“Don’t forget your puffer!” yelled his mom.
We got in the Honda.
It had been an awful lot like picking him up for a date.
Singin’ in the Rain was most excellent if you like movies where people burst into song and tap-dance. Which I do, though not as much as I like movies where people don’t.
Afterward, we walked down one side of the Ave, which was filled with busy restaurants and boisterous college students, then back up the other side. There was a slight drizzle, like there usually is in Seattle, and the streets looked shiny in the lamplight.
When I asked, Noel talked about his asthma. He got a little touchy about it, though. Not like he was mad at me for asking, but like the whole thing just made him so angry that he hated to even have it mentioned.
To me it sounded like an annoying medical thing and not much else, but to Noel it was a box that he’d been shoved into. He was always trying to figure out how to push his way out.
He said that if his parents had their way he’d never go away for November Week, and he had to fight with them about it every year. How when he’d gone to New York City they’d given his brother Claude strict instructions about exactly when he should be taking his meds, as if they didn’t trust him to do it himself. How they were always yelling out the door that he bring his puffer or pop his anti-inflammatories.
He didn’t want people to know he had asthma, he said. If people knew, it would be like walking around with a sign on his back that said “Defective Goods,” and he wasn’t sure what made him drag me into the bushes that first day of school, because he never showed people his inhaler. Aside from the school nurse and the cross-country coach, both of whom had to know, I was the only one.
“Why me?” I asked.
“I don’t have that many friends.”
I socked him on the arm. “You’re golden, Noel. You get invited to parties all the time. You could eat lunch with anyone you want.”
“True enough. But I don’t have them over to meet the folks like you did today. I’m not close to any of them.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought of it like that.
“I’ve told you, the Tate Universe isn’t quite my thing.”
“And I am?” I said it sarcastically, and his answer surprised me:
“Yes,” said Noel. “You are my thing.”
Abruptly, he stopped walking. I stopped a few steps ahead and turned back to wait for him. I thought he was going to take my hand and kiss me, and I thought that I wanted him to.
I thought, Oh, we’re not friends, we’re in love.
And then a pile of college students poured out of a bar next to where we were standing, laughing with their arms around each other, singing “Louie Louie.”
Noel started walking again and began talking about frat rock as a genre.5 So I asked, who were the Knack and why were they called that? Because I had seen something about them on “Behind the Music.”
For my edification, Noel sang “My Sharona” in such a loud voice that everyone looked at us like we were insane as we walked up the Ave. Then we both sang “Wild thing…Dow dow dow NOW…I think I love you…Dow dow dow NOW…but I wanna knoooow for sure…”
We got in the Honda and went on discussing subjects generally related to frat rock (including the movie The Blues Brothers, the death of John Belushi, and old Saturday Night Live episodes we’d seen), and suddenly, we were in front of his house.
I stopped the car. He hopped out.
And I drove myself home.
The next day, nothing was sexy or romantic between us. It was all back to normal.
FIVE. In French Cinq (level five), we had to act out dramatic scenes from Cyrano de Bergerac and I was forced to be partners with Cricket.
Heidi and Ariel were in class with us too, but they partnered with each other, and Cricket was left with no one. We’d had an assignment like this once earlier in the term, and Cricket had partnered with a sophomore named Sophie, while I had partnered with Hutch.6 But Hutch was absent, and Sophie had since made friends with another girl in the class, so Cricket got stuck with me.
We hadn’t spoken for months, but she had never talked any crap about me that I could hear, and she never bothered Nora for refriending me. She just pretended I didn’t exist.
After Madame Long split us up into partners, Cricket dragged her backpack across the room to where I was sitting.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Do you want to be Roxane or Cyrano?”
“You can be Cyrano,” I said. “You are the summer drama camp goddess. You’ll do it better.”
I was so mad at her and I wanted her to like me again, if that makes any sense.
Like, I didn’t think she was such a good person anymore, and she didn’t think I was such a good person anymore, but she had always made me laugh and I missed her.
“Okay,” Cricket said.
So we read through the scene, with everyone else reading through scenes all around us, and I thought, God, each second of this is torture because we’re so mad at each other, and also, This is kind of fun and maybe we’ll be friends again.
We practiced until the end of the period. When Madame Long told us to stop, Cricket immediately stood up and put her book in her backpack. “Later,” she said—and I thought, Really? Does she mean later, as in she’ll see me later, she’ll talk to me later? although I knew it was just a phrase.
I left class slowly, feeling relieved to at least have talked to Cricket after all this time, and stupidly hopeful.
Cricket was standing in the hall with Ariel and Heidi, who had come out of French across the way. As I walked past them, I waved.
“Heya,” said Heidi.
“God, she is so annoying,” Cricket complained, loud enough for me to hear.
And I thought, Annoying? What did I do?
I did nothing; we just read the scene.
I understand if she thinks I’m a bad person. But since when am I annoying?
Why would she think that?
Heidi elbowed Cricket in the ribs. “She can hear you,” she whispered.
“Fine,” said Cricket, even louder. “She should know how annoying she is.”
“Try to imagine how little I care,” I lied.
SIX. I finally called Angelo. Two weeks after going to the movies with Noel, and three weeks after he first gave me his cell number.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to call before. It was more that I knew it would be awkward when I did, because Angelo and I hadn’t figured out how to talk to each other yet.
And maybe we never would.
Besides which, I couldn’t sort out my feelings.
I liked him. He had nice fat lips and was a camp counselor and was funny with his dogs and was practically a medalist at boob groping. But there were complicating factors. Five, to be precise.
1. Our moms were friends.
2. I’d lied to Jackson about Angelo being my boyfriend.
3. I was jealous of the zoo girl being with Jackson.7
4. I kept thinking about those two times with me and Noel when I thought he might kiss me.8
5. The physical side with Angelo had progressed pretty far, pretty fast. You know, straight to the groping on day one. And though that whole part of it was my idea, I’d never gone any farther than the upper regions. Not even with Jackson. I had no idea what Angelo would be expecting on our third encounter, but it would almost certainly get horizontal.
Still, I wanted to kiss him again. I mean, I had gone months kissing no one after the Spring Fling debacle, but now that I had remembered what it was like, I was interested. And I thought, Why are you overanalyzing and making yourself miserable? Angelo is a good guy. You like each other at least enough to go hang out for an evening. It’s not marriage. It’s one date. So just call him. Go out with him. See what happens.
He answered on the second ring. “Hola.”
“Hi, it’s Ruby,” I said.
“Oh, sorry,” he laughed
. “I thought you were going to be somebody else.”
“No. Just me,” I said. And went right to the point. “Do you wanna, um, hang out sometime?”
“What, like, sometime soon?”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
There was an awkward pause. “Roo, I, um…”
“What?”
“You never called…”
“I’m sorry. I’ve just been busy.”
“…so I figured you weren’t into it.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, that’s okay. You don’t have to be into it if you don’t feel it. You should do what’s right for you.”
“Um-hm.”
“I mean, I started seeing someone,” he said. “When you didn’t call. This girl at my school. And I—I don’t want to step out on her.”
Of course. “No, no,” I said. “I wasn’t asking you that.”
“It was just…you didn’t call. And you told me not to call you, which is why I didn’t.”
“You’re completely right,” I answered. “That is what I said.”
Here was Angelo, who wouldn’t step out on a girl he’d only been seeing for two weeks. A guy who, though certainly not skilled in the telephone department, appeared to be straightforward and honest.
A cute guy who liked me and I liked him and maybe we could have had a thing together.
And I had ruined it.
I got off the phone as quickly as I could.
Why You Want the Guy You Can’t Have: Inadequate Analysis of a Disturbing Psychological Trend
Fact: I like Angelo more now that I can’t have him.1
How could I have been so stupid, not to call? I am full of regret.
Angelo, being a mentally stable type of person, stopped liking me once he figured I was unavailable. But me, no. My brain and heart do the opposite of what would be in their best interests.
Why do we want what we can’t have? Are we conditioned to feel that way by toxic advertising images, social pressures and bad stuff that happens to us? And is there anything we can do to change the situation?
Because I know that, neurotic as I am, I am not alone. Cricket crushed on Billy Alexander all last year, and it started the same week he began seeing Molly.2 And Ariel started liking Shiv when he went out with that freshman.
A guy becomes instantly more desirable when he is with someone else. And that is bad. Because you can’t have him. And also because it’s stupid and kind of sick.
On one hand, it makes sense: if everyone says the new peanut butter ice cream is excellent, you’d probably want to try it, even if peanut butter isn’t usually your thing, right? You might not like it once you’d tried it, but you would want to see what the hype was all about. And you certainly wouldn’t have gotten interested in it if someone else hadn’t pointed out how good it was.
On the other hand, it’s like we’re three years old. You don’t want that scruffy old teddy bear until your friend takes it and starts having a good time with it. Then suddenly it’s the cutest bear you’ve ever seen, and you want to get it away from her.
Ag.
Shouldn’t we be past that by now, and all be falling in love or making out with people who are actually available?
Why are we like this? A few possible theories:
1. Our dads were always going off to work or reading the newspaper when we were little, so now our vision of the ideal man is one who isn’t interested in us. (Very Freudian.)
2. Our dads were in love with our moms, so everyone from infancy (except maybe people raised by single parents or two moms) has this thing where the man they love the best is in love with someone else. (Even more Freudian. Ag. We can stop going there now.)
3. The point of a lot of advertising, as Mr. Wallace explained to us last year in American History & Politics, is to spark desire by creating a sense of inadequacy. Like, we look at some fashion model in a magazine and think, Whoa, I’m ugly and oddly plump next to her. I suck. She’s great. What can I buy to make myself suck less? Oh, that eye shadow she’s modeling. So the magazine photo makes us feel like crap and then we want something. And we’re used to that, because ads are such a huge part of our society. So then when a guy makes us feel bad (by going out with someone else or rejecting us), we respond by wanting something (him).
4. We’re slaves to whatever’s popular. And if a guy has a girlfriend, he’s more popular (pretty much) than any guy who’s free.
5. We are actually scared to have real live boyfriends that we’d have to be all intimate with, so it’s safer to like someone we can’t have.
6. Then again, maybe it’s just true that the cute guys are always taken and I should stop analyzing so much.
Whatever the reason, liking a guy who’s already taken is a recipe for horror. But how to stop liking a person you like? Even if you know your psychotic, messed-up heart is only playing tricks on you?
Practically impossible.
—from The Boy Book, written by me, Ruby Oliver. Approximate date: late October, junior year.
when I showed the entry to Meghan at the B&O a couple of days later, she reached into her book bag and pulled out a pen. “Is it okay if I add something?”
“Sure,” I said, though it had never occurred to me she’d want to. Partly because, well, she wasn’t Cricket or Nora or Kim. And partly because she’s not the analytical type. But she wrote for a long time, then handed it back to me. I read:
Another thing that’s toxic in this whole trend of people wanting what they can’t have is that it leads to evil, manipulative games. Like girls who try to make their boyfriends jealous because then the boys will like the girls even more when they think said girls want somebody else. Or girls who lie to guys, saying they have a boyfriend when they don’t. Or guys who ignore their girlfriends in public, because they think that seeming uninterested will make the girl actually more devoted.
All of which sometimes works.
But then, everyone is fake, and half of them have had their feelings hurt.
Maybe the thing to do is to refuse to play those games, even if you are tempted. Part of me wants to find someone to have a fling with in order to make Bick start paying attention. Because now he hardly seems to know I exist—and I think about him all the time.
Which is awful.
But if he thought I wasn’t thinking about him, and I was thinking of someone else instead, I bet he’d think of me.
But I shouldn’t go having flings I don’t want to have in order to make my boyfriend notice me. And I shouldn’t pretend that I don’t like him so he’ll come crawling back. Because it’s creepy and stupid.
It would be better to stop liking him for real. Then I’d be a lot happier.
—written by Meghan. Approximate date: late October, junior year.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still that shattered about this whole thing.”
Meghan nodded.
“Are you gonna break up with him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It was only when I wrote that just now that I even thought I’d be happier if I didn’t love Bick.”
“Oh.”
“But the problem is, I do. I can’t break up with someone I want to be with.”
“You can’t?”
“How can I walk away from him when I want him so much? Doesn’t that seem like giving up on love?”
I felt like telling her she should dump him. He made her feel like crap and she’d be better off without him. But I knew I’d never have walked away from Jackson if he hadn’t broken up with me. Things had already been weird between us for months before the debacle. Little events (or nonevents) shattered me, like when I baked him black-bottom cupcakes and he barely even noticed. Or when he didn’t buy me a Christmas present. Or didn’t ask me to the Spring Fling until really late. Or the whole Valentine’s Day flower horror.
For pretty long, before we broke up, being with Jackson had made me feel more bad than good.
But I never would have left.
“I know what you mean,” I told Meghan.
“I’d be happier if I didn’t like him,” she said again, like she was trying out the sound of it.
I dialed Angelo’s cell twice one day, having this idea that if I told him I was thinking about him all the time,
and reminded him what it was like that night in the Honda,
and told him that I wanted him,
he’d break up with the other girl.
But he didn’t even pick up. I didn’t leave a message.
He probably looked at his cell to see who had called, and he didn’t ring me back.
Thursday night before November Week was Halloween. My parents were going to the same big party they go to each year, and they had spent the whole afternoon getting ready.
Mom was going as Frida Kahlo, the artist, and had drawn her eyebrows together, put on nearly black lipstick and found some Mexican peasant clothing. She was forcing my dad to be Salvador Dalí, my favorite painter, who had an insane mustache. She glued it on his lip and squeezed him into a red velvet coat, a yellow shirt and a long-haired wig.
There was a party at Jackson’s friend Matt’s, but I don’t need to tell you I wasn’t going. Meghan came over and we watched The Ring, The Others and half of The Exorcist before we got too scared and had to turn on all the lights and eat Popsicles to de-freak ourselves.
The Friday before November Week, Nora pulled me aside when she saw me in the refectory. “Kim is coming home,” she whispered. “Her flight gets in this morning.”
“What?” I was shocked.
“She doesn’t like the exchange program.”
“Why not?”
“Her host family is mean to her. She’s been really homesick.”
Oh.
I had figured that Kim, who had traveled all over the world with her parents on vacation, was having a great time in Japan. It had never occurred to me that she was doing anything but having glamorous, independent adventures. “How did you find out?” “E-mail. But here’s what I have to tell you. Please don’t be mad.”