Sounded good to me. “So how do we start?”
Josie leapt up and went over to her desk, returning with three pencils and a pad of paper. “Here,” she said and tore off three sheets. “Start writing down everything that ever drove you crazy about a guy. We need to catalog all of their annoying habits and the stupid things they do.”
Lucy waved her sheet of paper in the air. “One page? I could fill an entire notebook with this stuff.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Josie told her. “But first I think we should begin by taking an informal survey of senior girls to find out what bothers them the most. To prioritize our grievances and make sure we tackle the worst things first.”
“I don’t think anyone but the three of us should know what we’re planning to do,” I told them. “We’ll ask the girls questions, but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t give away that it’s for the guide.”
“I’ve got it!” Josie cried out, startling Lucy and me.
“What do you have?”
“I have the first ‘guy don’t.’” Josie scribbled something on her sheet and then read it aloud to us. “Don’t lay your hand on the top of a girl’s head and pretend to stroke her hair in a not-so-subtle attempt to push her facedown into your lap—you’re not fooling us.”
Lucy and I smiled. That was a Guy Don’t we could all identify with.
While Lucy worked on the questions for the survey, Josie and I started our Guy Don’t lists.
“We should probably swear off any guys for the rest of the year,” I decided, as if, given my current situation, that might actually be a problem.
“Already done,” Josie told us. “I’m through with guys until they get their shit together.”
“When do you think that happens?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when they’re older? Like twenty?”
“Twenty!” Lucy repeated. “I’m not swearing off guys until I’m twenty.”
If anybody was going to object to our ban on guys, I thought it would be Josie. She wasn’t one to sit around and lament an ex-boyfriend. She was more likely to call out “next!” But Lucy? What did she care? Guys were way less interesting to Lucy than the win/loss record of Heywood’s soccer team. Or at least they used to be.
“Okay, then let’s just promise that we’re done with guys until we finish the guide. We can’t very well be objective if we’re dating someone.”
I didn’t think there was much danger in that. Sean had pretty much cured me of any interest in the opposite sex.
“A future generation of Heywood girls will thank us for this some day,” Josie declared, already on her sixth Guy Don’t: Don’t say you’re going to call unless you really plan to pick up the phone, dial my number, and talk to me. Which dovetailed nicely into Guy Don’t #7: Don’t call me and then sit there expecting that I’ll carry on the conversation by myself.
“That’s a good one,” I told her, remembering some brutal phone conversations I had with Owen our freshman year. He’d call me and then sit there with the TV on in the background. “Do not call a girl unless you actually have something to say and plan on carrying on a conversation—and playing with your Xbox while I tell you about my cat is not a conversation,” I added, motioning for Josie to write down my contribution to her Don’t list. “Neither is phone sex.”
Lucy and Josie laughed at me. “You’re really serious about this not being nice thing, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am.”
They both grinned and seemed almost proud. “Then this should be interesting.”
“Not just interesting,” I told them. “This is going to be fun.”
In ninth grade we may have been bonded together by our complete and absolute devotion to Josh Hartnett and Neutrogena self-tanning cream, but now we had something even better. Something stronger. Josie, Lucy, and I were taking matters into our own hands and taking back control. Misery might love company, but we loved something else. It’s called getting even.
And that’s exactly what we were going to do.
Even if it wasn’t nice.
Chapter Five
The Guy’s Guide Tip #13:
Bodily noises are not cause for high fives, chest bumps, or other forms of celebration. Keep them to yourself.
Around five o’clock, Josie said she’d drive me home and I took her up on the offer, not even getting depressed about going home to a house that was filled with brown cardboard boxes, but absent one father. For the first time in days, I felt like I had something to look forward to—and I knew that Lucy, Josie, and I were on to something fabulous. Every time I thought about it I couldn’t help smiling. It was truly amazing how much could change in three days. Now I had hope. I had purpose. I had control over something. Finally.
I don’t think Josie and Lucy expected me to be so into the idea of picking apart the guys in our class. Every time I came up with a new Don’t, they kind of looked at me like they were trying to figure out if I was serious or not, like they were wondering if justbelow the surface of the Emily they thought they knew, this lessnice Emily had been lurking, waiting for the right time to come out. Well, I was out. Big-time.
Gone was the girl who used to listen to her mom’s advice that if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Now I just wasn’t going to say it, I was going to write it down and let future generations know that Emily Abbott was tired of being the good girl.
“Hang your next right,” I instructed Josie, trying to get my bearings straight in the dark. I’d only been to the new house in the daytime. “Then it’s the third house on the left.”
When I moved to Chicago, none of us could drive, no less tool around in our own black BMW 3 series still reeking of new car smell. I never in a million years would have predicted this. Josie used to hope she was going to get to drive her dad’s old Jeep with the duct tape keeping the torn plastic top from flapping in the wind, and now here we were getting our butts toasted on heated leather seats.
“Don’t forget, tomorrow we begin our research for the guide,” Josie reminded me as I opened my car door and started to get out.
“How could I forget?” I asked. “Tomorrow is the beginning of the end for the guys in our class.”
“You know, I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you, but I almost think you’re going to enjoy writing this guide.” Lucy shook her head at me. “Makes me glad I never did anything to piss you off.”
I narrowed my eyes and attempted to sound menacing. “Let’s keep it that way.”
She laughed at me and they sped away.
Even though it was only five o’clock, it was already pitch-black outside. And, because I’d lived in my new house for all of two days and nobody had bothered to shovel the front walk, I had to make my way through almost a foot of snow to get to the front door. If my dad were here, he would have been outside shoveling the walk before we were even up this morning. But, of course, he wasn’t here. And all of a sudden I envisioned the front walk piling up with snow all winter, and how the job of shoveling would naturally fall to me. Not because I especially relished the idea of laboring with a shovel, but because I knew I should offer. And I knew TJ never would.
I left my boots and coat in the front hall and made my way into the living room, which was beginning to resemble some form of order, even if discarded bubble wrap and packing tape still littered the hallway. As tempting as the bubbles looked, I resisted the urge to step on them. My mother would definitely not approve, which is why, when we were packing up our house back in Illinois, she forbade TJ to go near the bubble wrap. While my brother and I both knew better than to pop all the little air pockets, my mom knew us well enough to know that TJ wouldn’t follow the rules. And I would.
“So, how was it?” my mom asked, stepping out from behind a stack of cardboard boxes, her hair held back by a red bandanna, looking vaguely like her idol, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, only without the dark sunglasses and presidential seal of approval.
“It was okay,” I answered, almost surprised by how okay my first day back at Heywood had been. “It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
“It never is,” she singsonged, picking up a matching pair of candlesticks and walking them over to the fireplace mantel. “I knew you’d be fine all along.”
Of course, my mom would never admit otherwise. She’s eternally optimistic. It’s an occupational hazard.
“I’ll be upstairs,” I told her, even though I knew I should offer to help her unpack. I had my own unpacking to do.
“Your dad already called to see how it went today,” she told me. “You can call him on his cell phone.”
My dad. The man who’s lived with Polite Patty for twenty years and yet still managed to handle the past two weeks all wrong—which, come to think of it, didn’t bode well for our ability to change the way Heywood’s guys treat girls.
I stopped next to the pile of bubble wrap. “Do I have to call him now?”
My mom looked over at me and frowned. “It would be nice.”
Of course it would. “Maybe later,” I told her, turning to go upstairs. And then I stopped. And instead of walking away on the hardwood floors, I stepped to the right and let my foot land on a sheet of bubble wrap, setting off a series of little pops that sounded a lot like firecrackers.
“Emily.” My mom gave me her best disappointed look, which included a furrowed brow and a slight shaking of her head.
But instead of apologizing I found myself smiling. Yeah, I knew better. But the new Emily didn’t care. And she certainly wasn’t returning her father’s phone call.
“Don’t forget to call your dad,” my mom called after me as I headed upstairs, as if oblivious to the fact that she was reminding me to call a man who had decided he was better off nine hundred miles and an entire time zone away from us.
But I wasn’t oblivious to that piece of information, and there was no way I’d be picking up the phone to call him. He’d made his choice, and now I was making mine.
Chapter Six
The Guy’s Guide Tip #14:
Do not blame my tone of voice, my lack of patience, or my bad mood on PMS. It’s not my period that’s my problem. More likely, it’s you.
The next day Lucy, Josie, and I went to work. We’d decided that the most efficient thing to do was split up the girls in our class and find a way to bring up a topic that would get us the information we wanted. We had to be subtle, so we wouldn’t give away our time capsule idea, but we needed to get honest answers.
Before lunch I took a walk by the library and peeked in, looking for a few seniors I could start with. And I found exactly what I was looking for. Pam Stoddard and Carolyn Mills were hunched over a table, flipping through what looked like art history books.
I couldn’t just walk over and start playing twenty questions. I needed a reason to sit down and start a conversation.
I pulled open the library door and walked in, grabbed a National Geographic from the shelf, and sat down across from Carolyn and Pam.
Art history. There had to be an opening there somewhere. I tried to remember everything I learned from class field trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Statues of perfectly chiseled men who seemed to be superhumanly endowed? While it may give me a chance to bring up anatomical preferences, it wasn’t exactly the right direction. Maybe tormented artists with super-sized egos? That was a little closer to what we were after. Didn’t Van Gogh cut off his ear to impress a girl?
I laid my magazine on the table and opened to a random page.
“Is that for art history?” I asked, glancing up at them.
Carolyn nodded. “Yeah. We have to pick an artist for our term paper.”
“Who are you looking at?” I asked nonchalantly, pretending to be interested in an article on mating rituals of Madagascan aye-ayes.
“Pretty much the regulars: Jackson Pollock, Mary Cassatt, Monet, Van Gogh.”
Bingo!
I looked up from the aye-ayes and prepared to get the ball rolling. It was the moment of truth. Could I, the person who’d been raised to believe that honesty is the best policy, get Carolyn and Pam to give me the information I wanted without coming right out and asking for it?
“Hey, is it true that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend?”
“That’s what they say,” Pam told me. “Why? You think we should do Van Gogh?”
Carolyn shrugged, like that wasn’t such a bad idea. “There is a ton written about him.”
“I was just thinking how a guy today would never do something like that,” I started, hoping that Pam and Carolyn would take my lead and run with it.
Luckily, Pam took the bait. “Yeah. Or if he did he’d show his friends first, just so they knew how tough he was. And they’d probably think he was, even if the rest of us knew he was an idiot who’d be hard of hearing the rest of his life.”
“Or, he wouldn’t even show his friends,” Carolyn said, “because God forbid he actually acts like he really likes her. Instead he’d walk around with a bloody bandage strapped to his ear pretending like nothing happened. And his friends wouldn’t even ask.”
“Of course they wouldn’t. Why ask a personal question when you can rehash the Red Sox World Series for the billionth time.”
That was all it took. Pam and Carolyn were off and running. I pushed aside the National Geographic, tipped my notebook against the edge of the table, and pretended to write about the aye-aye’s diet of insect larvae. It was time to take notes. And fast.
That gargling noise guys make in the back of their throats before they hock a loogie six feet (the farther the better, for some reason).
How they can remember every single word to a movie that’s twelve years old, but they can’t remember what we told them fifteen minutes ago.
The way a guy scratches his crotch or adjusts his junk in public, rummaging around like he’s looking for something he misplaced.
It was amazing. I could barely write fast enough to capture the stream of intolerable traits flying across the table at me. And, although their answers were exactly what I was looking for, it wasn’t the quality of the material that kept a smile on my face as I scribbled down gripe after gripe. It was that I felt like I was part of some covert operation only Lucy, Josie, and I knew about. I’d never belonged to a secret club where you picked a code name like Penelope or Leticia and made up some secret handshake (secrets are rude, after all). But that’s exactly how I felt right then, sitting across from Carolyn and Pam as they gave me exactly what I was after without even realizing it. Like I was going undercover. Like I should be wearing dark sunglasses and a trench coat. Okay, maybe that was too much. In any case, I didn’t have time to plan out an appropriate wardrobe for my mission. I was having a hard enough time keeping up with Carolyn and Pam as it was.
It was like they’d saved up every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating action of every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating guy they’ve ever known. By the time I was on the third sheet of paper, my fingers were cramping and I was writing so fast my hand was smeared with black ink from dragging along the page. They’d given me more than enough material to start with.
“So, what do you think?” Carolyn asked. “Which artist should we do?”
“Mary Cassatt,” I told them, collecting my notebook and standing up.
“Really? Why her? I thought you said we should do Van Gogh.”
“I think the guys have gotten enough attention already. It’s time us girls got a little airtime, too.”
“Hey, don’t you need your magazine?” Pam called after me as I made my way toward the door.
“That’s okay,” I answered. “I’ve got everything I need.”
This wasn’t going to be so hard after all. In fact, I almost wondered why someone hadn’t done this sooner.
As I passed a guy in the hall or sat next to one in class, I started to look at all of them differently. I studied their every move, dissected every word they
spoke. Out of the corner of my eye I caught some junior basketball player cupping his crotch, rearranging himself like it was the most normal thing in the world—almost something to be proud of—while a group of freshman girls diverted their gaze, embarrassed. I watched two sophomore guys sit with their eyes glued to a pair of boobs as they bounced down the hallway toward earth science class, and then break into big grins before making snide comments filled with innuendo.
And, once I started looking at them as specimens to be scrutinized and examined before we cut them up into pieces, they almost became more interesting than annoying. Almost.
Luke still bugged the crap out of me. I may have been on my way to looking at Matt LeFarge, Curtis Ludlow, and Ricky Barnett with a sort of detached scientific curiosity, but I couldn’t help but get irritated every time I saw Luke. Not that he had much to say to me; in fact, ever since our encounter outside Mrs. Blackwell’s class, he seemed to look right through me, instead focusing his attention on the adoring little twits who were dumb enough to get snagged in his web of floppy hair, perfect teeth, and an ass that begged to be wrapped in a pair of faded Levi’s. And it grated on me. Not just because his adoring posse of girls seemed incapable of seeing him for the asshole he was, or because, for the first time ever, I didn’t care if someone didn’t like me—because that part I loved. It felt great. I didn’t care if Luke thought I was a raging bitch. Let him. In the end we’d expose him, and the rest of the guys, for what they were. No, what bothered me was that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the Luke Preston I remembered could become just like the rest of them. Make that the worst of them.
And it was obvious Luke knew how I felt. There was just no way he accidently bumped me while passing in the hall. And, yes, I am genetically programmed to utter polite phrases regardless of the situation, so I did mutter “excuse me” the first time—but the second time I knew better. And the third. And the fourth.