Why We Broke Up

by Daniel Handler

  “I don’t have to put up with this,” she snarled. “Nine fifty.”

  You gave her a bill from your pocket. “Don’t be that way. You know I love you best.”

  That was the first time I saw that part, too. The hag melted into a fluttery puddle and smiled for the first time since the Paleozoic era. You winked, took the change. I should have seen it, Ed, as a sign that you were unreliable. Instead I saw it as a sign of charming, which is why I didn’t break it off right then and there, like I should have and wish wish wish I did. Instead I stayed out late with you on a bus and the stranger streets of a lost, far neighborhood where Lottie Carson was hiding out in a house with a garden full of statues making shadows in the dark. Instead I just kissed your cheek for a thank-you note, and we walked out opening the package and reading the instructions together for how to do it. It’s easy, it was easy, too easy to do this. Avant-garde was the term you were thinking of, I learned from When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film, but we didn’t know that when we had this. There were a million things, everything, I didn’t know. I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy. I took this thing I’m giving you back, this thing you gave me as the star we were waiting for finally emerged.

  “It’s opening!”

  “Where?”

  “No, the door!”

  “What?”

  “Across the street! It’s her! She’s leaving!”

  “OK, let me open it.”

  “Hurry!”

  “Be quiet about it, Min.”

  “But this is the moment.”

  “OK, let me read the directions.”

  “No time. She’s putting on gloves. Act normal. Take the picture. It’s the only way we can know if it’s her.”

  “OK, OK, Wind film tight with knob A.”

  “Ed, she’s going.”

  “Wait.” Laughing. “Tell her to wait.”

  “What, wait, we think you’re a movie star and want to take your picture to be sure? I’ll do it, give it to me.”

  “Min.”

  “It’s mine anyway, you bought it for me.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You don’t think girls can work a camera?”

  “I think you’re holding it upside down.”

  Ten steps down the block, laughing more.

  “OK, now. She’s going around the corner.”

  “Hold subject in frame—”

  “Open the thing.”

  “How?”

  “Give it back.”

  “Oh, like this. Now. There. Then what? Wait. OK, yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think so. Something clicked.”

  “Listen to you, something clicked. Is this how you’ll be when you’re directing a movie?”

  “I’ll order someone else to do it. Some washed-up basketball player.”

  “Stop.”

  “OK, OK, then you wind it again? Right?”

  “Um—”

  “Come on, you’re good at maaath.”

  “Stop it, and this isn’t math.”

  “I’m taking another. There, at the bus stop.”

  “Not so loud.”

  “And another. OK, your turn.”

  “My turn?”

  “Your turn, Ed. Take it. Take some.”

  “OK, OK. How many are there?”

  “Take as many as we can. Then we’ll get them developed and then we’ll see.”

  But we never did, did we? Here it is undeveloped, a roll of film with all its mysteries locked up. I never took it anyplace, just left it waiting in a drawer dreaming of stars. That was our time, to see if Lottie Carson was who we thought she was, all those shots we took, cracking up, kissing with our mouths open, laughing, but we never finished it. We thought we had time, running after her, jumping on the bus and trying to glimpse her dimple through the tired nurses arguing in scrubs and the moms on the phone with the groceries in the laps of the kids in the strollers. We hid behind mailboxes and lampposts half a block away as she kept moving through her neighborhood, where I’d never been, the sky getting dark on only the first date, thinking all the while we’d develop it later. We searched her mailbox, Lottie Carson on the envelope we hoped, you sprinting to trespass on her worn and ornate porch, perfect for her, while I waited with my hands on the fence watching you bound your way there and back. You clambered there in five swift secs, over the iron wrought spikes cooling my palms in the dusk, quick quick quick through the garden with the whatnot of gnomes and milkmaids and toadstools and Virgin Marys all outwitted like the opposing team. You flew your way through all those stone silent statues, and if I could I’d thunk them all at your goddamn doorstep, as noisy as you were quiet, as furious as we were giggly, as cold and scornful as I was breathless and hot watching you cat burglar for evidence and come back shrugging and empty-handed so we still didn’t know, we still couldn’t be sure, not until everything was developed. Those thick kisses on the long bus home at night with nobody but us leaned out on the last row of seats and the driver with his eyes on the road knowing it was none of his business, and kissing more at the bus stop when we parted from that date, and the shout of you moving crisscross away from me after I wouldn’t let you walk me home and have my mom bullet you all over the sidewalk from asking where in the world I had been. “See you Monday!” you called out, like you’d just figured out the days of the week. We thought we had time. I waved but couldn’t answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I’d wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it’ll get dropped someday, shoes that’ll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you’ll soon enough muck up filthy. Al probably heard it in my voice when I called him, waking him because it was so late, then telling him never mind, forget it, sorry I woke you, go to bed, no I’m fine, I’m tired too, try you tomorrow, when he said he had no opinion. Already. First date, what could I do with my stupid self and the thrill of see you Monday? thinking there was time, plenty of time to see what pictures we’d made? But we never developed them. Undeveloped, the whole thing, tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that’s why we broke up.

  Here it is. It took me forever to get it back to how it was, your amazing math scores all adding up in how this thing was folded. When I opened my locker Monday morning, it looked like an origami spaceship from the old Ty Limm sci-fis had landed on top of Understanding Our Earth, ready to unleash the electro-decimator onto Janet Bakerfield’s spinal column and destroy her brain. That’s what this did to me, too, when I unfolded the note and read it. I got all tingly and it made me stupid.

  Maybe you waited for me that first morning at school, I never asked you. Maybe you wrote it last minute after second bell and slipped it through the slats before the Olympic dash to homeroom all the jocks always do, leaving the slowpokes spinning as you bound past their backpacks like pinball toys. You didn’t know I never go to my locker until after first. You never really learned my schedule, Ed. It is a mystery, Ed, how you never knew how to find me but always found me anyway, because our paths tug-of-warred away from each other for the whole loud and tedious stretch of school, the mornings with me hanging out with Al and usually Jordan and Lauren on the right-side benches while you shot warm-up hoops on the back courts with your backpack waiting with the others and skateboards and sweatshirts in a bored heap, not a single class in common, your Early Lunch trash-dunking your apple core like it’s part of the same game, my Late Lunch on the weird corner of the lawn, hemmed in by the preppies and the hippies bickering over the airwaves with competing sound tracks except on hot days, when they truce it with reggae. In Ships in the Night, Philip Murray and Wanda Saxton meet in the last scene under the rainy awning, their wrong wife and fiancé finally story-lined away, and walk out together into the downpour—we know from the first scene, Christmas Eve, that both of them like walking in the rain but don’t have anybody who w
ill do it with them—and it’s the miracle of the ending. But there are no crisscross intersections for us, a blessing now that I live in fear of bumping into you. We’d only meet on purpose, after school before practice, you changing quick and shooing away your warm-upping teammates until you had to go, one more kiss, had to, one more, OK now really, I really really have to go.

  And this note was a jittery bomb, ticking beneath my normal life, in my pocket all day fiercely reread, in my purse all week until I was afraid it would get crushed or snooped, in my drawer between two dull books to escape my mother and then in the box and now thunked back to you. A note, who writes a note like that? Who were you to write one to me? It boomed inside me the whole time, an explosion over and over, the joy of what you wrote to me jumpy shrapnel in my bloodstream. I can’t have it near me anymore, I’m grenading it back to you, as soon as I unfold it and read it and cry one more time. Because me too, and fuck you. Even now.

  When I look at this ripped in half, I think of the travesty of what you did and the travesty of how I didn’t care at the time. I can’t look at this while I write about it, because I’m afraid Al will see and we’ll have to talk about it all over again, like you’ve ripped it in half all over again and all over again I said nothing. You probably think this is from the night we went to the Ball, but it isn’t. You probably think it got ripped in half by accident, for no reason, just the way things happen with all the posters for all the events that end up pulped by rain or untaped by the janitors to make room for the next one, like the Holiday Formal posters that are everywhere up now, with Jean Sabinger’s careful drawing of one of those glass ornaments which, if you look real close, has people dancing all funhouse-curved in a reflection, replacing the skulls and bats and jack-o’-lanterns on this poster, but you did it, bastard. You did it and made a scene.

  Al had the posters in a huge orange stack on his lap on the right-hand benches when I arrived at school with my hair ridiculous damp and my Advanced Bio homework not done in my backpack. Jordan and Lauren were there, too, each holding—it took me a sec to get it—a roll of tape.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Morning, Min,” Al said.

  “Oh no. Oh no. Al, I forgot.”

  “Told you,” Jordan said to him.

  “I totally forgot, and I need to find Nancie Blumineck and beg to copy her bio. I can’t! I can’t do it. Plus, I don’t have any tape.”

  Al took out a roll of tape, he’d known all along. “Min, you swore.”

  “I know.”

  “You swore it to me three weeks ago over a coffee I bought you at Federico’s, and Jordan and Lauren were witnesses.”

  “True,” Jordan said. “We are. We were.”

  “I notarized a statement,” Lauren said solemnly.

  “But I can’t, Al.”

  “You swore,” Al said, “on Theodora Sire’s gesture when she throws her cigarette into what’s-his-name’s bathwater.”

  “Tom Burbank. Al—”

  “You swore to help me. When I was informed that it was mandatory that I join the planning committee for the All-City All Hallows’ Ball, you didn’t have to swear to attend all the meetings like Jordan did.”

  “So boring,” Jordan said, “my eyes are still rolled into the back of my head. These are glass replicas, Min, placed in the gaping bored holes in my skull.”

  “Nor did you have to swear, as Lauren did, to hold Jean Sabinger’s hand through six drafts of the poster as each of the decorations subcommittee submitted their comments, two of which made her cry, because Jean and I still can’t talk after the Freshman Dance Incident.”

  “It’s true, the crying,” Lauren said. “I have personally wiped her nose.”

  “Not true,” I said.

  “Well, it’s true she cried. And Jean Sabinger is a crier. It’s these artistic temperaments, Min.”

  “All you swore to do,” Al said, “in order to get your free tickets by being a listed member of my subcommittee, was to spend one morning taping up posters. This morning, actually.”

  “Al—”

  “And don’t tell me it’s stupid,” Al said. “I am Hellman High junior treasurer. I work in my dad’s store on weekends. My entire life is stupid. The All-City All Hallows’ Ball is stupid. Being on the planning committee for anything is the height of stupidity, even when, especially when, it’s mandatory. But stupidity is no excuse. Although I myself have no opinion—”

  “Uh-oh,” Jordan said.

  “—some would argue, for instance, that a certain amount of stupidity is exhibited by anyone who finds it necessary to chase after Ed Slaterton, and yet I abused my power just yesterday, as a member of the student council, and looked up his phone number in the attendance office at your request, Min.”

  Lauren pretended to faint dead away. “Al!” she said, in her mother’s voice. “That is a violation of the student council honor code! It will be a very long time before I trust you ever, ever—OK, I trust you again.”

  They all looked at me now. Ed, you never cared for a sec about any of them. “OK, OK, I’ll tape up posters.”

  “I knew you would,” Al said, handing me his tape. “I never doubted you for a second. Pair up, people. Two will do gym through library, the others the rest.”

  “I’m with Jordan,” Lauren said, taking half the stack. “I know better than to interfere with the sexual tension festival you and Min have going on this morning.”

  “Every morning,” Jordan said.

  “You think everything’s sexual tension,” I said to Lauren, “just because you were raised by Mr. and Mrs. Super-Christian. We Jews know that underlying tensions are always due to low blood sugar.”

  “Yeah, well, you killed my Savior,” Lauren said, and Jordan saluted good-bye. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  Al and I headed for the east doors, stepping over the legs of Marty Weiss and that Japanese-looking girl who holds hands with him by the dead planters, and we spent the morning excused from homeroom taping these posters up like they meant something, Al holding them flat and me zipping out pieces of tape over the corners. Al told me some long story about Suzanne Gane (driver’s ed, bra clasp) and then said, “So, you and Ed Slaterton. We haven’t talked much about it, really. What’s—what’s—?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, tape tape. “He’s—it’s going well, I think.”

  “OK, none of my business.”

  “Not that, Al. It’s just, it’s, you know, he’s—fragile.”

  “Ed Slaterton is fragile.”

  “No, we are. I mean. Him and me, it feels that way.”

  “OK,” Al said.

  “I don’t know what will happen.”

  “So you won’t become one of those sports girlfriends in the bleachers? Good shot, Ed!”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I have no opinion.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “they don’t call it shot.”

  “Uh-oh, you’re learning basketball terminology.”

  “Layups,” I said, “is what they say.”

  “The caffeine withdrawal is going to be hard,” Al said. “No after-school coffee served in the bleachers.”

  “I’m not giving up Federico’s,” I said.

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I’ll see you there today.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “No opinion, I said. Anyway, tell me later.”

  “But Al—”

  “Min, behind you.”

  “What?”

  And there you were.

  “Oh!” It was too loud, I remember.

  “Hey,” you said, and gave a little nod to Al that of course embarrassed him with his Halloween stack.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You’re never around here,” you said.

  “I’m on the subcommittee,” but you just blinked at that.

  “OK, will I see you after?”

  “After?”

  “After school
, are you going to watch me practice?”

  After a sec I laughed, Ed, and tried the ambidextrous thing of looking at Al with a Can you believe this guy? and you with a Let’s talk later at the same time. “No,” I said. “I’m not going to watch you practice.”

  “Well, then call me later,” you said, and your eyes flitted around the stairwell. “Let me give you the best number,” you said, and without a thought, Ed, the travesty occurred, and you ripped down a strip from the poster we’d just put up. You didn’t think it, Ed, of course you didn’t, for Ed Slaterton the whole world, everything taped up on the wall, was just a surface for you to write on, so you took a marker from behind Al’s ear before he could even sputter, and gave me this number I’m giving back, this number I already had, this number that’s still a poster in my head that’ll never tear down, before giving back the pen and ruffling my hair and bounding down the stairs, leaving this half in my hand and the other wounded on the wall. Watching you go, Al watching you go, watching Al watching you go, and realizing I had to say you were a jerk to do that and not being able to make those words work. Because right then, Ed, the day of my last coffee after school with Al at Federico’s before, yes, goddamnit, I started to sit in the bleachers and watch you practice, the number in my hand was my ticket out of the taped-up mornings of my life, my usual friends, a poster announcing what everybody knows will happen because it happens every year. Call me later, you’d said, so I could call you later, at night, and it is those nights I miss you, Ed, the most, on the phone, you beautiful bastard.

  Because the day, it was school. It was the bells too loud or rattly in broken speakers that would never get fixed. It was the bad floors squeaky and footprinted, and the bang of lockers. It was writing my name in the upper right-hand corner of the paper or Mr. Nelson would automatically deduct five points, and in the upper left-hand corner of the paper or Mr. Peters would deduct three. It was the pen just giving up midway and scratching invisible ink scars on the paper or suiciding to leak on my hand, and trying to remember if I’d touched my face recently and am I a ballpoint coal miner on my cheeks and chin. It was boys in a fight by the garbage cans for whatever reason, not my friends, not my crowd, my old locker partner crying about it on the bench I sat on freshman year with a gang I barely see anymore. Quizzes, pop quizzes, switching identities during attendance when there’s a sub, anything to pass time, more bells. It was the principal on the intercom, two whole minutes of ambient hum and shuffling, and then a very clear “That’s on, Dave” and it clicking off. It was a table selling croissants for French Club knocked over by Billy Keager like always, and the strawberry jam a sticky stain on the ground for three days before anyone cleaned it. Old trophies in a box, a plaque with this year’s names waiting to be filled in on the tag, blank and coffin-shaped. It was the deep daydream and waking up with a teacher wanting an answer and refusing to repeat the question. Another bell, the announcement “ignore that bell” and Nelson scowling “He said ignore it” to people zipping backpacks. It was the paperwork in homeroom, stapled together wrong so everyone has to rotate them to fill them out. It was the bullshit and the tryouts for the school play, the banners with the big game Friday and then the big banner stolen and the announcement to rat someone out if anyone knew anything. It was Jenn and Tim breaking up, Skyler getting his car taken away, the rumor that Angela was pregnant but then the counter-rumor, no, it’s the flu, everyone throws up with the flu. It was the days the sun wasn’t even trying to get out of the clouds and be nice for once in its starry life. It was wet grass, damp hems, the wrong socks I forgot to throw out and so now found myself wearing, the sneaky leaf falling from my hair where it had nested for hours to surely someone’s delight. Serena getting her period and not having anything for it like always, scrounging from girls she didn’t even know in the bathrooms during second. Big game Friday, go Beavers, beat them Beavers, the dirty joke so boring to everyone but freshmen and Kyle Hapley. Choir tryouts, three girls selling knitting to help people in a hurricane, it was the library having nothing to offer no matter what needed looking up. It was fifth period, sixth, seventh, clock-watching and cheating on tests just because why not. It was suddenly being hungry, tired, hot, furious, so unbelievably startling sad. Fourth period, how could it be only fourth, is what it was. Hester Prynne, Agamemnon, John Quincy Adams, distance times rate equals something, lowest common whatever, the radius, the metaphor, the free market. Someone’s red sweater, someone’s open folder, it was wondering how someone could lose a shoe, just one shoe, and not see it when it was hopeful on the windowsill for weeks. Call this number on the bulletin board, call if you’ve been abused, if you want to kill yourself, if you want to go to Austria this summer with these other losers in the picture. It was STRIVE! in bad letters on a faded background, WET PAINT on a dry floor, big game Friday, we need your spirit, give us your spirit. Locker combinations, vending machines, hooking up, cutting class, the secrets of smoking and headphones and rum in a soda bottle with mints to cover the breath, that one sickly boy with thick glasses and an electronic wheelchair, thank God I’m not him, or the neck brace, or the rash or the orthodontics or that drunk dad who showed up at a dance to hit her across the face, or that poor creature who somebody needs to tell You smell, fix it, or it will never, never, never will it get better for you. The days were all day every day, get a grade, take a note, put something on, put somebody down, cut open a frog and see if it’s like this picture of a frog cut open. But at night, the nights were you, finally on the phone with you, Ed, my happy thing, the best part.