Why We Broke Up Read online

  “Do not put this down,” you said, slipping my backpack onto my shoulder. “Don’t put anything down you don’t want in the fire. I’m getting us beer.”

  “You know I don’t like it,” I said. By now I’d told you about dumping the Scarpia’s at Al’s Bitter Sixteen.

  “Min,” you said, “you really don’t want to be sober for this,” and you jaunted off, having a point, I thought. I stood for a sec wondering now what? and thought about sitting on some logs felled nearby, like some pioneers had canceled a cabin last minute, but don’t put anything down you don’t want in the fire, I remembered, and, anyway, the great flames were beckoning with their sheer light, inescapable and mighty. I stepped closer, closer still, the camera I could see close on my face, letting the shivering light of the fire make a nice visual on my brow. Searched my pockets for something I could add. Found my ticket, the one you left for the game, made it smoke in a sec. Kept staring, still staring, the fire so glorious in my eyes that the music started sounding good, even. Stared some more, my brain so deep in the bonfire that I startled hard at the hand on my shoulder.

  “Almost too close,” said Jillian Beach, your goddamn ex-girlfriend. “Your first bonfire, right?”

  “Sort of,” I said, feeling my arms cross.

  “We knew it,” said the girl who was with her. “It always happens, getting too close when someone’s never seen it before. It’s like the fire attracts the virgins, ha-ha.”

  They were both looking slyly at me. I wanted a beer. “Ha-ha,” I said. “It’s true my hymen is extremely flammable.”

  They laughed, but only sort of. “Okaaay,” Jillian said, with that weird curve she uses in her voice sometimes, airy but spiky like a bug-eating plant. “That was kinda funny but kinda weird.”

  “Happens all the time,” I said, another movie I love that you’ll never see.

  They looked me over. Both of them were skinnier, and at least one of them, not Jillian, was also prettier. “I’m Annette,” that one said.

  “Min,” I said, yanking back my hand when I saw we weren’t supposed to shake. “Short for Minerva, Roman goddess of—”

  “Okaaay,” Jillian said in that way again. “First, everyone knows you, they all found out. And B, when you meet somebody, you don’t have to give a whole speech, history of the world. Min is fine. Later people can hear your medical history.”

  “Jillian’s drunk,” Annette said quickly. “Also, you know, she and Ed used to go out.”

  “Like last week,” Jillian said. “You say it like it was the eighteen-whatevers.”

  “This is her first bonfire, since,” Annette said. “You know, it’s hard for her.”

  “You’re making it hard,” she spat.

  “Jillian—”

  “I didn’t even want to go over to her. I didn’t.”

  “I’ll get her out of here,” Annette said to me.

  “I don’t need your help getting out of here,” she said, though her tipsy stomp called that a lie. “Nice to meet you, Greek goddess of bye-bye.”

  She waggled her fingers, and her beer frothed over the thick rings on her hands, the kind of jewelry all wrong for me. Annette stepped closer and we watched her go through a plume of sudden smoke—the wind changed, I guess.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I love being in a soap opera.”

  “Kinda no choice tonight,” Annette said. “When Jillian does her vodka thing…”

  “I know I’m stupid about my name,” I said to my shoes. “I learned it a long time ago and I just keep saying it. I should stop.”

  “No, it’s cool.”

  “No, I sound like an idiot.”

  “Well, it’s cool your name has a story. I’m just Annette, like a little Ann, you know? If you can’t afford the regular Ann, there’s Ann-ette, marked down.”

  “There’s Annette DuBois,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, who’s she again?”

  “An old movie star,” I said. “Did you ever see Call Me a Cab? Or Night Watchgirl?”

  Annette shook her head. Somebody tossed planks into the fire, but you could still smell the pot from behind a bush.

  “Call Me a Cab’s so great. Annette DuBois plays the dispatcher, flirting with everybody through the car radios. She likes Guy Oncose best, but one day this actress gets into his cab and makes him read from the script so she can practice her home-wrecker scene, and Annette DuBois hears them and thinks he’s a cad.”

  “Like a driver?”

  “No, cad, it means an asshole. A guy who’s mean to women.”

  “That’s everybody.” She took a long sip.

  “Well, Annette starts giving him the bad jobs, like driving to the wrong part of town, and she’s living with her mom who’s played by Rose Mondrian who’s always great.”

  “OK, OK, I’ll see it.”

  “She’s so beautiful. You could, she has this hat she wears, Annette DuBois, I mean, you’d look great in.”

  She smiled at me, her teeth so shiny they showed little parts of the bonfire. “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, and where was my boyfriend?

  “Ed’s right about you,” she said. “You’re different.”

  “Arty,” I said. “I know. Can I have some of yours?”

  She handed me the plastic cup. “He never said arty.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just different. He likes you, Min.”

  I sipped, I liked beer, hated beer, sipped again. “I didn’t realize you were close.”

  “I’m, like, the only ex-girlfriend he talks to.”

  “Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, but then remembered what everybody knew and stood biting my lips next to her, grateful that the bonfire made everyone, not just me, appear to be blushing.

  “Oh,” she said back at me.

  “Sorry, I—”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Annette, I didn’t think.”

  “Right. You remember something else besides an old movie now, huh?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You already said that, and I already said OK. Junior prom was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “So we keep in touch, me and Ed.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That’s what everybody says. The least we could do, or something, or me. Like it means it didn’t happen, or happened less, anyway. Anyway, we’re nice to each other, and he says really nice things about you.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Thought you should know,” Annette said. Her eyes were shiny in the night as we were quiet together watching the fire, and I finished her beer instead of saying something more. I kept thinking, I thought of everything. I thought of Three Lost Brides, in which the women who’ve all been married to the same man meet accidentally and then shriek at each other and then plan his murder and then—unsatisfying in the movie, with Al snorting derisive about it—forgive him and hold hands in the credits. The ex-girlfriend club, I thought, Ed Slaterton Chapter; I’d have to join eventually if I had to think about it, not like we were going to be forever. I mean, who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn’t know how things played out. I thought how I only wave at Joe if I see him in the halls, how that can’t even count as still talking to him, let alone staying friends like we promised we would when we ended it. But most of all, in the blaze and clatter of the park, I tried to put it together how I saw it then and how I saw it before, turning it over like a toy in my hand, the way it’s different again now with you, with your friends gone from my Fridays and no more bonfires lighting up my eyes in the park and you just an ex-boyfriend about to get his stuff thrown back on his doorstep. Because right then, the planks collapsing and the sparks jumping up to the moon, you were my date for the night, and your friends, your exes, were like old wooden stairs, unreliable and full of strange creaks, only certain ones I could trust and only after testing them to find out. It w
as a world I was in, shouty with mascots and nowhere to put my stuff if I didn’t want it burned away. But before, not so long ago—my own rose from prom still OK on the mirror, dried but not a corpse—you were just Ed Slaterton, jocky hero, handsome in the student newspaper and star of a million strands of gossip. Now Annette was a person to me, standing right there, and not just an oh-my-God-have-you-heard, and you were something else fierce and fiery in my chest and I tried to put it together in my head, the print and the negative, the boyfriend and the celebrity shadow, like Theodora Sire sat next to me in history, borrowing pencils, but was still a movie star above my bed. Because as you came out of the dark to me, you were the boy I was kissing and wanted to kiss more, back to find me at a party like anybody might do, but you were Ed Slaterton too, and not the cad you are now, but just Ed Slaterton, co-captain, with a beer in your hand and Jillian Beach on your arm.

  “OK,” she was saying. “See? She’s fine. You can talk to me for a minute without your precious Minerva disappearing.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jillian,” Annette said.

  “Hi,” you said to me. “Sorry that took a while. I got you a beer.”

  “Got one already,” I said, holding up my empty cup.

  “Then that one’s mine,” Jillian said, grabbing your hand holding it. You moved away but, Ed, not fast enough, so it was Annette who came to the rescue.

  “Come on,” she said, already dragging Jillian. “We’ll both get beers.”

  “They only give the captain the good stuff,” she said.

  “Co-captain,” you said, idiot, very wrong answer.

  “Jillian,” Annette said. “See you later, Min.”

  “Min,” Jillian sneered. “The artsy fag hag at a bonfire. How long can this thing go?” but Annette got her out of there like snarling Doris Quinner at the end of Truth on Trial. I tossed my empty cup. You gave me the beer you’d brought.

  “I’m really sorry,” you said.

  “It’s OK” is what came out of my teeth.

  “I know you’re mad at me,” you said. “I should have kept you next to me. Everyone wanted to say hello. They do it every game I win.”

  “OK.”

  “But I wanted to find you this surprise, is where I went.”

  “Surprise!” I said. “A beer at a bonfire!”

  “Not that.”

  “Surprise!” I said. “Your ex-girlfriend yelling drunk at me!”

  You shook your head. “She’s,” you said, “well, she’s OK, Jillian, but you can’t seriously be jealous. Look at her.”

  “Most people would say,” I said, “that she’s beautiful.”

  “That’s because she’s been with most people,” you said.

  “Including you.”

  You shrugged at me, like you couldn’t help it, she was right there on the plate. But then you took your other hand from behind your back and rolled this into my hand, small, heavy, cold, your fingernails dirty, your fingers curled around it until I held it up to the light of the fire.

  “Toy truck,” I said, but the truth I’m telling you is that I’m lousy at the pout, already warming to you knowing this would smooth it fine.

  “I know it’s stupid, kinda,” you said, “but I always look for them here. And you, Min, you are the only girl, person, who would even get this. I mean, no offense. Wait, forget I said that last thing, shit. But you are, Min.”

  I could not, of course not, not smile at you. “Tell me,” I said.

  You sigh-shrugged. “Well, kids lose them. Boys. They bring them, their favorites anyway, to play traffic-jam pileup over by the wall there, the curved part by where the sand is, you know? See?”

  You were pointing at sheer blackness, nothing at all in that direction in the dark. See? You’d said “traffic-jam pileup” like it was a real thing everyone said, “World War Two” or “love at first sight.”

  “And—?”

  “And, it’s like I used to,” you said. “I’d do it, and of course sometimes lose them, or a kid snitches them, bigger, like a bully, or you just forget them buried in a pile of sand. But, Min, I know it’s lame, but those were my saddest times. I’d cry my eyes out when I realized, beg my mom in the middle of the night to take me back here to find them. Nobody got it, it’s just a toy or you have plenty of cars or it’s your responsibility to take care of your things. But I was so lost without them, those times when I lost them. So now I always look and I always, Min, you can always find at least one. And I know it’s weird, or mean, even, because I should probably leave them there in case, although they were always gone, of course, if I ever got to go back in the morning. I’d give them back if I could, I wouldn’t torture someone like that, whatever boy lost them. But this feels better, like the right thing. I find them and I look, I’ve always looked, for someone to give them to, who didn’t think Slaterton was crazy. I know it’s stupid, like somehow I can make it right, all the ones I lost, it’s stupid—”

  I was kissing you by now, one hand tight around the little truck and the other in your hair, still short and still no combing like the little boy you were, crying in this same park. Hard I kissed you, like that too, would make it right, the right thing to do this wild, strange Friday night.

  “How do you like your first bonfire?” you said in my ear.

  “It got better,” I said.

  More kissing, more.

  “But tomorrow we’ll do my end of it?” I said. “Tomorrow?”

  “Your end?”

  Trying not to think of Jillian (How long can this thing go?), my friends frowning with their bad grilled cheese. “My turn, my side, however you want to say it. Like, of the see-saw. The thing I want to do.”

  “Another movie?”

  “If there’s time, but Tip Top Goods for sure, remember? I told you, and you said Joan would let you have the car.”

  “Yes. Whatever you want.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  More.

  “But tonight’s not over,” you said.

  “Yes. What do we—”

  “Well, Steve has his car.”

  “Are we leaving already?”

  You looked, Ed—right at me. “No,” you said, and I nodded, not trusting my mouth to say anything, just take another sip. Though of course it did more. We got to Steve’s car. This is another thing I think of, turning it over, try to put together two pictures of it, but this time it’s about me, it’s myself I’m trying to figure. Because one sounds so disgusting, not even able to tell Al about it, win the big game, take the virgin to her first bonfire, feed her a beer or two, and then the two of us in someone’s car with your hand between my legs, unbuttoned and hiked down and the noises I made, before I finally, gasping, stopped you. It sounds terrible and it’s probably the truth, the real picture, gross when I write it down and shamed about it. But it’s the real, whole truth I’m trying to get down, how it happened, and honestly it felt different then, different from that bad picture. I can see it, so gentle the way you moved, the thrill that was there with us as no one knew where we were or what we were doing. It was different, Ed, and beautiful how we moved and touched, not just two kids fooling around like it would look in a movie. Even now that is the one I try to see, not just the kissing and the clothing and the quiet, taut, and awkward afterward, wondering how late it was, thanking the gods for no cruel laughing knock on the window. Not just that, but the things I can’t see, can’t bear to, and the things I didn’t see until I finally got home and turned on the bathroom light, first to look at my reflection and then at my strange hand hurting with odd, skinny bruises on my palm, sore, almost breaking the skin. I can feel them now almost, as I hold this, the marks left from the way my hand clenched so tight and ragged with breath and wild joy in the back of that car, around this odd, thrilling thing you gave me that I can’t stand to look at ever again.

  Ed, did you ever see—no, of course you didn’t—Like Night and Day, this Portuguese vampire movie the Carnelian ran for a full week? O
f course you didn’t see it. I saw it twice. A girl—I don’t know the actors, they’re all Portuguese—has a dull job as a clerk in some government thing and walks home through a graveyard dreaming. One day, she works late, and it’s night. The nighttime scenes are in black and white. She meets the boy vampire, slender and pale with his eyes glassy and angry, and for a while she’s with him every night and spends her days squinting and exhausted and pale and almost getting fired. Her blind mother senses something wrong, spiritual unrest is what the subtitle says she says. This music plays, and the girl dreams what he also dreams, crying in his grave, a gauzy dance of Catholicism and spinning skulls that I don’t really get. Then she’s a vampire, and he’s a young man with amnesia in a hospital who finally gets discharged and finds work as a clerk, and the affair begins again until one day, announced at the government office as dreamed by the blind mother, there’s an eclipse and it ends in tragedy and ashes. When I dragged Al along so I could see it a second time, he finally said, when I told him there was no way someone could see Like Night and Day and not have an opinion, he said his opinion was that it should have been called We Fuck at Dusk. And it’s true the love scenes are in a strange light, an in-between space as the characters bump and adjust to their haze of a dream of a life. It was like that then, the same lighting when you picked me up at seven at Steam Rising, my third-favorite coffee place but the best one near my house. The Portuguese lovers part dazed and bitten, not knowing what would happen next, I didn’t know either, what the encounter would be in the weird dawn. The streets were graveyard quiet and we’d fooled around in Steve’s car and maybe I’d messed it all up, I thought, missed my cues, unaware at the bonfire the way you slapped my friends with a jukebox choice. Or maybe I was just tired. I was hoping it would work, that it was still working, but maybe it had changed since you’d dropped me off at one in the morning. Just tired, I thought, waiting worried under the awning, the raging rain not helping a bit, and then hurried to your sister’s car when you pulled up, the umbrella tucked under my arm because I couldn’t hold it up and both our coffees too.