E. Lockhart - The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them

acknowledgments

Thank you to Marissa for hacking out the boring footnotes and making the whole thing so much better. And to Beverly, Chip, Kathleen and everyone else at Delacorte Press, especially the sales force, for all their hard work and support of my books. I am always and muchly in debt to Elizabeth for her stellar and unflagging representation.

I am grateful to the people in my YA novelists newsgroup for their wonderful humor and insight about the publishing and writing process.

Thank you also to the FOZ (friends of Zoe)Julia, Anne, Vanessa and Mikawho gamely took the John Belushi pop-reference quiz, thus enabling this book to be (hopefully) full of footnotes and film references that are entertaining and semi-informative, rather than un-. Most of all, my appreciation to Zoe, quiz administrator extraordinaire, who also helped me figure out how to end the book.

Thanks to Bellamy Pailthorp and Melissa Greeley for helping me get the Seattle details right, though I know I completely reinvented the Woodland Park Zoo for my own literary purposes.

My love and thanks to my immediate family and felines, although for accuracys sake it must be noted that the cat Mercy Randolph caused more problems than she solved.

ALSO BY e. lockhart

The Boyfriend List

Fly on the Wall

Excerpt copyright 2006 by E. Lockhart Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything is about a girl called Gretchen Kaufman Yee who goes to a wacked-out art school in New York City. Gretchen is a collector of plastic Chinese food and odd figurines, a passionate comic-book artist, and a crazy Spider-Man fanatic. Shes also completely freaked out by the opposite sexin particular, the Art Rats, a group of guys in her drawing concentration. One day, she wishes she could be a fly on the wall of the boys locker room, just to find out what the heck guys are really talking about.

And the next thing she knowsshe is.

Afly.

On the wall of the boys locker room.

I think this might be the best YA novel, as in a book published for young adults and also written for young adults, that Ive ever read. Because its a reworking of Kafka, and its this crazy brilliant upending of all the sexual stereotypes weve ever hadparticularly in YA litand its hilarious, and its so very smart. I mean, Im serious. Its really amazing.

John Green, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Looking for Alaska

f riday. I am eating alone in the lunchroom.

Again.

Ever since Katya started smoking cigarettes, shes hanging out back by the garbage cans, lighting up with the Art Rats. She bags her lunch, so she takes it out there and eats potato chips in a haze of nicotine.

I hate smoking, and the Art Rats make me nervous. So here I am: in my favorite corner of the lunchroom, sitting on the floor with my back against the wall. Im eating fries off a tray and drawing my own stuffnot anything for class.

Quadriceps. Quadriceps.

Knee.

Calf muscle.

Dull point; must sharpen pencil.

Hell! Pencil dust in fries.

Whatever. They still taste okay.

Calf muscle.

Ankle.

Foot.

KA-POW! Spider-Man smacks Doctor Octopus off the edge of the building with a swift kick to the jaw. Ocks face contorts as he falls backward, his metal tentacles flailing with hysterical fear. He has an eighty-story fall beneath him, and

Spidey has a great physique. Built, but not too built. Even if I did draw him myself.

I think I made his butt too small.

Do-over.

I wish I had my pink eraser, I dont like this white one.

Butt.

Butt.

Connecting to: legandquadriceps.

There. A finished Spidey outline. I have to add the suit. And some shadowing. And the details of the building. Then fill in the rest of Doc Ock as he hurtles off the edge.

Mmmm. French fries.

Hell again! Ketchup on Spidey.

Lick it off.

Cammie Holmes is staring at me like Im some lower form of life.

What are you looking at? I mutter.

Nothing.

Then. Stop. Staring, I say, sharpening my pencil again, though it doesnt need it.

This Cammie is all biscuits. Shes stacked like a character in a comic book. Cantaloupes are strapped to her chest.

Her only redeeming quality.

Why are you licking your Superman drawing? Cammie tips her nose up. Thats so kinky. I mean, Ive heard of licking a centerfold, but licking Superman?

Spider.

What?

Spider-Man.

Whatever. Get a life, Gretchen.

Shes gone. From across the lunchroom comes her nasal voice: Taffy, get this: I just caught Gretchen Yee giving oral to some Superman drawing she made.

Spider. Spider. Spider-Man.

She would. Taffy Johnson. Stupid tinkly laugh.

Superman is a big meathead. Id never draw Superman. Much less give him oral.

I havent given anybody oral, anyway.

I hate those girls.

Taffy is doing splits in the middle of the lunchroom floor, which is just gross. Who wants to see her crotch like that? Though of course everybody does, and even if they didnt, she wouldnt care because shes such a unique spirit or whatever.

I hate those girls, and I hate this place: the Manhattan High School for the Arts. Also known as Ma-Ha.

Supposedly, its a magnet high school for students talented in drawing, painting, sculpture or photography. You have to submit a portfolio to get in, and when I did mine (which was all filled with inks of comic-book characters I taught myself to draw in junior high) and when I finally got my acceptance letter, my parents were really excited. But once youre here, its nothing but an old, ugly New York public school building, with angry teachers and crap facilities like any other city public schoolexcept Ive got drawing class every day, painting once a week and art history twice. Im in the drawing program.

Socially, Ma-Ha is like the terrible opposite of the schools you see on television, where everyone wants to be the same as everyone else. On TV, if you dont conform and wear what the popular kids are wearing, and talk like they talk, and act like they dothen youre a pariah.

Here, everyone wants to be different.

People have mohawks and dreadlocks and outrageous thrift-store clothes; no one would be caught dead in ordinary jeans and a T-shirt, because theyre all so into expressing their individuality. A girl from the sculpture program wears a sari every day, even though her familys Scandinavian. Theres that kid whos always got that Pink Panther doll sticking out of her jacket pocket; the boy who smokes using a cigarette holder like they did in forties movies; a girl whos shaved her head and pierced her cheeks; Taffy, who does Martha Grahamtechnique modern dance and wears her leotard and sweats all day; and Cammie, who squeezes herself into tight goth outfits and paints her lips vampire red.

They all fit in here, or take pride in not fitting in, if that makes any senseand if youre an ordinary person youve got to do something at least, like dye your hair a strange color, because nothing is scorned so much as normalcy. Everyones a budding genius of the art scene; everyones on the verge of a breakthrough. If youre a regular-looking person with regular likes and dislikes and regular clothes, and you can draw so it looks like the art in a comic book, but you cant express your interior life on the page, according to Kensington (my drawing teacher), and if you cant draw what you see, rather than imitate whats in that third-rate trash you like to read (Kensington again), then youre nothing at Ma-Ha.