The Romantics

by Leah Konen

  “So what’s your favorite horror movie?” she asked.

  “Easy,” Gael said. “The Birds.” Not even its recent association with Anika could quell his love for the masterpiece.

  “Umm, The Birds totally doesn’t count as horror.”

  “Of course it does!” Gael ventured a sip of his hot chocolate, but it was still too hot. “What are you talking about?”

  “No one even dies,” Sammy protested. “You can’t have a horror movie without at least one death.”

  “The schoolteacher dies,” Gael said.

  Sammy rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. Favorite slasher film, then. You know, where there’s a killer, and the killer is not, like, a pigeon.”

  It was actually mainly crows and seagulls in The Birds, but Gael let that one slide. “Psycho.”

  Sammy burst out laughing. “You, my friend, are a broken record when it comes to Hitchcock. You need to expand your repertoire.”

  They crossed Cameron Avenue and made their way onto the upper quad. It was quieter there, fewer people, less revelry. Just them and the moon. Gael shrugged. “He’s the best.”

  “Right,” Sammy said. “So then we should only read, I don’t know, War and Peace over and over instead of other good books because they’re not the best book of all time.”

  She had a point, he had to admit.

  “Have you even seen Friday the 13th?” Sammy asked.

  “That’s the one with Freddy Krueger, right?”

  Sammy stopped so short that a bit of hot chocolate sloshed out of her cup. “Wow, for a movie-lover you are totally lacking in the horror department. Friday the 13th is Jason. Freddy Krueger is—”

  “Halloween,” he guessed.

  “No!” she said with disdain. “A Nightmare on Elm Street! And coincidentally Johnny Depp’s first movie, if you need a reason to watch it besides the fact that it’s fabulous. Michael Myers is Halloween. You seriously need an education.”

  And you’re the perfect one to give it to me, he thought.

  But then—no—that wouldn’t really work. Once he and Cara were dating, he was certainly not going to be hanging out one-on-one with Sammy all the time. It would be, to borrow Cara’s oft-used term, weird.

  Sammy started walking again and took a sip of her drink.

  “All right,” Gael said. “I’m not so knowledgeable in what you would call true horror, you know, movies with no plot and a bunch of gore that aren’t half as awesome as the shower scene in Psycho.”

  They reached the top of the upper quad. Franklin Street waited for them, with all its shops and restaurants and promise.

  Sammy turned to him and smiled. “At least you stick to your principles,” she said.

  “Hitchcock forevah.” Gael held up four fingers with his free hand.

  They both laughed.

  On Franklin, a group of sexy cops and nurses stumbled down the street, likely headed for a pre-Halloween frat party.

  “So what are you doing for Halloween?” she asked.

  Gael shrugged. “Nothing much. Just going to walk Franklin Street with Cara.”

  Sammy’s eyes looked blank for a second, but then she smiled. “You guys are getting serious, huh?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” he said with a shrug. “But we’re getting to know each other, I guess.”

  Suddenly, he had an idea.

  (All right, all right, I may have given him said idea.)

  “Did you want to come with us? I mean, since you’re friends with her, too?”

  (For a moment, Sammy considered it. I reminded her that she didn’t have any set plans for Halloween, that her roommate had kind of been annoying her of late, and it would be more fun to go with Gael, anyway. I even let the streetlights catch Gael’s eyes so they’d glisten in a way I knew she’d find downright adorable. But, alas, it was no use. Sammy was a Cynic, as I have mentioned previously. And she had too much freaking pride.)

  “I have plans,” she said, shaking her head. “And I also don’t want to crash your date.”

  Gael was about to tell her that it wasn’t a date—not officially, at least—but that’s when it started to rain. Hard.

  (Okay, the rain was my handiwork. This is a love story, after all. You might call it clichéd, but I call it classic.)

  “Shit,” Sammy said, as the two of them ran for cover under the nearest tree.

  It began to rain harder.

  Gael looked at Sammy, at her dew-kissed hair and the raindrops on her nose and her glasses, which were already fogging up. And all he wanted was to pause this moment, freeze it in place, just like this.

  Their eyes met, and he could swear she was thinking the same thing.

  Her lips parted ever so slightly, and he felt so nervous, like something might happen, something that could change everything.

  But then she pressed her lips together and crossed her arms.

  “I should go,” Sammy said.

  “You don’t want to wait it out?” he asked. “It’s pouring.”

  She shook her head quickly, making it clearer than ever that even if he wanted more than friendship, she didn’t.

  And without another word, she took off into a run down the brick sidewalk.

  To Gael’s surprise, the rain stopped almost as soon as she was gone. And so he crossed Franklin and headed toward Henderson Street, trying not to be too disappointed by her sudden departure.

  He took another sip of his hot chocolate, but it had already gone cold.

  gael’s netflix queue, pre- and post-sammy

  Pre:

  2001: A Space Odyssey

  Alfred Hitchcock Presents

  Reservoir Dogs

  Moonrise Kingdom

  Breaking Bad: Seasons 1–6

  Post:

  When Harry Met Sally

  Friday the 13th

  Silver Linings Playbook

  A Nightmare on Elm Street

  Lovestruck: The Evolutionary Reasons Behind Why We Fall

  scenes from a baltimore dorm room

  My work is a bit like juggling. At any given time there are tons of people who need me. And I do my best to balance it all. But sometimes, I don’t. Sometimes, I focus so very much on diverting someone away from the wrong person and over to the right person that I lose sight of, well, the bigger picture.

  This was one of those times.

  While Sammy was running away from both the rainstorm and her own confusing feelings, her ex, John, was kneeling on a dusty linoleum floor, rummaging around in the chaos that lived beneath his lofted bed in Wolman Hall at Johns Hopkins.

  John had once thought that his parents paying a boatload for him to go to school here would equal at least a semi-nice dorm room, but that certainly wasn’t the case—not that he and his roommate, Juan (yes, John and Juan and at Johns Hopkins, no less), had worked to make it any better.

  His hand hit the edge of a Tupperware tub, and he pulled it out from under the bed. A range of gadgets that his mom and dad had thought would be useful lay inside in a spaghetti-like tangle of cords.

  Juan shuffled into the room. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “The panini maker,” John said, tossing his two Kraft singles onto a plate on his bed so he could better dig through the cords.

  “Oh shit, man,” Juan said. “I just took it to Cayden’s this afternoon and forgot to bring it back . . .”

  But John stopped listening. Suddenly he didn’t care about the panini maker.

  There in the bin, peeking out from beneath the George Foreman grill, which still had its tags, was The Elements of Style.

  John stared at the vacant-looking watercolor basset hound on the cover. How in the hell had this gotten in here? he wondered. He could’ve sworn he’d intentionally left it at home to make his decision to break up with Sammy a little easier.

  He glanced up at Juan, who was still going on about the panini maker while opening a fresh bag of Cheetos.

  “It’s okay, dude,” John said. “Forget it.�
�

  He fingered the book in his hands.

  “You okay, man?” Juan asked. “You look freaked out all of a sudden.”

  John didn’t answer. He just stared at the book.

  In the chaos of packing up his room, his mom or brother must have tossed it in last-minute.

  All that summer, John had had the unshakable feeling of wanting to break up with Sammy, as he watched fellow high school couples dissolve in preparation for fall orientation. But she had been steadfast. She had asked him just once, right after graduation, if he thought they would stay together. It was in the middle of fooling around, and he’d said yes without thinking about much more than the fact that he wanted to get her top off. She’d never asked him again, instead frequently enlightening him on the average cost of flights from Baltimore to Raleigh and how long it would take to drive, with and without traffic.

  John broke up with her on Labor Day, just before the second week of school. The long weekend had been a frat-party bacchanalia. On Friday and Saturday, he’d dutifully told every hot girl who tried to flirt with him that he had a girlfriend in North Carolina.

  But then on Sunday, when AC/DC rang through a crowded, beer-stale basement, and a cute brunette leaned her head in close to his, he didn’t stop her.

  He broke up with Sammy the next day. Told her that he needed to be independent, to figure out who he really was, all kinds of vague bullshit that he knew she’d see right through.

  “You hooked up with someone else?” she’d asked, her voice rising in a way that signaled tears were on the way.

  She’d hung up on him before he could hear her cry.

  He hadn’t gotten to the chance to tell her that the drunken make-outs were less exciting each time. He longed to call Sammy and tell her about the antics of his dinosaur of a world civ professor, with his nasally voice and his Grateful Dead T-shirts and the hilarious way he had of saying “Byzantium.” He wanted to tell her that he often wondered whether he’d rushed too quickly to embrace the no-strings-attached spirit of college. What if he’d already had the perfect relationship and had stupidly pissed all over it?

  Now, here it was, the book she’d given him just a couple of weeks before he’d broken her heart. His dad was pushing him to do premed, but he wanted to be a journalist, and so she’d bought him The Elements of Style, the writer’s standby.

  He flipped it open to the first page and read the inscription:

  J

  Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t be what you want to be. You got this.

  xxoo

  Sammy

  John glanced up, and Juan was staring at him, hand shoved deep into the Cheetos bag.

  “What?” John asked.

  “You wanna order a pizza?”

  “No,” John said quickly, glancing back to the book.

  Before he could stop himself, he grabbed his phone and headed to the balcony where both reception—and privacy—were better.

  I watched in dread—it was too late for me to do anything. I could see how he was hoping she would give him a second chance.

  And I had the most horrible hunch that she would.

  boys do cry

  “How do I look?” Piper asked Gael proudly as she and his mom came down the hallway and into the living room on Wednesday afternoon.

  Halloween had finally arrived, and Gael and his dad were standing awkwardly in the living room. His mom was going to take Piper trick-or-treating, but his dad had insisted on coming over to see her costume and take some pictures, as if they were all a big happy family once again.

  Piper, for her part, reveled in the attention. She was decked out in pasty white makeup, a silver-gray wig, and bright feathers in her hair. Her dress poofed out at the sides to ridiculous proportions, and she held a fan his dad had gotten on Sunday at a junk shop in Carrboro.

  Gael took a picture with his phone. “Awesome sauce.”

  “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” Piper cried with bravado. “That means, let them eat cake.”

  “I guessed as much,” Gael said.

  “But it actually meant that she didn’t care about poor people,” she said. “Sammy told me.”

  Gael couldn’t help but laugh.

  His mom pulled out her phone. “Let me get one of everyone.”

  “We’re not even dressed up,” Gael said.

  His mom waved his protest off with a flick of her hand. “Who cares? I just want all of you together.”

  Why? he wanted to ask. Why pretend like things are all right when they so obviously aren’t?

  But he didn’t want to cause a scene. He couldn’t ruin Piper’s moment—he’d already done plenty of that lately.

  Gael and his dad took their places on either side of Piper. His sister’s dress was so big his mom had to turn the phone sideways to get them all in. Piper struck pose after pose, while his dad beamed. His mom even jumped in for a selfie with the four of them.

  After myriad photos, Gael cleared his throat and grabbed his bag of Halloween costume supplies. “I really gotta go,” Gael said, when his mom refused to put the phone down.

  “All right, all right,” she said, popping the phone into her pocket and bending down to adjust one of Piper’s ruffles.

  His mom stood up and crossed her arms like she did when she was worried for his safety. “Now be careful, and don’t do anything stupid. No drinking. No drugs. No hassling the cops. I don’t want to see you getting pepper-sprayed on the news. Cops these days.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Mom.”

  “Fine, fine. Off you go.”

  He gave his mom and Piper a hug, but he didn’t bother saying bye to his dad.

  His dad followed Gael outside, anyway. Since the split, Gael swore his dad was like a needy fourth-grader, looking for friends.

  His dad clicked the key to unlock his Subaru. “Let me give you a ride to Franklin.”

  A small group of trick-or-treaters approached a neighbor’s house nearby, and Gael watched as a mini ghost tripped over his sheet.

  “It’s not far,” Gael said, shaking his head. “I’ll walk.”

  “Come on,” his dad said. “I want to drive you.”

  “I’m not even going to Franklin. I’m going to my friend’s on campus first.”

  “Even better. I have to pick up something at my office.”

  “I thought you wanted to see Piper,” Gael argued.

  “She won’t go till dark. There’s plenty of time. Come on.” His dad opened the driver’s side door and hopped in, without giving Gael much of a chance to protest any further.

  His dad checked about five times to make sure no kids were behind him, as he always did, then he backed out of the driveway and pulled down the street, heading toward campus.

  When they got closer to campus, traffic was bad, as Gael had expected. Many of the revelers were already out, and Franklin Street was partially blocked off.

  “Where does your friend live?” he asked.

  “Avery.”

  His dad knew the campus well—even the dorm areas, as Gael had learned—and soon, they were in front of Cara’s dorm. His dad pulled to the side of the road and idled.

  “Err, thanks for the ride.” Gael reached for the door.

  “Wait,” his dad said.

  Gael sighed loudly. “What?”

  “What is up with us lately, Gael?” his dad asked. “I feel like you’re angry with me all the time, and I can’t help feeling like there’s something else going on?”

  Gael’s shoulders slumped and he twisted the bag in his hands. “Do we have to talk about this right now, on Halloween?”

  His dad turned to face him. “Yes, Gael, we do. You’ve been avoiding me like the plague since your birthday. I know that the split has been rough on you—it’s been rough on all of us—but I don’t think—”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s been really rough on you,” Gael interjected.

  His dad scrunched up his eyebrows as a gaggle of Super Mario characters walked past their
car. “What do you mean by that?”

  Gael’s eyes caught the very dorm he’d seen his dad walk into just over a week ago. He was unable to hold it in any longer. “Look, I’m not an idiot, okay? You may have fooled Piper but you haven’t fooled me.”

  “Gael,” his dad said seriously. “What in the world do you think you’re talking about?”

  Gael looked away from the dorm and stared through the side window as a group of girls in fishnet tights walked by, along with someone carrying a huge cardboard box and a can of spray paint into the dorm. He rushed at the words, afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them out if he took his time. “I know you cheated on Mom, okay?” Gael felt hot tears on his cheeks, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at his dad, to see the confirmation he knew would be there.

  (Only I could see the ache that Arthur Brennan felt, the pain that twisted at his insides as he fought it down, because he knew, in this moment, more than anything else, he needed to be there for his son. Romantic love is one thing, but the love between a parent and child—well, that is always worth fighting for.)

  Gael felt a hand on his shoulder. “Gael,” his dad said.

  Gael tried to shrug him off, but his dad wouldn’t move his hand. “Gael,” he repeated calmly.

  “What?” Gael finally turned to face him, wiping the tears from beneath his eyes.

  And the look on his dad’s face—well—it said everything.

  “I would never cheat on your mother, Gael. I want you to know that.”

  Gael sniffled. “You’re lying. I saw . . .”—he paused to catch his breath—“I saw everything.”

  His dad folded his hands in his lap. “What do you think you saw, Gael? Tell me. I’m here.”

  Gael took a deep breath. There was no turning back now. He pointed toward the dorm in question. “I saw you go with a girl into that dorm.”

  His dad sighed.

  Gael seized on the moment. “You had an affair, right?” he asked, hoping against hope that he was wrong. “With her?”

  But his dad just shook his head. “Gael, that’s where the Young Socialists club meets. I’m the faculty advisor.”

  “But you said you had office hours that day.” Gael wiped a bit of snot from beneath his nose. “Why did you say that?”