The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon—and Me, Ruby Oliver

by E. Lockhart

  also by e. lockhart

  RUBY OLIVER NOVELS

  The Boyfriend List

  The Boy Book

  Fly on the Wall

  Dramarama

  The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

  How to Be Bad

  For Sarah and Lauren, who made this book so much

  better than it was

  contents

  I Am Not Always a Good Friend

  I Give Instructions for Ruining Your Life

  I Exist in the State of Noboyfriend

  I Become a Baby CHuB

  I Fixate on a Poncho

  I Am a Reluctant Bodyguard

  I Receive a Frog Laden with Meaning

  I Correspond with a Pygmy Goat

  I Uncover the Secret Mental Health of Hair Bands

  I Join Up with Granola Brothers

  I Unleash the Powers of Magic Cookies

  I Embark on a Doughnut Enterprise

  I Am Wearing the Wrong Bra

  I Suffer from Rabbit Fever

  I Should Resist, but I Do Not Resist

  I Encounter Horrible Feet

  I Choke on Ninja Deliciousness

  I Fight the Tyranny of Cute

  I Reveal the Treasure Map

  I Want to Be Treated Like a Dog, Strange As That Sounds

  I Am Not Always a Good Friend

  Ruby,

  In laboratories dim

  We bend to Fleischman’s whim

  And suffer twice a week

  Horrors terrible to speak.

  Will you deign

  To ease my pain?

  Or will I slowly

  Go insane?

  Say you’ll be my partner true

  In Chemistry, it’s me and you.

  —written on yellow legal paper in Noel’s cramped, somewhat illegible scrawl; found in my mail cubby, folded eight thousand times and with a bit of coffee spilled on one corner.

  the first day back from winter break, junior year, I walked into Chem to find a head of red cabbage on every lab table. Also a juicer. Tate Prep is the kind of school where the chemistry teacher has a budget to buy fourteen juicers. I go there on scholarship.

  Mr. Fleischman started the class yelling, “Happy New Year, people! Wash your hands and juice your cabbages! No fingers in the machinery!”

  He was a small white man, only five foot two, with a pug nose and a large bald spot ill concealed by a comb-over. He jumped up and down more than most fifty-year-olds do and dyed what little hair he had left a shiny black. “Kitchen science!” cried Fleischman. “That’s our new unit, people. Everyday chemical reactions that happen in your very own home.”

  I washed my hands and juiced my cabbage. Sadly, I was familiar with the procedures for juicing vegetables because my mother had started the new year by embarking on a raw food diet. Her new idea of breakfast was celery juice.

  The cabbage was my cabbage and my cabbage alone because Noel was late. I’d gotten his note that morning in my mail cubby, but I hadn’t seen him since before the holiday.

  “Say you’ll be my partner true/In Chemistry, it’s me and you,” he’d written.

  Only now he wasn’t here.

  “Come to the front and get six plastic cups, protective gloves, baking soda, orange juice, liquid Drano, ammonia and vinegar,” announced Fleischman. Katarina and Ariel, golden girls of the junior class, were squealing at the semi-disgusting purple glop that had formed in our juicers.

  “I think I’m gonna puke from the smell,” said Ariel.

  “Don’t puke,” called Fleischman. “There’s no puking allowed in chemistry. Scientists never puke.”

  “You smell it,” said Ariel. “See how you feel.”

  Fleischman ignored her. “Be careful with the ammonia, people. And the Drano. I’m not seeing the gloves on your hands. The gloves go on your hands. Is that too much to expect you to figure out?”

  I had to make three trips to the front to get everything. The third time, Ariel was there too. She held a little dish of orange juice. “Hello, Ruby,” she said to me. “How was your break?”

  “Good,” I answered. Since the debacles of sophomore year had died down, Ariel, Katarina and Heidi all spoke to me if they had to. But I knew what they really thought of me.

  “We skied Mount Baker over New Year’s,” Ariel said.

  “Cool.” I shrugged. Skiing is not in my budget. I spent winter break helping my dad repair cracks in his greenhouse off the side of the houseboat we live in and watching way too many movies. Dad runs an obscure and deeply earnest gardening newsletter entitled Container Gardening for the Rare Bloom Lover.

  Why was Ariel making conversation with me, anyhow?

  “Yeah,” she went on. “Me, Katarina and Heidi were all about Sneaky Pete and Blueberry Cat Track.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Possibly ski trails. Possibly coffee drinks. Video games? Sexual positions?

  “But Cricket skied the Chute and Kim owned Gunners Bowl,” Ariel went on. “Jackson, Kyle and those guys came for New Year’s. Such an excellent party.”

  Oh.

  That was why she was telling me this.

  Kim and Cricket are my ex-friends. Ariel was making sure I knew they’d all spent New Year’s skiing together, which meant that Kim and Cricket were now firmly in the Katarina set.

  “Spankin’,” I said. Because of course it hurt that she had Kim and Cricket now. She meant it to hurt. There was nothing I could say in retaliation except something that would confuse her.1

  “Whatever,” Ariel answered, wrinkling her nose.

  I went back to my table and put spoonfuls of baking soda in my cups of cabbage juice.

  The cabbage juice turned blue.

  “I see it’s turning blue, people!” Fleischman cried, jumping. “That’s good. Now add precise dropperfuls of your various other substances to the blue cabbage juice, and make a record of how many droppers it takes to return the fluid to reddish purple. Then come to conclusions about the acidic and basic contents of your ingredients.”

  I added ammonia to one of the cups. The juice turned green. Did that mean it was acidic or basic?

  What were we supposed to be writing down, again?

  As my lab partner, Noel was usually Captain of the Pen, while I was usually Captain of the Beaker.

  Where was Noel? Was he really going to ask to be my lab partner and then ditch class?

  And why had he asked to be my lab partner, anyway? We had been lab partners last term. We were obviously going to be lab partners this term too. There was no need to write a note about it.

  The Drano turned my cabbage juice blue.

  “Later in the term we’re doing the science of baking!” Fleischman continued. “Did you people know that chemical reactions are taking place constantly in your home ovens? In your very own blenders? It’s fascinating, I promise you.”

  The plastic gloves felt hot on my hands and I was starting to sweat in the warm lab. I was nervous about seeing Noel.

  Because Noel liked me.

  Or at least, he once liked me.

  And I liked him back, if liking someone means you want to touch him whenever he’s sitting next to you and he makes you laugh and you find yourself thinking about him, like, when you’re alone in the shower with the door locked. If liking someone means that whenever he’s in a room with you, even an auditorium or the refectory, you know exactly where he is and what he’s doing, like you’ve got Noel radar.

  Yeah.

  Last fall, Noel had asked if he coul
d kiss me. I wanted to say yes and throw myself on top of him like a kissing lunatic—but there were a thousand reasons not to. It was very complicated. So I told him no.

  After that incident of extreme awkwardness, we had settled into being lab partners and occasionally eating lunch together with other people; a semi-friendship that didn’t involve e-mailing, calling, writing each other notes or hanging out after school. So far, it had worked out okay. I mean, I just tried not to think about him—and most of the time I managed it.

  But now, he had left me this note. And if you’re like me (which hopefully you’re not, because that would mean you’re so neurotic you need professional help), you’ve read it over four times. “Say you’ll be my partner true,” he wrote. “In Chemistry, it’s me and you.”

  It’s verging on romantic, am I right?

  “Will you deign/To ease my pain?/Or will I slowly/Go insane?”

  I felt an unreasonably happy glow every time I thought of it. A glow, followed by a wave of agonizing guilt.

  Glow. Guilt. Glow. Guilt. Glow. Guilt.

  That was how my morning had been, leading up to fourth-period Chem.

  Then Noel ditched class. I turned my cabbage juice a variety of shades of bluish purple, made the best notes I could and left without speaking another word to anyone.

  The Thousand Reasons Not to Kiss Noel

  Nora likes him. She told me so. True, she hasn’t done anything about it except giggle when he’s around and touch his shoulder too much. But she is my best friend, the only one of my old crowd who came back after the debacles of sophomore year—and she liked him first.

  Nearly the entire population of Tate Prep thinks I am a megaslut, even though I’ve kissed a total of six guys in sixteen years and have never even reached the nether regions. Given my shattered reputation, I should swear off guys for a while. Like forever.

  I am still mentally unstable thanks to said sophomore-year debacles and have to see Doctor Z to keep some semblance of sanity. I am obviously in no shape to have an actual boyfriend.

  I have two whole friends, Meghan and Nora. If I went for Noel, and Nora hated me for it, Meghan would probably hate me too. I cannot afford to be friendless. I have been there before, thank you very much, and have no intentions of returning to complete leprosy.2

  —entry in The Girl Book, my sort-of, only-sometimes-updated journal, written December of junior year.

  Okay, so those are only four reasons, not a thousand. But they might as well have been a thousand, as they still resulted in me not kissing Noel and Noel not kissing me.

  I knew I shouldn’t write him back when he didn’t show up for Chem. Pretend you have some complete muffin for a lab partner, I told myself. If Noel were a muffin, you wouldn’t write him a note just because he missed Chem.3

  Don’t write him.

  You don’t have to write him.

  It’s better not to write him.

  You owe it to Nora not to write him.

  Here’s what I wrote:

  Captain of the Pen,

  Cabbages red

  Became cabbage juice blue

  Became substances vile

  And of many a hue.

  I juiced and I poured;

  I measured stuff too.

  But naught came out right,

  For ‘twas done without you.

  —Captain of the Beaker

  Maybe Nora’s feelings for Noel had just been a passing attraction and she hadn’t really meant it.

  Maybe she got over him during winter break while her family was on Grand Cayman.

  Maybe Nora would fall madly in love with that guy on the basketball team who kissed her in December, or maybe she had already started seeing some hot college boyfriend she met through her brother, Gideon.

  If so, it was okay to write this note.

  I folded it into an origami balloon, blew it up and shoved it deep into Noel’s cubby.

  1 Spankin’: My new favorite word. As in, “That’s a spankin’ pair of lederhosen you’re wearing, where did you get those?” Not as in, “Stop your whinin’ or you’ll get a spankin’, you little brat.”

  2 Leprosy: It’s a metaphor. Leprosy is a horrible bacterial disease that disfigures your face and rots your hands and feet. They used to send all the lepers into isolation hospitals or make them wear bells so people would hear them coming and stay clear.

  3 Muffin: Not exactly an insult. A muffin is pleasant. It’s just nothing to get cranked about. You never think, Oh, I’m going to drive out of my way so I can get that unbelievably scrumptious muffin they have at the bakery. No, you think, Unbelievably scrumptious brownie. Unbelievably scrumptious white chocolate cookie. You wouldn’t go out of your way for something as ordinary as a muffin, that’s what I’m explaining here.

  I Give Instructions for Ruining Your Life

  How to Ruin Your Life in Nine Easy Steps:

  You too can ruin your life. It isn’t hard. Are you ready? Here’s how.

  Lose your first-ever boyfriend (Jackson) to your then-best friend (Kim).

  In the process, lose your best friend. Suffer a broken heart.

  Kiss your ex-boyfriend (Jackson).

  Get caught kissing him. Congratulations! Now you’ve lost all your friends, because you’re obviously a wench who runs around making out with other people’s boyfriends.

  Suffer panic attacks.

  See a shrink.

  Write a list of all the boys you ever crushed on, going back to nursery school. Because your shrink tells you to. It’s for your mental health.

  Accidentally leave a copy of said boyfriend list where people who hate you can find it.

  Do nothing. The people who hate you find the list. Misunderstand it. And xerox it.

  Voila! You are not only a leper, but also a famous slut. Life successfully ruined.

  —entry in The Girl Book, written December of junior year.

  the panic things have gotten better since I started going to see Doctor Z, my shrink. And the leprosy has abated some since Nora started being friends with me again.

  But my reputation still sucks.

  I showed Doctor Z what I wrote a couple of days before school started in January. She was asking me to think about why things happened to me. Whether any part of the debacle of my life was under my control. She read “How to Ruin Your Life” carefully, then asked: “What might you do to cause the situation to be different this year?”

  “Nothing,” I told her.

  “Nothing?” That’s not the kind of answer she likes to hear.

  “I can’t do anything but try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Then how will you stay out of trouble, Ruby?” she asked me. “There must be something you can articulate.”

  I thought for a moment. “I can keep away from boys,” I answered.

  I Exist in the State of Noboyfriend

  The state of Noboyfriend is not a state like New Jersey is a state. It’s a state like catatonia is a state. Or depression. Or ennui.1

  A person in the state of Noboyfriend is in stasis. Nothing is happening on the boy front. So little happened last month, and so little is expected to happen next month—or ever—that she is immobile in terms of romance. She is also afflicted with mild depression and ennui due to a lack of affection, excitement and horizontal action.

  She knows, of course, that Gloria Steinem, her favorite feminist from American History and Politics last year, would tell her that “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” and she firmly believes this is true.

  But maybe, depending on who she is, she wants a boyfriend anyway. Maybe the fish wants a bicycle.

  The state of Noboyfriend is hard to leave, once you’re well and firmly in. The longer you are there, the more entrenched you are. Doctors and shrinks won’t be of any help. There are no pills for the state of Noboyfriend, no psychoanalytic diagnoses, no miracle cures.

  —written by me, with help from Meghan and Nora, on a latte-stained B&O Espresso napkin, before wi
nter break, junior year.

  thankfully, I didn’t have to brave the refectory alone at fifth period that first day. Meghan was already sitting at our usual lunch table. She was wearing Birkenstocks with red woolly socks, white carpenter pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt. Despite this tragic outfit, she was easily the sexiest girl in the room.

  That’s why she isn’t popular. Girls don’t actually like a person who licks her lips like a porn star in history class or distracts their boyfriends at parties by wearing a bikini in the hot tub. And Meghan has no self-awareness whatsoever, despite being the only other teenager I know who sees a shrink, so she doesn’t understand how irritating some of the stuff she does is.

  She doesn’t bug me anymore, though. There’s a lot to be said for a girl who sticks by you when hardly anyone else at school will, and the two of us secretly sing ridiculous pop songs at the top of our lungs when she carpools me to school.

  “I’m over this Noboyfriend thing,” Meghan announced as I sat down. “I decided that during Choir.”

  “Already?” I cracked open my peach iced tea.

  “Way over it.”

  “Hello? You’ve been Noboyfriend for what, a month?”

  “Seven weeks!” Meghan said, her mouth full of taco.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re counting.”

  “Yes, I’m counting.”

  “Well, don’t make me count or I may have to slit my wrists.”2

  “Roo. Suicide threats are not funny.”

  “Then don’t make me count.”

  “Okay, I won’t make you count…”

  “Thanks.”

  “… but only because I’m wearing white pants. The bloodstains would never come out. Ooh, there’s Nora.” Meghan jumped up and wrapped her arms around Nora’s five-foot-eleven-inch frame. “Come sit, come sit! I need your advice!”