Is this my pattern for life, to be always dumped with no warning?1
Here’s what happened. Last year in November, Shiv and I were assigned to do a scene in Drama Elective together. We had to work on it for homework, so we met a few times in an empty classroom during lunch to rehearse. Shiv was (and is) an Indian American boy with a big nose and the most enormous black eyes you’ve ever seen. I was fascinated by his eyes. He’s quite popular—friends with Pete (Cricket’s boyfriend, as of Valentine’s Day) and this guy Billy Krespin. He plays rugby and basketball, and this year he’s going out with Ariel Oliveri. I was glad to do a scene with him. I’d always thought he was cute.
Blah blah blah: All the details of our conversations, and the clever notes about when to schedule rehearsals, and the time we spilled pop all over the teacher’s desk, and the time he put his arm around me at assembly (but in the dark so no one could see)—none of that is important. What’s important is that one day, he stopped reading his lines, threw his script on the floor, looked into my eyes and said, “Roo, let me ask you something. Will you be my girlfriend?”
“Yes,” I said.
He kissed me, then. Really put his arms around me and kissed me. It went through my body like he had flipped some electrical switch and lit me up. His skin was so warm, and he was suddenly so beautiful, and I thought, Oh, this is what all the hype is about—because I certainly hadn’t felt anything like this with Michael Malone in the woods in my nightgown. We kissed for the rest of lunch period, leaning against the closed classroom door so no one would be able to interrupt us.
Girlfriend! I was somebody’s girlfriend! And beautiful, popular, good-kisser Shiv, on top of it all!
Okay, so I’m completely undignified. As soon as school got out, I ran up to Kim, Nora and Cricket on the quad and told them the news. They were completely surprised and excited: Cricket was even jumping up and down. “Shiv! Ag!” she yelled.
“He’s fine,” said Nora, giggling.
“Have you seen him in his rugby uniform? He has some serious legs,” said Kim.
“How did it happen?” Cricket wanted to know.
I told all.
They wanted to know more.
“What did it feel like?”
Electricity.
“What did he smell like?”
Nutmeg.
“What did he taste like?”
I don’t know. Person.
“Did he lick your ear?”
No. Gross! (Laughter.)
“Did you grab his butt?”
“Cricket!”
“I would have grabbed his butt.”
(More laughter.) “I’m not up to butts,” I said. “That’s way too advanced.”
“Not down the pants!” she yelled. “On top of the pants.”
“Even so. Butt-grabbing on a first kiss is a bit much.”
“Oh, I think you can get a nice handful even before the first kiss,” said Cricket. (Raucous laughter.)
“You’re just going to reach over and squeeze?” I asked.
“Sure, why not?”
“Please. You’re all talk.”
“No. I would completely do it. On top of the pants, mind you.”
And so on.
The next day, I got to school wearing like four times as much lip gloss as usual and Shiv was in the hall, standing next to his mail cubby. “Hey, Shiv,” I said to him.
He turned around and walked away.
In Poetry, he didn’t look at me.
At lunch in the refectory, he didn’t talk to me or sit anywhere near me, but Cricket, Kim and Nora had told all the girls about what happened, so I was pretty busy fielding gossipy questions from Heidi, Ariel, Katarina and the like, so I didn’t really have time to think about it much.
In Drama, Shiv and I had to perform our scene.
“What did you think?” I said, after.
“It was okay,” said Shiv, his eyes on the ground. Then he grabbed his backpack and left.
After school, I saw him heading for the bus. “Shiv, wait up!” I called.
He kept walking.
By this point, it was obvious he had changed his mind. I felt like an idiot. Had I been a rotten kisser during our session against the door? (This was certainly possible, as I had so little experience.)
Maybe I smelled bad?
Or had there been a booger hanging out of my nose when we stopped kissing?
What could I have done to make him stop liking me?
I thought about it all the time, but I never found out. I felt like a complete loser. I liked him so much, and now he seemed to hate me, and there was no way to turn it around. I was completely helpless.
I never really talked with him again, except to say hi in the halls.
When I told her about Shiv, Doctor Z thought I should ask him what happened. Well, she never says anything quite that directly. What she really said was “Is there a way you could find out?”
“No.”
Silence. She was wearing that poncho again.
“Well,” I said, after a minute, “I guess I could ask him. But I’d rather die than do that.”
More silence. It really is a horrible poncho.
“I don’t care, anyway.”
Even more silence. Who buys this woman’s clothes?
“Well, I guess maybe I kind of do,” I went on. “I mean, I do. I liked him, I wanted to kiss him again, we had a good time together. And the whole thing was humiliating. Everyone knowing we were going out, and then with us breaking up so fast after—I felt like people were talking about me.”
“Can you ask him?”
I ignored her question. “And this is my life, getting dumped with no warning. Or liking people who don’t like me back, or who don’t like me enough, or not as much as they like someone else. You have the list in front of you: Hutch dumped me for Ariel, Gideon never liked me back, Ben didn’t know I was alive, Sky had another girlfriend.”
“Story of your life?”
“Exactly. Why is that? I wish I could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”
“Just one kiss” is never just one kiss. The one with Shiv changed my whole idea about kissing. And when I went to the dance with Jackson, there was “just one kiss”—but it made everything even worse than it was before.
You wouldn’t think that was possible, but it was.
After Jackson asked me to the dance, I had a lot of phone calls to make.
First, I had to call up Angelo and tell him not to take me. I was super nervous. I had never called him before, and here I was canceling on him. But he was nice about it. “That’s cool,” he said. “If he’s your boyfriend, you should go with him.”
“I don’t know if he’s my boyfriend,” I said.
“Whatever. You should do what you gotta do.”
“Okay.” There was a weird silence. “There’s a party on the dock by my house after,” I said, feeling guilty. “Around eleven. You should swing by if you’re around.”
“Sure,” said Angelo, though I was sure he was only being polite.
“You shouldn’t go,” said Cricket when I called her. “It’s way too complicated.”
“It’s just as friends,” I said.
“Still.”
“Kim told him to take me.”
“But that’s Kim. She feels bad about everything.”
“Yeah? She doesn’t act like it.”
“Trust me,” said Cricket. “She does.”
“I’m still going,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
“You shouldn’t go,” said Nora when she called me.