The Boy Book (14 page)

4. Girls who think I’m a leper and that the strange blue spots of leprosy will infect them if they so much as give me the time of day.

But I figured I’d go with Nora, if she was up for it, and maybe she’d ease the way for me. Meghan wanted to go, because she was trying to keep herself distracted from the Bick situation. And some swim team girls would be there, and they were always reasonably nice.

And Jackson.

He wanted me to be there. And that made me want to be there too.

But that all changed on Saturday afternoon.

I was at my zoo job. I’d spent the morning at the Family Farm, helping toddlers get food out of the dispensers and answering questions about the names of the llamas and the breeds of the goats. It was actually fun. I pet the soft gray necks of the llamas and fed Maggie the cow a handful of pellet treats. Her tongue was slimy when she licked them off my fingers.

Then I helped Lewis in the greenhouse for a bit, watering stuff and pruning a little, and ate my brown-bag lunch by the elephant enclosure, watching a baby elephant trail around after its mother.

Two o’clock was the penguin feeding. I had my script memorized, but I also had a printout of it folded up in my pocket. Anya met me by the door of the AV closet and got me set up, since it was my first time being official penguin announcer. The feeding schedule was posted all around the zoo, so a few minutes before we were supposed to start, visitors began crowding in around the penguins, watching them swimming their fat bodies through the blue water.

The room was dark, and penguins on the land part of the enclosure seemed to sense that feeding time was near: a good number of them had waddled over to the door, waiting for the keepers to come out with buckets of fish.

I stood on a footstool and started my talk when Anya gave me the sign to go ahead. “Welcome to the Woodland Park Zoo’s Humboldt penguin feeding. You’ll notice that Humboldts are medium-sized penguins, averaging twenty-eight inches long and weighing about nine pounds. You can distinguish them from other penguins by the black band of feathers across their chests and by the splotchy pink patches on their faces and feet. The pink parts are bare skin, which is an adaptation that keeps these warm-weather penguins nice and cool. Humboldts are native to the coastal regions of Peru and Chile.”

I looked up from my paper as the keepers entered the enclosure wearing knee-high rubber boots. Penguins started hopping out of the water and waddling toward the buckets, opening their mouths. “Okay, you can see they know it’s lunchtime!”

I looked out at the crowd. There, with his back to me, looking at the Humboldts, was Jackson.

Jackson and a girl.

A girl I’d never seen before. An impossibly pretty African American girl, with a head full of tiny dreadlocks.

A girl who reached out, there in the dark, and took his hand.

“If you don’t like eating fish, you wouldn’t like to be a penguin!” I squeaked out, feeling Anya’s eyes on me. “The keepers are feeding them anchoveta, little fish that live in the waters off the South American coast. Humboldts also eat squid and crustaceans.”

Jackson leaned down and whispered in the girl’s ear. I could feel heat rushing to my face. My mouth felt dry, and I could hardly keep going.

“They don’t have to drink water, since they take in seawater as they swallow their fish. But like all penguins, they have a special gland that removes the salt from their bodies.”

That sick feeling that I had every day last year in the refectory, watching Jackson and Kim together after they hooked up, flooded through me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Would he recognize my voice and turn around?

Had he recognized it already?

“Some fun facts about Humboldt penguins,” I said, my hands shaking as I held the speech in front of me. “They can swim at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, using their wings to propel them forward while steering with their webbed feet. After mating, the female lays two white eggs. Both mom and dad take turns sitting on them until they hatch, a real case of shared parenting!”

Jackson moved around behind the girl and put his arms around her, hugging her from the back.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I skipped the whole part I was supposed to say about the Humboldts’ being endangered by commercial fishing and communicating by flipper waving. “Well,” I said, speaking as fast as I could, “you can see they’re nearly done with lunch! Thank you for visiting our Humboldt penguins today. And make sure to stop by the reticulated python feeding in the reptile house at four o’clock.”

I stepped down from the footstool as fast as I could and started pushing the AV cart back toward the closet—but I was in such a rush I forgot to turn off the mike and unplug the equipment, so first the microphone let out a horrible screech, and then the electrical cord jerked and the rolling stand toppled over.

Anya jumped forward and braced it, and between the two of us we got it upright again. “Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, bending down and pulling the cord out of the socket.

Standing up, I couldn’t help looking in Jackson’s direction again.

He was looking straight at me.

When the crowds cleared out and we had put the AV equipment away, Anya gave me a talking-to. Blah blah blah wasn’t fully prepared, blah blah blah she knew I was nervous and it was my first time, blah blah blah maybe I needed another training session or should work another few hours for Lewis instead if I didn’t like public speaking.

I barely listened to her.

Jackson was seeing someone. Behind Kim’s back.

Even after what happened last year, I never thought he would do something like this. Kim swore to me that she and Jackson had never acted on their feelings until he and I had broken up, and there was comfort in the idea that they’d stuck to the rules. That I hadn’t been a complete dupe. That I hadn’t been kissing him and thinking I was going out with him when really he was with someone else.

That he hadn’t been bareface lying to me.

I knew Jackson wasn’t the person I’d thought he was when we were going out. But I’d always believed what Kim said: when they got together, they’d been blindsided by love into doing something that was out of character for both of them. And all that stuff that happened during the Spring Fling debacle could be explained if you think (like my dad does) that Jackson was torn and confused by his emotions.

But he wasn’t torn and confused now. He was watching a penguin feeding. He had a girlfriend in Tokyo who had only left town four weeks earlier and who was coming back at winter break.

And he was out with someone else.

When I got home, I called Nora and Meghan and told them I wasn’t going to Kyle’s party.

Nora I had to lie to. I couldn’t tell her about seeing Jackson in the zoo, or how I’d written him back after he wrote me that note.

I had never told her it was Jackson who invited me to Kyle’s in the first place.

So I said I was having an attack of leprosy and had to stay home.

Meghan I told everything. She said there was no way she was going to the party without me and invited me over to sit in her hot tub instead. So we did that, getting cans of pop and looking out at the lake while we soaked. The air was chilly, and steam rose from the tub like a tropical mist.

I explained the whole Jackson scenario in gory detail. It was a relief to put it all into words. But as usual, Meghan’s interpretation was woefully simple. “Forget it, Roo,” she told me. “Jackson is nothing to you anymore, and Kim’s nothing to you either. Just let it go.”

But they weren’t nothing to me. They were still huge, enormous somethings, even after all this time.

“In my Yoga Elective,” Meghan went on, “we do all this tension release. The idea is that you
surrender
to the pose, whatever stretchy position you’re in, and release into it, letting go of all the stuff that’s making it hurt.”

“But don’t you think if someone is doing something wrong to someone else, even someone you don’t like, you should say something?” I asked, hiking myself up to sit on the edge of the tub.

“You should
stay out of it,
” said Meghan, taking a drink of Sprite.

I slid back into the water and dunked my head.

Sunday, Nora came over. We watched
Hairspray
on video and she told me about Kyle’s party. She went with Cricket. This was the news: Katarina scammed with Jackson’s friend Matt. Ariel and Shiv seemed to be having some fight and Nora drove Ariel home. Cricket and Heidi spent most of their time flirting with some senior guys from the basketball team, stud-muffins we’d never noticed last year.

“Josh said something about my boobs,” reported Nora, “and Noel stood up for me.”

“Noel was there?”

“Noel always goes to parties, Roo. He
acts
like he doesn’t like them, but he always goes. He knows all those guys from cross-country.”

She had a point. “How did he stand up for you?”

“Told Josh to enter the twenty-first century or fuck off.”

Score one for the Rescue Squad.

“Have you ever seen Noel dance?” Nora asked.

I hadn’t.

“He’s hilarious. None of the other guys would dare dance around like that. He told me his brother took him to these gay nightclubs last summer in New York City.”

“Yeah, he told me that, too.”

Part of me didn’t like thinking of Nora and Noel hanging around together without me. But that is the sort of possessive jealous-lady thought I should probably stop having, so I kept quiet on that topic. “What did Josh say about your boobs?” I asked.

“Two things of beauty are a joy forever.”
¹

I smiled. “You have to admit, that’s a little bit funny.”

“He’s such an asshole,” said Nora. “You’d think I’d have a snappy comeback by now, but I stand there like an idiot, wanting to hit someone.”

“We should think of stuff to say. Like when guys say things to us on the streets or in the hall. So we’re prepared.”

“Genius!” cried Nora.

And that’s how we ended up pulling out
The Boy Book,
which Nora hadn’t even looked at since March, before the debacle, and starting a fresh page.