Actually, we still do most of these things.

At least, we did until the three of them stopped talking to me.

The night I saw Adam Cox again I felt pretty good. We all felt pretty good, but it is a sad truth that I have learned: Dances are generally more fun to think about and get ready for than they actually are when you get there. The “mixer” was a dark gymnasium with some music playing, and a bunch of people I didn’t know milling around. That’s it. Nora and Cricket went off and danced together, and lots of the girls were dancing in groups—but the boys stood around the edges of the room and splashed each other with punch until a teacher came by and made them stop.

Kim and I amused ourselves by trying to decide which Tate boy we wished would ask us to dance. Shiv Neel.
Billy Krespin. Noel DuBoise. Kyle Greco. “See the guy in the blue shirt?” Kim said. We had been standing there, not dancing, for a long time.

“Yeah.”

“He was looking at you just now.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“No, really.”

“That one?” I looked at the boy she was pointing to. He didn’t go to our school. He had dark eyebrows and shaggy hair. “Wait! I know him!”

Kim widened her eyes. “Get out.”

“I do. From when we were little.”

“He’s so cute.”

Our discussion went on for like ten more minutes, detailing
how
he was cute, who he was cuter than, whose type he was, what we thought of his style, how old he probably was, what movie star he looked like—the kind of thing that’s completely interesting when you’re talking about it with your best friend, and boring as hell when you read it written down. The end result was that Kim wanted to meet him, and although my palms were sweating and my clothes suddenly seemed all wrong, I walked over to where Adam was goofing around with his friends, Kim trailing behind me.

“Are you Adam Cox?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“Why you want to know.”

“I’m Ruby Oliver. We used to play together.”

“Play together?” One of his friends started laughing
like it was some kind of sex joke. “She says Adam used to play with her! Hey, Adam, did you get some play?”

“Don’t you remember?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Adam shrugged.

“What about the mermaid game?” I said. (We used to play this mermaid game.)

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In the splashy pool,” I said, to remind him.

“Beats me.”

“You know how your cat had kittens and I helped name them?” I said.

“Yeah, right.” He sounded sarcastic. “Meow.”

His friends chuckled. “Who’s the girl?” one of them called. “Are you two playing kitty cats?”

I took a deep breath. “This is my friend Kim. We go to Tate.”

Adam turned his back. “I have no idea what she wants with me,” he said to his friends. “Four-eyes.”

My face felt hot. “Come on, Kim,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go.”

Kim has this quality. It’s a great quality—until it’s turned against you. She’s quiet, she doesn’t rock the boat. But if you really make her mad, she goes nuts. It’s like she spends all this time being a good person, holding up ideals, getting good grades and being nice—and then when someone else fails to live up to her standards, she goes on a rampage. She lit into Adam Cox right there in the middle of the mixer. She walked up and stuck her chin in his chest (he was a lot taller than her), looked up and called him a flabby, low-life, eyebrow-headed mermaid.