“I want to ask, do you see any common pattern between your behavior and your mother’s?”
What? My mother was the least passive person I knew. “Elaine Oliver! Feel the Noise! Express your rage!” I shouted. “Are you kidding?”
“Both of you are excellent talkers, that is certainly true,” said Doctor Z.
I had never thought of myself as being like my mom that way. Did Doctor Z really think I was an excellent talker? Was I an excellent talker? Hmmm. Ruby Oliver, excellent talker. “Why do you think she’s passive?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
Ag. How come these shrinks won’t give you the answers when they know them already? “Um,” I said, excellent talking ability rapidly deteriorating.
Silence.
I thought as hard as I could. Nothing.
“Didn’t you tell me a story about a taco suit?” Doctor Z prompted.
“Yeah.”
“And a macrobiotic diet?”
“Uh-huh.”
We sat there for another minute.
“Do you think there’s any kind of power struggle going on in your home?” she finally asked.
“Maybe. Yeah.”
“What’s the dynamic that you see?”
I had a rush of memories. My mom: shredding tissues and sitting by the phone the time my dad went on a business trip and didn’t call. My mom: spending a weekend at a plant show, bored out of her mind. My mom: going to that Halloween party in the same dumb silly hat as last year after wasting her entire day on the taco. My mom: cleaning the house while my dad ran a 10K with some friends, then having a two-hour fight with him over interpretations of the mayor’s education policy, which she doesn’t actually care about that much. My mom: going macrobiotic after my father made plans to spend every weekend greenhousing the southern deck, when she wanted to go on day hikes and take a family vacation. My mom: not on tour right now with her latest one-woman show, because Dad couldn’t go with her.
My mom, always “expressing her rage,” but never really getting her way.
She does a thousand tiny things she hopes he’ll appreciate—clipping articles from the paper, putting a vase of flowers on his desk, leaving notes whenever she goes out—but he doesn’t fully see them, unless she points them out. And she never stops doing them, and never stops being angry that he doesn’t appreciate her enough.
The all-about-your-mom analysis was true—but also very annoying. I kind of hate it when Doctor Z is right, especially when it makes me a cliché: Ruby Oliver, repeating her mother’s patterns. Still, I decided to ask Shiv Neel what happened last year. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, once I had told the story in therapy: how we’d flirted for weeks during our Drama rehearsals, how he put his warm arm around me in assembly, how we kissed in the empty classroom, how beautiful his eyes were, how good it felt to be his girlfriend, even if it was only for an afternoon.
And then—how he disappeared on me.
Shiv is popular. I knew I’d never get him alone in the refectory or on the quad. He’s always surrounded by the adoring Ariel or a bunch of loud rugby players. But he’s also on the Sophomore Committee, which is Tate’s round-table way of having a class president/vice president/treasurer, etc.—and that meant he stayed late on Wednesdays.
I skipped lacrosse practice and waited after school until his meeting was over, reading a book outside the classroom door. My hands were soaked with sweat, I was so nervous, but I took deep breaths and didn’t have a panic attack. He came out. I stood. “Hey, Shiv, do you have a minute?”
“I guess,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Well, you probably know Jackson dumped me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, um, I—can we go somewhere?” Two brainy-looking committee members were standing right next to us in the hall.
“Okay.” Shiv shrugged as if he didn’t care what we did.
“I don’t mean go somewhere go somewhere,” I said, remembering that he surely thought I was a slut, and after all, last time the two of us had been alone we’d been all over each other. “I mean, outside on the steps.”
“I got it.” He looked at me like I was an idiot. We went outside and sat down.
I looked at my shoes. They were scuffed.
I fiddled with my fingernails, and chewed on one of them a bit.
I got out my pencil, and tapped it on my knee.
“Roo,” said Shiv. “I don’t have all day.”
“Okay. Do you remember you once asked me to be your girlfriend?”
“It wasn’t that long ago.”
“But then, somehow, it never happened?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I, well—I wondered why you changed your mind. I’m not mad or anything. Only, I’m trying to figure stuff out, since the Jackson thing, and I know it wasn’t a big deal, and maybe you don’t want to explain, but I’ve been thinking about it, I guess, and …” Blah blah blah. I went on for some ridiculous amount of time, sounding completely lame and saying “like” just about every other word.
Eventually, finally, I got it all said and shut up so he could answer.
“Roo, you were laughing at me,” Shiv said, looking down at his own shoes now. “I heard you on the quad.”
“What?”
“I heard you, with Cricket and Kim and those guys, cracking up over what a jerk you thought I was.”
“That’s not true!”
“I was there.”
“I didn’t.”
“You yelled ‘Gross!’” he said. “I know I’m not wrong. And you were laughing all over the place, like I was some big joke.”
“Ag!” I said. “That’s not how it happened.”
“And something about I smelled like nutmeg? Like you were disgusted by kissing an Indian or something.” His voice was bitter. “I wasn’t going to go out with you after that. I didn’t even want to look at you for months.”
“Nutmeg is good, Shiv,” I said. “Nutmeg smells good.”
“You made me feel like a loser, Roo,” he said. “Like a complete outsider.”
Shiv, the golden, the popular, the perfect. Saying this to me.
“I didn’t say what you thought I said,” I whispered. “At least, I didn’t mean what you thought I meant.”
“Okay, then,” he said.
“I liked you. They were asking me what it was like to kiss you. That’s all. It’s how girls are, together. No one said anything bad.”
“All right.”
“The gross thing was about ear licking. Cricket asked if we did ear licking, and I’d never heard of it before.”
He laughed a little. “I guess that’s nice to know.”
“All this time I thought it was something wrong with me that made you stop talking to me,” I said.
“It was,” he pointed out.
“I mean with my kissing, or my body, or my personality.”
“It was your personality.”
“Oh.” I tried to crack a smile. “But it was a mistake. Please believe me. I would never say that stuff about you.”2
“Yeah, okay.”
“The Indian thing is not a thing. I mean …”
“I got it, Roo.”
“I’m all messed up now.”
“Yeah, well. I’m all messed up too,” he said. “But thanks for the explanation.”
He hiked his bag over his shoulder and walked down to the parking lot without offering me a ride.
1 I swear, I am the only person at Tate who doesn’t have a cell phone. Even the fifth graders have them.2 When I think about it, this is both true and not true. I have talked a lot of trash about people. Meghan. Hutch. Katarina. I really have. But throughout this whole horror, I never said one mean thing about Kim, Cricket or Nora to anyone, even when all that stuff was up on the bathroom wall.