The Boy Book (3 page)

We wrote the Rules partly because we were annoyed with Meghan, who had hooked up with Bick in the middle of the summer and was always necking with him or sitting in his lap in public places. But we also wrote them because we knew that having real and actual boyfriends might begin to split up our foursome if we didn’t lay down some guidelines.

And we tried to stick to the rules.

But remember that one about how it’s okay to steal someone’s boyfriend if you think it’s “meant to be”?

I thought up that stupid rule myself. And Kim followed it.

Here’s what you need to know:

Jackson Clarke was my boyfriend for most of sophomore year. We were together. That was that.

Then Kim stole him. She felt that things with her and Jackson were “meant to be,” and it was fate. She said she never touched him until he and I were broken up. She said she followed all the rules—and everyone (Cricket and Nora) thought I’d get over it.

But I didn’t. I started having panic attacks—these horrible episodes where my heart was pounding and I couldn’t breathe and I thought I was going to die, only I wasn’t dying at all; I was just neurotic.
¹
I had to start seeing a shrink.

When Kim went away on the weekend of a big dance, Jackson invited me to go to Spring Fling. As friends. For old times’ sake. To make it up to me, because he felt so bad about what had happened.

We ended up alone in the moonlight, and I kissed him.

He kissed me back.

We got caught.

All my friends hated me for blatantly not following the Rules for Dating and for betraying Kim, and Kim—she hated me even more. I became a leper and a famous slut.

So I was starting junior year in a seriously compromised position. My status vis-à-vis the various people I used to hang out with was as follows:

1. Kim: Not speaking. But far away in Tokyo.

2. Cricket: Not speaking.

3. Katarina, Ariel and Heidi: Informally not speaking. Meaning they were probably talking crap behind my back, but would say hello if absolutely necessary.

4. Nora: Speaking—sort of. She and I chatted a couple of times this summer when we bumped into each other outside of school. But she hadn’t called me or anything.

5. Girls I knew from swim team and lacrosse (sporty girls): Speaking to say hello. But none of them had been my friends, really, anyway.

6. Noel: Didn’t care what anyone thought.

7. Meghan: Didn’t have any other friends.

8. Hutch: Didn’t speak to anyone at school anyhow.

9. And Jackson. The big one: Not speaking.

That was the hardest part of going back to school this year. Seeing Jackson. Remembering how we’d noticed each other on the first day last year. Seeing his freckled arms reaching down to pick up his backpack and knowing I’d never touch them again. Seeing him sit there during assembly, talking to Kyle and Matt, as if he didn’t even know I was in the room.

At one point on the second day of school, he was two people behind me on line for lunch, and I was so flustered I dropped my change purse and money fell all over the floor. I had to move my tray out of the way so other people could pay, and balance it under my arm while I bent down to try to get at least the quarters before I died of embarrassment.

No one offered to help.

Jackson didn’t even turn around.

I left the pennies and nickels on the dirty tiles.

“It was like he didn’t know I existed,” I said to Doctor Z that afternoon. “Like my entire human body had ceased to be visible. Like the fact that he had ever even known me had been wiped from his mind.”

“Did you
want
to talk to him?” she asked me.

“No, I didn’t want to talk to him,” I snapped. “Do you think he could have been turned into a pod-robot over the summer?”
²

Doctor Z didn’t answer. She rarely does when I say ridiculous stuff.

“Last night my mother said she thinks he never had any feelings to begin with and he’s a horrible boy,” I went on. “She saw him with his mom down at Pike Place Market and claimed she was disgusted at what an unexpressive individual he was and did I know if his mom had had a nose job or did her face always look that way.”

“Um-hm.”

“But then again, she never did like Mrs. Clarke, and she always gets into such a thing against anyone who’s been mean to me,” I said. “It’s one of the hazards of being an only child. So I don’t know that I credit her opinion.” I picked at my fingernails while I talked. “Then my dad said, ‘Elaine, he’s a teenager,’ and started going on about how conflicted and guilty Jackson must feel, and how he probably just seems like a pod-robot because he’s got so many feelings inside that he doesn’t know how to handle.”

“What did you say to that?” asked Doctor Z.

“Nothing. But my mom got mad that my dad was taking Jackson’s side and my dad said he
wasn’t
taking sides. That was the point, he was seeing
all
sides.”

“And?”

“I pointed out that he couldn’t say
all
sides, he had to say
both
sides, because there were only two.”

Doctor Z cracked a smile. I love it when I get her to do that. She crossed her legs and let one Birkenstock sandal dangle off her sock foot. “I see,” she said.

Doctor Z, by the way, is my shrink. The one I started seeing when I first had the panic attacks. I go to her twice a week.

She’s African American and wears lots of crafty-type clothing on the order of batik blouses, bead necklaces and one superhorrible crocheted poncho. She wears glasses with red rims. Her office is next to a mall, in a medical building full of dermatologists and dentists, but she’s decorated it so it’s cozy.

I like her well enough, and there’s no doubt I’m feeling better in the panic attack department, but she also annoys me no end. I used to angst about her writing down all kinds of shrinky-type things about me as soon as I left her office. Like:

“Ruby Oliver, focused on grammatical particulars when she should be thinking through the emotional resonances of her father’s defense of ex-boyfriend,” or “Ruby Oliver, leaving change on the refectory floor in symbolic expression of personal loss of said ex-boyfriend,”

or “Ruby Oliver, suffering from paranoid delusion that said ex-boyfriend is actually a pod-robot,” or “Ruby Oliver, still obsessed with ex-boyfriend.”

But now I’ve learned not to care. “I’m just glad I got through the first two days without having a panic thing,” I said. “I had to do a little deep breathing now and then, but I didn’t go mental.”

“Um-hm.”

“Don’t you think I deserve a prize or maybe a small plaque? Perhaps a medal with my name engraved?”

“For what?”

“For getting through not only the first but the second day of school without a breakdown.”

“Do you want me to congratulate you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why not?”

“Congratulations, Ruby,” she said. “But I don’t think you need my affirmation. Your own sense of well-being is what matters.”

“When I dropped the money was the worst,” I said. “I couldn’t believe he didn’t even turn around.”

“What did you want him to do, Ruby?”

I had wanted him to see me as a damsel in distress and come to my aid and touch my hand and feel a rush of desire and remorse. I had wanted him to notice my legs in my fishnet stockings as I knelt on the floor to pick up the quarters. “Nothing,” I said. “I just could feel him ignoring me from across the room. Only it was a different kind of ignoring from last year. Because Kim’s gone, probably.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m doing Reginald
³
today,” I said. “You can ignore me.”

“I’m not going to ignore you,” said Doctor Z, popping a square of Nicorette gum. “This is therapy. You have my complete attention.”

My sixteenth birthday was in August. My parents took me out for dinner at a restaurant by the water that makes great fried zucchini and puts umbrellas in the drinks, and Meghan gave me a box with five lip gloss colors in it.

That was it.

But I did get my driver’s license, and neither of my parents needed the car on Tuesday afternoon, so after the Doctor Z appointment I swung into the mall next door, jumped out to buy a blackberry smoothie from the frozen yogurt stand, got back in the Honda, and drove to an interview I had for a part-time job.

Not a lot of kids at Tate Prep have to work after school. They don’t need the money. Finn Murphy, Kim’s stud-muffin ex-boyfriend, mans the counter at the B&O Espresso—this great coffee bar with amazing cakes and batik prints on all the tablecloths—but he’s the only other person I know of on scholarship.

Me, I needed to work. And no way was I babysitting anymore. That kid was like a vomit machine.

The Woodland Park Zoo, where I had the interview, is extremely pretty. They keep the animals in these nice naturalistic enclosures. And they have an internship program where you get paid a little honorarium and you muck out stalls or take school groups around, and learn about zookeeping.

I parked and found the administration building. A woman named Anya, who was wearing an ugly brown zoo uniform, took me into her office and sat me down on a hard folding chair. “Tell me about your work experience, Ruby.”

“Babysitting is pretty much it,” I said. “This would be my first real job.”

“And what makes you want to join our team here at the zoo?”

Doctor Z had made a big pitch for my finding some alternative thing to spin my brain around on. I mean, I swim in fall and play lacrosse in spring, and I read mystery novels and watch way too many movies, but I didn’t really have any
interests
that occupied my mental energies, as she put it, and with school starting I would now be forced to spend all day every day at the exact place where all the badness happened last year, a place that was still filled with psychological weirdness and horror—which then made me seriously in danger of spending all my free time fixating on stuff Jackson once said to me, or imagining him fooling around with Kim, or obsessing on what happened and what I could have done to make stuff turn out differently—or at least how I might have retained some smidgen of dignity. And when my mind goes round and round like that, I start to feel panicky.

So Doctor Z wanted me to have a distraction. At first she said I should consider a hobby, something creative, but when I said knitting and stuff like that makes me gag, she said she meant something that would occupy my thoughts.

“I’m interested in animals,” I said to Anya. “In how they behave. I read this book,
The Hidden Life of Dogs,
about the social dynamics of all these dogs that live in this one house. One was the alpha dog, and he bossed the others around, but when he wasn’t there the whole dynamic changed.”

“Oh?”

“And I read how there were these gay penguins at a zoo in Berlin. A number of them, actually. And one of the penguin couples adopted a rock, instead of an egg, and they’d sit on it to keep it warm.”

“Yes, I read about that,” said Anya, and I wondered if she thought I was a complete idiot. I mean, I really was interested in this stuff, but a list of goofy factoids wasn’t about to qualify me to muck out a goat pen or answer tour group questions on the food chain.

“Did you read about the polar bear that got depressed?” I babbled on. “I think it was in New York City. His name was Gus, and he was so miserable all alone in his cage that he started OCD-ing and he would swim back and forth for hours at a time, as if he couldn’t stop.”

She didn’t say anything.

“They helped him out by giving him toys and putting his food in hard-to-reach places, so he had to like rip open this plastic jar to get the fish inside. And they gave him peanut butter, too—he’d lick it off whatever it was. So he had stuff to keep him entertained, and he stopped OCD-ing.”

“Yes, we have toys for our polar bears here, as well,” said Anya.

“But it makes me think,” I said—because once I’m on a roll I don’t stop; I’m like my mom that way—“It makes me think that zoos are problematic. I mean, I know they’re important for education, and they get people to care about the animals in the first place so students will want to study them and so people can do stuff to prevent extinction. But if the animals are getting depressed, and they always seem to be having trouble mating in captivity, then there’s got to be something horrible about zoos, as well. I mean,
I’d
be a madman if I was locked up somewhere with a bunch of polar bears staring at
me
all day.”