E. Lockhart - The Boyfriend List

1 I think Doctor Z is wrong here. Official does too matter, because having an official boyfriend changes everything: how people treat you at school, how you feel when the phone rings, what kind of gum you chew (mint if you have a boyfriend, because you might kiss him at any moment, but bubble gum otherwise). And that leads me to this problem: How are you supposed to know when it’s official? Do you have to say “boyfriend” in front of the guy and not have him flinch? Or does he have to say it, as in, “This is my girlfriend, Ruby”? Does he have to meet your parents? Or hold your hand in public?

Meghan says, four weeks after the first kiss it’s official—but what if you break up for one of those weeks? That happened to my friend Cricket when she was going out with Tommy Parrish.

I was hoping there’d be a set of guidelines handed out in Sex Ed class, but Sex Ed—when I finally got to take it—was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people. Like how to tell what it means when someone forgets to call you when he said he would, or what to do when someone gropes your boob in a movie theater.

I think there should be a class on that. 2 Okay, she didn’t say knitting. She said, “something creative,” some kind of hobby where I make things. But knitting is the kind of thing she meant.3 Meghan was never exactly my friend, but she lives two blocks from me and when she got her license in December she started carpooling me to school every morning. Actually, she’s not really friends with anyone, except her boyfriend, Bick. He’s a senior. Frankly, Meghan’s a girl the other girls don’t like. When Josh Ballard pulled her pants down in eighth-grade gym class (juvenile, I know, but there you have it), she was wearing pink bikini panties and she turned around like three times in shock, showing them off, before she yanked her shorts back up. And she and Bick went into the bathroom of the bus station when we took a school trip to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and came out twenty minutes later looking hot and sweaty. Plus she just radiates sex appeal even though she’s usually wearing some old flannel shirt, which is very annoying.4 In case you don’t know already, panic attacks are episodes where a person feels a sense of massive anxiety; she thinks she can’t breathe, her heart rate speeds up, that kind of thing. If a person has them all the time, she probably has a panic disorder. Important: Doctor Z says these breathing problems and heart-pounding things can also be symptoms of actual physical problems, so see a doctor, no matter what, if anything like this happens to you.5 One of my all-time favorite words. Debacle: A sudden, complete, ludicrous downfall.6 Ag! Once you start seeing a shrink, everything you say sounds dirty.7 Thank god she let me keep my bra on; no way was I showing my boobs to the mother of my carpool driver.

1. Adam (but he doesn’t count.)

Adam was this boy that I used to stare at in preschool. His hair was too long, that’s why. It stuck out behind his ears and trailed down his neck, whereas all the other five-year-old boys had bowl haircuts. I didn’t have too much hair myself—it didn’t grow fast and my mom was always trimming it with her nail scissors—so I was a little obsessed with hair.

Adam’s last name was Cox, and after I had been eyeing him for a couple of months, I named this stuffed bunny I had after him. All the grown-ups laughed when I said the bunny’s name was Cox, and I didn’t understand why. 1

Pretty soon, Adam and I were playing together. Our parents took us to the zoo, and we’d spend time after school in the nearby playground, drawing with chalk and walking up the slide. I remember we went swimming a few times at the YMCA, and hung out in a plastic wading pool in his backyard. His cat had kittens, and I got to help name them because I came over the same morning they were born.

And that was it.

We were only five years old.

When I was old enough for kindergarten, I started at Tate Prep and he went somewhere else.

Doctor Z looked down at the Boyfriend List. She didn’t seem too impressed with my Adam Cox story. Or maybe it was the list itself she didn’t think much of—though it had taken me a lot of work to do. I started the night after our first appointment, in bed in my pajamas, writing on this thick, cream-colored stationery my grandma Suzette got me. It says Ruby Denise Oliver on the top in this great curlicue font—but I never use it, since anyone I’d want to write to has e-mail.

My first draft, I only wrote down Jackson and Cabbie. Then I added Gideon at the beginning, with a question mark next to his name. Then Michael, the guy who was my first kiss—putting him in between Gideon and Jackson.

Then I turned off my light and tried to go to sleep.

No luck.

Well, I wasn’t sleeping well lately anyway—but I lay there with this feeling that the list wasn’t finished. I remembered that I’d told Doctor Z about Angelo already, so I turned the light back on and squeezed him in between Jackson and Cabbie.

Oh, and I had mentioned Noel to Doctor Z, too—though we were only friends. I stuck him in right after Jackson, just to have somewhere to put him. Then I rewrote the list in nice handwriting and managed to get myself to sleep—but in the middle of the night I woke up and wrote down two more boys and my History & Politics teacher.

Then I crossed them all out.

At breakfast the next morning, I jumped up from my cereal bowl and put one of them back on.

At school, the hallway by the mail cubbies suddenly seemed like an obstacle course of old crushes and rejections. Shiv Neel. Finn Murphy. Hutch (ag). All three in my face before I even got to my first class. I pulled out the list and wrote them down.

All day long, I thought about boys. (Well, even more than usual.) And the more I thought, the more I remembered.

Adam, the mermaid.

Sky, the jerk.

Ben, the golden boy.

Tommy, who surfed.

Chase, who gave me the necklace.

Billy, who squeezed my boob.

Never in a million years would I have expected the list to be anywhere near so long. But by the end of the day, there were fifteen names on there, and the list was all scribbly-looking, with arrows zooming around to show what order the boys should really go in.

It was a mess, so during geometry I recopied it on the stationery in my best writing and threw the old one away. 2Then I tucked it into a matching envelope to give to Doctor Z.

“Why did you stop playing with Adam?” Doctor Z wanted to know.

“I told you, I started a different school.”

“Is there something more?” she said, looking at me over those red-rimmed glasses.

“No.”

I had liked making the list, it was kind of fun. But ag. What was the point of talking about something from ten years ago that wasn’t even important? Zoo trips with Adam Cox and his mom weren’t exactly significant to my mental development.

Not that there was anything else I wanted to talk about.

I just wanted the panic attacks to stop.

And the hollow, sore feeling in my chest to go away.

And to feel like I could make it through lunch period without choking back tears.