The Boy Book (8 page)

Meghan can’t be counted on for any analysis of social awkwardness, the way Nora, Kim and Cricket could. And I could never talk to her about the Noel DuBoise bush/ puffer experience. She’d just be all, “Ooh, poor Noel,” and that’s it.

“I’m okay.” She sniffed.

“Is your mom bugging you about quitting golf?”

Meghan’s mom is a serious golfer, and Meghan learned to play when she was five. But she bailed on the team this year. She’s doing Yoga Elective instead.

“No. It’s—Bick and I had a long conversation yesterday.”

“What?”

“We didn’t break up. I don’t know why I’m so shattered.”

“What happened?”

We pulled into Starbucks and ordered vanilla cappuccinos. “He gave me this speech about how things are in flux,” said Meghan, handing over our cash at the window. “How relationships aren’t a constant, how people have to grow and change with each other. He said we should redefine what we are together each day, depending on what makes us happy in that moment.”

“And that means…what?”

“He’s reading all this philosophy, he said. Like Carlos Castaneda.”

“He’s been in college two weeks. How much can he have read?”

“It wasn’t for class. He started reading this before, in the summer. It’s all about being in the moment, and not being defined by social structures. Him and me, I mean. The boyfriend/girlfriend thing.”

“So?”

“So we should just
be,
each day, as it makes us happy to be, right then.”

I was quiet for a minute. “It sounds like he wants to squeeze it into some girl,” I finally said.

Meghan’s whole face contorted. The Jeep swerved as she started to cry, and a green VW nearly hit us when she veered into its lane. Tears were running down her face, and she was making these hacking, choking noises.

“Stop!” I cried. “We have to pull over.”

Still sobbing, Meghan nodded and got off the freeway, then pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. I jumped out of the Jeep and went in to buy her chocolate while Meghan stayed behind the wheel. I got back in the car and put some peanut butter cups on the dashboard, but she just sat with her hands over her face, weeping.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t believe that came out of my mouth.” I dug a crumpled tissue out of my backpack and handed it to her.

Meghan kept crying.

“Really. Erase the whole sordid thought from your mind. I’m obviously bitter breakup lady whose boyfriend dumped her months ago and she’s still not over it.”

She sobbed into the tissue.

“Meghan, please. I’m deluded by my own issues. I’m sure Bick doesn’t want to squeeze it into anyone.”

“But he does,” cried Meghan, sniffling.

“He told you that?”

“Not exactly. But he said he wants to have the full college experience, and that I should feel free to see other guys. And that this is a more enlightened way to be going out because we can be more true to ourselves and that will make us more true to each other.”

“He used the word
enlightened
?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he smoking something?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She rested her head on the steering wheel.

“I don’t see why the ‘full college experience’ has to include horizontal action,” I muttered.

“He said he still wants to be my boyfriend. Because we’re in love, and nothing we do will change that.” Meghan wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then looked at her watch. “We’re going to be late for class.”

“It’s only Precal.” We had a miniquiz that morning that I’d studied for, but I didn’t say anything. “Don’t angst.”

“Okay. I just have choir.”

“All right. So we can sit here.”

“Yeah.”

“I would be shattered if someone said that to me,” I said after a minute. “Even if there’s no one in particular he wants to squeeze.”

“You would?”

“Absolutely.”

“But I don’t want to break up with him,” she moaned. “I love him.”

In Chemistry, Noel and I were mixing some something with some other something to create a reaction. The new something was supposed to turn pink when we put the first two somethings together. We had a periodic table of the elements.

It was unbelievably boring. You had to write up a three-page report in a special lab format to explain that you poured the contents of one beaker in with the contents of another.

“Thanks for the Roll-Up,” I said after we’d finished the experiment.

“Think nothing of it,” Noel answered, not even looking up from his report. “You know I have a remarkable surplus.”

“Then we need to use it up. Do you have another mission for us?”

“I thought you were Mission Director.”

“Me? Then what are you?”

“Master Hit Man.”

“But you had a plan in the planning stages.”

“Well.” He looked serious. “I lied.”

I laughed. “I don’t know if we can limit ourselves to hooters. There may be other body parts that need our assistance. We shouldn’t discriminate.”

“Like what?” he said, still looking down at his paper so that Mr. Fleischman, the Chemistry teacher, wouldn’t notice we weren’t working. “Do you know some ankles that are in dire circumstances? Some victimized elbows?”

“No.”

He raised his eyes briefly. “Roo, if you’re not going to take the Rescue Squad seriously, we may have to impeach you.”

“Is there a formal process?”

“I’m just saying. As Mission Director, you have a responsibility to research the needs of the community and plot the operations of the squad.”

“Point taken,” I answered. “Reconnaissance work will proceed immediately.”

“Five more minutes,” announced Mr. Fleischman. “Rinse your beakers in the sink and wipe down your counter. Finished labs are due in class on Wednesday.”

When I got to my mail cubby at the end of the day, there was a piece of pale green paper, folded up into quarters.

It said: “Root beer floats are always better.”

November Week at Tate Prep is an Upper School institution. Sometime in late September, you get a catalog that contains the same goofy introduction from the headmaster each year:

Back in 1972, Tate Preparatory renewed its founding fathers’ commitment to the environment and outdoor education. The school had become coeducational only two years earlier, and new headmaster Frank Patrickson decided that our school should “get with the times” and “break the lockstep.”

He arranged to suspend classes for two days in November, with everyone being encouraged to “do his or her own thing,” connecting healthy bodies and healthy minds to the great outdoors. Students might build kites or hike Mount Rainier.

These days, I am happy to report, our options have expanded—and November Days has turned into November Week. Tate students go rafting on the Deschutes River, learn to kayak on Barkley Sound, explore the lava caves of Mount Saint Helens, or backpack in the Canyonlands. They return to school refreshed, and with a reinvigorated sense of the wonders of nature.

What the introduction doesn’t say is that November Week activities are superexpensive. Next to each project description is a cost. Two hundred dollars for kayaking. Five hundred for rafting or Canyonlands.

Not a lot to the parents of my friends. But a lot to mine.

Each year when the catalog arrives, my mom gets mad, saying that Tate Prep charges so much money, we should have projects like these included in the tuition. Especially since you
have
to do November Week. It’s not like you can skip.

“It’s exploitative of my trust, that’s all I’m saying,” she argues, year after year.

“You don’t even pay to send me there,” I answer. “It’s not exploiting
you
at all.”

“Roo, it’s the principle. You go to Tate, you should figure the school’s programs are included in the price they quote you. It’s enough I have to buy your lacrosse uniforms.”

Then, each year, I ask if I can do the rafting expedition ($450), and she says no. Then I try for the lava caves ($350), and in the end I have to stay home and do the cheapest course in the catalog, which is Birds of the Great Northwest ($50).

What that means is every morning of November Week you get on a school bus with Ms. Harada, who teaches my Advanced Painting Elective this year, along with a few freshmen whose parents won’t let them go away from home for a week.

You go to a state park. And you watch birds.

Freshman year, it was okay. Me and this girl Varsha Lakshman, who was new that year and swims butterfly, hung out a bit.

We all had rented binoculars and notebooks to record what birds we saw, and we hiked through various parks Harada took us to. We saw kinglets and nuthatches and pelicans down by the water. Varsha and I shared our lunches, and it seemed like we might be friends, but after November Week she settled in with the swim team girls and I went back to Cricket, Kim and Nora. Which was okay.
²

But sophomore year, I was completely sullen through the whole thing. All my friends went river rafting, and Jackson and his friends went backpacking in the Canyonlands. Katarina, Heidi and Ariel did the lava caves. Varsha and the girls from swimming hiked Mount Rainier, and the girls from lacrosse did Be the Ball, which involved a lot of running and listening to motivational speakers.

And there I was, with a bunch of freshmen and one geeky junior guy whose name I never even knew, staring at the same old pelicans, going on the same old nature walks, with same old Harada enthusing on the beauties of nature and trying to get us to sketch landscapes with the colored-pencil set she carried around in her shoulder bag. Then I’d go home at night to hang out with my parents like a complete loser.

I didn’t want to bird-watch. I wanted to kiss Jackson on the top of a mountain and sneak out of my tent at night to meet him in the dark and make out under the stars. Or raft down an icy river, laughing with my friends.

When everyone got home, they had pictures of themselves rappelling off the sides of cliffs, or sitting together on the edge of a rubber raft, or standing in front of Mount Saint Helens. Me, I had another notebook filled with sketches of pelicans and phonetically rendered spellings of birdcalls.