[Rulebook 01.0] The Rules of Love

by Cara Malone

  “Is that so?”

  “Mm hmm,” Ruby said with a laugh. “Oh, and I decided to run for president of the library department’s student organization. The election is at the end of the semester.”

  “That’s good, baby. I’m sure you’ll get it, my little social butterfly,” her mother said. “But what I really want to know about is how you’re doing. Have you made friends already?”

  “A few,” Ruby lied.

  She wouldn’t exactly call it friendship to get a beer with someone who looked like she was on the verge of telling the bartender she was the victim of a hostage situation, and she’d struck up conversations with a lot of people in her classes, but they weren’t banging down Ruby’s door to hang out yet, either. She felt bad lying to her mother, but she also couldn’t stand the concerned tone that crept into her voice. That was her ‘I’m worried about you because you’re all alone and heartbroken’ tone, and Ruby had gotten to know it quite well over the summer.

  So she fibbed and said, “I’ve made a couple of friends from class. We checked out Granville’s night life yesterday. Oh, and I made a sworn enemy.”

  She said this last bit just to get a laugh out of her mother, but it turned out to be the wrong thing to say, or maybe her delivery was just too deadpan.

  “What happened?” her mother asked quickly. “It’s only been a week.”

  Ruby tried to laugh it off. “It’s not like that, mama. I was just teasing. There’s this girl running against me for GLiSS president and I just don’t think she likes me very much. We’re not really enemies.”

  Ruby wasn’t quite so sure about that, but there was no reason to worry her mother about it.

  “Any love connections?” she asked.

  “Mama!”

  “What?”

  “You said yourself, it’s only been a week,” Ruby said. “Besides, I’m not nearly ready for that. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready again, but definitely not right now.”

  “Oh,” her mother said, then gave a sigh that Ruby knew instantly. It meant that she was holding something back, but waiting for Ruby to pry it out of her.

  She was approaching the small courtyard outside of the library, so she’d have to get it out of her mother quickly or else it would nag at her through the whole meeting until she could call her mother back.

  “What is it?” Ruby asked.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  “Mama, I have to go to my meeting in a couple of minutes,” Ruby said impatiently.

  “Okay,” her mother relented, caving easily which told Ruby this was the true reason for her call – she’d been dying to share whatever information was forthcoming. “I saw Megan at the mall the other day.”

  Ruby sighed heavily into her phone, and after a long pause, she said, “Mama, I can’t hear about that right now. I have to go be productive in this meeting.”

  “I’m sorry, baby,” her mother said. “She just looked so forlorn. Are you sure the two of you can’t figure out a way to make the long-distance thing work?”

  “She’s the one who didn’t want to try,” Ruby reminded her mother. “If you want to convince someone, you better go back to the mall and find her again.”

  A little edge had cut into her voice on this last comment – Ruby had to rehash the details of the breakup and all the reasons why their relationship couldn’t continue so many times over the summer, and she didn’t want to show up to the group meeting puffy-eyed and drained from yet another crying jag on this subject.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said quickly. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “It’s okay,” Ruby said. Her mother had good intentions – Ruby and Megan had been together so long she was practically a member of the family. Still, it hurt to hear her own mother pining for their broken relationship. Ruby took a deep breath and cleared her head before saying, “I have to go now, okay?”

  “Okay, baby, call me when you can talk longer,” her mother said. “I want to hear about your classes and I definitely want to hear more about that enemy of yours.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes, but once again tears were rising in the back of her throat as another wave of homesickness washed over her. “I miss you, mama.”

  “I miss you too, my little butterfly,” her mother said and then Ruby hung up, tucking the phone back into her pocket as she went into the library.

  Seven

  Max

  Max was the first of the group to arrive, going over to the reference desk to ask Maureen (favorite book: To Kill a Mocking Bird) which study room Ruby had reserved. She headed upstairs and found the room empty, and she sat down with an irritated glance at the clock. It was five past eleven, and Max was just beginning to wonder if showing up on time was considered a character flaw when Ruby (The Color Purple) appeared at the door.

  “It’s ten after,” Max said, pointing at the lock screen of her phone as Ruby came into the room and set her bag on the table.

  “Yeah?” Ruby said, and her body language – torso turned away from Max, eyes narrowed – said that she was probably not going to be particularly pleasant during this encounter.

  “You’re late,” Max replied, although it should have been obvious that’s what she was inferring with her initial comment.

  “By ten minutes,” Ruby said. “It’s not a big deal - I got held up. The rest of the group isn’t even here yet.”

  “If the rest of the group jumped off a cliff-” Max started, but Ruby didn’t let her finish.

  “Yeah, maybe I would,” she said, and then just audibly under her breath, Max heard her mumble, “Especially if it got me out of being alone here with you.”

  Ruby pulled her laptop out of her bag and thumped it down on the table, then fished a wrinkled copy of the syllabus out of the bottom of her backpack and smoothed it out before laying it beside her computer.

  “Should we go over the assignment while we wait for them?” She asked, and Max was actually grateful for this suggestion.

  She was punctual to a fault, showing up on time or five minutes early to every event she’d ever been to, and while the benefits of punctuality outweighed the risks of small talk, it meant she was subjected to quite a lot of awkward silences and abortive attempts to talk about the weather. The prospect of sharing an awkward silence with Ruby made Max’s palms sweaty just thinking about it, and all week she’d been dreading this limbo time before the meeting.

  But Ruby was doing her a favor and skipping the social niceties – probably because she despised Max, but whatever got her out of chit-chat was fine. Max reached into her own backpack and grabbed her notebook, taking out the perfectly preserved syllabus that she’d tucked into the pocket and laying it on the table next to Ruby’s wrinkled mess of a handout.

  “Have you read the syllabus?” Max asked Ruby, which elicited a roll of her eyes.

  “Yes,” Ruby snapped. “I wouldn’t come to a meeting unprepared.”

  Max flipped to the appropriate page, where the details about the project were listed, and while her eyes scanned over the words, Mira’s voice ran through her mind, telling her to work harder at controlling the tone of her voice.

  After a few moments of internal debate, Max said, “I’m sorry. Of course you read the syllabus,” and when Ruby didn’t respond immediately, Max volunteered more information – something she never did with just anyone because it fell dangerously close to small talk. It felt necessary though, so she added, “I go into all group projects assuming that I’m the only one who’s actually going to do any work, but it was unfair of me to expect you to be unprepared.”

  Ruby didn’t respond for another few seconds, in which Max was beginning to bristle at the continued silence, but then Ruby looked at her across the table and smiled. “Thank you. I’ve had similar experiences with group work, so I understand.”

  Ordinarily, Max would have just left it at that and maybe gone over to Mira’s place afterward to brag that she’d made a little bit of small talk… no,
ordinarily, Max never would have volunteered anything in the first place to someone she knew so little about as Ruby. She would have just sat there reading and rereading the project instructions, deciding exactly how she was going to go about it, until the rest of the group arrived and she could tell them how it would be. There was something about Ruby, though, that made her want to keep talking.

  It was weird and uncharacteristic and slightly uncomfortable, but Max wanted to find out more about her.

  “I once did a semester-long sociology experiment entirely by myself while everyone else in the class worked in groups of four,” she said. She hoped that didn’t sound too much like bragging – it was factual, after all – and she watched Ruby closely for a reaction.

  “That’s impressive,” she said, and Max could detect no sarcasm. Even better, Ruby threw her own anecdote into the mix. “One time my sorority volunteered to run a book drive for kids in Chicago’s urban school districts and we spent all semester collecting donations. Then the day we were supposed to distribute them, every single one of the sisters came down with this awful stomach bug – most of campus had it. I was sick too, but it was the day before winter break and if I didn’t deliver the books, none of the kids would get them before Christmas. I spent the whole day driving to different schools around the city and swigging Pepto Bismol every fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you going to be a children’s librarian?” Max asked. “In the GLiSS meeting you said you wanted to do diversity outreach.”

  “I don’t know if I want to work with kids or adults yet,” Ruby said, and she was smiling as she said it. This was the first time that she’d directed anything but a scowl Max’s way since after the student organization meeting, and it felt pretty nice.

  Max wondered if this was what it felt like to be an active participant in the process of making a friend – Mira had more or less chosen her, whether Max liked it or not, and she hadn’t had friends in high school, when everyone unilaterally decided that she was too weird to hang out with and she decided in the same moment that she preferred to be alone, anyway.

  But talking to Ruby felt different than talking to Mira. Whenever Max looked at Ruby – whether she was scowling or not – something started fluttering in her stomach and making her feel just a little bit queasy, but in a good way. It was definitely a feeling she’d never experienced before, and she wanted to keep feeling it.

  “I just want to work in whatever area of the library will allow me to do the most good,” Ruby was saying. Her hair bounced slightly whenever she moved her head, and her lips were so smooth and glossy Max couldn’t keep her eyes off them as she watched the words form. She nodded, hoping that Ruby would never stop talking if it meant she could continue being an audience member in this private show. Ruby added, “My parents were pretty strict about things like TV and movies, and I went to a private school where everyone wore uniforms and were carbon copies of each other. If it wasn’t for books like Annie on My Mind and Keeping You a Secret and The Bermudez Triangle, I would probably still be going on dates with boys and wondering why I wasn’t having nearly as much fun as my friends. There are so many awesome young adult LGBT books out there now, I want my job to be getting them into the hands of the people who need them.”

  “That’s very noble,” Max said. “When I graduate, all I want is to find a job where I don’t deal with new people very much.”

  Ruby laughed, and although Max hadn’t expected that reaction, she smiled and then laughed with her. She even managed to tuck away her annoyance at the tardiness of the rest of the group to linger in this small talk, which was the first time in memory when she hadn’t found it to be a painful experience.

  “I love meeting people,” Ruby said. “Especially right now. They’re a good distraction.”

  “Distraction?”

  “I just broke up with my girlfriend over the summer,” she said with a sigh. “We were together since junior year of high school and we spent pretty much every minute together, between classes and the sorority. I keep trying to get over her, but it’s so lonely here and the only times I can forget about her is when I’m distracted. Meeting new people is the best distraction from Megan and it’s such a natural thing after four years at Delta Zeta. New batch of girls every fall, you know?”

  “No, I don’t,” Max said. She couldn’t believe Ruby had to go and ruin a perfectly nice moment by shoving her social life in Max’s face like that. “I’m getting two degrees in the time it takes you to get one, so I don’t have time for bullshit like relationships and socializing.”

  Max didn’t care if her voice was brusque, or whatever stupid word Mira used to describe her tone – that’s just what she sounded like. She picked up her syllabus again, tapping it against the table to keep all the pages neatly aligned, and then started reading it again, signaling to Ruby that their conversation was done.

  Thankfully, before the silence had a chance to turn awkward, the rest of the group finally walked in. There was the petite girl who wore her hair piled on top of her head and didn’t seem to like eye contact much more than Max did, and the useless guy who’d sat next to her in McDermott’s first class.

  “Way to go,” Max said to them both, looking again at the time. “Our reservation for this room expires in fifteen minutes. Sit down, we have work to do.”

  She shot one more look over at Ruby, who was pointedly ignoring Max, and then didn’t look at her again for the rest of the meeting.

  Eight

  Ruby

  Ruby left the library feeling even more emotionally drained than when she walked into it an hour earlier, which was impressive considering the fact that her mother had managed to bring up Megan for about the hundredth time just before she went in.

  Taking a deep breath as soon as she got out to the courtyard, Ruby felt a little better but she was still very tense. Between the flood of emotions that Megan always elicited and the way that Max had of getting under Ruby’s skin, she needed to find a way to relax. She headed back to the graduate dorms, feeling the stress in her shoulders and temples, and that’s when she remembered the little yoga studio she’d found that morning.

  She took out her phone and searched for it by name – Get Bent, she recalled with a hint of a smile – and pulled up the day’s schedule. There was a power vinyasa class beginning in forty-five minutes, which would give her just enough time to go home and change into workout gear, then hustle back across campus to the studio.

  Ruby thought a good, sweaty yoga class would be the perfect way to release all of the pent-up anger and frustration that her mother had released about Megan. And considering the fact that she’d gritted her teeth through the entirety of the group meeting thinking about how aggravating Max was, it might also help Ruby let out some of that emotional build-up, too.

  The meeting had ended with a plan to head to Granville’s public library the following weekend to observe information usage among the patrons, then write up a set of recommendations for ways the library could better accommodate information seeking behaviors in the twenty-first century. It sounded lofty enough to be impressive, or at least it had enough buzz words to give that illusion, but it meant several more hours in close proximity to Max. If Ruby was going to survive, she’d need to find an effective way of blowing off steam afterward.

  So she went to Get Bent and bought a five-class package with her credit card, then went into the studio.

  It was a large room and there were already quite a few people laying out their mats on the floor. The space looked big enough for a class of about forty, and Ruby estimated that there were already at least twelve or thirteen spots taken. She went over to a spot in the front row, close to where the instructor would be, and rolled out her mat.

  Ruby had hit the yoga mat pretty hard over the summer – it was one of a very few number of activities that Megan had not ruined for her. She went to one class with Ruby and said it was a dumb trend for upper-class women with more money than sense, and she’d never gone again. Bu
t Ruby loved to watch her biceps growing pronounced on her slim arms and her stomach beginning to show hints of abdominal muscles just below the surface. As her headstands got better and her flows got stronger, she got used to leaving her problems behind when she entered the studio. That’s why she let out an audible groan the moment she saw Mira walking into the room with a yoga mat tucked under her arm.

  Ruby quickly clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the rude sound, and then she went into child’s pose, putting her forehead down on the mat to avoid detection.

  “Ruby? I didn’t know you were into yoga,” she heard Mira say, her footsteps creaking across the wood floor toward her. “Is this spot taken?”

  Ruby rose reluctantly out of her pose and waved Mira to the open space beside her. “By all means.”

  The last thing she needed when she was here to clear her mind and forget about her problems was Problem Number One’s girlfriend on the mat beside her. But it was not in Ruby’s nature to be curt with people – she wasn’t Max after all – so she plastered on a smile and ignored the fact that Mira would most likely help Max steal the GLiSS presidency away from her in a couple weeks’ time.

  “Come here often?” Ruby asked as Mira rolled out her mat.

  She was wearing a pair of faded leggings and her mat was equally well-used. She sat down and pulled her straight, dark brown hair into a messy bun. “Yeah, a couple times a week if I can manage it between classes. Getting a dual Master’s degree is a lot more work than I expected and I discovered the need to de-stress pretty quickly.”

  Ruby laughed – she couldn’t help it. This really was Max’s girl. “You thought getting two Master’s degrees was going to be a walk in the park?”