Real Live Boyfriends (9 page)

“I live
with
you!” I cried. “I have eaten raw food for breakfast and dinner every day for months and months. How am I not going to react to that?”

“You’re supposed to show respect for what I’m doing,” Mom said.

At this juncture in a classic Ruby/Elaine argument, Dad would typically be intervening and saying that yes, it was healthy for us to be sharing our deep feelings, but he thought that maybe we could benefit from some mediation and could he just hear each person’s point of view voiced calmly? Only he didn’t.

“You don’t mean respect,” I told her. “You mean you want me to be quiet and let you boss me around the way you boss Dad.”

“I do
not
boss your father,” said my mother, teeth gritted.

“I’m allowed to say if I want dessert! I can to ask to borrow the car! That’s just basic conversation when you live with someone.”

“Take it back!”

“What?”

“About your father. Take it back.”

“Take it back? We’re not in fourth grade here.”

“Take it back, Ruby. I do not boss him.”

“I’m not taking anything back,” I said.

I knew I was being mean.

I knew I had picked a fight and done it in a completely public place, which was horrible.

completely public place, which was horrible.

And I knew I must seem shallow to my mother.

But still, I felt right. She
was
a crap listener. A boss.

A foll ower of fads. She
was all those things
—and just then, at least, it seemed desperately important that someone point that out to her.

“I don’t need to take anything back,” I said.

“Because everything I’ve said is true.”

“Kevin, get the car,” my mom said, grabbing his arm and practically yanking him up from the table.

Dad fumbled for his wall et as if wondering how much the meal would cost.

“Don’t give her money!” barked Mom. “I can’t believe you’d stop to give her money after the way she’s acted.”

She snatched the wall et from him and marched out of Snappy Dragon. My dad shrugged on his jacket and followed her, mumbling an apology to Hutch.

I stood at our table, choking with rage and embarrassment and wondering how on earth I was going to pay for what must be a seventy-dollar meal with the twenty dollars in my bag.

Then I realized that the figure dressed in black, standing by the cash register, was Noel.

Meghan spotted him when I did and in typical fashion ran up and threw her arms around him in a full-

body hug.1 She grabbed Noel by the arm and pulled him toward our table. He looked wan and tired from the cross-country flight, and he hadn’t put any gell in his hair, so it hung down softly over his forehead. He wore a shabby black trench coat I hadn’t seen before and a T-shirt that read EASILY DISTRACTED BY SHINY OBJECTS.

“Ruby’s mom just had a ginormous fit and yelled at her,” Meghan was saying. “I don’t know if you saw.” Noel nodded. “I’ve been here awhile, actually.” Ag.

He saw me say all those horrible things to my mother.

He saw me make a scene in a restaurant.

He saw me ruin Hutch’s going-away party.

Ag.

A month ago it would have been fine.

A month ago, Noel was my real live boyfriend and I would have trusted him to understand why I had acted the way I did. Or to forgive me if he didn’t understand it.

But now—I was disgusted with myself; there was no reason he wouldn’t be disgusted with me. Yet at the same time I felt like screaming at him: It’s your fault.

Don’t you see that? If you’d just called me like a real boyfriend, and showed up here to say goodbye to Hutch like a real friend, I would never have been so lonely inside and tangled. If you had showed up, I never would have yelled at my mother and everything would be fine right now.

But I’m not so crazy that I said that out loud.

“Hi, Ruby,” Noel said as I sat there at the food-covered table, staring at him with my eyes overflowing. “It’s great to see you.”

I couldn’t talk.

He was still standing on the other side of the table.

Wasn’t he coming around? Wasn’t he going to explain, or kiss me so I’d know everything was okay?

Didn’t he see I was crying? Wouldn’t he take me in his arms?

No, I realized.

He wasn’t going to hug me, or kiss me, or even smile at me.

He was just saying “It’s great to see you” like a pod-robot. A very, very attractive pod-robot, but a pod-robot still.

I had had a boyfriend turn into a pod-robot before.

Jackson.

I bolted.

I yanked the twenty-dollar Bill from my bag and shoved it at Meghan, saying, “I’ll pay you back for the rest, I promise,” and blurting out the word
sorry
to Hutch, I ran out of the restaurant and down the block.

In the movies, when a heroine bolts from a difficult situation, the night is black and the empty rain-slicked streets nearly glow. The shot cuts to a few minutes later. She is far from the scene and the people giving her angst, walking picturesquely through the night while some tortured music plays.

But life is not a movie, as I am continually forced to acknowledge, and I stumbled out of Snappy Dragon into sunshine, since in Seattle it doesn’t get dark until after nine in the summer. There was no sound track of agonized contemplation, no empty landscape.

Instead, there were cars honking and people running errands or going to dinner. Everything looked ordinary and uncinematic.

I ran about a block and then stopped. I had no money for the bus and I had forgotten my house keys.

They were in my jacket, draped over the back of a chair in Snappy Dragon.

I was going to have to go back.

I sank to the sidewalk, leaning against a mailbox.

Maybe Noel would run down the street after me.

Was he coming? His coat flapping behind him as he called, “Ruby, wait! Let me explain!” Was he?

No.

He wasn’t coming.

Each minute that passed made it clearer.

It wasn’t romantic or intense to have bolted.

It was just mental.

Meghan’s Jeep pulled up alongside where I was sitting. She popped the door and called, “I’ve got your jacket. Get in.”

“I’m never leaving this mailbox,” I moaned.

“You have to leave the mailbox.”

“No, I don’t. The mailbox is my only friend. It will protect me against pod-robots and my own lack of sanity. hello, darling mailbox. You are my savior and protector.”

“Leave the mailbox, Roo. I’m your friend.”

“ ’Cause you feel sorry for me. Mailbox doesn’t feel sorry for me. Mailbox admires my ambulatory legs and opposable thumbs. Mailbox worships me and will lay down her life for me.”

“Roo.”

“Mailbox wants you to know that I’m so sorry I left you with the check.”

“Oh, shut up!” cried Meghan. “I put it on the credit card. You know my mom pays it for me every month.

She never even looks at the bill.”

“Seriously? I did not know that, actually.”

“Can we have this conversation in the car?

Please?”

I sniffed. “Where’s Noel?”

“Driving Hutch home.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“He asked if you were okay.”

“What did you say?”

“I said obviously you were
not
okay and he should go after you.”

“And he said?”

“Will you get in the car, Roo?”

“Do you think he’s turned into a pod-robot like Jackson did?”

“No.”

“He seemed like a pod-robot. He didn’t even hug me.”

“Will you just get in the car already?”

“I love you, mailbox. You have been very, very good to me,” I said, patting it. “I will come back and visit you often, even if it means I have to hide from the staff of Snappy Dragon, who will probably pour soup on my head if I ever set foot near their restaurant again.”

“Get in!” barked Meghan. “You have ceased to be amusing.”

I got in.

The girl had my house keys.

Meghan pulled into traffic and said: “So Noel was all, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.’ ”

“What?”

“He sat down at the table and ate a fortune cookie and said he didn’t know what to do. Then even Hutch said he should go after you, and Noel put his head down on the table.”

“Why?”

“He said, ‘I can’t deal right now.’ ” Meghan shrugged. “So I got the check.”

Ag.

“I don’t know what his problem is,” Meghan went on.

“He needs to go to boyfriend school.”

I sniffed again. “Maybe. But I can’t expect him to go running after me when he just got into town and I’m crying like an infant and my parents hate me and I made a scene in the restaurant.”

“You can too. He’s supposed to go after you if you’re upset. Finn would never leave me crying on the street talking to a mailbox.”

No. None of Meghan’s boyfriends would ever have done that.

“You have bad luck with guys, Roo,” Meghan went on. “It’s like, you pick ones who have zero talent at being boyfriends.”

“Jackson was a good boyfriend.”

“Jackson? Please.”

“He was a good boyfriend to Kim, at least,” I said,

“if not to me. He was
capable
of being a good boyfriend.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Meghan sarcastically. “He cheated on her and then dumped her at school. Roo, hello?”

“Whatever. The problem is obviously me. Guys don’t want mental-patient girlfriends. Except in the movies.”2

Meghan pulled the Jeep into her driveway. “Noel should have gone after you. Even if he wants to break up, he should still have gone after you.”

“Maybe,” I said, looking at beautiful Meghan in the setting sunlight.

Her reddish brown curls hung across her shoulders.

She wore a pair of Finn’s old jeans and a Tate Prep tank top. Even though I knew most of the girls at school hated her, even though I knew she had lost her dad and saw a shrink, even though she couldn’t
really
be as oblivious to pain and weirdness in her heart as she seemed on a day-to-day basis—sometimes I wished I were Meghan instead of me.

Because she never seemed to second-guess her thoughts.

Me, I second-guess everything.

1
This is precisely the kind of behavior that
makes girls generally hate Meghan. Like:
Why does she need to be rubbing her sexy
body up against my boyfriend’s torso?

Why?

But I have learned to ignore this aspect
of her because she is so freaking nice to
me—and in this case, I was grateful. There
I was, red-faced with embarrassment,
anger and tears, and she was able to act
like nothing tragic had happened
.

2
Movies where a quality guy loves a girl
and sticks with her even though she’s one
or another kind of insane—maybe
alcoholic, maybe addict, maybe psychotic
or depressed:
Mad Love, When a Man

Loves a Woman, Bed of Roses, Benny and

Joon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless

Mind, 50 First Dates, Almost Famous,

Proof, Center Stage, The Hours, My Sassy

Girl, What Dreams May Come, Rachel

Getting Married, Forrest Gump
(if you
consider him a quality guy) and
Betty Blue
.

But in real life, I think it’s more likely the
guy gets sick of the girl’s insane behavior
and goes off with a nice normal person to
live happily ever after. And who can blame
him?

Surprise Kissing!

e-mail from Hutch:

I am eating a strange pretzel in the airport. It is
warm, with cinnamon sugar and frosting. Long
and thin, not normal pretzel shape. Like the baby
of a cinnamon bun and a pretzel
.

Seems wrong, somehow
.

My flight doesn’t leave for another hour
.

The real purpose of this e-mail: Are you okay?

I wrote back:

Sorry about last night
.

Again, sorry sorry sorry
.