The Boy Book (2 page)

I wondered if he sent the e-mail to more than one person, but then I decided I didn’t care. I had only one official friend (Meghan), and I couldn’t afford to get huffy. So I wrote him back:

Number of Popsicles consumed in a single sitting: 3.5.

Number of times my dad said, “Where did those Popsicles go? I was sure I had some in here”: six.

Person who is annoying me: my mother. Twenty seconds ago she went, “Ruby, I notice there is a lot of your stuff lying around the living room,” because she read a book called
Empower Your Girl Child
that told her not to tell me to pick up my damn stuff, because that kind of authoritative directive subjugates me when I’m supposed to be developing my autonomy. Instead, she’s supposed to remark on something I’m doing that she doesn’t like, using the phrase “I notice,” and then wait for me to make an independent decision to take the socially responsible action of…picking up my damn stuff.

Only I am wise to her wily parenting ways, because I read her book when she wasn’t looking!

Person who is making me laugh right now: John Belushi.
⁵
(No, not here. That would be seriously weird and highly disturbing. On TV.)

Person I can see out my dad’s office window: Hutch.
⁶

Person who has her driver’s license and permission to borrow the Honda on weekends:

Roo!

Roo!

Roo!

And Noel wrote back:

Why Hutch outside window?

And I wrote back:

He helps my dad in the greenhouse. Kevin Oliver = sole employee and proprietor of a gardening catalog/ newsletter/extremely boring publication entitled
Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.

Hutch got a haircut.

Noel didn’t reply. But on that first day of school he asked me to be his Chem lab partner. Even though we didn’t have to do a lab until Thursday.

I nodded. After class, we headed toward the refectory for lunch, and Noel lit a cigarette, not caring if any teachers could see him.

I looked at his pale skin and his bony hand clutching the smoke, and he’d written “through page 40” on his knuckles in blue ink. I was thinking how good it was to see him, and how even though we hadn’t seen each other all summer, maybe we’d be friends, at least of the hanging-out-at-school sort, and also how he was really quite cute in an anemic sort of way, when Noel tossed his cigarette in the garbage and grabbed my arm. We were ten yards from the refectory entrance.

“Just a sec,” he said. “You can come with me if you want—” And he pulled me around the side of the building, behind a bush where no one could see us from the path.

I thought for a second he was going to kiss me and I didn’t know if I wanted him to because I hadn’t thought it was leading to that even though we had held hands that one time at the Spring Fling afterparty but maybe I did want it to lead to that—and his pale neck looked beautiful and his gray-green eyes had a sparkle and yes, I did want to.

But would he really kiss me right there in the middle of the Tate campus, halfway to lunch?

And was it a good idea for a person (me) with a bad reputation to be making out in the bushes on the first day of school?

Then Noel pulled an orange plastic tube out of his jacket pocket, inhaled, stuck it in his mouth and pressed the top down. He breathed in and out a few times, then put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, looking at the ground.

I could see the white skin of his back, between the top of his cords and his coat.

He stood up and puffed again.

He wasn’t going to kiss me at all.

I felt like an idiot.

“Don’t angst,” Noel said, looking at my shocked face. “It’s not crack.”

“I know,” I said, though I hadn’t been sure. Not being a crack smoker myself.

“I probably should have explained ahead of time. It’s kind of creepy to drag you into the bushes and force you to watch me inhale controlled substances.” He stood up and shoved the tube back in his pocket.

“You’re asthmatic,” I said, after a second.

“Since I was four.”
⁷

“But you smoke.”

“Yeah.”

“That can’t be good.”

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

Noel sighed. “Because it fucking annoys me. ‘Noel, don’t forget your medicine.’ ‘Noel, stay inside—it’s dusty out today.’ ‘Noel, don’t work yourself too hard.’ ‘Noel, check in with the nurse.’ ‘Noel, don’t do this, don’t do that.’”

“Harsh.”

“It’s like—I hate having restrictions. The doctor said I shouldn’t go on overnights without a parent. I shouldn’t go to summer camp. I shouldn’t travel to dusty or polleny locations. She even said I shouldn’t run cross-country. That I should pick something that doesn’t push the lungs for such a long time.”

“But you do run.”

“Exactly. And I went to summer camp. And I travel without regard to the pollen count. Because I want to prove I can.”

“The smoking is like that?”

“In a sick way, yeah.” He laughed. “I don’t want them telling me I can’t.”

“You’re a madman.”

“So they tell me.” Noel changed the subject. “Hey, it’s pizza day. You getting that, or salad bar?”

“What I want is one of those sticky buns,” I answered.

We left the bushes and went into the refectory.

Had we just had some kind of moment? Not a kissing moment like I’d thought, but a little intimate thing where he was letting me in somehow?

Maybe Noel had told me a secret.

Or maybe he took all his friends—sophomore girls and Painting Elective people, whoever (he was always hanging around with
someone
)—maybe he took all of them in the bushes too. In fact, maybe I was the last person in the Tate Universe to have the Noel DuBoise bush/puffer experience.

I couldn’t tell.

We got on line. I ordered a sticky bun and made myself the same salad I always get: lettuce, raisins, fried Chinese noodles, baby corn, cheese, black olives, ranch dressing. Noel got pizza. I couldn’t find Meghan, but I didn’t know what her schedule was. Maybe she’d had lunch already.

We sat down at one of the junior tables.

Cricket and Nora were two rows over. My ex-friends. Where I would have been, if life had been different.

I felt a rush of gratitude to Noel for not leaving me to eat lunch alone on the first day of school.

He tossed his head in their direction. “I went to that Yamamoto thing last week,” he said apologetically. “She invited me.”

I shrugged. Kim had always thought Noel was cool.

“I know you wouldn’t be caught dead there,” he went on, giving me more credit than I deserved, “but I can give you a report if you want a little light entertainment.”

Then he recapped the news about the skinny-dipping and the boobs, adding the details of the soggy blue panties and Cabbie’s photographs.

“Oh my God!” I said, indignant on Nora’s behalf. “He can’t go showing those around school.”

Noel leaned back in his chair. “I judge him capable of pretty much anything.”

“Nora would be shattered.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, more shattered than almost anyone else I know.”

“So?” He shoved a piece of pizza crust into his mouth.

“So what?”

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“Me?”

“Cabbie has got to be stopped.”

“And you think I’m gonna stop him?”

“All right,” said Noel. “What are
we
gonna do about it, then?”

By the time we stacked our trays by the kitchen door, Noel and I had formed the Hooter Rescue Commission, the purpose of which was to recover the photographs of Nora Van Deusen’s private, personal boobs from the nefarious and nearly unstoppable Cabbie, aka Shep Cabot.

Rules for Dating in a Small School

1. Don’t kiss in the refectory or any other small, enclosed space. It annoys everyone.

2. Don’t let your boyfriend walk with his hand on your butt, either. It is even more annoying than kissing.

3. If your friend has no date for Spring Fling and you already have one, you must do reconnaissance work and find out who might be available to take your friend.

4. Never, ever, kiss someone else’s official boyfriend. If status is unclear, ask around and find out. Don’t necessarily believe the boy on this question. Double-check your facts.

5. If your friend has already said she likes a boy, don’t you go liking him too. She’s got dibs.

6. That is—unless you’re certain it is truly “meant to be.” Because if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, and who are we to stand in the way of true love, just because Tate is so stupidly small?

7. Don’t ignore your friends if you’ve got a boyfriend. This school is too small for us not to notice your absence.

8. Tell your friends every little detail! We promise to keep it just between us.

—entry from
The Boy Book,
written by me, with Kim, Cricket and Nora leaning over my shoulder as I wrote. Approximate date: early October, sophomore year.

k
im Yamamoto had been my best friend since kindergarten. She is the only child of a brain surgeon and a cardiac surgeon, and has a warm way of talking to people that makes you feel like she really likes you.

And she did. Really like me.

Since I was Roo, she became Kanga. In the beginning, we played around doing the usual kid stuff together—dolls and soccer and jumping on the bed. Later, sleepovers and nail polish and boy bands and trying to do the splits. Kim has a real mouth on her when she’s angry, and she yelled at anyone who made fun of my glasses. In middle school, she’d come to my house and stay for dinner whenever the Doctors Yamamoto were too tightly scheduled to pick her up.

Somewhere along the way, around fourth grade, we befriended curvy, bookish, laughing Nora, and then in eighth grade this girl called Cricket with white-blond hair and pastel clothes. None of us knew what to think of her when she first got to school, until she started making these fortune-tellers out of paper.

We had all given up paper fortune-tellers in sixth grade, but Cricket made them funny. “You will make out in the grass behind the refectory with the guy who sits nearest you in math.” Or “You won’t amount to much, but you’ll see a lot of action.”

So we decided we loved her, and the four of us went through Tate Prep in relative harmony and popularity–not ruling our class (Ariel, Katarina and Heidi did that), but not lepers, either.

One night late in eighth grade when I was sleeping over at Kim’s, she and I started our joint notebook, which we kept until late sophomore year, when everything went wrong. In it, we wrote the most important bits of data we had on the male species. We decorated the notebook with silver wrapping paper, and deemed its all-important contents only for the eyes of the truly worthy. (That is, Cricket and Nora.)

We called it
The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them
(
A Kanga-Roo Production
), like it was a nature book about wolverines or something.

Which it pretty much was.

The Boy Book
was a work in progress. Most entries were never officially finished: we added on to a topic as new information came to light, or as new stuff happened to us. Cricket and Nora would read it and write comments in the margins. Sometimes we had to tape in extra sheets of paper to make room for a particularly important subject; other pages were scribbled over with pseudo jargon declaring an entry “disproven by scientific experiment” or saying that “studies now demonstrate contradictory findings! Ref. page 49.”

The “Rules for Dating in a Small School” were written by me with help from everyone else during a brief but glorious period at the start of sophomore year when Cricket was going out (well, more like making out) with this guy Kaleb from her summer drama camp, Kim was going out with Finn the stud-muffin and I was going out with Jackson Clarke. Nora wasn’t going out with anyone, but then, Nora didn’t seem to want to, so that was okay. Anyhow, with this glut of boyfriends, we were feeling quite pleased with life.