Real Live Boyfriends (10 page)

Re: Pretzel. That is your last American
deliciousness! Savor its American pastry
goodness, as from here on in it will be all
patisserie
.

(You poor thing. Can you tell I am v. jealous?)
Re: Am I okay?

Yeah
.

Slept at Meghan’s
.

Home now
.

Mom giving me silent treatment
.

I tried to apologize, but she said she wouldn’t
accept it until I took back what I said about her
bossing Dad
.

But you know what? She bosses Dad
.

So I wouldn’t take it back
.

Hutch replied:

Re: Last night. No worries. Honestly was
relieved not to have to eat white chocolate
.

They are boarding my flight now
.

I threw the pretzel out and got a giant bag of
Sour Patch Kids for last American deliciousness
.

Au revoir
.

Hutch never wanted to talk about me and Noel. And so we never did. It was almost a forbidden subject between us—not that we ever talked very intimately anyway. Those e-mails were probably some of the most personal things we ever said to each other.

It’s funny how you can see a person in your greenhouse every day, and you can watch movies next to him on the couch and sometimes go get pizza or something for most of a summer, and you still don’t share all the dark secret details of your lives.

Back when I was friends with Nora, Kim and Cricket, the dark secret details of our lives were what friendship was all about. We talked about fights with our parents, dreams for the future, guys we liked, disappointments and small triumphs. There was an endless series of notes, e-mails and phone calls.

With Hutch, it was all about music and plants and sometimes not talking at all, just existing in the same room together, watching whatever Netflix had just delivered.

There was never a reason to call Hutch twenty minutes after he left my house.

The afternoon after the Snappy Dragon Debacle I worked at the zoo from two until closing. When I was done I changed my clothes, put some minty gum in my mouth and washed the goat smell off my hands, then drove to Noel’s house. My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I was determined not to have a panic attack. I found a parking space in front of Noel’s place and sat there in the Honda, taking deep breaths and blasting Queen’s greatest hits.1

A hand knocked on my window.

It was Sydonie, Noel’s younger half sister. “Why are you out here?” she wanted to know.

“I came to see your brother.”

“Why are you
sitting
out here?”

“I was listening to the song.”

“But it’s a different song now than it was when you parked,” she said.

She had me there.

“You want me to get him?”

“I—”

“I’m going to get him!” cried Sydonie as she ran into the house. “Noelie, Noelie! Your Ruby is here!

Your Ruby is here, Noelie!”

Your Ruby.

Your Ruby is here.

I got out of the car and leaned against it, waiting. In a minute, Noel was standing in front of me and in another minute he was kissing me and Sydonie was dancing around us yelling “They’re kissing! They’re kissing!” and I could feel his arms, warm around my back and then his hand on my cheek and I kissed him back.

“Hey there,” Noel said finally.

“Hey yourself,” I said. Drunk with the kissing. So surprised. I had been sure he was going to break up with me.

“Sorry I’ve been hard to reach,” he said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” I told him.

It just popped out of my mouth on impulse—that lie.

It wasn’t okay. “Sorry you arrived last night in the middle of my family drama,” I added.

Noel kissed me again. “Forget it,” he said. “Do you want to go to the movies?”

I nodded. He checked his iPhone for a schedule.

“Lots of things will be starting around seven, seven-thirty. You want to just go to the Ave and see what’s playing?”

“Okay.”

He told Sydonie to tell his parents where he was and got into the Honda.

I couldn’t quite believe it.

I seemed to have a boyfriend, after all that.

We went to the Ave and Noel put his hand on my leg while I drove. We got popcorn and saw a movie with a lot of car chases and gunshots. It felt so incredible to hold hands, pressing my forearm against his, rubbing my thumb against his palm. I leaned my head on his shoulder and just breathed in the moment.

Noel was here.

Noel still wanted me.

I told myself I was utterly, completely happy.

“And?” Doctor Z inquired the next day, looking at me over the rims of her red-framed glasses.

“And what?”

She was silent.

I had never noticed it before, but Doctor Z had a photograph in a frame, facedown on her desk.

Had the photo always been there?

Had I really never noticed it until now?

Was it always facedown?

Like, so her clients couldn’t see her top-secret personal photo?

I tried to think whether there had ever been a photograph on her desk.

Did she have children? A dog?

I knew she had a boyfriend named Jonah, because I’d seen them together once, at the Birkenstock store where I used to work.

Maybe the photo was new. Maybe she got a pet, or got engaged to Jonah, or had a baby born in the family.

Whatever it was, it had to be important enough to her that she wanted it up in her workspace even though it meant she had to turn it facedown whenever any of her clients were in there with her, which must be most of the time.

Or maybe it was a gift from a client. Maybe some deranged neurotic thought: Oh, I’m going to give Doctor Z a photo of myself so that she can look at me always. And the client was pretty much loony, so Doctor Z had to display the photo whenever the client came for therapy because otherwise he would go berserk and have to be straightjacketed with maniacal grief. Then when he wasn’t there, she didn’t really want to look at it, so she turned it facedown.

“Ruby!” Doctor Z startled me.

“What?”

“Is this subject difficult to talk about?”

“I got distracted,” I said. “What were we discussing?”

“Your relationship with Noel.”

Oh.

Yeah.

Funny how I could forget that, even for a minute.

Why is my brain like this? It just switches gears and starts obsessing about something completely unimportant.

“I’m really happy he wants to be together,” I told Doctor Z. “It’s so great to have him back. I’m so relieved.”

She stared at me.

I wasn’t lying.

I really felt that way.

I just felt a whole lot of other stuff too.

She stared at me some more. I could hear the clock ticking. I could hear myself breathing. I could hear someone out in the hallway talking.

I twisted my hair. She knew what I was going to say.

And she knew I knew she knew.

“But I’m not,” I said. “Actually. Happy. Or relieved.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Why are people so crap at apologizing?” I said. “I know people feel bad about stuff they’ve done, but still they don’t apologize for it. My dad never apologizes to my mom. He just starts cuddling her or rubbing her shoulders until she stops pouting.”

“Could that be a form of apology?”

“Kind of. But also
not
.”

“Noel apologized to you. Didn’t you say that he did?”

“Yeah, but ‘Sorry I was so hard to reach’ isn’t a real sorry.”

“Why not?”

“He made it sound like the whole thing was out of his control. He didn’t say, ‘Sorry I didn’t call you back.

Sorry I didn’t write you. Sorry I hurt your feelings. Sorry I didn’t run after you.’ ”

“It didn’t feel like a real sorry,” Doctor Z said. She does that a lot. Repeats what I’ve said.

“And when he said sorry he was hard to reach, I said, ‘It’s okay.’ But only because that’s what you’re
supposed
to say when someone says sorry. Not because I meant it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or maybe because I
wished
it was okay. But—” She looked at me.

“—it was a complete lie.”

“Oh.”

“I was basically acting fake the whole night, trying to pretend I was just letting everything go. Or like I hadn’t even minded how he’d disappeared on me and not called me and all that. Like I was some extra-mell ow relaxed girlfriend who didn’t care about anything. Like those two poems made up for everything.” I bit my nails. “I kept thinking—all night I kept thinking that if I had never gone over to his house after work, he might never have even called me.”

“Really?”

“He would have just gone about his life, avoiding me, or forgetting about me, or meaning to call me but not just yet—whatever he’s been doing since halfway through the New York trip.”

“Mm.” Doctor Z popped a piece of Nicorette out of its packaging and put it thoughtfully in her mouth.

“What did you two talk about?”

I shrugged. “The movie we saw. Whether or not Christian Bale is deranged. Why there aren’t more female action heroes.”

“Ah.”

“Why did we have to go to a movie? For once in my life, I didn’t want to go to a movie.”

“No?”

“We didn’t talk that much, even.”

“Oh.”

Noel and I had kissed in the front seat of the Honda when I drove him home, and we had held hands in the theater—but whenever I spoke I had this sense that I was chattering at him. Like some part of his brain was elsewhere.

He wasn’t truly listening. So I didn’t tell him anything.

You have to have someone listening if you’re going to really talk.

1
Go ahead and laugh, but sometimes I
listen to Dad’s Queen albums even when
he and Hutch aren’t rocking out in the
greenhouse. Okay, and sometimes Guns
N’ Roses. And sometimes Aerosmith. And
once AC/DC
.

Retro metal is very good for diverting
panic attacks
.

The Waketastic Adventure!

a video clip:

Roo’s parents sit on their couch. Polka-dot is there too, his head on Elaine’s lap. Kevin has garden dirt on his T-shirt. Elaine is wearing black, her frizzy hair puffed out around her head.

Roo: (behind the camera) What’s your
definition of friendship?

Elaine: I don’t know why we’re doing this,
Kevin. She still hasn’t taken back what she
said. I told you I wasn’t outputting energy
toward her until I had a full apology
.

Kevin: It’s for her college applications. We
agreed to be supportive of her college
applications, even
though the two of you
are going through a difficult time
.

Elaine: It’s not a difficult time. She just owes
me an apology. (Looking directly at the
camera.) That’s what friendship is, Ruby.

Apologizing when you know you should
.

Roo: I did apologize
.

Elaine: Not fully. I don’t know why we have
so much trouble being friends. A mother
and a daughter should be the closest
friends
.