The Boy Recession (14 page)

“But there’s nothing,” Bobbi tells Darcy, “like a boyfriend who really loves you for who you are.”

This is exactly the kind of cheesy sentiment Darcy hates, like that quote girls have on their Facebook pages about special girls who “don’t get picked” because they’re “like apples at the top of a tree” or some crap like that. So when Bobbi goes to get the cinnamon shaker, I wait for the patented Darcy Ryan eye roll. But it doesn’t happen. Darcy is just sitting there, holding her tea and looking thoughtful.

When Bobbi comes back, she seems a little happier. Maybe it was that cinnamon.

“I do love Eugene,” she tells us. “But I guess if he doesn’t want to be in a relationship, I should forget about him for now. Maybe it would actually be good to talk to another guy and get my mind off him. Do you think I should spill my drink on my iPhone and ask the guy with the headphones to reprogram it for me?”

“Definitely,” Aviva says. “If nothing else, another guy will make Eugene jealous.”

As Aviva helps Bobbi destroy her very expensive phone in the name of new love, I think about Hunter and Diva. If
Hunter is forgetting about me, then I should forget about him. The only problem with that is, unlike Bobbi, I don’t have a coffeehouse full of willing guys at my disposal.
It took me long enough to find one guy I like. Where am I going to find another one?

W
hen I wake up on New Year’s Day, I have the worst headache ever, and I’m in a purple sleeping bag. I don’t remember whose sleeping bag it is, but it’s definitely not mine.

It takes me an excruciating second to remember I’m at the
Chicago
cast sleepover at this sophomore girl Kerry’s house. Last night all thirty of us were hanging out together, but now all the sleeping bags around me are empty. There’s a rolled-up Twister mat and a bunch of plastic wineglasses scattered around the room, but no people. I guess everyone is upstairs.

I’d never heard of a coed sleepover before, and I’m pretty sure most people’s parents wouldn’t be too happy about it, but I told my parents I was sleeping at Eugene’s, so they didn’t know, and Kerry’s parents don’t know anything
because they’re away at their cabin for the weekend. I guess this sleepover thing is a tradition, and this year, I got invited.

Actually, I’ve been invited to a lot of stuff lately. It started when Bobbi would invite Eugene places, and Eugene would bring me and the D-Bags along. Bobbi always knew someone who was having people over to drink or watch a movie or go in somebody’s hot tub. Before Eugene asked Bobbi out, I had no clue anyone in Whitefish Bay had a hot tub.

And once rehearsals for
Chicago
got going, the chorus girls from the show started inviting me places, too. I get the girls in the chorus mixed up—maybe because a lot of them have K names: Kerry, Kaitlyn, Kara. In the show, we do this big dance number called “All I Care About Is Love,” during which all the girls sing “We want Billy…. We need Billy….” before I burst through the doors and onto the stage.

That song kind of explains my life right now. I mean, people aren’t singing songs about me in the school hallways, but last night, when I walked into the sleepover with Eugene and a case of champagne, the girls went berserk.

Squinting my eyes and looking around the room, I spot Eugene stretched out on a really nice couch. Eugene
would
get a couch all to himself and leave me stranded on the floor in some random sleeping bag. Too bad I’m not allowed to bitch at Eugene today.

“Hey, gingerbread boy,” I say, but my voice is so shot that it barely registers.

So I throw a pillow at Eugene’s head.

“What’s up?” he croaks.

“Happy birthday,” I tell him, unzipping the purple sleeping bag to get my legs free.

“Happy New Year,” Eugene tells me, sitting up and right away feeling between the couch cushions for his BlackBerry.

“I feel like shit,” I tell him. “My head hurts so bad.”

“It’s the sugary drinks,” Eugene says. “They give you the worst hangovers. Your body can’t metabolize sugar and alcohol at the same time. You’re probably dehydrated.”

I would kill for a Pepsi right now. A huge glass of really fizzy Pepsi with lots of ice cubes.

“Oh, man, what a night,” Eugene says, tossing his BlackBerry to the other side of the couch and stretching his arms over his head.

Eugene’s not in
Chicago
, but I brought him to the sleepover anyway, because it’s his birthday and he didn’t have any plans. He broke up with Bobbi about two weeks ago. I think their problems started when she showed him her promise ring. At first, Eugene thought she was only wearing it to be like all those girls on the Disney Channel, but it turned out Bobbi is actually pretty religious. She’s so into the whole purity thing she wouldn’t even let him touch her boobs. After a while it drove him crazy, being around that amazing rack and not being able to do anything about it. Then he started spending time with all these freshman girls and the temptation got to him. Yeah, I know—he’s a
horny, douchey bastard. I agree. Apparently he gave Bobbi a big breakup speech that was a big load of bullshit, about how he was like the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
and she was the Wizard, who gave him a heart, but their journey on the Yellow Brick Road had come to an end, and blah, blah, blah. Eugene said Bobbi burst out crying.

But now Eugene is free to flirt with any chorus girl who’s dumb enough to humor him. And he did plenty of flirting last night. He was loving all the drunken chorus girls. Kerry made us play all these games—Twister, Catch Phrase, charades—but the chorus girls turned them into drinking games. Lemme tell you, these girls can drink.

“We’ve got mimosas!” Kerry announces loudly, coming down the basement stairs holding a tray of drinks.

Oh, crap. Here we go again.

Eugene takes one off the tray, but I don’t. Even the thought of alcohol makes my stomach hurt. Then I see Diva come downstairs, and my stomach hurts for a whole different reason. I suddenly remember who owns the purple sleeping bag and why I was in it.
Oh, crap, oh, crap, oh, crap.

Last night at midnight we did the whole New Year’s countdown thing, and everyone started grabbing one another and making out. Kerry was kissing George, Eugene was doing some creepy three-way kiss with two sophomore chorus girls, and Diva jumped on me. She’d been trying to hang out with me all night, saying we should be on teams together for charades and Catch Phrase,
because we’re both leads in the play and whatever. Then after midnight we made out on the couch for a while, until Eugene kicked us off so that he could go to sleep. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, so Diva made me share her purple sleeping bag. When I see Diva, I get the urge to jet out of the room as fast as possible. But apparently she doesn’t feel the same way, because she comes right over to the couch and sits next to me and kind of snuggles.

“How’d you sleep?” she asks me, reaching up to touch my hair.

“Uh… okay,” I say, avoiding her eyes.

“I told you my sleeping bag was really comfy!” Diva says. “It was comfy, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You didn’t get a mimosa?” she asks. “I’ll get you one.”

“No, I’m good,” I say quickly. “I’m in more of a Pepsi place right now.”

“I’ll get you a Pepsi!” Diva says, popping up from the couch.

Man, I gotta get out of here.
I try to give Eugene the escape signal, but he’s too busy flirting. He’s asking Kerry and her friends about their New Year’s resolutions, and they’re telling him about how they want to go to the gym and try that exercise class where you use a stripper pole, and Eugene’s telling them that he knows a guy who could install stripper poles for them in their rooms.

“You know what
your
New Year’s resolution should
be?” Kerry says to Eugene, putting down her tray of mimosas. “You should be in the musical next year!”

“Yeah! Yeah!” All the girls are agreeing. “Eugene, you
have
to be in the musical next year!”

Diva comes downstairs holding my dream Pepsi—the glass is huge and filled with ice cubes. It’s ridiculously fizzy, too. After a few sips, my mouth doesn’t feel so dry anymore, and the throbbing in my head chills out a little bit. And I realize I’m actually pretty hungry.

“I think me and Eugene are gonna go,” I tell Diva, getting up off the couch, where she was smashed up against me.

“You should stay!” Diva says. “We’re making bacon and eggs upstairs.”

Man, bacon and eggs sounds good.
Maybe this girl isn’t so bad—purple sleeping bag, Pepsi, bacon…. But if I don’t tear Eugene away from these chorus girls, we’re gonna be here forever. So I tell him I’ve got a birthday surprise waiting for him and drag him away.

Diva calls out to me, “I’ll text you later,” which throws me off, because I had no clue she had my phone number.
When did that happen?
But I just say, “Cool,” and head out the door.

I don’t actually have a birthday surprise for Eugene, but I have my wallet, so I take him to IHOP for breakfast. Eugene gets steak tips and eggs, and I get a Smokehouse Combo with sausage links and hash browns and extra bacon. When I look up from my food, I notice that Eugene’s on his BlackBerry.

“Hey,” I say, spitting out little bits of sausage. “Stop texting.”

“I’m on Facebook,” he says. “I love being on Facebook on my birthday. Everyone’s sending me messages and writing on my wall.
And
I already got a bunch of friend requests from your chorus girls. And pokes.”

“Very nice.”

“Do you think Kerry and Katie would ever be interested in a kind of… PG-thirteen threesome?”

“Weird,” I say. “Which Katie?”

“Katie R.”

“No way in hell. Don’t even try it.”

“Hey, look at this,” Eugene says.

“What?”

“Is this true?”

“What?”

“Diva Price is in a relationship,” Eugene says.

“What? She has a boyfriend?”

Crap. Crap. Is some steroid-chugging douche from Milwaukee gonna come beat me up because his girlfriend forced me into her purple sleeping bag? And if Diva has a boyfriend, why was she groping me on New Year’s Eve?

“Doesn’t say,” Eugene says. “It just says
in a relationship
. And… Oh, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“She just changed her relationship status to ‘in a relationship,’ like, ten minutes ago.”

“Huh? What does that mean?”

Eugene puts his BlackBerry down on his napkin and looks at me intensely across all our breakfast meats.

“Huntro,” he says. “Tell me what happened last night.”

“I dunno! She just, like, jumped me. We hooked up on the couch for a while, and then we were in that sleeping bag…. I don’t know! I guess at some point she got my phone number, but I don’t remember that.”

“Is it possible at some point you asked her out and you don’t remember that?” Eugene asks.

“Nah. No way.”

“Or
she
asked
you
out and you don’t remember?”

“Nah…” I hesitate. “I don’t think so. No, right?”

“I don’t know, Huntro.”

I stop eating mid-sausage.

“What do I do?” I ask Eugene.

“Well, why not go with it?” Eugene says. “I mean, I like being single, but this doesn’t seem like a girl who’s gonna pull a promise ring on you.”

“Yeah. I guess not.”

I guess Diva’s not that bad. At times she’s attractive, and she does seem to like me.

“And this could be your only chance to get a girlfriend. Not that you’re not adorable, Huntro. But you never ask anyone out. I mean, do you have anything else going on?”

Kelly Robbins pops into my head. But Kelly is really pretty and cool and totally chill. And who the hell am I? A sweaty bacon-eating guy who spent the night drunk in a weird sleeping bag.

“I guess not,” I say.

“This girl fell in your lap,” Eugene says. “Lemme tell ya, it doesn’t get much easier than that.”

“Yeah,” I say.

I lean back against the booth and stretch my arms above my head. I guess I’ll just deal with this when I have to. I mean, she didn’t ask me to change my relationship status.

B
eing in Darcy’s room is like being called into the principal’s office. All the shelves above her huge desk are full of binders and not-fun books such as
America’s Top Universities
and
SAT vs. ACT: The Most Important Choice of Your Life
.

“Explain the ‘gospel of wealth’ that was embraced during the Gilded Age,” Darcy demands, spinning around on her imposing desk chair.

Aviva is sitting cross-legged on the end of Darcy’s bed, flipping through our textbook, looking for attractive men from American history for her special midterm column on historical hotties. According to her, they started getting attractive only after 1805.

“I think I like the Gilded Age,” she observes. “Amazing houses, rich guys with big mustaches… Maybe I should help to bring the bushy mustache back in style!”

“You think you have that kind of influence?” I ask. “You can bring back the bushy mustache?”

“I’m a trendsetter in the blogosphere,” Aviva informs me. “One hundred sixty-three people like my blog on Facebook. Some of them are random Canadians.”

“How did random Canadians find your blog?” I ask.

“Excuse me,” Darcy interrupts our conversation. “Are we here to study or what?”

Every year, we have a two-and-a-half-week winter break at Julius: The first week and a half is holiday vacation, and the next week you’re supposed to spend studying for midterms. Of course, it’s another one of Julius’s terrible ideas; people like Aviva consider it an extra-long vacation, and people like Darcy consider it no vacation at all, because she’ll study the whole time. I try to have one week of fun and one week of studying. But this year I made a mistake: I went on Facebook. I swear I was only gonna go on for five minutes, check a few photo albums, get my distraction impulses out of the way, and then buckle down with studying. And then I saw Diva Price’s relationship status. She had one of those red hearts next to her name—suddenly I hated Mark Zuckerberg for inventing those red hearts—and it said “Diva Price is in a relationship.”