Real Live Boyfriends

best.Roo: Why?Hutch: Because I was cured. I realized the popular people weren’t nice or funny or great-looking. They just had power, and they actually got the power by teasing people or humiliating them—so people bonded to them out of fear.Roo: Oh.Hutch: I didn’t want to be a person who could act like that. I didn’t want to ever speak to any person who could act like that.Roo: Oh.Hutch: So then I wasn’t trying to be popular anymore.Roo: Weren’t you lonely?Hutch: I didn’t say it was fun. (He bites his thumbnail, bonsai dirt and all.) I said it was for the best.

After Grandma’s funeral, and after Hanson went home to crawl into whatever hole he lives in, Dad had to clear through Grandma’s things and field condolence notes from all her friends. One afternoon, he came home from walking Polka-dot with tears streaming down his face.

The next day I found him weeping into a pot of miniature roses. And from then on it was pretty typical to have him sobbing into his salad at dinner, or to find him lying on the couch in the morning, insomniac, staring at the ceiling fan with a quivering lip.

Mom got progressively impatient with him—she’d say things like “Kevin, if you have to sob, do it in the bedroom. I’m trying to write an e-mail here” and “Kevin, blow your nose like an adult human being, won’t you? There’s no reason there should be snotty tissues on the table while I’m trying to eat my kiwi.”

“He was always overly attached to her,” Mom said one day when she was driving me to my job at the Woodland Park Zoo. Polka was sticking his ginormous head out the back window of the Honda.

“She was his mother,” I said. “She died.”

“Yeah,” said Mom. “But Kevin has always been something of a mama’s boy. That’s why he’s such a wreck now that she’s gone. Overattachment.”

“Shouldn’t people be attached?” I asked. “Isn’t that the point of human relationships, to be attached?”

“Well, there’s such a thing as too much,” she said, pulling off the freeway. “Still”—she checked her eye makeup in the rearview mirror—“he’ll get better in a couple days, I bet. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

But I was.

And Dad didn’t get better in a couple of days. He got a lot worse.

1 Roly-poly: A roly-poly is a bug, technically a woodlouse, that curls up in a hard little ball if you touch it. But what I mean is, Hutch is a social outcast.2 In case you care: Grizzly Man and Super Size Me. We watched a bunch of others, too, but those were the best.

Agony and Love Poems!

a video clip:

Noel sits before an outdoor table at the coffee shop down the road from Roo’s house. In front of him is a sesame bagel with cheddar cheese. His favorite.Noel: Whenever you’re ready.Roo: (behind the camera) So. How do you define … friendship? Noel: (bitterly) My dad says it’s something that gets in the way of a business deal.Roo: Ag.Noel: Yeah. Well. That’s probably why he’s divorced.Roo: No kidding.Noel: And my brother Claude says friendship is a method of castration that doesn’t use a sharp object.Roo: Huh? Noel: Like, friendship is a word girls use when they want to turn down guys. As in, “Oh, I can’t go out with you because I’m afraid of what it will do to our friendship.”Roo: Oh.Noel: Or in Claude’s case, guys use it to turn down guys.Roo: But how do you define it? Noel: A lot of people see friends as something you have on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. If someone wants to read your updates and you want to read their updates, then you’re friends. You don’t ever have to see each other. But that seems like a stupid definition to me.Roo: Yeah.Noel: Although on the other hand, rethink. Maybe a friend is someone who wants your updates. Even if they’re boring. Or sad. Or annoyingly cutesy. A friend says “Sign me up for your boring crap, yes indeed”—because he likes you anyway. He’ll tolerate your junk.Roo: You have a lot of friends.Noel: No, I don’t.Roo: You do. You know everyone at school. You get invited to parties.Noel: I get invited to parties, yeah. And I know people. But I don’t want their updates.Roo: Oh.Noel: And I sincerely doubt they want mine.Roo: I want your updates.Noel: I want your updates. (He looks down, bashfully.) I do. I want all your updates, Ruby.Roo: Trust me. You don’t want them all.Noel: I do. Even the boring ones.Roo: It’s not the boring ones that are the problem. It’s the crazy ones.Noel: (shakes his head disbelievingly)Roo: I have some very deeply mental updates, Noel. You don’t need to be around for those.Noel: You’re not mental. You think you’re mental. That’s a different thing.Roo: Isn’t that mental?Noel: Can I have the updates, please? I said I wanted all the updates.Roo: (laughing) Fine. Your funeral.

Noel was leaving Seattle for most of August. He was headed to New York City to stay with his brother Claude and Claude’s boyfriend Booth on the Lower East Side. He had gone last year and the year before, too. He and Claude were really close.

Noel talked about his brother like he was golden. Smart and brave. Comfortable in school or in nightclubs or biking the dangerous streets of New York City. A sharp dresser. I think Claude treated Noel like a grown-up, even though they were almost four years apart. Made him feel like his opinion mattered.

Booth and Claude were a funny couple, Noel said. Booth was bitter and probably partied more than was good for anybody, while Claude was quieter: idealistic, a dreamer. Still, they had been each other’s real live boyfriend since the end of their freshman year of college. Now they were juniors and had a four-bedroom apartment with a bunch of fellow students in a converted factory, living in what Noel described as “domestic bliss and squalor.”

Noel was my real live boyfriend, so when he got to New York he called me on his cell