Sunday evening I called him up. “Hey, Cabbie,” I said, when he got to the phone. “I want to tell you, um, I can’t go to that rugby game on Tuesday.”
“That’s cool. We play all the time. There’s another game on Friday.”
“Yeah, well. I mean, I’m kind of still getting over Jackson.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s cool.”
“All right. Well, sorry about that.”
“No big deal. See you around.”
“See you.”
We hung up. I felt relieved. Although if I could have had a purely boob-squeezing relationship with him, maybe I would have done that. You know, like sitting in movie theaters once or twice a week having my boobs groped, with no obligation to kiss his meaty face or have boring conversations with the guy.
But that was impossible, so we were better off apart.
The next day was the day Kim Xeroxed the Boyfriend List and put it in everyone’s mail cubbies. My life was sucking in all the ways I’ve already detailed, and on top of it all I heard Cabbie saying to Billy Alexander, “Yeah, I felt her up. But I don’t know, she’s kind of skanky. I’m not so interested. What about you?”
“Don’t look at me, man,” Billy said.
“Come on, you can tell me.”
“I’m serious man, I didn’t touch her.”
“Nice tits, though, am I right?”5
“Sure.”
“Was it Billy
“Could be. Why don’t you ask him?”
And that was that. You know the rest.
The good thing about the whole Cabbie episode was that I realized I might actually like having my body touched by somebody other than Jackson. I mean, being felt up6 is pretty intimate, and before going out with Cabbie I thought I’d never want to do anything like that with anyone ever again.
It did feel good, I can’t lie about that.
Maybe I won’t be heartbroken forever.
Doctor Z and I are done with the list. Now we just have conversations. She gave me another homework assignment, which was to make a drawing of my family, and I ended up making this little diorama of our houseboat, using an old shoe box. It came out pretty cool. I had this little cutout of my mom waving her arms, and one of my dad hugging a peony bush, and one of me, wearing fishnets.
I’ve started wearing the fishnets again.
Doctor Z thinks it’s a healthy expression of my sexuality.
I just think they look good.
Other than that, I tell her about my life. I haven’t had any more panic attacks, although sometimes my heart races and I do a little deep breathing. “Do I get a clean bill of health now?” I asked her.
“What do you think?” Ag. She really does make me insane with that kind of question.
“Um. I don’t know.”
“Would you
I sighed. “I don’t want to be a mental patient forever.”
“Are you saying you’d like to stop therapy, Ruby?”
“Um.”
“You don’t have to stop until you want to. We can do this as long as you like.”
“Don’t you get bored, listening to my problems?”
“No.”
“You probably have a bunch of anorexics and sex addicts who are a lot more interesting.”
“It’s not your job to entertain me, Ruby.”
True enough. That’s why therapists are different from friends. You don’t have to make them like you.
So I kept going.
I guess I like it.
School is over now. Jackson and Kim are still together. He doesn’t seem to have realized he loves me. In fact, he seems to have forgotten everything that happened. Neither of them spoke to me the rest of the year except for Jackson saying hello when absolutely necessary—and I still had the Beth-Ann-Courtney-Heidi-Kim radar all through the very last day of finals, stupid as that is. People still whispered about me in the hall, but no one wrote anything more on the bathroom wall. I kept my head down. I hung out with Noel in Painting Elective and ate lunch with Meghan. Once, after a game, I went for ice cream with a crowd of girls from the lacrosse team. I haven’t been back
