by Adi Alsaid
“You did not listen to a calculus podcast,” I’d said. “You were probably rehearsing for the play.”
“I don’t just sing, Lu, Jesus. I have other interests.” We’d made it to my room by then, flopped onto the bed to lay next to each other, my head finding its resting spot on his chest. I’d craned my neck to look at him, judging his last statement. “Fine, I was singing. But, still, I contain multitudes.”
I snapped out of the memory to realize I’d been staring at Leo.
“I guess this isn’t much better,” Leo said with a grimace, which made Miguel and Karl burst out laughing.
I looked past Leo and his jackass friends to my still-long line. I wished Pete were around to rescue me from this, but his shift had finished an hour ago and he was waiting for me at The Strand. I could feel myself start to blush. Rage-blushing, I think it was.
“Um,” Leo said, starting to shift uncomfortably. This was the first time we’d seen each other since he broke up with me. This wasn’t exactly how I was picturing it, with my coworkers around and the next person in line looking exasperated at any motion that wasn’t strictly in my job description.
“We’re gonna do the friends combo.” He pushed a couple of twenties across the counter. I stared at the money, wishing it was something else. Maybe one of the bills had a love letter written on the back, or an apology. He was a theater geek after all; this could all be some elaborate, dramatic ploy. More chuckles from the jackasses. Leo bit his bottom lip, then looked back at his friends and told them to shut up. He turned toward me but didn’t meet my eyes at all, his cheeks reddening. Shame-blushing, I guessed.
I started filling tubs of popcorn, my hands shaking enough that half the kernels spilled onto the floor. The other day at Madison Square Park, I’d had this whole speech prepared for him. I was going to try to convince him that we shouldn’t break up, not for something as easily overcome as distance. I’d gone over the words in my head about a thousand times during all those hours when I couldn’t sleep because of him, tinkered with their arrangement, wanting every damn sentence to punch him right in the heart so that I could then nurse him back to health. Now though, none of those words came to mind.
I slammed two tubs of popcorn on the counter and tried to ask him what he wanted to drink. But my voice was about to do that whole squeak-when-you’re-about-to-cry thing, so I just picked up a couple of large cups and raised my eyebrows at him.
How I wanted those cups to be bottomless. How I wish I could just fill them up with his choice of orange soda for an hour straight until my shift was over, watch the bubbles fizz incessantly so I wouldn’t have to face him in this state.
“So...” he said, with a long pause, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he should follow it up with anything or if he just let the words speak for themselves. Relationships don’t end in periods, they end in ellipses, stretching the end out as if they don’t know it’s arrived. “What’d you want to talk to me about the other day?”
I slid the sodas over to him and punched in the order into my register. I thought about Cal’s words to me on the bench. What a weird thing we do, he’d said. Love.
I grabbed Leo’s change but just held it in my hand for a moment, looking up at him. “What do you think, Leo?” I managed to say. Instead of meeting my eyes, he looked down at the floor and shrugged. We’d been in love so recently, and now here I was trying to decide whether I should place the bills and coins on the counter to show him how hurt I was or if I should reach out and drop it into his hand for the pleasure of brushing his fingertips with mine.
The last time we’d held hands and meant it we were out on his fire escape, watching the neighbors. It hadn’t been the dead of summer yet, the night warm but comfortable. Leo had just come up with a new song to add to the ongoing R & B album of our relationship. This one was titled “Fire Escape Boners” which I promise was a much sweeter song than what it sounds like. He had such a lovely singing voice, and he could come up with song lyrics that fit my sense of humor and made me swoon at the same time.
Nine months we’d dated. If I got to live until I was eighty, our relationship would only take up 0.9% of my lifetime. I tried to tell myself that 0.9% of my lifetime couldn’t possibly have this much of an effect on me. It was meaningless. That’s how long I spent in karate classes when I was eight, and I sure as hell didn’t know any karate now, nor miss its presence in my life. I watched him open his mouth stupidly with no response. He brushed his hair back again.
“My movie’s starting,” he said, calling his friends over to help him with the snacks. They muttered hellos as if we hadn’t noticed each other yet, then scurried away. “Sorry,” Leo said.
Again, instead of saying all those words I’d prepared just for Leo the other day, I thought of Cal’s, We have love. Isn’t that enough?
He finally met my gaze and I looked into his eyes, eyes that I’d looked into most days for the last nine months, eyes that, on more than one occasion, had been the first thing I’d seen in the morning. I wished our time together had endowed me with the ability to know what he was thinking, to identify exactly the amount of love he had for me. But I had no clue, and didn’t want to guess.
Then Leo turned and left, a trail of spilled popcorn in his wake.
* * *
As soon as I got off work, I grabbed my bag from the employee room and bolted down the street toward The Strand. I found Pete hanging out at the customer service desk with Starla, the two of them leaning over a crossword puzzle. The store was quiet, only a handful of people wandering about half an hour before closing. Indie rock was playing quietly on overhead speakers, and the soft, warm lighting made it feel like we were in a movie.
Starla spotted me first, and she smiled as I approached. “What’s up, babycakes?” She did that whole antiquated-term-of-affection thing that usually only sweet, elderly ladies can pull off unironically.
“Oh you know, just my angst,” I sighed and plopped my forehead onto the desk.
“Uh-oh,” Pete said. “Shift not go so well? Are you disillusioned by the masses swallowing up Hollywood franchises again?”
I kept my head down on the wooden surface, turning so that I could see them, my cheek smooshed and making my words come out garbled. “I mean, yeah, that doesn’t help. But...” A groan escaped me. “Leo showed up.”
“Is that the ex?” Starla asked in an unsubtle aside to Pete.
“The very one. Let me guess, he didn’t try to serenade you back into his arms?”
“Not quite.” I stood up, feeling like no amount of sighing could ever help the queasiness in my stomach. “More like he showed up to swallow Hollywood franchises.”
“That’s a weird way to put it,” Pete said. Then he snapped his fingers and grabbed the pen from Starla to write into the crossword. “Swallow! Seventeen-down.” They high-fived, Starla’s many bracelets jingling with the impact. “So, did you confront him?” Pete went on. “Unload the speech that’s been building up inside of you lo these many days?”
“Again, no. More like stared into his stupidly pretty eyes and silently begged him to still love me.”
“Yeesh,” Starla said, eyebrows angled in concern. “Running into exes is never fun. It’s just so easy to tell that at least one party involved is holding back some pain, some longing. It lingers there like a fart, making normal conversation impossible.”
“Especially when you’re the one who farted,” Pete chipped in.
“Thanks, Pete, that’s helpful.”
“Sorry.” He chewed on the back of the pen, looked up from the crossword. “Of all the movie theaters in all the world, why’d the dick have to walk into yours?”
“‘I didn’t know you’d be working today,’” I said, dropping my voice and making it sound as dumb as possible in imitation of Leo. It’s not what he sounded like at all. Again, the jerk’s voice was beautiful. But I was angry th
at he hadn’t let me convince him to still be an us, hadn’t bothered to show up to our meeting but had waltzed into my theater as if he didn’t know I’d be there, angry that he wasn’t still singing R & B songs with me. I groaned and looked around the shop, trying to find comfort in one of my favorite places, the quiet beauty of colorful, nearly endless stacks of books. All of them chock-full of love and heartache, couples killing themselves because they couldn’t be together, couples traveling into hell to find each other, couples climbing over and fighting through and barreling past obstacles to be together. How had that not prepared me for a precollege breakup?
“You alright, girly?” Starla asked me.
“What percentage of these books do you think are about love, in some way?” I asked, ignoring her question and turning my back toward them so I could look out at the whole store. “Or at least have a romantic element in them?”
“Shiiiiiit,” Starla said, stretching out the vowel. “If you leave out nonfiction and all the reference books, I’d guess 90 percent.”
“That’s so crazy,” I said. “Why? Why this one thing? Life’s much more than just love.”
An old, balding white guy picked up a thick paperback from the classics table, turning it over to read the back cover. A black woman and her two tween daughters roamed the children’s section, one girl holding her mom’s hand, the other rushing ahead and gathering a pile of books.
I turned back to Starla and Pete, who had stopped doing their crossword puzzle and were looking out at the store too. “Because,” Starla said, “love’s the pinnacle of the human experience, yet it’s still a mystery to us. The joys and the pains alike, not to mention the awkward mumblings of seeing an ex for the first time since your breakup. It’s the best thing that happens to us—”
“Love’s the worst thing that happened to me,” I interrupted.
“—but we don’t really know why,” Starla continued, acknowledging me with a chuckle and a couple of reassuring shoulder pats. “All that art, it’s just...the attempt to understand it.”
“You should know more than anyone,” Pete added, the words half-mumbled because of the pen in his mouth. Starla reached over and grabbed the pen from him.
“Gross, dude, that’s my pen.”
“Me? Why would I understand it?”
“Don’t you write about it professionally? Love, specifically.”
“Well, yeah. But I’ve never claimed to be a love expert. I’m wading through the murky shitswamp that is love, and bringing my readers along for the ride.”
“Wow, was that your pitch?”
“My love-hate relationship with love is part of my relatable charm. I’m not doling out advice, I’m chronicling what it’s like to be a teen maneuvering through this...” I waved my hand and gestured at all these stupid books about love, then at myself for added emphasis.
They went back to their crossword puzzle and I looked out at the store a little longer, thinking about what Starla had said. I spotted the aisle where I first eavesdropped on Iris, wondered how she would deal with her first run-in with Cal after their breakup.
“You’re going to be okay,” Starla reassured me, offering a light forearm touch, her bracelets cold on my wrist.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what the books and movies keep telling me.”
I took my time walking home, not really in a hurry to deal with my mom, or with another failed attempt at sleep. I tried eavesdropping a few times on people around me, even pausing near a few bars with patios and pretending to text so that I could listen in, but I couldn’t seem to focus.
I climbed up the five short steps of my stoop, unlocked the front door that led into the mail vestibule, then the inside door that led to the stairway. We’d been living in this apartment since my parents got divorced and my dad moved to New Jersey, but for some reason I’d never really noticed how many stains were on the gray carpet, how the paint along the walls was peeling so much that it looked like it was trying to escape the building. Every apartment I passed by was replete with noise, TVs blasting, music thumping, feet stomping. It was like I was suddenly attuned to something about the city that I’d never really focused on before.
When I unlocked my apartment door, Mom immediately pushed her chair away from the kitchen table. “Oh thank God,” she said. “I was so tired.” She walked over to the kitchen, setting a mostly empty red-wine glass by the sink. “Hope your day was good. Eggplant parm in the fridge, you can heat it in the microwave for a minute and a half. Good night.” She planted a kiss on my forehead, which made me just want to fall into her arms.
I wrapped her into a hug, and she let out a soft “oh” in surprise, then held me tighter, probably thinking all sorts of mom thoughts. I wondered for a moment if I should tell her about Leo. I wanted to, felt the urge rising in my chest, though it was too easily suppressed. After Leo and I broke up, my mom had asked me if I was okay, and I managed to shrug and say a weak, “Yeah.” After a few repetitions of this, she didn’t bring it up again.
I don’t know when Mom and I settled into the kind of relationship where love was not discussed, but it had happened too long ago for me to do anything about it now. I remember when my parents got divorced, I was old enough to see some sort of heartbreak in her, to sense her sorrow past my own. But I was thirteen and didn’t know how to ask her about it, and the topic hadn’t been broached since.
“G’night,” I said, letting go of her and turning away, hoping she wouldn’t call attention to my hug. “Please make pancit one day. Or lumpia. Literally anything not covered in tomato sauce.”
“Very funny,” she called down the hall. “Don’t be loud, you’ll wake your brother.”
A record-breaking day for sighs, no doubt. I made myself a plate, threw it into the microwave, checked my email. Hafsah’s warning still sat there. I read it again, wondered what I would do if I lost the job, lost my scholarship. I grabbed the book I was reading and set it on the kitchen table along with a glass of water, but struggled to read even a page.
Too many thoughts raged through my head, all of them uncomfortable to linger on. Bad furniture, that’s what my thoughts were.
I ate as much of my dinner as I could stomach, then went into my room and fell on top of the sheets, wanting to cry but not exactly knowing what had changed from yesterday to today. I’d known Leo was unlikely to change his mind even with a speech, and all I’d done that day was muttered a sentence and handed him his change. What a weird thing we do to ourselves, I thought.
Then I sat up with a start. Inspiration poked at me for the first time in months, jabbing its persistent finger into the small of my back. I reached for my phone on the nightstand and clicked to reply to Hafsah’s email.
Sorry, H. Been struggling with some heartbreak-induced writer’s block. Fitting, right? But I have an idea. Are you free for coffee tomorrow?
5
PANIC VINAIGRETTE
Explaining dreams to someone when you don’t really remember the details is one of the worst things a person can do, so I’ll spare you. What you should know though, is that when I woke up I was happy. Overwhelmingly happy for just an instant, until I realized that I was happy because I’d dreamed about Leo. We’d been sitting on that bench in Union Square Park where I met Cal, but instead of Leo bailing on me, he’d shown up and taken my hand without a word. I was back within that comfort, within the joy of sitting next to someone you love and just feeling your hand in theirs. He started singing one of our R & B songs for me, then leaned in and kissed me.
I lay in bed, the feeling of being loved lingering even though it had come from a fictionalized version of a person who no longer loved me. I checked my phone and saw that Hafsah had emailed, saying we could meet at noon in Midtown. The desire to fall back asleep and into the dream made my bed a little more comfortable than it usually was, and the relief from Hafsah’s email made me want to sink as deep into my
mattress as possible. I snoozed my first alarm, not ready to start the day or to think about what it meant to be so happy after a dream like that. It’s bizarre how dreams can just bleed into the day after they’re done, like they’re something tangible, like they’re clothes you wear until you go to bed again. I was just about to doze back off when my backup alarm rang out. I groaned into my pillow and pulled myself out of bed. Cal’s wallet was still on my nightstand, and I picked it up and rummaged through it for the millionth time before deciding it was best kept out of sight and chucking it into my drawer.
In the living room, Jase was back on the couch with his video games. Mom was at work. I got myself a bowl of cereal and watched Jase kill a few more people, trying to clear my head of the dream. “Don’t you have any social interactions planned today?”
“What are you talking about? I’m playing with literally all my friends right now.”
“What if you read a book today? Just, like, a page.”
“This game actually has a really good storyline.” Jase paused his game for a second to take a bite of leftover eggplant parmesan. There were four pieces piled onto the plate, and that’s not even counting however many he had devoured before I’d woken up. He used to be such a sweet, small kid. So small. I could pick him up and even physically intimidate him when I needed to. But now he was eating as much in one meal as I was in a week, and his limbs looked like a magician pulling a colored handkerchief out of his sleeve. They just kept going and going.
“What about some community service hours? Volunteer work? Meditation? Any plans to do those today?”
“Prolly not.”
“Your generation will be the end of us all,” I said, getting up to go shower.
I still had plenty of time, so I decided to save myself the subway fare from Chinatown and walk to Midtown. I wanted to corral my thoughts, so that I could make a good pitch to Hafsah. But my thoughts were un-corral-able, and altogether too painfully focused on Leo. I ended up just eavesdropping the whole way there. Nothing meaningful really. I wasn’t within earshot of anyone long enough to get a full conversation. Just lines, words I plucked out of the air.
