Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak

by Adi Alsaid

  The restaurant I was meeting Hafsah at was obviously a business-lunch meet up. It was empty at 11:45 when I got in, and at exactly noon the line snaked out the door, all thirty-, forty-, and fiftysomethings in business attire. There was a staggering number of blazers.

  I felt weird as hell sitting there, obviously out of place. Well, not that exactly. But like everyone else thought I was out of place. I’d been meeting with Hafsah at places like this for over a year now.

  I’d checked into the front desk of the building she worked in and saw the looks the security guards gave me, their eyebrows raised, the contemptuous stares of middle-aged white dudes wondering what I was doing in the elevator with them. In their eyes, I was lost. I’d wandered in accidentally.

  But here of all places, I was not lost.

  I’d found Misnomer’s call for writers online in a Tumblr post, shared hundreds of times before I’d even laid eyes on it. I was probably supposed to be doing homework at the time, but of course had gotten sucked into the black hole of the internet.

  The post said the site was looking for “fresh teen voices” in a handful of categories, which immediately filled me with hope that they were looking for exactly me, while also making me question whether my voice was fresh or even typically teenage or what category I was suited for. I’d seen “love” on the list, but had assumed I could do humor or current events or lifestyle, whatever that one meant. They’d asked for a cover letter and a portfolio of writing samples, so I’d spent the next few hours shirking my academic responsibilities in order to go through everything I’d ever written. After overcoming nausea from reading the garbage I’d written over the years, I managed to find a handful of blog entries, essays, and stories that I felt strongly enough about to submit.

  A week later I had an email from Hafsah, the managing editor, telling me that since I lived in New York, I should come in for an interview, ready to discuss ideas. I filled three pages in my notebook with pitches on what I could write for her.

  That first time in the Misnomer offices, I’d felt out of place, sure. Up until I sat down in front of Hafsah’s desk. There were many ways I could describe Hafsah, but above all else, she’s a badass. At twenty-nine she was the managing editor for a magazine, had a publishing deal for two books of essays, had her work featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as having been interviewed a handful of times on TV for her insight into a number of social issues. I’d researched all of this before coming in for my interview, and I was in the presence of the woman whom I aspired to be someday.

  “What do you want to write about, Lu?” she’d asked, right off the bat.

  I thought for a second. “Is it a bad interview answer to say ‘anything’?”

  “Not necessarily.” She’d turned to some papers in front of her, presumably my printed writing samples, but they could have easily been, like, hidden Harry Potter manuscripts or classified Pentagon papers or something. She’s was that cool. “How often do you write?”

  “Most days.”

  “Do you schedule time to do it, or wait for inspiration?”

  “At least a half hour before bed. And usually during math classes, as a stimulant. Except on days when I need a break.”

  She’d smiled. “How do you feel about love?”

  “Um.”

  “I’m sure you saw that one of the positions we’re looking to fill is a regular romance and relationship columnist. Not a Dear Abby thing, per se, more like a Carrie Bradshaw thing.”

  I tilted my head. “The quarterback?”

  “As in Sex and the City?”

  I snapped my fingers. “Right. I knew that.” I noticed that the usual discomfort that came after I said something stupid didn’t rage in my thoughts. My comment dissipated in my memory. It was a wonderful thing, being unbothered.

  Hafsah flipped through the pages in front of her, leaning her chin in her cupped hand for a moment before looking back up at me.

  “How would you feel about writing about love?”

  “I mean, writing is writing. I’m not too...experienced, or whatever. But I’d be happy to do it.”

  “Well, (a), that doesn’t matter. I just love your voice, and some of these blog posts are exactly what we’re looking for. Those two weeks when you had a crush on the kid in chess club led to some compelling, funny reading. And, (b), being in a relationship isn’t the sole experience of teen love. God knows it wasn’t for me. We’re not looking for a relationship advice person, that’s too passé. We want someone to muse about love and dating, the absence and longing of both.”

  “That,” I said, “I can write about.”

  Hafsah smiled again, and I almost felt like my life as a writer-with-an-audience was already beginning. “You’ve got these insights that I think could resonate with readers. Even now I’m looking forward to reading more from you.”

  It didn’t sound like I was interviewing for a job anymore, which almost prompted me to run a victory lap in her office. I didn’t, which is probably why I got the job.

  I knew what I had to offer the world, and it was my writing. And ever since I’d started at Misnomer, regardless of how I moved within the world, I’d felt more a part of it than ever before. So they could raise their eyebrows all they wanted.

  At the fancy restaurant I didn’t/did belong in, I sipped on seltzer water until Hafsah arrived, smiling at the hostess and pointing me out as she strode past the line of people waiting for a table.

  “Have you been here long?” Hafsah asked as she sat down. She pushed her menu aside and looked around for a waiter, one arm raised slightly, two fingers stretched just enough to catch someone’s attention, but not enough that someone might think her desperate for it.

  “No, I just got here.”

  We chatted small stuff for a while, mostly her asking me how it felt to be done with school. To be honest it still just felt like any other summer. A stupidly heartbroken one, but whatever. I wasn’t thinking about starting college in the fall yet.

  When our food arrived, Hafsah went into business mode. “Alright, what’s your pitch?” She unraveled her silverware from its little cloth napkin sleeping bag and started poking away at her pasta. I had a great-looking ahi tuna salad with soy vinaigrette in front of me, but now that it was time for me to tell her my idea, I couldn’t bring myself to casually eat while unloading the speech I had been going over in my mind all morning.

  It took some stammering and a few expectant looks from Hafsah before I could actually start speaking intelligently. “So, the other day, I eavesdropped on this couple,” I said, fidgeting with my fork, my glass of water, my phone, the tablecloth, my tuna, anything within reach. “They were talking about how the girl was leaving to go to college, and the guy was staying here, and the conversation turned to...”

  Hafsah waited for me to finish.

  “A breakup, I guess. You know, classic summer before college stuff.”

  “Just like you, huh?”

  “Slaying me with the casualness there, H.”

  “Sorry,” she said, offering a forced grimace before turning to her pasta again, probably not wanting to let the afternoon flitter away unproductively. “So, you’re thinking a piece about precollege breakups?”

  I toyed with my fork for a little while, rubbing some wasabi across the side of a piece of seared tuna. “A series. I was thinking I could profile specific couples. Starting with those two.”

  “How would you find them again? Didn’t you just overhear them?”

  “I, uh, have the boy’s wallet. It’s a weird, long story where I promise I am in no way implicated for any legal wrongdoing. But I have a way to get in touch with them. I could interview them, fresh from their recent heartbreak. And then I could do a whole series of other couples going through the same thing. I could write about it from so many different angles, right? It’d be
interesting. Couples who are staying together long-distance, couples who decided to change plans to be together, couples who...didn’t.”

  Hafsah chewed thoughtfully on her pasta, eyeing me. I tried not to squirm. I wasn’t uncomfortable in her presence. She was in no way a mean person. It was just intense to be under the scrutiny of someone you admired, someone you knew was damn good at life.

  “Are you going to write yourself into the pieces?” she said, finally, wiping at the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

  “Um, I hadn’t really thought about that,” I said, because those words were easier to say than, Sure, but thinking about my failed relationship is crippling me and I’d rather think about anything else.

  “It would help make it more relatable. Be transparent about what led you to this interest. The readers would love that.” She shrugged, maybe because she saw the panic on my face. “Just a thought. But, yeah, I like it. We’ll see how the first one turns out before committing to a series. Monday work for you?”

  “Oh.” I finally managed to take a bite of tuna, buying myself time while chewing. I looked around the restaurant at all the business people going about their days, having conversations about performance, sales, accounting, or... I guess I don’t really know what those people talked about over business lunches. I couldn’t fathom sitting down to actually write a reflection on Iris and Cal, and definitely not one on myself. But I couldn’t risk getting my column dropped. Partly because it would completely unravel the external validation crucial to my (admittedly dwindling) mental health. Mostly, though, if I lost the scholarship that was tied to my job, I wouldn’t be able to go to school at all.

  “Lu?” Hafsah said. “Can I see a draft by Monday?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I took another bite of my salad, which was probably delicious but kind of tasted like a dusty slab of clay at that point. “Wait, what day is it today?”

  “Thursday.”

  I heroically resisted throwing up. “Yeah, sure. Monday. Cool, cool. All weekend. And then some! Ha!”

  Understandably, Hafsah looked at me as if I’d just turned into one of those homeless dudes who doesn’t really carry a sign or has any sort of clear goal he’s trying to accomplish, but rather spends his time yelling out random strings of nonsense words. Luckily, Hafsah knows that I’m much better at stringing words together on paper. “If the couple’s slow to get back for an interview, let me know and we’ll push it back, but I’d really prefer to see something by Monday.”

  “Monday,” I said again, nodding my head vigorously to reassure my editor that I was totally normal and capable of writing and not a babbling maniac. “Cool.”

  “Great,” Hafsah said. She set her fork and knife neatly across the plate, done with her food and ready to move on to whatever super important badass thing she was doing next. She got a waiter’s attention again and set down her corporate card to pay for the bill. I told her I was fine on my own and so she took off, saying she was looking forward to reading what I came up with.

  Now I was free to enjoy my panic salad and try to come up with a way to introduce myself to Cal and Iris without coming off as a stalker. Although I’d already kinda met Cal, and now I had his wallet, so I was definitely going to come across as at least a little stalkerish. Which meant they’d have to be really naive about the ways of the world to let me anywhere near them again. Which meant I wouldn’t have anything to send Hafsah on Monday. Which meant bye-bye to college and my ability to ever write again.

  6

  OFF THE RECORD

  I spent the rest of that day just kind of staring at the computer and making low guttural sounds. Then on Friday I decided I should probably at least try to find a way to talk to the lovebirds. Cal’s name hadn’t worked on Facebook, but I realized I had Iris’s full name from the raffle ticket, and when I typed it in she came up right away. Her privacy settings weren’t superintense either, so I opened up a private message.

  Then I stared at it for a long time and made some more guttural sounds. When that didn’t seem to cause words to appear on my screen, I texted Pete.

  LU

  Help, I need to human.

  PETE

  Why? You have the day off. Be a slug. Slugs have good lives.

  LU

  Are slugs good at making introductions with strangers on whom they’ve eavesdropped?

  PETE

  No conclusive evidence either way on that one.

  I told him about my pitch to Hafsah, which I knew would really get him on board with the whole helping me thing. Pete’s the biggest fan of my writing, and he takes every opportunity he can to encourage me to do more of it. Which was great at the moment because of the whole sucking-at-writing-since-Leo-dumped-me thing. Just say you found the wallet and want to return it, Pete wrote, oversimplifyingly.

  Shut up, that’s a word.

  LU

  And how do I approach the whole we’re-strangers-but-I-want-to-interview-you-and-your-very-recently-ex-boyfriend thing?

  PETE

  ...Journalistically?

  LU

  Shut up, that’s not a word.

  PETE

  You’re a journalist, Lu. A writer mostly, but technically a journalist. Just tell them what the situation is. It’s really not that weird. Worst thing they can say is no.

  LU

  And then I get fired and lose my scholarship and don’t go to college and die in vain, another wasted human life lost into the folds of history.

  I slouched deeper into the couch and let loose a few more guttural sounds. Weird how an audible expression of discomfort helped ease the discomfort itself, even if just for a second. It probably increased Jase’s discomfort, since he was sitting right next to me, and no amount of video games can distract from your older sister low-key imitating a walrus half the morning.

  Finally, feeling on the verge of an existential crisis if I didn’t even attempt to hang on to my columnist job, and only after many, many drafts, I sent Iris Castillo, aka Crying Girl, aka Bench Boy’s version of Leo, a message: Hi! This is going to sound weird, but I found someone named Cal’s wallet the other day. His name didn’t lead to anything on Facebook, but there was a raffle ticket with your name in there, which is how I found you. Lemme know if I should get in touch with him or where we should meet to give you the wallet or whatever you want to do.

  Hitting Send felt like the onset of a mild panic attack.

  Thankfully I only have normal teen levels of angst-xiety, and my uncomfortable morning was made calm when Iris responded fifteen minutes later. OMG! That’s so nice of you. Can you come to the address on the raffle ticket? I’ll pass it along. I’m free any time before three.

  * * *

  I trekked back uptown to Iris’s apartment building. This time, when I got out of the subway I looked around for some coffee to prepare for the conversation I was about to have. It’s a weird compulsion, getting coffee in advance of a potentially nerve-racking situation. Maybe it was comforting to have something in my hands, or the constant motion of sipping was somehow soothing. Very often, it ended up being a terrible mistake that made me need to use the bathroom right in the middle of the nerve-racking situation, but I somehow still thought of it as a security blanket.

  The night Leo and I broke up, I stormed out of his apartment and went straight to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant to get an iced coffee. We’d had pho there about once a week since we started dating, but even the suddenly painful experience of being in there—the bitter taste of what had once been a happy place now marred by the end of the relationship—wasn’t a match for my craving of sweet, stomach-gurgling coffee. I’d sat on the curb, holding the coffee close to me in the early summer heat, wishing its comforts could extend deeper than my taste buds.

  On the Upper West Side, I picked up a dollar cup of hot coffee from a bagel cart and walked to Iris’s building, the whole tim
e tinkering with how I would ask if I could write about her and Cal. I’d done it a bunch of times already for other articles I’d written, approached someone for permission, or for an interview. For some reason this one felt different. I couldn’t put my finger on why, though if I had to guess I’d probably say that my finger would have landed somewhere in or around the awkwardness of eavesdropping on someone’s breakup and then introducing yourself.

  I checked the time to make sure I wasn’t late or freakishly early, then texted her so she would come down. A moment later, as I stepped around the corner, someone coming the other way plowed into me, splashing scalding coffee all over the front of my shirt. I bellowed in pain and looked up to face my attacker, which is when I saw Grace chasing after her skateboard down the street.

  “Owwww,” I said.

  “I’m sorry!” Grace cried. “You were just there suddenly.”

  I pinched the front of my shirt and pulled it away from my body, so that it wouldn’t melt into my skin. “It’s okay,” I said, recovering from the shock. “I spill things too.”

  I looked around lamely for a napkin or something to sop up the mess and saw Iris emerging from her building a few doors down. She stood there for a bit before noticing us, and gave one of those looks you give people you’re about to meet but have never seen before except for little profile pictures online. You tilt your head and squint your eyes and try to reconcile how they appear in person with the digital version of themselves you’ve seen before. Then she broke out into an earnest, charming smile and waved as she came toward us. I doubt I’d smiled at anyone since my breakup with Leo.

  “Lu?” she asked, sticking her hands into the pockets of her dress. Noticing Grace, she frowned for a moment and said hi to her too, then started piecing together what had happened.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Iris said, looking at my shirt, which was basically just one big coffee stain. “We’ll get napkins or something. Grace, are you okay?” Grace, probably happy to take this as absolution for causing the coffee spill, nodded, hopped on her skateboard, and rolled away, weaving around a couple slow-walking down the sidewalk.