Jamie’s eyes boring into my brain. Don’t let her catch you thinking about her, I thought. Ah, I mean—shit.
Then Mr. Haggerty called out, “Ruby Ocampo,” and I looked up.
You know those people who were a little too good-looking as fifth graders? Like, so good-looking that you knew, as a fifth grader yourself, that something deeply and biologically unfair was afoot? Before fifth grade, my classmates and I were on pretty equal footing, looks-wise—all of us barefaced and missing teeth, wearing braids and ponytails that hung loose and weird by the end of each day. Back then the only person fit for a crush was my teacher, Ms. Urlacher, who had a bottle-blond newscaster blowout and wore blue mascara and Britney Spears perfume. (I knew this because she kept a bottle on her desk, and once I’d pretended to leave something behind so I could run back and sniff it.)
Then fifth grade started, and a few of the girls I thought I knew came back to school so pretty it embarrassed me to look at them. That was when I learned two very important things: one, that I was super gay, and two, that life wasn’t fair.
Ruby didn’t go to my elementary school, or my middle school for that matter, but I knew, I just knew she’d been one of those fifth-grade girls. You could see it in her face, in the way she sat in her chair: the mind-numbing boredom of lifelong beauty.
When Mr. Haggerty called Ruby’s name, she didn’t say anything. She just lifted the hand she’d been using to hold her head up. She was seated across the room from me, so it was easy to get away with looking at her, which I felt like I hadn’t done in forever. When Jamie and I were together, other girls stopped existing to me. But way, way back before Jamie and I got together, I had a not-so-tiny crush on Ruby. So did Jamie. Once we figured out we both liked girls, but before we figured out we liked each other, we spent a gleeful afternoon listing all the girls we thought were prettiest at school. All of them were straight, just like everyone we knew. And lo, the Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t list was born. It was a joke, obviously, and I’d fully forgotten at least five of the fifteen or so names we’d written. I no longer knew where the physical list was, and I kind of hoped I’d never find it. But I would never forget writing Ruby’s name in the number-one spot. She still belonged there. That much, at least, hadn’t changed.
Ruby was—how to put this?—so hot I wanted to die. Her hair was incredible: long, shiny, and black, the tips currently dyed emerald green. This was one of her signatures. In fact, I had a theory that Beauty Supply Warehouse based its Manic Panic stocking decisions on the color of Ruby’s tips. When she showed up to school with a new shade, it was like a pandemic: at first there would be one alt-girl copycat with a streak in the same color, and then there were three, and suddenly there were twelve. Ruby had the kind of hair you’d naively bring a picture of to your salon, as if there were any way a mere mortal could turn the mess on your head into that.
Ruby also had high cheekbones, straight teeth, a sharp jaw. All the desirable adjectives, correctly applied. Back in freshman year, the unconfirmed rumor (circulated thanks to Alexis) was that her bra size was 32E. I hadn’t known such a size existed.
I was for sure staring, I realized. I returned my attention to the front of the room, but the problem was that nothing there was hot or interesting. Slowly my eyes crept back. While I was sure my newfound singleness was as visibly disfiguring as a horn growing out of my forehead, Ruby looked refreshed, light, happy. For her, anyway. She wasn’t a big smiler, so it was hard to say. Maybe I was reading too much into nothing because of what Alexis had told us. Maybe it wasn’t even true. But every time I looked at Ruby during class (and it was a lot of times), I felt a tiny but inarguable