The Boy Book (7 page)

My dad looked aghast and started to back away.

“I’ll do it,” said my mother, taking the knife.

Juana kissed her on the cheek. “Slice it up the middle, too. It’ll steam in ten minutes. I’m stuffing it with leeks. The corn pudding’s in the oven. I got bread from Paradise, the kind with black olives baked in. Oh, and there’s cheese somewhere in the fridge. Kevin, if you’re scared of the salmon, you can root around in there and find the Camembert. It needs to be unwrapped so it can breathe and get to room temperature before we eat it.”

My parents went to work in the kitchen.

“Get yourself a pop, Roo,” said Juana. “Angelo’s down in the basement watching television.”

I didn’t want to see the head come off of the fish. I grabbed a Coke and headed downstairs.

Angelo was sitting on a fur-matted sofa with two Labradors and a Yorkie. He was watching some reality TV show. “Hey, hey,” he said to me, half looking up.

He looked good—curly black hair, baggy clothes, brown skin with a bit of a tan leftover from summer camp. “Hey, hey, yourself,” I said, sitting down next to him and snapping open my drink. I would have sat farther away, but dogs were taking up half the couch.

“This guy,” said Angelo, pointing at the television, “he’s got to crawl through a tunnel that’s a foot and a half high—and filled with cockroaches.”

“Sick.”

“The girl who went before him chundered when she came out,” he said. “It was brutal.”

I looked at his profile. He has full lips and a strong nose. I thought of how the kids at summer camp must have looked up to him.

“I’m not too bad with bugs,” I said. “But I draw the line at cockroaches.”

He pressed his leg against mine. Just a bit, but I could feel the warmth of his thigh through his jeans.

I wondered if I should say something about all the weirdness back in April. Because I’d been talking to Doctor Z about how to make my “relationships” with other human beings better than they are—which is completely sucky—and I felt bad because of how I had treated Angelo that night when he gave me the flowers.

“You know that party,” I mumbled. “On our dock? I really was glad you came. It was a horrible night, and I did a lot of things I regret.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t even tell you. The repercussions were completely harsh. I know I was rude to you.”

“De nada.”

“What?”

“
De nada.
It’s nothing.”

“Oh. Sorry,” I said. “I take French.”

Angelo switched the channel to MTV. “No, it was all right. I started talking to this guy Shiv, you know him, yeah? We cut out after a while. Me and him and some other people drove back to his girlfriend’s house and went in the hot tub.”

“Ariel.”

“Yeah, that was her. They had this big tub on a deck overlooking the city, and Ariel gave me her brother’s suit to wear. So I had a posh night. Don’t sweat it.”

Almost everyone who goes to Tate Prep (except me) has a hot tub on their decks. Rich Seattle people are way into hot tubs. But Angelo doesn’t live in the Tate Universe.

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

And then I surprised myself.

I reached over and touched Angelo’s chin. He turned to look at me, and I kissed him.

His skin was warmer than I expected, and he put his hand on my neck and kissed me back. I was wearing a shirt that buttoned up the front, and he right away undid a couple buttons and touched my left boob. I reached my hand in and opened the front-close bra so he could get the upper-region access.

It felt amazing. I hadn’t kissed anybody since April, and I could tell from the start that Angelo knew what he was doing.

I didn’t think about Jackson.

I didn’t think about Nora.

I didn’t think about my panic attacks, or my leprosy, or how weird it was that Angelo had hung out with Shiv Neel after my party.

I didn’t think about anything. It was better than working at the zoo.

“Dinner!” Juana bellowed from the kitchen upstairs.

I sprang back and squashed a Labrador (I don’t know its name) and it let out a surprised yelp. “Ag. Sorry,” I said, leaning over to pet the dog’s ear in apology.

My naked boob brushed against its fur. I had forgotten that my whole chest was hanging out. Angelo was looking at me, laughing.

Not
what you want when a guy sees your boobs for the first time.

I sat up as quickly as I could and wrangled my frontal equipment back into my bra, then buttoned my shirt. “We better go up,” I said.

“Coming!” he yelled to his mother. He stood and gestured at the stairs. “After you, my lady.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and went up to dinner.

We had salmon with cilantro sauce (which I didn’t eat because I’m a vegetarian), corn pudding and Camembert with olive bread. There was white wine, and Angelo and I were allowed to have some. Juana and my mom discussed theater. My boobs felt like they weren’t properly arranged in my bra. One was squished off to the side and the other was halfway trapped under the underwire. My dad told everyone he was the Brian Johnson of container gardening and no one knew what he was talking about, after which he gave a long, involved history of AC/DC and the ins and outs of competition among members of the plant newsletter community.

Dogs wandered around our legs and Juana fed them salmon off her plate. There was a raspberry tart for dessert. Juana asked how my classes were at school.

Angelo didn’t say much.

I didn’t say much either.

What was all that about? I wondered, when I was finally alone in my (microscopic) bedroom.

Why had I kissed Angelo?

Did I like him? Did he like me?

Had that been a
thing
thing, or just a thing?

Was he going to call me?

Was I going to call him?

“Think about what you want from a situation,” Doctor Z is always saying, “and then try to get it.”

She says that to get me to stop being so passive. Because I talk too much and think too much and don’t take action to get what I want. Because I blurt stuff out that might be how I feel, but that isn’t remotely conducive to decent human relations. Like with Jackson: “Why didn’t you call me?” or “Why did you talk to Heidi so long at that party?”

Well, I had taken action, that’s for sure. Even with Jackson, whom I had kissed all the time, I had never opened my own bra. I had always waited for him to do it. Like I thought he might not be in the mood for my boobs unless he went for them himself.

Which is idiotic, I know. Guys are always in the mood for boobs.

So I had taken action, and I got what I wanted, and I deserved many therapy bonus points, yeah?

Only: I hadn’t even known I wanted it until it was already happening. And now that it had happened, I had no idea what I wanted next.

Scamming: Our Brief and Irregular History

For future citizens of the planet who may find this book on an archeological dig and have no idea what we’re talking about,
scamming
is physical contact of a relatively advanced nature between two consenting teenagers who are not going out, and who probably never will go out, and who are just entertaining each other horizontally at a party or whatever.

Now the history:

1. Cricket and French camp guy. Time: summer before eighth grade. Location: la belle France. Level: upper-regioning, outside the clothes only.

2. Kim and Basil from middle school. Time: eighth grade. Location: outside at the Christmas dance. Level: lips.

3. Cricket and Sammy Levy. Time: eighth grade. Location: Sammy’s dad’s bedroom, Sammy’s fourteenth birthday party. Level: tongue.

4. Nora and Ben Ambromowitz (details omitted as the whole thing was gross, claims Nora).

5. Nora and Gideon’s friend what’s-his-name from church camp who had the long hair. Time: summer after eighth grade. Location: Van Deusens’ Fourth of July party, in the boat shed. Level: tongue.

6. Kim and Steve Buchannon. Time: ninth grade. Location: Spring Fling afterparty at Katarina’s. Level: upper region.

7. Cricket and four different boys from drama camp, all of whom remain nameless at her request, to be referred to only as Hair Product Guy, Ear-Licking Guy, King Lear and Horse Face. Time: summer after ninth grade. Level: two tongue, two upper region.

—written in Kim’s handwriting, by all of us. Approximate date: August before tenth grade, upon Cricket’s return from drama camp.

n
ote my absence from the
Brief and Irregular History
?

I never scammed with anyone.

Kim, Cricket and Nora had all kissed people by the end of seventh grade and made out at parties by the end of eighth grade.
¹
But I didn’t even kiss anyone—unless you count one completely unfortunate spin-the-bottle situation—until November of freshman year. Shiv Neel and I had made out in an empty classroom—but that didn’t count as scamming because we were technically going out at the time, short-lived though it was. After that and before Jackson, I did kiss this guy Billy at a toga party while we were waiting for the bathroom, but Cricket said that didn’t count as scamming either, because the whole thing only lasted two seconds and we were standing up the whole time.

But now I had scammed!

However: I was reduced to having a single, solitary girlfriend to tell the story to. I was bursting at the seams with my scamming news all day Sunday—and Meghan wasn’t answering her cell.

Monday morning, I found out why. She was all teary when I got into the Jeep.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Meghan shook her head and bit her lip.

“You can tell me,” I pressed—though truth be told, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I wanted to know. Meghan is loud about her personal life (like how she sees a shrink because her dad died and the shrink makes her tell details of her sex dreams) and at the same time clueless about relating to other people. She’ll tell you when she has her period, and she’ll tell you every single sentence Bick wrote in a note, even really private stuff, but she doesn’t seem to see how
complicated
life is. She’s surprisingly unaware of how much talking went on behind her back last year thanks to all her public make-out sessions with Bick, and she doesn’t seem to know that licking her lips all the time when she’s talking to guys is highly annoying to everyone except the guys themselves. The senior girls in Bick’s set all hated her, and she was completely ignorant.