Real Live Boyfriends

by E. Lockhart

  “I can’t tell you anything since you got back from New York,” I said to Noel as I snatched the piece of paper from Dittmar. “You don’t react. You don’t have anything to say. It’s like talking to a lobotomy patient.”

  He looked at me silently.

  “That came out wrong,” I said.

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  I grabbed my bag and left the office. As I headed down the spiral steps of the math building, I could hear Noel’s footsteps behind me.

  “It’s like you don’t care anymore, Noel,” I yelled up into the stairwell. “That’s what it feels like. And I’ve tried and tried to talk to you about it, but the not-caring means you don’t want to hear what I have to say about it, and then—”

  “Would I be mad about you going out with Gideon if I didn’t care?” called Noel. I kept running down the stairs.

  “I didn’t go out with him!” I called back. “Nothing happened.”

  A mathematical-looking freshman nearly collided with me as I rounded the landing. She squeaked and ran down the hall to her class.

  “Stop being jealous!” I went on, yelling up to Noel.

  And what I meant was:

  Believe in me.

  Don’t listen to what people say.

  Don’t read the writing on the walls.

  You, of all people.

  Believe in me.

  I kept stumbling down the stairs, but Noel ran cross-country and he caught me easily. He grabbed my upper arm. “Won’t you just listen?” he said, his voice taut.

  “Don’t grab me,” I said. “You don’t get to grab me like that.”

  He didn’t let go. “It is so unfair,” he said, “to accuse me of not caring and then harsh on me for being jealous.”

  Okay.

  I could see that.

  But you know what?

  Through this whole argument he hadn’t said he cared.

  He’d said, “Would I be mad about you going out with Gideon if I didn’t care?”

  But not that he actually cared.

  “Jealousy is not the kind of caring I want,” I said. “And stop grabbing me.”

  “How can I trust you when you’re going out with other people behind my back?”

  “Not other people. One other person.”

  “One is enough.”

  “You’re not really here,” I told him. “You’re not my real live boyfriend.”

  “I’m not your boyfriend?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant, you’re not acting like a boyfriend. Not a real live one. Not like the ones Meghan has.”

  “I don’t know what you think one should act like!” Noel was shouting, and his voice echoed up the staircase.

  “Will you please stop grabbing me?” I said.

  “This isn’t making me happy,” Noel said, without letting go. “I came back from New York and I thought you would make me happy but I’m not happy.”

  “Are we breaking up, then?”

  Noel didn’t answer.

  “Are we breaking up?” I repeated.

  When he didn’t answer again, I couldn’t stand it.

  “If you’re not going to answer, then what you mean is yes,” I said. I reached for his fingers, still holding my arm, and pulled them off me by force. I threw his hand away from me. “Let me go.”

  Noel was wheezing, and maybe he was dizzy—I don’t know—but he lost his balance as I pushed his arm and fell down half a flight of stairs. Not head over heels, like in the movies, but awkwardly, like he was made of paper, crumpling, and like his backpack weighed more than he did. He landed on his knees with a crack.

  “Shit, oh, shit,” he moaned.

  I looked down at him. On his hands and knees, almost like a prayer. Breathing funny.

  Had I pushed him?

  Not quite.

  He’d been grabbing me.

  But had I pushed him, really?

  A little bit. Not down the stairs but away from me. Yes, I had pushed him.

  I stumbled down. “Are you okay?”

  “Just go away,” said Noel, not meeting my eyes. “I’m fine, everything’s fine, just go away.”

  “Do you need your puffer? Are your knees hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” he said again. “Just leave me.”

  “But—”

  “Leave me,” he said bitterly.

  And so I did.

  I skipped lunch and went straight to the gym, where I got undressed and stood in the shower stall under the hot water, letting tears and shampoo stream down my face.

  “I have an idea for a business,” Mom announced at dinner a week later. She had barely been speaking to me in the wake of the Snappy Dragon Debacle. I ignored her as much as possible too, because even though I knew I’d acted badly, I felt she was acting worse. She didn’t seem to care that my father was miserable, or that my heart was broken.

  Anyway, we did all sit down to dinner together most nights, even though none of us had anything to say—Dad ’cause he was depressed and Mom and me ’cause we didn’t like each other anymore—but this night she suddenly wanted to communicate.

  “I think we can get investors for it,” Mom said, shoveling a piece of steak into her mouth, “and I scouted a location down in Pioneer Square. The rent is ten thousand dollars a month, but for sure we’ll make a profit in the first year because there is nothing like this in Seattle. Nothing. And people are gonna love it.”

  At the phrase “ten thousand dollars a month” my dad choked on a mouthful. “What’s the idea?”

  “Pioneer Square is the best neighborhood for it,” Mom went on, ignoring him. “Because you get the tourist trade there as well as locals.”

  “You’re looking at places to rent already?” Dad asked. “What’s the idea?”

  “I started drawing up a business plan too,” Mom said. “You know I have to do more than copyediting when Ruby goes to college. If she doesn’t get a full scholarship, we’re going to need every penny I can possibly earn.”

  “And you think a good plan for earning that money is to sign a lease for ten thousand dollars a month?”

  “It’s not like you’re earning much,” snapped Mom. “Since your mother passed, you haven’t finished your Web site, you haven’t written any newspaper columns, you haven’t—”

  “What’s your idea, Mom?” I interrupted.

  “A meatloafery,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “A restaurant,” said my mother.3 “With brick ovens the way they have at fancy pizza places, so you can see into them and watch the meatloaves cooking.”

  Dad put down his fork and looked at her in astonishment.

  “People come in,” Mom went on, “and on their table is an assortment of ground meats, different kinds of bread crumbs—like maybe garlic bread, rye, pumpernickel—and ingredients in pretty little dishes. Ketchup, barbecue sauce, onions, roasted garlic, maybe Dijon mustard, maybe chopped tomato.”

  “Back up,” I told her. “An assortment of ground meats?”

  “Of course,” said Mom. “I’m thinking lamb, pork, veal, beef and turkey to start. Then we can have chicken and buffalo, too, once business picks up. Buffalo meat is very current.”

  “Just raw on the table?”

  “Sure. How else are people going to make their own meatloaf? The best meatloaves are a mix of meats. You would know that if you’d tried the one I made on Sunday and looked at the cookbook like I asked you.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded her.

  Mom went on, ignoring me. “At MeatMix we’ll be letting people choose the mix they’re in the mood for!”

  “MeatMix?”

  “That’s the name of the restaurant. Or maybe MoodMeat. Or maybe KitLoaf? Juana thought of KitLoaf.” She took a drink from her wineglass.

  “You’re going to have hygiene issues,” I told her. “All those people mixing up raw meat.”

  “We’ll have rubber gloves,” said Mom. “So people can actually mix with their hands. Th
at’s half the fun of making meatloaf, feeling it squish between your fingers. It’s not the same if you use a spatula.” She stood up to clear the table.

  “Meatloaf takes an hour to cook,” said Dad, as if coming out of a stupor. “What are people going to do while they wait for their food?”

  “There’s going to be a full bar!” snapped my mother, as if he were an idiot. “People will bond. They’ll talk over recipes and give each other tips.”

  “Not everyone is as into meatloaf as you are,” Dad cautioned.

  “Comfort food is a new trend in restaurants,” Mom said.

  “Are they gonna eat in the same place they cooked?” I wanted to know. “Like on a table covered with scraps of raw meat?”

  “An hour is a long time to wait for your meal,” Dad said. “I don’t know if just drinks will cut it. Isn’t this a family kind of place?”

  “If you’re letting kids in there, the hygiene issues are going to be even more serious,” I argued. “What if they get snot in their meatloaf? What if they drool? Are you really going to just stick a snot meatloaf in the oven and serve it to a customer? Even if it’s the customer’s own snot?”

  “I’m not certain you’re going to find investors for this, Elaine,” my dad said gently.

  “Why are you two so unsupportive?” Mom exploded. “All I do is support, support, support both of you, all the time!”

  “It’s ten thousand dollars a month,” said Dad. “In the year before we send Ruby to college.”

  “This kind of attitude is just what I’m talking about!” she cried. “You can’t even imagine for a single second that something of mine is going to be a success, can you? You can’t think that it might make money and pay for Ruby’s damn college.”

  “It’s a meatloafery,” I said. “You’re not even a chef.”

  “It’s make your own!” she said, stamping her feet.

  “Elaine,” said Dad, in a pleading tone of voice. “I’m not trying to be unsupportive. I—”

  “You’re cutting me down!” said Mom. “Neither of you lets me even finish explaining my business plan. You think you’re so quick, so clever, making me feel stupid. But is that a positive way to deal with other people? Is it?”

  I knew she was partly right. But she was so unsympathetic. She was living with two broken people, two people deep in the pain of Reginald.4 My grandmother was dead. My true love had turned cold. Dad’s mother was gone. And Mom acted like our sadness was one big irritant: an obstacle in her quests for smoked meat, yogic enlightenment and performance-art fame.

  “I’m cutting you down because it’s a stupid idea,” I told her.

  The rest of the evening did not go well.

  1 I still eat things with eggs and dairy in them, not because it doesn’t upset me the way those are produced (it does), but because I’m not perfect. Also, my quest for deliciousness, especially in the form of baked goods, makes it pretty much impossible to say goodbye to butter. But maybe I’ll give it up when I’m older and more mature.

  2 Muffin: Bland person. Mildly pleasant, but lacking in spice, novelty and deliciousness.

  3 Perhaps I should note here that my mother has no culinary training, no business experience and, apparently, no sense of her own limitations.

  4 Reginald is what Doctor Z and I call the grieving process, or a process of accepting the difficult things that have happened. Because phrases like grieving process make me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

  The Wenchery of Cricket and Kim!

  Parent Questionnaire

  Please fill this form out as soon as possible so we can begin helping your child in his or her college applications process.

  How do you see your child?

  As little as possible.

  What kind of education do you want for your child?

  One that doesn’t require me to fill out stupid questionnaires. Also, one that’s free.

  What are your child’s strengths and weaknesses?

  Ruby is self-involved and neurotic. She may be a repressed lesbian.

  She may be an anorexic.

  As for strengths: she is superb at making stingingly unkind remarks.

  From your observation, what subjects is your child most interested in?

  Staring at the television. Moping. Acting superior.

  What is your educational background, and that of your spouse?

  Nothing that prepared us in any way for the horrors of raising a teenager.

  —written with black Sharpie in my mom’s large, loopy cursive on Dittmar’s printout.

  My senior year went on.

  Without Noel.

  Without Noel.

  I worked at the zoo.

  I did a lot of homework.

  I swam after school.

  Without Noel.

  I sent away for college applications.

  I walked Polka-dot.

  I went to therapy.

  Without Noel.

  Doing all these things, I cried a lot.

  My dad cried a lot too.

  My mom butterflied a lamb, stuffed it with rosemary and garlic and invited people over for dinner.

  The headmaster made me write a formal apology note to Dittmar promising never to disrupt his class again. During CAP Workshop, my Noel radar was in such a massive frenzy, I felt like I was going to have a panic attack every time I went—but I managed not to by taking off my glasses and letting the whole room blur, then singing retro metal songs in my head, ignoring everything Dittmar or anyone else said.

  We will

  We will

  ROCK YOU.

  (Clap!

  Dum dum

  Clap!)1

  I still knew where he was, and my heart bounded every time he spoke, but Noel was just a soft outline of himself, not real Noel with his mouth in a thin line, making jokes with hateful, hateful Ariel Olivieri. I didn’t feel guilt over his knee, which was still heavily wrapped, or guilt over wakeboarding with Gideon. At least, I didn’t feel those things until I put my glasses back on and stopped singing in my head.

  Mom brought an entire dead piglet home and dismembered it. She ground bits of it up to make sausage and left its head sitting in the fridge while she researched ways of serving it.

  I dared to suggest that this was a deeply inconsiderate and even cruel thing to do when one of the people you lived with had been a vegetarian for three years, and in response, Mom filled out Dittmar’s parent questionnaire with the most obnoxious things she could think of to write and shoved it in my backpack. And as a performance artist, she writes obnoxious things professionally.

  I found it at school during Calc. At first I thought, Ag, I have to turn this sheet of full-on madness in to Dittmar and he’s going to think I’m even more insane than he already does. It’s really going to hurt my chances in terms of getting any actual advice from him for my college applications—plus he’ll show it to the other teachers and they’ll all think I come from a completely certifiable family, and that’s even without knowing that we found my dad this morning sitting in the shower stall wearing only his underwear and staring blankly at the tiles.

  But then I thought: I don’t have to give this paper to Dittmar.

  I can tell him my parents keep not filling it out. Eventually, he’ll forget about it.

  I know better now than to throw any kind of incriminating document in the school trash can, so I ripped the questionnaire into tiny, tiny shreds and flushed it down the toilet.

  “It was liberating,” I told Doctor Z later. “Like I said, I’m not letting this badness in my life. I’m flushing it down with all the poo.”

  The upside-down picture wasn’t on her desk anymore. I was grateful because it was seriously distracting. Likewise, Doctor Z wasn’t wearing an orange poncho or patchwork skirt or anything else so incredibly crafty and horrific that it detracted from my ability to have a therapeutic experience.

  “My mother did this nasty thing,” I went on, “but I didn’t have to let it in. I mean,
I have enough things in there tainting my brain. I don’t need that.”

  “Good.”

  “I also didn’t have to give the questionnaire to Dittmar. Even though he told us to turn it in. Sometimes, it’s just better to ignore what you’re supposed to do and do what’s best for you.”

  Doctor Z nodded. Then she asked: “What else do you think is tainting your brain?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Just my dad’s depression, missing my dead grandma, our carnivorous household, Meghan always off with Finn, Nora always off with Kim and Cricket, Hutch in Paris, total isolation, mental illness, people who are cruel to animals, the question of whether to grow out my bangs, college applications, guilt over Noel, guilt over Gideon, major heartbreak and self-loathing. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Well,” Doctor Z said, crossing her legs, “can you flush any of that?”

  “How could I flush it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “These are not the kinds of things you can flush.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re not pieces of paper. They’re situations.”

  “What if you put them down on pieces of paper?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Sure. That can be a very therapeutic thing to do. You write out a problem that is bothering you, and then you flush it. Or burn it. Destroy it in some way as a gesture of setting yourself free.”

  “Yeah, but I can write my heartbreak down on paper six thousand times and flush it just as many. I’m still going to be heartbroken when I wake up in the morning. I’m still going to feel awful when I see Noel at school.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “How do you know until you try?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “This week. Consider writing something that’s bothering you on a piece of paper and flushing it,” said Doctor Z. “It can be a small thing, if you want. It doesn’t have to be your heartbreak, if you’re wedded to that.”

  “I am not wedded to my heartbreak,” I said. “I hate my heartbreak. I hate it.” I was almost crying. “I am just heartbroken,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”