And: "Say you'll be my partner true/In Chemistry, it's me and you."
What a stupid set of contradictory statements. And what a stupid set of guys to be spending my time thinking about. The whole thing was idiotic.
None of them gave a crap about me anyway. Jackson was a cheater/pod-robot and I couldn't believe I'd been
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thinking about him so much when I was supposed to have gotten over him ages ago. I ripped his photograph off the treasure map and tore it in half.
Noel. He'd made out with Ariel and let me down for the bake sale and didn't listen when I tried to explain about Jackson. He'd also abandoned me during the storm of gossip after Ariel found us kissing in the art studio-so whatever he'd felt couldn't be much, now could it?
No.
Do not think about guys who have broken your heart six ways. It is mentally deranged to chase after heartbreak.
I was crying, my eyes leaking and my nose running, and was digging through my desk for my scissors so I could cut up the map, when my dad tapped on the door.
"I'll come out in a minute," I called, but he knocked again.
"Hold on!" I set the scissors on the desk and rummaged under my bed for a box of tissues. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes and put some powder on my face. If I had any luck Dad would just be asking some inane question like did I do my French homework, when it was only Saturday morning. He wouldn't notice I'd been crying.
"Okay, come in!" I told him-but it wasn't Dad. It was Hutch. He'd been helping out in the greenhouse when I got home with Polka-dot.
"Hey," he said, standing in the doorway. "Sorry to bother you." In practically a whole year working at our house, he'd never entered my room.
I sniffed. "No problem. What do you want?"
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"I, um." He picked at his fingernails. "I could, uh, tell you were upset when you got home, so I wanted to see if you were okay."
"I'm not upset," I said. "How could you tell I was upset?"
Hutch shrugged. "Usually you come say hi to us in the greenhouse, or at least you yell a derogatory comment about plant life."
I smiled. That was true.
But who knew Hutch even noticed anything I usually did?
"This time," he went on, "you moped into the house like you had something weighing on you, and I heard your door slam. Your dad called for you to come out and look at the new planters we bought at the nursery, but you didn't even seem to hear him."
"Oh." It was strange having Hutch in my room. He wasn't wearing the Iron Maiden leather jacket he wore to school no matter what the weather-just a gray Skid Row T-shirt and jeans with planting soil on them. "You can sit if you want." I gestured at the chair by my desk.
"When you didn't come back out," Hutch said, sitting down, "after a while I thought I'd knock."
"That was nice of you, but I'm okay," I told him. "I'm just having, you know, a sucky life right now."
Hutch looked at the treasure map next to him. "What's this?" he asked.
I wanted to lie and say it was an art project for school, but he was looking at it carefully. I stared at him, sitting at my desk with his pimply, pockmarked skin and greasy
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hair and his general awkward Hutch-ness, and I couldn't make the lie come out. "It's a treasure map of boys," I said. "You're not allowed to laugh."
His eyes crinkled. "Okay."
"I mean it, no laughing."
"No laughing," he said. "But admit: it does sound a little bit funny."
"It sounds insane is what it sounds," I told him, "but it's this thing my shrink made me do. You know I see a shrink, right?"
"Your dad might have mentioned it." This was Hutch being polite, as Dad was all too inclined to say things like 'John, Ruby's therapist is working with her on anxiety management, but she still covers her emotions with obnoxious statements about the dullness of container gardening, so you can take what she says with a few grains of salt, 'kay?" If you hung around with my folks for more than half an hour, you were sure to know their kid was in therapy. They believed in being open about these things even with people they barely knew.
"Yeah," I said. "So the shrink gave me this treasure map assignment and I'm supposed to be sorting out all my crap personal relationships and visualizing how they might be better, only I did it all wrong."
"Wrong, how?"
"It was supposed to be about my peer group and friends and stuff, and instead I did it just about boys, because I'm obsessed or something, possibly certifiable. Again, don't laugh."
Hutch didn't laugh.
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I babbled on: "Then everything went wrong with my shrink because she has this boyfriend with gross feet and I met him and now I can't even talk to her about anything anymore. So I never showed the map to her or redid it the right way. Now I realize none of it makes any sense and none of the people on it would ever want me anyway--or the only one who does is an egotistical pod-robot and just wants me because he doesn't have me."
Hutch nodded. But he looked confused.
"I sound like a madman, don't I?" I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.
"I'm a boy," Hutch finally said, looking at the treasure map. "But I'm not on here."
"God," I said, sniffling. "Why would you even want to be on there?"
He stood up and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Obviously there's nothing romantic between you and me, but we are French partners, Ruby. We do eat lunch sometimes, and we do hang out in the greenhouse like a couple times a week."
"Yeah?"
"So. I feel dumb saying this, but I don't have a very long list of friends, and you're on it. That short list that I have. So I thought I might be on your map."
Oh.
That was true.
And it must have been really hard to say. I had spent weeks feeling like I had only one friend in the Tate Universe and that was Meghan. But here was
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another one, standing right in my house. Right in my bedroom.
He just didn't look how I thought my friends looked. How my friends used to look.
This was what Doctor Z meant about a treasure map. I was supposed to find the treasure in my own life, and map out how I might dig deeper and get more of it.
Hutch had brought me a surprise cappuccino that time.
And now I had hurt his feelings.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Sometimes I'm not a very good friend."
He shrugged.
I took a Sharpie and sketched in a small free space on the map. "That's you, see, with the Skid Row T-shirt-- here's your arm, here's your other arm. You're holding a plant. Okay, not a very good-looking plant, but a plant."
Hutch laughed.
"Now here are legs, and feet, and I'm drawing a box around you to make it clear you're not part of all the insanity going on with all the rest of these guys. Good?"
"I look bald," said Hutch.
"Okay, I'll give you a little more hair." I scribbled it in. "Do you like it?"
"Now my hair is enormous."
"You see? Being on my treasure map is not all you imagined it would be," I said. "In fact, it kind of sucks. But now you're on it and there's no taking you off."
"I guess I asked for it," he said, smiling.
"Do you want to go to Spring Fling with me?" I
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blurted. "You know, as friends. We could dress up and eat somewhere fancy. It'd be fun. And even though we wouldn't have date dates, we wouldn't miss the dance?"
Hutch coughed. "I. Ah ..."
"What?"
"Honestly, I want to miss the dance."
"You do?"
"Those things always make me feel like a loser." Oh.
"Like my clothes aren't right and I can't dance."
"You wear a suit, the clothes won't be a problem," I said.
Hutch shook his head. "What I mean is, I don't like most of the people at Tate, anyway, so fuck it. Why go somewhere that makes you feel bad if you don't have to go there to get your education? The last dance I even tried going to was in seventh grade."
Oh.