The Boy Recession

  It’s the same thing with boys. Aviva is interested in a different boy every day. Darcy won’t let herself get interested in any boy. (Except Stalin. And maybe Shostakovich.) Me, I just want one normal, nice boy to crush on.

  But the thing about being normal is no one notices you. I blend in. I always have. In my fourth-grade school picture, I was in the middle row with a bunch of other girls with long brown hair, bangs, and headbands. My mom pointed to the picture and said, “You look so cute!”

  She was pointing to Maddy Berg, another girl in my class.

  Blending in wouldn’t bother me, except I think it’s contributing to the patheticness of my pathetic love life. I’ve never had any summer lovin’. And I’ve never had any school year lovin’, either. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never hooked up with a guy. And this morning, on my Internet browser, an article popped up about women marrying themselves.

  Even my wireless connection knows I’m alone.

  I’ve been semi-depressed all day, realizing another summer has gone by without me having a boyfriend or even a crush. I’m picturing myself buying my own prom corsage, ordering a giant cake with three layers, and showing up at a scientific lab and asking if they’ve perfected asexual reproduction yet.

  My sad daydreams are interrupted by Aviva, who comes back from the lake dripping wet and shakes out her towel, getting water and sand all over me.

  “How’s what’s-his-face?” I ask Aviva.

  “He won’t last long,” she says, tilting her head and rubbing her towel against her ear.

  “You’re sick of him already?” Darcy asks.

  “No,” Aviva says darkly. “He has a very suspicious mole on his shoulder.”

  Darcy turns to me and rolls her eyes.

  Aviva cheers up quickly and says, “I burned off a lot of calories flirting. Can we go get frozen custard?”

  “No way.” Darcy shakes her head. “That’s so unhealthy. I brought snacks!”

  It’s not a real trip to the beach unless Darcy brings three books, SPF 85, and a mini-cooler—which she opens now, to take out a box of blueberries.

  “They have antioxidants!” she says. “They keep your skin young.”

  “Young?” Aviva makes a face. “What do I want with that? Darce, stop with the sunscreen and the antioxidants. We already look young. Find me a berry that makes me look twenty-one. Find me a berry that will get me into an R-rated movie.”

  Darcy’s about to lecture her, but I interrupt to keep peace.

  “Darce, you eat the blueberries,” I tell her. “The ice-cream truck is here. I’m gonna get Viva and me snacks that will make us old and fat.”

  “Ooh, Choco Tacos!” Aviva says, stretching out full-length on her towel, with sand clinging all over her wet body. “Those will do the trick!”

  “Hey, Kelly!”

  As I walk toward the ice-cream truck, shaking sand on the sidewalk with my flip-flops, Hunter Fahrenbach comes at me on his skateboard. Hunter and I are friends and have been in the school band together since freshman year. Darcy calls him Hairface Hunter, because his hair goes down past his chin—and it’s usually hanging in his face. Right now, it’s soaking wet. Actually, all of him is soaking wet—his shirt, his khaki shorts, his socks. His sneakers make squishing sounds as he stops short in front of me and gets off his skateboard.

  “I would hug you, but…” Hunter holds out his arms, displaying his wet shirt, and grins.

  “What happened to you?” I ask him, laughing.

  “I jumped off Eugene’s boat. With all my clothes on… obviously.”

  Hunter and I talk a lot during band, but we don’t hang out much outside of class. I guess it’s because he’s busy doing crazy things like hanging around the gas station and setting stuff on fire. And, apparently, jumping into Lake Michigan fully clothed.

  “What did you do this summer?” I ask him, adjusting the tankini strap because it’s rubbing against my sunburn.

  “Just hung out so far,” Hunter says, putting one foot up on his skateboard and rolling it back and forth. “I’m supposed to find a summer job, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “Um, you know school starts tomorrow, right?” I ask him, smiling.

  “Oh, crap, right,” Hunter says, looking up at me from under his hair. He breaks out smiling when he sees me smiling. “I guess I can stop job hunting, then!”

  He takes his foot off his skateboard and asks, “What have you been up to?”

  “I worked at a music camp,” I tell him. “I taught the cutest little kids.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Hunter says. “The Lieutenant will be happy with you.”

  I laugh. The Lieutenant is our band teacher, who was in the Marines for ten years. She makes us call her Lieutenant, and also makes us play patriotic music at every single concert. My dad refuses to videotape our performances anymore, because he’s so sick of the “Armed Forces Medley.”

  “Oh, guess what I heard?” I say. “We’re getting a piccolo! A freshman is coming in.”

  “No way!” Hunter says. “The Lieutenant is always saying we need a piccolo. What’s that song she wants to play that has a big piccolo part?”

  “ ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ ” I say. “I know, she’s always talking about that song! But get this. This is the best part. It’s a guy!”

  “The piccolo?” Hunter says. He’s so surprised he lets his skateboard roll away from him, and he has to jog a few steps to stop it with his foot. “We’re getting a guy piccolo?”

  I’m sure there’s a male piccolo player in every orchestra in the world. But the piccolo is such a tiny, squeaky little leprechaun instrument that it seems like something a high-school guy would get beat up for playing.

  Hunter must be thinking the same thing, because he says, “That kid’s got to have balls to play that weird little thing in public.”

  Hunter sounds so… impressed… that I have to laugh.

  “Should be an interesting year,” he says. “I gotta take off. I’ll see ya tomorrow, though. Bye, dude.”

  “Bye… dude,” I say as he skates away.

  I head for the ice-cream truck, and my bad mood returns. Maybe it will be an interesting year for Hunter or an interesting year in band. But I doubt it will be an interesting year for me. It’s hard to have an interesting year when you’re the kind of girl that guys call “dude.”

  CHAPTER 3: KELLY

  “Popularity of Plaid Shorts Plummets as Preppies Flee Julius”

  Aviva Roth for The Julius Journal, September

  Happy First Day of School!” Darcy chimes when I get into her car.

  Before I can sit in her passenger seat, I have to move Darcy’s huge backpack that’s full of a month’s worth of books. Then I have to buckle my seat belt, because Darcy won’t even shift out of park until I’m buckled.

  “What are you so happy about?” I ask her irritably.

  I’m pulling on the right side of my hair, which is wet. The left side is dry. Last year I had way too many messy-bun days, so I made this resolution that I was going to blow-dry my hair every morning of junior year. But today I had time to blow-dry only one side of it before Darcy was honking outside my house. On the first day of school, Darcy drives both Aviva and me so she can force us to be on time. Every other day, Aviva drives me, and Darcy arrives freakishly early on her own.

  “All the boys are gone!” Darcy announces.

  “What? What boys?”

  I wish I could tilt Darcy’s side-view mirror so I could see the right side of my head, but she would freak out. She has very strict rules about the angles of her mirrors.

  “All the boys!” Darcy says. “All the Devine brothers transferred out of our school. And all the McKennas.”

  There are four Devine brothers, all of whom are really smart and cute and preppy. Charlie Devine, the oldest one, is president of our student senate. And there are five McKenna brothers, all of whom are amazing athletes—and also really cute. Mrs. Devine and Mrs. McKenna are really
competitive with each other. They fight over everything. They end up taking up three pages of ads in the back of the yearbook every year, because they try to one-up each other by buying more space. Mrs. Devine is always bragging about Charlie’s grades, because she’s still angry that Mrs. McKenna beat her by having that fifth son. The girls of Julius P. Heil High School are really grateful for this rivalry, because, besides being entertaining at school fairs, it’s produced so many beautiful boys for us to look at.

  “Why did they leave?” I ask. “How could they leave? They’re involved with so much stuff! Pierce McKenna is the whole reason our football team is good!”

  “Remember the budget cuts I told you about? How teachers were leaving because Julius did a salary freeze?”

  “Um, sure,” I say.

  I didn’t understand everything Darcy told me about the salary negotiations she sat in on as student senate rep. But she did report back that one teacher dropped the F-bomb when talking to our principal—although she wouldn’t tell us which teacher it was.

  “So the football coach left for this prep school in Milwaukee,” Darcy says. “And Pierce McKenna followed him, so he can get his college football scholarship or whatever. All the McKennas are going to prep school now, so once Mrs. Devine found out, she found a better prep school in Chicago, and the Devines are going there. They said it was because Mr. McDonnell left, and Charlie needed a good guidance counselor to get into Georgetown.”

  “You’re not worried that Mr. McDonnell left?” I ask Darcy as she turns onto Aviva’s street.

  Mr. McDonnell was the guidance counselor for all the really uptight kids who started taking practice SATs in the seventh grade—i.e., Darcy. Lots of Mr. McDonnell’s kids joined the band last year after there was an article in the Tribune saying playing the oboe could get you into college.

  “Please,” Darcy scoffs. “I’ve had my college essays written for eighteen months now.”

  She stops in front of Aviva’s house—the biggest of any of our houses, which is unfair, because Aviva is an only child—and honks really loudly.

  “But Charlie Devine is the president of our school,” I remind her.

  When Darcy turns to me, she’s grinning like a maniac. She shakes her head.

  “Not anymore,” she says.

  Wait. Darcy is the vice president of the student senate. And once I caught her in the school computer lab researching presidential assassinations. She said it was for a report on John F. Kennedy, but I secretly wondered if she wanted Charlie out of the way so she could take over. No wonder she’s so happy. With Charlie gone, Darcy takes over as…

  “I’m the president of the United States!” Darcy bursts out, unable to hold her announcement any longer. “I mean, of Julius P. Heil High School.”

  “Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I caution her.

  Great. Darcy is the ruler of our school. Pretty soon, Julius is going to be like Singapore—you’ll get a $500 fine for chewing gum or making out in the hallways. Oh, well. The making-out thing won’t affect me. And the boys leaving won’t affect me, either. My love life couldn’t be more nonexistent if Julius was an all-girls’ boarding school with a moat full of alligators around it. I give up on pulling on the wet side of my hair and let it go frizzy as we wait for Aviva.

  Now, I am not a morning person, but Aviva takes not being a morning person to the extreme. Every time we pick her up, she stumbles out of her house like she’s hungover—or still drunk—from some party the night before. It’s not true, because Aviva doesn’t drink, but that’s how she looks. Today she comes stumbling out of her house in a loose black off-the-shoulder top and short black shorts and immediately winces at the sun in her eyes. She fishes her big black sunglasses out of her messenger bag, puts them on, and starts clomping across her wet lawn in four-inch wedges, walking right through the spray of a rotating sprinkler.

  Darcy rolls down her window and says, “Dry yourself off before you get in my car!”

  Aviva makes some vague attempt to wipe her wet legs with her wet hands, and then gets in the backseat and curls up in the fetal position, moaning.

  “Morning, sunshine,” I say, looking back at her and grinning. “I see black is the new black?”

  “I’m in mourning!” Aviva declares dramatically.

  “You still have to buckle your seat belt,” Darcy says, waiting patiently to shift into drive.

  “What are you mourning?” I ask Aviva, watching her buckle.

  “All the boys are gone!” she whines. “Pierce McKenna left, so the other guys who wanted football scholarships left, too! All the boys are gone!”

  “Well, not all of them,” I say. Then I get nervous. “Right?”

  As Darcy pulls away from her house, Aviva starts to count on her fingers.

  “All of the Devines. That’s four. All of the McKennas, which makes nine. And then six other guys from the football team!”

  Aviva throws up her hands in despair. She ran out of fingers.

  “Fifteen boys,” she says. “Fifteen boys, and we go to the tiniest school of all time. That’s, like, sixty percent of the male population.”

  Darcy raises her eyebrows right away at that dubious calculation. Without taking her eyes off the road for a second, she corrects Aviva.

  “There are approximately two hundred fifty students at Julius P. Heil High School, so we’ll say for argument’s sake that one hundred twenty-five of them are male. If fifteen of those one hundred twenty-five left, that’s only twelve percent of the male population. Not sixty.”

  “Aha!” Aviva says, leaning forward to stick her head between our seats. “Twelve percent of the population. But sixty percent of the hotness.”

  “You shouldn’t care, anyway,” I tell her. “You already made out with most of the guys at Julius. You hooked up with two Devines and the three cutest McKennas.”

  “Yeah, but some of them I kissed before puberty,” Aviva says. “I was gonna give them a second go-around now that they have facial hair.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find someone,” I tell her. “You always do. You can reignite your imaginary relationship with that cute teacher’s assistant.”

  “He probably left, too,” Aviva says. “There’s a complete exodus of testosterone. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. Where is this horrible boy karma coming from?”

  “Maybe it’s because you always make out with boys and then refuse to talk to them,” I tell her.

  “Do they not like that?” she asks. Then she sighs and asks Darcy, “Can we go to Starbucks? I need an iced mocha to cheer me up.”

  “No! We’re turning into school right now!” Darcy says. “I have to get there early to sit in on the budget-cuts meeting with Dr. Nicholas before first period.”

  Dr. Nicholas is our principal, who everyone calls “Dr. Nicotine” because every year he tries and fails to quit smoking. I’m guessing if he has to deal with budget cuts, this will be another year he fails.

  “What budget cuts?” I ask her. “Is there other stuff besides the teachers leaving?”

  “Just frivolous stuff,” Darcy says. “Like sports and the arts.”

  “The arts?” I ask her. “What about the arts?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll find out in my meeting and tell you after,” Darcy says. “But don’t worry, Kell. I’ll fight against anything that screws us over.”

  I want to ask about band, but Darcy’s making a big show of pulling into the best space in the parking lot—the first front-row spot, the closest one to the school building. This is the school president’s spot.

  “Crap,” Aviva says as she takes off her seat belt. “This reminds me—I forgot to enter the parking raffle!”

  The parking raffle decides who gets the good spots in the Julius parking lot—the VIP parking. These spots are mostly taken up by senior and junior girls we call “spandexers” because they always wear thongs and tight stretchy pants to school. These girls are so devoted to showing off their asses that they joi
n the volleyball, field hockey, and tennis teams just so they can spend more time wearing spandex. Darcy, Aviva, and I dislike most of them. I would say they’re our enemies, but it’s pretty hard to have enemies when your entire class has sixty-five people in it. You keep bumping into them and being assigned group projects with them, and you figure out how to get along.

  Unless you’re Aviva, and you’re in a bad mood because boy karma is biting you in the ass.

  “Ugh, look at this place,” she says as she gets out of the car and sees a group of spandexers smoking and drinking coffee in an empty parking space. There’s not a boy in sight.

  “There’s so many girls,” Aviva says in disgust. “Yuck.”

  It turns out that one of the “frivolous” changes Darcy mentioned was that Julius got rid of the school band. Dr. Nicotine let the Lieutenant go. My first reaction when I heard was to wonder if the Lieutenant was the one who dropped that F-bomb. My second was to feel really bad for her. I hope she found another job, and that some school in Iowa is playing the “Armed Forces Medley” for the first time and is actually excited about it.

  After her meeting, Darcy came and found me and promised me she would lobby the school board to get band back. But for now, I’m supposed to sign up for a study hall. I don’t. Instead of going to the guidance office to change my schedule like all the other band kids do, I go to the band room, just like I have every third period since freshman year.

  The room is so depressingly… neat. The chairs on the bandstand are in perfect rows. The music stands are all the same height. This is how the Lieutenant always wanted the room to look, and now she’s not here to see it. Personally, I liked the messy chaos when there were fifty people in here—everyone tripping over the open euphonium cases, the clarinets passing around sheet music one of them forgot, the tubas emptying their spit valves onto the bandstand… okay, that last one was not sexy. Maybe I won’t miss that.