Why We Broke Up (19 page)

“That is why,” she said, and shook her hair. “But it’s you who got him.” She nodded at my file. “You’d better carry a weapon Saturday night. All the girls will be vampire Cleopatras trying to claw him away from you.”

She laughed and I decided to laugh too.
Kidding
, I said to myself, and then out loud, “Catfight. The boys will love that, girl on girl.”

“We could charge admission,” she said, pretending to claw at me. “You ready to go?”

I’d decided, absolutely, not to buy this stupid file. I followed her to the cash register with it in my hands while she bubbled her way with the cashier, who snipped the chain and gave her a discount. Mine gave me my change and a receipt.

“You want to go get a juice or something dumb like that?”

“No, thanks,” I said, following her out. “I gotta go home and do the rest of the costume.”

“You didn’t freak out about what I said about Saturday, did you? It was a joke.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, sort of a joke,” she said with a smile, switching hands with the bag of chains. “I mean, everybody knows he’s yours.”

“Not Jillian.”

“Jillian’s a
bitch
,” she said, too fiercely.

“Whoa.”

“Long story, Min. But don’t worry about her.”

I looked sadly out at the wet traffic. It had been raining, my Jewish hair a hideous cloud of pollution, and it was going to rain some more. I felt unshielded there outside Green Mountain, sensitive as a match flame, a lost baby something in the streets, without a mother or a collar or a cardboard box to call home. “I worry about everyone,” I said, why not let out the honest answer. “
Different
, everyone keeps saying different. He’s mine now but you’re right, someone could take him. I’m like an outsider to everyone else he knows.”

She didn’t bother saying I was wrong. “No,” she said. “He loves you.”

“And I love him,” I said, though what I wanted to say was
thank you
. I thought, the idiot that I was, the fool with a file in a bag, that she was looking out for me.

“
And love, who can say the way it winds
,” she recited, “
like a serpent in the garden of our untroubled minds
.”

“What’s that?”

“Salleford,” she said. “Alice Salleford. Sophomore English. And I thought you were the arty one.”

“I’m not arty,” I said.

“Well, you’re something,” she said, and gave me a quick hug good-bye, rattly with chains. Sure enough it started to rain. She dashed from awning to awning and gave me a wave before disappearing. Beautiful she was, beautiful in the rain
and her clothing. The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn’t have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It’s why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?

This isn’t yours
. It was left in an envelope taped to my locker, my name not even written on it. I thought it was something from you, but it just dropped into my hand, no note. I felt Al’s anger, sulky, honorable, goddamn furious in my hands as I held this. My free ticket, earned by helping him tape up posters. Goddamn subcommittee. He could have made me buy one, but instead there it was, a ticked-off gift. It’s not yours, but I’m giving it back to you because it’s your fault. The drama clubbers have these fancy tokens made instead of tickets so you can wear them around your neck all year if you’re extra goth embarrassing
to prove you went to the All-City All Hallows’ Ball. I never keep mine, just shove them in a drawer or whatever.
HOPE
, what a laugh. It’s a reminder of the night, let’s admit it now together—Halloween of Pure Evil—the night we should have broken up.

So why
did
we break up?
When I think of it now, think of it really, I think of how tired I was Halloween Saturday, from getting up early to sneak off to Tip Top Goods myself to buy these, which I never gave you. Yawning outside later, spray-painting an old thrift-store cap I used to wear freshman year, squinting at the gray to see if it matched my dad’s coat, Hawk Davies floating out my bedroom window to bask all over me, that cool part of “Take Another Train” when he polishes off a solo and you hear someone’s faint cry of appreciation,
Yeah Hawk yeah
while I grinned in the clear air. It wasn’t going to rain out. You
and I were going to the Bash and the Ball and it would be OK—extraordinary, even. I had no feeling of otherwise. I can see my happiness, I can see it and I can say that we were happy too then, not just me. I guess I can cling to anything.

“It’s good to see you happy,” my mom said, coming out with steaming tea. I’d been coiled up thinking she was telling me the jazz was too loud, think of the neighbors.

“Thanks,” I said for the Earl Grey.

“Even if it is in your father’s coat,” she said, this year’s thing of deciding it was OK to talk crap about Dad.

“Just for you, Mom, I’ll try to ruin it tonight.”

She laughed a little. “How?”

“Um, I’ll spill drugs on it and roll around in the mud.”

“When am I going to meet this boy?”

“Mom.”

“I just want to meet him.”

“You want to approve him.”

“I love you,” she tried like always. “You’re my only daughter, Min.”

“What do you want to know?” I said. “He’s tall, he’s skinny, he’s polite. Isn’t he polite on the phone?”

“Sure.”

“And he’s captain of the basketball team.”

“Co-captain.”

“That means there’s another captain too.”

“I know what it means, Min. It’s just—what do you have in common?”

I took a sip of tea instead of clawing her eyes out. “Thematic Halloween costumes,” I said.

“Yes, you told me. The whole team is prisoners and you’re playing along.”

“It’s not
playing along
.”

“I know he’s popular, Min. Jordan’s mother tells me this. I just don’t want you led around, like, like somebody’s goat.”

Goat?
“I’m the one being the
warden
,” I said. “I’m going to lead
them
around.” Not true, of course, but fuck her.

“OK, OK,” my mom said. “Well, the costume’s coming along. And what are those?”

“Keys,” I said. “You know, a warden has keys.” For some moron reason I thought I’d include her for a sec. “I thought I’d wear them on my belt, you know? And then at the end of the night I’d give them to Ed.”

My mom’s eyes widened.

“What?”

“You’re going to give Ed those keys?”

“What? It’s
my
money.”

“But Min, honey,” she said, and put her hand on me. My wrists trembled to spray-paint her in the face and make her gray, although, I noticed suddenly but without surprise, she already was. “Isn’t that a little, you know?”

“What?”

“Symbolic?”

“What?”

“I mean—”

“
Ew
. Like, a dirty joke? Key in the keyhole?”

“Well, people will think—”

“Nobody thinks like that. Mom, you’re
disgusting
.
Seriously
.”

“Min,” she said quietly, her eyes searchlighting all over me. “Are you sleeping with this boy?”

This boy. Goat. You’re my daughter
. It was like bad food I was force-fed and couldn’t keep down. Her fingers were still on me, skittering on my shoulder like a little pair of school scissors, blunt, ineffective, useless, and not the real thing. “It is none,” I said, “none,
none
of your business!”

“You’re my daughter,” she said. “I love you.”

I walked three steps down the driveway to look at her, hands on her hips. On newspapers on the ground the hat I was going to wear. Do you know, Ed, how much it fucking punches me in the stomach that my own
mother
was proved right? I must have shouted something and she must have shouted something back and stomped, she must have, into the house. But all I remember is the music fading, vengefully turned down so it no longer sound-tracked the day. Fuck her, I thought.
Yeah Hawk yeah
. I was done anyway.

Though I didn’t, did I, give you the keys. The day cooled to dusk while I did a little homework, dozed, missed Al, thought about calling Al, didn’t call Al, got dressed, and headed out with a dagger-glare at my mother pouring little candy bars into a bowl she’d sit and eat while waiting for youngsters. The boy I used to babysit was out on the corner throwing eggs at cars while the sun set. He flipped me off. The world was getting worse I guess, like this Japanese remake of
Rip Van Winkle
called
The Gates of Sleep
that Al and I left early from, each time the hero awoke it was more depressing, wife dead, sons drunks, city more polluted, emperors more corrupt, the war dragging on and more and more bloody. Al said that one should have been called
Are You in a Good Mood? We’ll Fix That: The Movie
.

I should have known when an old guy on the bus, totally not kidding, thanked me for my service, that my costume was going to be another disaster, but not until I walked under the archway of orange and black balloons looking for you did it really hit me clear, from Jillian Beach of all people. “Oh my God,” she said, already tipsy in red-and-white-striped shorts and a bra of blue bandanas. She was porcupined with goose bumps from the evening cool, Annette was right, I didn’t have to be afraid of her.

“What?”

“You really are
out there
, Min. A Jewish girl dressing as Hitler?”

“I’m not Hitler.”

“They’re going to expel you. You’re gonna get expelled.”

“I’m a warden, Jillian. What are you?”

“Barbara Ross.”

“Who?”

“She invented the flag.”

“
Betsy
, Jillian. I’ll see ya, OK?”

“Ed’s not here,” she said back to me.

“That’s OK,” I said, but I didn’t even try to be convincing, a Nazi too early for an outdoor party. A nest of freshmen walked around me chattering in mouse ears. A bunch of Draculas preened in a corner. They were already playing that song I hate. The coaches were sipping coffee and sweating in their capes. It was Trevor, who would ever think, who rescued me, limping over with his foot in a cast.

“Hey, Min. Or should I say Officer Green?”

Better a cop than Hitler. “Hey, Trevor. What are you?”

“A guy who broke his foot yesterday and so can’t be in the chain gang.”

“You’ll do anything to get out of dancing onstage.”

He laughed loud and pulled a beer out of somewhere. “You
are
funny,” he said, as if someone had said otherwise, and took a swig before handing it to me. I could tell he did this with any girl, any person, and that never until me had it been handed back unsipped.

“I’m good.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You don’t like beer.”

“Ed told you.”

“Yeah, why, am I not supposed to know?”

“No, it’s fine,” I said, looking for you.

“Because, you know, he’s always going to tell me.”

“Yeah?” I said, and then gave up and looked him in the eye. He was drunk too, as usual, or maybe he was never drunk, I realized I didn’t know him well enough to know the difference.

“Yeah,” he said. “Slaterton girlfriends need to learn that and scoot if they can’t handle it.”

“Scoot?”

“Scoot,” he said with a wobbly nod. Even drunk, if he was drunk, he was tough-enough-looking to say words like
scoot
. “We talk, Ed and me.”

“So what does he say?”

“That he loves you,” Trevor said instantly, without embarrassment. “That you passed the test with his sister. That you put up with his math thing. That you’re planning a weird movie-star party and that I have to get the fucking
champagne
or he’ll kick my ass. And you don’t let him say
gay
anymore, which is—can
I
say
gay
?”

“Sure,” I said. “
You’re
not my boyfriend.”

“Thank God,” he said, and then, that’s where you got it I guess, “no offense.”

“None taken,” I said.

“I just mean, I don’t think we’d get along like that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“We’re just, I mean,
I
like a fun girl who doesn’t change me around with movies or stores that open first thing in the goddamn morning, you know?”