Real Live Boyfriends

by E. Lockhart

  What I really mean is, I thought he wouldn’t shut down with me.

  Once we were together.

  Because I was different.

  Someone I had loved—someone I still loved—had gone through something awful. He was shattered. He needed people around. And maybe there was some way I could help.

  I wanted to wrap my arms around him and listen to anything he had to say.

  I—

  I spent three hours editing the video of the two of us to try to show him how I felt. Maybe if he saw us together, I thought, maybe he’d remember. Maybe he’d feel something for me again.

  Then I watched what I’d made and thought: If a guy I didn’t like anymore gave this to me, it would make me feel completely creeped out.

  I shut down iMovie.

  Then I spent another hour writing Noel a long e-mail. I ran into Claude at the zoo, and he told me about Booth and the accident, and if there’s anything I can do to help, if you need an ear, blah blah blah.

  When I read it over, though, the note seemed creepy too.

  If he wanted to talk to me, he would simply talk. It was useless begging him to confide in me when he hadn’t even done so when we were together.

  I deleted the e-mail.

  Then I thought: I should make him brownies or some other deliciousness and give it to him with a very short note that says I’m sorry about Booth. That’s what I would do for Nora or Meghan.

  I pulled out all the cookbooks and scoured them for a recipe I could make with whatever was in the house—since at this point it was after midnight and my parents had long since gone to bed.

  Sugar cookies: no.

  Maybe butter lemon?

  Cocoa?

  What was delicious enough?

  What did Noel even like?

  I couldn’t remember.

  Did I even deserve to have him back if I couldn’t remember what sweets he liked?

  This line of thinking was psychotic. I put the books away. It was two in the morning, and as I ate the last of Dad’s stash of spearmint jelly candies, I finally had an idea.

  It wouldn’t solve anything, but at least it was a start.

  I called Gideon’s cell phone. He picked it up before it went to voice mail and said sleepily: “Ruby? It’s two a.m. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s okay,” I said. “But I can’t go out with you anymore.”

  1 A turducken is a boned chicken stuffed into a boned duck stuffed into a partly boned turkey, all layered in with stuffing and—well, it’s a triple-crown meat extravaganza, that’s all you need to know.

  2 Movies where the safe responsible guy is revealed as a jerk—thus freeing the heroine to leave him for someone more exciting: Desperately Seeking Susan; The Wedding Singer; The Holiday; Legally Blonde; Sliding Doors; French Kiss; Bring It On; Working Girl; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; George of the Jungle.

  3 Movies where a brooding, even sulky guy seems like a good idea for a quality boyfriend: Twilight, 10 Things I Hate About You, Edward Scissorhands, Pump Up the Volume, Heathers (until the end), The Breakfast Club, The Bourne Identity, Grosse Pointe Blank, Angel Eyes, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Beauty and the Beast, Reality Bites, Donnie Darko, Wuthering Heights, Good Will Hunting, The Piano, Rebecca, Rebel Without a Cause.

  4 Like me, not knowing about Noel’s witnessing that car accident. Not knowing Booth had died, at all.

  5 Because he’s busy brooding.

  Emotional Breakdown in the Parking Lot!

  Peer Questionnaire

  Please fill out this form by November 22 for the peer or peers who have requested your help with their college admissions process.

  Reminder: Please take your responsibilities as a peer commenter seriously. A helpful response can assist someone in finding the right college!

  What are your peer’s strengths?

  Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She gets so stoked about things. A camera. A film she’s seen. An idea in her lit class. She waves her hands and jumps and talks, and no matter how you’re feeling, you can’t help but get excited about it too—whatever it is.

  Also, she’s amazing with animals.

  Also, she is the wittiest person I know.

  Also, she cares. About doing a good job. About how people feel.

  What are your peer’s weaknesses?

  Self-loathing.

  In what career do you imagine your peer excelling?

  Ruby could run a bake shop. Ruby could be a zoologist. Ruby could be a swim coach or a charity fund-raiser or a cinema historian or a controversial feminist. But she wants to be a filmmaker.

  And what Ruby wants, she usually gets.

  I think that’s what she’ll be.

  What does your peer do in his or her free time?

  She makes films. She makes doughnuts.

  She makes people laugh.

  She looks after pygmy goats and potbellied pigs.

  She makes the world seem shiny and sunlit.

  My family survived Thanksgiving by inviting Meghan and Dr. Flack over to eat with us. It’s just the two of them in that big house, and I think usually they go visit a relative, but this year they were going to be home. Meghan said they were planning to eat at a restaurant, which sounded sad to me on Thanksgiving, so I invited them.

  Before dinner, we watched Hannah and Her Sisters, because that’s the perfect Thanksgiving movie, in my opinion, and Meghan had never seen it. Dr. Flack let Dad pontificate about bonsai plants and winter blooms as he showed her through the greenhouse. My mother made the turducken, and I made a thing with butternut squash and like six pounds of cheese that I read about in a cookbook, and also a thing with green beans and almonds, so there were actual good-tasting vegetable dishes.

  Dad made apple pie and wept about Grandma Suzette and pies she’d made throughout his childhood, but otherwise he kept it together. I ate a small slice of the turducken to make Mom happy.

  Hanson drank from a flask and slurred his words before we even got to the dessert—but we all just breathed deeply and tried to be nice to him.

  There was nothing else to do, really.

  Dad had a long talk with him before he left on Saturday, telling Hanson that the drinking was a serious problem and he needed to get treatment.

  Hanson probably wouldn’t go, Dad said.

  He hadn’t gone the other times they’d talked.

  Sometimes, you just can’t help people. You can only offer to help.

  Or say you’re there if they want it.

  And you do that. You offer, even if it seems hopeless. Because you can’t give up and do nothing.

  Think how you would feel if you didn’t try.

  Gideon and I talked again over the holiday weekend. I called him, and when he picked up, his voice was flat. He basically grunted at me while I uttered the following inane remarks:

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “I’m just going through a complicated time in my life.”

  “Maybe if things were different, it would have worked out between us.”

  “I hope we can still be friends.”

  “You’ll make some other girl really, really happy.”

  I felt like a complete Neanderthal. Because even though Gideon and I hadn’t been going out very long, I knew he deserved better. These were stupid clichés that had been said a hundred thousand times to a hundred thousand people being dumped, and they were completely meaningless.

  I just didn’t know what else to say.

  I didn’t want to hurt him.

  It wasn’t him. It was me.

  And I did hope we’d be friends.

  Though I could tell from the hard sound of his “goodbye” that we probably wouldn’t be.

  When I got back to school on Monday and showed up at CAP Workshop, Dittmar handed back our application packets with comments and suggestions for colleges we might like. As I flipped through my papers, reading his notes
in red pen, I came across my peer questionnaire.

  She cares, Noel had written. About doing a good job. About how people feel … She makes the world seem shiny and sunlit.

  He wrote those things after we broke up.

  Dittmar gave us the questionnaire the same day Noel and I had made that awful scene in workshop.

  Noel had handed it in recently. The date said November 20.

  He had written that I was witty.

  That he thought I’d be a filmmaker.

  That I made him feel excited and interested in the world.

  As the class filed out of Dittmar’s office, I tapped Noel on the shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Same old, same old.”

  “I. Um. I heard about Booth and the accident,” I said. “I ran into Claude at the zoo.”

  Noel shrugged as he headed down the stairs. “Yeah, well. That was a long time ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It just happened, okay?” said Noel. “It was an accident. It was awful for my brother, but you know, I moved on. I didn’t let it bother me.”

  “How can you say that?” I said, following him as he headed out of the math building and toward whatever class he had next. “You were behind him on your bike, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I just didn’t dwell on it and fall apart like some people,” he said, still moving fast. “I walked away.”

  “Is that what you’re doing now?” I said. “You’re walking away from this conversation?”

  “I wanted to be happy,” he nearly barked at me. “Is that such a hard thing to understand?”

  “But how could you be happy? Booth died right in front of you!” I cried.

  Noel winced. “Why are you bringing all this up, Ruby? It’s history.”

  “Because you and I had something,” I said, on the edge of tears. We were walking through the parking lot now. Noel headed toward his Vespa and unlocked his helmet. “We were close,” I went on. “I mean, I thought we were close—but you didn’t tell me this horrible, horrible thing that happened.”

  “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to forget,” said Noel. “And I still want to. Can you please just leave it alone?”

  He sat on the scooter but he didn’t put the helmet on.

  “How can you forget that?” I said. “You can’t forget that. You have to deal with it.”

  “Listen,” said Noel. “I came back and I wanted to be with you. It was you who kept being unhappy all the time. You were always complaining that things weren’t right.”

  “Because things were obviously not right!” I cried. “How could you not trust me enough to tell me what happened?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone, okay, Ruby? I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t even talk about it with my parents. Like I said, I wanted to forget.”

  “But I’m not a forgetting person,” I said. “I’m not an ignoring person. You should have known it wouldn’t work.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t forget things, or ignore them—bad things that happen,” I said. “I’m a lay-it-all-out person, a dwell-on-it person, an obsess-about-it person. If I hold things in and try to forget or pretend, I become a madman and have panic attacks. I have to talk.”

  “Okay. That’s you,” said Noel, tapping his helmet with his fingers. “That’s not me.”

  “Well, if you wanted some forget-about-it girlfriend, you should have stuck with Ariel Olivieri, or found some freshman who would think it was cool you were so emo and would never ask you anything about anything,” I said heatedly. “But you picked me, and I have to understand things. It was like torture to me that you had this huge secret, even though I didn’t know you had it, because somehow I could feel it there, distracting you, hurting you and—” I started crying then, and clapped my hand over my mouth.

  “I didn’t mean to torture you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I went out on the lake with Gideon, I’m sorry I didn’t know how to be there for you—”

  Noel interrupted. “I didn’t want anybody there for me.”

  “I know it’s so stupid,” I went on, the words gushing out. “But when I saw what you wrote on the peer questionnaire just now, I thought maybe you could love me again. I mean, not love, maybe not love, because we never said love, so that’s not the right word, but—oh crap, all this is coming out wrong—you wrote such nice things, about me caring and about how I was witty. You said I made the world seem shiny—so I thought—I thought maybe you still felt the way I do and—”

  My throat closed up and I felt so, so stupid I could barely talk. I rubbed my sleeve across my face and tried to get my breathing under control.

  Then, as we stood in silence for just that quick moment, I realized I didn’t have to be there anymore. I didn’t have to humiliate myself this way, begging for Noel to want me again.

  I could just end this horrible situation right now.

  “I have to go,” I said, and spun around.

  “Bye.”

  I walked on shaky legs to the trail that led from the parking lot back to the main campus of Tate. My pack felt heavy on my shoulder.

  It was only as I started down the path that I heard Noel’s Vespa pull up behind me.

  “Ruby,” he called.

  “What?” I turned. He had his helmet under his arm still, and his face was extremely pale in the cold November light. We were about six feet apart.

  “Love was the right word,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “It was definitely the right word,” he said. “For what we used to have.”

  Then he drove away.

  “It sounds to me as if he’s immature,” said Doctor Z, chewing a piece of Nicorette. “And possibly limited.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Has he had a girlfriend before?”

  I shook my head. “Not a serious one, anyway.”

  “He’s inexperienced.”

  “We’re seventeen. Of course we’re inexperienced.”

  “Well,” said Doctor Z. “You have more history than a lot of teenagers do in terms of having a romantic relationship that lasts more than a couple weeks.”

  Oh. “What do you mean, Noel is limited?”

  “It sounds like there are limits to what he’s willing to risk. To where he’s willing to go, emotionally,” said Doctor Z.

  “The whole parking lot debacle was completely humiliating,” I told her. “When we started talking, I meant to be sympathetic about Booth and thank him for the nice things he wrote in the peer questionnaire. But as soon as I got near him and we were talking, all these feelings started spilling out uncontrollably.”

  “The thing to consider,” said Doctor Z, “is whether a relationship with a limited person of this type is something you want to pursue.”

  “The thing to consider,” I said, “is why I don’t seem to be able to keep my mouth shut when it would really, really be to my advantage to do so.”

  “The thing to consider,” said Meghan, the next day at the B&O, “is who else you can go out with.”

  “What? I don’t want to go out with anyone else. If I did, I wouldn’t have broken up with Gideon.”

  “Gideon obviously wasn’t doing it for you,” said Meghan, licking her coffee spoon provocatively.

  “Gideon is a great guy.”

  “Yawn. I’m sure he is. But you need to fall in love with someone other than Noel, and obviously you couldn’t fall in love with Gideon.”

  “I think I need to be Noboyfriend if I can’t be with Noel.”

  “How much fun is that?” said Meghan.

  “It’s not fun. It’s just—” I broke off.

  “He’s the one you want,” said Meghan. Suddenly understanding.

  I nodded.

  Meghan pushed her chocolate cheesecake across the table to me. I hadn’t gotten paid yet for November, so I had only order
ed coffee. “Here,” she said.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “Sure I want it. I ordered it. But I’m giving it to you.”

  “Why?”

  Meghan stood up and got me a fork. “Remember what Nora said about love? In your movie?”

  “Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it,” I said.

  “So it’s really amazing cake,” said Meghan. “And I want you to have it.”

  “The thing to consider,” said Nora, “is that boys are not the most important things in life.” She was running the bake sale this year. Varsha from swim team and I were sitting in her kitchen, helping her make “magic cookies” for the recruiting table.

  “I mean, I’m sad for Gideon that you don’t want to go out with him anymore,” Nora went on, “but let’s face it. He’ll recover. He always has one girlfriend or another.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And now you’re free to concentrate on what’s really important.”

  “Like what?”

  “Roo!” Varsha rolled her eyes at me.

  “Seriously. Like what?”

  “It’s senior year. Hello. College apps?” said Varsha.

  “Or the bake sale—raising money for Happy Paws,” said Nora.

  “And sports,” said Varsha. “You are like this close to being a serious contender. If you worked out more, you could get your time down.”

  Nora added: “Plus you’ll probably make varsity goalie in lacrosse this year if you go back on the team.”

  I knew I was supposed to care about these things. I did actually care about them.

  I just couldn’t concentrate on them.

  I still had a broken heart, I guess.

  It wasn’t healing, and the fact that Noel had said he loved me—all right, used to love me—I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  “I broke up with Happy, by the way,” said Nora. “In case you are doubting whether I practice what I preach.”

  “By the way?” I squealed. “How can you just mention that as a ‘by the way’? That’s a serious thing.”

  Nora shrugged. “He’s too much of a party boy. He’s going to get to college and join a frat. You know he is.”