Tommy Parrish and Ben Ambromowitz gave me weird looks.
The Whipper pinched my butt in the hallway.
Cabbie and Billy Alexander talked crap about me where I could easily overhear.
Ariel, because she’s dating Shiv, slammed into me so hard in the refectory line that my shoulder got bruised. “Ooh,” she said loudly, “I guess I wasn’t thinking about other people’s feelings.”
Michael from Geometry leered and waggled his eyebrows, then passed me a note that said, “You’re on my list too.”
Chase Hilgendorf said hi to me in the hall, then cracked up laughing.
In class, Finn growled at me under his breath: “You’ve made everything worse, you know.”
“What?” I asked.
“Why would you go and do that?” he whispered. “You know what Kim’s like when she’s mad.”
“I didn’t write it for everyone to see,” I started to say—but he turned away from me and wouldn’t talk anymore.
It went on like this all week. I went from being just a leper to being a leper and a famous slut.10 By Friday, the girls’ bathroom in the main building had a ton of anti-Roo graffiti.
“Who does Ruby Oliver think she is?” (This in Kim’s writing.)
“Mata Hari.”
“Pamela Anderson.”
“God’s gift to the male sex.”
“Ruby Oliver is a _____ (fill in the blank).”
“Lousy friend.”
“Fantasist.”
“Slut.” (Kim again.)
“Ho. Remember? We can’t say slut anymore.”
“Trollop.” (Kim.)
“Hussy.”
“Tart.”
“Chippie.”
“What is that boyfriend list? Your interpretation here.”
“Guys she’s blown, in order of size.”
“I hear she goes on her knees behind the gymnasium.”
“Guys she’s done, in order of conquest.”
“Guys she’s done behind other girls’ backs.” (Kim.)
“Do you think she really did Noel DuBoise? Who has he gone out with, anyway?”
“Do you think she really did Hutch? Gross.”
“Maybe he’s an acquired taste.”
And in Nora’s round printing: “Come on, ladies. She may be a lousy friend, but doesn’t everyone make lists of boys they think are cute? That’s probably all it is.”
“I hope she’s using birth control.”
“I heard she might have an STD.”
“Do you think she gave it to Billy A? He’s so hot.”
“Billy Alexander keeps condoms in his back pocket.”
“So does Cabbie.”
“Big deal if she did Cabbie. Hasn’t everybody done him by now?”
“It’s still skanky.”
I tried to wash it all off with a wet paper towel, but you could still read it with no trouble, especially the parts in black Magic Marker. I borrowed a scrub brush and some spray cleaner from the janitor’s closet and was down on my knees trying to get it off when Kim came in.
It was the first time I’d seen her alone since she started going out with Jackson. She ignored me and started putting her hair up with a barrette.
“You made that Xerox, didn’t you?” I said.
“What if I did? People should know what kind of person you are.”
“And did you start all this on the wall?”
“No.” She kept fixing her hair.
“You didn’t?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I know your writing, Kim.”
“So why are you asking me, then?”
“It was a list I had to make for my shrink, okay? I have to see a therapist now, and she made me write a list.” Kim was quiet. “I’m all screwed up.”
“Tell me about it.” Her voice was sarcastic.
“I’m losing my mind,” I said. “Because my best friend stole my boyfriend. I trusted her and she stabbed me in the back.”
“I didn’t steal him. It was fate.”
“How is that different from stealing? Enlighten me.”
“We’re in love,” she said hotly.
“You were supposed to be my friend.”
“I told you, we never meant for it to happen. It’s one of those things that’s meant to be.”
“Then what was he doing with me at the Spring Fling?”
“He was trying to be nice, Roo. He told me all about it.”
“That’s what he says.”
“I trust him,” said Kim. “I know exactly what went on. It’s you I can’t trust.”
“Me?” The wet scrub brush had dropped into my lap and was soaking water into my cords, but I didn’t care. “What did I ever do to make you not trust me?”
“I could never trust you with Finn,” she spat out. “You were always flirting with him.”
“I never even talked to him,” I said.
“No, you gave him looks, and batted those eyelashes, and crossed those legs of yours in your fishnets, and avoided him, like if you talked to him for one minute he was sure to fall madly in love with you.”
“What?”
“I saw you at the Halloween party. What you two were like when you were alone together.”
“We were never alone!”
“Well, it sure looked like something. He went on and on about how funny you were, after. How he was a jaguar/Freddy Krueger or something.”
“Freddy Krueger kitty cat.”
“Whatever. Like an in-joke.”
“He was a panther, anyway.”
“That’s not the point. You were all over him.”
“I was not.”
“Ever since then. Or even before that. You two move around each other like there’s some big secret between you that no one else knows about. He was always asking about you.”
“Kim! Nothing happened.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I don’t want him anymore anyway. But you should think about what kind of friend you are before you go around saying I stole your boyfriend.” She zipped her backpack shut with a sudden noise. “Take a look at yourself, Ruby,” she said, heading for the door. “I may be a bitch, making that Xerox, but if it makes you think at all about how you act, how you cross lines and kiss people you shouldn’t kiss, and flirt around all over the place without considering how other people feel—then I’m glad I did it.”
And she was gone.
My dad always wants me to empathize with other people. Consider their positions, work on forgiveness. And now that this whole debacle is nearly four months behind me, I do think Kim was right about me and Finn. Not that he has a thing for me, not that I have a thing for him, not that we did anything wrong, exactly—but I did stay out of his way because I somehow thought I was capable of stealing Kim’s boyfriend, like there was something underground there; and he did give me looks, especially when I wore fishnets, and I did like it. The whole dynamic between us was not what it should be if he was dating my best friend. I mean, I put him on the list—even though nothing even remotely romantic ever happened between us. That must mean something.
So I was wrong. About that. And I stopped wearing the fishnets.
Kim believes in fate; she believes Tommy Hazard is out there somewhere waiting to be her one and only; and now she believes Jackson is it. Him. Her Tommy Hazard. She believes he didn’t kiss me back, or come back to the Spring Fling party with the idea of getting back together with me—because she wants him to be the perfect guy she’s always been looking for. I couldn’t have been that cranked about Jackson if I was flirting with Finn, she thinks—and she was half angry with me about the Finn thing anyway, which made it all the easier to justify starting up with Jackson.
Kim plays by the rules. She spends all this time being a good person, doing charity stuff, getting good grades and being the nice overachiever the Doctors Yamamoto want her to be. When someone (me) doesn’t live up to her standards, she dishes out what she thinks they deserve. And she thought I deserved the Xerox.