The Boy Book (16 page)

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“Bick went to get a drink—guys, do you know where Bick went?—and he left his cell on the table so I answered it. Oh my god, Holmes, you are so dead! Stop it! Oh my god, do you really go to Harvard?” Cecily was laughing, talking to some people around her, hardly even remembering she was on the phone.

Meghan hung up.

Bick didn’t call her back until the next day.

FOUR. Noel, Meghan, Nora and I were supposed to go to the movies on a Saturday night. But Meghan’s mom decided she had to stay home for dinner all of a sudden, and Nora’s brother, Gideon, surprised her family by driving down from Evergreen State College, an hour or two away, so Nora wanted to stay and see him.

I picked up Noel in the Honda. His mom wouldn’t let him drive the Vespa at night. His house was a big Victorian-style place in Madrona, and when I went inside, Mr. and Mrs. DuBoise (his mom and stepdad that he’s had for like fourteen years) were in the middle of a ginormous collaborative cooking project. The dining table was covered with vegetables chopped into tiny pieces, and Mrs. DuBoise had three open cookbooks stacked one on top of the other.

A couple of smaller DuBoises were running underfoot. Everything smelled like frying onions.

“We’re glad to meet you, Ruby.” The stepdad had a booming voice and was yelling over water running in the kitchen sink. “We’ve heard all about you.”

“I was hoping my reputation hadn’t preceded me,” I said—which sounded like a joke, but which I really meant, given the suckiness of my reputation.

“Ha, ha!” the stepdad boomed. “All good, all good, I promise.”

“Noel will be down in a minute,” his mother said, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’s doing something with hair gel.”
³

“No problem.”

“Do you want a pop?”

“Nah. I’m good.”

“What movie are you seeing?”

“Singin’ in the Rain,”
I answered. “At that retro film place in the U District. They’re doing an all-musical weekend, and my mom said this was the one to see.”

“You must be some girl, Ruby,” laughed his mom, “if Noel is willing to go see a musical with you.”
⁴

“He made fun of us last week for renting
The Sound of Music,
” added his stepdad. “He doesn’t even like
My Fair Lady.
I mean, what’s not to love about
My Fair Lady
?”

“You mean, besides the fact that it’s completely sexist?” I asked.

“What?”

“It is. The man molds the woman into his ideal mate, changes everything about her—and she loves him for it. It completely bothers me. Shouldn’t he like her for who she is? Because by the time he realizes he loves her, he’s loving this shell of a person who has no sense of self.”

Mrs. DuBoise laughed. “I can see why Noel likes you,” she said. “I bet you give him a run for his money.”

“Excuse them,” said Noel, coming into the kitchen. “They’ve only just been let out of their cages.”

“I’m sure we totally embarrassed you, honey,” said his mother, blowing him a kiss. “Just thank your stars you weren’t here to suffer through most of it.”

“I suffered through enough,” said Noel.

“Back by eleven!” boomed the stepdad as we went out the door.

“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.