Real Live Boyfriends

like I just happened to have other people to be with?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or am I supposed to be mad at them and not speak to them?” Nora wept. “I don’t know how to even go to school in the morning.”

Of course, this was exactly how I had felt ever since the debacles. Every day, I was walking into a hotbed of hostility and potential cruelty. But I didn’t say that to Nora. What I said was: “I want to try something. Will you come in the bathroom with me?”

The B&O Espresso bathroom is painted dark purple and is not even big enough for one person. If you’re in there on the toilet, you could completely wash your hands at the same time, without ever getting up. (Not that you would.)

I brought a marker, and Nora and I squeezed ourselves in there together. She is five eleven, so my face was practically in her uniboob, but I just went with it. I pulled off a long piece of toilet paper and wrote, in large letters: The Wenchery of Cricket and Kim. Then I gave it to Nora.

She took it and looked down at me. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“We’re flushing it down with the poo,” I told her.

“What?”

“The wenchery of Cricket! Down with the poo.”

“Do you have to say poo?” Nora asked. “You could just say flush it down. You don’t have to mention poo. There’s no poo in there right now anyhow.”

She was right. “We’re flushing it,” I told her. “Because we don’t want it to have power over us. Because we don’t want to be trapped in the yellow wallpaper.”

“What’s flushing it gonna do?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “But my shrink wants me to do it. It’s good for the mental health.”

“But the wenchery is my problem,” said Nora, waving her toilet paper sign. “Not yours.”

Of course the wenchery of Cricket and Kim was a problem for me as well, but she was right. It wasn’t looming large in comparison with my enormous freaking host of other problems. “Doctor Z wants me to flush my broken heart,” I said. “But I don’t think I can.”

“Can you flush the Boneheadedness of Noel?” Nora asked. Which, given that she’d once crushed on him, was really a very nice thing to say.

I shook my head. “The problem isn’t his boneheadedness. The problem is that I’m deranged. Everything would have been okay if I wasn’t such a mental patient.”

“Okay. Seriously. That’s what you have to flush,” said Nora.

“What?” I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Come on, Roo,” Nora was pulling a sheet of toilet paper off the roll. She grabbed my pen.

“What are you writing?” I tried to peek over her tall shoulder.

“Shush. You’re going to thank me.”

Someone knocked on the door of the B&O bathroom. “In a minute!” Nora yelled. “We’re doing therapy homework!”

“Yes!” I called. “It’s more important than urination!”

Nora handed me the toilet paper. In enormous letters she had written: Self- loathing.

“No, no, no,” I said. “I can’t give that up. Who would I be without my self-loathing?” I was being sarcastic, but Nora looked at me seriously.

“You could let it go, Roo. You’re always saying awful stuff about yourself. Like you just called yourself a mental patient.”

“But I am a mental patient.”

“You make it sound like you’re locked up in the asylum.”

“Well,” I joked, “it’s only a matter of time.”

Nora made an exasperated sound. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Okay, but it’s not fair. You’re getting to flush the badness of other people, but I have to flush the badness of myself.”

The knock sounded again on the door of the bathroom. “Just a minute!” called Nora. “Roo. We have to flush now.”

“Fine,” I said. “We rip them up first.”

Nora and I ripped our toilet paper signs into tiny shreds and dropped them into the paint-splattered toilet.

We flushed.

“Good riddance!” I yelled as the paper swirled down.

Then we opened the door to the bathroom and tumbled out of it, laughing hysterically.