E. Lockhart - The Boyfriend List

In Drama, Shiv and I had to perform our scene.

“What did you think?” I said, after.

“It was okay,” said Shiv, his eyes on the ground. Then he grabbed his backpack and left.

After school, I saw him heading for the bus. “Shiv, wait up!” I called.

He kept walking.

By this point, it was obvious he had changed his mind. I felt like an idiot. Had I been a rotten kisser during our session against the door? (This was certainly possible, as I had so little experience.)

Maybe I smelled bad?

Or had there been a booger hanging out of my nose when we stopped kissing?

What could I have done to make him stop liking me?

I thought about it all the time, but I never found out. I felt like a complete loser. I liked him so much, and now he seemed to hate me, and there was no way to turn it around. I was completely helpless.

I never really talked with him again, except to say hi in the halls.

When I told her about Shiv, Doctor Z thought I should ask him what happened. Well, she never says anything quite that directly. What she really said was “Is there a way you could find out?”

“No.”

Silence. She was wearing that poncho again.

“Well,” I said, after a minute, “I guess I could ask him. But I’d rather die than do that.”

More silence. It really is a horrible poncho.

“I don’t care, anyway.”

Even more silence. Who buys this woman’s clothes?

“Well, I guess maybe I kind of do,” I went on. “I mean, I do. I liked him, I wanted to kiss him again, we had a good time together. And the whole thing was humiliating. Everyone knowing we were going out, and then with us breaking up so fast after—I felt like people were talking about me.”

“Can you ask him?”

I ignored her question. “And this is my life, getting dumped with no warning. Or liking people who don’t like me back, or who don’t like me enough, or not as much as they like someone else. You have the list in front of you: Hutch dumped me for Ariel, Gideon never liked me back, Ben didn’t know I was alive, Sky had another girlfriend.”

“Story of your life?”

“Exactly. Why is that? I wish I could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”

“Just one kiss” is never just one kiss. The one with Shiv changed my whole idea about kissing. And when I went to the dance with Jackson, there was “just one kiss”—but it made everything even worse than it was before.

You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.

After Jackson asked me to the dance, I had a lot of phone calls to make.

First, I had to call up Angelo and tell him not to take me. I was super nervous. I had never called him before, and here I was canceling on him. But he was nice about it. “That’s cool,” he said. “If he’s your boyfriend, you should go with him.”

“I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend,” I said.

“Whatever. You should do what you gotta do.”

“Okay.” There was a weird silence. “There’s a party on the dock by my house after,” I said, feeling guilty. “Around eleven. You should swing by if you’re around.”

“Sure,” said Angelo, though I was sure he was only being polite.

“You shouldn’t go,” said Cricket when I called her. “It’s way too complicated.”

“It’s just as friends,” I said.

“Still.”

“Kim told him to take me.”

“But that’s Kim. She feels bad about everything.”

“Yeah? She doesn’t act like it.”

“Trust me,” said Cricket. “She does.”

“I’m still going,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“You shouldn’t go,” said Nora when she called me.

“I know, but I so want to,” I said. “I have that dress.”

“You could wear that dress with Angelo,” she said.

“I want to go with Jackson. I was always supposed to go with Jackson, he asked me a long time ago.”

“Not exactly,” she reminded me.

“But still.”

“It’s your funeral,” she said. “Maybe you should come to dinner with me and Matt, to keep it all under control.”

Matt added two more onto his reservation, and we all had dinner at the top of the Space Needle, which is this restaurant inside an old World’s Fair building that turns around and around so you get a 360-degree view by the time you finish your dinner. They didn’t have any vegetarian food, so I ate three side dishes: creamed spinach, mashed potatoes and a salad. Then we drove to the pier in two separate cars, and got on the miniyacht just as it was pulling out.

Here’s what I remember from the dance: Cricket looked beautiful, in a pink dress with her sleek blond hair piled on top of her head. Nora looked sexy, showing off her great boobs in a low-cut black thing. She took pictures of us all with her Instamatic.

Jackson touched my hand when we were dancing and told me I was pretty. There was hardly anywhere to sit down. When the band played a slow song, Jackson asked me to dance, and put his cheek against mine as we did. Then he suggested we go upstairs and get some air.

I didn’t have a coat. It was freezing on deck. He put his arm around me to keep me warm. It was the first time we were alone all evening. We were standing in the moonlight, looking over the railing at the lake, watching the light play across the dark water, like I’d imagined. Jackson was talking about some anime movie he’d seen.

I wasn’t listening.

I was looking at his mouth and feeling his warm hand against my chilly shoulder.

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do what I did: I put my hand on his neck and kissed him.

He kissed me back.

I thought: This is right. I forgive everything. He wants me again. We’ll be together.

Then he pushed me away. “Ruby,” Jackson said in a strange, loud, public voice. “What are you doing? That’s not how it is, now. We’re here as friends. You know I’m with Kim.”

I looked across the deck. Standing there, looking at us—Heidi Sussman and Finn Murphy. Jackson pushed past them and ran down a set of steps.

As soon as I was alone on the deck of the boat, I had a panic attack. Heidi and Finn had disappeared, and there was no one out there except Meghan and some seniors, down at the other end, plus one couple who had their tongues down each other’s throats. I felt so dizzy I had to hold on to the railing to stand up, my heart was hammering, my breath was coming in tiny gasps; I felt like there was no oxygen, and I broke out in a sweat, even though it was freezing. Eventually I staggered over to a bench.

Noel came out and sat next to me. He’s the boy from Painting Elective who sent me that carnation with the goofy rhyme on Valentine’s Day. “How do I love thee? As high as pigs can fly.” He was wearing a tuxedo, which no other boys were doing (they wore suits), and he lit a cigarette with an old-fashioned silver lighter.

This Noel is one of those not-quite-friends-with-every-body people who never seems like he’s being serious. He’s very ironic about Tate and everything it stands for (preppy white lacrosse players driving BMWs), but he’s got a lot of confidence and no one gives him any crap. His shaggy blond hair sticks out in a ridiculous way that I think probably requires hair gel. His left eyebrow is pierced. That night, his combat boots were sticking out under his tux, big steel toes glinting in the moonlight.