At Cricket’s house, we did a lot of things you could only do without supervision. Nora baked batches of chocolate chip cookies and we ate them all; we sat topless in the sauna; we copied each other’s homework; we watched R-rated movies from her mom’s DVD collection; we sent instant messages to boys we thought were hot, using a secret identity.
Actually, we still do most of these things.
At least, we did until the three of them stopped talking to me.
The night I saw Adam Cox again I felt pretty good. We all felt pretty good, but it is a sad truth that I have learned: Dances are generally more fun to think about and get ready for than they actually are when you get there. The “mixer” was a dark gymnasium with some music playing, and a bunch of people I didn’t know milling around. That’s it. Nora and Cricket went off and danced together, and lots of the girls were dancing in groups—but the boys stood around the edges of the room and splashed each other with punch until a teacher came by and made them stop.
Kim and I amused ourselves by trying to decide which Tate boy we wished would ask us to dance. Shiv Neel. Billy Krespin. Noel DuBoise. Kyle Greco. “See the guy in the blue shirt?” Kim said. We had been standing there, not dancing, for a long time.
“Yeah.”
“He was looking at you just now.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“No, really.”
“That one?” I looked at the boy she was pointing to. He didn’t go to our school. He had dark eyebrows and shaggy hair. “Wait! I know him!”
Kim widened her eyes. “Get out.”
“I do. From when we were little.”
“He’s so cute.”
Our discussion went on for like ten more minutes, detailing how he was cute, who he was cuter than, whose type he was, what we thought of his style, how old he probably was, what movie star he looked like—the kind of thing that’s completely interesting when you’re talking about it with your best friend, and boring as hell when you read it written down. The end result was that Kim wanted to meet him, and although my palms were sweating and my clothes suddenly seemed all wrong, I walked over to where Adam was goofing around with his friends, Kim trailing behind me.
“Are you Adam Cox?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“Why you want to know.”
“I’m Ruby Oliver. We used to play together.”
“Play together?” One of his friends started laughing like it was some kind of sex joke. “She says Adam used to play with her! Hey, Adam, did you get some play?”
“Don’t you remember?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.” Adam shrugged.
“What about the mermaid game?” I said. (We used to play this mermaid game.)
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“In the splashy pool,” I said, to remind him.
“Beats me.”
“You know how your cat had kittens and I helped name them?” I said.
“Yeah, right.” He sounded sarcastic. “Meow.”
His friends chuckled. “Who’s the girl?” one of them called. “Are you two playing kitty cats?”
I took a deep breath. “This is my friend Kim. We go to Tate.”
Adam turned his back. “I have no idea what she wants with me,” he said to his friends. “Four-eyes.”
My face felt hot. “Come on, Kim,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go.”
Kim has this quality. It’s a great quality—until it’s turned against you. She’s quiet, she doesn’t rock the boat. But if you really make her mad, she goes nuts. It’s like she spends all this time being a good person, holding up ideals, getting good grades and being nice—and then when someone else fails to live up to her standards, she goes on a rampage. She lit into Adam Cox right there in the middle of the mixer. She walked up and stuck her chin in his chest (he was a lot taller than her), looked up and called him a flabby, low-life, eyebrow-headed mermaid.
“Uh! Get off me!” Adam looked around at his friends as if for help—but they seemed too surprised to do anything.
Kim called him a shallow, phony Barbie doll, and his friends started to laugh.
She was getting started on how he was an uncute, piddle-brained know-nothing, and Adam was looking like he really might hit her, when a tall teacher with a thick brown beard put his hand protectively on Kim’s shoulder. “Walk away from it, boys,” the teacher said. “Just walk away.”
Adam stepped back, but punched the air near Kim’s head.
“I said, walk away,” the teacher repeated. “You’re not going to fight girls in my gymnasium. It’s not happening. End of story.”
Adam turned to go, but he gave Kim the finger when the teacher looked away for a second.
Kim and I got a lecture about behavior and how if we wanted boys to be gentlemen we should act like ladies, which was idiotic because we didn’t want the boys to be gentlemen. We wanted them to think we were pretty and ask us to dance and hold our hands and maybe kiss us in the corner and then send us clever instant messages.
Yes, that’s what we wanted, even from boys who were as stupid and mean as Adam Cox and his friends.
I know I should have felt grateful to Kim for defending me, but I was embarrassed. I wished we had been the kind of girls those boys would have been nice to, automatically. I’m not even sure what kind of girls that would have been, why some girls were attractive to boys and others weren’t. We were just as cute as Heidi and Katarina—both of whom were dancing with actual ninth graders from Sullivan Boys’ Academy. Our clothes were fine. My glasses weren’t any worse than Heidi’s nose blackheads or Katarina’s retainer. But somehow we weren’t in that league. It didn’t seem like anything that would ever change. Although it did.
The whole Adam debacle did have one redeeming element. Kim and I began our official joint notebook, in which we wrote the most important bits of boy/girl information we knew. We decorated the notebook with silver wrapping paper, and decided that its contents would be for the use of any female we deemed worthy (meaning Cricket and Nora) for purposes of attracting and not immediately repelling the opposite sex—and for understanding what the heck they were all about. We called it The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them (A Kanga-Roo Production), as if it was a nature book about lizards or something.
Which it kind of was.
The very first thing we wrote in it was this: “If you’re trying to talk to a boy in front of his friends, don’t mention anything too girly. Like mermaids. Or kittens. If you do, he is apt to act like a complete wanker and cause severe injury to your self-esteem. Beware.”
Then later, as our understanding of the male psyche increased (well, it’s still pretty minimal, but as we got older and read more books and watched more television, at least), we added, bit by bit as our humiliations mounted up: “In addition to mermaids and kittens, the average boy is likely to feel threatened if you mention the following topics: Poetry. Sunsets. Movies with kissing. Notes he’s written to you. Notes you wrote to him. Instant messages, likewise. Also e-mail. Past actions suggesting sentiment, such as weeping or saying he likes you. Pet names such as ‘snookie’ or ‘peachie’ that the two of you share (if going out). Hairstyles. His mother. Books you liked when you were younger. Dolls. Cooking (if he does it). Singing (if he does it). Failure.”