The Boyfriend List

be done with it.5 What was he saying? Were we breaking up, or not? The vagueness made the whole thing even worse than it already was.6 The next day, Nora pointed out to me that this is a trend. The breaker-upper always says that he wants to be friends, and tries to get the break-upee to commit to undying friendship immediately after he has just made her feel like she wants to crawl into a hole and die. I guess he asks so he doesn’t feel guilty. And the girl says yes, because it’s a little less like being broken up with, if the boy still wants the connection of being friends.

9. Michael (but I so didn’t want to.)

You might count Michael Malone as my first kiss. Technically, maybe, he was.

But officially, he wasn’t at all.

Everyone else I’ve ever heard of had kissed at least someone by the end of seventh grade.¹ But not me. Then the summer after seventh, I went back to Camp Rainier, the same camp where I had dreamt about Ben Moi for four straight weeks—only this year, instead of singing and going on nature hikes and doing crafts projects with yarn, all anybody did was play Spin the Bottle.² Girls Twelve/Thirteen was right next door to Boys Twelve/Thirteen, and after lights-out, we’d grab a flashlight and troop over to a woodsy clearing a short way off. The boys would all be wearing jeans and T-shirts (what did they sleep in, I wondered?), but we girls would go in our nightgowns, because it seemed cuter and more adventurous. Plus, it was too much bother to change.

Ben Moi wasn’t at camp, much to the disappointment of nearly every girl who’d been there the previous summer. But there was a pack of reasonably interesting, if woefully short, boys—maybe eight who showed up for Spin the Bottle on a regular basis. And twelve of us girls.³ The way the game worked was this:⁴

Everyone sat in a circle. In the middle was an empty plastic pop bottle, resting on a big atlas someone had borrowed from the camp’s small library of nature-related books. A boy would spin the bottle, and when it came to rest, it would be pointing at a girl. If it pointed at a boy, he got a redo. Sometimes, if he didn’t want the girl he got, he’d claim it was pointing at a boy sitting next to her, and redo. Or the bottle would skid off the atlas, and he’d redo. Or, he wouldn’t get a good spin, and he’d redo. Or, the girl he got would claim there was some kind of technicality that made his spin invalid (because she didn’t want to kiss him), and he’d have to redo.

Most of the game was taken up with redos. When the bottle finally pointed at a girl, and everyone agreed it was official, the couple would go off a short ways into the dark woods and have “Seven Minutes in Heaven.”⁵ While they were doing this, the rule was that everyone had to stay seated in the circle— but we all tried as hard as we could to see what was going on out there, and anyone who could see anything would report back to everyone else in a loud voice.

Then the couple would come back to the circle, sometimes holding hands, and then it would be the next boy’s turn.

The only girls in our cabin who didn’t go on these moonlit adventures were a skinny girl who rocked back and forth in her chair and mumbled things to herself, a fourteen-year-old who was completely angry at being in the Twelve/Thirteen cabin and wouldn’t speak to any of us and a girl who spent all her time reading books like Misty of Chincoteague and talking about how she wished she was at horse camp instead.

I pretty much had to play, to avoid becoming a leper, but I was terrified. I had no idea what people were doing during the Seven Minutes. Kissing, I figured, but seven minutes was a really long time (we had a stopwatch) and how long could you kiss for? Would you stand up, or sit down on a log or something? Would you hug? If so, where would you put your hands? And I had boobs, but I didn’t normally wear a bra under my nightgown, and what if the boy tried to feel my boobs with no bra? Would he think that was weird? Or would he think it was weird if I was wearing a bra underneath my nightgown? Plus, I had good reasons not to want to kiss any of the boys we played Spin the Bottle with. Two of them were obnoxious. Three were physically repulsive. One was cute but extremely short, and I couldn’t figure out how it would work if I had to kiss him because he’d have to stand on tiptoe. That left two acceptably cute boys—but one of them my friend Gracia liked (so he was off-limits), and the other had called me four-eyes (so I knew he didn’t want to kiss me).

For the first week of camp, I managed to avoid kissing anybody by claiming a redo every time a bottle pointed to me. Then, I begged Gracia to help me by claiming redos or saying the bottle was pointing at someone else. She agreed, and I stayed unkissed—until the third week, when I told some other girls about how Gracia had failed the pencil test, where you stick a pencil under your boob and see if the fold of your boob will hold it up. You fail if the pencil stays.⁶

Gracia’s boobs were big, and her pencil stayed, and of course she was furious that I told everyone.⁷ But instead of yelling, she just contradicted me when I claimed a redo that night.

“Roo, it’s pointing right at you,” she said. “Why are you always saying redos? Are you scared or something?”

“No,” I said. “But look at the bottle. It’s practically off the atlas.”

“It’s still pointing at you,” Gracia said loudly.

Everyone looked at Michael Malone, one of the three physically repulsive boys, and the current spinner of the bottle. Michael shrugged. “It seemed like a decent spin to me,” he said.

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!” someone chanted from the other side of the circle.

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!” some others echoed back.

“Go on, Ruby,” said Gracia, bitterly. “Don’t be such a baby.”

“Oooh, ooh, Michael and Roo!”

This Malone character was probably a perfectly acceptable physical specimen to some people. I mean, I’m a perfectly acceptable physical specimen, but I know I grossed out that boy who called me four-eyes, plus Adam Cox, and probably a number of other people I don’t even know about. It’s just a matter of taste, and I’m sure he was a decent-looking boy by objective standards. But he disgusted me in the following ways:

He had too much saliva and always seemed to be sucking it back before it spilled out of his mouth accidentally.

His legs were quite hairy already, and his knee, covered with black hair, would stick out of a hole in his jeans. It looked like a dead animal.