Real Live Boyfriends

by E. Lockhart

  “You’re not!” I cried. “You’re such a bad listener you have to pay Doctor Z to listen to me instead. How many parents have to do that?”

  Meghan kicked me under the table again, hard this time.

  “I am working extra hours copyediting to pay for that doctor,” said my mother. “Do not give me attitude about that.” She picked up a piece of tea-smoked duck with her fingers and shoved it into her mouth, talking while she chewed. “And do not give me attitude about my choices, either. I want to eat smoked duck now? I eat smoked duck. It is not any of your business to be commenting or criticizing what I choose to eat or how I choose to live.”

  “I live with you!” I cried. “I have eaten raw food for breakfast and dinner every day for months and months. How am I not going to react to that?”

  “You’re supposed to show respect for what I’m doing,” Mom said.

  At this juncture in a classic Ruby/Elaine argument, Dad would typically be intervening and saying that yes, it was healthy for us to be sharing our deep feelings, but he thought that maybe we could benefit from some mediation and could he just hear each person’s point of view voiced calmly? Only he didn’t.

  “You don’t mean respect,” I told her. “You mean you want me to be quiet and let you boss me around the way you boss Dad.”

  “I do not boss your father,” said my mother, teeth gritted.

  “I’m allowed to say if I want dessert! I can to ask to borrow the car! That’s just basic conversation when you live with someone.”

  “Take it back!”

  “What?”

  “About your father. Take it back.”

  “Take it back? We’re not in fourth grade here.”

  “Take it back, Ruby. I do not boss him.”

  “I’m not taking anything back,” I said.

  I knew I was being mean.

  I knew I had picked a fight and done it in a completely public place, which was horrible.

  And I knew I must seem shallow to my mother.

  But still, I felt right. She was a crap listener. A boss. A follower of fads. She was all those things—and just then, at least, it seemed desperately important that someone point that out to her.

  “I don’t need to take anything back,” I said. “Because everything I’ve said is true.”

  “Kevin, get the car,” my mom said, grabbing his arm and practically yanking him up from the table.

  Dad fumbled for his wallet as if wondering how much the meal would cost.

  “Don’t give her money!” barked Mom. “I can’t believe you’d stop to give her money after the way she’s acted.”

  She snatched the wallet from him and marched out of Snappy Dragon. My dad shrugged on his jacket and followed her, mumbling an apology to Hutch.

  I stood at our table, choking with rage and embarrassment and wondering how on earth I was going to pay for what must be a seventy-dollar meal with the twenty dollars in my bag.

  Then I realized that the figure dressed in black, standing by the cash register, was Noel.

  Meghan spotted him when I did and in typical fashion ran up and threw her arms around him in a full-body hug.1 She grabbed Noel by the arm and pulled him toward our table. He looked wan and tired from the cross-country flight, and he hadn’t put any gel in his hair, so it hung down softly over his forehead. He wore a shabby black trench coat I hadn’t seen before and a T-shirt that read EASILY DISTRACTED BY SHINY OBJECTS.

  “Ruby’s mom just had a ginormous fit and yelled at her,” Meghan was saying. “I don’t know if you saw.”

  Noel nodded. “I’ve been here awhile, actually.”

  Ag.

  He saw me say all those horrible things to my mother.

  He saw me make a scene in a restaurant.

  He saw me ruin Hutch’s going-away party.

  Ag.

  A month ago it would have been fine.

  A month ago, Noel was my real live boyfriend and I would have trusted him to understand why I had acted the way I did. Or to forgive me if he didn’t understand it.

  But now—I was disgusted with myself; there was no reason he wouldn’t be disgusted with me. Yet at the same time I felt like screaming at him: It’s your fault. Don’t you see that? If you’d just called me like a real boyfriend, and showed up here to say goodbye to Hutch like a real friend, I would never have been so lonely inside and tangled. If you had showed up, I never would have yelled at my mother and everything would be fine right now.

  But I’m not so crazy that I said that out loud.

  “Hi, Ruby,” Noel said as I sat there at the food-covered table, staring at him with my eyes overflowing. “It’s great to see you.”

  I couldn’t talk.

  He was still standing on the other side of the table.

  Wasn’t he coming around? Wasn’t he going to explain, or kiss me so I’d know everything was okay?

  Didn’t he see I was crying? Wouldn’t he take me in his arms?

  No, I realized.

  He wasn’t going to hug me, or kiss me, or even smile at me.

  He was just saying “It’s great to see you” like a pod-robot. A very, very attractive pod-robot, but a pod-robot still.

  I had had a boyfriend turn into a pod-robot before.

  Jackson.

  I bolted.

  I yanked the twenty-dollar bill from my bag and shoved it at Meghan, saying, “I’ll pay you back for the rest, I promise,” and blurting out the word sorry to Hutch, I ran out of the restaurant and down the block.

  In the movies, when a heroine bolts from a difficult situation, the night is black and the empty rain-slicked streets nearly glow. The shot cuts to a few minutes later. She is far from the scene and the people giving her angst, walking picturesquely through the night while some tortured music plays.

  But life is not a movie, as I am continually forced to acknowledge, and I stumbled out of Snappy Dragon into sunshine, since in Seattle it doesn’t get dark until after nine in the summer. There was no sound track of agonized contemplation, no empty landscape. Instead, there were cars honking and people running errands or going to dinner. Everything looked ordinary and uncinematic.

  I ran about a block and then stopped. I had no money for the bus and I had forgotten my house keys. They were in my jacket, draped over the back of a chair in Snappy Dragon.

  I was going to have to go back.

  I sank to the sidewalk, leaning against a mailbox.

  Maybe Noel would run down the street after me.

  Was he coming? His coat flapping behind him as he called, “Ruby, wait! Let me explain!”

  Was he?

  No.

  He wasn’t coming.

  Each minute that passed made it clearer.

  It wasn’t romantic or intense to have bolted.

  It was just mental.

  Meghan’s Jeep pulled up alongside where I was sitting. She popped the door and called, “I’ve got your jacket. Get in.”

  “I’m never leaving this mailbox,” I moaned.

  “You have to leave the mailbox.”

  “No, I don’t. The mailbox is my only friend. It will protect me against pod-robots and my own lack of sanity. Hello, darling mailbox. You are my savior and protector.”

  “Leave the mailbox, Roo. I’m your friend.”

  “ ’Cause you feel sorry for me. Mailbox doesn’t feel sorry for me. Mailbox admires my ambulatory legs and opposable thumbs. Mailbox worships me and will lay down her life for me.”

  “Roo.”

  “Mailbox wants you to know that I’m so sorry I left you with the check.”

  “Oh, shut up!” cried Meghan. “I put it on the credit card. You know my mom pays it for me every month. She never even looks at the bill.”

  “Seriously? I did not know that, actually.”

  “Can we have this conversation in the car? Please?”

  I sniffed. “Where’s Noel?”

  “Driving Hutch home.”

  “Did he say anything about me?”
<
br />   “He asked if you were okay.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said obviously you were not okay and he should go after you.”

  “And he said?”

  “Will you get in the car, Roo?”

  “Do you think he’s turned into a pod-robot like Jackson did?”

  “No.”

  “He seemed like a pod-robot. He didn’t even hug me.”

  “Will you just get in the car already?”

  “I love you, mailbox. You have been very, very good to me,” I said, patting it. “I will come back and visit you often, even if it means I have to hide from the staff of Snappy Dragon, who will probably pour soup on my head if I ever set foot near their restaurant again.”

  “Get in!” barked Meghan. “You have ceased to be amusing.”

  I got in.

  The girl had my house keys.

  Meghan pulled into traffic and said: “So Noel was all, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.’ ”

  “What?”

  “He sat down at the table and ate a fortune cookie and said he didn’t know what to do. Then even Hutch said he should go after you, and Noel put his head down on the table.”

  “Why?”

  “He said, ‘I can’t deal right now.’ ” Meghan shrugged. “So I got the check.”

  Ag.

  “I don’t know what his problem is,” Meghan went on. “He needs to go to boyfriend school.”

  I sniffed again. “Maybe. But I can’t expect him to go running after me when he just got into town and I’m crying like an infant and my parents hate me and I made a scene in the restaurant.”

  “You can too. He’s supposed to go after you if you’re upset. Finn would never leave me crying on the street talking to a mailbox.”

  No. None of Meghan’s boyfriends would ever have done that.

  “You have bad luck with guys, Roo,” Meghan went on. “It’s like, you pick ones who have zero talent at being boyfriends.”

  “Jackson was a good boyfriend.”

  “Jackson? Please.”

  “He was a good boyfriend to Kim, at least,” I said, “if not to me. He was capable of being a good boyfriend.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Meghan sarcastically. “He cheated on her and then dumped her at school. Roo, hello?”

  “Whatever. The problem is obviously me. Guys don’t want mental-patient girlfriends. Except in the movies.”2

  Meghan pulled the Jeep into her driveway. “Noel should have gone after you. Even if he wants to break up, he should still have gone after you.”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking at beautiful Meghan in the setting sunlight.

  Her reddish brown curls hung across her shoulders. She wore a pair of Finn’s old jeans and a Tate Prep tank top. Even though I knew most of the girls at school hated her, even though I knew she had lost her dad and saw a shrink, even though she couldn’t really be as oblivious to pain and weirdness in her heart as she seemed on a day-to-day basis—sometimes I wished I were Meghan instead of me.

  Because she never seemed to second-guess her thoughts.

  Me, I second-guess everything.

  1 This is precisely the kind of behavior that makes girls generally hate Meghan. Like: Why does she need to be rubbing her sexy body up against my boyfriend’s torso? Why?

  But I have learned to ignore this aspect of her because she is so freaking nice to me—and in this case, I was grateful. There I was, red-faced with embarrassment, anger and tears, and she was able to act like nothing tragic had happened.

  2 Movies where a quality guy loves a girl and sticks with her even though she’s one or another kind of insane—maybe alcoholic, maybe addict, maybe psychotic or depressed: Mad Love, When a Man Loves a Woman, Bed of Roses, Benny and Joon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 50 First Dates, Almost Famous, Proof, Center Stage, The Hours, My Sassy Girl, What Dreams May Come, Rachel Getting Married, Forrest Gump (if you consider him a quality guy) and Betty Blue. But in real life, I think it’s more likely the guy gets sick of the girl’s insane behavior and goes off with a nice normal person to live happily ever after. And who can blame him?

  Surprise Kissing!

  e-mail from Hutch:

  I am eating a strange pretzel in the airport. It is warm, with cinnamon sugar and frosting. Long and thin, not normal pretzel shape. Like the baby of a cinnamon bun and a pretzel.

  Seems wrong, somehow.

  My flight doesn’t leave for another hour.

  The real purpose of this e-mail: Are you okay?

  I wrote back:

  Sorry about last night.

  Again, sorry sorry sorry.

  Re: Pretzel. That is your last American deliciousness! Savor its American pastry goodness, as from here on in it will be all patisserie.

  (You poor thing. Can you tell I am v. jealous?)

  Re: Am I okay?

  Yeah.

  Slept at Meghan’s.

  Home now.

  Mom giving me silent treatment.

  I tried to apologize, but she said she wouldn’t accept it until I took back what I said about her bossing Dad.

  But you know what? She bosses Dad.

  So I wouldn’t take it back.

  Hutch replied:

  Re: Last night. No worries. Honestly was relieved not to have to eat white chocolate.

  They are boarding my flight now.

  I threw the pretzel out and got a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids for last American deliciousness.

  Au revoir.

  Hutch never wanted to talk about me and Noel. And so we never did. It was almost a forbidden subject between us—not that we ever talked very intimately anyway. Those e-mails were probably some of the most personal things we ever said to each other.

  It’s funny how you can see a person in your greenhouse every day, and you can watch movies next to him on the couch and sometimes go get pizza or something for most of a summer, and you still don’t share all the dark secret details of your lives.

  Back when I was friends with Nora, Kim and Cricket, the dark secret details of our lives were what friendship was all about. We talked about fights with our parents, dreams for the future, guys we liked, disappointments and small triumphs. There was an endless series of notes, e-mails and phone calls.

  With Hutch, it was all about music and plants and sometimes not talking at all, just existing in the same room together, watching whatever Netflix had just delivered.

  There was never a reason to call Hutch twenty minutes after he left my house.

  The afternoon after the Snappy Dragon Debacle I worked at the zoo from two until closing. When I was done I changed my clothes, put some minty gum in my mouth and washed the goat smell off my hands, then drove to Noel’s house. My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I was determined not to have a panic attack. I found a parking space in front of Noel’s place and sat there in the Honda, taking deep breaths and blasting Queen’s greatest hits.1

  A hand knocked on my window.

  It was Sydonie, Noel’s younger half sister. “Why are you out here?” she wanted to know.

  “I came to see your brother.”

  “Why are you sitting out here?”

  “I was listening to the song.”

  “But it’s a different song now than it was when you parked,” she said.

  She had me there.

  “You want me to get him?”

  “I—”

  “I’m going to get him!” cried Sydonie as she ran into the house. “Noelie, Noelie! Your Ruby is here! Your Ruby is here, Noelie!”

  Your Ruby.

  Your Ruby is here.

  I got out of the car and leaned against it, waiting. In a minute, Noel was standing in front of me and in another minute he was kissing me and Sydonie was dancing around us yelling “They’re kissing! They’re kissing!” and I could feel his arms, warm around my back and then his hand on my cheek and I kissed him back.

  “Hey there,” Noel said finally.

 
; “Hey yourself,” I said. Drunk with the kissing. So surprised. I had been sure he was going to break up with me.

  “Sorry I’ve been hard to reach,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I told him.

  It just popped out of my mouth on impulse—that lie. It wasn’t okay. “Sorry you arrived last night in the middle of my family drama,” I added.

  Noel kissed me again. “Forget it,” he said. “Do you want to go to the movies?”

  I nodded. He checked his iPhone for a schedule. “Lots of things will be starting around seven, seven-thirty. You want to just go to the Ave and see what’s playing?”

  “Okay.”

  He told Sydonie to tell his parents where he was and got into the Honda.

  I couldn’t quite believe it.

  I seemed to have a boyfriend, after all that.

  We went to the Ave and Noel put his hand on my leg while I drove. We got popcorn and saw a movie with a lot of car chases and gunshots. It felt so incredible to hold hands, pressing my forearm against his, rubbing my thumb against his palm. I leaned my head on his shoulder and just breathed in the moment.

  Noel was here.

  Noel still wanted me.

  I told myself I was utterly, completely happy.

  “And?” Doctor Z inquired the next day, looking at me over the rims of her red-framed glasses.

  “And what?”

  She was silent.

  I had never noticed it before, but Doctor Z had a photograph in a frame, facedown on her desk.

  Had the photo always been there?

  Had I really never noticed it until now?

  Was it always facedown?

  Like, so her clients couldn’t see her top-secret personal photo?

  I tried to think whether there had ever been a photograph on her desk.

  Did she have children? A dog?

  I knew she had a boyfriend named Jonah, because I’d seen them together once, at the Birkenstock store where I used to work.

  Maybe the photo was new. Maybe she got a pet, or got engaged to Jonah, or had a baby born in the family.

  Whatever it was, it had to be important enough to her that she wanted it up in her workspace even though it meant she had to turn it facedown whenever any of her clients were in there with her, which must be most of the time.