The Boyfriend List

there’s a bunch of kids who lie low at Tate, don’t go to parties and dances, don’t act in plays or sit around on the quad on sunny days; they seem to just do their work and maybe play some sports or serve on planning committees. Nobody gossips about them.

So the four of us were reasonably popular—not really, really— but popular enough.

We started hanging around as a foursome at the start of eighth grade, although Kim and I had been friends since kindergarten, when people teased her about what was in her lunchbox (red-bean cake and tofu) and I traded because I don’t like peanut butter anyway and that’s what my mother always packed. We’ve been close ever since, and because I was Roo, she became Kanga. Then Nora joined up with us a couple of years later—giggly, bookish, tall and curvy Nora with her huge basement full of dress-up clothes and her ever-present Instamatic camera. Then bawdy, loudmouth Cricket came to school in September of eighth grade, and one day at the start of that year, we were all four sitting in the way-back of the bus on the class field trip to the natural history museum. We were fooling around and laughing and putting our feet up on the seat in front, making fortune-tellers out of folded paper and writing scandalous fortunes inside—until finally a teacher came back and yelled at us, which made us laugh even harder.

Suddenly, after that, Cricket was like our leader. Kim and I were still best friends, sleeping over at each other’s houses and talking on the phone for hours every night, but we spent a huge amount of time over at Cricket’s house, which is completely deluxe—even bigger than Kim’s, and even fancier than Nora’s. It has six bedrooms, and a pool, and a sauna, and a hot tub, and two refrigerators. Cricket’s room has its own stereo and TV. Her mom works long hours, and Cricket’s older sister, Starling, had a car. Starting in eighth grade, we’d ride home with her after school and watch TV and splash around in Cricket’s hot tub until our parents came to pick us up before dinner.

At Cricket’s house, we did a lot of things you could only do without supervision. Nora baked batches of chocolate chip cookies and we ate them all; we sat topless in the sauna; we copied each other’s homework; we watched R-rated movies from her mom’s DVD collection; we sent instant messages to boys we thought were hot, using a secret identity.

Actually, we still do most of these things.

At least, we did until the three of them stopped talking to me.

The night I saw Adam Cox again I felt pretty good. We all felt pretty good, but it is a sad truth that I have learned: Dances are generally more fun to think about and get ready for than they actually are when you get there. The “mixer” was a dark gymnasium with some music playing, and a bunch of people I didn’t know milling around. That’s it. Nora and Cricket went off and danced together, and lots of the girls were dancing in groups—but the boys stood around the edges of the room and splashed each other with punch until a teacher came by and made them stop.

Kim and I amused ourselves by trying to decide which Tate boy we wished would ask us to dance. Shiv Neel. Billy Krespin. Noel DuBoise. Kyle Greco. “See the guy in the blue shirt?” Kim said. We had been standing there, not dancing, for a long time.

“Yeah.”

“He was looking at you just now.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“No, really.”

“That one?” I looked at the boy she was pointing to. He didn’t go to our school. He had dark eyebrows and shaggy hair. “Wait! I know him!”

Kim widened her eyes. “Get out.”

“I do. From when we were little.”

“He’s so cute.”

Our discussion went on for like ten more minutes, detailing how he was cute, who he was cuter than, whose type he was, what we thought of his style, how old he probably was, what movie star he looked like—the kind of thing that’s completely interesting when you’re talking about it with your best friend, and boring as hell when you read it written down. The end result was that Kim wanted to meet him, and although my palms were sweating and my clothes suddenly seemed all wrong, I walked over to where Adam was goofing around with his friends, Kim trailing behind me.

“Are you Adam Cox?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“Why you want to know.”

“I’m Ruby Oliver. We used to play together.”

“Play together?” One of his friends started laughing like it was some kind of sex joke. “She says Adam used to play with her! Hey, Adam, did you get some play?”

“Don’t you remember?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Adam shrugged.

“What about the mermaid game?” I said. (We used to play this mermaid game.)

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“In the splashy pool,” I said, to remind him.

“Beats me.”

“You know how your cat had kittens and I helped name them?” I said.

“Yeah, right.” He sounded sarcastic. “Meow.”

His friends chuckled. “Who’s the girl?” one of them called. “Are you two playing kitty cats?”