The Boyfriend List

“He’s a mystery.”

“You don’t have feelings for him?”

“It doesn’t matter, even if I did. I told him to fuck off. It’s not like he’d ever talk to me again.”

Doctor Z paused in her know-it-all way, like she was waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. “Why is he on your list?” she finally asked.

“Do we even need the list anymore?” I asked back. “I mean, what are we going to talk about once it’s finished?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

Silence.

“So why is he on your list?” she finally asked.

The thing is, I liked Noel. He was interesting. He was different. He was outside the Tate universe, at least a little bit. When he took me home after the Spring Fling and held my hand at the party, it felt good. I liked talking to him.

The Sunday after Meghan and I went to the Woody Allen festival,³ I dug my watercolor paints out of the very bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t think I had used them on my own since seventh grade. I got a piece of white paper and folded it in half. “How am I sorry?” I wrote in purple watercolor. “Let me count the ways …”

And inside, I wrote:

Like a shark who ate a license plate by mistake.

Like a movie star caught without her makeup.

Like a lady with a fancy hairdo, in the rain without an umbrella.

Like a cat who rolled in jam.

Like a hungry raccoon that ate its young by mistake.

Like a neurotic teenage girl, traumatized by recent social debacles, who doesn’t know a friend when he looks her in the eye, and gives her a ride home, and offers to ruin his reputation for her.

I painted a tiny picture of each person/animal with deep remorse on its face. The last one was me, down in the bottom corner.

It took me a couple of hours, but it looked pretty good when I was done—although the raccoon and the cat were pretty similar, and the rain didn’t seem very rainy. I blew off my Bio/Sex Ed lab, Geometry worksheet and Brit Lit reading to finish it.

The next morning, I put it in Noel’s mail cubby, feeling embarrassed, but also rather well adjusted, if I do say so myself.

I figured I wouldn’t see him until Painting in the afternoon, and I had no idea what to say to him when I did, or whether I should try to put my easel next to his, or what. But I actually got in line right behind him at lunchtime,⁴ and he was in the middle of negotiating with the lunch lady about whether she’d be willing to put his slice of pizza in the microwave (she was claiming it was hot enough; he was saying it was cold), and he barely even looked at me, and I almost turned around and snuck back out the door of the refectory—but then he reached out and grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and held it all the while he was doing this monologue about the difference in texture between cold mozzarella and hot, while the lunch lady looked at him with murder in her eyes.

He lost the argument, let go of my hand with a final squeeze, took his chilly pizza and went out into the dining hall to sit with a table of freshman girls I’d never noticed before.

I felt like I was walking on air.

1 The part about Noel is at the end of the chapter. I have to write down this other important stuff first.2 The next minute of the conversation is not written down with any accuracy. I wasn’t paying attention, because I was too busy picturing Gideon naked in a hot spring full of steam.3 The movie we saw, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, involves a superenormous breast chasing people across the countryside. They finally capture it in a giant bra.4 I’d been lying low, generally. No fishnets. No wild clothes. At lunch, I was sitting with Meghan and the seniors. Most of the older kids ignored me, except for Bick, who was pretty cool. But I was definitely still a leper. Hutch and I did say hi in the halls now, and the girls from lacrosse were perfectly civil, like if I had a question about schoolwork, or practice or something. But that was it.

15. Cabbie (but I’m undecided.)

It seems weird to me now that Cabbie is even on the Boyfriend List, although it’s true we went on an actual date and there was even physical contact of a strangely advanced nature.

I’ve already pretty much forgotten about him. I’m certainly not undecided about him anymore. Shep Cabot is out, finished, kaput—and the heading of this chapter should more accurately read: “Cabbie (but it was just a grope.)”

Cabbie is a junior. He plays rugby and he’s cute in a meaty sort of way. He’s not my type. Too big. Too manly manly. He caught up with me after a lacrosse game a couple of days after the Spring Fling and asked me to the movies. Out of the blue. Right before my first appointment with Doctor Z. My guess is, he’d heard I was easy¹ thanks to Mr. Wallace’s well-publicized antislut lecture in H&P, and he figured he could get some if he paid for my movie ticket.²

I didn’t much care why he was asking me out.