Why We Broke Up Read online

  “Oh,” I said, or something.

  Al gave me a smile of, what can you do? “Yeah.”

  “I guess I am an idiot.”

  “One of us is,” Al said simply. “There’s nothing idiotic about not thinking about me that way, Min. Most people don’t.”

  “That girl in LA,” I said. “Oh.”Of course, again. “Whose idea was that?”

  “That movie Kiss Me, Fool.”

  “But that’s a terrible movie.”

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t work, making that up,” Al said. “You didn’t get jealous.”

  “She sounded nice,” I said wistfully.

  “I just,” Al said, “described you.”

  Then where were you, is what I wanted to say, all my lonely times, but right next to me, I knew, was where. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would it have mattered?”

  I sighed shakily at the end of my rope. I said a thing, made some noise, in order not to say probably.

  “Well, I’m telling you now, I guess.”

  “Now that I’m in love.”

  “You aren’t,” Al said, “the only one.”

  It was a true heart he had, Ed. Has, still, leaving to pull his truck around so I can finish. But that morning—November 12—I didn’t have a place to put it, I could hardly hold these postcards of old dangers and disasters. I was blinking, I knew, too many times. In a sec the bell was going to ring.

  “It’s a lot, I know,” Al said. “And you don’t have to, you know, feel the same or anything.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Yes, then, don’t do anything,” he said. “That’s fine too, Min. Really. But let’s stop, like, scowling at each other and not talking. Let’s have coffee.”

  I was shaking my head. “I have a test,” I said stupidly.

  “Well, not now. But sometime. You know, at Federico’s. We haven’t in forever.”

  “Sometime,” I said, not quite in agreement, but Al said “OK” and lifted one foot like he does, balance-beamy, like there was a part of the place we had to be careful on.

  “OK,” I said too.

  He looked like he wanted to say something else. He should have. I didn’t want him to. It wouldn’t have mattered. “OK, though? Is it?”

  “OK,” I said again, and again, and then I said I had to go.

  Here we are at the bottom, almost empty. It’s like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful.

  Lauren told me when we hung out that weekend that you must have wanted to be found out, that you wanted it over and that’s why we ended up at Willows after practice. I think and think about it. But what I think is you were just outmaneuvered. I’d seen it happen at games, suddenly the others upon you and the ball gone the sec your eyes wandered, the very moment of distraction. When you were cocky sometimes it happened, or not enough sleep. “God I need coffee,” you told me, out of the gym. “Extra cream, three sugars.”

  I, the idiot, waved at Annette and took your arm to walk you away. “On the way to Willows,” I said.

  “What? Not home?”

  “Joan’s getting tired of me,” I said. “Plus I want to go to Lottie Carson’s place. Today’s the day to invite her.”

  “OK, all the way out there,” you said, “but why Willows? You said you never wanted flowers.”

  “They’re for her,” I said. “Then we can have coffee at Fair Grounds while I write to her on one of these.”

  “One of whats?”

  “Look. Cool, huh? She was in a volcano movie.”

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “Al got them.”

  “So you guys are better now?”

  “Yeah, we’re OK.”

  “Good. He must be getting laid, he was getting too crazy Todd says, even in class. That girl from LA come out for a visit?”

  “Long story,” I said.

  You nodded dismissively and then remembered you were supposed to listen to such things. “Tell me over coffee,” you said.

  “Flowers first.”

  “Min, I don’t know. Flowers? Why?”

  “Because she’s a movie star,” I said, “and we’re, like, high school kids.”

  “Let’s have coffee and talk about it.”

  “No, you told me Willows closes early.”

  “Yeah,” you admitted, good at math. “That’s why I said coffee first.”

  “Ed.”

  “Min.”

  We stood cross at one another but knowing, at least me, it was another cute bicker. “You still aren’t wearing the earrings,” you said, like this might get you your way.

  “I told you,” I said. “They’re fancy, kind of.”

  “That’s not what she said when I bought them.”

  “She who?”

  “I don’t know,” you goddamn stammered. “The jewelry store lady.”

  “Well, they are. We can go somewhere fancy, then I’ll wear them.” This was a hint, I wish I didn’t have to admit, that you would ask me to the Holiday Formal. You hadn’t, you didn’t, you are swine. “Right now, though, it’s Willows. Come on.”

  I dragged you, sweaty and wriggling, down the two or three blocks, your legs moving in a choppy tiptoe like you had to pee, some exaggerated dance that still spelled out grace. Your hand squirmy in mine like a caught frog, your hair needing cutting, your lips bitten and wet. Wish it was the last time I found you beautiful, Ed. I could have let you go then, pushed back your kisses and toppled us into traffic instead of the way you haunt my hallways now. I should have had a feeling right then, in the last crosswalk as the light changed, because instead—

  The Willows door beeped open. Inside was a hothouse of choices among which you hemmed and shrugged. “What does it mean?” I asked. “You’ve done more flowers than I have.”

  “Um.”

  “Though I guess not in a while, huh? These are pretty. Lily.”

  “Um.”

  “Some of these are so lovely I never should have said the thing about flowers. I should have fought with you and fought with you just to get them.”

  “Um.”

  “Do you do them in that old-fashioned code, like daffodils mean I’m sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you? Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?” I was a stupid marionette in there, spritely and thinking I was cute when all the while it was a jerky joke even kids found tedious. “What’s the one for happy birthday? Or please come to our party? What’s flower code for you don’t know me but if you are who we think you are, we love your work and my boyfriend and I have been organizing an elegant affair for your eighty-ninth, please come? How do you say make my dreams come true?”

  “You must be Annette.”

  No, that wasn’t it.

  “How are you, Ed?” the flower guy said, bald with glasses on a necklace of beads. I told myself he hadn’t said that or I hadn’t heard him or I was not hearing you staying silent, even as he shook my hand. “So nice to put a name to a face finally.”

  “No, Ambrose,” you said finally. “We’re just looking for—”

  “I know what you’re looking for,” he said in a wavery coo, and crossed to a wall of fridges. “Saving me the delivery charges. I’ll knock ten bucks off your mother’s account, Ed. Do you know his mother, Annette?” He shut the door and walked toward me in a flashing shrub of scarlet. “She’s loved flowers forever,” he said, and placed it in my hands, sparkling, an impressive arrangement, tall in a vase chilly in my hand. Red roses. Everybody knows what that means.

  “Those aren’t for her,” you said suddenly, and this was also, Ed, the wrong goddamn thing.

  “You’re not Annette?”

  Annette, it was still taking me a sec. It was the name on the little envelope, offered up on a plastic spear like a spit in my face. For a girlfriend, red ro
ses would have to be, and that was me. So I took it, the envelope cold too, and sharp on the edges.

  “No,” you said quietly.

  Ed, they were very, very beautiful to see.

  “I’d like to see,” I found myself lying, “what you wrote to—” I’d already scraggled it open. The gasp in the room must have been, embarrassing, mine.

  I can’t stop thinking about you.

  It was an ocean, a canyon of awful. I couldn’t see it, some scene in a flower shop. Stop gulping, is what I thought to myself. Your expression is moronic in the reflection of the glass door. And now she’s going to say, I’d predict scornfully sitting through this movie at home, How long has this been going on?

  And I said it.

  “Min—”

  “I mean, it seems like awhile,” I said, the word slimy in my mouth, “because, I mean, you can’t stop thinking of her.” The florist put his hand on his face. All the gay talk, I had time to think, and look who knows your boy-girl secrets, Ed.

  “Min, I was trying to tell you.”

  “But this isn’t for me,” I said, and something crinkled in my fist. There was a crash on the floor, the crash of letting something go.

  “Min, I love you.”

  “And you can’t stop thinking of me,” I said, “is what it was in your note.” My head rattled with bad arithmetic. You must have stopped thinking of me because you couldn’t stop with Annette. I thought of her in the chains, the ax, and closed my fist around those goddamn petals right here. Couldn’t stop thinking of who, I thought, a fraction I couldn’t add up in my head. I needed help, but you’re the only one good with a fucking protractor.

  “Min, listen—”

  “I am!” I shouted. “Listening!” I threw the envelope—now she’s going to throw the envelope in his face—in your face. “Are you—when did—”

  “Look, first of all I never said we wouldn’t see other people.”

  “Bullshit!” I said. “We said that very thing!”

  “I said I didn’t want to see anybody else,” you said, back on the noisy bus, for a sec it was Halloween and I felt the night air on my arms, “not that—”

  “Bullshit! You said you loved me!”

  “I do, Min, but Annette, you know, she lives right nearby. And you know we’ve stayed friends. I mean, you have guy friends, you know how it is, and I’ve never given you a hard time about it—”

  “She lives nearby?”

  “So she’d come over some nights, just for homework or whatever. She never got on with Joan, so we’d always be upstairs.”

  “Oh God.”

  “She likes basketball, Min. I don’t know. Her dad used to be friends with mine. She’s a good listener. And yes, mostly it was just friends.”

  “You—did you sleep with her?” Nights I began to add up, when we didn’t talk on the phone, or did but quickly. Joan mad and evasive answering, stomping upstairs to fetch you. I was a good listener, I am one. I was listening to all of it. But now, then, you didn’t say anything. Just the water rivering on the floor, an answer I knew, gone out of the pretty vase.

  “Look, Min, I know you don’t believe me, but this is hard. For me too. It’s awful, it’s weird, it’s like I was two people and one of them was, yes, Min, really—really really happy with you. I did love you, I do. But then at night Annette would knock on my window and it was just like something else, like a secret I didn’t even know about—”

  The room rattled, the glass doors of the fridge. You stopped talking. I must have screamed, I thought.

  “Min, please. It was—we’re—it’s different, you know that.” You had the same look from the court again, thinking quick strategy. “There must be some—I don’t know, like a movie, right? Isn’t there some movie where it’s like there’s two guys, twins I think, one guy doing the right thing and—”

  “This isn’t a movie,” I said. “We’re not movie stars. We’re—oh my God. Oh my God.”

  I was staring at something else now, staring. How many, I wondered, terrible things would be projected in front of me, bad scenes in worse movies, stupid mistakes, how many travesties that had to be torn off the walls?

  “Hey,” said the flower guy. “Wait.”

  I shook my wrist out of his hand and kept ripping. I’d tear it all down, I thought, wreck whatever the fuck I wanted and anyone who tried to stop me. “Wait,” the guy said again, “wait. I realize you’re upset and, well, part of it is my fault. But you can’t vandalize my store. That’s mine, dear. She always meant the world to me and I’ll never find that again if you—”

  I ran out with both hands full roaring. Nobody on the sidewalk cared. The air was too cold, like I’d forgotten my coat, and then unbearably close and hot in my mouth, my body. You came after me. My fucking virginity, I realized with a churning lurch. You had seen everything, you had everything. Showering together. Your body inside mine. You had every scrap of skin, and I had a handful of petals in one hand, somebody else’s flowers, and this in the other. How many times had you been in Willows, seen it right there tacked to the wall next to a picture of kittens hanging from a tree, all bug-eyed sad, with a stupid caption everybody’s seen a million times?

  “Did you know about this?” I stormed at you.

  You gave another fury-making shrug. “Min, I didn’t understand—”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, trying to hang in there. “Are you—did you dump me for another girl and I didn’t even know it?”

  You blinked like maybe it was a close guess.

  “And then this? This? And you never—”

  “You’re the one,” you said, “Min, who said, you always said even if it isn’t! You said that even if it isn’t—”

  “You knew and didn’t tell me?”

  Nothing from you.

  “Tell me!”

  “I don’t know,” you said. Beautiful in the dimming sun. I could have touched you, wanted to, couldn’t stand it. Who were you, Ed? What could I do with you?

  “What’s the other choice?” I cried. “What else is there?”

  “Min, it’s different,” you said, but I was shaking my head so violently. “You are! You’re—”

  “Don’t fucking say arty! I’m not arty!”

  “—different” which was what shattered me. I fled down the street because it was not true. It wasn’t. It wasn’t and it isn’t. You’re a goddamn athlete and could have caught me without breaking a sweat but, Ed, you didn’t, you weren’t there when I reached a far lost corner and stood heaving with my hands full of all I had left. It wasn’t true, Ed, I was going to scream it at you when you called my name, but you were gone, it wasn’t you. Of all people Jillian Beach was there, in that car her dad bought her shiny with bumpers and bad music at the red light. She was my best friend, Ed, is how fucking low you threw me to. She just opened her passenger door, and I sobbed everywhere. She turned off the radio, of all people, and didn’t ask anything. Later it came to me seeing her avoid my gaze at the lockers that she must have already known what it meant to find me there alone sobbing, that I’d finally found out. But then it just seemed magic and gratefully extraordinary that she said nothing and let me cry desperate and ugly in her car, drove calmly where she knew I needed to go, and then stopped. She reached across me and opened the door. She gave me my bag even with my hands full and, Ed, a kiss, even, a kiss on my weepy cheek. A little push. I was hiccuping now, it couldn’t be worse, but I saw what she meant and stumbled through the door. The few people looked up at the girl crying, and Al rose from the table where we always sit at Federico’s if we can, his face pale and grave while I cried and cried and told him the truth of it.

  And the truth is that I’m not, Ed, is what I wanted to tell you. I’m not different. I’m not arty like everyone says who doesn’t know me, I don’t paint, I can’t draw, I play no instrument, I can’t sing. I’m not in plays, I wanted to say, I don’t write poems. I can’t dance except tipsy at dances. I’m not athletic, I’m not a goth or a cheerlea
der, I’m not treasurer or co-captain. I’m not gay and out and proud, I’m not that kid from Sri Lanka, not a triplet, a prep, a drunk, a genius, a hippie, a Christian, a slut, not even one of those super-Jewish girls with a yarmulke gang wishing everyone a happy Sukkoth. I’m not anything, this is what I realized to Al crying with my hands dropping the petals but holding this too tight to let go. I like movies, everyone knows I do—I love them—but I will never be in charge of one because my ideas are stupid and wrong in my head. There’s nothing different about that, nothing fascinating, interesting, worth looking at. I have bad hair and stupid eyes. I have a body that’s nothing. I’m too fat and my mouth is idiotic ugly. My clothes are a joke, my jokes are desperate and complicated and nobody else laughs. I talk like a moron, I can’t say one thing to talk to people that makes them like me, I just babble and sputter like a drinking fountain broken. My mother hates me, I can’t please her. My dad never calls and then calls at the wrong time and sends big gifts or nothing, and all of it makes me scowl at him, and he named me Minerva. I talk shit about everybody and then sulk when they don’t call me, my friends fall away like I’ve dropped them out of an airplane, my ex-boyfriend thinks I’m Hitler when he sees me. I scratch at places on my body, I sweat everywhere, my arms, the way I clumsy around dropping things, my average grades and stupid interests, bad breath, pants tight in back, my neck too long or something. I’m sneaky and get caught, I’m snobby and faking it, I agree with liars, I say whatnot and think that’s some clever thing. I have to be watched when I cook so I don’t burn it down. I can’t run four blocks or fold a sweater. I make out like an imbecile, I fool around foolishly, I lost my virginity and couldn’t even do that right, agreeing to it and getting sad and annoying afterward, clinging to a boy everyone knows is a jerk bastard asshole prick, loving him like I’m fucking twelve and learning the whole of life from a smiley magazine. I love like a fool, like a Z-grade off-brand romantic comedy, a loon in too much makeup saying things in an awkward script to a handsome man with his own canceled comedy show. I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing. I’m a blemished blemish, a ruined ruin, a stained wreck so failed I can’t see what I used to be. I’m nothing, not a single thing. The only particle I had, the only tiny thing raising me up, is that I was Ed Slaterton’s girlfriend, loved by you for like ten secs, and who cares, so what, and not anymore so how embarrassing for me. How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved. It’s not, it isn’t, catastrophic to think so, a pudgy toddler in a living room dreaming of ballerinas, a girl in bed star-eyed over Never by Candlelight, a nut thinking she is loved following a stranger in the street. There is not a movie star walking by, is what I know now, don’t follow her thinking so, don’t be ridiculously wrong and dream of an eighty-ninth birthday party celebrating feebleminded smattering ignorance. It’s gone. She died a long time ago, is the real truth of what slayed me in my chest and head and hands forever. There are no stars in my life. When Al dropped me home, exhausted and raw, to climb out over the garage and realize it all over again crying alone, there weren’t even stars in the sky. The last of the matches was the only light, all I had, and then those, those you gave me you bastard, those were dead and nothing too.