My pulse quickened. I had been trying to be so good-encouraging, reliable, honest-and now she was saying I was hard to be with?
"I love you both, but you know."
"No, I don't."
"Guys are always looking at you and wanting you," said Nora. "You're so sexy all the time, with lipstick and stuff, and Meghan-well, she's just Meghan. The two of you sit there at the bake sale table flirting with everyone. I just can't be like that. I'm not that type."
"You think I'm sexy?". I blurted.
Sometimes I felt sexy, and sometimes I felt like a troll. In any case, I didn't walk around all day trying to be sexy.
"Hello? Orange bra? Fishnets?"
I nodded. When she put it that way, she had a point. I was shocked, though, that she thought of me and Meghan as the same kind of girl. Meghan was experienced and enterprising and often annoying on the boy front.
Was I the same way?
It was true, I guess, that I was getting attention from Gideon, Finn, Noel and maybe even Jackson, while Nora was getting attention from--no one. And that despite all the horrors that resulted, I had had a real boyfriend last year, while Nora had been Noboyfriend for life.
And I liked wearing fishnets. And I did like the way guys looked at my legs when I wore them.
151
"So I guess I'm saying, please don't steal him," Nora went on as we pulled out of the drive-in parking lot.
"I'm not trying to steal him," I said. "I'm just trying to talk about it."
Nora kept looking straight ahead. "It's not fair for you to have Gideon and Jackson and half the soccer team flirting with you, and then decide you're interested in the one guy I like when you could have almost anyone. Don't you see what I'm saying, Roo?"
I had never thought of myself that way. As flirting with half the soccer team. But with CHuBS recruiting, I couldn't deny it was true.
I looked at Nora. Her hands in fuzzy blue gloves. Her skin tan from skiing. Her lips a little chapped. Her eyes on the road because she's always a good driver, even when she's upset.
I didn't want to be the slut most people at school thought I was. I didn't want to be the boy-stealing flirt Nora obviously thought I might be. I wanted to be a good friend. The kind of friend who gets invited over for Troy and cheesy popcorn when something bad has happened.
"Point taken," I told her.
***
"Ruby, did you make the treasure map we talked about?" Doctor Z asked next Tuesday, when I told her about the drama.
"No. But I'll get to it, I promise."
Doctor Z looked at me.
152
"I've been superbusy," I said. "Did I tell you about the SAT practice tests? They're making us do practice tests. I spent my Saturday night doing that."
She looked at me some more.
"Plus all the Baby CHuBS stuff, plus I have to read House of Mirth. Plus"-I spit it out-"I had another panic attack this morning. Just randomly before I left for school."
She crossed her legs and still didn't say anything.
"Are you mad I had the panic attack? Because you're right, I should be over them by now."
Doctor Z shook her head. "I'm not mad. This is not about me being mad or judging you in any way, Ruby."
"Sorry."
"You don't need to apologize," said Doctor Z. "I'm wondering if we should spend some time examining your resistance to making the treasure map."
"I don't know what I want!" I yelled. "How can I make a map of what I want when I don't know what I want?"
Silence from Doctor Z.
"I want Jackson one day. I want Noel another day. I want Gideon another. Sometimes I want random people I don't even like especially, like Finn Murphy or my Am Lit teacher."
"Um-hm."
"I want something real one day and I want something like in the movies the next. I'm not consistent, so I don't know how on earth I'm supposed to do this assignment."
"I see."
153
I sat there for a minute or two. "What should I do?"
"I can't tell you that," said Doctor Z.
"Then we're not going to get anywhere," I told her, "because I don't know what to do myself. I know you always say I should take action to get what I want out of a situation, but if my mental health is so bad I don't even know what I want, there's no action to take."
"Lots of people don't know what they want."
"Yeah, but are they mentally stable?"
"Possibly."
I stared at her.
Doctor Z chewed her Nicorette. After a while, she said, "I can offer you an observation, for what it's worth."
"What?"
"The treasure map assignment was to create a map of positive peer-group relationships-a friendship collage."
"Uh-huh."
"The map you've been describing, based on what you said just now about Gideon, Jackson and Noel, is more like a treasure map of boys rather than friends."
Oh.
"When we're talking about these people, we're talking about love relationships, are we not?"
"Um. Maybe not love, exactly."
"Romantic relationships."
"Yes."
"I think that's an interesting interpretation on your part."
"What do you mean?"
154
"I mean that you interpreted peer-group relationships as romantic relationships." Oh yeah. That.
"That's why I'm here," I told her. "My priorities are completely warped."
155
14.
I Suffer from Rabbit Fever
Dear F-SHAN (Former Secret Hooter Agent Noel),
The hooters of F-SHAR (Former Secret Hooter Agent Ruby) are sincerely indebted to you for their heroic rescue last week. Despite the closure of the Hooter Rescue Squad, your skills remain sharp and your instincts unwaveringly chivalrous.
F-SHAR has kept your hoodie much longer than she meant to, but now it's clean and she can give it back. In the interim, she begs you to accept this package of Band-Aids that look like bacon strips, as a sign of her sincere appreciation for your efforts.
--written on white typing paper in black pen--after several drafts; folded in thirds and wrapped around a package of bacon Band-Aids. Shoved with hoodie into Noel's mail cubby.
156
I hadn't thanked Noel properly for the rescue, since after my conversation with Nora I felt self-conscious every time I talked to him. But finally I did the laundry and I had to give him his hoodie back, so I wrote this note trying to be amusing and unromantic.
At the start of junior year, before Nora liked him, before he asked if he could kiss me, back when we were friends without any added weirdness, Noel and I had formed a top-secret agency devoted to protecting the rights and interests of hooters everywhere. It was subsequently disbanded. Long story. Anyway, the note was a flashback to the days of the Hooter Rescue Squad, when we were friends, just friends. I stuck it in Noel's cubby on Thursday morning.
I bought the bacon Band-Aids at Archie McPhee. It's this amazing store on Market Street that has things like windup nuns, Devil Duckies, pirate garbage cans, action figures of Sigmund Freud and Jane Austen-and the world's largest collection of snow globes. I got Noel the bacon Band-Aids, even though I'm a vegetarian, because it was so perfect that the bacon was the right shape. Also because Mr. Fleischman had sent home a Chem handout on hydrogenation and how bacon fat is solid at room temperature and liquid when heated and how you could make soap from it too. The Xerox included a photograph of bacon-as if Chem students couldn't be relied upon to have a clear idea of what bacon was without visual assistance. Noel and I had laughed about that a lot when we first got the handout: "What's bacon, again?" he kept asking. "I can never seem to remember. I hope it's not on the test."
Thursday lunch, Noel wrapped three of his fingers in
157
bacon strips. He waved them at me across the refectory, and I got my raisin salad and went to sit with him, Nora, Meghan and Hutch.
Hutch was wearing fingerless gloves and his usual biker jacket with "Iron Maiden" painted on the back. He didn't talk much, not around Meghan and Nora, at least. I wasn't sure if it was because Hutch didn't like them, or because he worried they didn't like him, but he was definitely different at school than when he worked with my dad in the greenhouse.