The Boy Book (6 page)

I didn’t tell Kim. At least, not then. What I did do when I got home is e-mail Noel the following:

HOOTER RESCUE SQUAD UPDATE

Mission abort! Mission abort!

The hooters apparently want to take care of themselves and do not need our help. Besides, it has been several days, and if Cabbie hasn’t brought pictures to school, he’s probably not going to.

Yours sincerely, in solidarity and in defense of hooters around the globe,

Secret Hooter Agent Roo

He wrote back ten minutes later.

What to do with surplus Fruit Roll-Ups and art supplies?

—SHAN (Secret Hooter Agent Noel)

That’s what I like about guys (sometimes).

They don’t ask you
why
Nora’s hooters want to take care of themselves. They don’t read between the lines and say, “What, did you and Nora have a fight?”

They ignore that stuff, or they don’t see it at all, and start trying to figure out your next mission.

What to Wear When You Might Be Fooling Around

1. A shirt that buttons up the front, for obvious reasons.

2. A front-close bra. Also for obvious reasons.

3. Perfume, but not all over your neck. Right behind the ears and on the wrists only, because if you have it on your neck, your neck is going to taste yucky. Let us repeat: not on the neck.

4. Lip gloss—but never dark red lip
stick.
Or you’ll both get covered with it.

5. No rings. (This from Cricket. She claims it has to do with adventuring to the nether regions but refuses to elaborate for those of us who don’t know what she’s talking about.)

6. No sneakers. They can be smelly even on the best of us, and if it gets to the point of shoes coming off, you don’t want to have to get up and go put them in the other room.

7. And whatever you do, don’t wear a dress. Because if you’re not nether-regioning each other, but you do want to give him upper-region access, the dress is going to pose a serious impediment. Yes, you could unzip the back of it and pull it down from the top. But that is dorky. So leave the dress in the closet. P.S. Bring gum or breath mints. Not bubble gum.

—written by Kim and Roo, with nether-region addition from Cricket. Approximate date: February, sophomore year.

i
wore a dress to school the next day. A vintage navy blue thing with roses embroidered around the bottom of the skirt. I also wore a pair of old Converse, two rings, a back-close bra, red lipstick and perfume on my neck. I chewed bubble gum.

I was untouchable.

I hadn’t seen Jackson except from afar since he left the birthday note in my cubby. I had written him six notes and two e-mails back, but I ripped up the notes and deleted the e-mails without sending them. Because what could I say?

“Thanks for the birthday note”? Too formal.

“What, are you and Kim broken up now?” Obviously desperate and semihostile.

“I hate you I love you I hate you I love you”? True. But lame.

Finally, I had figured out what to write. (Yes, I knew I shouldn’t write
anything.
I knew a mature girl would ignore his plea for forgiveness and attention. And an ethical girl wouldn’t flirt with someone else’s boyfriend.

But I couldn’t quite do that.

He was Jackson Clarke. It was how I felt.)

So I wrote “Blackberry smoothies are the only kind worth drinking” and left it in his mail cubby.

But nothing was going to happen between us. We weren’t even on speaking terms, and my outfit was all wrong on purpose.
¹

I looked for Jackson in the refectory later, but either we didn’t have the same lunch on Fridays, or else he’d gone off campus. Nora said hi to me on the lunch line, and I said hi back, but I couldn’t quite look her in the eye. I had a swim team meeting after school—the first of the year—and after that, I checked my mail cubby to see if Jackson had written.

There was a Fruit Roll-Up in there.

My internship at the Woodland Park Zoo started on Saturday, and Anya showed me around. In the Family Farm area, from nine o’clock to eleven, I was to stand around wearing a zoo polo shirt and answering questions. She gave me a handout with the names of all the animals and information on their feeding habits. I watched a fellow intern help kids get food from the dispensers.

The cow was named Maggie, the llamas were Laverne and Shirley, and the goats all had ridiculous names like Rasputin and Napoleon and Queen Anne. Anya said I’d do a training program the following Friday after school to learn more about Family Farm. At eleven I was supposed to report to a groundskeeper named Lewis and assist him with gardening stuff.

Lewis was a thin, blondish man with an unfortunate skinny mustache. He had me plant flowers near the zoo entrance. He got all cranked when I told him my dad was the proprietor and sole employee of
Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.

I had a lunch break for an hour; then at two o’clock I reported back to Anya and she said that since I was a good speaker (!!) she was going to put me in a training session to be on the microphone at the Saturday-afternoon Humboldt penguin feeding. The training wouldn’t be until the following week, so Anya walked me around the rest of the zoo. We ended up in the penguin room, which was dark and cool. Penguins were waddling around and hurtling themselves into the water. Anya showed me the closet where the microphone equipment was.

“You wheel it out on a cart and put it in this corner here,” she said, pointing. “Then when the keepers come in with the fish, you read from a script we’ll give you that tells some fun facts about the animals. I know you’re interested in penguins,” she said, giving me a look that said maybe I was just interested in penguins’ sexual orientation, “so I think this will be a rewarding part of the job for you.”

“Oh sure,” I said. “I’m all about penguins.”

“You have a fan,” I told my dad when I got home that evening. He and Hutch were messing around with a bunch of ugly bushes in the greenhouse on the southern side of our houseboat.

“I have many.” Dad grinned.

“You do not.”

“He does,” put in Hutch. “People write him letters asking all kinds of questions.”

“I am the Angus Young of container gardening,” said my dad.
²

“Oh, no,” cried Hutch. “You’re completely the Brian Johnson.”
³

“You think so?” asked Dad, flattered. “I don’t know. That
Small Roses for Small Spaces
guy is giving me a run for my money.”

“No comparison. He’s all flash and no substance. He’s the Sammy Hagar of container gardening, if he’s anything at all.”
⁴

“This guy at the zoo was all over me when he found out you were my dad,” I said. “He does the plantings over there and I helped him put in some things by the front gate.”

“Really?” My dad looked interested. “What are they planting?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t blooming yet.”

“You don’t
know
what you were planting? How could you not know what you were planting?”

I shrugged. “I planted what he gave me.”

“Roo.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t forget we’re going to Juana’s for dinner tonight.”

Juana Martinez is my mom’s best friend. She’s a Cuban American playwright with four ex-husbands and thirteen dogs. Her son, Angelo, is a year ahead of me at school, but he goes to Garfield, which is public, so we live in different universes.

Angelo and I have a bit of a history together. But only a little bit. There was a moment last year, in the middle of the Spring Fling Debacle, when he gave me some flowers. I kissed him on the cheek to say thank you, and he kissed me on my cheek back, and this tingle ran down my spine—but it was in the middle of a party and all kinds of badness was going on with me and Jackson (and with nearly everyone else there too), so nothing ever came of it.

I hadn’t seen him since that night. My family had been to Juana’s for dinner, because we’re always going to Juana’s for dinner, but Angelo lives part-time with his father and he had been a junior counselor at a summer camp on one of the San Juan Islands for a couple months, plus I had traveled, so we hadn’t had to face each other yet.

“Do I have to go?” I asked my mom, inside.

“Yes.”

“Why? I have a ton of homework.”

“It’s the weekend, Roo. You can do your homework later. And I don’t want you sitting home on Saturday night. It’s bad for your psychology.”

“Oh, like going out with my parents is any better?”

“It’s a lot better,” said my mom. “Juana is making corn pudding for you.”

I love Juana’s corn pudding.

“And she just finished a new play and she thinks maybe there’s a part for me in it.”

“That’s supposed to make me want to go?”

She laughed. “Go for the corn pudding. Go to make your old mother happy.”

Juana’s kitchen was an absolute maelstrom when we got there. Corn on the floor, a big fish on the counter with its eyes googling up, dishes piled in the sink and chopped herbs in small piles on the counter. “I’m getting it under control!” she yelled, wiping her face with her hand and smearing grease across her cheek. “Kevin, chop the head off the salmon, will you?” She grabbed a butcher knife and held it out.