Breaking Up Is Really, Really Hard to Do

by Natalie Standiford

  Ramona and her friends all wore thin ties of various patterns knotted around their necks. It was their cult symbol, indicating their worship of Dan. Lina hated the ties at first, but they were beginning to grow on her. Still, she'd never wear one herself. It was too stupid. She wondered if Dan had noticed them yet, and if so, what he thought it was supposed to mean. She wished she could ask him about it in an e-mail.

  “Listen to this,” Ramona said, tapping her ghostly white cheek with a green glittery nail. “‘Keith Carter's Wild Ride. I'm Keith Carter, that's my name, I ride my motorbike to national fame—’”

  “Ugh. Reject,” Chandra said. She'd drawn a tiny pentagram between her eyes in red ink.

  “Here's a good one.” Siobhan held up a piece of torn notebook paper covered in purple scrawl. “‘My so-called best friend/has abandoned me/she left a hole in me that hurts/like an infected tongue piercing/crusted over—’”

  “Gross,” Lina said.

  “But vivid,” Ramona said. “Put it in the maybe pile.”

  “So far we have two maybes, tons of nos, and five yeses, all of which were written by us,” Maggie said.

  “If we don't get enough material, we won't publish this issue,” Ramona said. “I won't publish motorbike epics just because we don't have anything better.” She glanced at Lina. “You're quiet today.”

  Lina shrugged. “I'm just listening and learning from the pros.”

  “Sure,” Ramona said. “I know you. You think we're idiots. There must be something else on your mind.”

  Lina stretched her mouth into the most convincing smile she could muster. “No, really. Nothing on my mind. See? Empty.” She knocked on her head for emphasis. Ramona would die if she knew about “Beauregard.” An accidental discovery like the one Lina had made was the Holy Grail for the Cult, second only to getting Dan to profess his love for one or more of them. To this end they cast numerous spells on him and performed ceremonies and rituals meant to capture his heart, with meager results. Certainly nothing to rival a full-fledged, intimate e-mail correspondence with Dan.

  Sometimes Lina was tempted to tell Ramona about it. She knew Ramona would understand in a way that Holly and Mads never could. Holly and Mads thought that writing to Beauregard was funny, a kick. But to Lina it was almost like a real love affair, and Ramona was the only other person in the world who could appreciate it.

  But Lina knew she couldn't tell Ramona. She couldn't trust Ramona not to give her away, for one thing. After all, Ramona loved Dan, too, and she might get jealous.

  “Does Dan ever have a say in which poems you publish?” Lina asked. “I mean, he's a guy. Maybe he likes motorbike epics.”

  Ramona made a face. “Are you crazy? Dan likes what we like.”

  “How do you know?” Lina asked.

  “We know,” Ramona said.

  “We can see him in our crystal ball,” Maggie said. She jolted in her seat as Ramona kicked her under the table. “What? Well, Ramona can, anyway.”

  “Crystal ball?” Lina asked.

  “Well, we're trying to see him,” Ramona admitted. “We have a crystal ball, and we look into it. Sometimes I swear I see him riding his bike or buying coffee.”

  Lina glanced at the other girls, who wouldn't meet her eye. Nobody saw any such thing, she knew. But they were all going along with it, humoring Ramona.

  “You should come to the museum this Friday,” Chandra said. “It's ritual night.”

  “Let me guess,” Lina said. “You cast spells on each other to turn your hair unnatural colors?”

  “I'll let that go,” Ramona said. “Because I know that somewhere in your future there's a bottle of magenta hair dye waiting. And when that day comes, when you realize you're really a magenta-head at heart, you'll look back on the silly comments you made to us and feel a pang of regret.”

  Over hair dye? Talk about over-dramatizing.

  “On ritual night we perform the SDLC,” Chandra said. Off Lina's blank look she added, “The Sacred Dan Love Ceremony.”

  “Don't tell her about it, Chandra,” Ramona said. “She doesn't care about that stuff.”

  Lina wanted to pretend she didn't care, but she was curious.

  “We take one of his artifacts…” Chandra said. The Cult collected Dan memorabilia such as used coffee cups, uneaten pizza crusts, and stray hairs to put on display in the “museum.” “We put it on the altar, light it on fire, and chant ‘See the light as it burns, See the truth in the fire, You have but one love, Chandra, Chandra, She's the one that you desire.’ Except each girl puts in her own name in place of Chandra.”

  “Really?” Lina said. It was even stupider than she'd imagined.

  “We're starting to run out of artifacts, though,” Maggie said. “We've really got to hit the cafeteria tomorrow. He leaves all kinds of stuff on his tray. Used napkins are the best, because they burn so well.”

  “That's disgusting,” Lina said.

  “It's only Dan germs,” Maggie said.

  “I think it's starting to work,” Siobhan said. “You should see what Dan wrote on Ramona's last paper. What did it say again?”

  ‘“Your reading comprehension skills are admirable,’” Maggie recited. ‘“But of course, I'd expect that from you.’”

  “Wow,” Lina said. “Book a caterer—I hear wedding bells.”

  “It's one of those things where you have to read between the lines,” Ramona said. “And know what came before. The context. It could be a secret signal. We'll do a handwriting analysis on it this weekend and find out.”

  “I'd love to come,” Lina said. “But I've got some cuticles that need trimming, and you know how it is—you can't let that go for long. Whoops—that reminds me.” She jumped to her feet and gathered her bag. “I've got my first sportswriting gig for the Seer.” She'd gone to an editorial meeting the day before and received her assignment from Kate Bryson.

  “Ooh, the Seer,” Ramona said in a mocking voice. “And they call that waste of paper news. What are you covering, fifty minutes of testosterone-crazed morons bashing each other with lacrosse sticks?”

  “No, I'm covering girls’ badminton,” Lina said. “I doubt there will be much testosterone or bashing. Now if you don't mind, I've got to go.”

  “You're hiding something, Ozu,” Ramona called as Lina left the room. “You think I don't have powers, but I do. I can tell when something's up, and something's up. But the goddesses will reveal all when it's time for me to know.”

  Lina hurried down the hall to get away from that goddess talk as fast as she could. And she didn't want to be late for her first sports assignment, even though she'd been disappointed when she found it out was only a badminton match, and intramural to boot. In other words, nobody cared about it at all, except maybe the ten girls in the badminton club. And even that was doubtful.

  “Fault!” the referee, Ginnie the Gym Teacher, called. Lina dutifully jotted it in her notebook. “Scintillating match-up between singles players Bridget Aiken and Lulu Ramos. Score: three-love, Aiken. Ramos faults on first serve—probably distracted by tiny cut-off top that rides up every time she lifts her racket.”

  “Ramos, second serve,” Ginny barked. Lulu, chomping on gum, sighed and whacked the shuttlecock into the net.

  “Aiken serves,” Ginny said. Bridget picked the shuttlecock out of the net and walked pertly to her service corner. Lulu tugged at the bottom of her skirt. She was a tattooed bottle-blond whose naturally dark hair struggled mightily to assert itself against the peroxide. Lina had a strong hunch that Lulu was only taking badminton because RSAGE required students to play at least one sport for three years, and badminton was the easiest. Unlike the perky Bridget, Lulu wasn't the badminton type.

  “How's your first assignment going?” Walker sat beside her in the nearly-empty bleachers. “Don't feel bad if this doesn't make the paper. It has nothing to do with your writing—it's just that it's hard to squeeze an exciting story out of intramural badminton. Kate's just trying you out.”
>
  “Actually, an interesting angle occurred to me,” Lina said. “Who's on the badminton squad, anyway? What's a girl like Lulu doing here, or Rania Burke, or Abby Kurtz?” Lina nodded toward Rania, a hip-hop diva type, and Abby, a sneering punk rocker covered with so many chains and studs she clanked.

  “Sports requirement?” Walker said.

  “Exactly. But look what a motley crew it's brought together. The badminton team might be the most diverse squad in the school, socially, and why? Because so many of its members have one thing in common—they hate sports.”

  “Interesting,” Walker said. “The sport for people who hate sports. Except for Bridget over there. And her friend Miriam.”

  Bridget and Miriam were the only girls in the gym who wore the regulation badminton uniform in the Rosewood colors, white and pink. The rest of the team wore t-shirts, cut-offs, pleather minis—just about any-thing but appropriate badminton wear. But since it was just an intramural sport and they rarely played teams from other schools, Ginnie didn't waste her energy enforcing the dress code. It was hard enough just to get the team to show up for practice.

  “Fault!” Bridget screamed after Lulu finally batted a serve that scored a point. “Her foot went over the line!”

  “Who gives a—” Lulu began, but Bridget cut her off, saying, “Maybe if we were playing in the backseat of a car you'd pay more attention.”

  “You little—” Lulu ran under the net and dove for Bridget, knocking her to the gym floor. Ginnie blasted her whistle. “Girls! Girls! Stop it right now!”

  “Whoa,” Walker said. “Lulu just opened up a can of badminton whoop-ass on Bridget. Maybe there is more of a story here than I thought.”

  Lina snapped a picture of Ginnie breaking up the fight. “We're going to revolutionize the sports page.” She scribbled “Badminton Smackdown!” in her notebook.

  “Cat fight—I love it. But I've got to go cover the girls’ soccer game,” Walker said. “I can only hope it will be as exciting. See you later.”

  “See you,” Lina said. Things calmed down in the gym, and Ginnie disqualified Lulu for unsportsmanlike behavior. Game, Set, Match: Bridget.

  “Good,” Lulu snarled as she stormed out of the gym. “Now I can finally leave this yawn factory.”

  The next match began. Lina's mind wandered. What would Larissa be doing now? Certainly not sitting in a gym watching girls bat a shuttlecock around. Maybe sitting in a dark movie theater, thinking of Dan.

  If only she could be Larissa for real. Wouldn't everything be better then?

  9

  Portraits

  To: mad4u

  From: your daily horoscope

  HERE IS TODAY'S HOROSCOPE: VIRGO: The answer to a sticky problem will come-to you from an unexpected source.

  That's your sister?” Stephen asked. He and Mads were in the art room one afternoon, working on their projects as usual. Mads had taken portrait photos of her mother, father, sister Audrey and brother Adam, who was home from college that week, nerding up the place. Eleven-year-old Audrey, the living Bratz doll, was posed in her signature style—pink Juicy Couture sweatpants, a white t-shirt (cut off at the waist and flashing a pink sequined heart on the front), strawberry-blond hair tied with a pink velvet bow in. a high ponytail. She was doing her best Britney imitation, sticking out her lower lip (her idea of a pout), hands on hips.

  “Is something wrong with her mouth?” Stephen asked.

  “No,” Mads said. “She's trying to look sexy.”

  “Looks like a bee stung her lower lip.”

  “I know. She always poses that way. Do you think I should draw her like that or try to correct it?”

  “I guess it depends on which way expresses the true Audrey,” Stephen said.

  “Definitely lip-out,” Mads said.

  “Then draw her that way.” Stephen flipped through the photos. “That's my dad,” Mads said, pointing to a shot of her father sitting at his cluttered desk in his home office. “He's a labor lawyer.” Russell Markowitz's graying hair puffed around his head as if it had never known a comb. He grinned from behind his big glasses.

  “He looks like a nice guy,” Stephen said.

  “Yeah. He's so nice we call him the Dark Overlord as a joke.”

  Stephen flipped to a picture of a slim woman with frizzy blond hair and red cat's-eye glasses, sitting in the lotus position with a Siamese cat on her knee. “Captain Meow-Meow? And Mom, right?”

  “We call her M.C.,” Mads said. “For Mary Claire. She's a pet shrink. Holistic, of course.”

  “Is there any other kind?” There was one more picture in the pile. A nineteen-year-old with thick black hair and glasses like his dad, face contorted in pain over a table full of dead plants. “Who's that?”

  “That's my brother, Adam,” Mads said. “He's about to kill me because he left me in charge of his plants while he's away at college. I watered them maybe once. Basically, I killed them. I tried to warn him—I've got a black thumb. Thumb of death. Not like Adam and M.C. They can make anything grow.”

  Stephen set the photos on Mads’ art table. “These portraits are going to be good,” he said. “They all tell a story. But you'd better get to work. You've got a lot of people to immortalize in pastel.”

  “Look who's talking,” Mads said, nodding toward his bedroom installation. “You've still got a whole dresser to build—and fill with clothes.”

  “How many more portraits are you planning to do?” Stephen asked.

  “Well, I've got one more photo to take,” Mads said. “Sean Benedetto.”

  “You're doing a portrait of him?” Stephen asked.

  “Sure.” Mads smiled. “He kind of cries out to be immortalized in pastel. Don't you think?”

  Stephen shrugged. “It's your art project. How are you going to pose him?”

  “I don't know yet,” Mads said. “I know my family and Holly and Lina so well, it's easy for me to find ways to express their personalities. But how to show Sean's? He's such a complicated person.”

  “He is?” Stephen asked.

  “Definitely,” Mads said.

  “I don't know the guy. What kinds of things is he interested in?”

  “I don't know,” Mads said. “Partying. Music.”

  Mads went to the window. She could see the school playing fields in the distance. The girls soccer team was running drills, and the boys lacrosse squad broke up for laps.

  “Some artists use athletes for inspiration,” Stephen said. “Degas painted dancers—”

  “He's a great swimmer,” Mads said. “Maybe I'll pose him in his bathing suit.”

  Stephen laughed. “His bathing suit? Would he do that for you?”

  “I don't know,” Mads said. But the more she thought about it, the more excited she got. It was perfect. She'd make it the centerpiece of her show. Maybe she could even draw him life-sized!

  But Stephen had a point. She could probably get Sean to stop long enough to let her take a snapshot of him in his normal clothes. But how could she get him to pose in his bathing suit?

  10

  The Awful Truth

  To: hollygolitely

  From: your daily horoscope

  HERE IS TODAY'S HOROSCOPE: CAPRICORN: Something confusing will happen today. But you're used to that by now, right?

  Have you ever seen the Eleven before?” Mo asked Holly. They leaned against the jukebox at the Rutgers Roadhouse Saturday night, waiting for the Kevin Eleven to take the small wooden stage.

  “No, never seen them before,” she said.

  “You'll like them. They're great to dance to.”

  Holly watched as kids paid the three-dollar cover charge and streamed into the bar. The Roadhouse was a low, ramshackle wooden building that had been there forever. They served pizza and burgers and beer. bands played there most nights. This was an all-ages show. Anyone could come in but you needed to show ID to get a beer.

  Holly recognized a few kids from school. Sean, with his leggy blond friend Jane, nod
ded at Mo from across the bar. Holly realized that she'd been seeing Sean at social events with Jane for several weeks in a row now. That went against the usual Sean pattern of a new girl every week. Holly wondered if Mads had noticed it, too. It was a new development, and not good for Mads’ chances. Not if Sean and Jane were getting serious.

  Then Autumn breezed in, trailed by Vince, Rebecca, and David. Autumn stuck her hand in the back pocket of Vince's jeans, and Vince did the same. They marched around the room, stopping for a long, showy kiss every few feet. Autumn was soaking it up. She couldn't get enough attention, but then everybody already knew that. Vince was the surprise. He grinned like a movie star at people he didn't even know. Holly had thought he was quiet and shy. She'd thought he might calm Autumn down. But it seemed that the opposite had happened—Autumn had hyped him up. They were hanging all over each other. A slow song came on the jukebox and Autumn immediately pressed herself against Vince. They swayed and kissed, even though no one else in the room was dancing. They obviously didn't mind—people who weren't dancing had more time to stare at Autumn and Vince and be jealous of their passion.

  “Uh, you fixed those two up, didn't you?” Mo said.

  Holly nodded. “I think I've created a monster.”

  “I'll say. They're grossing me way the hell out.”

  In her mind, Holly started writing a new quiz. Some people needed to learn about how to behave in public.

  Are You a PDA-aholic?

  Do you and your honey gross everyone out with your constant Public Displays of Affection? Take this quiz and find out if you need to tone it down! Grade each statement with a 1 (not like you at all), 2 (sort of like you), or 3 (so like you it's scary).

  _1. Your idea of a polite greeting is full-body contact.

  _2. You spend so much time lip-locked you're not even sure what your honey looks like.

  _3. You're always the last to leave a party—you come up for air and everybody's gone.