Adam’s last name was Cox, and after I had been eyeing him for a couple of months, I named this stuffed bunny I had after him. All the grown-ups laughed when I said the bunny’s name was Cox, and I didn’t understand why.1
Pretty soon, Adam and I were playing together. Our parents took us to the zoo, and we’d spend time after school in the nearby playground, drawing with chalk and walking up the slide. I remember we went swimming a few times at the YMCA, and hung out in a plastic wading pool in his backyard. His cat had kittens, and I got to help name them because I came over the same morning they were born.
And that was it.
We were only five years old.
When I was old enough for kindergarten, I started at Tate Prep and he went somewhere else.
Doctor Z looked down at the Boyfriend List. She didn’t seem too impressed with my Adam Cox story. Or maybe it was the list itself she didn’t think much of—though it had taken me a lot of work to do. I started the night after our first appointment, in bed in my pajamas, writing on this thick, cream-colored stationery my grandma Suzette got me. It says Ruby Denise Oliver on the top in this great curlicue font—but I never use it, since anyone I’d want to write to has e-mail.
My first draft, I only wrote down Jackson and Cabbie. Then I added Gideon at the beginning, with a question mark next to his name. Then Michael, the guy who was my first kiss—putting him in between Gideon and Jackson.
Then I turned off my light and tried to go to sleep.
No luck.
Well, I wasn’t sleeping well lately anyway—but I lay there with this feeling that the list wasn’t finished. I remembered that I’d told Doctor Z about Angelo already, so I turned the light back on and squeezed him in between Jackson and Cabbie.
Oh, and I had mentioned Noel to Doctor Z, too—though we were only friends. I stuck him in right after Jackson, just to have somewhere to put him. Then I rewrote the list in nice handwriting and managed to get myself to sleep—but in the middle of the night I woke up and wrote down two more boys and my History & Politics teacher.
Then I crossed them all out.
At breakfast the next morning, I jumped up from my cereal bowl and put one of them back on.
At school, the hallway by the mail cubbies suddenly seemed like an obstacle course of old crushes and rejections. Shiv Neel. Finn Murphy. Hutch (ag). All three in my face before I even got to my first class. I pulled out the list and wrote them down.
All day long, I thought about boys. (Well, even more than usual.) And the more I thought, the more I remembered.
Adam, the mermaid.
Sky, the jerk.
Ben, the golden boy.
Tommy, who surfed.
Chase, who gave me the necklace.
Billy, who squeezed my boob.
Never in a million years would I have expected the list to be anywhere near so long. But by the end of the day, there were fifteen names on there, and the list was all scribbly-looking, with arrows zooming around to show what order the boys should really go in.
It was a mess, so during geometry I recopied it on the stationery in my best writing and threw the old one away.2 Then I tucked it into a matching envelope to give to Doctor Z.
“Why did you stop playing with Adam?” Doctor Z wanted to know.
“I told you, I started a different school.”
“Is there something more?” she said, looking at me over those red-rimmed glasses.
“No.”
I had liked making the list, it was kind of fun. But ag. What was the point of talking about something from ten years ago that wasn’t even important? Zoo trips with Adam Cox and his mom weren’t exactly significant to my mental development.
Not that there was anything else I wanted to talk about.
I just wanted the panic attacks to stop.
And the hollow, sore feeling in my chest to go away.
And to feel like I could make it through lunch period without choking back tears.
And Jackson. I wanted Jackson back.
And my friends.
“Did you ever see him again?”
“Who?” I had forgotten what we were talking about.
“Adam,” said Doctor Z.
Actually, I did see Adam Cox at an “interschool mixer” two years ago, when I was in eighth grade. Tate Prep is completely small, and so are some of the other private schools in Seattle. The guidance counselors or someone else concerned with our adolescent adjustment decided to try and foster what they called “wider social opportunities for the students, outside the competitive arena of sporting events.” Translation: there was going to be a dance. Only they didn’t call it a dance, they called it an interschool mixer.
The night I saw Adam Cox again started with us all over at Cricket’s house, getting ready and eating cheese puffs. Here’s Cricket: cool and blond and wearing pastels, which is a real fake-out because she’s the most hyperactive, sarcastic girl I know. Here’s Nora: wearing a red shirt that makes her look dramatic; laughing about her boobs-puffing them out and shaking them around, so funny that she had such big ones that early. Here’s Kim: sleek, black Japanese hair almost to her waist, a bohemian peasant shirt and no makeup. Here’s me, Ruby: just discovered thrift stores, jeans and my zebra-print glasses, plus a beaded blue sweater that cost me $7.89 at a store called Zelda’s Closet.
I’m not telling you what I look like in any detail. I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine’s physical attributes: “She had piercing blue eyes and a heaving milk-white bosom blah blah,” or “She hated her frizzy hair and fat ankles blah blah, blah blah.” First of all, it’s boring. You should be able to imagine me without all the gory details of my hairstyle or the size of my thighs. And second, it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who’s ideal—or completely shattered. Give me a break. People have got to be smarter than that.3
Anyway, here’s us: Kim, Roo, Cricket and Nora. We weren’t—and aren’t—the really, really popular ones. That’s Katarina, Ariel and Heidi, girls my History & Politics teacher4 would call the ruling class5 of the Tate universe.6 And we weren’t the bottom of the social strata either—there’s a bunch of kids who lie low at Tate, don’t go to parties and dances, don’t act in plays or sit around on the quad on sunny days; they seem to just do their work and maybe play some sports or serve on planning committees. Nobody gossips about them.
So the four of us were reasonably popular—not really, really—but popular enough.
We started hanging around as a foursome at the start of eighth grade, although Kim and I had been friends since kindergarten, when people teased her about what was in her lunchbox (red-bean cake and tofu) and I traded because I don’t like peanut butter anyway and that’s what my mother always packed. We’ve been close ever since, and because I was Roo, she became Kanga. Then Nora joined up with us a couple of years later—giggly, bookish, tall and curvy Nora with her huge basement full of dress-up clothes and her ever-present Instamatic camera. Then bawdy, loudmouth Cricket came to school in September of eighth grade, and one day at the start of that year, we were all four sitting in the way-back of the bus on the class field trip to the natural history museum. We were fooling around and laughing and putting our feet up on the seat in front, making fortune-tellers out of folded paper and writing scandalous fortunes inside—until finally a teacher came back and yelled at us, which made us laugh even harder.
Suddenly, after that, Cricket was like our leader. Kim and I were still best friends, sleeping over at each other’s houses and talking on the phone for hours every night, but we spent a huge amount of time over at Cricket’s house, which is completely deluxe—even bigger than Kim’s, and even fancier than Nora’s. It has six bedrooms, and a pool, and a sauna, and a hot tub, and two refrigerators. Cricket’s room has its own stereo and TV. Her mom works long hours, and Cricket’s older sister, Starling, had a car. Starting in eighth grade, we’d ride home with her after school and watch TV and splash around in Cricket’s hot tub until our parents came to pick us up before dinner.