E. Lockhart - Real Live Boyfriends

“There’s going to be a full bar!” snapped my mother, as if he were an idiot. “People will bond. They’ll talk over recipes and give each other tips.”

“Not everyone is as into meatloaf as you are,” Dad cautioned.

“Comfort food is a new trend in restaurants,” Mom said.

“Are they gonna eat in the same place they cooked?” I wanted to know. “Like on a table covered with scraps of raw meat?”

“An hour is a long time to wait for your meal,” Dad said. “I don’t know if just drinks will cut it. Isn’t this a family kind of place?”

“If you’re letting kids in there, the hygiene issues are going to be even more serious,” I argued. “What if they get snot in their meatloaf? What if they drool? Are you really going to just stick a snot meatloaf in the oven and serve it to a customer? Even if it’s the customer’s own snot?”

“I’m not certain you’re going to find investors for this, Elaine,” my dad said gently.

“Why are you two so unsupportive?” Mom exploded. “All I do is support, support, support both of you, all the time!”

“It’s ten thousand dollars a month,” said Dad. “In the year before we send Ruby to college.”

“This kind of attitude is just what I’m talking about!” she cried. “You can’t even imagine for a single second that something of mine is going to be a success, can you? You can’t think that it might make money and pay for Ruby’s damn college.”

“It’s a meatloafery,” I said. “You’re not even a chef.”

“It’s make your own !” she said, stamping her feet.

“Elaine,” said Dad, in a pleading tone of voice. “I’m not trying to be unsupportive. I—”

“You’re cutting me down!” said Mom. “Neither of you lets me even finish explaining my business plan. You think you’re so quick, so clever, making me feel stupid. But is that a positive way to deal with other people? Is it?”

I knew she was partly right. But she was so unsympathetic. She was living with two broken people, two people deep in the pain of Reginald. 4My grandmother was dead. My true love had turned cold. Dad’s mother was gone. And Mom acted like our sadness was one big irritant: an obstacle in her quests for smoked meat, yogic enlightenment and performance-art fame.

“I’m cutting you down because it’s a stupid idea,” I told her.

The rest of the evening did not go well.

1 I still eat things with eggs and dairy in them, not because it doesn’t upset me the way those are produced (it does), but because I’m not perfect. Also, my quest for deliciousness, especially in the form of baked goods, makes it pretty much impossible to say goodbye to butter. But maybe I’ll give it up when I’m older and more mature. 2 Muffin: Bland person. Mildly pleasant, but lacking in spice, novelty and deliciousness. 3 Perhaps I should note here that my mother has no culinary training, no business experience and, apparently, no sense of her own limitations. 4 Reginald is what Doctor Z and I call the grieving process, or a process of accepting the difficult things that have happened. Because phrases like grieving process make me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

The Wenchery of Cricket and Kim!

Parent Questionnaire

Please fill this form out as soon as possible so we can begin helping your child in his or her college applications process .

How do you see your child?

As little as possible.

What kind of education do you want for your child?

One that doesn’t require me to fill out stupid questionnaires. Also, one that’s free.

What are your child’s strengths and weaknesses?

Ruby is self-involved and neurotic. She may be a repressed lesbian.

She may be an anorexic.

As for strengths: she is superb at making stingingly unkind remarks.

From your observation, what subjects is your child most interested in?

Staring at the television. Moping. Acting superior.

What is your educational background, and that of your spouse?

Nothing that prepared us in any way for the horrors of raising a teenager.

—written with black Sharpie in my mom’s large, loopy cursive on Dittmar’s printout.

My senior year went on.

Without Noel.

Without Noel.

I worked at the zoo.

I did a lot of homework.

I swam after school.

Without Noel.

I sent away for college applications.

I walked Polka-dot.

I went to therapy.

Without Noel.

Doing all these things, I cried a lot.

My dad cried a lot too.

My mom butterflied a lamb, stuffed it with rosemary and garlic and invited people over for dinner.

The headmaster made me write a formal apology note to Dittmar promising never to disrupt his class again. During CAP Workshop, my Noel radar was in such a massive frenzy, I felt like I was going to have a panic attack every time I went—but I managed not to by taking off my glasses and letting the whole room blur, then singing retro metal songs in my head, ignoring everything Dittmar or anyone else said. We will

We will

ROCK YOU .

( Clap!

Dum dum

Clap!) 1

I still knew where he was, and my heart bounded every time he spoke, but Noel was just a soft outline of himself, not real Noel with his mouth in a thin line, making jokes with hateful, hateful Ariel Olivieri. I didn’t feel guilt over his knee, which was still heavily wrapped, or guilt over wakeboarding with Gideon. At least, I didn’t feel those things until I put my glasses back on and stopped singing in my head.

Mom brought an entire dead piglet home and dismembered it. She ground bits of it up to make sausage and left its head sitting in the fridge while she researched ways of serving it.

I dared to suggest that this was a deeply inconsiderate and even cruel thing to do when one of the people you lived with had been a vegetarian for three years, and in response, Mom filled out Dittmar’s parent questionnaire with the most obnoxious things she could think of to write and shoved it in my backpack. And as a performance artist, she writes obnoxious things professionally .

I found it at school during Calc. At first I thought, Ag, I have to turn this sheet of full-on madness in to Dittmar and he’s going to think I’m even more insane than he already does. It’s really going to hurt my chances in terms of getting any actual advice from him for my college applications—plus he’ll show it to the other teachers and they’ll all think I come from a completely certifiable family, and that’s even without knowing that we found my dad this morning sitting in the shower stall wearing only his underwear and staring blankly at the tiles.

But then I thought: I don’t have to give this paper to Dittmar.

I can tell him my parents keep not filling it out. Eventually, he’ll forget about it.

I know better now than to throw any kind of incriminating document in the school trash can, so I ripped the questionnaire into tiny, tiny shreds and flushed it down the toilet.