The Break-Up Artist

by Philip Siegel

  I wonder if he likes Bari because he knows he’s smarter than her. I wonder if she minds.

  I glance over at my target, who has taken a brief rest from her phone. She smushes together two paper hole reinforcements and slides the result onto her left ring finger. She gazes at her fake ring with stars in her eyes, clearly forgetting for a moment that it’s a piece of plastic worth three cents. It’s never too early to start planning your wedding, I guess, though I hope she hasn’t booked a band yet.

  Mr. Harrison ends class a few minutes early. As I shove my notebook in my backpack, a paper football falls out of the trig section. I unfold the football and instantly roll my eyes when I see what it says: I NEED A BOY!!

  1 I only have rough time periods of when two people began dating. Not exact dates. That would be weird. It’s not like I know them personally.

  2 Based on a scale from LOW–SEVERE that I copied from the Department of Homeland Security website.

  3 Derek looks really cute without a shirt on.

  3

  I wait for the note writer outside her locker. I hear her cheerful voice booming from down the hall. Val—never Valerie—is midconversation with a classmate; her green eyes light up when she sees me. She has bright blond hair and a smile on her face even when she’s upset, which is rare. Her childhood pudginess is slowly morphing into a more mature figure, but she dresses herself well to hide any trouble spots. Right now, she’s all about blazers.

  I hold up the note and raise my eyebrows; she hangs her head. We both bust out laughing. Yet more proof that I have a really weird best friend.

  I crumple the note up and toss it into the trash. “You love cutting to the chase, don’t you?”

  “If I can’t say that to you, then who can I say it to?” she says.

  “Nobody else, I hope.” More classmates funnel into the hall, pushing against us. “Ready for lunch?”

  Val makes her midday book exchange at her locker. She only carries two books and a notebook with her at one time. According to her unofficial research, this makes her appear studious yet willing to have fun. Carrying three books is nerdy. They are hard to hold in one arm, and she would die of embarrassment if she spilled them in the hall. Val refuses to wear a backpack. They don’t suit her, she claims.

  We cut through swaths of students en route to the cafeteria. “I hope you don’t truly feel that way,” I say.

  “What way?”

  “That you need a boy. You don’t need a boy. The only things you need are oxygen, food, water and a dozen pairs of shoes.”

  “I know, I know.” She waves her hand, cutting me off. She won’t listen when I’m right, but she won’t refute me either. “So PB&J was a bust. None of my prongs worked.”

  “Not even prong three?”

  “Nope. When I invited him over to do homework, I didn’t expect him to actually do homework!”

  Val had a three-pronged plan to make Patrick Burroughs Jr., aka PB&J, fall for her. Prong one was to switch lab partners so that they’d work together. Prong two was to download some of his favorite music and casually listen to it during lab, piquing his interest. Prong three was to invite him over to work on the write-ups together, with the music setting the mood in the background. I tried telling her that she and he were too different. He’s very serious—buzz cut, steely eyes, always talking in short, terse sentences—and she’s fun and bubbly. Her opposites-attract theory did not pan out. But she was dead set on this. She even made charts.

  “He smelled so good, too,” she says, letting out a ginormous sigh. She checks the time on her phone. “And because of Michigan, aka Evan Lansing, I have like a hundred more captions for the stupid yearbook to write by Friday. Note to self—never join a club to meet a guy again.”

  I nudge her elbow. “Hey, it’s his loss.”

  “And his yearbook’s gain.”

  “In ten years, all he’ll have in his life is that overpriced photo album, and he’ll be clinging to it in an alley and whispering your name to himself.”

  Val gives me a strange look.

  “Was that too creepy?” Some girls are highly adept at giving the cheer-up talk. Even if they know what they’re saying is 100 percent well-worn cliché, it still manages to brighten their friends’ moods. I am not blessed with that skill. But maybe if Val stopped making the search for “True Love” her main mission in life, she would have more luck.

  A cacophony of conversation bounces off the walls in the cafeteria, a hotbed of gossip. Stories and social reputations are getting confirmed, denied or shared, information traded as if it’s the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  Val and I put down our books and my backpack at our table and head to the lunch line. A loud, perky yelp comes from the entrance, and we swivel around to watch the daily yuckfest. Steve Overland carries Huxley Mapother through the double doors, past admiring subjects and adoring lunch aides. After four years, I’ve gotten quite good at ignoring them, making myself forget that I ever had a past with Huxley. But Calista’s tear-streaked face flashes in my mind, and suddenly I’m back in the middle-school cafeteria, watching Huxley abandon me to sit with Steve, refusing to make eye contact. Nothing is more definitive than lunchroom seating.

  “Excuse us.” Addison, Huxley’s friend and lieutenant colonel, shoves me aside, creating a wide path for the couple. I rub my shoulder. Just because she said it nicely doesn’t mean it was a friendly push.

  Steve sets Huxley down at their corner lunch table, the one bathed in natural light at which all students must crane their necks to gander. They are a sight to behold, a Seventeen photo shoot live in our school. Huxley hides her face in embarrassment, lightly slapping Steve on his broad shoulder. But I can detect the pure delight radiating from her olive skin as she soaks in the stares of her kingdom.

  “They are so cute,” Val says with an added aww.

  “They probably rehearsed that all weekend. And why is he wearing his football jersey in March?”

  Val leans against the wall and takes a breath. She’s tired, and not from our walk.

  “I need a boy.”

  “You want one. But you don’t need one.”

  “Want, need. You say tomato, I say ketchup.” We each put a premade grilled-chicken salad on our tray. Val grabs two Diet Cokes from the cooler. “I want to do couple-y things. I want someone to walk to class with, and a guy who’ll be waiting for me at my locker and text me when I wake up saying he had a dream about me. And I don’t care how that makes me sound because it’s you, and no matter what I say, you’re contractually obligated to be my friend.”

  “So you just want a boyfriend to show off in school? Flash him around like the new Cynthia Swann bag?”

  It never bothers me when Val complains about wanting a boyfriend, which does happen often. It’s my duty as a best friend to listen and bite my tongue. I want her to be happy, even if having a boyfriend ultimately won’t achieve that. I know she’d never ditch me like Bari ditched Calista. She’s a real friend.

  “That is a nice bag,” she says.

  “They sell really nice knockoffs of them by my dad’s office. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “Becca Williamson, don’t you dare. Do you really want to settle for a knockoff over the real thing? Don’t make me wash your mouth out with off-brand soap.”

  “Fine. You’re right. No fakes for me.”

  We laugh and fantasize about that Cynthia Swann bag. After I break up Bari and Derek, I’ll be able to buy it. I’ll just tell Val I pooled together multiple birthday and Christmas checks from my grandparents.

  “Five ten,” the cashier says to Val.

  Val hands her a five and rummages through her bag for some change. Her face flips to a deep-hued red. Avoiding any type of humiliation in the cafeteria is essential. “Do you have a d
ime?” she asks me, but I’m already searching my pockets and coming up empty.

  The lunch lady starts ringing me up, leaving Val to continue her frantic search. “Do you got it or not?” It’s like the cashier’s voice is engineered to be loud and maximize embarrassment.

  “I have it,” a guy says from behind me in a deep radio-deejay voice. Ezra Drummond and his puff of black hair waltz up to the register with two nickels.

  “Thank you so much!” Val says.

  “My pleasure. I couldn’t let a fellow student starve...or go without caffeine.”

  “And they say chivalry is dead.”

  “I don’t think anything under a quarter can be considered chivalry, per se.”

  “Uh-huh.” Val’s gift for gab goes missing.

  I pay for my meal and step out of line, waiting for Val to join me.

  “Thanks again.” Val speed walks to our table. I scurry to catch up, making sure I don’t spill or hit anyone.

  “So I totally got a vibe from Ezra,” she says. She does the 1-2-3-look as he makes his way back to his pack of theater friends.

  “That was really nice of him.”

  “That was more than nice. You have to admit, there was definitely some kind of vibe there.”

  Ezra’s a generally friendly guy. We randomly had a bunch of electives together sophomore year, and he still gives me a nod when we pass each other in uncrowded corridors. I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.” I don’t have the energy to go this path with Val. I’m hungry.

  But we can’t eat just yet.

  We reach our table to find it dotted with comic books and Capri Suns, and instead of empty chairs awaiting us, we have three scrawny guys.

  “Hi.” That’s the first word I’ve said to Fred Teplitzky and his patch of acne in about six years. “Um, we were sitting here.”

  “We saved your seats.” The other two guys, Quentin Yao and Howard Langman, pat the chairs next to them. Is this a date ambush?

  “Can you please move your magazines?” Val asks. They grab their comic books away from Val’s incoming lunch tray.

  Fred jumps out of my chair. I’m face-to-face with his beaming smile and surprisingly straight teeth. Props to his orthodontist. “Listen, there were some fisticuffs at our usual table, and we need a new home. We could all squeeze and make it work here.”

  “Fisticuffs?” I ask. When was the last time somebody used that word?

  “We went to sit at our table today, but it was taken by the D’Agostino twins and their girlfriends,” Fred says, nodding his head to the table. Lucy Dorsett and Gina Janetti are snuggled in with equally ripped John and Jack. “We tried to tell them that we’ve been sitting there since September, but they aren’t the type of guys to listen to reason. They have those arm-chain tattoos.”

  “Don’t they usually spend their lunch period smoking in the parking lot?” I had to sit next to Lucy in sixth period last year, and I almost died of secondhand smoke.

  “I guess they wanted to add more fiber to their diet,” Fred says.

  “There’s a table by the kitchen,” Val says. She firmly believes that you are who you sit with, and sharing a table with these guys—even though they’re all nice guys—will not help her social profile.

  “It smells like lard and grease over there,” Quentin says.

  “Invest in potpourri.”

  Val turns to me for solidarity. I can’t tell the D’Agostino twins apart, but they each have their right arm around their girlfriend. I never noticed how many couples populate the cafeteria. Why do they get to dictate the seating chart? You never hear of a gaggle of girls or a group of guys evicting a twosome from their table.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Join us.”

  Val shoots me a nasty look, but before she can say anything, I whisper into her ear: “I think Ezra and Fred are friends, or friendlyish.”

  Val’s face lights up and she reverts to her 1-2-3-look.

  “Really? We had speech class together freshman year, and he was always really nice. Hmm...Ezra Drummond.” Val smiles to herself. She’s coming dangerously close to a neck cramp. “And the hemp choker necklace really brings out the hazel in his eyes....”

  If I have to spend a lunch period listening to people talk about crushes and comic books, my head may explode.

  “Whoa, they’re eating each other alive!” Quentin points to Derek and Bari at a side table. His mouth swallows her tongue whole. His hands dig into her hips.

  PDA = HIGH.

  They stand and stroll up to the garbage cans with their trash, holding hands and keeping one eye on each other the whole time. Calista eats with other cheerleaders, but isn’t engaging with them. The newly minted couple pass Calista’s table, completely oblivious to the loneliness in her eyes. Bari could probably decipher Calista’s exact mood with one glance, if she’d only pay her friend a speck of attention.

  I glance across the cafeteria and watch my former best friend have the lunch period of her life. Huxley nestles her head against Steve’s shoulder. She doesn’t even notice I’m staring.

  4

  My English teacher Ms. Hardwick is one of the youngest teachers at Ashland, and as coach of the cheerleading squad, she likes to think she’s one of the girls. My parents thought she was a student when they met her. They couldn’t believe she taught honors English. So it’s difficult to take her seriously when she discusses Shakespeare.

  “Okay, guys,” she says, taking a seat on her desk. “You should’ve all finished Romeo and Juliet over the weekend. So let’s discuss. What did you guys think? Wasn’t it super sad at the end?”

  Shana Wigand raises her hand. “I found the themes of forcefulness of love and the inevitability of fate to be the most captivating.”

  “Now, Shana. I asked everyone to read R and J, not Wikipedia. C’mon, guys. Give me your honest feedback. We all know this story in one form or another.”

  Silence.

  Ms. Hardwick smacks her lips together. They’re soaked in red lipstick. “Anyone? Don’t be shy.”

  “I thought they were so romantic,” another classmate says.

  I know that voice. That calm, cold voice in the center of the room weighted down with unbridled confidence.

  “Huxley, care to elaborate?” Ms. Hardwick asks.

  Huxley sits up straight, refusing to slouch like us common folk. There always seems to be a spotlight on her olive skin and cascading brown hair, straight out of a shampoo commercial. She’ll make a perfect senator’s wife one day, and she knows it.

  “Their love was passionate and intense, but quiet and delicate at the same time. It was...beautiful.” Huxley says her words slowly, since nobody will dare interrupt her.

  “Nicely put,” Ms. Hardwick says. A tidal wave of nods flows across the room. Even Greg Baylor and his jock crew in the corner agree.

  “It was so amazing. Even reading the synopsis gave me chills,” Shana says, not missing an opportunity to score brownie points with Huxley. And the teacher, too.

  “They were the pinnacle of true love,” Huxley says. Does she realize that 90 percent of what she utters is straight-up cliché? Probably, but the class eats it up anyway.

  I roll my eyes. Killing yourself because you can’t date someone seems a tad overdramatic.

  “Care to comment?” Ms. Hardwick asks someone. Then I realize she’s looking at me. Now so is the whole class.

  “What?” I ask, my palms slick with sweat.

  “You don’t seem to agree.”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe if I give bland answers, she’ll let me go back to blending in with the class. Why is everyone staring at me? Please go back to texting, writing notes, staring out the window. Anything else.

  “Are you sure, Becca?”

  I shake my head yes. I choose to
risk my participation grade and keep my mouth shut. They don’t want a second opinion. They prefer the first one.

  “It’s okay, Rebecca,” Huxley says to me, in her friendliest tone. It’s incredible how easily she turns it on. “I think it’d be interesting to hear how someone who’s never had a boyfriend interprets the play.”

  The girls around me snicker softly. I grit my teeth into a smile. My thoughts override my nerves, and before I know it, I’m turning in my chair to face Huxley. “Romeo and Juliet were not in love. They were full-on crazy.”

  The class remains silent, giving me weird looks instead.

  “Crazy? That seems kind of extreme,” Ms. Hardwick says, tossing objectivity out the window.

  “But meeting, allegedly ‘falling in love’ and dying for each other in less than a week isn’t?”

  “It only takes a few seconds to know you’ve found your soul mate. When you know, you know. That’s how I felt with Steve,” Huxley says. The class swoons, and I’m ready to go out the window. “That’s love.”

  I won’t let Huxley have the satisfaction. She always has the satisfaction. “That’s not love. That’s poor decision-making skills. Romeo and Juliet were two very repressed and unhappy people. Being forced to stay apart made them want to be together more. It’s like when a parent tells their child not to go into the attic—where is the one place they want to go? It’s not because they love the attic.” Greg Baylor nods his bulky head. Getting through to the class makes me push harder.

  “Interesting point,” Ms. Hardwick says. “How much do you think their love was based on their circumstance?”