The Boy Recession (20 page)

The way Eugene explains it, it sounds easy and almost fun. But as soon as we get started, we realize it’s not easy or fun, and everything goes wrong. First Eugene reverses down the dock ramp at full speed, with Derek and me screaming at him, “Go right! Go right!” But of course he ignores us and doesn’t go right, and the boat trailer starts to careen off the side of the dock. Derek has to jump into the cold-ass lake to keep the boat on track.

“Why the hell did you take this out of the water in the first place?” I ask Eugene as I struggle with the stupid rusty trailer hitch.

“The lake can freeze over, Huntro!”

“Everyone left their big yachts in there.”

“If you leave your boat in the water, you have to winterize it,” Eugene says. Even though it’s his boat, he’s not helping us with the hitch. He’s standing at the top of the dock, “directing” us. “And I don’t know how to winterize a boat.”

“You don’t know how to do this, either!” yells Derek, who’s trying to brace his wet sneakers against the slippery dock.

I try to just grit my teeth and bear it, because Eugene has promised that the advice he’s going to give me is pretty important.

“Okay, lay it on me,” I tell Eugene a half-hour later, when we’re out on the water. “Tell me how to be the perfect date.”

We’re hanging out on the boat, and Eugene has rewarded us with beers and snacks. It’s actually not too cold now that the sun’s out, but the beer has so much ice on it I’m holding it with my sleeve instead of my hand. Derek’s lounging on the deck in the sun with a baseball hat over his face, drying off. He lifts his head up for a minute and squints at us to ask, “What is this? This is the advice you want?”

“Huntro’s in love,” Eugene informs Derek, shutting the top of the cooler and sitting down next to me.

“What? Nah,” I say, leaning my head back against the railing.

“You are!” Eugene says. Then, to Derek, “He’s in love. You know when I knew? Sunday night, soon as he’s done the last show of
Chicago
, Hunter calls me up, asks me what a cummerbund is.”

“Vegetable!” Derek guesses, like we’re playing a trivia game.

We both ignore him.

“I’m not in love, dude. I just didn’t know what a cummerbund was.”

I’m not in love, but I’m totally pumped to go to the prom with Kelly. It’s kinda funny—when I thought I’d have to go with Diva, I was dreading wearing a nice suit and paying for the limo and taking a million pictures. But now that I’m going with Kelly, I want to get an awesome suit, and pay for the limo, and take a million pictures. I’m determined to be a kick-ass date. In fact, I’m so determined to be a kick-ass date that I’m gonna listen to Eugene’s advice, and take notes, and not make fun of him when he talks. That’s a big sacrifice for me.

“The basic foundation of seduction is etiquette,” Eugene says, standing up, taking off his sunglasses, and putting them in his pocket.

“Be a gentleman. When she walks in a room, you stand up. When she gets to a door, you open it. When she gets to a chair, you pull it out.”

“Bullshit!” Derek calls out, his voice muffled by his hat. “Women can hold their own doors and pull out their own chairs. You’re a sexist pig, Eugene.”

“I don’t give a crap how stupid Eugene sounds,” I say. “When it comes to this stuff, I’m listening to him.”

“Why?”

“Picture in your head what Bobbi looks like.”

Derek lifts up his hat to show us that he’s smirking. “I often do.”

“Watch your mouth!” Eugene warns.

“Now, look at Eugene,” I instruct Derek, extending my hand toward the captain of the vessel. “Observe the
sweater vest and the chubby little sausage fingers. And remember this amazing fact:
He
dumped
her
.”

Derek sits up and pushes his hat back. “Okay,” he says. “I’m paying attention.”

Eugene sits down to continue his lecture.

“A big romantic gesture can do a lot,” he says. “And if it’s a
surprise
big romantic gesture, you get double points. Like, Bobbi and I were going through her family photo album, and she showed me this necklace her grandpa gave her grandma after they came to America. I had a jeweler re-create it. But with a bigger stone, of course,” Eugene adds proudly.

“Hold up,” I say. “I don’t have any money. I have, like, eight dollars in an empty pretzel tub.”

“It’s not about the money, Huntro,” Eugene says, stepping over a bunch of ropes to go fix one of the sails. “It’s about doing something personal, something that means something to the girl. What does Kelly like?”

I’m drinking from my Heineken, and I shrug.

“I dunno. She likes everything, I think. She’s not Diva, so she’s actually a nice person…. I dunno, music?”

“Okay, okay,” Eugene says thoughtfully. “We can work with that. Lemme ruminate.”

“Man, Huntro, I’m glad our prom dates are friends,” Derek says. “We get to ride in the same limo.”

I look over at Eugene and raise my eyebrows. Eugene, who’s folding his handkerchief, just shakes his head.

“Uh… dude?” I say to Derek. “I thought Darcy turned you down.”

“I’m gonna win her over,” Derek says, standing up and resting his arm on the railing, totally confident. “Don’t worry. She’ll be my date.”

“You gonna hold some doors and give her a necklace?”

Derek shakes his head. “I’m gonna tell her she has to bring me, to save me from a life of prostitution.”

“What?”

“What? It’s true, right?” Derek appeals to Eugene. “If I don’t have a date, you’re gonna force me into prostitution, right?”

“It’s not prostitution!” Eugene says. “But yeah, I’d probably recruit you.”

“See?” Derek says to me.

“What about you, gingerbread boy? You got a date? Or are you full-time pimp for the night?”

“Full-time pimp,” Eugene says, sighing. “But I found out Bobbi was going alone. She and Diva are doing the independent-women thing. I should have asked her.”

“You dumped her!” Derek says.

“We’re still friends. And I think I miss her, guys. I
do
miss her. I do.”

“Of course you do,” Derek says. “You invested a crapload of money in her. I mean, that necklace?” He whistles.

“No, not the necklace,” Eugene says. “I don’t care about the money. I mean, I’m trying to expense it on my tax
return, but I don’t care about the money. Or the promise-ring thing. I miss her. I miss hanging out with her. I was so comfortable with her. I could be myself.”

“Your greedy, greasy self,” I say, grinning.

But Eugene’s words get me thinking.
I was so comfortable with her. I could be myself.
It actually reminds me of the song I wrote. As soon as I realize that, a plan for a romantic gesture starts forming in my head.

“Yo, Derek!” I call out.

While I was spacing out, Derek climbed onto the dock to tie up the boat. When he looks at me, I ask him, “You think you and the D-Bags could actually learn to play some music?”

S
o the first-wave feminists were all about legal rights,” Diva says. “They wanted to be allowed to vote, so they went around with these axes, smashing up all the bars. At the end of the night, it looked like an episode of
Bad Girls Club
. Does anyone watch that, on Oxygen? Oxygen is a feminist television network, by the way. So is Oprah’s channel.

“So anyway, the reason we get to vote is because of these women called suffragettes. The most famous suffragette was the mom from
Mary Poppins
. She showed us the true meaning of feminism by leaving her children behind and forgetting about them so she could go out and do political stuff….”

It’s the second week in April, and I’m sitting through Diva’s U.S. history oral report on the Women’s Rights Movement. Somehow, while I was in bed with mono, our
class covered everything from the Great Depression to Reaganomics. Now I have to catch up, because our AP test is only a month away. These presentations we’re doing this week are bearable only because there’s finally sun coming through the classroom windows and it’s warm enough that I’m not wearing a turtleneck sweater.

“What’s the deal with this?” I whisper to Darcy, leaning across the aisle. “She’s not making any sense, but she seems really into it.”

You know that a presentation is bad when even Darcy isn’t taking notes. She’s sorting her pencils by size and color.

“She thinks she’s a feminist,” Darcy tells me. “It’s her new obsession. She’s moved on from hating you.”

“… So when the third wave came around, all these women from different races and countries came together and were working together. It was all about cooperation. Although
some
women were still petty and jealous, and would steal each other’s boyfriends.”

At this point, Diva stops and stares pointedly at me.

“Hasn’t moved on completely,” Darcy amends.

The bell finally rings, and Darcy and I pack up our bags and wait for Aviva to collect all her layers—her scarf, her sweater, her leather jacket. Even in spring, Aviva piles on more clothes than an Ellis Island immigrant.

“Are we going to Derek’s party?” Aviva asks as she puts on her sunglasses and follows us out of the classroom. “Eugene’s gonna bring the boy binder, and I need help picking out a photogenic prostitute.”

“Hunter asked me to go,” I say, stopping at my locker.

“
Ooooh
,” Aviva coos. “Is it, like, a
date
?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“What’s the deal with you guys?” Darcy asks. “Are you together?”

“I don’t think so.” I shut my locker, turn around, and sigh. “I don’t know what’s going on. Hunter’s been really weird since I asked him to prom.”

“Like, asshole weird?” Darcy says, immediately suspicious.

“No! The opposite. He’s weirdly nice. He doesn’t make fun of me anymore. And yesterday, when I walked into PMS, he stood up.”

“He stood up?”

“Like, he stood up
because
I walked in the room,” I say. “Like I was the queen or something.”

“Lucky,” Darcy says. She thinks everyone should stand when she walks in a room because she’s school president.

It’s not lucky, though. It’s awkward. Hunter has been so polite, timid, and boring. He’s acting like Johann! And when I’m in PMS with Hunter and Johann, and Hunter is acting like Johann, and Johann is acting like Johann, everyone is quiet and polite. It’s driving me crazy.

“Maybe he’s confused about what your status is,” Aviva
says. “Does he think you’re going to the prom as friends? Some girls ask guys, and then say, ‘Let’s go
as friends
.’ ”

“I didn’t say we were going as friends.” I lower my voice, because we’re getting closer to pre-calc, and Hunter is in our class.

“If you didn’t mention it either way, maybe he’s unclear,” Aviva suggests.

“Well, what was I supposed to say? What’s the opposite of going as friends? Was I supposed to ask, ‘Do you wanna go to the prom… as lovers?’ ”

But I shut up just in time, because Hunter is waiting outside our pre-calc classroom.

“Hey, Kell,” he says. “Do you need to copy the homework? I did it last night. All of it.”

“You did all the homework?” I ask, as Aviva and Darcy look from me to Hunter, smiling. “But you usually copy
my
homework.”

When we all go inside, I pull on Aviva’s arm and whisper in her ear, “See? He did his homework! He’s definitely being weird.”