The Boy Book

by E. Lockhart

  When I got home, there was a message from Anya on the answering machine saying I had the internship, if I wanted it, and I could work every Saturday from noon until six, and Fridays after school.

  She said she thought I had a real sympathy for animals, and that was what they were looking for.

  To celebrate, my parents took me out for ice cream. My dad kept calling me Zookeeper Roo. Then I spent the evening reading over The Hidden Life of Dogs.

  By the time I turned my light out, I hadn’t thought about Jackson for nearly four hours.

  Your Business Is Our Business: A Pledge

  We are your friends and everything is our business!

  Just kidding.

  Of course you have a right to privacy.

  But in the pursuit of badly needed knowledge about the male of the species, we, the undersigned, do solemnly pledge to reveal in these pages any bit of relevant data on the subject at hand. That is, if you find out something about boys and you can benefit female-kind by explaining it, you will do so in this book.

  Even if it is embarrassing.

  For example, if you find out:

  1. How to do the nether-regioning in a proper and sophisticated manner

  2. Why some guys think it is cool to get drunk

  3. Why they act different in front of their friends

  4. What they say about us when we’re not there

  5. What they do when we’re not there

  6. Why they don’t want to dance at a dance (Hello? It’s a dance.)

  7. Why they don’t call when they say they will

  8. Why they don’t shave when they have wispy mustaches that are obviously ugly

  9. Why they don’t want to talk about feelings, or

  10. Why they chew with their mouths open

  We need to know! And you must report back.

  We pledge to reveal all relevant information.

  Signed, in solidarity,

  Kanga, Roo, Cricket and Nora

  —written by all of us. Approximate date: October of sophomore year.

  the morning after I got the zoo job, an e-mail from Noel showed up in my inbox. Send time 12:34 a.m.:

  THE VAN DEUSEN HOOTERS NEED YOUR HELP: A PLEDGE DRIVE

  No, they’re not endangered. In fact, these rare but hardy hooters are flourishing in their native habitat and well supplied with the necessary support

  heh heh heh

  anyway

  The Van Deusen hooters are fortified with brassieres and whatever else they need for their daily maintenance. Their problem is the unlicensed reproduction and possible circulation of their likeness and the likeness of their owner, wearing nothing but soggy blue cotton bikini panties.

  Please donate to the cause. Everything will go directly to the retrieval of the unfortunate images. Suggested items that will be gratefully received by the commission:

  telescopes

  art supplies

  combat boots

  infrared goggles

  and Fruit Roll-Ups.

  I wrote back from my dad’s computer while I ate a granola bar.

  What about Hooter Rescue Squad, instead of Commission? Sounds more studly. How about a Saturday-morning cartoon: H.R.S!—we could rescue hooters in distress across the nation. There would be a beacon in the sky, like Batman has, only ours would be shaped like—well, you get my drift.

  P.S. Do we have an actual plan? I have art supplies.

  And Noel replied:

  Plan is in the

  um

  planning stages.

  Have stocked large quantities of Fruit Roll-Ups. Now we just need goggles.

  “Roo, you parked too far from the curb.” My mother looked out the window of our houseboat, making her judgment from a hundred yards away.

  “I did not.”

  “You always do. It’s your weakness as a driver.”

  Besides being a performance artist, my mom is a part-time copy editor, which she does from home. So she’s around a lot. Unfortunately.

  “Don’t you think you should be more supportive of Roo’s driving?” said my dad, pouring himself a bowl of cereal and glancing out the window. “Roo, you parked beautifully.” He’s been giving me meaningless compliments ever since Empower Your Girl Child told him he had to build up my self-esteem.

  “You can’t even see the Honda from here,” I said.

  “I can see enough to know you did just fine,” said my dad.

  Meghan pulled her Jeep up to the dock entrance. I escaped out the door.

  “Coffee?” I slammed the Jeep door and shoved my backpack down behind the seat.

  “Of course.” She drove to the Starbucks drive-through window a couple of blocks away and ordered two vanilla cappuccinos to go.

  “Bick sent me an e-mail yesterday,” said Meghan as we pulled out and got onto the freeway. “He finally got his college account set up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I thought it would be better somehow,” she said. “I mean, he calls me every day, and he says he misses me and all, but the e-mail was like, about parties and a list of what classes he’s taking, which I already know.”

  “Maybe he’s not a writing type,” I offered. “Some guys aren’t.”

  “I want something to hold on to, you know? Like I want to reread it when I miss him, only when I do, there’s nothing that makes me feel any better.” She made her voice lower to imitate Bick. “I didn’t get to sleep till three and I have a wack headache. Gotta motor before the eating hall closes down breakfast.”

  “Blah blah blah,” I said.

  “He’ll be home at Thanksgiving,” said Meghan, “which is only two and a half months. Then Christmas and spring break. And next year, I can apply to Boston College or maybe Tufts, so we can be together.”

  “Why not apply to Harvard?”

  “I’ll never get in. I did too bad in German last year. Besides, I’m the kind of person who’s all about relationships,” said Meghan. “I mean, I’m going to college—of course I’m going to college—but it’s more important to me to be with Bick. Our love is the key. Everything else will work around that, don’t you think?” She paused to give the finger to the driver of a minivan that had just cut her off.

  I was split between feeling envious of her having a real boyfriend—a boyfriend who called her every day and wanted to keep going out long-distance until she could join him in Cambridge—and a feeling of bitter pessimism regarding Meghan’s whole situation that I probably should have been talking about in therapy.

  I mean, if a person (me) was legitimately possessed of mental health, wouldn’t she be optimistic? She would trust what Bick said, and trust what Meghan said, and believe in the power of young love.

  But I couldn’t help thinking that:

  1. Young love was foolish and all too often cruel.

  2. Bick was extremely hot in a rugby-playing, scruffy-hair way—and there was a good possibility Harvard suffered a real dearth of genuinely studly guys. He was going to have a lot of temptation. Sexy Harvard librarian types were going to be throwing themselves at him right and left, whereas Meghan was stuck with the same old guys we’ve known since kindergarten.

  3. Underneath her lip-licking, sexpot exterior, Meghan is no dummy. She gets As and Bs. She sings in the school choir. She runs track and she’s a great golfer. Is it wrong that I wished she didn’t think she was the kind of person who was “all about relationships”? She was acting like a complete throwback to the 1950s women we studied in American History & Politics last year: smart, accomplished women who gave up their aspirations in life to define themselves in terms of the men they married.

  4. On the other hand, if she wanted to be all about relationships, why not let her, if that’s what made her happy? Maybe I had no political point whatsoever, and I was just jealous.

  “I bet you could get into Harvard,” I said. “You should apply if you want to go.”

  “I don’t know,” Meghan said. “Bick says the girls there are sup
ersmart.”

  “I can’t think about college at this point,” I groaned. “I’ll be lucky to survive another day at Tate.”

  On Thursday, at the break after second period, there was a note in my mail cubby. My heart started pounding when I saw it.

  Nora, maybe? She seemed less mad at me than Cricket.

  Meghan? Probably not. We had just had Global Studies together.

  Noel?

  When I had it in my hand, I could see it was written on pale green paper that was very familiar. And it was folded in quarters, the way he always folded everything he wrote.

  The note was from my ex. Jackson Clarke.

  Last year, Jackson put notes in my cubby all the time. Funny stuff that he’d written while goofing off in class, or the night before as he was getting ready for bed.

  Most days there had been something waiting in my cubby before lunch. And although we had arguments on the telephone, and there were so many, many little things near the end that made me feel insecure and oversensitive around him, the cubby notes were always easy. He liked to write, and could draw good cartoons. He had a favorite blue-black pen.

  He knew how to make me laugh.

  Then later, when I saw his quarter-folded green paper notes in Kim’s mail cubby, the thought of them made me sick to my stomach. It was like he had taken something that was just between us and given it to my replacement.

  One day, in the middle of all the horror that was going on sophomore year, I had found myself alone by the cubbies. I was late to class, so no one was in the halls.

  In Kim’s cubby was a note from Jackson.

  I know it is completely wrong and also psycho, but I took it. I shoved it down in the pocket of my jeans, where it felt like it was burning a hole into my leg, and ran into a stall in the girls’ bathroom to read it.

  K—

  I’m in Global Studies, and I’m looking out the window

  And I see you late for class because you went to buy a sticky bun.

  You’re licking the icing as you walk across the quad

  And I like the way your tongue looks, licking,

  And I like the way you walk,

  as if you like the way your sandal-feet are tickled by the grass.

  So it’s like you’re with me now,

  as Kessler hands us out a pop quiz

  and I haven’t done the reading, ’cause

  last night I was with you.

  Tears ran down my face and I had to stay in the bathroom for twenty minutes, blowing my nose, splashing water on my cheeks, putting on lip gloss, and then crying again and having to do it all over.

  It seemed so wrong to see that note in Jackson’s writing, that note with his blue-black pen, that note that only a month before would have been addressed to me, and to know it wasn’t mine.

  To know I’d never have another note like that, never again.

  And now I had one. We hadn’t spoken since the end of last March, and here, in my hand, was a note. I opened it.

  Saw you from afar at Northgate yesterday.

  Proof: you were drinking a purple smoothie.

  Then you got in the Honda and drove away, you legal driver, you.

  Happy (late late late) birthday.

  Jackson

  At that moment—and I know this is certifiably insane—I missed Kim so much. It was Kim I’d always talked to about everything. She’d dissected Jackson’s notes, analyzed his gifts, listened to the blow-by-blow of any argument we’d had.

  If this was last year, Kim, Nora, and Cricket and I would have spent the entire lunch period discussing the possible meanings of Jackson’s note, after which we’d have written a new entry in The Boy Book—if not several new entries.

  I couldn’t talk to Noel. He was a guy. Plus, he was on the cross-country team with Jackson, and they didn’t like each other much, so he wouldn’t be objective. And I couldn’t talk to the girls from swimming. I didn’t know them well enough. So I grabbed Meghan an hour later as we were going into Am Lit.

  “Jackson wrote me a note,” I whispered as the teacher1 tinkered with the connection of his laptop to a projection screen. He was all cranked to show us these Web sites about Colonial Boston and Puritan women in preparation for reading The Scarlet Letter.2 But he wasn’t technically adept, so someone from the AV club was supposedly on his way over to help.

  “What did it say?” whispered Meghan.

  “Happy birthday.”

  “Is it your birthday?” Meghan smiled. “No, wait, I gave you something in August. Lip gloss.”

  “He saw me driving the car the other day, so he figured out I turned sixteen.”

  “That’s so sweet!” Meghan has no eye for the subtleties and weirdnesses of human drama. “When I turned sixteen,” she said, “Bick brought three dozen roses to my house at like six in the morning, and left them in a vase outside my bedroom door. He arranged it ahead of time with my mom.”

  I didn’t say anything. Bick, Bick, Bick.

  “He’s like that,” Meghan said, and turned her attention to the Bostonian Society Web site, which was finally up on Mr. Wallace’s screen.

  At lunch, I didn’t see Jackson anywhere. Seniors drive off campus a lot and get lunch at Dick’s Drive-In or wherever. Nora and Cricket were sitting with Katarina, who had started going out with the nefarious Cabbie shortly after he squeezed my boob in the movie theater, but had apparently dumped him over the summer.

  I sat with Meghan, eating my ranch-dressing raisin salad, and listened to her talk about Bick.

  Blah blah blah.

  But when I saw Nora get up and grab her backpack, with Cricket and Katarina still sitting, I bussed my tray.

  “Nora. Wait up.” We were in the refectory foyer.

  “Hey, Roo.” She smiled. A good sign.

  I felt like maybe I was supposed to make small talk. Ask her how the rest of her summer had been, discuss the classes I was taking. But I couldn’t. “Can I show you something?”

  “I guess. What?”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  It was gray out—Seattle is nearly always gray—but warm. We went out to the quad and sat on the grass. I pulled the note from my pocket.

  Nora took it and read it in silence. Then she said, “Why are you showing me this?”

  I wanted to be friends again.

  I wanted to tell her about the Hooter Rescue Squad—for her to laugh and feel grateful.

  I wanted her to say, in her Nora way, all the things she thought the note meant, all the things it didn’t mean.

  I wanted her to tell me if I should write back. And what I should say.

  As if nothing bad had ever happened between her and me.

  As if Kim was some random girl Jackson was dating, and not her friend.

  I thought all that would be obvious. And I guess I thought she would do it. Just do it automatically, because I was Roo, and she was Nora.

  “Kim is going to freak out when she hears,” Nora muttered, not waiting for my answer.

  “I didn’t show it to you so you’d tell Kim,” I said, taking the note back.

  “Roo–”

  “It’s only a ‘Happy birthday.’”

  “Then why are you showing it to me?”

  “I–”

  “Because if Jackson’s stepping out on Kim, or even thinking about it, I’m going to have to tell her. That’s what friends do. We had a pledge.”

  “Why would you freak her out for nothing? He’s not getting back with me.”

  “He’s not?” Nora eyed me. “Roo, then I don’t understand what this is about. Why are you putting me in the middle?”

  “I’m not putting you in the middle.” I felt like I might cry.

  “Yes, you are,” she said. “You’re making me choose between lying to Kim and being nice to you. God, sometimes it’s like you have no sense of how other people are going to react to what you do.”

  “I thought—” Anything I could say was going to make me sound like a pathetic leper.
<
br />   “You thought what?”

  “I thought we could talk about it,” I said. “Like we used to talk about stuff. I needed someone who would understand.”

  “Look, Roo,” said Nora, standing up. “I can’t make you stop liking Jackson. It’s a free country. You can like whoever you like.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Whatever. It seems like you do.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “What I’m saying is, you can do whatever you do and I can’t stop you. But you can’t go stealing other people’s boyfriends and think people are going to like you for it. And you can’t go putting me in the middle, because I’m just not going to be there.”

  I thought she was going to turn around and walk away, but she didn’t. She stood still, looking at me like she thought I was going to say something.

  Nora tries to be a good person. She believes in God. She does charity work. She would never want a guy she wasn’t supposed to want.

  “I can’t tell if we’re friends or not,” I said finally. “You and me.”

  “I can’t tell, either,” she almost whispered.

  “Are you going to tell Kim about the note?”

  “I don’t know.” Nora picked at her fingernails. “I wish you hadn’t put me in this position.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What is up with you guys?”

  “Me and Jackson? I haven’t talked to him. We haven’t even said hi since June.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe you should just stay away from him.”

  “I probably should,” I answered.

  “I gotta get to class,” said Nora, sighing.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  And that was how we left it.

  When I thought about it later, I realized that Nora was telling me who to like and what to do, even though she said she couldn’t. “Like she was saying that if I stayed away from Jackson, we could maybe be friends again,” I explained to Doctor Z at our Thursday-afternoon appointment.