The Boy Book (27 page)

³
Reginald is the name I have for what Doctor Z would prefer I call “experiencing a grieving process” or “coping with the loss of my entire life, such as it was.” Because phrases like
grieving process
make me gag.
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¹
Mr. James Wallace is actually my favorite teacher. He’s from South Africa and has a tasty, clipped accent. He also coaches the swim team and has some serious shoulders. I wouldn’t normally whisper in his class, but this was a verifiable emotional emergency.
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²
The Scarlet Letter.
By Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s about this woman who commits adultery and gets forced to wear a scarlet letter
A
on her chest to proclaim her shame to everyone, all the time. No one will talk to her. She loses all her friends. And then the guy she slept with dumps her and acts like it never happened.

Do I need to tell you that I loved this book?

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¹
“Sounds like you were dressing up,” said Doctor Z, later.

“No,” I said. “This was the anti-make-out outfit. Everything you’re not supposed to wear if you want to hook up with a boy.”

“Oh.” Doctor Z was silent for a minute. “Lots of people would say that red lipstick and dresses and perfume are very attractive.”

“It was an anti-Jackson outfit,” I persisted. “So nothing could happen as a consequence of me writing him back.”

“Do you think he knew that?”

“Um. No. It was more like insurance for myself,” I said. “Like it proved I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“Uh-huh.” Doctor Z crossed her legs.

“What?”

“I’m just listening to you, Ruby,” said Doctor Z.

I didn’t know what else to say. “I looked good, though,” I finally admitted. “I don’t usually wear lipstick.”

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²
Angus Young: lead guitarist of the band AC/DC, famous for wearing velvety shorts and a suit jacket onstage, like a British schoolboy. AC/DC is an ancient heavy metal band that my dad obsessed on in his youth. And still does, actually.

Hutch encourages him. The two of them blast geriatric guitar-fiend bands while they plant obscure flowering herbage.

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³
Brian Johnson: AC/DC’s lead singer.
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⁴
Sammy Hagar: another old rocker dude. Even less cool than the others, if that is possible. He fronted Van Halen for a while and was famous for a song called “I Can’t Drive 55.” (Can you believe I know this stuff? It’s my dad’s fault.)
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¹
If you look at the history, you’ll see Nora didn’t do anything in ninth grade. She got a lot of attention in eighth, partly due to having acquired those hooters before the rest of us had anything whatsoever up top. But she only scammed those two times and then pretty much gave up boys. I’m not really sure why. Ben Ambromowitz was gross, she says, but it’s not like he traumatized her.
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²
I play lacrosse in the spring, but for some reason none of the swim team girls do. They row crew instead. So I’ve never really bonded with them. They’re very sporty, and I think they see me as some kind of thrift-store/fishnet girl who they can only really relate to when I’m in my bathing suit. They’re nice enough at practice—even after the debacles of sophomore year. But I wouldn’t call them my friends. Same with the lacrosse players.
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³
This is true, actually. Gay men, especially, love my mother’s performances, and lots of the people she knows from working in the theater are gay.
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¹
Everyone at Tate Prep, even the fifth graders, has a cell phone. Everyone but me.
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¹
Movies where a wild girl enchants and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary (but still attractive) man:
Along Came Polly. Something Wild. Pretty Woman. Addicted to Love. Bringing Up Baby. Chasing Amy. What’s Up, Doc?. Cabaret. The Seven Year Itch. Garden State. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Moulin Rouge. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My Fair Lady. Funny Face. Annie Hall. Sleeper
(okay, so Woody Allen is not attractive or ordinary, but still).
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¹
It’s a quote. We learned it in Brit Lit last year. John Keats, the Romantic poet, wrote: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever. / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness.”
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¹
One of my favorite insults that we found, though it doesn’t fit any of these scenarios, comes from Groucho Marx: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”
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²
In case you don’t know, Prozac is an antidepressant, and Ativan is an anti-anxiety drug. They can help people a lot. But Doctor Acorn was completely pill happy. I mean, he can hardly evaluate me from listening to my mother. The woman thinks I’m a lesbian.
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³
Hair gel.

He was getting ready. To go somewhere.

With
me.

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⁴
Noel didn’t want to go to this movie? When I’d invited him, he’d seemed completely cranked.
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⁵
Frat rock: Big, loud party music that is not disco or hip-hop or R&B. Music that you kind of have to like, even if you think it’s dumb. Have you seen the movie
Animal House
? Like that. But it transcends time period. Some examples: “Louie Louie.”“Shout.”“Addicted to Love.”“Whip It.”“Wild Thing.”“Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll.”“My Sharona.”“Centerfold.”“Our House.”“Come On Eileen.”“Gloria.”“Mama Told Me (Not to Come).”“I Want Candy.”
This list compiled by me and Noel, with additions from a later consultation with my dad.
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⁶
Thus completely cementing my leper status, but actually beneficial to me in the grade department because Hutch is très good at Français and actually sounds Frenchie when he says stuff.
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⁷
I am deranged, I know. But that is how I felt.
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⁸
Because if this was a film of my life, that would be the plot. Noel would turn out to be the hero.
Movies where a guy and a girl are just good friends, and one of them likes somebody else, but at the end they finally realize they love each other with a mad passion:
Clueless. The Sure Thing. Can’t Hardly Wait. Some Kind of Wonderful. When Harry Met Sally. The Wedding Singer. Emma. Sabrina. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton.
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¹
And I liked Jackson more too–ever since I’d seen him with the zoo girl. Well,
liked
isn’t the right word. But I hated him and wanted him to want me instead of her. But I couldn’t put that in
The Boy Book,
because Nora would probably read the entry.
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²
And Kim started liking Jackson when he was with me. Also left out of
The Boy Book
entry to avoid fighting with Nora.
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³
I hate it when people say “Please don’t be mad.” Because you’re almost always
going
to be mad at whatever they’ve done, and even if you aren’t mad about that, you feel mad anyway, because even before telling you about it they have (1) implied that you’re the kind of person who gets mad about all kinds of things unreasonably, and (2) attempted to squelch your self-expression.
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¹
Captain Kangaroo was this old guy on children’s television who my dad is always talking about. Kangaroo comes from me (Roo) and Kim (Kanga). And “The Kaptain Is In” comes from those Peanuts cartoons where Lucy is the shrink and she has a sign that says “The Doctor Is In.” (Kim has a huge stack of
Peanuts
books, and we used to read them all the time when we were younger.) So that’s how we thought of it.
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²
Movies where the heroine meets a guy who is funny and cute and kisses her—but then she never lays eyes on him ever again: none.
So of course I thought Billy would eventually call, or we’d run into each other and he’d have an explanation, or something. Because on some level, even though it never turns out to be true, and even though I should know better, I still expect life to be like the movies.
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³
True, I was completely ready to say “Didn’t I dissect you in Biology class?”—but I’d rather it didn’t happen in the first place.
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⁴
Most of these people don’t end up being that important to the story I’m telling you. They were there on Canoe Island, and I talked philosophy with them and we cooked meals together, and they were nice enough—but you don’t need to remember who everyone is. I’m just giving you the lay of the land.
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⁵
Okay, they didn’t say complete crap. They said, if you’re going to watch movies, watch movies that experiment with the filmmaking medium, movies that ask fundamental questions about life and the way we live it, rather than teen comedies or
Star Wars
or whatever. Which led to a long discussion, actually, about whether
Star Wars
was deep or not, and finally Mrs. Glass was forced to admit she had never seen it, and we (the kids) won the argument after making her sit through a long and heated analysis of the relationship between Luke and Leia, the deeper causes of Vader’s malevolence, the sexual symbology of Jabba the Hut and all that.

Hee, hee. It was the best discussion we had all week.

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¹
A homework assignment from Doctor Z, which she shrinkily calls a list of affirmations, but which I prefer to term Nancy Drews, because Nancy Drew, girl detective, was good at everything, even horseback riding and water ballet, though there was no evidence she had ever practiced or even heard of either one until she miraculously turned out to be expert at them.
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2 Nora’s brother, Gideon, the one who goes to Evergreen, was there—home for Thanksgiving break. I think Gideon is extremely hot, even though Nora claims his eyebrows grow together in a truly disgusting fashion. Anyway, I caught him staring at my legs when we got in the hot tub. So that put me in a good mood.
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