After that, one of the ways she punished me for speaking my mind was by continually cooking meat. I’m a vegetarian, not because I think humans shouldn’t ever eat meat so much as because freshman year I read an article in the Sunday magazine about the way these big meat companies treat the animals, penning them up so they can’t even turn around or lie down, feeding them foods that aren’t natural to their bodies, injecting them with massive amounts of hormones and antibiotics, just horrible stuff. I couldn’t stand it, so I stopped eating meat.1
Anyway, Mom bought an enormous book on charcuterie and a cookbook claiming to be the ultimate American barbecue bible. She started talking about buying a grass-fed cow, having it professionally slaughtered, and smoking and curing the meat herself. She was reading a lot of blogs on the subject, subscribed to a publication called Meat Paper, and researched jumbo-sized freezers that might fit on our northern deck.
Most nights of the week, she was roasting something sizable and dead in the oven and planning to serve it with nothing but a green vegetable. So I was still getting nothing but vegetables for dinner, though at least they were cooked, and I had to stare at a large hunk of dead animal on the table every evening.
My father, however, ate like he’d just been released from prison, shoveling chicken legs into his mouth and sucking all the meat off them.
“You’ll crack eventually, Ruby,” said my mother. “Tomorrow I’m making Swedish-style meatballs with veal, beef and pork. All three! I’ll serve them over rice.”
“I’m not going to crack for veal,” I told her. “Veal is the most unethical meat you can eat. Besides, are you really interested in being a carnivore, or is this all about making me crack?”
“It’s not all about making you crack,” said Mom smugly. “I just think you will.”
Back to the first day of school. It was weird to be a senior. The new herd of freshmen looked like frightened deer. The junior boys were taller than before summer. Meghan and I sat at the senior tables near the big windows of the refectory, just like all the seniors had for countless years before us. It felt surreal and powerful.
The strangest thing was being at school without Jackson. Ever since he’d come back from Japan my sophomore year, even before we’d started going out and long after we’d broken up, I’d had Jackson radar. I’d known where he was standing, noticed what he was wearing and wondered what he was talking about, every single day.
Now Jackson was at Cornell, three thousand miles away, and I would never have to wonder if he was looking at me, or not looking at me, or ignoring me, or hating me, or lusting after me. Not ever again.
Nora had her camera slung around her neck and was snapping first-day pictures of all her friends. She took one of me standing outside the main building and told me to have a good first day of school. I was glad to see her, and felt more relaxed since Gideon had told me she told him we’d made up—but nothing felt the same as it had before we argued. We weren’t starting senior year together.
Kim had a supershort haircut that made her look mod and adult. Cricket’s summer at drama school had led her to go heavy on the eye makeup and black clothes. Ariel Olivieri, who made out with Noel last year and was therefore another person I was destined to have plugged into my radar, had spent the summer perfecting her tan.
I wondered if I looked different to them after a couple of months away. I had on jeans, Converse and a vintage bowling shirt. I didn’t dress up because I was trying to look like I didn’t care—you know, about the first day of school, how I looked, what people might be saying about me—but when I looked in the bathroom mirror I thought maybe I was trying too hard. To not care.
I put on lip gloss.
Then rubbed it off.
I shouldn’t have trimmed my bangs myself.
Varsha and Spencer from swim team ran up to me by the mail cubbies. I hadn’t seen them all summer, except once when I’d run into them at Pike Place Market and we all got cinnamon rolls. They weren’t my real friends. They were swim team friends. They were Future Doctors of America. I didn’t find them fantastically amusing, but they were neither catty nor golden and at least they didn’t seem to hate me or think I was a slut. “We’re counting on you for the relay,” Varsha told me. “Now that Angelica graduated, you’ll swim backstroke. Sound good?”
“Spankin’,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Excellent. If Wallace says okay,” I told them. “Though Laura’s faster than me.”
“Nah,” said Spencer. “She’s got a boyfriend. She barely worked out all summer. You worked out, right?”
“In August. But I was pretty out of shape when I started. I didn’t even play lacrosse last spring.”
“Why not?” Varsha asked.
“No way I’d make varsity goalie with Chelsea Lefferts still here, so I bailed. Spring was a complete slugfest.”
“Slugfest!” laughed Spencer. “You say the strangest things, Ruby. Doesn’t she, Varsha? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be the hottest relay team.”
That was how conversations with Varsha and Spencer went, and they kind of filled me with ennui. Still, I was grateful they were so nice, because I had been angsting about lunch. Now I knew I could eat with the swim team girls. Meghan was likely to spend lunch at Finn’s table of soccer muffins2 (who were all about Dude Time and therefore made me uncomfortable and also bored), Hutch was in Paris and Nora was pretty certain to be at Cricket and Kim’s table this year.
And Noel. He was the sort of person who was welcome anywhere. A floater. Last year, before we were going out, he sometimes sat with guys from the cross-country team, sometimes with a bunch of sophomore girls, sometimes with us and sometimes with people he knew from art class or November Week. It was hard to say where he’d be for sure, and if he was with people I didn’t know that well, I wasn’t sure how it would feel to just go and sit down next to him.
Oh.
Ag.
I had just wondered whether or not I’d be welcome to sit with Noel in the refectory.
He was absolutely not my real live boyfriend anymore.
I mean, I knew that. But this was proof upon proof.
What was wrong?
How had we gone from love to this?
I was thinking all through first-period Calc, second-period Physics and third-period Women Writers. Each time I had to walk from class to class, I wondered if I’d run into Noel and how things would be between us since I’d jumped out of the car last night.
Was he mad?
Was I mad?
Could we talk about it, or would it just be a replay of the same conversation, where he insisted nothing was wrong?
Maybe I should just pretend everything was perfect. That seemed to be what he wanted.
But everything wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t.
Did I really want to be fake with Noel, of all people?
After Women Writers, I went to the top of the math building for my College Application Process Workshop—CAP. All seniors had this on their schedule once a week in the fall. It was supposed to be an information-sharing process where we met in groups of ten to give each other support on our applications, recommend schools we’d researched and so on.
Dittmar (the college admissions guy) had cleared space on the rug in his office and was sitting on it cross-legged. His madras pants hiked up in this position to reveal hairy pink legs and sweat socks. “Ruby, sit down,” he said, smiling and tapping his clipboard happily.
Noel, Kim and Cricket were there already, sitting across from each other. So was Ariel Olivieri (who had kissed Noel), Darcy the Neanderthal and several Future Doctors of America.