The Boyfriend List (7 page)

My dad found a parking space and we marched into the B&O, him all beaming and talking about the teen hangouts of his youth, the merits of different coffee beans and the importance of whole milk in cappuccinos. I scanned the room, my heart thumping.

But Jackson wasn’t there.

And neither was Heidi.

Some artist types sat at a table for six, sucking down espresso. Kim was at the counter, writing an essay on her laptop. Finn was behind the register, wearing a black apron and gazing at her with big moony eyes.

Where were Jackson and Heidi? Had they seen Kim and decided to go elsewhere for more privacy?

Or had they finished up quickly and gone their separate ways?

Or had they finished up quickly because they had fallen madly back in love with each other and were even now making out in the Dodge Dart Swinger, steaming up the windows?
³

My dad clapped Kim on the back in greeting and
started quizzing Finn about professional-level milk-steaming methods.

“Where’s Jackson?” I whispered to Kim. “How long were they here?” She knew the whole situation, of course.

“He
never came,
” Kim whispered back. “Finn has been here since three o’clock.”

“What?” I could handle it when I knew where they’d be—but now it seemed like Jackson and Heidi had gone off to do some private thing between the two of them, like I didn’t even exist. I wondered if he’d even lied to me about what the plans were.
⁴

My dad was having the time of his life, so pleased to be in his own daughter’s hangout, drinking cappuccino with her real live friends. He ordered cake. He flipped through the ads for rock shows in the local free paper and imagined he was going to buy tickets to something. I tried to be a good sport and act like I was enjoying myself. He’s a sweet dad, he completely is, and he meant well and was trying to bond, and who can blame him for not noticing that I was nearly out of my mind with anxiety?
⁵

Jackson called when my dad and I got home. He wanted to come over. We sat on the deck, even though it was cold, to get some privacy.

He and Heidi had played tennis, for old times’ sake. They were so evenly matched and it was something they used to do together. Then they had talked in the restaurant area of their country club. Heidi wanted to get back together with him, Jackson said. She didn’t understand why things had broken off so suddenly. But he didn’t want to. Heidi was fun and superbeautiful and all, but she wasn’t that interesting. “I told her I was with you,” he said, taking my hand. “Roo, please don’t feel upset. I’ve never felt like this with anyone before I met you.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Good,” he said, leaning in. “I hoped not.”

We kissed in the cold air for a long time.

But the truth is, I never felt the same after that. Not really. Look back and reread what Jackson actually said when he told me about his afternoon with Heidi. True, he said he wanted me, had never felt like this before. But he also said Heidi was superbeautiful and fun, and that they’d played tennis for old times’ sake, because they were so well matched, blah blah blah.

Now, if your entire focus was on making your
new
girlfriend feel better about your feelings for your
old
girlfriend, would you mix your declaration of love in with nostalgia about tennis games and the superbeauty of the old girlfriend?

No.

You would only do that if you were still thinking about the beauty and the tennis.

It’s not that I think anything happened with Heidi that day, or that Jackson was lying about how he felt toward me. It’s more that I realized he had this history with other girls, and I couldn’t stop him thinking about them, and he
would
think about them even when he was looking me in the eye.

It shattered something inside me that hadn’t been broken before.

So then I had Heidi radar on top of the Beth-Ann-Courtney radar.

And now I have Kim radar.

All the way until the end of the school year, I could
barely walk across the quad without evil vibrations attacking me from all directions. Ag! Kim on the staircase! Heidi in French class! Triple threat of Beth-Ann-Courtney in the library, wearing pastels and having good hair days! The evil was everywhere—and just writing that sentence proves to me that I’m seriously messed up and thank goodness my mother made me start seeing Doctor Z because I am obviously about to go off the deep end, even after all this time has passed.

Believe me, I know the actual truth is that these are all nice girls. Some of them even used to be my friends. And I firmly believe that women should not get all cruel and petty with each other over men, because how on earth will we run companies and countries if we’re preoccupied with someone else’s big boobs in a pink sweater set?

In H&P, Mr. Wallace was talking about this kind of problem (we were covering the feminist movement), and I so agreed with the points he made about what he called “self-defeating antagonism between members of oppressed groups.” Translated from Wallace jargon, that means that if people want to fight for their rights and actually see some action, then they have to stick together and not be pissy with each other about little things.

My problem is I can think whatever I think—girl power, solidarity, Gloria Steinem rah rah rah
⁶
—but I still feel the way I feel.

Which is jealous. And pissy about little things.

Maybe the stuff that went wrong between Jackson and me
made
me feel insecure, and that’s why I got jealous of Beth/Ann/Courtney/Heidi. Or maybe I felt that way to start with out of some sour meanness in my soul, and my neurotic jealousy is part of why things went wrong in the first place. I’m not sure.

I only know that I felt this way—and I still feel this way. Even though Jackson and I are broken up.

I wish I felt different. I’d like to walk into the refectory and not have any radar at all. I’d like to just go in there, make my raisin salad and eat my damn lunch without a care in the world. But I doubt if it’s happening anytime soon. Right now I’m still lucky to get through a meal without a panic attack.

When I was in seventh grade, Tommy Hazard was a blond California boy, a top surfer for his age. He wore bright color-block shorts and had a smile that showed his slightly crooked front teeth. His voice was low, so when he talked it was like you were the only person in the world who could hear it. He had a blue ten-speed bike and would ride me on the handlebars. He smelled faintly of chlorine from his family’s swimming pool, and the two of us would spend warm afternoons with our feet in the water, holding hands and watching the clouds go by.

In eighth grade, Tommy Hazard had a Mohawk and rode a skateboard. He could play electric guitar, and hung out at an underage punk-rock club downtown. He always
had a novel in his back pocket, and he bought his clothes at vintage shops, like I did. He seemed tough, but on the inside he was vulnerable and kind.

By the time I was in ninth grade, Tommy Hazard was old enough to drive, and he rode an old Vespa scooter. His helmet was painted with zebra stripes, and I’d ride along behind him with my arms around his narrow waist. Tommy’s hair was shaggy and dark, and he wore an old sharkskin suit and a narrow tie; he had a darkroom in the garage of his family’s house, and when he was alone he’d go in there and develop the most beautiful black-and-white photographs. He took a lot of pictures of me, saying he didn’t want to miss a moment.

Then I met Jackson, and now there is no Tommy Hazard. He’s just gone.

Kim still has him, I bet. Her Tommy was always the same, whereas mine was always changing.

We invented Tommy Hazard on our seventh-grade day hike, which was basically a bunch of harassed teachers trying to move our twelve-year-old butts up a mountain and get us to like it, while we all gossiped and wished we were at the mall.

We ran out of stuff to talk about halfway up the trail.

We walked in silence for a mile or so; then we made up Tommy Hazard. He was the perfect boy. The boy who was never obnoxious in math; the boy who never threw spitballs, or pushed anyone on the playground; the boy with clear skin and a sense of purpose; the boy who never did anything stupid in gym class or the talent show; the boy who knew the answers in class but didn’t say them;
the boy who was beautiful; the boy who was cool; the boy who could have any girl he wanted—and all he wanted was me. Or Kim.

Tommy became our boyfriend from seventh grade on, and we’d hold him up as an ideal whenever we talked about actual boys. For example, Kim went out with Kyle for two weeks in eighth grade, and when she broke up with him, she said, “He was okay. But let’s face it, he was no Tommy Hazard.” Or I’d catch sight of a cute boy in a movie theater, and say, “Kim! Look over there! I think it’s Tommy Hazard!”

During the long periods where no boys liked us and there weren’t even any decent boys for us to like, we made plans with Tommy. Tommy took me to see old movies at the Variety. He took Kim out in a canoe. He put his arm around me in the theater. He stopped paddling and kissed Kim, out there in the middle of the lake.

These were the Hazard core elements, agreed upon by both of us:

He never embarrassed us.

He did something more interesting than watching TV after school.

He was a great kisser.

He held our hands in public.

And he was utterly confident, but weak in the knees whenever he saw us.

Beyond that, we personalized him. My Tommy was always changing: surfer boy, skate punk, mod—those were only the top three. Sometimes he was a boisterous athlete; sometimes a quiet poet. He was the boy everyone knew;
or the boy no one besides me ever noticed. Sometimes he had a tasty foreign accent; sometimes he played piano. He was muscled. Or he was slight. He was white, black, Asian, anything.

Kim’s Tommy Hazard was always the same. She refined him over the years, adding and subtracting minor qualities, but fundamentally he was consistent. Tommy Hazard à la Kim had traveled all over with his family; he was an adventurous eater (she loves spicy food and gets irritated by people who only eat pasta and peanut butter); he was a boatsman (she sails); a film buff; a good student. He was older, he was popular, he was tall.

“He’s out there, somewhere,” Kim said to me, the summer after ninth grade. We were walking through the open-air market, down by Puget Sound, looking at woven bags and bead earrings and handmade wooden puzzles. We had been talking Tommy Hazard for the past half hour. “I really do think so,” Kim went on.

“What do you mean, out there?”

“I don’t mean Tommy Hazard, like he looks the way I think he looks,” she said. “I mean someone who’s the one for me, and I’m the one for him.”

“True love.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She fingered a batik pillow, shopping while she talked. “But more like destiny. Or fate. I know it’s silly, but I kind of feel that if I keep thinking about him, someday he’ll show up.”

“How will you know? Love at first sight?”

“Maybe. Or it could sneak up on us. My mom says one day she ‘just knew’ that my dad was the one.”

“Really? How?”

“A feeling,” said Kim. “They had been dating for nine months. But they got married three days later. Once she knew, she knew.” I couldn’t picture the Doctors Yamamoto doing anything so romantic.
¹

“I don’t know if there’s a
one
for me,” I said. “I think I might like variety.”

In tenth grade, poor Finn the stud-muffin still had to compete with Tommy Hazard. Kim liked Finn, she did, but he was a bland-food eater (not even pepper) and had never traveled out of the Pacific Northwest. He wasn’t “the one.” He was “for now.”

In any case, after I told her the whole story about me and Finn in second grade, the sweet shrimpy looks and the “sittin’ in a tree” and all that, I did make an effort to talk to him like a normal person. On top of the weirdness of having avoided him all those years, though, it was strange trying to have a conversation when I knew stuff about him like whether he had chest hair (no, but a little on the stomach), what he smelled like (soap) and what his room looked like (he still had a stuffed panda on his bed). My first few attempts were failures.

“What’s up, Finn?”

“Not much. How are you?”

“Good.”

“Good.”

Like that.

Tate Prep has all these charity initiatives—you have to do a certain amount of community service each term. In late October, all the sophomores grouped together to create a Halloween party for kids at a local YMCA on a Saturday afternoon. We had to come in costume. I was a cat in a black minidress, fishnet stockings, a fake-fur jacket and ears. Cricket was a cricket, which involved antennae and a green leotard. Nora was Medusa. Kim was a ballet dancer in a pink tutu.

Most of the boys were firefighters or cowboys or something else manly-manly, but Finn was a black cat too—at least that’s what he looked like. He wore a black turtleneck and black jeans, a long tail and gloves that had claws on them. His face was all black greasepaint, and he had a hood with ears coming out of it that looked like it was probably leftover from a Batman costume the year before. It was a very un-Tommy Hazard kind of outfit.

Mr. Wallace was organizing us. He had retained his dignity and dressed as Albert Einstein. This involved wearing a suit (he’s usually in khakis), graying out his hair and wearing a sign on his back that said “E=mc
²
,” in case no one could tell (which no one could, until we read the sign). “You kitty cats,” he said, pointing at me and Finn, shortly after we arrived at the YMCA, “you man the face-painting table.”

Finn and I sat down at a table filled with odds and
ends of makeup heisted from the drama department storage room. “He called me a kitty cat. Can’t you tell I’m a panther?” Finn said to me. “Look at my claws.” He held his hands up.

“You’ll have to take them off to put makeup on the kids,” I said.

“Damn. Then I’ll look like a kitty.”

“What’s wrong with a kitty? I’m a kitty.”

“No insult to kitties,” said Finn, smiling. “That’s just not what I am. I’m a panther.”

“I have to tell you,” I said. “You look pretty kittyish to me.”

“Hey, did you know a panther is really a black leopard?” he asked. “If you look closely, you can actually see the spots underneath the black.”

“You got that from me,” I said. “From the nature book.”

“Nuh-uh. I got it from watching the Discovery Channel.”

“Finn! I told you that in second grade. Don’t you remember, in the library?”

He changed the subject. “How can I be more panthery?” he mused, sorting through the makeup on the table. “Do you think I need whiskers?”

“Your face is black. You can’t put whiskers on.” Kim and Nora were across the way from us, setting up a pumpkin-carving table.

“Red. What about red whiskers? Then I’d be scary.” He took off his gloves and picked up a lipstick. “Where’s the mirror?”

I handed it over. He opened the lipstick and started drawing fat red lines across his face. He had no idea how to do it. It was a disaster. “You look like Freddy Krueger,”
²
I said. “Especially if you put the gloves back on.”

“Damn! Now I’m some Freddy Krueger kitty cat.” He was laughing. “Maybe I should give up and be a dude in black.”

“Let me help.” I took a tissue and some cold cream and wiped the makeup off Finn’s cheeks. Then I redid his black greasepaint and used a makeup brush to draw thin red whiskers on his face. “Much better. Now you’re so the panther.”

I finished with his face and looked up. Kim was staring over at us from the pumpkin table, her eyes narrowed. “Mine,” she mouthed, pointing at Finn.

I put the makeup brush down and busied myself organizing the greasepaints.

Finn and I didn’t talk much the rest of the day—or ever again. I pretty much ignored him. It didn’t seem worth it. But even so, on the bus ride back he and Kim got in a whispered argument in the seat behind me and Nora.

“So thanks a lot,” she hissed at him, as the bus pulled out of the parking lot.

“What?”

“You know.”

“What?”

“Finn, don’t give me that.”

“What?”

“If you don’t know, I’m not telling you.”

“Kim, please. Whatever it is, I’ll make it up to you.”

“You were ignoring me all afternoon.”

“I was not!”

“Especially after you didn’t come to dinner with my parents last night, I’d think you could bother to hang out with me in school.”

“I had to work. There wasn’t anything I could do.”

“You could have got a sub.”

Finn sighed. “I had to work because I need the money, Kim.”
³

“Fine. So ignore me all day, then. Just ignore me forever.” And then, as we got off the bus and stepped into the Tate parking lot, she really let him have it. When Kim stops beating around the bush and says what she really thinks—look out. She let forth a string of obscenities in English and Japanese, and told him she never wanted to see him again. There was no reasoning with her. Once she’s decided she’s right and someone else is wrong, there’s nothing anyone can do to change her mind. Everyone was standing around in the parking lot, listening and kind of pretending that they weren’t. It was a real scene. Finally, Kim stormed off to the girls’ bathroom and locked herself in a stall. Cricket and Nora and I went in there and tried to make her feel better, but she asked us to leave her alone, so we did.

The stud-muffin was in the doghouse for days after this—Kim called me that night and told me he had known about her parents’ dinner party for weeks, and had said he would come, and when he didn’t, all these annoying friends of her mother’s had spent the evening asking where her mysterious vanishing boyfriend was, ha ha ha—and then he’d eaten lunch the next day with a bunch of soccer players, and if he wasn’t going to pay attention to her and do stuff with her, why was he her boyfriend anyway and he could just go fuck himself.

I thought she was wrong, but I didn’t say anything. She was my best friend. And three days later they were cuddling tog ether in the library, so everything was okay.

When I got home that afternoon, my parents were in a fight. They were going to a costume party, and my mom wanted my dad to be a taco with her. She had spent the day at home, building a giant taco suit out of colored foam rubber, crepe paper and twine. She was going to be the filling, and my dad was supposed to be the shell.