The Romantics

by Leah Konen

  Gael headed to the back and grabbed the rake, then walked to the front yard and began to tackle the leaves.

  It had always been his dad’s job, raking the leaves. Gael remembered the one time his mom had decided that their chore division was too “gendered” and had taken it over. It wasn’t three days before she came into the house, handed his dad the rake, and said: “If traditional gender roles mean I never have to rake leaves again, I’ll take it.” His dad had just laughed and kissed her on the cheek, before taking the rake and finishing the backyard.

  He probably should have done this sooner, Gael thought, as he gathered the leaves into a big pile, his arms beginning to ache in a way that felt good. He probably shouldn’t have been so obsessed with his own drama and been there a little bit more for his mom.

  He was about halfway done when Sammy came outside.

  She put a hand on her hip. He stopped, planting the rake in the ground like the bald guy from that famous painting.

  Sammy smiled, surveying the work. “Nice raking.”

  Gael shrugged. “I thought I might as well do something with my wide open afternoons, besides driving you and Piper nuts.”

  Sammy laughed. “Well, speaking of, Piper sent me out here to inform you, in no uncertain terms, that she’s still very mad at you.”

  Gael sighed. Even though he’d apologized, he knew he’d hurt Piper. But he didn’t know exactly what to do. It was the kind of hurt that he couldn’t fix. Because she might be mad at him right now, but she was really mad at the words he’d said, and those words were the truth. No apology would change that.

  “What happened?” Sammy asked. “It’s not really like Piper to be mad at people.”

  “I yelled at her a little bit,” he said, embarrassed. “I mean, not really at her, but I yelled anyway. She’s somehow got the idea in her head that my parents are going to get back together, and neither of them are exactly disabusing her of that notion.”

  Sammy let her arms fall to her sides. “That sucks,” she said. “My parents split up when I was about Piper’s age. It’s hard to grasp, for sure.”

  Gael had an overwhelming urge to put his arms around her, hold her tight, but he pushed the thought away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

  Sammy kicked a leaf back that had been blown out of his neat pile. “It’s been awhile. I’ve processed it. I just know how hard it is, especially when you’re young.”

  Gael set the rake down and sat in the perfect patch of grass he’d just cleared. “Sit down for a second,” he said casually, thinking how easy it was to just be himself around her. “Ditch your babysitting duties.”

  Sammy raised an eyebrow. “I take babysitting duty very seriously, as I’m sure you know.” But then she smiled and sat down across from him.

  Gael picked up a leaf and started ripping it into bits. Then he sat back and stretched.

  “Why did your parents split up?” he asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  She shrugged, grabbed a handful of leaves, and tossed them up. They spun around as they fell back down. Sammy tucked her hair behind her ears and spread out her fingers in the grass. “I don’t even know,” she said. “They just did.”

  Gael looked up at the sky, and his dad’s motto accosted him, like it often did on a bright sunny day—“If God isn’t a Tar Heel, why is the sky Carolina blue?” He pushed his dad’s chipper voice out of his head. Then he looked back at Sammy. She was wearing a black jumper and a striped top underneath, and her short hair was pulled up into a knot like some kind of chic French ballet dancer. He imagined her twirling around in the raked leaves, kicking them up and turning it all messy again.

  He decided in that moment that he trusted her with this. “I think my dad cheated on my mom,” he said.

  Sammy sat up straight and adjusted her glasses. “Really?”

  “You’re surprised?” he asked.

  “Why do you think that? Your dad doesn’t seem like that kind of guy at all.”

  Gael shrugged, but her reaction weakened his resolve. She didn’t have to look so shocked. It wasn’t that crazy of an idea. Sure, he’d always thought of his dad as a generally nice guy, but nice people did shitty things all the time. Look at Anika and Mason.

  “There has to be some reason. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Sammy looked down at her hands. “There doesn’t always have to be a big groundbreaking reason,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just a bunch of little reasons.”

  Gael stared at her, incredulous.

  He looked up at the sky, wishing he could believe her. But it seemed like in his life, there was always a big reason. Finally, he looked back to her.

  “You know, you’re kind of an inspiration,” he said, eager to move the subject away from his parents.

  Sammy laughed, turned her head ever so slightly to the side. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “You and John. It’s been three years, right? And you’re both in college and you’re still making it work.”

  (Face palm.)

  Sammy forced a smile. “I guess,” she said.

  She stood up. “I really should get back to Piper. Good luck on the rest of the leaves.”

  Gael watched her go in, completely unaware of what had just happened.

  intervention

  The next day at school, Gael was shocked to see Anika and Mason back at their old spots at the lunch table.

  He stopped short. He did not need to deal with them right now. He had more than enough to process between Piper being angry, the discoveries about his dad, and his worries that Cara was already growing tired of him.

  Of course, he could leave it to those two to know exactly how to kick him when he was down.

  I feel a little bad even admitting this, but I didn’t try to stop them this time. I had watched, the night before, as Gael stared at his phone, desperately wanting to call the one person he’d relied on more than anyone when his parents were splitting up, the one person who’d been content to listen to him gripe and wonder and try to make sense of it all. He wanted to call Anika.

  With my nudgings, coupled with his own resolve, he’d talked himself out of it. But still, he’d wanted to.

  A little reminder that Anika was no longer in his corner wouldn’t hurt.

  Okay, it would hurt, actually. Pretty badly. But sometimes hurt is necessary. It’s just an unfortunate reality of my job.

  Anika smiled at Gael like nothing was the matter. Danny and Jenna were wearing fake, forced smiles of their own. Mason was the only one who avoided his eyes.

  “Umm,” Gael said. “What are you doing?”

  “We thought we’d join you guys for lunch. That’s cool, right?” Anika asked.

  Anika had always been good at asking questions that weren’t really questions at all.

  Gael crossed his arms. He looked to Mason, who was just staring at the table. “Umm, no, obviously that’s not cool.”

  Anika sighed. “We were talking, and—”

  “Who’s we?” Gael demanded.

  Jenna cleared her throat and held Danny’s hand in hers. “Look, Gael, we get that you’re really hurt, and you totally have a right to be. But it’s not really fair to the group, you know? I mean, we’re all friends, and Danny and I didn’t do anything. And it has been more than a week of sitting apart. So we were thinking we could all start sitting together again.”

  Gael scoffed. “Are you guys freaking kidding me? What, did you have like a team meeting about this without me?”

  Danny squeezed Jenna’s hand. “We think you should come back to marching band, too,” Danny said. “We miss you in the sax section.”

  Gael rolled his eyes. “Too late. Mr. Potter told me on Friday that I missed too many practices now to come back this semester. Such a shame, I really wish I could spend more time with all of you guys, together again.” Even Gael was surprised by the level of bitterness in his voice. There was silence for a moment.

  “We�
�re just worried about you, Gael,” Anika said timidly. “We think it would be better if we were all friends again.”

  Gael laughed, but underneath it, he felt like he might break down. It was one thing to deal with Mason’s awkward attempts at reconciliation. It was another to sit here, day in and day out, and pretend that everything was the same.

  “If that’s what you all want, I’ll just eat by myself,” he said finally. He turned to head back out to his old trusty courtyard. It was pretty cold out today, but it didn’t matter. It was better than this.

  And that’s what finally broke Mason’s stoicism. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not what I want at all.” He glared at Anika. “I told you this was a bad idea. Come on, we’ll go back to our table.”

  Anika humphed. “Mason. I only agreed to change seats because I thought it would be temporary.”

  “Whatever. I’m not doing this,” Mason snapped. And he pushed his chair out, the legs making an awful screeching sound, and walked away.

  Anika sighed loudly, then followed him back to their table in the corner.

  “Thanks a lot, guys,” Gael snapped, taking his usual seat and angrily pulling out his sandwich.

  “It was Anika’s idea,” Danny said.

  Jenna smacked him on the arm.

  He shrugged. “Well, it was.”

  Gael took a bite of his sandwich, but his eyes drifted toward Anika and Mason, where they sat with their backs to him.

  Mason might be the worst best friend in the history of best friends, Gael thought, but it was nice to know that at least he hadn’t turned into a total lunatic.

  rom-coms, an education

  That afternoon, Gael approached his house at his usual early, marching-band-free time.

  What Gael had said at today’s quasi-intervention was true. Mr. Potter wasn’t going to let him back in until the following semester. Plus, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back. At least, not yet, anyway.

  When he got inside, he saw Sammy sitting at the dining room table, arms crossed, eyebrows knit. She was surrounded by scraps of tulle and satin from the elaborate Marie Antoinette costume his mom was making for Piper for Halloween, and she was tracing circles with her finger in the ivory tablecloth.

  “Do you know where Piper is?” Sammy asked. “She should have been here fifteen minutes ago. I’m getting worried.”

  It took Gael a minute to put it together. “Oh shit,” Gael said. “I think she has a field trip.” He remembered Piper saying something about the UNC planetarium over breakfast. It was the first time she’d sounded more like her usual self, like she wasn’t mad at him anymore. “My mom didn’t call you?”

  Sammy glanced at her phone. “Nope, no missed calls. Looks like she forgot to tell me.”

  Gael shrugged. It would have been nuts for his mom to miss a detail like that months ago, but now? Not so much. “Sorry you had to come for nothing.”

  Sammy sighed. “It’s fine.” She grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulder, standing up. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”

  As she headed for the door, Gael followed her. “Wait,” he said.

  Sammy turned back, exasperated. “Yeah?” she asked.

  Gael wanted to ask her why she’d walked away so abruptly yesterday. He wanted to ask her if everything was all right. But suddenly it seemed ridiculous—pushy. “You want to hang out or something?” he asked. “Since you’re already here?”

  Sammy shrugged, then adjusted her glasses. “What do you want to do?”

  His eyes searched the room for some kind of idea and landed on his mom’s Entertainment Weekly. “Uhh, we could go to a movie? I’m not sure what’s out, the new Wes Anderson doesn’t open until Friday, not that you would want to see that, but we could walk down to the Varsity and see what’s playing.”

  Just then, the Entertainment Weekly fluttered off the dining room table, landing at Sammy’s feet. Gael glanced at the open window. Weird, he thought. He could have sworn that was closed a minute ago.

  (I mean, I have no earthly idea how that window got open, either. *winks*)

  Sammy picked it up. “I totally forgot that Goodbye Yesterday was out. That’s playing at the Varsity.”

  Gael raised an eyebrow, stepping closer to see the spread. A generically good-looking girl looked up at a tall, lanky guy. “A romantic comedy,” he laughed. “Of course.”

  Sammy rolled her eyes. “Well, the only other option at the Varsity is likely some depressing foreign film. They’re always playing that kind of thing.”

  Gael burst into laughter. “Are you serious?”

  Sammy crossed her arms and leaned back against the front door. “Watching foreign movies that aren’t assigned for class feels like work. Plus, Goodbye Yesterday is by a seriously funny woman with an awesome YouTube series. It’s not going to be as cheesy as you think. And even if it is, one cheesy movie won’t kill you.”

  She pulled out her phone and tapped a few times. “It’s playing in half an hour. If we leave now, we’ll just make it.”

  “All right, all right,” Gael said, throwing his hands into the air. “But I reserve the right to ceaselessly criticize it afterward.”

  Sammy smirked. “Maybe you won’t even want to.”

  “Maybe.” Gael grabbed some money from his mom’s emergency canister on the kitchen counter (he thought it only seemed right since she’d forgotten to cancel on Sammy), shrugged into his jacket, and followed Sammy out the door.

  There was a chill in the air as they headed down Henderson Street toward Franklin. Sammy wrapped an intricately patterned scarf around her neck and shoved her hands deep in her pockets.

  “So are you telling me you mostly watch rom-coms?” Gael asked.

  Sammy shrugged. “I do watch a lot of them, but I mostly watch horror, to be totally honest.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You got a problem with that, too?”

  Gael shook his head. “It just seems so unlike you.”

  They cut over to Rosemary Street as a car blasting Sublime flew past them.

  “Look, I watch all the serious movies, too. But if you’re going to be a genre snob, you’re going to miss out on a lot of good stuff. What’s your deal against romantic comedies, anyway?” she asked.

  “My deal,” Gael said, as stunning Southern homes and the occasional frat house rose up around them, “is that they’re really formulaic, and the writing is always bad, and they’re so . . . predictable.”

  Sammy smirked. “Oh, and the movies you like are so much better? I’ve seen the shelves in your room. Seventies crime movies. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wes Anderson. Don’t tell me Wes Anderson isn’t super predictable. A young boy struggles to find his place in the world, and the girls are all quirky, and the colors look way more vivid than they do in real life!”

  Gael laughed. “Hey, his movies are so fun to watch.”

  Sammy crossed her arms defiantly. “So are romantic comedies. There’s nothing wrong with genre movies.”

  Gael rolled his eyes. “All right, so some movies I like are a little predictable. But you can’t seriously argue that movies like Serpico and Taxi Driver are basic. They’re epic.”

  “Ooh well, I actually like Serpico,” she said, as they waited to cross the street. “But let me do it anyway: Young guy tries to beat all the bad guys, gets in over his head, caves under the pressure, messes up his love life, but still wins in the end!”

  Gael ignored her rather sound argument as a car stopped, letting them cross. “None of my friends have even heard of Serpico, much less seen it.”

  Sammy shrugged. “My dad is from Brooklyn, and he’s like obsessed with movies that were made in New York during that time—he’s always saying that the seventies were the last time that New York was really New York, even though he was like eight years old then and my grandma talks about how she could never take him to the park because of all the drug needles lying around.”

  “Wow,” Gael said. “
I can’t imagine growing up in Brooklyn. That’s so cool.”

  The two of them cut down the alleyway between Rosemary and Franklin Street, the same alleyway where the flower lady had told Gael, not even two weeks ago, that Anika wasn’t worth it. Gael wanted to laugh out loud at the memory. Who knew that flower sellers were so wise?

  “All right,” Gael continued. “Do Eternal Sunshine, then,” he said. “You can’t very well say that’s predictable.”

  Sammy bit her lip.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I haven’t exactly seen it.”

  Gael stopped in his tracks right in the middle of the alley. “Are you kidding me?”

  Sammy put a hand on her hip. “It’s like anyone who thinks they’re a movie person loves that movie. It can’t be that good. I read the description. It sounds awful.”

  “Just watch it,” Gael said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I’m serious. I am not moving from this dank alleyway until you promise you’ll watch it.”

  She started to walk ahead, but he didn’t budge.

  She walked about ten feet before she realized he wasn’t behind her. She turned back to him. “Really?” She put a hand on her hip.

  He put one on his, too. Mocking. But the nice kind of mocking. “I told you I’m not moving. If you want to go to the movie by yourself, go right ahead.”

  Sammy took one step closer. “Are you seriously holding me hostage with what’s probably an overhyped hipster movie?”

  He nodded. “Oh, believe me, I am.”

  She paused, assessing him. Then her face broke into a smile. “All right,” she said, lifting one hand in the air. “Promise.”

  “Was that so hard?” he asked, running to catch up to her.

  The two of them emerged onto Franklin.

  “If I watch Eternal Sunshine, you owe me one of my choice,” Sammy argued, as they got into line behind four other people.

  “Isn’t this your choice?”

  Sammy rolled her eyes. She was good at that. “This is what I picked because it was playing at the right time—and really, I think it’s going to be good. But it’s not, like, the movie I want you to see. Get your hands on When Harry Met Sally. Believe me.”