Break It Up

by Tippetts, E. M.

  The screen lights up when I touch it with my finger and I find he’s got his Kindle app displayed. On the page, he’s highlighted the following words: “Love ain’t boxing. At least it shouldn’t be. To love, you need to both lower your hands and stand there, completely vulnerable, easily damaged, both believing with all your hearts that the other person could never, would never, hurt you. And then they hurt you. And you hurt them.”

  Yeah, that’s a good hook. I navigate to the beginning of the book and see it’s called Bachelor Number One by some guy with a name I don’t dare try to pronounce—Mishka Shubaly. While Jason yammers on with his agent or whomever he’s on the phone with, I read what turns out to be a short nonfiction piece about a guy who gets an offer to be on a dating reality television show. The author is a recovering drug addict who says stuff like, “I decided I would apply the same logic to this idiotic dating reality show that I had used when I elected to smoke crack: Why not? I’ve tried everything else.”

  I laugh, even though I know it’s sick. I can relate to this. Oh, and this guy’s in a rock band too. This is so not something I should read. Googling myself might be safer.

  Fifty percent of the way in, another highlighted passage hits me like a knuckle punch to the gut. “…having done every filthy, hedonistic, rock’n’roll thing I can think of, my wildest sexual fantasy now involves having sex with a woman I love in a decent hotel room with a big bed with clean white sheets with a door that locks. That’s it. No gaggle of national cheerleading champions, no pink furry handcuffs, no exotic locations, definitely no toys or accessories, no champagne glass-shaped hot tub, not even any champagne, in fact, no artificial ingredients of any kind: just one man, one woman, one big clean bed, privacy, and clear and present love. That’s it. Pretty boring, huh? I think it sounds like heaven.”

  Yeah, definitely heaven. It’s only when I pause to wipe my eyes that I notice Jason’s off the phone, staring at me.

  “Did you plant this so I’d find it?” I ask, holding up his iPad.

  “Um. No.” He swipes it back. “It’s one of my favorite books. Not something I read and thought, ‘Gee, I’ll share this with my eighteen-year-old niece, because that isn’t creepy at all.’ Especially that part about his ideal sex fantasy.” His face is red as he shuts down his Kindle reader and switches his iPad off.

  I stare at Jason as a moment of realization hits me so hard that I feel knocked out of reality for a second. The room turns to dream haze and Jason’s discomfort is like something I’m watching on a television through the glass window of an appliance store from across the street. I literally need to rub my eyes and shake my head to come back to the here and now.

  “That how you felt when you met Chloe?” I ask. “That you’d done every stupid—”

  “Yep.”

  I knew Jason had a reputation as a party animal in Hollywood, especially when he was younger, and he sure was in the tabloids all the time.

  He looks sidelong at my face, catches my expression, and his posture softens. He turns towards me. “You and Zach. That was real, wasn’t it?”

  I shrug. “For me it was.”

  “What’s he think about all this?”

  “He won’t even answer a text.” I’ve already cried too many tears over this, so I force myself to pull it together.

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah…” Don’t cry, I think. Do. Not. Cry. “So what did Chloe think of your past?” Chloe, the introverted virgin who didn’t even watch Jason’s movies.

  He shrugs. “Well, I guess you could say we’re still dealing with all that. It’s not like it’s one problem. It creates new problems all the time. Like with this whole cheating accusation scandal, thing. I don’t think she’d have thought twice about it if it weren’t for my past.”

  “Did she think you’d cheated on her?”

  His gaze is uneasy, as if he’s afraid I’m about to punch him. “She doubted me a little, which was the worst feeling ever. I love her so much, and here she thought I might do something like that.”

  “But she’s okay now?”

  “Yeah, well…I’m luckier than I deserve to be.”

  “You are not.” The words come out with more heat than I expect.

  He raises an eyebrow, surprised.

  “You’re good to her. You’d do anything for her. Nobody loves her like you do.”

  Jason eyes me up and down before he puts a hand on my shoulder. “I knew, okay? When I was screwing around, I knew that what I was doing was the exact opposite of what any of the guys in my family would have done. I was arrogant and I thought I could just switch over to being the nice, committed, family guy at any time. You’re in kinda a different situation.”

  “Because my parents’ marriage is weaker than yours was?”

  He takes a moment to process that. “Your dad and Jen’s marriage, you mean?”

  “Yeah, okay, so she’s not my mother…” Hot tears pool in my eyes.

  “No, hey, that’s not how I meant it. I’m just trying to keep straight who you’re talking about. Jen would love to hear you call her your parent, okay? She’d probably forget to torture me for, like, five whole minutes she’d be so happy. I’m not making judgments about Kyle and Jen. I meant…you got abandoned by your own mother. I don’t know the story there, like, not any of it, but that’s gotta affect you. I’d be so messed up if that happened to me. I know I’m way needier than you are, but still.”

  “That would be a lame excuse for what I did in high school. My dad and Jen were married the whole time.”

  “Sure, but Jen’s…listen, we never ever thought of you as an outsider. Once you are in the family, you’re in. You can’t get rid of us. We all have baby pictures of you and that’s how it is, but I know we’re a little different than your birth mother’s family.”

  “You mean because of the race thing?”

  “Whatever. Mixing families, it’s not easy. And while you were dealing with all that stuff, we loved you but we didn’t know how to help you.”

  “I knew that sleeping with half my school was stupid. I guess I just thought the happily ever after thing wouldn’t be my bag anyway.”

  “Okay, that’s…yeah. Well…maybe we aren’t so different after all. I thought it wouldn’t happen for me either so it was, you know, not worth trying for sometimes.”

  “Right.”

  “But then I decided being alone was better than doing any of that stuff. Sleeping around and all that. It’s like…” He hefts his iPad. “Like what Mishka however-you-say-his-last-name says. I wasn’t wired that way, and a lot of us aren’t. At the end of it all, you just want something real.”

  I nod.

  “So what happened with Zach?”

  The tears that have been threatening to fall spill over and I dab them away with my fingertips. “We didn’t even sleep together. It was like he was my best friend and every kiss was…so intense that we had to pace ourselves.”

  Jason pulls me in for a rough hug and I lean against his muscular chest. My friends may think of him as the ultimate sex god, but to me, he really is just family. I can ugly cry in front of him. “You want me to see if I can track him down? Get you one last conversation? He owes you that.”

  I shake my head. “I’m doing this the normal person way. Not the Hollywood princess way.”

  “I hear that.”

  “It’s my fault. I didn’t tell him about my past.”

  Jason rubs my shoulder. “It’s kind of hard to find a good time for that, you know? ‘Hey, I like you. I’ve screwed more people than are in this room. So what’s up? You want to hang out sometime?’”

  I laugh. “Pretty much.”

  “Yeah…”

  “At least Chloe already knew, thanks to the media. And hey, every person I could possibly ever date knows too. Upside
?” I say.

  “Chloe didn’t know because she never read that stuff until a friend of hers got a bunch of articles about me and made her read them. This was after…before we got together, but after we’d met. When I was basically texting and calling her all the time, trying to get her to give me the time of day.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t fun.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Umm…” He heaves a sigh, my head still on his shoulder. “She said she didn’t care because I was ‘just a friend.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “I know. I broke down, like, a week later and told her I loved her, and she said no thanks.”

  “I know. When you came to our house to cry about it afterwards, I was listening in the hall.”

  “What?”

  I shrug.

  “I’d have totally done the same thing,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “But I still hate you for it. How embarrassing.”

  “Nah,” I say, “it was sweet. And Chloe was cool. I’ve always liked her. I tried to, like, talk to her and stuff so she wouldn’t just forget about you. I don’t think it helped, but I tried. And when you guys finally were dating, I tried not to be the most awful person ever when she was around. I failed, but I tried.”

  “That’s what that was about then. You shaping up the moment Chloe walked into any situation.”

  Now it’s my turn to shrug. “I know it didn’t help much.”

  “Hey, I’m not so sure about that. I don’t know what happened with her. One month she thought of me as just a friend, and the next she was totally okay with me kissing her.”

  “She saw you shirtless in the New Light movies. Totally fangirled on the gladiator thing.”

  “Yeah, uh huh. That must’ve been it.” He’s laughing though.

  “She still has the theme song as your ringtone on her phone.”

  “I know.” He laughs harder. “Which is just so her. And listen, it’ll happen for you too someday.”

  “Some guy will set Triple Cross as my ringtone?”

  That kills the mirth. Jason shakes his head. “Kyra…”

  “You were just a party boy. I’m a slut.”

  “The world’s got a double standard, yeah.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “It’s one of my least favorite things about reality. I’m just a guy with a libido, but Chloe’s frigid, according to the press, and you’re responsible for the death of modern music. Women have it rough. People get any hint of your sexuality and they’ve got some judgment to make. But I promise you, a lot of guys just don’t care. I mean…I dunno. Even the ones who say stupid things in the locker room, it’s because if they met you, they’d be intimidated. They’d think you wouldn’t be interested because they don’t know how to swing from the chandeliers. Underneath it all, they’re just scared. They write you off first so they won’t feel rejected.”

  “Thank you,” I say, “but you’re lying. They think I’m easy and will think I’ll put out for anyone, chandelier swinging or no.”

  “The people who matter—”

  “Are really thin on the ground sometimes, you know? When the whole of the internet and television and print media want to roast you alive.”

  “I hear that. And you’re right. Even on my worst days, I never went through anything like what you’re going through. And there’s the race thing, which isn’t fair either.” His phone rings, and from his answer, I can tell it’s family.

  Within ten minutes, Steve and his wife and kids and Lillian and Doug join us in the staff room. Everyone hugs and no one mentions my media issues. There are a few looks that linger, asking silently if I’m okay, and hugs that are tighter than usual, but beyond that, I can tell they don’t care about what I’ve done to the family reputation or to Triple Cross. Here I’m just Kyra. I couldn’t ask for a better family than this.

  It’s evening when I finally get to hold my little sisters, who have red, smushed up faces and tiny little hands that grasp at the hems of their swaddling blankets. My father positively glows with exhaustion and happiness, and Jen has never looked so serene. “It’s the drugs,” she assures us.

  While everyone gathers around to hug her, my father hands me one of the babies, who is so tiny that it’s hard to believe she’s a whole person who’ll someday stand as tall as I am. “Josefina,” my father says. “And Angelina.” He indicates the baby in his arms. Both have the softened “J” and “g” sounds, the Spanish pronunciation. So here I am, mostly Spanish with a name like Kyra, and here are my sisters with a blue-eyed mother and the names Josefina Armijo and Angelina Armijo. Suffice it to say, we’re one thoroughly mixed family.

  Jen’s room is a cocoon of warmth and security. The press and that whole nasty world are locked away outside.

  But when Chloe arrives, she looks a little worse for wear. “It’s bad,” she warns everyone. “I’ve never seen a crowd of paparazzi that big.”

  Even here and now, my problems are affecting people, not that anyone in the family seems to care. I don’t know whether to be devastated or furious. Devastation seems more humble, but looking at my baby sisters and knowing this is the world they’re in, that definitely incites fury. I wish I could run outside and drive all the media away, protect these new little souls from all that ugliness. I just feel so helpless.

  Chloe gives me a hug and a grin and I smile back. “I’ll leave before the rest of you guys,” I say.

  “You’ll leave when you want to leave,” says Chloe. “I can say something that will seem especially frigid to distract them. They love making me seem frigid.”

  Everyone laughs a little, but it’s not funny. It’s really not funny. I admire the way Chloe stands up to it time after time though. As she takes Angelina in her arms, I watch her expression. There’s definite joy there, but there’s world-weariness too. Chloe sees the worst of humanity in her job as a forensic scientist, and before she was that, she was a crime victim, nearly knocked out of the world by three gunshots. She’s never taken any of that lying down though. Chloe’s a fighter. Even if she can only make one little corner of the world a better place, she’ll work day and night to make that happen.

  I just wish there was something I could do.

  Then again, maybe there is.

  “No way,” says Dave, Jason’s assistant, on the phone. “Nuh-uh.”

  “You help me or I go to the media all by myself.” A week has passed since my sisters were born, and I’m in my room. Paparazzi are gathered outside the house—still.

  Dave is adamant. “Don’t make the same mistake hundreds of other people have made. They always think talking to the press will make a difference, but if you talk, you do it on their terms, on their turf, and they’ll use your words just like they’ve used everything else against you. So no. You will not give an interview.”

  My phone beeps and Jason’s number pops up.

  “Thanks for nothing,” I say as I click the line over.

  “No,” says Jason. “I get what you’re thinking and I’m glad. I’m glad you want to fight, but you fight this by staying quiet.”

  “It isn’t blowing over,” I say. “Aidan’s got enough movie clips to keep them coming until the concert-movie-turned-band-breakup-expose comes out, and then I’m really toast.”

  “Which will feel like an eternity. You wait it out.”

  “No—”

  “Yes. Go to college. Live your life. Move on. They won’t hover forever. Do not talk to them.”

  Talking to him is like talking to a brick wall. I grit my teeth and think this over. What would a Vanderholt say to flip this situation? They’ve got a gift for turning any argument around to suit what they want. That’s why they make such good lawyers.

  Yeah, I got nothing.

  “Okay,
so this is another stupid mistake I’m about to make,” I say. “Let me make it. Let me learn from it. Just let me live my life and don’t coddle me. I’ll regret it, you can say, ‘I told you so,’ and that’ll be that.”

  “Well gee, if you’re gonna sugarcoat it like that—”

  “Jason—”

  “Listen,” says Jason, “you aren’t the first person who’s tried to do this. Not by a long shot. The problem is, trying to tell your side of things always backfires. Who can you think of who had the whole world against her and turned it around? Okay, before you answer? Here’s an example of someone who did do that: Anita Hill. You know who she is? Accused a Supreme Court justice of sexual harassment? People laughed at her when she testified, but nowadays most people believe her. You know how she achieved that? By staying quiet. Living her life. Letting it blow over. Read up on her. She’s a good example.”

  “But—”

  “Stop arguing.”

  “I’m gonna go read up on Anita Hill. Because if she did testify against a Supreme Court justice, she talked.”

  “And got ridiculed and hated for it.”

  “Until people came around.”

  “Kyra.” Jason’s really exasperated now. “It took years. Decades.”

  “Got it. Okay. No quick fix. I’m good with that. I’m gonna get dragged through the mud anyway when the movie comes out.”

  “Right, so why make it worse?”

  “Because it’s worth trying to make the world better. Even if you fail, you know?”

  Jason goes silent.

  I don’t know how to read that. “Please?” I say.

  “I hate you.”

  “You’re going to help me?”

  “And hate you for it. Hate, you got it? This is a big mistake. Jen’s gonna hate me. Chloe’s gonna hate me—”

  “I’ll talk to Chloe.”

  “You’re gonna blame me when this all goes wrong.”