“What do you think?” Ag. She really does make me insane with that kind of question.
“Um. I don’t know.”
“Would you like a clean bill of health?”
I sighed. “I don’t want to be a mental patient forever.”
“Are you saying you’d like to stop therapy, Ruby?”
“Um.”
“You don’t have to stop until you want to. We can do this as long as you like.”
“Don’t you get bored, listening to my problems?”
“No.”
“You probably have a bunch of anorexics and sex addicts who are a lot more interesting.”
“It’s not your job to entertain me, Ruby.”
True enough. That’s why therapists are different from friends. You don’t have to make them like you.
So I kept going.
I guess I like it.
School is over now. Jackson and Kim are still together. He doesn’t seem to have realized he loves me. In fact, he seems to have forgotten everything that happened. Neither of them spoke to me the rest of the year except for Jackson saying hello when absolutely necessary—and I still had the Beth-Ann-Courtney-Heidi-Kim radar all through the very last day of finals, stupid as that is. People still whispered about me in the hall, but no one wrote anything more on the bathroom wall. I kept my head down. I hung out with Noel in Painting Elective and ate lunch with Meghan. Once, after a game, I went for ice cream with a crowd of girls from the lacrosse team. I haven’t been back to the B&O.
You might think that Heidi started going with Finn the stud-muffin, since he took her to the Spring Fling as a Kim replacement. But it didn’t work out that way. Heidi’s now dating Tommy Parrish, who used to go out with Cricket.
Ariel and Shiv are still together, but I heard her in the locker room saying she thought Steve Buchannon (Bick’s friend) was completely hot. Cricket and Pete split up. Pete started going out with Katarina—until Katarina made out with the Whipper at yet another party I wasn’t invited to, and Pete got mad and broke up with her. So now she’s going out with Cabbie. And Pete is going out with Courtney. And Finn is going out with Beth. Cricket started dating Billy Alexander, which I’m sure she’s cranked about since she’s lusted for him ever since that one time he drove her home from that basketball game. But he also just graduated, and I don’t know the whole story, because we don’t talk.
It’s still the Tate universe.
I ran into Nora in the University District right after school ended. I had been shopping for a bathing suit, and I had just left the store when she called my name from across the street. I showed her what I’d bought. She liked it.
We talked about tan lines, and how the bathing suits that make nice tan lines aren’t the ones you look good in, somehow. She said her boobs get squashed flat or pushed up, and why wasn’t there a bathing suit that made boobs just look normal? You would think scientists and fashion designers could have figured that out by now.
It was good to see her. She wasn’t up to much, she said. Watching TV. Hanging out with Gideon a little. Her mom had bought her a new camera, a real one where you have to adjust everything.
I felt like guilting her for cutting me out all spring, but I thought about something Doctor Z said, which was that sometimes it’s a good idea to think about what you want from a situation, and try to get it, rather than just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head. And I realized I was glad Nora was talking to me, finally—and I didn’t want to mess it up. So I said, “Hey, I love your brother again.”
“He’s got a girlfriend,” she said. “Diana. She’s a poet.”
“I know,” I answered, although I didn’t really. “But he just does it for me, anyhow.”
She laughed. “There’s no accounting for taste.”
“I’m through with boys for the moment, anyway,” I said. “Too dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it can get ugly out there.”
“Uh-huh. I think it’s better as a spectator sport.”
“What, dating?”
“Uh-huh.” Nora scratched her neck. “It’s just so messy, you know, all that stuff with you and Kim and Heidi and—”
“I got you.”
“I just feel like, I’d rather shoot baskets, or something,” she went on. “Even read a book. I mean, not that there’s anyone I’m into, anyway.”
“The problem is,” I joked, “our school is too damn small. Remember how we wrote that in The Boy Book? Any decent boy was used up ages ago.”
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “Sometimes I feel like a leper.”
That surprised me almost as much as Shiv Neel, golden boy, thinking we were all laughing at him because he was Indian.
Like even the people at the center of the Tate universe feel like they’re on the outside.
Nora said she was late, hoisted her bag over her shoulder and waved goodbye. I watched her go down the street and get into her car.
Maybe I’ll give her a call later in the summer, when the whole debacle is a bit more behind us.
Maybe.
I slept over at Meghan’s house a couple of nights in June. She has a huge bathroom all to herself and two twin beds and a collection of like forty different perfumes. I found out she’s still a virgin, though she lets Bick go down on her.7
My dad is still working on the greenhouse. It’s coming along.
Here is what I think about these days: Jackson. Pitiful, but true. The ceramic frogs are still sitting on my dresser, with a photograph of the two of us holding hands out on my deck. I think he may not be the nicest person, really. He’s not the person I thought he was. Some days, I’m mad at him, actually—which I wasn’t before. For the bad presents, and the forgotten phone calls, for the stupid anime movies. And for Kim. But that happens in waves, on certain days. The other days, I think about the lollipop-tasting experiment, and kissing in my kitty-cat suit—and I feel like I lost something.
I’d probably still take him back, if he showed up at my door like in the movies.
He’s Jackson Clarke.
It’s just how I feel.
I think about Cricket and Nora. And how much I used to laugh. And how I’d go into the refectory in the morning and they’d be sitting there, drinking tea (Cricket) and Diet Coke (Nora) and goofing around (Kim was always late), and how that was the best part of my day, most days—and how it’ll never happen again.
And of course, I think about Kim. It’s so weird that I used to have a best friend and now I don’t. I have a drawer full of pictures of her. The red vintage jacket she bought me for my birthday is hanging in my closet, and the book about Salvador Dalí I borrowed is sitting on my desk. I’ve got The Boy Book on the shelf in my bedroom where it’s always been, a big, ratty notebook with our handwriting all over it. I even thought about photocopying it and mailing it to her as a kind of reproach. Or maybe as a gesture of friendship. I’m not sure which.
But I didn’t.
I still automatically pick up the phone to call her when something happens that’s worth talking about, then remember and put the phone down again without dialing. Sometimes I call Meghan instead—but most of the time, I don’t call anyone. Doctor Z told me I’m going through a “grieving process,” and that all these behaviors are natural.
I told her that phrases like “grieving process” make me gag.
She laughed and said it’s still a process and it’s still grieving, whatever I want to call it.
I said let’s call it Reginald. “I’m doing Reginald today,” I say now, when I’m feeling like I have no friends.
I think about Angelo, too, which is deeply perverse because he probably doesn’t ever want to talk to me again (subject of much therapy discussion). My family went to dinner at Juana’s again in May, but he wasn’t there. He sort of lives in a different universe—not the Tate universe—and I wonder sometimes what it’s like. Why he asked me to the Homecoming dance. Why he came to the party and brought me that corsage. What he thinks of that dog-filled house. What he does after school. Whether he’s thinking about college. What he looks like without a shirt.