“It would be better than talking about a bunch of boys I barely even know,” I snapped.
“So how do you feel?” Doctor Z looked like she might laugh.
“I feel bored.”
Doctor Z didn’t say anything.
“Right now. I feel like I’m wasting my time,” I said.
Again, she didn’t say anything.
I wasn’t going to say anything if she wasn’t going to. I looked at my fingernails. I pulled at a thread sticking out of my jeans.
“Are you?” Doctor Z finally said.
“Am I what?”
“Are you wasting your time?”
“It’s a waste of time to be here, I mean.”
“But you’re here, Ruby. You don’t have a choice. Are you wasting the time?”
We were silent. Four more minutes ticked by. I could see the second hand going around the clock.
It was true.
I was wasting my time. Because I wasn’t telling her anything.
Dad’s friend Greg, the one with the panic attacks, stays in his house all day and eats out of delivery cartons.
The attacks were completely scary. I felt sick and weak when they were happening.
Doctor Z looked sweet in her stupid embroidered sweater and red glasses. Not like someone with a PhD in mental illness.
I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. None of my friends would even speak to me. Not Cricket. Not Kim. Not Nora. Not even Meghan or Noel.
“Finn is the boy who started this whole horror,” I finally said.
In second grade, Finn was not the six-foot blond soccer player he is today. He was a shrimp with white hair who stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth when he was concentrating. I never noticed him much. No one ever noticed him much. Until one day, he was in the school library when I was in there, and he was checking out a book on wildcats that I had read already.
“Did you know that a panther is really a black leopard?” I said.
He looked surprised and clutched the book to his chest.
“And that a mountain lion and a cougar and a puma are all the same thing?” I went on. “It’s in there.”
“Where?”
“I’ll show you.”
We bent over the book together, looking at big glossy photographs of lions and ocelots and bobcats in the wilderness. It turned out Finn knew a lot already about the way they train circus lions, and he told a funny story about a cat he knew who could do tricks.
About a half hour later, Katarina and Ariel came into the library and saw us with our heads together over the book. “Ruby and Finn, sitting in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” they shouted.
“Shhh,” whispered the librarian.
But the damage was done.
For the rest of the year, people teased me and Finn every time we came within two feet of each other.
On the playground: “Ruby’s got a boyfriend, Ruby’s got a boyfriend!”
In kissing tag: “Ruby, I got Finn for you! Come here and kiss him!”
At lunch: “Finn! There’s a chair free next to Ruby. Don’t you want to sit with your girlfriend?”
It never died down, because Finn sometimes actually would come over and sit in the chair, or he’d give up his swing if he saw me waiting—which only made things worse. He never denied anything either, although I did. When people teased him about me, he’d look over into my eyes in this sweet, shrimpy way that I got to like. After a while, it was as if we had this special secret friendship without ever talking.
After summer vacation, people seemed to have forgotten all about the whole thing. There were new rumors to circulate; the old jokes weren’t funny anymore.
But Finn and I remembered. I never spoke to him if I could possibly avoid it. I never chased him in tag, sat near him at lunch, never partnered up on field trips, nothing. I didn’t want to risk being teased again, and I’m sure he didn’t either—but every now and then I still got that sweet, shrimpy look from him, across the crowded playground.
By the start of sophomore year, he had deshrimped himself. His hair had darkened (though he was still blond), and he had become an athlete. He was quiet, good at computers and science; he played violin in the orchestra. Cute, in a soft, slightly big-nosed way. Not popular, but not geeky, either. Just there. We still didn’t talk to each other. It had become old habit by then. If the seat next to him was empty, I automatically didn’t sit in it. If I saw him in the halls, I didn’t say hi—and he didn’t say it, either. No contact at all, besides the looks. Until—
“Know what’s true?” Kim said, a week after school started, tenth grade year. She and Cricket and I were sitting on the grass outside the refectory after lunch, drinking pop and people-watching.1 Cricket was braiding her long blond hair into tiny braids.
“Tell me what’s true,” I said.
“Finn Murphy is a stud-muffin.”
I opened my Brit Lit notebook and flipped through it. Years and years of pretending Finn didn’t exist had made this an automatic reflex. But Cricket nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said, looking across the quad to where Finn was kicking a soccer ball around with a couple of other boys. “He is a muffin.2 There’s no denying it. But he’s a studly muffin. And that makes all the difference.”
“I hung out with him after school yesterday,” Kim said.
“No way!” Cricket hit her with a straw.
“Way. I went to the B&O to do homework and he was working behind the counter.3 It was dead in there and his boss was off, so he came out and sat with me.” Kim looked down at her lap.
“Was it a thing?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think it was a thing.”
“What kind of thing?” Cricket wanted to know.
“A thing thing.”
“A thing thing? You mean, really?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, was it, or wasn’t it?”
“Okay, it was. It was definitely a thing thing.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying there was kissing?”
Kim looked at the sky. “I’m not saying there wasn’t.”
“You kissed Finn Murphy?” squealed Cricket.
“Cricket!”
“Kanga had a thing thing/kissing thing with Finn Murphy yesterday afternoon and we’re only hearing about it now?” Cricket sounded outraged.
“I had a lot of homework,” said Kim.
“That’s no excuse. You could have e-mailed us, at least,” said Cricket. “You are shockingly out of line, young lady. Thing things with stud-muffins that no one else knows about? What is the world coming to?”
“Wait!” I held up my hand. “It is only a real and true thing thing if the kissing thing was good.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Cricket said. “Was he a good kisser?”
“Was there tongue?” I asked.
“And was it only a little tongue, or a whole big slurpy tongue?” Cricket asked.
“And where did it happen?” I said. “Did he tongue you right there in the B&O?”
“Or did he walk you home?”
“Or what?”
“I didn’t say I kissed him,” said Kim, looking pleased with herself. “I only said that he’s a stud-muffin this year.”
“He’s a good kisser, then,” said Cricket, standing up to go to her next class. “Look how she’s gloating. That’s a happy Kanga.”
Within a week, Kim and Finn the stud-muffin were going out and it was common knowledge. I had just started seeing Jackson (#13 on the list, my now-ex-boyfriend and the reason for nearly all the debacles of sophomore year). Cricket had a boyfriend named Kaleb from summer drama school, and Nora had—well, Nora can talk about boys with the best of them, and in eighth grade I know for a fact that she tongue-kissed three different guys in a single month—but she hasn’t gone out with anyone like a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. I think she’d like to. It just doesn’t seem to happen. She takes pictures and rows crew and plays basketball.