If I’d ever told my mother about what happened with the boyfriend list (which I never did), she would have said that Kim is a double-crossing backbiter. Then she’d have said I should vent my rage, forget all about Kim, get on with it and go eat some soy-based product.
My dad tells me to forgive.
My mom tells me to forget.
But I don’t want to do either. Just because I understand where Kim was coming from doesn’t mean that I think what she did was right.
And I can’t forget her. We go to school together.
The Monday morning after my confrontation with Kim in the girls’ bathroom, I was waiting at the bus stop near my house, reading the comics page of the Times and drinking juice from a carton—when Meghan’s Jeep pulled up to the curb. “Your mom said I’d find you here,” she said, leaning over to yell out the passenger window. “Get in.”
I got in. She stepped on the gas.
We drove in silence for about ten minutes, until she pulled into the Starbucks drive-thru and ordered our usual vanilla cappuccinos. “My treat.”
“How come?”
Meghan looked at me. “You had a bad week.”
“Yeah. I’m having a bad life.”
“And you paid me gas money in advance,” she said. “So now I owe you, since I didn’t drive you.”
Meghan turned on the radio and we sang stupid songs together at the top of our lungs until we got to school.
1 Doctor Z: “You’re here in therapy to look at your behavior patterns. Recognizing them is the first step toward changing them, if you desire.”
Me: “But it’s not a behavior pattern. It’s something other people are doing to me.”
Annoying silence from Doctor Z.
Me: “Seeing that it’s a pattern isn’t going to help. The No Warning part is about how there’s no warning. I can’t see it coming, so what can I do about it?”
Doctor Z: More silence. Even more annoying, if that’s possible.
Me: “Why aren’t you talking?”
Her: “I want to let you draw your own conclusions.”2 Because she was mad at me on Kim’s account and was basically never going to talk to me again.3 Ditto.4 All right. Maybe I had. In fact, I certainly had. He was cute. I wanted some attention. I wanted to feel like less of a loser. This admission, courtesy of yet an other therapy session with Doctor Z.5 Which I found out by blatantly listening in on a conversation she and Ariel were having.6 In H&P, Mr. Wallace is always talking about how the media “spins” the facts one way or another, depending on political agendas. Like a Democratic newspaper would emphasize how much the former President Clinton did for the economy, while a Republican paper might focus on how he never seemed to keep it in his pants. Heidi put her own spin on the Jackson/Roo drama, probably because she still likes Jackson. No one ever asked me for my spin, except for Doctor Z—but here it is, anyhow:
Jackson was cheating on Kim when he asked Roo to the dance, because Jackson still likes Roo; they went out for six months, after all. He slow-danced with Roo and made her feel all sexy. He took her out for a moonlit walk on the deck of the boat. He put his arm around her, not like friends at all. He was being romantic, dammit! And he kissed her back when she kissed him, because the whole kissing thing was what he’d wanted all along.
Then he changed his tune when he got caught.7 It’s a painting by this surrealist artist named Salvador Dalí who had the most amazingly strange mustache. It’s called Soft Watch at Moment of First Explosion and it shows this almost gloopy-looking pocket watch, really huge, which is self-destructing. I love it.8 Trollop! Hussy! Tart! Chippie!9 Which, now that I think of it, means that Angelo almost certainly knows I’m a severe neurotic with anxiety problems, since my mom told Juana and Juana probably told him. Not that he’d ever speak to me again, anyway, after what happened.10 The only person who said anything even semidirectly to me was Nora, when I asked her if she was mad at me about the Xerox, and she said “Give me some credit, already,” as if she didn’t believe whatever was being said about it. But she was furious about my kissing Jackson when he belonged to Kim and breaking the Rules for Dating in a Small School—so it wasn’t like she was lending me any support.
12. Billy (but he didn’t call.)
Four weeks and 8.5 therapy sessions after the Xerox went around school.
“Billy was this boy who said he’d call me last summer but he didn’t call,” I told Doctor Z. “I kissed him at a party in July. Everyone was wearing togas. You know, made from sheets. His had daisies and ducklings all over it. I think he goes to Sullivan.”
“You kissed him? Or he kissed you?” she wanted to know.
“He kissed me. We were waiting in line for the bathroom. It was a dark hallway.”
“Then what?”
“He squeezed my boob through like eight layers of folded blue sheet. It was my first boob squeeze, but I’m not sure it should count.”
“Because of the sheets?”
“Yeah. Anyway, I gave him my number, and he never called. I waited by the phone like an idiot, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now, what I want to know is, why do you ask a girl for her number and then not call? To me, the hard part would be asking for the number, or leaning in to kiss someone you’ve hardly met when you’re wearing a sheet covered in little yellow duckies. After you’ve done those things, you know she’ll go out with you if you call. So why not call?”
Doctor Z didn’t say anything. She doesn’t say anything a lot of the time.
“Unless you suddenly find her disgusting or stupid or something,” I went on, “and only ask for her number because you already kissed her, so you think you have to. But actually, Billy didn’t have to. I would have been perfectly happy to have a toga-party kissing escapade and leave it at that! It was only once he said he’d call that I wanted him to call, and then there I was, running home to check my messages, and there weren’t any.1 It was all so dumb.”
“How long did this go on for?”
“Two weeks. After two weeks I figured he was never calling.”
“Ruby,” said Doctor Z. “I’m going to say something to you, and if you feel it’s not accurate, say so and we’ll move on. But it is time to be frank. From my observation, you have a lot of passive patterns in place right now that aren’t making you happy.”
Translation from therapy-speak: I sit around too much, waiting for people to do stuff and angsting about stuff they’ve done, without doing anything myself. I could have gotten Billy’s number at the party, could have called him, could have made it happen, if I’d wanted it. I could have made up with Meghan just by calling her and apologizing, but I sat there at the bus stop every morning, letting her be angry, until she felt sorry for me and gave me a ride. I could have called Cricket and Nora. I could have told Jackson the truth more, could have insisted we watch something other than boring anime movies. Slept in instead of watching cross-country meets on Saturday mornings. Refused to hang around with Matt all the time. Could have not answered the phone, if Jackson called at five p.m. when he said he’d call in the morning. Could have asked him to the dance. Could have taken off his damn pants myself, if I wanted them off. “Go on,” I said to Doctor Z.