“Until he stopped.”
“He’s such a strange guy sometimes, Noelie.”
I tried to smile, but my face wouldn’t cooperate.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, Noel didn’t really deal,” continued Claude. “I mean, not that anyone could deal. It was just—I’ve been—” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Anyway, Noel can’t stand it if I even mention Booth, or the accident. He hates to have it talked about.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
I couldn’t stand for the conversation to go on any longer, so I turned to Sydonie and Marie, who had been running in circles around the hedge I was cutting. “Did you guys feed the llamas yet?” I said as brightly as I could.
“I want to!” cried Marie. “I’m going to give them food from my hand.”
“If you go to the Family Farm area, you can buy food pellets and feed the animals,” I explained to Claude.
“Come with us, Ruby!” said Sydonie. “Tell Claude the names of all the goats!”
“I can’t, cutie,” I told her. “I have to work.”
We said our goodbyes awkwardly, and Claude led the girls off. I went on clipping the hedge.
Like a regular person.
Like a person who knew what to do with everything she knew, now.
That night Gideon took me bowling. He was down for the weekend from college, and as I laughed and chatted and rolled my orange ball down the lane, deep inside I was thinking: Are these really the only options in terms of romance?
1. Love with a brooding, confusing guy who makes me feel insecure and stops being my real live boyfriend because he is too messed up, or
2. Nonlove with a real live boyfriend who is wholesome and sweet and responsible but just isn’t that exciting and kisses with too much slobber?
In other words, love and pain, or safety and boredom?
In the movies heroines often appear to be confronted with this choice. In actuality, however, their situations get resolved supereasily because the safe boyfriend—the #2, the husband material—turns out to be no good. Maybe he cheats, maybe he’s a shallow idiot who only cares about money, maybe he’s crooked or spineless. Or possibly he just rejects the heroine so she doesn’t have to reject him. Then she’s free to go off with the much hotter brooding guy, who magically doesn’t deliver pain and heartbreak any longer but is mature and available for a serious relationship.2
The movies make the brooding guy the hero—the guy with problems, the guy who carries a gun, the guy with unresolved anger, the guy with a chip on his shoulder, the guy who’s a vampire—and they tell you that you can have the mythical happy ending with that same brooding guy.3
But in reality, the brooding guy is cranky. He doesn’t reply to e-mails. He doesn’t call. He’s only half there when you’re talking to him, and he doesn’t chase you when you run. You feel insecure all the time. You get needy and sad and you hate yourself for being needy.
If you don’t know why he’s brooding, you’re shut out.4
And if you do know why he’s brooding, you’re still shut out.5
Even if he shares his feelings—or overshares his feelings, like my dad—he’s still not really there. He’s off in his own mind, wrangling his Reginald and drooling onto the couch or sobbing into dinner or lying on the floor.
It is really, really, really not as attractive in true life as it seems in the movies.
Gideon wasn’t a jerk. I had tried to find something wrong with him, I really had—but he was neither a shallow idiot nor a crooked, spineless cheater. And he seemed to really like me. What was more, he was incredibly hot and always wanted to go do fun things like bowling or wakeboarding; he was interested in school and questioned authority—and listened when I spoke.
Maybe, I thought, I should be the serious girlfriend of Gideon. Maybe, if I kept pretending to him that my home life was good, that I felt confident about college, that I was experienced in the nether regions and in possession of solid mental health—maybe if I kept pretending, bit by bit, those things would become true.
Gideon thought I was a good person with an easy life.
Maybe with him, I could be that.
In life, I told myself, if not in the movies, the nice guy should finish first. Stick with him and stay away from people who don’t call you and have secrets and weird behaviors. Be with that nice guy because he is good and kind, without angsting about all the ways in which he doesn’t live up to your romantic ideal.
Romantic ideals are stupid anyway.
Fact: I was lucky to have Gideon.
Fact: I was happy with Gideon.
Or almost happy.
Or something that might turn into happy.
If he could just be trained to be a better kisser.
And if I could just tell him what was really going on in my life.
The Ditz said our college application prep materials had to be in the day before Thanksgiving: practice essays, lists of potential colleges, peer and parent questionnaires.
I’d listed swimming, lacrosse, Woodland Park Zoo and the Tate Prep Charity Holiday Bake Sale (CHuBS) for my extracurricular activities. Mom laughed when I told her I’d thrown her parent questionnaire in the toilet, and filled it out again. She actually wrote some nice things about me too. That I had always been a great reader and she was proud of how much feminism I’d absorbed in American History and Politics. That she hoped I would keep studying film because she could tell how much I loved it. That she dreamed of my having a better education than she’d had.
I wrote an essay about my love-hate relationships with gardening and retro metal that was pretty amusing, if not exactly deep. I made a list of colleges with strong cinema studies and film programs, including NYU, Temple and UCLA.
When the paperwork was together, I loaded all my video footage into Dad’s computer and started editing my film submission—at least a first draft of it—so I could turn it in to Dittmar.
There was Meghan, saying love “fills you up and you can’t think about anything but the other person and it all seems like a dream.”
Then Hutch, saying love was a reason people killed themselves.
Finn: “Love is when you give someone else the power to destroy you, and you trust them not to do it.”
Mom, rudely: “That’s what friendship is, Ruby. It’s apologizing when you know you should.”
Nora: “Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it.”
And Noel, saying: “I want your updates. I do. I want all your updates, Ruby.” Even the boring ones, he’d said. Even the mental ones.
Plus that clip of us together when I first got my camera. Laughing. Flirting. Him kissing my neck.
I watched them over and over.
I was so happy back then.
And so was Noel.
I never thought he was the kind to shut down the way he did.
I mean, except about his asthma.
And when he was jealous of Jackson.
What I really mean is, I thought he wouldn’t shut down with me.
Once we were together.
Because I was different.
Someone I had loved—someone I still loved—had gone through something awful. He was shattered. He needed people around. And maybe there was some way I could help.
I wanted to wrap my arms around him and listen to anything he had to say.
I—
I spent three hours editing the video of the two of us to try to show him how I felt. Maybe if he saw us together, I thought, maybe he’d remember. Maybe he’d feel something for me again.
Then I watched what I’d made and thought: If a guy I didn’t like anymore gave this to me, it would make me feel completely creeped out.