He wasn’t truly listening. So I didn’t tell him anything.
You have to have someone listening if you’re going to really talk.
1 Go ahead and laugh, but sometimes I listen to Dad’s Queen albums even when he and Hutch aren’t rocking out in the greenhouse. Okay, and sometimes Guns N’ Roses. And sometimes Aerosmith. And once AC/DC.
Retro metal is very good for diverting panic attacks.
The Waketastic Adventure!
a video clip:
Roo’s parents sit on their couch. Polka-dot is there too, his head on Elaine’s lap. Kevin has garden dirt on his T-shirt. Elaine is wearing black, her frizzy hair puffed out around her head.Roo: (behind the camera) What’s your definition of friendship?Elaine: I don’t know why we’re doing this, Kevin. She still hasn’t taken back what she said. I told you I wasn’t outputting energy toward her until I had a full apology.Kevin: It’s for her college applications. We agreed to be supportive of her college applications, even though the two of you are going through a difficult time.Elaine: It’s not a difficult time. She just owes me an apology. (Looking directly at the camera.) That’s what friendship is, Ruby. Apologizing when you know you should.Roo: I did apologize.Elaine: Not fully. I don’t know why we have so much trouble being friends. A mother and a daughter should be the closest friends.Kevin: My mother and I weren’t friends. She was my mother. She mothered me.Elaine: Are you saying something about my mothering?Kevin: No.
A couple of days before school started, Meghan was with Finn per usual and I didn’t have to work at the zoo and Noel had to go shopping with his stepdad for school clothes and cross-country shoes, so I helped Dad in the greenhouse a bit and then went out on the dock to mess with the video camera.
I was trying to figure out how to shoot something dark with sunlight behind it, fiddling around with settings and playing snippets back to see how my shots turned out, when I heard the putt-putt of a motorboat.
“Did you run out of gas again?” I shouted when Gideon was twenty feet away.
“No,” he yelled. “I’m full.”
“Do you need a Band-Aid?”
“No.” He cut the engine and tied up.
“What do you need?”
“A driver.” He climbed out and bopped me on the arm, dude style.
“What?”
“You ever wakeboard?”
I rolled my eyes.
“But you water-ski.” He said it like a statement.
No. I didn’t. I mean, I had been out on the Van Deusens’ boat before while other people were waterskiing, the summer after freshman year, but the one time I tried to actually get up on water skis I had fallen flat on my butt within two seconds.
“Hasn’t Evergreen started yet?” I said, to change the subject.
Gideon wasn’t fooled. “Yeah, but it’s the weekend. Okay, so you don’t water-ski. But aren’t you some kind of awesome swimmer?”
“I’m on the team at Tate,” I said. “But I’m not taking home a lot of ribbons.”
“It’ll be easy for you,” he said. “And driving the boat’s really fun. No roads. Nothing but the wind on your face.”
Was I really going out on a boat with Gideon Van Deusen?
When I completely had a boyfriend?
“I’ll teach you,” said Gideon, smiling. “Wakeboarding is actually easier than waterskiing for a lot of people.”
“Um. I gotta ask my dad,” I said. “Will you wait here?”
“Sure.” Gideon immediately lay down on the dock. “I’ll just absorb some sun.”
I went into the house, but I didn’t ask my dad. He was mumbling something about his mother into a dried-out peony plant. What I did was call Noel.
He hadn’t called me that day, or the day before. I hadn’t seen him since Thursday night.
The cell went to voice mail.
I tried again.
Again voice mail.
The third time I left a message. “Hey, it’s Ruby. You want to go get ice cream with me tonight? I have a craving for Mix. Maybe coffee with Heath bar and chocolate chips. Call me right now if you can go.”
Then I sat on my bed and waited for him to call me back.
And waited.
And he didn’t call.
I don’t know why I was surprised.
I put on a bathing suit. The Speedo my parents got me for team practice, nothing cute.
And still, I sat on my bed.
And still, the phone didn’t ring.
I put on a cotton vintage skirt and a T-shirt. Flip-flops.
I grabbed a towel.
I looked at the phone.
Noel was my boyfriend. But he wasn’t my real live boyfriend anymore.
Fine.
The water was insanely cold, and it took me five tries to get up on the wakeboard. When I did, my legs felt like jelly and the sun was in my eyes—but I was up, and light was glinting on the water, and I was cutting in and back across the wake of the boat, and I was laughing and screaming both together and it was just gorgeous. The universe seemed golden for a minute.
Then I was over my head in the bitter water, and Gideon was steering the boat around to pick me up, and he was laughing. “Don’t stick your butt out! The moment you stick your butt out it’s over.”
He reached his tan arm down and I grabbed it and he hauled me up onto the boat. “You wanna go again?”
I nodded.
So I went again.
And again.
And then it was a long time before I fell.
I drove for a while, and Gideon attempted numerous tricks, many of which failed. He was trying to get airborne, but most of the time he just crashed into the water, laughing. When he got tired, we floated for a while. I was cold and he gave me his fleece hoodie to wear. We drank Cokes from a cooler and ate these weird organic cheese puffs Gideon brought.
I thought, and not for the first time, that Gideon would make an excellent boyfriend. As I watched him driving the motorboat back toward my dock, I said to myself:
This is Gideon, whom I loved in sixth grade. This is Gideon, who doesn’t live in the Tate Universe. This is Gideon, who traveled the world for a year after high school.
This is Gideon, who plays guitar. This is Gideon, whose leg touched mine all through the movie that time. This is Gideon, who listens to what I say.
This is Gideon, straightforward and normal.
This is Gideon, who said I should call him if I didn’t have a boyfriend.
“Thanks for the waketastic adventure,” I told him.
He looked down at me. “You’re …”
“What?”
Gideon shook his head. “Different from most of Nora’s friends, that’s all.”
More deranged, I thought. “I’m not sure we’re exactly friends anymore.” Nora had been on Decatur Island with her parents since a week after the funeral, so I hadn’t seen her. I wasn’t sure what the status was.
“She said you guys made up.”
“She did?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I guess we did,” I said.
Gideon ate a cheese puff. “Cricket and Kim and that new one, Katarina what’shername—”
“Dolgen.”
“And Heidi and Ariel. They’re all the same.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. They all seemed so unique to me. Especially Cricket and Kim. They had been my closest friends for years and years. “We should probably change the subject,” I said.
“Okay.” We didn’t speak. The roar of the boat made it nearly impossible to have a conversation anyway.
As I got out of the boat, I took off Gideon’s hoodie and gave it back to him. “Thanks for letting me borrow this.”
“Keep it.”
“What? No, I can’t.”