The Book - E Lockhart

I retrained for penguin-lecture-giving at the zoo and redeemed myself in Anya’s eyes on the next go-round. I started to like the Family Farm part of the job as well. Me and Laverne and Shirley got pretty close. And after a while, I asked to do less gardening and more stuff with the animals, so Anya let me help muck out the farm animal pens instead of gardening. Which was gross, but anyway.

Of course, all my money went to paying back my parents for Canoe Island, so I was broke until the new year.

My parents were happy that I was dealing with my issues in therapy with Doctor Z, and continued to speculate on whether I was a lesbian.

And to remind me that they were okay with that.

“I’m not a lesbian, you guys,” I’d say.

“It’s a perfectly normal way to be, sweetie.”

“Yeah, only I’m not.”

“It’s normal to be in denial, too. Just be true to yourself,” one of them would say, and then we’d have a long dinner conversation for my benefit about all the gay friends my mother has, and her possibly lesbian relationship with Lisa from high school, and movies they’d seen and liked with gay characters in them, and famous people who were gay. Then my dad would give me some meaningless compliment—how pretty I am or what an interesting person I am—in hopes of boosting my self-esteem. And I would look at my plate and stir my pasta around, waiting for the meal to be over.

Ag.

A few days after Canoe Island, Hutch asked Noel if he wanted to go see Aerosmith in concert, and Noel said yes, and they went and did manly bonding things involving rock music. So the two of them started hanging out a bit. And though Hutch’s leper status didn’t improve much beyond that, and his skin didn’t either, he sat with us at lunch now and then. And it was okay, so long as he didn’t quote obscure retro metal lyrics that no one understood.

We went back to being partners in French.

Angelo fell in love with his new girlfriend. Her name was Jade. Juana told my mother, and my mother (completely ignorant of my adventures with Angelo) told me. She said Angelo brought Jade home for dinner and she was really charming and smart, and Angelo just looked at her like the sun was shining through her eyes.

And I didn’t feel a thing when I heard about it. Except glad for him.

We had to have dinner together sometimes, just like we always had. But we sat on opposite sides of the couch when we were watching TV, and I always wore a back-close bra and a dress, just to stay on the safe side. Because when I looked at the excellence of Angelo’s profile, I did start to remember his proficiency in the boob-groping department and got a little tempted. But then I’d just pet a rottweiler or a shih tzu or something and make some comment about reality TV, and the moment would be over.

And me. Ruby Oliver. I started The Girl Book. Excerpt at the start of this chapter. It’s like a free-for-all notebook for stuff that I’m thinking. I made a cover for it with a painting of Humboldt penguins, gouache on construction paper, and it doesn’t look half bad. My dad bought a new computer and gave me his old one, so I used that to write down all the things that happened at the start of this school year, which is what you’re reading now.

I swim. And I go see Doctor Z. And I work my zoo job. And I write stuff. I rent movies with my girlfriends and drink espresso milk shakes at the B&O.

I don’t think about Jackson at all anymore. I see him in the halls, and my radar is gone. He’s a pod-robot and I don’t care.

I do not care.

I do not care.

I see Kim, and there is still an ache for the kind of friends we used to be. Because I don’t have that with anyone, the way I did with her. And maybe I never will.

Maybe friendships aren’t like that when we get older.

But the Kim ache is dull. Not a surge of immediate panicky pain and anger like it used to be. It’s an ache for what happened in the past, not what’s happening now.

I can live with it.

And I do.

If I am sad about anything, and sometimes I am, it is Noel. I talk about him a lot in therapy. Because I think there could have been something, a real thing, between us. And now there is just a low-level friendship that will never get any deeper. At least, I don’t think it will.

I made the right decision. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any regrets.

The first night of winter break, I had Meghan and Nora sleep over at my house.

I almost never have anyone sleep over. I hardly ever did, even before the debacles of sophomore year. Our place is so much smaller than where my friends live, and the walls are thin. Why would you sleep on the floor in the living room of a semibohemian houseboat when you can have hot tubs and swimming pools and bedroom-bathroom suites?

The answer was always obvious: you wouldn’t.

But I invited them anyway, because Meghan was going away to visit her grandparents for the holidays, so we wouldn’t see her for two weeks. And they came.

My parents went to Juana’s for dinner, and Nora made nachos and chocolate chip cookies, and the three of us played Trivial Pursuit, Silver Screen Edition, which I’d bought for myself after spending a horror-filled evening with the four-year-old vomit machine I used to babysit. (I kicked some serious butt at Trivial Pursuit, by the way, even when Meghan and Nora teamed up against me.)

Then we put mud masks on our faces and Meghan painted her toenails and Nora looked at my dad’s flower photograph books and I cleaned up the kitchen so my parents wouldn’t have a fit when they got home.

They arrived, and my dad was tipsy and pretended to be terrified at our green-mud faces, and they made a lot of noise going in and out of the bathroom brushing their teeth, and then they left us alone.

We made a big extended bed on the living room floor with couch cushions, three pillows and sleeping bags Nora and Meghan had brought over, plus my bedclothes and a lot of extra sheets. It was like fifteen feet wide. We washed the mud off our faces, put on pajamas and got in to watch Saturday Night Live.

The show was kind of boring, and Meghan fell asleep five minutes into it. Nora, on my other side, went out a couple of minutes later.

I lay there in the blue light from the TV set. Not really watching. Just lying there, between Meghan and Nora.

Meghan snored softly.

Nora was breathing through her mouth and drooling onto the pillow.

The TV went to a commercial and I switched it off with the remote.

The water lapped at the sides of our houseboat.

And I felt lucky.

acknowledgments

Thank you to Marissa for hacking out the boring footnotes and making the whole thing so much better. And to Beverly, Chip, Kathleen and everyone else at Delacorte Press, especially the sales force, for all their hard work and support of my books. I am always and muchly in debt to Elizabeth for her stellar and unflagging representation.

I am grateful to the people in my YA novelists newsgroup for their wonderful humor and insight about the publishing and writing process.

Thank you also to the FOZ (friends of Zoe)—Julia, Anne, Vanessa and Mika—who gamely took the John Belushi pop-reference quiz, thus enabling this book to be (hopefully) full of footnotes and film references that are entertaining and semi-informative, rather than un-. Most of all, my appreciation to Zoe, quiz administrator extraordinaire, who also helped me figure out how to end the book.

Thanks to Bellamy Pailthorp and Melissa Greeley for helping me get the Seattle details right, though I know I completely reinvented the Woodland Park Zoo for my own literary purposes.

My love and thanks to my immediate family and felines, although for accuracy’s sake it must be noted that the cat Mercy Randolph caused more problems than she solved.