He crinkled his forehead. “What?” It was like he’d forgotten the whole conversation we’d just been having.
I didn’t want to repeat myself. “I have to go,” I said.
“Ruby, wait!” he called as I got out of the car. “Are you mad?”
“No,” I turned. “I just have to go. We have school tomorrow.”
Noel didn’t get out of the car. He didn’t chase after me. Just like at Snappy Dragon, he didn’t chase after me.
1 Lobotomies: For real, they used to do this to people from the 1930s to the ’50s. Just chopped out a bit of the brain to see if it solved a person’s mental health problems, including anxiety disorders and just inconvenient behavior like moodiness or defiance. The procedures involved either drilling holes in the scalp or going in through the eye with an ice pick. And get this: the doctor didn’t need to get the patient’s informed consent, so you could completely just go to bed in the mental hospital and wake up with a section of your brain having been removed.
Needless to say, it’s good I wasn’t born back then, or I’d have had an ice pick through the eyeball ages ago.
An Agonizing Public Scene! With Violence!
a video clip: Meghan, leaning against the front of her Jeep, which is parked in front of the Olivers’ dock. She’s holding her usual thermos full of vanilla cappuccino and wearing a golf team T-shirt, a jean skirt and Birkenstocks.
When school started, Mom was barely speaking to me. Since her Snappy Dragon duck temptation, she had started buying and eating cooked food—not to please me, but because she had practically been starving herself for a year eating only things like celery juice and peanut goulash. She was probably ten pounds under her natural weight and had a serious hunger buildup. I came home one day to find her heating up barbecued ribs in the oven and mashing potatoes.
After that, one of the ways she punished me for speaking my mind was by continually cooking meat. I’m a vegetarian, not because I think humans shouldn’t ever eat meat so much as because freshman year I read an article in the Sunday magazine about the way these big meat companies treat the animals, penning them up so they can’t even turn around or lie down, feeding them foods that aren’t natural to their bodies, injecting them with massive amounts of hormones and antibiotics, just horrible stuff. I couldn’t stand it, so I stopped eating meat.1
Anyway, Mom bought an enormous book on charcuterie and a cookbook claiming to be the ultimate American barbecue bible. She started talking about buying a grass-fed cow, having it professionally slaughtered, and smoking and curing the meat herself. She was reading a lot of blogs on the subject, subscribed to a publication called
Most nights of the week, she was roasting something sizable and dead in the oven and planning to serve it with nothing but a green vegetable. So I was still getting nothing but vegetables for dinner, though at least they were cooked, and I had to stare at a large hunk of dead animal on the table every evening.
My father, however, ate like he’d just been released from prison, shoveling chicken legs into his mouth and sucking all the meat off them.
“You’ll crack eventually, Ruby,” said my mother. “Tomorrow I’m making Swedish-style meatballs with veal, beef and pork. All three! I’ll serve them over rice.”
“I’m not going to crack for
“It’s not all about making you crack,” said Mom smugly. “I just think you will.”
Back to the first day of school. It was weird to be a senior. The new herd of freshmen looked like frightened deer. The junior boys were taller than before summer. Meghan and I sat at the senior tables near the big windows of the refectory, just like all the seniors had for countless years before us. It felt surreal and powerful.
The strangest thing was being at school without Jackson. Ever since he’d come back from Japan my sophomore year, even before we’d started going out and long after we’d broken up, I’d had Jackson radar. I’d known where he was standing, noticed what he was wearing and wondered what he was talking about, every single day.
Now Jackson was at Cornell, three thousand miles away, and I would never have to wonder if he was looking at me, or
Nora had her camera slung around her neck and was snapping first-day pictures of all her friends. She took one of me standing outside the main building and told me to have a good first day of school. I was glad to see her, and felt more relaxed since Gideon had told me
Kim had a supershort haircut that made her look mod and adult. Cricket’s summer at drama school had led her to go heavy on the eye makeup and black clothes. Ariel Olivieri, who made out with Noel last year and was therefore another person I was destined to have plugged into my radar, had spent the summer perfecting her tan.
