The Boyfriend List

year. He had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder. We had driven around the city for hours in his beat-up old car, never running out of things to talk about. He told me he’d never felt this way about anyone before.

He had only been my ex for sixteen days. We’d even kissed since he broke up with me. If I told Doctor Z what happened with that kiss, and with Kim, and the Spring Fling debacle, and the stupid, stupid boyfriend list she made me write that had already made everything even worse—she might not approve when Jackson finally came around and loved me again.

“All right, then,” said Doctor Z. “You wanted me to ask how you feel.”

“It would be better than talking about a bunch of boys I barely even know,” I snapped.

“So how do you feel?” Doctor Z looked like she might laugh.

“I feel bored.”

Doctor Z didn’t say anything.

“Right now. I feel like I’m wasting my time,” I said.

Again, she didn’t say anything.

I wasn’t going to say anything if she wasn’t going to. I looked at my fingernails. I pulled at a thread sticking out of my jeans.

“Are you?” Doctor Z finally said.

“Am I what?”

“Are you wasting your time?”

“It’s a waste of time to be here, I mean.”

“But you’re here, Ruby. You don’t have a choice. Are you wasting the time?”

We were silent. Four more minutes ticked by. I could see the second hand going around the clock.

It was true.

I was wasting my time. Because I wasn’t telling her anything.

Dad’s friend Greg, the one with the panic attacks, stays in his house all day and eats out of delivery cartons.

The attacks were completely scary. I felt sick and weak when they were happening.

Doctor Z looked sweet in her stupid embroidered sweater and red glasses. Not like someone with a PhD in mental illness.

I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. None of my friends would even speak to me. Not Cricket. Not Kim. Not Nora. Not even Meghan or Noel.

“Finn is the boy who started this whole horror,” I finally said.

In second grade, Finn was not the six-foot blond soccer player he is today. He was a shrimp with white hair who stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth when he was concentrating. I never noticed him much. No one ever noticed him much. Until one day, he was in the school library when I was in there, and he was checking out a book on wildcats that I had read already.

“Did you know that a panther is really a black leopard?” I said.

He looked surprised and clutched the book to his chest.

“And that a mountain lion and a cougar and a puma are all the same thing?” I went on. “It’s in there.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you.”

We bent over the book together, looking at big glossy photographs of lions and ocelots and bobcats in the wilderness. It turned out Finn knew a lot already about the way they train circus lions, and he told a funny story about a cat he knew who could do tricks.

About a half hour later, Katarina and Ariel came into the library and saw us with our heads together over the book. “Ruby and Finn, sitting in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” they shouted.

“Shhh,” whispered the librarian.

But the damage was done.

For the rest of the year, people teased me and Finn every time we came within two feet of each other.

On the playground: “Ruby’s got a boyfriend, Ruby’s got a boyfriend!”

In kissing tag: “Ruby, I got Finn for you! Come here and kiss him!”

At lunch: “Finn! There’s a chair free next to Ruby. Don’t you want to sit with your girlfriend?”

It never died down, because Finn sometimes actually would come over and sit in the chair, or he’d give up his swing if he saw me waiting—which only made things worse. He never denied anything either, although I did. When people teased him about me, he’d look over into my eyes in this sweet, shrimpy way that I got to like. After a while, it was as if we had this special secret friendship without ever talking.

After summer vacation, people seemed to have forgotten all about the whole thing. There were new rumors to circulate; the old jokes weren’t funny anymore.

But Finn and I remembered. I never spoke to him if I could possibly avoid it. I never chased him in tag, sat near