The Break-Up Artist

by Philip Siegel

  Val looks me over. “You don’t seem happy.”

  “For you? This is great,” I say with all the excitement of a eulogy.

  “Real convincing. You’re my best friend. I thought you would seem more excited for me.”

  “I am. I just... Things are different now.”

  “They aren’t. I just have an addition in my life.”

  “I know.” And I know it’s not true. I check the time on my phone: 2:27 p.m.

  “I gotta run,” I say. “Maybe we can hang out later?”

  “Can’t. Ezra and I are studying tonight. Where are you rushing off to?”

  “Practice.” My walk quickly morphs into a jog.

  “For what?” Val asks, but I’m already gone.

  My clicking heels reach a piercing pitch and echo down the hallway.

  * * *

  I enter the gym at 2:35 p.m. Forty sets of eyes stare at me, but nobody says a word. They are embarrassed for me. I keep my head down and scurry to the bleachers. Since when do clubs start on time here?

  “You’re late,” Huxley says.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you started right at two-thirty.”

  I take a seat in the front bleacher.

  “Stand up,” she says. “You can sit when practice is over.”

  “Are you serious?”

  She glares at me with the fire of a thousand tanning booths. I’ll take that as a yes.

  I do as she says. All the girls have a perfect view of me. Now even the guys on the scenery crew stop what they’re doing to gawk.

  Huxley turns to the other dancers. “We only have the gym for two hours a day, and there are eight routines to master in six weeks’ time. So when I send an email saying practice begins promptly at two-thirty, I mean it.” She cocks an eyebrow at me.

  Message received.

  She turns on her smile, all traces of nastiness gone. I sit down.

  “Rebecca, I didn’t say you could sit yet.”

  It’s only the thought of her relationship crumbling, of her sitting at a lunch table alone and forsaken, that propels me back to my feet.

  “Our next order of business is to choose what sports each squad will be representing. Every captain came up with one sport. And this year, to make the process more democratic, I will be choosing sports at random from a hat,” Huxley says, unaware that that isn’t democracy.

  She chooses first, exaggerated excitement on her face. “My squad, our sport is...curling? What’s curling? Who put this in here?”

  Meredith Arturro, captain of one of the lesser squads, steps forward. “It’s like shuffleboard on ice.”

  “Shuffleboard isn’t in the Olympics.”

  “But curling is. It’s big in Canada.”

  While they go to someone’s laptop to verify curling’s existence, my squad mates talk among themselves. Ninety percent of their sentences begin with “My boyfriend.”

  “My boyfriend has the most adorable golden retriever.”

  “My boyfriend is taking his driving test next week, and he’s been practicing like a maniac.”

  “My boyfriend and I went to a sushi restaurant, even though my boyfriend hates Japanese food. And I told my boyfriend that sushi is amazing, but my boyfriend was like ‘I’m gonna puke if I have to put one of those things in my mouth.’ So my boyfriend just got chicken. At a sushi place! Ugh, my boyfriend.”

  They wait for me to join in the conversation. I stand there with my mouth gaping open. “I didn’t know they serve chicken at sushi restaurants.”

  The girls humor me with smiles, then continue their deep conversation.

  Across the court, the scenery crew nails together the first of the sets. Each dance routine gets its own sets that wheel across the court to emphasize what the theme is. I guess the school had to find a way to open SDA up to guys. I spot a familiar face painting Olympic rings on a canvas.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re in SDA?” Ezra asks. Sweat forms around his temples. Flecks of paint dot his face and arms.

  “I am. I live to dance.”

  “Me, too, but I find the costumes too binding,” Ezra says, matching my penchant for sarcasm. “So I paint.”

  “You paint.” I look at his masterpiece thus far. The rings are squares layered with jagged brushstrokes. Painting is not his medium. “Looks good.”

  “Yeah right.” He dips the brush in more paint and steadies his hand on the canvas. That doesn’t do the trick. “I’m directing the interstitial videos for the show, but since that’s technically part of the scenery crew, I have to help out. At least I was able to sucker some of my theater compatriots into helping out, too.”

  “Yeah, you need someone to paint over all your strokes,” his friend Jeff O’Sullivan says.

  “I’m more Kubrick than Kandinsky, I guess.”

  “You’re doing the videos? That’s so cool,” I say. The SDA captains, and their boyfriends, act in video skits to introduce the show and then each routine. They are usually the only ones who find them funny, but I have faith that Ezra can create something nongroanworthy. “Hopefully they’ll be better than Starship Alien II.”

  “Starship Alien II had some redeeming qualities, surprisingly.” Ezra’s face brightens, as it does whenever movies come up.

  “Yeah, it was under ninety minutes.” I may have liked the movie more if I didn’t have to watch him and Val mash their faces together. I shudder at the memory.

  “I’m with you,” Jeff says, flicking back his thin, blond hair. He’ll probably be bald by the time he’s thirty, poor guy. Luckily, he’s been dating Carrie Kirby since freshman year, and she doesn’t seem to care. They’re one of the few couples I can think of that seem to have lives outside of each other. Shocker. “My favorite part is when it ended. And when that scientist took her top off.”

  “There were some genuinely scary parts. And the movie had a good romantic subplot with Tony and Victoria,” Ezra adds.

  I throw my head back with laughter. “Oh, please! They have a one-night stand, and then he’s madly in love with her and sacrifices his brains to the aliens? That’s what I hate about romance in the movies. A guy looks at a girl once, and suddenly he’s in love.”

  “It happens. There’s that moment when you see someone and that feeling hits you. It’s like you’re noticing them for the first time.”

  “In the movies. Not in real life.”

  “You fall for someone in an instant, not gradually.” Ezra taps his chest, getting more paint on his T-shirt. “The heart doesn’t do gradual.”

  Everything Ezra says needs cheesy background music and sparkles. I wonder if his mom read him greeting cards as a baby. Jeff agrees with me and pretends to hold back throwing up. Ezra elbows him in the ribs.

  “You could feel the attraction between Tony and Victoria,” Ezra says.

  “Ezra, do you even know what a one-night stand is? Victoria only felt one thing inside her that night, and it wasn’t love.”

  He nods, taken aback by a girl not talking like a girl for a second. “Here, let’s multitask,” and he hands me the orange paintbrush.

  “Starship Alien II wasn’t a total abomination of cinema, but it definitely wasn’t Casablanca,” he says. Ezra talks like no other guy at school. It’s refreshing.

  “You got that right.” My dad made me watch it on a snow day. He told me if I watched any more reality TV, my brain would rot, and it was time to watch something good. Usually I hate his movie recommendations, but I found myself captivated. Inspired by Humphrey Bogart, I went out the next weekend and bought myself a trench coat.

  “You like Casablanca?”

  “Yeah. It’s a classic.”

  “Interesting,” he says. He wipes up dripping paint with his T-shirt. “Now that had a great romance.�
��

  I take a break from adding curves to his square rings. “Just the opposite. It’s one of the only movies where logic trumps love. Rick realizes that he and Ilsa had some fun times in Casablanca, but it’s not serious enough to warrant leaving her husband.”

  “Not serious enough? When Rick tells Ilsa to get on that plane—that’s love.” Ezra makes the same pained face as my mom when she joined my dad and me for the final scene.

  “Telling her to leave with her husband and never come back is love?”

  “He cared about her so much. He wanted her to be safe and live a happy life above all else, even if it wasn’t with him.”

  “Or he realized that their fling wasn’t worth ruining their lives over. If he really loved her, capital-L loved her, he wouldn’t have let her get on that plane.” I point my brush at him.

  “Let’s agree to disagree.” He turns back to the canvas. “What about Titanic? Easily the most romantic film of the past twenty-five years.”

  “I thought film geeks were supposed to have good taste in movies,” Jeff interjects. “Man, we really need to get you to a Michael Bay film, stat.”

  “It’s still a classic.”

  “Jack and Rose? That was just a vacation fling,” I say. “He teaches her how to spit, she sees him in a tux, and suddenly they’re soul mates? Nope.”

  Why do none of the movies girls at my school love have happy endings? One half of the couple either dies or moves away. But they can’t get enough of those films. Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Atonement, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, every other Nicholas Sparks film known to man. My classmates want a relationship, yet they idolize movies where couples never wind up happy. I don’t get it.

  Ezra turns back to finishing his rings. “You must love The Wizard of Oz, then.”

  “What? There’s no romance in that one.”

  “Exactly my point.” He smiles and his eyes do the awkward shift up and to the left like a child asking for a cookie. Val’s right. It’s adorable, from an objective standpoint.

  Huxley has begun speaking again. I have a minor panic attack. I drop the brush into the paint can.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  Ezra gives me a salute. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Really, thank you,” Jeff says. “It actually looks good.”

  I spin back around. “You guys do know that there’s no orange ring in the Olympics logo, right?”

  * * *

  Angie,

  It’s been too long. I’m working this Monday night—I’ll give you extra pepperoni as long as you save me your crust :)

  I tuck the coupon into the note and stick them in an envelope. I stroll down my driveway in slippers, relieved to be out of those heels. I place the envelope inside the mailbox and turn up the flag. The wind pierces at my skin and pushes me back.

  Oh, no, Mother Nature. You’re not stopping me tonight.

  14

  The first three days of SDA have been a parade of pulled muscles, twisted ankles and missed cues. I didn’t know it was possible for every part of my body to be sore. My fingernails. My earlobes. My index finger. They all throb like they’re under a pain microscope. My teammates barely break a sweat.

  Since I’m on Huxley’s team, not to mention in her final dance number, I have to be the cherry atop the perfection sundae. Our number has to bring people to their feet. When I think we’re Broadway good, Huxley finds the cracks. She’s blunt, morally opposed to sugarcoating. In fact, we’re not supposed to eat sugar or any complex carbohydrate while under her tutelage. I can tell, though, that Huxley’s favorite part of being captain is getting to point out the flaws of other dancers. Especially me.

  “Rebecca, on that first count, you start with your right foot, not your left. Do you know the difference between your right and your left?”

  “Rebecca, your leg has to go higher. You’re not kicking a soccer ball.”

  “Rebecca, smile when you dance. You’re supposed to be having fun.”

  “Rebecca.” She cringes at the pouches of sweat under my arms and between my legs. “Never mind.”

  Is this her plan to mold me into datable material? Belittle and berate me on a daily basis while causing me excruciating pain? Did I join SDA or a cult? She sneaks looks among her friends, sharing a telepathic moment at my expense. I suspect that helping me was never her plan. I’m the entertainment, the thing that gets the team to smile while they dance.

  The only thing that pulls me through practice is knowing that Monday is just a few days away.

  * * *

  “Spider-Man is a much better superhero than Iron Man,” Fred says to his friends before shoving a handful of ketchup-drenched fries into his mouth. “All Iron Man has is a metal suit.”

  “At least he can fly. Spider-Man just swings. Do you ever wonder why Spider-Man doesn’t fight villains in the desert or tundra? No buildings to swing off of,” Howard says back as he bites off a chunk of soft pretzel.

  They’ve been at this argument for the entire lunch period, and neither has chewed with his mouth closed once. Since Val went to eat with Ezra, I’ve had to embrace my new lunch-table role of token girl. Fred, Howard and Quentin, and their stacks of plastic-enshrined comic books, have taken over. At least I’m not eating alone.

  “What do you think?” Fred asks me. “Iron Man or Spider-Man. Who’s cooler?”

  I shrug my shoulders. I’d be better equipped to explain the quadratic equation. “Well, Robert Downey Jr. is pretty funny.”

  “Booyah!” Howard yells. The other two slump back in their seats. This isn’t terrible. It’s nice not listening to a conversation about boys, shoes or our classmates.

  I doodle on a copy of Huxley and Steve’s homecoming picture. I don’t touch Steve’s face, but Huxley gets devil horns, blacked-out teeth and a thought bubble over her with “I’m a bitch” scrawled inside of it. It’s juvenile, I know. And it’s just a piece of paper. But I do get some pleasure out of seeing Huxley look like a redneck devil.

  “So Val and Ezra are now official, huh?” Quentin asks me. He’s the last person I would guess cared about Ashland gossip, but I suppose every student likes to stay up on current events.

  “He’s ‘not into labels,’” I say, making air quotes with my fingers. “But, yes, they are.”

  “That guy has got some serious game,” Howard says after chugging his can of Hawaiian Punch. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a girlfriend. Like not even for a day.”

  “I think someone has a crush,” Quentin says. He mimes to Howard to rub the red off his teeth.

  “No, I’m just saying. The guy always has a girl by his side. I’m in awe. I wish I had half his mojo.”

  “You wish you had half his girlfriends.”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  I wait for Fred to chime in, but he’s preoccupied with another table across the cafeteria. A sextet of guys, who look identical to my tablemates, huddle around a table oohing and aahing over something. A Rubik’s cube? A Playboy?

  “Jeremy Fowler brought in another one of his vintage Batman comics from the 1940s,” Fred says. I shrug my shoulders. “It’s like if a girl brought in a pair of Jimmy Choos, I think.”

  I close my notebook, hiding the picture. “I didn’t know you were such a fashionista.”

  “I have a sister.” His eyes drift to the other table again. “We all used to sit together. We even had this tradition whenever a guy brought a rare comic to lunch. None of us ate when the comic was out. We gave ourselves a twenty-minute time limit to flip through it, then we put it away and had lunch.” He rests his head on his hand.

  “What happened?” I find myself slipping into Break-Up Artist mode.

  “Jeremy’s grandpa died,” he says, his voice dropping. “Jeremy was never a real co
mic fan. He just liked to pretend he knew what he was talking about, and we always kind of ignored him. He once mixed up the Green Lantern and Green Goblin!”

  “Well, they’re both green.”

  “Trust me. You don’t mess those two up,” he says. He shakes his head, getting worked up. “But then his grandpa died and left him this stash of vintage DC Comics. Out of the blue! The guys were salivating over them. Suddenly, he thinks he’s lord of the lunch table and demands that we only discuss DC Comics, or else he won’t bring in any of the old books. My boys and I—” he points to Quentin and Howard “—are Marvel fans through and through. We’ve had lively debates at our table.” Fred gets more animated, leaning closer to give me the full scoop.

  “But Jeremy said the table should only be for DC fans. Real comic-book fans. He had the nerve to say that! I said that’s stupid, of course. So he put it to a vote. Since the other guys wanted to check out his old comics, they sided with him. The table voted and excommunicated us when we came back from Christmas break. Heath Ledger is probably rolling over in his grave.”

  “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” I ask. Who knew boys could be just as catty as girls? I can feel the wheels churning in my head, a plan forming.

  “He won’t listen to what I have to say.”

  “Get him to sell the comics.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “He would if the price were right,” I say.

  “I make eight dollars an hour at my parents’ restaurant. I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse in about fifty years.”

  That makes me laugh. It’s refreshing when you find people at this school with a real sense of humor. I regain focus and catch a quick look at Jeremy. “What if his friends found out he was selling the comics? They’d be mad, right?”