Free The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart

shoe for a trick on yourself. And I have only just begun to brainstorm! Your big bad penny-totin’ man, Jackson.” Or, “I left at 2 PM today because we got out of chem early. Why? There was a fire and a hurricane and lightning in the chem lab. Oh, sorry, did I alarm you? Really, it’s ’cause Dimworthy said, ‘Clarke, you’re so damn smart. I’ve taught you everything I know already about the mysteries of the universe. Get the hell outta here and go shoot some pool.’ So I left. See you tomorrow. Jackson.”
    I loved those notes. I still have all of them. Back when I dreamed of having Ben Moi as my boyfriend, knowing I was pretty, knowing I was wanted—those things were true when I was with Jackson, and I didn’t worry.
    Now—after everything that’s happened—I am tempted to say it was too good to be true. But it
was
true, for at least a month. And when I think of what I want from a boyfriend, or a lover, or a husband someday—what Jackson and I had, at first, that is the thing that I want.

    The other way that Jackson was like Ben Moi was that he had had a lot of girlfriends. Before he went to Japan, he had gone with Beth, Ann and Courtney—all girls in his year—and once I started going out with him I developed Beth-Ann-Courtney radar. I could sense whenever one of them was in the room, what she was wearing, how pretty she looked. It seemed so weird that those Beth-Ann-Courtney lips had touched Jackson’s lips; that they’d heldhis big, freckled hands; that he thought they were beautiful; that he thought they were interesting. Before Jackson was my boyfriend, those girls had seemed perfectly nice. Now, they seemed shallow and overly flirtatious. They irritated me, laughing and being charming and having nice legs and no glasses. I wished they would all three disappear.
    Jackson and I had been going out for six weeks when an incident happened that inspired a whole new section of
The Boy Book
entitled “Traumatic Phone Calls, E-mails and Instant Messages: Documented Painful Episodes Involving Communication Technology.” 2
    Here’s what happened: I was over at the Clarkes’ house on a weekday around six p.m. We were doing homework and playing video games in his room. The phone rang as Jackson was on his way downstairs to get something, so he asked me to pick it up.
    “Clarke residence,” I said.
    “Um, is Jackson there?” It was a girl’s voice.
    “He’s downstairs,” I said, wondering who it was. “Do you want to hold on?”
    “Um, yeah,” she said.
    I handed the phone to Jackson when he returned. He sat down with his back to me. “Hey, what’s up?” he said into the receiver.
    There was a pause.
    “I can’t talk now, someone’s over.”
    Why wouldn’t he say
Ruby’s
over? I wondered. Ruby, my girlfriend, is over. That’s what he should have said.
    “Please don’t say that,” Jackson was almost whispering. “No, no, it wasn’t that way.”
    What way?
    “It’s not anything you did, I told you,” he went on. “Listen, it’s not a good time. Can I call you later? … Yes, I still have your number.”
    Then he hung up, picked up the Xbox joystick and went back to killing aliens.
    I looked down at my math homework, but I couldn’t concentrate. Who had been on the phone?
    What were they talking about?
    Why didn’t he tell me?
    It was none of my business, really. He could get phone calls from whatever girls he wanted.
    Or maybe it
was
my business; after all, I was his girlfriend, and wasn’t I entitled to know if there were other girls he had intimate conversations with, conversations that were obviously about important feelings?
    “Who was on the phone?” I asked, trying to sound bored.
    “Oh? Just now? Heidi Sussman,” he said. Heidi from Katarina’s set.
    “What did she want?”
    “She’s upset about something or other. I told her I’d talk to her later.”
    “Upset about what?” I hoped I sounded concerned for Heidi and not overly nosey.
    “Oh, she’s always