E. Lockhart - The Boyfriend List

“I got you.”

“I just feel like, I’d rather shoot baskets, or something,” she went on. “Even read a book. I mean, not that there’s anyone I’m into, anyway.”

“The problem is,” I joked, “our school is too damn small. Remember how we wrote that in The Boy Book? Any decent boy was used up ages ago.”

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “Sometimes I feel like a leper.”

That surprised me almost as much as Shiv Neel, golden boy, thinking we were all laughing at him because he was Indian.

Like even the people at the center of the Tate universe feel like they’re on the outside.

Nora said she was late, hoisted her bag over her shoulder and waved goodbye. I watched her go down the street and get into her car.

Maybe I’ll give her a call later in the summer, when the whole debacle is a bit more behind us.

Maybe.

I slept over at Meghan’s house a couple of nights in June. She has a huge bathroom all to herself and two twin beds and a collection of like forty different perfumes. I found out she’s still a virgin, though she lets Bick go down on her. 7

My dad is still working on the greenhouse. It’s coming along.

Here is what I think about these days: Jackson. Pitiful, but true. The ceramic frogs are still sitting on my dresser, with a photograph of the two of us holding hands out on my deck. I think he may not be the nicest person, really. He’s not the person I thought he was. Some days, I’m mad at him, actually—which I wasn’t before. For the bad presents, and the forgotten phone calls, for the stupid anime movies. And for Kim. But that happens in waves, on certain days. The other days, I think about the lollipop-tasting experiment, and kissing in my kitty-cat suit—and I feel like I lost something.

I’d probably still take him back, if he showed up at my door like in the movies.

He’s Jackson Clarke.

It’s just how I feel.

I think about Cricket and Nora. And how much I used to laugh. And how I’d go into the refectory in the morning and they’d be sitting there, drinking tea (Cricket) and Diet Coke (Nora) and goofing around (Kim was always late), and how that was the best part of my day, most days—and how it’ll never happen again.

And of course, I think about Kim. It’s so weird that I used to have a best friend and now I don’t. I have a drawer full of pictures of her. The red vintage jacket she bought me for my birthday is hanging in my closet, and the book about Salvador Dalí I borrowed is sitting on my desk. I’ve got The Boy Book on the shelf in my bedroom where it’s always been, a big, ratty notebook with our handwriting all over it. I even thought about photocopying it and mailing it to her as a kind of reproach. Or maybe as a gesture of friendship. I’m not sure which.

But I didn’t.

I still automatically pick up the phone to call her when something happens that’s worth talking about, then remember and put the phone down again without dialing. Sometimes I call Meghan instead—but most of the time, I don’t call anyone. Doctor Z told me I’m going through a “grieving process,” and that all these behaviors are natural.

I told her that phrases like “grieving process” make me gag.

She laughed and said it’s still a process and it’s still grieving, whatever I want to call it.

I said let’s call it Reginald. “I’m doing Reginald today,” I say now, when I’m feeling like I have no friends.

I think about Angelo, too, which is deeply perverse because he probably doesn’t ever want to talk to me again (subject of much therapy discussion). My family went to dinner at Juana’s again in May, but he wasn’t there. He sort of lives in a different universe—not the Tate universe—and I wonder sometimes what it’s like. Why he asked me to the Homecoming dance. Why he came to the party and brought me that corsage. What he thinks of that dog-filled house. What he does after school. Whether he’s thinking about college. What he looks like without a shirt.

I think about books. I read through a stack of paperback mystery novels from the public library when the term ended, and then I read some books from Brit Lit that I blew off during the year. I watch too many movies. I think I’ve seen all the Woody Allens now.

I think about getting a job. No more babysitting. I hate it. Maybe I could help out at the Woodland Park Zoo for a few bucks an hour. Or at the library.

I think about getting my driver’s license. Not that I’d have a car, but I could take the Honda on weekends, maybe. My birthday is in August. I’ll be sixteen.

I think about turning sixteen, and how I won’t have a party like I always thought I would, with my friends all sleeping over and being silly and eating cake.

I probably think too much.

In early July, I got on my first ever airplane and went to join my mom in San Francisco, where she’s doing her show. I didn’t want to go, I said I’d rather rot than hang out with her all summer, and my dad made a lot more fuss about her being selfish and how that wasn’t how they’d agreed to run their marriage—but in the end, she went—and I realized I wanted to go too. I wanted to see some men in drag and some general California stuff and just go somewhere where the air smells different. I called her up when she was in Los Angeles and asked if I could come meet her in San Francisco. It was funny. I didn’t think I’d be as glad to see her as I was when she picked me up at the airport. When we’re done here, we’re going to Chicago and Minneapolis.

Don’t get me wrong. Elaine Oliver is driving me nuts, because I have to share her hotel room and she is so full of self-importance, what with an audience clapping for her every night, that she’s damn near impossible to deal with—but she’s given up the macrobiotic thing and she took me to five different Chinese restaurants for lunch, all in one week. They have an amazing Chinatown here. It feels like you’re in a different country.

When she’s doing her show, I stay in the hotel and write on her laptop—which is the stuff you’re reading now. Or I mess around with my watercolors. Or read more mysteries. Then I fall asleep and she comes home and calls my dad and moans about how much she misses him, which wakes me up. And then I talk to her while she takes off all her makeup.

In the daytime, we go do tourist stuff. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, rode a streetcar, toured Alcatraz. We walked through the Castro district, where someone asked my mom for an autograph.

Last Monday, the day when theaters are dark, we rented a car and drove down the coast to see Big Sur. I drove part of the way, and when my mother commented eight times about how fast I was changing lanes and had I checked whether I was going the speed limit, I told her to please be quiet for at least fifteen minutes and see if we stayed alive. And she did.

At one point we stopped and took a picnic down to the beach. It was cold, and sand got in our potato salad, but we stayed anyway. There were surfers in the water, looking like seals in their wet suits, sailing into shore on huge waves. We watched them for like an hour.

Tommy Hazard would have loved it.

I loved it.

I was out of the Tate universe, standing on the edge of the sea.

1 Doctor Z: “Is it impossible that he liked you as a person and just wanted to go to the movies with you?”

Me: “Yes.”2 And he was right! Ag.3 Complete idiocy. I know.4 In case you don’t remember: Jackson, Noel, Angelo and Cabbie.5 I wanted to kill him. Telling another guy how he squeezed my boob! What a sleazy gross thing to say. But now, I think it’s not so different from what I told my friends about Shiv and Jackson, and what I know about Kaleb and Finn and Pete.6 Or actually down, in this case, given that his hand was coming from over my shoulder.7 Me: “You let him? Isn’t that supposed to be fun for you ?”