E. Lockhart - Real Live Boyfriends

“Everything’s okay,” I said. “But I can’t go out with you anymore.”

1 A turducken is a boned chicken stuffed into a boned duck stuffed into a partly boned turkey, all layered in with stuffing and—well, it’s a triple-crown meat extravaganza, that’s all you need to know. 2 Movies where the safe responsible guy is revealed as a jerk—thus freeing the heroine to leave him for someone more exciting: Desperately Seeking Susan; The Wedding Singer; The Holiday; Legally Blonde; Sliding Doors; French Kiss; Bring It On; Working Girl; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; George of the Jungle . 3 Movies where a brooding, even sulky guy seems like a good idea for a quality boyfriend: Twilight, 10 Things I Hate About You, Edward Scissorhands, Pump Up the Volume, Heathers (until the end), The Breakfast Club, The Bourne Identity, Grosse Pointe Blank, Angel Eyes, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Beauty and the Beast, Reality Bites, Donnie Darko, Wuthering Heights, Good Will Hunting, The Piano, Rebecca, Rebel Without a Cause . 4 Like me, not knowing about Noel’s witnessing that car accident. Not knowing Booth had died, at all. 5 Because he’s busy brooding.

Emotional Breakdown in the Parking Lot!

Peer Questionnaire

Please fill out this form by November 22 for the peer or peers who have requested your help with their college admissions process .

Reminder: Please take your responsibilities as a peer commenter seriously. A helpful response can assist someone in finding the right college!

What are your peer’s strengths?

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She gets so stoked about things. A camera. A film she’s seen. An idea in her lit class. She waves her hands and jumps and talks, and no matter how you’re feeling, you can’t help but get excited about it too—whatever it is.

Also, she’s amazing with animals.

Also, she is the wittiest person I know.

Also, she cares. About doing a good job. About how people feel.

What are your peer’s weaknesses?

Self-loathing.

In what career do you imagine your peer excelling?

Ruby could run a bake shop. Ruby could be a zoologist. Ruby could be a swim coach or a charity fund-raiser or a cinema historian or a controversial feminist. But she wants to be a filmmaker.

And what Ruby wants, she usually gets.

I think that’s what she’ll be.

What does your peer do in his or her free time?

She makes films. She makes doughnuts.

She makes people laugh.

She looks after pygmy goats and potbellied pigs.

She makes the world seem shiny and sunlit.

My family survived Thanksgiving by inviting Meghan and Dr. Flack over to eat with us. It’s just the two of them in that big house, and I think usually they go visit a relative, but this year they were going to be home. Meghan said they were planning to eat at a restaurant, which sounded sad to me on Thanksgiving, so I invited them.

Before dinner, we watched Hannah and Her Sisters , because that’s the perfect Thanksgiving movie, in my opinion, and Meghan had never seen it. Dr. Flack let Dad pontificate about bonsai plants and winter blooms as he showed her through the greenhouse. My mother made the turducken, and I made a thing with butternut squash and like six pounds of cheese that I read about in a cookbook, and also a thing with green beans and almonds, so there were actual good-tasting vegetable dishes.

Dad made apple pie and wept about Grandma Suzette and pies she’d made throughout his childhood, but otherwise he kept it together. I ate a small slice of the turducken to make Mom happy.

Hanson drank from a flask and slurred his words before we even got to the dessert—but we all just breathed deeply and tried to be nice to him.

There was nothing else to do, really.

Dad had a long talk with him before he left on Saturday, telling Hanson that the drinking was a serious problem and he needed to get treatment.

Hanson probably wouldn’t go, Dad said.

He hadn’t gone the other times they’d talked.

Sometimes, you just can’t help people. You can only offer to help.

Or say you’re there if they want it.

And you do that. You offer, even if it seems hopeless. Because you can’t give up and do nothing.

Think how you would feel if you didn’t try.

Gideon and I talked again over the holiday weekend. I called him, and when he picked up, his voice was flat. He basically grunted at me while I uttered the following inane remarks:

“I’m really sorry.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

“I’m just going through a complicated time in my life.”

“Maybe if things were different, it would have worked out between us.”

“I hope we can still be friends.”

“You’ll make some other girl really, really happy.”

I felt like a complete Neanderthal. Because even though Gideon and I hadn’t been going out very long, I knew he deserved better. These were stupid clichés that had been said a hundred thousand times to a hundred thousand people being dumped, and they were completely meaningless.

I just didn’t know what else to say.

I didn’t want to hurt him.

It wasn’t him. It was me.

And I did hope we’d be friends.

Though I could tell from the hard sound of his “goodbye” that we probably wouldn’t be.

When I got back to school on Monday and showed up at CAP Workshop, Dittmar handed back our application packets with comments and suggestions for colleges we might like. As I flipped through my papers, reading his notes in red pen, I came across my peer questionnaire.

She cares , Noel had written. About doing a good job. About how people feel … She makes the world seem shiny and sunlit .

He wrote those things after we broke up.

Dittmar gave us the questionnaire the same day Noel and I had made that awful scene in workshop.

Noel had handed it in recently. The date said November 20.

He had written that I was witty.

That he thought I’d be a filmmaker.

That I made him feel excited and interested in the world.

As the class filed out of Dittmar’s office, I tapped Noel on the shoulder.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“How’s it going?”

“Same old, same old.”

“I. Um. I heard about Booth and the accident,” I said. “I ran into Claude at the zoo.”

Noel shrugged as he headed down the stairs. “Yeah, well. That was a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It just happened, okay?” said Noel. “It was an accident. It was awful for my brother, but you know, I moved on. I didn’t let it bother me.”

“How can you say that?” I said, following him as he headed out of the math building and toward whatever class he had next. “You were behind him on your bike, weren’t you?”