The Boyfriend List (4 page)

“Roo!”

“… and look at him in his Speedo swim trunks every morning before I go off to work, while he stays home with the kids. But he’ll never go for it.”

“He’s already married.”

“Oh, yes. That’s another problem. My love is unrequited. Must you add to my misery?”

“Roo, seriously—”

“Mr. Wallace doesn’t love me. I need some more ice cream.”

“—what is the deal with you and Finn?”

Now, the intelligent girl would not have told. The intelligent girl would have said, “Nothing, I swear on my life,” and started talking to Finn like a normal person.

But me, no.

I decided to spill my guts about this minor weirdness from second grade that clearly no one remembered except me and him. I told Kim the whole story. How we had fun looking at the wildlife book, how Katarina and Ariel
teased us, how he’d save swings for me and had still given me that sweet, shrimpy look as recently as last semester.

Kim was my best friend. I wanted her to understand why I had been so weird with Finn. I figured I could tell her everything.

But now, I wish I hadn’t.

Doctor Z didn’t say anything while I told the story about Finn. She just nodded, and looked at me.

At home, my dad is always asking me questions about stuff, wanting to know the details of all my friends and their lives. And my mom is always interrupting anything I’m talking about to tell me stories about when she was young, and how she felt just like I do—only worse. It was weird to talk and have someone listen quietly for half an hour. When I was finished, Doctor Z looked up at the clock and said it was almost time to go, anyway. “Come back Thursday,” she added, “and we’ll do number three.”

Number three on the list is Hutch.

I almost didn’t put him on at all. I’d rather forget the
whole thing. Not that anything drastically bad happened. It’s just that Hutch has become a leper at Tate,
¹
and though I’m sure I’d be a better person if I was comfortable talking to all kinds of people, and if I treated everyone equally—I’m not, and I don’t. It’s sad that he’s a leper. He eats alone. He sits in the back corner of the classrooms. I’m sure he suffers unspeakable indignities in the locker rooms. And I do feel bad when people sneer at him. But he also creeps me out, like he’s gone into this zone of his own Hutch weirdness and he’s thinking his private heavy-metal thoughts and absolutely choosing not to wash his scraggly heavy-metal hair
²
or brush his grayed-out heavy-metal teeth. He says bizarre things if you ever talk to him—as if he’s making in-jokes about stuff that only he could possibly understand.

Like this: Nora sat next to him in Brit Lit. She came in one day wearing a black hoodie. She’s going through an all-black phase. Hutch went, “Nora Van Deusen. Back in black! I hit the sack.”

“What?”

“Back in black! I hit the sack.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” Hutch shook his head like Nora was the town idiot.

“Did you say, hit the sack?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, get in bed, hit the sack?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Hutch muttered. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“It better not be what you meant,” said Nora.

“Whatever,” he said. “I’m just joking with you.”

“It’s not a joke if nobody gets it,” Nora snapped, opening her notebook.
³

Stuff like that. He’d say things that sounded creepy, but you couldn’t figure out what he meant, so if you got mad, you seemed like an idiot. He’d appear to be quoting something, or referring to something—but he’d also know that you’d have no idea what it was—so why was he even talking if he was intentionally not communicating? He was basically talking to himself.
⁴

In fourth grade, Hutch was a laughing, popular boy. I didn’t know what happened, exactly, that made him change. I couldn’t remember when he switched from cool
guy to leper, but in fourth he was cool and he put a huge bag of gummy bears in my mail cubby with a note. I remember feeling happy that someone so confident and golden would notice me. The note didn’t say much. Actually, all it said was “From J.H. (John Hutchinson),” and for a second I worried that he put them in the wrong cubby and they were really meant for Ariel Oliveri—who had, has and probably always will have the mail cubby next to mine. When I looked up, though, Hutch was grinning at me across the hall, so I knew they were for me. I felt weird, because we hadn’t spoken to each other very much, but I spilled some bears into my pocket and ate them very slowly over the course of the day, thinking to myself, Hutch likes me, I got a present from a boy, Hutch likes me, he gave me candy. I said it over and over and over in my mind.

The rest of the bears I took home and hid under my pillow. They lasted a week. I’d eat them at night and think about how I sort of had a boyfriend, and how my dad would kill me if he knew I was eating candy after brushing my teeth.

But although Hutch and I did sit by each other one day at a school assembly, and although I sent him a valentine with two extra candy hearts taped onto it on Valentine’s Day, and although we smiled at each other a bunch for several weeks in a row, we were basically too young to do anything more.

Then one day, I noticed Ariel taking a big bag of gummy bears out of her mail cubby.

“Are those mine?” I asked her.

“No. See?” She showed me a card attached to the bag. It had her name on it. Hutch was smiling from the other side of the hall.

“So he was breaking up with you?” asked Doctor Z. It was two days later, our third appointment.

“I guess.”

“It was hard to tell?”

“I think he was
replacing
me.”

“Oh. Were you angry?”

“No. Why do you say angry?”

“I thought you might be, from the way you described Hutch being a leper with gray heavy-metal teeth.”

“I was just playing around with my vocabulary. I’m not angry.”

“I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.”

“I think I felt relieved. Like it was nice that he liked me, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, or talk to him, so it made me nervous whenever I was at school. When he started liking Ariel, then I didn’t have to angst about it anymore.”

“Talking to a boy who liked you made you anxious?”

“Doesn’t it make everyone anxious?” I asked. “Isn’t that a universal sentiment? You know, sweaty palms, shallow breathing, the symptoms of love?”

“Maybe. But we’re talking about you. A person who has panic attacks.”

None of my friends had spoken to me since Spring Fling. I didn’t even know why.

Not exactly. Not really.

I mean, it was obviously about the whole Jackson debacle, but why Cricket and Nora were on Kim’s side, I had no idea.

On the Tuesday after my first shrink appointment, someone finally
had
spoken to me, and that was worse than the silent treatment. I was in line for a pop and a sandwich that I could take out back to the bench by the library when Nora came up behind me.

I think she would have left if she had seen it was me, but her tray was on the counter and she had grabbed a bottle of juice before she realized I was standing there—so she was kind of stuck.

“Are you mad about something?” I asked her, when the silence was more than I could bear.

She looked at me and sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“About that Xerox?”
⁵
I asked.

“No. Give me some credit already.”

“Then enlighten me.”

Nora’s voice dripped with venom. “You can’t make out with someone else’s boyfriend, Roo,” she said. “That’s so against the rules.”

“What?”

“Rules for dating in a small school? You wrote them yourself.”

“We didn’t make out,” I said. “It was only a kiss.” (This, about the Jackson debacle. It’s a long story. For now, just know that there was ex-boyfriend kissing involved,
and that Jackson was now attached to Kim, making him technically off-limits.)

“Same thing.” Nora shrugged. “He belongs to someone else.”

“It was Jackson,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“He’s my boyfriend more than he is Kim’s.”

“Not true.”

“We went out for six months.”

“Well, you’re not going out anymore.”

“He kissed me back.”

“You started it, Roo. People saw you.”

“But there are circumstances!” I cried. “Can’t you think how I must have felt?”

“I never thought you could betray one of us like that. It’s so wrong.” Nora flashed her lunch card and stepped out of the line, walking fast like she wanted to end the conversation.

I followed. “Don’t you even want to hear my side of it?”

“What side could you possibly have?” She flipped her hair over her shoulder and turned away.

“So you’re dumping me as a friend? Without even talking about it?”

“I don’t even know what kind of friend you are, anymore,” she said, turning back.

I couldn’t believe she was saying this. After what Kim had done to
me.

“Neither does Cricket,” Nora added.

“What?”

“You always talk about official and unofficial,” Nora went on. “And then you just forget about it when it stands in the way of something you want. It’s like you never even think about how there’s other people, and they have feelings.”

“What about Kim?” I was almost yelling. “What about
my
feelings?”

“Kim didn’t cross any lines. She kept to the rules, completely.”

“Says her.”

“She did.”

“How do you know?”

“She’d never do anything like what you did. Everyone saw you kissing him. It was humiliating for her, didn’t you think of that?”

“For her?” My throat was closing up and my vision was blurring. I felt like I was going to have another panic attack. “I have to go,” I said, and bolted out of the refectory into the fresh air, where I followed Doctor Z’s instructions and took deep, calming breaths and tried to think relaxing thoughts, even though I felt like I was going to die, right there, leaning against the rough brick of the building.

That afternoon’s appointment with Doctor Z helped a bit, actually. I told her the Hutch story, and a little about how nobody would talk to me, and it suddenly hit me: I had become Hutch. Well, that makes it sound too dramatic (and also insane). But in the course of two weeks I had gone from reasonably popular to a bona fide leper—
and when I talked, I might as well have been talking to myself, since nobody seemed to understand a thing I said.

The next day at school, I was determined to face the refectory again. I hadn’t eaten lunch there in more than a week, but even lepers need their calories and somehow learn to stand it, eating by themselves in dark corners with their books propped up in front of them, while everyone else is joking and laughing. I couldn’t keep eating on the bench behind the library forever.

At the salad bar, I took a long time making the same combo I always have for lunch. Lettuce, raisins, fried Chinese noodles, baby corn, cheese, black olives, ranch dressing. I fiddled around adding things here and there until I saw Cricket, Kim, Jackson and Nora all sitting down at our regular table.

Finn, who used to sit with us, was eating with a bunch of guys from the soccer team.

Hutch sat in a corner wearing an iPod and looking very interested in his hamburger.

There was a table full of boys right in front of me: Shiv (#11 on my list), Cabbie (#15), Matt (Jackson’s best friend), Kyle (another of Jackson’s friends), Pete (Cricket’s new boyfriend) and Josh (who was just obnoxious). I couldn’t bring myself to face them.

Katarina and her set would probably tolerate me—I mean, I didn’t think they’d push me off my chair or anything—but I knew that they’d all heard Kim’s side of things, and heard her call me a slut in Mr. Wallace’s class, and that I wouldn’t exactly be welcome at their table. Plus Heidi
was there, and she’s Jackson’s old girlfriend, and the last thing I wanted to face was the weird new sisterly sympathy she had started affecting (like the same man hath done us both wrong and we should share our sob stories), when less than two weeks ago she’d been completely jealous and catty because I was the girlfriend of the boy she liked.