The Boyfriend List

When I got to eleven, I realized I could very easily get to twenty. Or thirty. Or forty. I put my pen down.

I was obviously a big huge liar and didn’t even know it.²

I actually never thought of myself as lying to Jackson. Well, some of them were lies I told to make him feel good. The haircut. His mom. But most of the others are actually lies that I told myself, and didn’t even know were lies, until I made that list. I would be bored watching cross-country, but I’d somehow tell myself I was learning about the sport. I hated the Japanese animation films he always wanted to rent, but I told myself I was getting a taste for them. His friend Matt isn’t awful, just kind of lunkheaded and boring—but I spent time with him every single week, and never stopped to think that I’d rather not. If Jackson asked him along with us, I never objected.

Jackson made friends with Kim around Thanksgiving. He and I went over to her house the morning of the holiday, and we all sat on her front porch, shucking corn and peeling apples for Mae Yamamoto, who seemed to view us as hired labor.

We were joking around and talking about Madame Long, the French teacher, and how she collected stuffed pigs, and how does one get started collecting such a thing? And Jackson said something to Kim in Japanese.

She said something back.

Then him.

Then her.

I shucked corn.

Kim squeezed my knee. “You didn’t tell me Jackson was fluent!”

“He was in Tokyo for a year,” I said.

“Really?” cried Kim, although I know she knew already. “I’m applying to go on an exchange program. Where were you hanging out?”

More Japanese going on. Back and forth. “Sorry, Roo,” they both said, at one time or another.

And I shucked corn.

From then on, they were friends. They did things together and talked on the phone. Jackson was a big proponent of boy/girl friendship, which in theory I appreciated. Yes! It’s important to be friends with the opposite sex, I thought. I was friends with Noel, wasn’t I? We should all be comfortable with everyone, and we shouldn’t be jealous and possessive, and it’s good for boys and girls to hang out together and not only see each other as sexual objects.

But I did feel strange when I saw Kim’s handwriting on a note, half in Japanese and half in English, sticking out of Jackson’s back pocket. Or the one time he left my house on Sunday afternoon and I found out the next day he’d gone over to her place after, to study for a test in the Asian History Elective they were both taking. Or the time he was taking me to a restaurant to eat Japanese food for the first time, and he invited Kim to come too, without even checking with me. It turned out we had a great time, but I was also a little disappointed because Jackson and I had never gone out to eat anywhere fancy before, and I had dressed up for a romantic date.

Not once did the two of them flirt in front of me.

No extra smiles, no longing looks, no secret jokes.

Never did Jackson talk about Kim being pretty. Never did Kim change how she acted when I told her stuff about Jackson. She knew every detail of what went on, and the only thing she ever said was that she knew he liked me and that his intentions were good—the way she did when I was upset about the half carnation. Never did Jackson stop kissing me the way he kissed me, like it mattered hugely, putting his hands on my face. Never did he stop coming over to my house, rooting around in our (macrobiotic) refrigerator, pulling me into my bedroom the minute my parents went outside on the deck so we could make out on the bed and feel the warm bare skin up each other’s shirts.

When I called, he always said, “Oh, I’m glad it’s you.”

When we watched a movie, he always held my hand.

He still put notes in my mail cubby almost every day, with jokes and little stories about stuff he’d been thinking about.³

He was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend. Whatever else went wrong, that seemed completely clear.

Until seven days before the Spring Fling dance.

Friday night, Jackson and I went to a movie. He didn’t reach over and hold my hand, like usual, but when I reached over to take his, he stroked my palm. After, we got ice cream at a place in the mall, but the lights were fluorescent-bright and the movie had been something sad with people dying in it, and somehow the mood was dead. Neither of us talked too much.

He dropped me off at the edge of our dock without coming in, though we kissed for a long time and even got in the backseat of the car so we could lie down.

The next morning, he called around eleven. “Roo, we have to talk.”⁴

“What about?” I asked.

“Not on the phone.”

“Want to come over?”

“I can’t come till after the ball game. Matt and Kyle are due here any minute to watch it on TV.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Can I just come over at six?”

“Sure. Are you staying for dinner?”