I always figured a boyfriend would ask me out, then pick me up on Saturday night. Me and this imaginary boyfriend would do boyfriend/girlfriend things that you don’t normally do with other people: walk on the beach, go for a scenic drive, see a foreign movie, go dancing. We’d have plans. I never thought he’d swing by on Saturday morning to see if I wanted to run his errands with him and we’d end up buying fifteen lollipops at the drugstore and opening them all and having blind taste tests.
I always thought I’d get dressed up to go out with my boyfriend. I’d put on lip gloss and eye shadow and fishnet stockings. But Jackson would be waiting for me when I left swim practice in sweats and a T-shirt, and I’d jump into his car and we’d immediately start making out, and he’d touch my chest through the wet swimsuit I had on underneath and I didn’t care that I had no makeup on, or that my boobs were squashed together by the suit, or that I smelled like chlorine, or that I had worn the same T-shirt the day before. I was just happy to see him.
He left me notes in my mail cubby nearly every day. “Here’s a penny,” he wrote. “Maybe it’ll bring good luck. Or you could buy a kiss from me. Or stick it on your nose, throw it in the air and catch it, buy a penny candy, give it to a man who is down on his luck, give it for a tip to a bad waiter, get it cold and drop it down your shirt, swallow it and get a free ride to the hospital, cover the face of someone’s watch so they’re late to class, give it to a cowboy and have him shoot a hole in it from fifty yards away, put it in your shoe for a trick on yourself. And I have only just begun to brainstorm! Your big bad penny-totin’ man, Jackson.” Or, “I left at 2 PM today because we got out of chem early. Why? There was a fire and a hurricane and lightning in the chem lab. Oh, sorry, did I alarm you? Really, it’s ’cause Dimworthy said, ‘Clarke, you’re so damn smart. I’ve taught you everything I know already about the mysteries of the universe. Get the hell outta here and go shoot some pool.’ So I left. See you tomorrow. Jackson.”
I loved those notes. I still have all of them. Back when I dreamed of having Ben Moi as my boyfriend, knowing I was pretty, knowing I was wanted—those things were true when I was with Jackson, and I didn’t worry.
Now—after everything that’s happened—I am tempted to say it was too good to be true. But it was true, for at least a month. And when I think of what I want from a boyfriend, or a lover, or a husband someday—what Jackson and I had, at first, that is the thing that I want.
The other way that Jackson was like Ben Moi was that he had had a lot of girlfriends. Before he went to Japan, he had gone with Beth, Ann and Courtney—all girls in his year—and once I started going out with him I developed Beth-Ann-Courtney radar. I could sense whenever one of them was in the room, what she was wearing, how pretty she looked. It seemed so weird that those Beth-Ann-Courtney lips had touched Jackson’s lips; that they’d held his big, freckled hands; that he thought they were beautiful; that he thought they were interesting. Before Jackson was my boyfriend, those girls had seemed perfectly nice. Now, they seemed shallow and overly flirtatious. They irritated me, laughing and being charming and having nice legs and no glasses. I wished they would all three disappear.
Jackson and I had been going out for six weeks when an incident happened that inspired a whole new section of The Boy Book entitled “Traumatic Phone Calls, E-mails and Instant Messages: Documented Painful Episodes Involving Communication Technology.”2
Here’s what happened: I was over at the Clarkes’ house on a weekday around six p.m. We were doing homework and playing video games in his room. The phone rang as Jackson was on his way downstairs to get something, so he asked me to pick it up.
“Clarke residence,” I said.
“Um, is Jackson there?” It was a girl’s voice.
“He’s downstairs,” I said, wondering who it was. “Do you want to hold on?”
“Um, yeah,” she said.
I handed the phone to Jackson when he returned. He sat down with his back to me. “Hey, what’s up?” he said into the receiver.
There was a pause.
“I can’t talk now, someone’s over.”
Why wouldn’t he say Ruby’s over? I wondered. Ruby, my girlfriend, is over. That’s what he should have said.
“Please don’t say that,” Jackson was almost whispering. “No, no, it wasn’t that way.”
What way?
“It’s not anything you did, I told you,” he went on. “Listen, it’s not a good time. Can I call you later? … Yes, I still have your number.”
Then he hung up, picked up the Xbox joystick and went back to killing aliens.
I looked down at my math homework, but I couldn’t concentrate. Who had been on the phone?
What were they talking about?
Why didn’t he tell me?
It was none of my business, really. He could get phone calls from whatever girls he wanted.
Or maybe it was my business; after all, I was his girlfriend, and wasn’t I entitled to know if there were other girls he had intimate conversations with, conversations that were obviously about important feelings?
“Who was on the phone?” I asked, trying to sound bored.
“Oh? Just now? Heidi Sussman,” he said. Heidi from Katarina’s set.
“What did she want?”
“She’s upset about something or other. I told her I’d talk to her later.”
“Upset about what?” I hoped I sounded concerned for Heidi and not overly nosey.
“Oh, she’s always upset about something. Who knows what it is, this time around,” Jackson said, killing aliens all the while.
What did that mean, always upset about something? What was going on with Jackson and Heidi Sussman? Was he just interested in the video game, or was he deliberately leaving out information?
I tried to be interested in the dying aliens.
I tried to be interested in my math.
I tried to think of another thing to talk about, a movie or something.
“Why is she calling you?” I finally asked.
“We used to go out,” he said. “You knew that.” Still killing aliens.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” I couldn’t believe I’d been sitting next to Heidi in class for weeks, doing a scene with her in Drama Elective, saying hello in the halls, all without knowing that she had been Jackson’s girlfriend.
Jackson turned to look at me. I’m absolutely certain he knew I didn’t know, and actually meant me not to know for as long as he could hide it from me. “It was in the summer. We were hanging out at tennis camp,” he said. “We broke up before school started.”
“How long before?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A couple of days,” he said. “The day before, I think.”
“The same week we started going out?”
“Yeah, I guess. She keeps wanting to talk about it.”
“What does she say?”
“I don’t know.” Jackson chuckled and put his arm around me. “I wish she’d leave me alone. I’ve got better things to do.” He nuzzled my neck. “I’m not gonna call her back, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I couldn’t blame Heidi for wanting to talk. I mean, Jackson had barely caught his breath before replacing her with a new girlfriend. Suddenly I felt dirty, like I’d been involved in something ugly and mean without my knowledge. “You should talk to her,” I said. “It’s only fair.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. There shouldn’t be any bad feelings.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll call her later.”