Wednesday night, Kim called me at home. “Roo, I wanted you to hear it from me,” she said.
“Hear what?” She had called during dinner. My mother and father were eating steamed mushrooms, tofu and brown rice, listening to every word I was saying.
“Please don’t be mad.”
“I won’t,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what I’d be mad about.
“Promise?”
“Okay, okay. What is it?”
A pause. “Jackson and I are going out now.”
I couldn’t even say anything. I just breathed into the phone.
“We’re such good friends,” she said. “He was talking to me about all the problems you two were having, trying to work stuff out, and that brought us really close together.”
“What problems?” I didn’t even know Jackson thought we had problems.
“It wasn’t like he was saying anything bad,” said Kim. “It was like he needed support. He needed someone who’d be there for him.”
“I wasn’t there for him?”
“Please, Ruby,” Kim said. “Don’t be too upset. It just happened. We didn’t mean it to. And I’d never do this to you, except the thing with you was never working out anyway—and I really think Jackson and me are meant to be.”
“What do you mean, never working out anyway?”
“Well, not for a long time between you two,” she said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“When did it start?” I asked.
“Only yesterday, I swear. We never acted on our feelings before. I hope you’ll believe me about that. I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Um-hum.”
(Never acted on them
“Please don’t be mad. It’s not like we could even help it. It’s like fate.”
“Um-hum.” My parents were eyeballing me now, tilting their heads as if to say, “This is family dinnertime, could you get back to the table?”
“Really,” said Kim. “I’ve never felt like this before. I think he’s the one. He’s like Tommy Hazard.”
“Why were you guys talking about me?” I asked.
“Jackson meant well, Roo, you have to believe that. He’s not the kind of guy to ever cheat on anyone. He needed an ear, he was so confused.”
“I gotta go,” I said.
“Please don’t be mad,” she said. “When you find your Tommy Hazard, you’ll understand. I honestly couldn’t help it.”
I hung up the phone.
That night, I had my first panic attack, in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. I felt hot, and then cold. I was sweating and when I put my hand on my chest I could feel my heart thumping like it was going to leap out of my skin. I lay down on the floor in my pajamas and looked at the ceiling and tried to breathe. There were black mildew spots up there I had never noticed.
1 Seriously, seriously annoying—and it wasn’t getting any better. In February, she went macrobiotic, and ever since then had been running around our kitchen chopping tofu and steaming brown rice and talking about how the green top leaves of the carrot were good for the top of the body and the orange root of the carrot was good for the lower half of the body.
Dinner at our house became entirely inedible. There I’d be, stirring a mess of tofu and carrot around and wishing for French fries—or at least spaghetti with pesto sauce, like we used to have—and my mother would get on my case about whether I hated my thighs and thought I was fat, because it seemed neurotic to her that I wasn’t eating this perfectly good dinner, and “Kevin, did you notice that Roo isn’t eating, and maybe she’s getting anorexic?”
Later, when she was on the phone or had gone to bed, my dad and I would sit together and eat bowls of breakfast cereal, we were so hungry.2 What about this Sky character whose name is at the front of the chapter, you are wondering?
Sky was the first boy who really seemed to like me, and I liked him back. I met him at a swim meet (he went to Saint Augustine’s) and I gave him my e-mail. He started sending me a lot of instant messages, funny jokes and flirtatious questions, like what movie star would I want to have babies with. He asked me out to pizza, and my dad drove me in to the University District and dropped me off. It was pretty fun. We got jumbo-size Cokes and played Ms. Pac-Man on the machine in the foyer. He held my hand afterward. But the next day I saw him in the mall with his arm around another girl. I asked around and found out he had had the same girlfriend for like three months.
I sent him an IM: “Do you have a girlfriend?”
He wrote back: “Not yet, but I’m hoping! Do you have a boyfriend?”
I switched off the computer and never talked to him again.
Liar.3 “Roo. The old parental units were gravely disappointed you weren’t able to attend our wondrous chili feast. Although we were all somewhat remorseful, the chili did flow, and how! It went round and round and was consumed with grunting and smacking sounds of delight, until all that remained was a bowl containing an amount of chili that would be disgraceful to give to a pygmy shrew as an after-dinner snack. Missed you. Jackson.”
And: “I am writing this at Kyle’s house. We are d-r-u-n-k because his mom gave us wine at dinner. Trivia: Guess who has a toothbrush that permanently lives at Kyle’s house? Answer: Me, silly! Good night, good night, from your woozy, bad-handwritin’ man, Jackson.”
I can’t throw them out, somehow. I know I should.4 It is so mean to tell someone you “need to talk” but then refuse to say what about. If you ever want to dump someone, or even just tell the person something important, don’t go saying you “need to talk.” Just talk and
