Only, I stayed where I was.
Besides the fact that if I came out they’d know I’d been hiding with my feet tucked up on the toilet seat, listening to their conversation, nothing I wanted to say was entirely true. I had been flirting with Jackson. I did have moments of wanting him back, now that he was single and talking to me.
What kind of person was I?
Pretty awful, I had to admit.
I mean, if I was Kim, I would hate me. And if I was Cricket I would hate me.
How did I become someone I myself would hate?
“Come to my house after school,” Cricket told Kim. “We’ll rent movies and eat cheesy popcorn. I’ll get Katarina, Heidi and Ariel to come too.”
“Nothing romantic,” said Kim. “I can’t watch romantic movies in my current state of mind.”
“Of course not.”
“And no anime or I’ll think about Jackson.”
“Would I ever intentionally watch anime?” Cricket asked.
“No,” Kim admitted.
“Action,” promised Cricket. “Action where guys take their shirts off. That’ll make you feel better.”
Kim laughed. “Not Troy again.”1
Maybe it was the mention of Troy. Cricket had convinced us to rent that movie so many times in ninth grade. It made me sad to think of them watching it again (because of course they would, despite what Kim said)—eating the popcorn Cricket always used to make with Cheddar, Parmesan and pepper.
Without me.
Thinking about it, I panicked. There in the toilet stall, my breathing grew short, my heart pounded, I could feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead. You don’t need another description. Same horror show, same channel. I stayed in the toilet stall through my whole lunch period, holding on to Noel’s hoodie for comfort.
I kept thinking: I can’t go on hanging out with Jackson at the bake sale table.
I can’t go on liking Gideon a little and liking Noel a lot.
I can’t keep pretending to help Nora get Noel while secretly wanting him myself.
After school, still wearing the hoodie, I convinced Nora to drive me to Dick’s Drive-in so I could make up for the calories missed at lunch. We got milk shakes and three orders of French fries with tartar sauce and mustard and leaned against the hood of her car to eat, even though it was chilly out.
“Noel saved me,” I said, having explained the debacle with the ginger ale and the orange bra.
“Just goes to show,” said Nora, her mouth full of French fry.
“What?”
“Skin color is the best color for underwear. It never shows through your clothes.”
“That’s not my point,” I told her.
“Bright orange bra is just asking for disaster,” Nora went on.
“Really,” I told her. “I have a point, and I want you to hear it.”
She looked surprised. “Okay.”
“My point is–” I didn’t know the best way to say it. I took a slurp of my milk shake to buy time. “Noel rescued me like it meant something. Like he wanted it to mean something.”
“Oh.” Nora’s face fell.
“And maybe I wanted it to mean something too,” I said.
Our fries were gone, so Nora crumpled up our greasy squares of paper and threw them in the garbage.
“What do you want me to say to that?” she asked as she came back.
“I don’t know.”
She twirled a strand of her hair on her finger and sighed. “You know I’ve liked him for a long time.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You told me you were just friends.”
“We are just friends,” I said, not wanting to lie but wanting to say what she wanted to hear. “I’m just trying to be honest with you.”
Nora was silent for a moment. “Let me be honest back, then,” she said. “You don’t know how it is to like someone for a long time. To keep thinking he might like you back, and thinking he might like you back, and never being sure. Every day you think something might happen. Every day you tell yourself, probably not—but maybe. And then every day it doesn’t. It’s hard.”
I nodded.
“So—it’s just not fair for you to suddenly decide you like Noel just because he loaned you his hoodie, when I’ve been liking him for months,” said Nora. She looked at me plaintively, then opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. I got in next to her.
“There’s more,” she said.
“What?”
“Like, with you and Meghan. It’s hard being friends with you sometimes.”
My pulse quickened. I had been trying to be so good-encouraging, reliable, honest-and now she was saying I was hard to be with?
“I love you both, but you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Guys are always looking at you and wanting you,” said Nora. “You’re so sexy all the time, with lipstick and stuff, and Meghan—well, she’s just Meghan. The two of you sit there at the bake sale table flirting with everyone. I just can’t be like that. I’m not that type.”
“You think I’m sexy?” I blurted.
Sometimes I felt sexy, and sometimes I felt like a troll.
In any case, I didn’t walk around all day trying to be sexy.
“Hello? Orange bra? Fishnets?”
I nodded. When she put it that way, she had a point. I was shocked, though, that she thought of me and Meghan as the same kind of girl. Meghan was experienced and enterprising and often annoying on the boy front.
Was I the same way?
It was true, I guess, that I was getting attention from Gideon, Finn, Noel and maybe even Jackson, while Nora was getting attention from-no one. And that despite all the horrors that resulted, I had had a real boyfriend last year, while Nora had been Noboyfriend for life.
And I liked wearing fishnets. And I did like the way guys looked at my legs when I wore them.
“So I guess I’m saying, please don’t steal him,” Nora went on as we pulled out of the drive-in parking lot.
“I’m not trying to steal him,” I said. “I’m just trying to talk about it.”
Nora kept looking straight ahead. “It’s not fair for you to have Gideon and Jackson and half the soccer team flirting with you, and then decide you’re interested in the one guy I like when you could have almost anyone. Don’t you see what I’m saying, Roo?”
I had never thought of myself that way. As flirting with half the soccer team. But with CHuBS recruiting, I couldn’t deny it was true.
I looked at Nora. Her hands in fuzzy blue gloves. Her skin tan from skiing. Her lips a little chapped. Her eyes on the road because she’s always a good driver, even when she’s upset.
I didn’t want to be the slut most people at school thought I was. I didn’t want to be the boy-stealing flirt Nora obviously thought I might be. I wanted to be a good friend. The kind of friend who gets invited over for Troy and cheesy popcorn when something bad has happened.
“Point taken,” I told her.
“Ruby, did you make the treasure map we talked about?” Doctor Z asked next Tuesday, when I told her about the drama.
“No. But I’ll get to it, I promise.”
Doctor Z looked at me.
“I’ve been superbusy,” I said. “Did I tell you about the SAT practice tests? They’re making us do practice tests. I spent my Saturday night doing that.”
She looked at me some more.
“Plus all the Baby CHuBS stuff, plus I have to read House of Mirth. Plus”—I spit it out—“I had another panic attack this morning. Just randomly before I left for school.”
She crossed her legs and still didn’t say anything.
“Are you mad I had the panic attack? Because you’re right, I should be over them by now.”
Doctor Z shook her head. “I’m not mad. This is not about me being mad or judging you in any way, Ruby.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” said Doctor Z. “I’m wonderin
g if we should spend some time examining your resistance to making the treasure map.”
“I don’t know what I want!” I yelled. “How can I make a map of what I want when I don’t know what I want?”
Silence from Doctor Z.
“I want Jackson one day. I want Noel another day. I want Gideon another. Sometimes I want random people I don’t even like especially, like Finn Murphy or my Am Lit teacher.”
“Um-hm.”
“I want something real one day and I want something like in the movies the next. I’m not consistent, so I don’t know how on earth I’m supposed to do this assignment.”
“I see.”
I sat there for a minute or two. “What should I do?”
“I can’t tell you that,” said Doctor Z.
“Then we’re not going to get anywhere,” I told her, “because I don’t know what to do myself. I know you always say I should take action to get what I want out of a situation, but if my mental health is so bad I don’t even know what I want, there’s no action to take.”
“Lots of people don’t know what they want.”
“Yeah, but are they mentally stable?”
“Possibly.”
I stared at her.
Doctor Z chewed her Nicorette. After a while, she said, “I can offer you an observation, for what it’s worth.”
“What?”
“The treasure map assignment was to create a map of positive peer-group relationships—a friendship collage.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The map you’ve been describing, based on what you said just now about Gideon, Jackson and Noel, is more like a treasure map of boys rather than friends.”
Oh.
“When we’re talking about these people, we’re talking about love relationships, are we not?”
“Um. Maybe not love, exactly.”
“Romantic relationships.”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s an interesting interpretation on your part.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you interpreted peer-group relationships as romantic relationships.”
Oh yeah. That.
“That’s why I’m here,” I told her. “My priorities are completely warped.”
1 Troy: Basically, lots of war and shirtless men.
I Suffer from Rabbit Fever
Dear F-SHAN (Former Secret Hooter Agent Noel),
The hooters of F-SHAR (Former Secret Hooter Agent Ruby) are sincerely indebted to you for their heroic rescue last week. Despite the closure of the Hooter Rescue Squad, your skills remain sharp and your instincts unwaveringly chivalrous.
F-SHAR has kept your hoodie much longer than she meant to, but now it’s clean and she can give it back. In the interim, she begs you to accept this package of Band-Aids that look like bacon strips, as a sign of her sincere appreciation for your efforts.
—written on white typing paper in black pen—after several drafts; folded in thirds and wrapped around a package of bacon Band-Aids. Shoved with hoodie into Noel’s mail cubby.
i hadn’t thanked Noel properly for the rescue, since after my conversation with Nora I felt self-conscious every time I talked to him. But finally I did the laundry and I had to give him his hoodie back, so I wrote this note trying to be amusing and unromantic.
At the start of junior year, before Nora liked him, before he asked if he could kiss me, back when we were friends without any added weirdness, Noel and I had formed a top-secret agency devoted to protecting the rights and interests of hooters everywhere. It was subsequently disbanded. Long story. Anyway, the note was a flashback to the days of the Hooter Rescue Squad, when we were friends, just friends. I stuck it in Noel’s cubby on Thursday morning.
I bought the bacon Band-Aids at Archie McPhee. It’s this amazing store on Market Street that has things like windup nuns, Devil Duckies, pirate garbage cans, action figures of Sigmund Freud and Jane Austen—and the world’s largest collection of snow globes. I got Noel the bacon Band-Aids, even though I’m a vegetarian, because it was so perfect that the bacon was the right shape. Also because Mr. Fleischman had sent home a Chem handout on hydrogenation and how bacon fat is solid at room temperature and liquid when heated and how you could make soap from it too. The Xerox included a photograph of bacon—as if Chem students couldn’t be relied upon to have a clear idea of what bacon was without visual assistance. Noel and I had laughed about that a lot when we first got the handout: “What’s bacon, again?” he kept asking. “I can never seem to remember. I hope it’s not on the test.”
Thursday lunch, Noel wrapped three of his fingers in bacon strips. He waved them at me across the refectory, and I got my raisin salad and went to sit with him, Nora, Meghan and Hutch.
Hutch was wearing fingerless gloves and his usual biker jacket with “Iron Maiden” painted on the back. He didn’t talk much, not around Meghan and Nora, at least. I wasn’t sure if it was because Hutch didn’t like them, or because he worried they didn’t like him, but he was definitely different at school than when he worked with my dad in the greenhouse.
While we ate, Meghan, Nora and I put on the serious pressure for the boys to contribute to Baby CHuBS.
Hutch shook his head. “You don’t want to eat my cooking, trust me.”
“Noel?” Nora pressed, leaning across the table and tapping his arm. “Won’t you help us out? It’s for a good cause. Ooh, excellent Band-Aids.” She touched his hand. “What happened to your fingers?”
Noel smiled at her. “I didn’t burn myself baking, I’ll tell you that.”
“Does it hurt?” Nora pushed out her bottom lip sympathetically.
“Nah,” said Noel. “I’ll live.”
“So bake for us!” she said.
“I’m not much of a cook.”
“But your parents cook,” I said. “Your parents are cooking fiends. You could use some of your mom’s recipe books. Does she make French stuff, like pastry?”
Nora turned to me. “When were you at Noel’s house?” she asked.
“In the fall,” I said. “When you couldn’t go to Singin’ in the Rain with us.”
“Oh,” said Nora, in a voice that had that slight edge to it-that edge that meant, I didn’t know you’d been to his house.
Hutch laughed. “Ruby dragged you to Singin’ in the Rain?” he teased Noel. “Dude, you have no willpower.”
Noel put his head on the table in mock shame. “Apparently I cannot say no when Ruby makes me do girly stuff. First a musical comedy, now baking.”
“Ruby’s not making you,” said Nora. “I am asking you, very sweetly.”
Hutch slapped Noel on the back. “You know what you need?”
“What?” Noel said, turning his face toward his bottle of orange juice.
“You need to go see Van Halen at KeyArena.”
“Oh no,” I said. “He does not need that. You do not need that, Noel.”
“You think that will counteract my sissy baking?” Noel asked Hutch, lifting his head.
“That was an official yes!” cried Nora. “You heard it here, first, guys.”
“David Lee Roth is a rock legend,”1 said Hutch, still talking about Van Halen.
Noel put his head back down. “If I make French pastry, I don’t know if even Led Zeppelin would be strong enough to counteract it.”
“Will you really do French pastry?” I asked. “What does your mom know how to make? Can you make pain au chocolat?”
Noel groaned.
“It’s not sissy baking,” said Meghan. “Several guys on the soccer team are already signed up.”
“She’s right,” said Nora. “It’s manly manly baking.”
Noel lifted his head. “She can make pain au chocolat,” he said, with faux resignation. “I’ll get her to show me how.”
“Yay!” Nora clapped her hands.
Noel stood to bus his tray. “Ruby, I am powerless to deny you, but you may be the death of me.”
Hutch laughed. ??
?You can come over and play Guitar Hero this weekend if you need to reclaim your manhood.”
“I may need to,” said Noel.
When the boys left, Nora’s forehead wrinkled. “He’s powerless to deny you?” she said to me.
I held up my hands in innocence.
At my next week’s therapy appointment I told Doctor Z about the conversation with Nora, the Hooter Rescue Squad note I wrote to Noel and how I’d gotten him to make pain au chocolat for the bake sale.
Doctor Z listened quietly and then she said: “Explain to me again how your note read?”
“The one I gave Noel?”
“Yes.”
“It said thank you for…um… rescuing my boobs. Only I called them hooters because that’s the official term used by the Rescue Squad.”
“Hm.”
“What?”
“You wrote the note after the conversation with Nora, am I understanding correctly?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t feel you were flirting with Noel.”
“No.”
“Some people might say that writing a note about your breasts to a boy is a flirtatious thing to do.”
Ag.
Ag, ag, ag.
I had written a note about my breasts to Noel.
What kind of girl writes a note about her breasts to the boy her best friend likes?
What kind of girl writes a note about her breasts, period? Was I in total denial, flirting with Noel when I’d promised not to? Was I a horrible person?
How had I let myself do that, after my promise to Nora?
There has got to be a word for the general but inadvertent sex mania I’ve been having. I mean, this is probably how rabbits feel, and why they’re always procreating at unreasonable speed. Like they don’t even mean to be thinking about sex, much less doing anything sexy, and then they suddenly find themselves in the throes of horizontal action, or whatever position rabbits do it in. They find themselves doing it and having a whole rabbit family without even meaning to, just like I find myself looking at Wallace’s chest hair or flirting with Jackson or pressing my thigh against Gideon’s or writing notes to Noel about my boobs.