E. Lockhart - The Boyfriend List

“Me neither,” I said.

“Good,” he said, leaning in. “I hoped not.”

We kissed in the cold air for a long time.

But the truth is, I never felt the same after that. Not really. Look back and reread what Jackson actually said when he told me about his afternoon with Heidi. True, he said he wanted me, had never felt like this before. But he also said Heidi was superbeautiful and fun, and that they’d played tennis for old times’ sake, because they were so well matched, blah blah blah.

Now, if your entire focus was on making your new girlfriend feel better about your feelings for your old girlfriend, would you mix your declaration of love in with nostalgia about tennis games and the superbeauty of the old girlfriend?

No.

You would only do that if you were still thinking about the beauty and the tennis.

It’s not that I think anything happened with Heidi that day, or that Jackson was lying about how he felt toward me. It’s more that I realized he had this history with other girls, and I couldn’t stop him thinking about them, and he would think about them even when he was looking me in the eye.

It shattered something inside me that hadn’t been broken before.

So then I had Heidi radar on top of the Beth-Ann-Courtney radar.

And now I have Kim radar.

All the way until the end of the school year, I could barely walk across the quad without evil vibrations attacking me from all directions. Ag! Kim on the staircase! Heidi in French class! Triple threat of Beth-Ann-Courtney in the library, wearing pastels and having good hair days! The evil was everywhere—and just writing that sentence proves to me that I’m seriously messed up and thank goodness my mother made me start seeing Doctor Z because I am obviously about to go off the deep end, even after all this time has passed.

Believe me, I know the actual truth is that these are all nice girls. Some of them even used to be my friends. And I firmly believe that women should not get all cruel and petty with each other over men, because how on earth will we run companies and countries if we’re preoccupied with someone else’s big boobs in a pink sweater set?

In H&P, Mr. Wallace was talking about this kind of problem (we were covering the feminist movement), and I so agreed with the points he made about what he called “self-defeating antagonism between members of oppressed groups.” Translated from Wallace jargon, that means that if people want to fight for their rights and actually see some action, then they have to stick together and not be pissy with each other about little things.

My problem is I can think whatever I think—girl power, solidarity, Gloria Steinem rah rah rah 6—but I still feel the way I feel.

Which is jealous. And pissy about little things.

Maybe the stuff that went wrong between Jackson and me made me feel insecure, and that’s why I got jealous of Beth/Ann/Courtney/Heidi. Or maybe I felt that way to start with out of some sour meanness in my soul, and my neurotic jealousy is part of why things went wrong in the first place. I’m not sure.

I only know that I felt this way—and I still feel this way. Even though Jackson and I are broken up.

I wish I felt different. I’d like to walk into the refectory and not have any radar at all. I’d like to just go in there, make my raisin salad and eat my damn lunch without a care in the world. But I doubt if it’s happening anytime soon. Right now I’m still lucky to get through a meal without a panic attack.

1 I honestly didn’t. Because I never even kissed anyone until I was thirteen and three quarters. This is an embarrassing and sadly true fact, made even worse by the fact that the guy I kissed was totally gross and I didn’t kiss anyone else after that until the end of my freshman year.2 Three sample entries from The Boy Book under this heading:

1. Kim e-mailed Finn re: that fight they had about her missing his soccer match, and he never e-mailed her back the whole weekend. Kim checked her e-mail every ten minutes and didn’t pick up her phone because she didn’t want to talk to him unless he’d read what she wrote. Then on Monday, Finn said he never got her e-mail, it must have gotten lost. But later he said he never checked his e-mail. Which one was it? The guy didn’t even get his stories straight.

2. Cricket’s drama-school boyfriend Kaleb, who lasted only six weeks (good riddance!) was always creating a sense of mystery around his answering machine. He would never check his messages if she was there to hear them—like there was going to be some big secret phone call from another girl on there. Cricket said she was pretty sure there were only messages from his friend Mike, or some similar Neanderthal, and that Kaleb was only faking her out by pointedly ignoring the message machine, and it must have meant a lot to him to do so—because by nature he was a compulsive message checker. He checked his cell like every hour.

3. In the period between Kaleb and Pete, Cricket got a ride home from a basketball game with Billy Alexander, and she was all excited because they were sitting in his car talking, parked in the driveway in front of her house. It seemed like he was going to kiss her, or ask her out, or something. But then his cell phone rang, and he answered it, and said “Dude!” a lot, and waved at Cricket as if to say “See you later!” So she got out and went inside—and that was that.3 Don’t I sound paranoid? When I told this story to Doctor Z, I tried to make a bit of a joke out of me thinking these insane things about Heidi and Jackson making out. I said something like “Oh, I know this is insane stalker paranoia, but these crazy thoughts went through my head.”

But Doctor Z said, “They don’t sound crazy to me, Ruby. It sounds like your trust had been shaken by Jackson’s hiding the fact that he’d gone out with Heidi.” And while the way she put it was pretty touchy-feely, and I found it kind of annoying to have her repeating my feelings back to me, I did appreciate that she didn’t try to talk me out of it, or tell me it probably wasn’t true.4 Either these thoughts are insane and paranoid (see previous footnote) and I am a superpossessive jealous lady, or they are completely justified reactions to a tense situation in which there is a completely reasonable possibility of betrayal.

And either Jackson was entitled to a private life and it was none of my business, or (as his girlfriend) I was entitled to an explanation of what he was up to when it concerns other girls. Which is right? I have been in therapy for several months now and have no answer.5 Know what Doctor Z said when I told her this about my dad? “You can blame him, Ruby. Blame away, if you’re angry.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

“It sounds like he wasn’t noticing the signals you were sending out. Did you hope he’d be more responsive?”

“Maybe he did notice completely and was just trying to give me space and not intrude on my business,” I said. “So there.”

Doctor Z chewed her Nicorette. “But either way, you wanted him to bring it up, isn’t that what you’re saying?”

“No. It’s not like I want to talk to my dad about that kind of thing.”