“No ham smells right,” I told her. “It’s a hunk of dead pig.”
“Veggie.” She laughed. “Here, Meghan, smell it.”
Meghan smelled and shook her head. “Don’t eat it. I need both of you alive to help me leave the state of Noboyfriend”
“What about me?” Nora asked. “I want to leave it too.”3
“Of course. This should be the end of Noboyfriend for all of us. Especially because it’s never too early to think about Spring Fling.”
I moaned. “It is too too early.”
“Fine. Only I think it would be great to have a boyfriend for Spring Fling. Not just a date, but like a real boyfriend to be in love with.”
This is a perfect example of how Meghan’s brain works. She can think that she’d like to work toward being in love by the time a particular dance comes around, even though she doesn’t have so much as a crush on any particular boy at school. And she wants to be in love not really to be in love, but to maximize romance on the mini-yacht dance Tate Prep throws every April. I mean, what kind of person has that for a goal, anyhow, instead of, I don’t know, making varsity lacrosse or a 2100 on the SAT?
“And who is this real boyfriend going to be?” I asked Meghan.
“I don’t know. That’s what I need help with. Who would be good for me?”
“Meghan!”
“What?”
“Who do you like?”
She shrugged. “I’m ruling out seniors,” she said. “The last thing I need is another guy who’s going off to college. But I’m having trouble when I look at the juniors, too.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out the school directory, which contained everyone’s name, address and school photo from the previous year. She flipped it open to the junior class page and handed it to me. “I’ve known these guys since kindergarten. We all have. It might be biologically impossible for me to go out with any of them. Unless you see something I haven’t.”
Nora looked over my shoulder. “Look at Noel’s hair,” she said, pointing to his photo.
I laughed. He was wearing a ridiculous amount of hair gel.
I scanned the photos. Tate Prep is a small school with a serious dearth of decent guys: it was all Neanderthals, sporty muffins and Future Doctors of America, or guys in the gaming club and guys who hadn’t hit puberty yet, ineligible for reasons I think must be obvious. That was pretty much it.
“How about Hutch?” I said.
John Hutchinson (aka Hutch) has been at Tate since kindergarten. He’s a leper due to tragic skin and a marked tendency to quote retro heavy-metal lyrics in place of making sane conversation, but now that I got to know him this past fall, I don’t think he’s so bad. He became my dad’s gardening assistant last year. They work together in the greenhouse on the southern side of our houseboat, and even though Hutch is even more lacking in human relationship skills than I am, he’s a nice guy. Noel likes him too.
Meghan wrinkled her nose. “I like a guy more athletic than Hutch,” she said diplomatically. Because Hutch is not an attractive physical specimen.
“This is bad news,” said Nora, shaking her head over the directory. “You may have to look at sophomores.”
“We are allowed to go out with guys outside of Tate, you know,” I said. “There’s no law against it.”
Meghan sniffed. “When would I even meet such a guy? I have tennis team starting soon; I have therapy. College visits on weekends. The most important thing in life, and I don’t even have time for it, really.”
“Boyfriends are not the most important thing in life,” said Nora. “They can’t be.”
“Not boyfriends. Love.”
I shook my head. “You are a warped little bunny, my friend.”
“Seriously,” Meghan persisted. “What’s more important than love? Because it’s not tennis team, I’m telling you that right now.”
“So you have to look at the sophomores,” Nora said.
I groaned.
“Why not?” Nora went on. “Boys do it all the time. I don’t want to think about how many junior and senior guys are going out with sophomore girls right now. It might as well be the other way around.”
Meghan shot a glance over to a sophomore table, where two six-foot boys were leaning back in their chairs. One threw a raisin at the other, who fell out of his chair. Knocked spineless by a raisin.
“They’re taller than they used to be,” she said thoughtfully.
“Operation Sophomore Love,” I said. “That’s your project, right there.”
Normally after school I have sports practice or therapy or I go to my internship at the Woodland Park Zoo, where I work in the penguin exhibit and the Family Farm area. But I was sitting out lacrosse this term since there was no way I’d make varsity goalie, and the internship hadn’t started again yet.
These circumstances meant I was free after school to go shopping with my mother. I needed a coat and a couple of sweaters. The weather was colder than usual that winter, and I’d gained a few inches since sophomore year. She picked me up in the Honda.
My mother is more bohemian than the other mothers at Tate Prep. Other mothers tend to be brain surgeons, lawyers or homemakers, while Elaine Oliver is a semisuccessful performance artist and part-time copy editor who could easily earn a merit badge for annoying babble. Despite her artsy lifestyle and minimal income, she would still like to dress me as the kind of child she wishes she had.
That is, wholesome and well-adjusted.
Mom took me to the BP department of Nordstrom because Grandma Suzette gave her a gift certificate there for Christmas. Also, I suspect, because Nordstrom is safely in the mall, where there are no vintage shops for me to wander into.
We strolled through the aisles of fresh, brightly colored sweaters and stacks of jeans. Mom waved an aqua turtleneck at me. It was decorated with an appliqué of a poodle. “This is your style, isn’t it, Roo?”
“It’s aqua. Have you ever seen me wear aqua?”
“It would bring out your eyes.”
“And have you ever seen me wear a turtleneck?”
“No,” she admitted. “But my neck is always cold in the middle of winter. Isn’t yours?”
“No.”
“I thought you’d like it because it’s vintage-y. See, with the poodle? People used to wear skirts with poodles on them in the fifties.”
I took hold of the foul turtleneck. Next, she showed me a white wool coat decorated with brown anchors and curlicues of nautical rope.
“This is very you,” she said, smiling proudly at her find. “Isn’t it?”
Anchors?
“It has a sense of irony,” she continued. “I know you like irony. Plus it’ll be warm around your neck. Try it on.”
It didn’t have a sense of irony. Those were completely unironic anchors.
While Mom was grabbing fuzzy pullovers in colors that radiated solid mental health, I picked up a navy blue hoodie and a plain black cardigan, in case she was going to insist we complete our shopping here.
She shoved herself into the dressing room with me, her mane of frizzy dark hair so close that when I took off my shirt I actually brushed against it with my bare body. She clucked her tongue upon seeing me in the poodle turtleneck. “You look beautiful!” she told me. “Oh, it clings to all the right places.”
Ag.
“I don’t know why you’re always covering your body with bowling shirts that used to belong to some old plumber,” my mother went on. “It’s self-sabotage, don’t you think?”
“No.”
“You should talk to Doctor Z about it.”
“About how I like vintage clothes?”
“Old things, things other people have discarded. Stuff that’s shapeless and falling apart.”
“And that shows what?” I prodded.
“That you feel discarded! That you don’t feel light and sunny. You never wear pink or yellow, Ruby.”
“Mom.”
“What?”
“Look in the
mirror.”
She looked. “I’m wearing all black, so what? That’s not the point. I’m forty-five years old.”
“You’re forty-seven.”
She harrumphed. “Whatever age I am, it’s an age where black looks good on me. And besides, all black is very stylish. You, you buy these old dresses that have practically no shape and the buttons falling off them, when you could spend the same money on this poodle sweater that shows off your breasts so nicely.”
Did she have to say breasts?
“You get your breasts from my side the family,” my mother said. “I have nice breasts.”
She owned a book called Empower Your Girl Child, which I had secretly read. It told her that as the parent of a teenager she should role-model bodily self-confidence. “Grandma Suzette has no breasts to speak of,” Mom continued. “She’s flat as a table. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It can be very attractive. Now try this coral angora one with the cute bow. Look, it says ‘fresh’ on the collar in rhinestones. Isn’t that similar to those beaded sweaters you like?”
I pulled off the turtleneck and my mom reached out a clammy hand and grabbed my naked arm.
“What?”
She stood to examine my shoulder. “Do you know you have some pimples on your back?” She ran her hand over the area.
Did she have to say pimples? Couldn’t she just say I was breaking out or having some skin trouble?
Pimples. Breasts. Pimples. Breasts. It was like the woman was walking around with a vocab list and consulting it regularly: Uncomfortable Words Relating to the Physical Changes of Adolescence.
“You don’t need to fondle them,” I told her.
She removed her hand and sat back down. “It’s normal to have pimples when you’re sixteen.”
“Thanks for the tidbit. And you wonder why I have to go the shrink.”
She barked with laughter. “It’s not because of me, you can be sure of that.”
“Right.” I pulled the coral angora rhinestone thing over my head so as not to be standing there in my bra anymore, giving her an eyeful of my bad skin.
“Really. It’s your father. He’s inconsistent with you. I’m sure you’ve noticed that. And I love him, but he does have quite a few inhibitions of his own. There’s no denying it. Ooh, look at yourself in the mirror!”
I resembled a tulip with bling.
“Try it with the anchor coat,” she commanded.
Fine. I put on the anchor coat.
“Roo, you have no idea how beautiful you are,” Mom gushed. “Now, did you see they have this same angora in lime? It says ‘Charmant’ on the collar, though.”
Ag, ag and more ag.
“Run out and it get it, why don’t you?” she said. “I want to see how it looks with your eyes.”
“Why don’t you go?” I whined.
She had her cell phone out. “I’m calling Dad, that’s why. I have to tell him to check the raw peanuts that are soaking in the fridge. Did you know my recipe actually says to take them out when they’re the size of border collie testicles? I swear to you, I’m not making that up. It’s straight out of the peanut goulash recipe.”
If she wanted me to go away, discussion of peanut goulash and border collie testicles was a good way to make it happen. I went to look for the “charmant” angora, tags from the unironic anchor coat flapping behind me.
I had just found the table where the lime green excrescence was folded neatly in a stack and was searching for my size when a voice murmured my name, near my ear.
“Hey there, Roo.”
My ex-boyfriend. Jackson Clarke.
Here in the BP section of Nordstrom. Wearing the jacket I bought him for Christmas a year ago.
We generally avoided each other as much as possible.
“That’s Ms. Roo to you,” I said.
Why, oh, why did I have to be blinged-up-angora-tulip-unironic-anchor person just when Jackson was wandering the BP? Because even if a girl is completely over her ex-boyfriend, and even if he has a girlfriend he’s been with for ten months, and even if he’s not even the person she thought he was, back when they were together—even if all those things are true, she still wants to be gorgeous and desirable every time she sees him.
She still wants him to look at her and think, Oh, man, I messed that up. She is unbelievably hot.
Jackson looked me up and down. “Shopping?”
“For superhero disguises,” I said, to explain my outfit.
He raised his eyebrows.
“You know,” I went on, “how superheroes need to have nerdy alter egos that help them go through life with no one suspecting their secret awesomeness?”
He nodded. “Like Meimi in Saint Tail.” Jackson had a thing for anime.4
“Like Superman,” I said. “So what do you think? Will this outfit delude the average men and women of America into thinking I couldn’t possibly wield superpowers?”
He laughed. “You do look funny,” he said.
Ouch.
Jackson leaned in to read my rhinestone collar. “Or should I say, you look fresh?”
“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked him.
But before he could answer, I realized what the answer had to be.
He was here with Kim. She was probably changing in the dressing room next to mine, listening to my mother talk about my breasts and my pimples and my psychological problems and also border collie testicles.
“Oh, I’m looking for a coat with anchors,” he told me. “Do you know where I could find something like that? Something nautical, with maybe some curly rope on it?”
“Shut up.”
“Don’t be fresh with me.”
“That’s not even funny.”
“Is too.” He turned his grin on me.
I shook my head. “You’ve lost your touch. Is Kim in the changing room?”
“I’m here with Dempsey. She has a gift certificate. I’m playing chauffeur.”
I exhaled. Dempsey is his sister. She’s an eighth grader. The Tate middle school has a different campus from the upper school, so I hadn’t seen her since Jackson and I were going out—but suddenly, there she was next to me, looking at the lime angora “charmant” sweater in my hand and saying, “Hi, Ruby, wow, do you like that sweater? It’s way sweet. Ooh, you have the coral one on already, that looks so cute on you, are you gonna buy it? Because if you’re not, do you mind if I try it on? I have a gift certificate, did doofus-head tell you that?”
“Hi, Dempsey,” I said.
“I haven’t seen you like, wow, since I was a seventh grader,” Dempsey babbled. “I love your hair. Do you think I should get bangs? I don’t think I can work bangs. It takes a face like yours to work the bangs.” She grabbed the front of her hair and pulled it up so that the ends hung down over her eyebrows. “What do you think?”
“You could work the bangs,” I said. “And I’m not getting either of these angoras. They’re all yours.”
But she had already lost interest in the angoras and was touching an argyle sweater vest. “Is argyle out yet?” she asked me.
I shrugged.
“And what do you think about Jackson being single again?” Dempsey asked.
I looked at Jackson. He was staring at his feet with his hands shoved in the front pocket of his sweatshirt.
He wasn’t single before winter break. He was with Kim. He’d been with Kim since last spring.
“News to me,” I said, my heart thudding.
“He and Kim broke up at lunch today,” Dempsey explained. “I thought you’d know.”
Why would she think I’d know? Did Dempsey think people like Cricket and Kim still talked to me?
“Goodbye, Dempsey.” This from Jackson, with a threat in his voice.
“I was hoping you might tell me details,” she went on, ignoring him. “He wouldn’t explain what happened. I know it has to be his fault, though. No offense, but I don’t know why anyone would go out with him in the first place.” Dempsey fingered a ray
on shirt. “He’s not even cute and his room is disgusting.”
That was untrue. Jackson was desperately cute. Dark brown hair curling at his neck. Soft freckles. Tall. Raspy voice. Narrow hips.
“She really likes you,” I said to Jackson, deadpan. “You must be a great big brother.”
“Don’t listen to anything she says,” he told me.
“I’m telling the truth!” cried Dempsey. “You told me yourself it was over with Kim!”
“My mom is waiting for me,” I said, grabbing a stack of heinous sweaters off the table. “I gotta go.”
I could hear my mother long before I reached the changing room, where she was still sitting. Elaine Oliver is one of those people who thinks she needs to yell into a cell phone and cannot imagine that anyone else might hear her conversation. “I’m stiff from that yoga class Juana made me go to!” she was shouting, presumably to Dad. “I did something to my groin area … Sure, you can massage it later.”
I opened the door to the dressing room.
“I gotta go, Kevin, Roo is back. Oh, will you get her some benzoyl peroxide at the drugstore when you pick up the paper towels? She’s got some pimples that look like they could use some treatment…. Love you too. Bye.”
I tried on ugly sweater after ugly sweater, not listening to my mother’s commentary, not looking at myself in the mirror, thinking: Jackson and Kim broke up.
Just today at lunch.
While I was eating salad with fried Chinese noodles.
While I was talking to Meghan about whether I should play lacrosse this spring.
Ten months ago, he had left me for her.
Ten months ago, she had left me for him.
Eight gazillion therapy sessions later, I finally didn’t care. They were together. That was how the world was.
I could handle the world that way.
And now, it wasn’t that way anymore. Everything had changed while I was drinking peach iced tea in the refectory.
Though I managed to avoid the poodle turtleneck in favor of the navy hoodie, I was too weakened by the situation to stop my mother from buying me the coat with anchors.
1 Ennui: Another one of my new words. It means “listlessness, boredom.” As in, “I would save the world, but I suffer from ennui, which forces me to lie on the couch and eat spearmint jelly candies instead.”