The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon—and Me, Ruby Oliver

by E. Lockhart

  I did not have a panic attack.

  I didn’t even have trouble breathing.

  I sat at the Baby CHuBS table until people came streaming out of the auditorium, and then I sold deliciousness until we had five hundred and seventeen dollars to donate to Happy Paws.

  I Reveal the Treasure Map

  Dear Robespierre,

  How have you been?

  I have been completely rotten and I miss scratching you behind your ears.

  We have a dog now: a Great Dane called Polka-dot. He is an idiot, but his heart is in the right place and his ears want scratching. I think the two of you would get on together well. You’re both inclined to eat things you aren’t supposed to eat. (Do you long for the sleeve of my green hoodie?)

  Anyway: I was wondering, Robespierre, do you ever get in fights with Kaczynski over the lady goats? Like, if you want to be with Mata Hari, and so does he, do you butt your heads in fury? Or does one of you back down and let the other one win?

  How do you work it out? Because I know you all have to live together in the indoor pen at night when the zoo is closed. Do you and Kaczynski forget your differences? Does one of you say sorry?

  Please write back as soon as you can. Which I do understand is probably never.

  —Ruby Oliver

  —written by me and mailed to the Woodland Park Zoo, with a note on the envelope reading: “For the ‘Write to Our Farm Animals!’ box.”

  the next day was Saturday and I felt like crying all morning. I wasn’t sure why, except that things had ended.

  Baby CHuBS.

  The Parents’ Day Handicap.

  Whatever had been going on with Jackson.

  I didn’t have to be at Granola Brothers until two pm, so I walked Polka-dot down to this place in our neighborhood that has coffee drinks and got a banana muffin and a vanilla cappuccino. Polka-dot licked my muffin halfway through, so I let him have it.

  I looked into his joyful, doggy face, dripping with slobber and good humor, and I had to admit I loved him, even though the way my parents dealt with him was certifiably neurotic. I massaged his soft ears and let him eat my paper napkin.

  Animals. I missed Robespierre. And the llamas Laverne and Shirley. Imelda, Mata Hari, Kaczynski and Anne Boleyn. The pig Lizzie Borden.

  I even missed the penguins, though they never paid me any attention.

  It was just a sad morning.

  When I got home I dragged the treasure map out of my closet and stared at it.

  Jackson, there in the center with a lollipop in his mouth, grinning.

  Finn, who hadn’t been crushing on me after all.

  Noel, who wasn’t speaking to me.

  Gideon, who was Nora’s brother and therefore hated me now.

  I had written: “Someone who doesn’t care if my hair looks stupid.”

  “Something uncomplicated.”

  “Something real.”

  “Wanting guys you can’t have is a recipe for unhappiness. Do not fall for people who hardly know you exist.”

  “Liking a guy just because he likes you: Is that immature and pitiful, or is that a smart interpersonal relationship strategy likely to result in true happiness?”

  “Do not think about guys who have broken your heart six ways. It is mentally deranged to chase after heartbreak.”

  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 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?”

  “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 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.

&n
bsp; 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 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 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.

  He was being truthful with me.

  “All right, let’s not go, then,” I told him. “It sounds like you’d really hate it.”

  “I do have an extra ticket to see Van Halen at KeyArena that night,” Hutch said. “Noel was going to go with me, but then he realized Spring Fling was the same time. So, ah. We could do that if you want. My parents bought the tickets. It wouldn’t cost you anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be excellent. I could use a little retro-metal therapy.”

  “A little what?”

  “Never mind. Do you think David Lee Roth will wear spandex and take his shirt off?”

  “He might,” said Hutch. “But now you have to promise not to laugh.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But admit: David Lee Roth is a little bit funny.”

  “I admit nothing,” said Hutch. “He’s a rock legend.”

  We got Popsicles out of the back of the freezer and ate them in the greenhouse with my dad, listening to Van Halen sing “Jump.” And I thought: This is my treasure. My ridiculous dad and my oddball friend Hutch, rocking out with purple mouths from the grape Popsicles, in this room full of flowering plants.

  Not everybody has this.

  Polka-dot misbehaved in the Honda on the way to the Woodland Park Zoo. He liked to stick his giant head out the window and bark like a lunatic at all the other cars. I wonder if he thought they were other Great Danes. They weren’t that much bigger than him.

  Dogs aren’t allowed inside the zoo, but I was only going to be a few minutes, so I tied him outside the entrance. No one would ever try to steal Polka-dot. He’s too enormous to even chance it. I mean, he is a superfriendly guy, but he looks as if he could bite your head off. And he might—if he thought there was a good chance you’d taste like a homemade doughnut.

  I found Anya, my old boss, sitting in her office shuffling papers and wearing a pinched expression. “Ruby,” she said crisply when I poked my head in the door. “How can I help you?” “May I come in?”

  “Certainly.”

  It was impossible to make small talk with Anya—she was an all-business person—so I told her why I’d come: “I want my job back.”

  “We don’t just give jobs back because people ask,” Anya said. “You lost your internship for a good reason.”

  “I know.”

  “There are other people working your stations now,” she said.

  “I realize that.”

  “Then I’m not sure what you expect me to do, Ruby.” Anya tapped her pen on the desk as if to show me I was wasting her time.

  I didn’t think she wanted to hear anything I had to say, but I was going to say it anyway.

  “I miss the job a huge amount,” I explained. “I miss the animals. I miss their smells. I miss feeling connected to something outside the universe of my school. I miss being cranked to go to work and caring whether I’ve done well.”

  “That’s all very nice, but you were negligent in surveying the area for which you were responsible, and you were unforgivably rude to one of our patrons,” Anya replied.

  “If you want to take me out of Family Farm customer interaction, that’s fine,” I said. “I don’t have to do the penguin talk anymore either. You can put me back on planting duty and mucking out farm stalls so I don’t have any contact with people who come to the zoo. Or you can have me go through training again.” Anya’s pen stopped tapping.

  “Any way you want to work it,” I continued. “But I’m really hoping you’ll give me another chance.”

  She looked at me with her tiny brown eyes and ran her tongue over her braces.

  “Please?” I said.

  “Lewis does need assistance with the spring plantings,” she said finally.

  “Great.”

  “And I have another intern who wants to move out of mucking the farm stalls into an activity that’s more patron-oriented.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  “We want someone to work Sundays, too,” she told me. “None of my interns wants to work Sundays.”

  “Sundays are fine.”

  “You’d be on probation for a month,” said Anya.

  “You mean I have the job?”

  She didn’t smile, but she held out her hand for me to shake. “Wednesdays four to seven, Saturdays twelve to five and Sundays nine to one. You start next week.”

  Wh
en I left the office, I went straight to the Family Farm to see Robespierre and the llamas. Laverne and Shirley snubbed me, acting as if they’d never seen me before in their lives and looking at me snootily through lidded eyes, but Robespierre remembered me. He rubbed his ears up against my hand and snarfled my palm. I bought him a handful of farm food and he ate it greedily. Then I wrote him another letter on park stationery.

  Dear Robespierre,

  I’m back! Did you miss me? I’ll be mucking out your pen Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, and scratching your head on a regular basis.

  I promise to wear the hoodie you like.

  Ruby Oliver

  When Polka-dot saw me coming through the front gates, he stood on his hind legs and barked with joy, wagging his tail and slobbering and terrifying a group of small children, one of whom cried, “Mean pony, mean pony!” and burst into tears.

  I stroked Polka-dot’s neck and told him what a handsome guy he was. Then the two of us squeezed into the Honda and drove away.

  Tuesday I brought my treasure map to Doctor Z’s office. She raised her eyebrows when I walked in with the big sheet of watercolor paper, but she didn’t say anything except “Hello, Ruby. Have a seat.”

  “I’m really freaked out that I met your boyfriend,” I blurted.

  “Oh?” She reached for the Nicorette and popped a piece of gum out of the packaging.

  “Jonah was nice,” I said—because he was—“but it was way too much information. Now I’m all spazzed out in therapy and I haven’t been able to tell you anything that’s been going on, like how I kissed Noel and everyone hates me again, and I’m shattered about Nora and Noel maybe going out together, and Jackson asked me to Spring Fling and I said no, and—I haven’t said anything about any of it, because whenever I want to start talking, I keep thinking about how you have this whole life outside the office and then nothing comes out of my mouth.”

  “It’s true,” said Doctor Z. “I do have a life outside the office.”

  “I know. Ag.”

  “Usually my clients don’t come across me in my other life, but now and then, we run into one another. Feeling unsettled by an encounter like that is a natural part of the therapeutic situation.”