The Book - E Lockhart

“Um-hmm.”

“Do you think she’ll tell Kim?” I asked.

“I couldn’t say.”

“Do you think she’ll tell Cricket? Because Cricket will tell Kim.”

“Roo,” said Doctor Z, leaning forward a bit. “We can’t know or say what other people will do. You have to think what you want to do. What you can do to get the situation where you want it to be.”

“I could tell Kim,” I said. “I have her e-mail.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do. Like that’s the code we set up when we wrote The Boy Book. To tell each other everything. Even after what happened. Because if it was my boyfriend writing notes to other girls, I’d want my friends to tell me.”

“You want to uphold the rules you laid out in The Boy Book. ”

“Yeah,” I said. “Only if it was me, I also couldn’t stand the suspense, thinking my faraway boyfriend might be stepping out. It would drive me certifiably insane, when probably there’d be no reason to even angst about it. I mean, Kim’s in Tokyo. There’s nothing she could even do.”

“Are you saying maybe it isn’t very nice to tell her?”

“I actually opened an e-mail to her today and started typing before I deleted it.”

“It sounds like you want to tell her.”

I was quiet for a minute. “I kind of want her to know.”

Silence from Doctor Z.

“Because—I guess I want her to think he still likes me. It’s like, Kim’s got all the power. She’s got Jackson, she’s got Cricket, she’s got Nora, she’s got everything. And the only thing I’ve got that she doesn’t have is this note.”

“I see.”

“So it’s not out of the goodness of my heart that I’d tell her. It’s actually out of the sour meanness of my soul.”

“I don’t think you have a sour, mean soul, Ruby.”

“You don’t?” I said. “Then I’m not sure you know me that well.”

I didn’t tell Kim. At least, not then. What I did do when I got home is e-mail Noel the following:

HOOTER RESCUE SQUAD UPDATE

Mission abort! Mission abort!

The hooters apparently want to take care of themselves and do not need our help. Besides, it has been several days, and if Cabbie hasn’t brought pictures to school, he’s probably not going to.

Yours sincerely, in solidarity and in defense of hooters around the globe,

Secret Hooter Agent Roo

He wrote back ten minutes later.

What to do with surplus Fruit Roll-Ups and art supplies?

—SHAN (Secret Hooter Agent Noel)

That’s what I like about guys (sometimes).

They don’t ask you why Nora’s hooters want to take care of themselves. They don’t read between the lines and say, “What, did you and Nora have a fight?”

They ignore that stuff, or they don’t see it at all, and start trying to figure out your next mission.

What to Wear When You Might Be Fooling Around

1. A shirt that buttons up the front, for obvious reasons.

2. A front-close bra. Also for obvious reasons.

3. Perfume, but not all over your neck. Right behind the ears and on the wrists only, because if you have it on your neck, your neck is going to taste yucky. Let us repeat: not on the neck.

4. Lip gloss—but never dark red lip stick. Or you’ll both get covered with it.

5. No rings. (This from Cricket. She claims it has to do with adventuring to the nether regions but refuses to elaborate for those of us who don’t know what she’s talking about.)

6. No sneakers. They can be smelly even on the best of us, and if it gets to the point of shoes coming off, you don’t want to have to get up and go put them in the other room.

7. And whatever you do, don’t wear a dress. Because if you’re not nether-regioning each other, but you do want to give him upper-region access, the dress is going to pose a serious impediment. Yes, you could unzip the back of it and pull it down from the top. But that is dorky. So leave the dress in the closet. P.S. Bring gum or breath mints. Not bubble gum.

—written by Kim and Roo, with nether-region addition from Cricket. Approximate date: February, sophomore year.

iwore a dress to school the next day. A vintage navy blue thing with roses embroidered around the bottom of the skirt. I also wore a pair of old Converse, two rings, a back-close bra, red lipstick and perfume on my neck. I chewed bubble gum.

I was untouchable.

I hadn’t seen Jackson except from afar since he left the birthday note in my cubby. I had written him six notes and two e-mails back, but I ripped up the notes and deleted the e-mails without sending them. Because what could I say?

“Thanks for the birthday note”? Too formal.

“What, are you and Kim broken up now?” Obviously desperate and semihostile.

“I hate you I love you I hate you I love you”? True. But lame.

Finally, I had figured out what to write. (Yes, I knew I shouldn’t write anything. I knew a mature girl would ignore his plea for forgiveness and attention. And an ethical girl wouldn’t flirt with someone else’s boyfriend.

But I couldn’t quite do that.

He was Jackson Clarke. It was how I felt.)

So I wrote “Blackberry smoothies are the only kind worth drinking” and left it in his mail cubby.

But nothing was going to happen between us. We weren’t even on speaking terms, and my outfit was all wrong on purpose. 1

I looked for Jackson in the refectory later, but either we didn’t have the same lunch on Fridays, or else he’d gone off campus. Nora said hi to me on the lunch line, and I said hi back, but I couldn’t quite look her in the eye. I had a swim team meeting after school—the first of the year—and after that, I checked my mail cubby to see if Jackson had written.

There was a Fruit Roll-Up in there.

My internship at the Woodland Park Zoo started on Saturday, and Anya showed me around. In the Family Farm area, from nine o’clock to eleven, I was to stand around wearing a zoo polo shirt and answering questions. She gave me a handout with the names of all the animals and information on their feeding habits. I watched a fellow intern help kids get food from the dispensers.

The cow was named Maggie, the llamas were Laverne and Shirley, and the goats all had ridiculous names like Rasputin and Napoleon and Queen Anne. Anya said I’d do a training program the following Friday after school to learn more about Family Farm. At eleven I was supposed to report to a groundskeeper named Lewis and assist him with gardening stuff.

Lewis was a thin, blondish man with an unfortunate skinny mustache. He had me plant flowers near the zoo entrance. He got all cranked when I told him my dad was the proprietor and sole employee of Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.

I had a lunch break for an hour; then at two o’clock I reported back to Anya and she said that since I was a good speaker (!!) she was going to put me in a training session to be on the microphone at the Saturday-afternoon Humboldt penguin feeding. The training wouldn’t be until the following week, so Anya walked me around the rest of the zoo. We ended up in the penguin room, which was dark and cool. Penguins were waddling around and hurtling themselves into the water. Anya showed me the closet where the microphone equipment was.

“You wheel it out on a cart and put it in this corner here,” she said, pointing. “Then when the keepers come in with the fish, you read from a script we’ll give you that tells some fun facts about the animals. I know you’re interested in penguins,” she said, giving me a look that said maybe I was just interested in penguins’ sexual orientation, “so I think this will be a rewarding part of the job for you.”