How to Break a Boy

by Laurie Devore

  I put the phone back meticulously, exactly how I found it, and slide the locker closed. My breath is the only sound in the room.

  I gather my things and leave calmly. I did it. I made the first move. By myself. They’ll all see I’m not her puppet—not anymore.

  Outside, a light breeze plays over the trees around the school. The sound of a football coach’s whistle floats up the hill from the stadium, cutting through the quiet. The leaves are changing color, the swift smell of cold making them shudder on their branches. They’ll be falling soon.

  I know what they call this kind of quiet.

  The calm before the storm.

  10

  LAST MONTH

  “Do we still love each other?”

  Twilight was streaming in through a small crack in the blinds, barely lighting the room. Ethan was at the edge of the bed, sitting, his head buried in his hands. No shirt on, his beautiful, long torso bare in front of me.

  The words stopped me, but not like they should have.

  “You don’t love me?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, turning his face. “No. Of course I do.” But he sounded so tired.

  His mom was out of town for the weekend. We’d holed up in his bedroom and done the things we did when we were alone. That was the right thing, I told myself. That’s what we’d always done.

  Except now it was different. Ethan wanted to go get ice cream, watch a movie, grab fries at the Rough House with Coxie and Claire. I wanted to lock ourselves inside and not leave the solitude even for a minute.

  “Sometimes I wonder, though,” he said.

  I scooted over from where I was sitting cross-legged in one of his too-big T-shirts, and moved behind him. Wrapped my arms around his waist and rested my cheek against the warm skin of his back.

  I closed my eyes and thought about nothing.

  “Remember that night at the lake?” he asked me, and I heard the smile in his voice.

  My fingers tensed up, my face moving away from his skin. “We were at the lake when we got the call about my brother.”

  He turned quickly to face me, his mouth an apology. “Not that night. I meant the night we—” He trailed off, the memory ruined.

  It hit me in a second then which night he meant. That night eight months after first meeting in the locker room, with the lake water lapping and our hearts banging against each other. He had told me he loved me, and we kissed and we did all the things we’d never done before. And then we did something else—this. For the first time. And when he looked at me with those bright blue eyes, I felt like a good person. Like a person who deserved happiness.

  It’s so hard to remember that feeling.

  There on the bed, I wanted to tell him it was okay. But everything in his eyes questioned who I was. He’d always questioned, but the answer had changed. I had been a girl pretending. Now I was just the remnant of a girl pretending.

  You can’t love something that was never whole to begin with.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I kissed him.

  11

  I’ve never seen a car crash, but I’ve spent a lot of time imagining them. Brakes screeching, car slamming into a tree, the sound of metal against metal. Those bright spotlights. That acrid smell.

  I imagine that’s what school will be like tomorrow.

  In my room, I open up the list of schools I made, all far away from here—pretty schools with sunny West Coast skies or crisp autumn leaves or snowcapped mountains in the distance. Then I dig into my bag and uncrumple the list of tutors. I run my fingers over the names, tracing the letters. Vera Drake. Justin Thomas. Whit DuRant.

  Whit DuRant.

  Adrienne hates him. The way she hates Michaela Verday with her class presidency or Meisha Allen winning every talent show with her perfect voice. Whit DuRant is Buckley’s prized athletic possession—a state champion golfer with a GPA that has colleges drooling at his feet. He has an easy better-than-you attitude that he wears around school like an Olympic medal.

  I think I hate him, too.

  My phone buzzes from where I’ve locked it in my desk drawer. I am too nervous to open it. I know I’ve done something bad. When the cheerleaders read those texts, they’ll know about Adrienne and Ethan and me and God-knows-what-else.

  I sacrificed my own secret to expose her and, even though I know it was worth it, I’m not ready to face reality yet. I need her to see us on the same footing—to know I can be her equal and not her toy.

  When she’s down and out, she’ll need me. And when everyone else knows what she’s done to me, maybe they’ll start to understand. Maybe I can escape all this hatred. Finally.

  Something moves outside of my bedroom door. “Olivia.” Mom peeks in, first her messy bun perched on top of her head, then her thin-framed glasses until she’s half in, half out.

  Story of my life.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. She does that a lot lately—like she cares.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. How would she know the difference?

  “I made you dinner,” she says. “It’s in the fridge.”

  I turn back to my computer, keying in the name of the first school on my list. Ryan smiles back at me from a picture on my desk. “Thanks.”

  I can’t do this right now. I can’t deal with trying to produce what she would consider an appropriate emotional response. Even the thought of it is exhausting, especially when I can practically see the cogs spinning as she tries to string the words together to speak to me, build a bridge over the chasm too deep to cross.

  She can’t decide to turn on her feelings now, like it’s time for some special relationship. I’d filled that hole with cement a long time ago and done perfectly fine on my own since. And if I hadn’t, well—it was still too late.

  When I look back up, she’s made it all the way into the room. On my computer screen, the cursor is spinning as a new page loads. My heart pumps a kick drum rhythm as I wait. “Can I help you?” I finally ask.

  A pretty school building with brick walls comes up. Admissions facts. Just looking at the average GPA, my heart sinks.

  “How are you doing?” Mom asks. She clips the words strangely on the end like she is translating into a language she knows only the technicalities of.

  It pisses me off.

  Using my toes, I swivel around in my chair. “Exactly how I was doing before Ryan died. So if you could revert to pre-dead-Ryan life, I would really appreciate it. I’m not going to have a breakdown or anything, I promise,” I say, choosing my most hateful words carefully. I don’t need a guidance counselor with a local university master’s degree to tell me I’m deflecting.

  She doesn’t say anything. I can feel her growing colder by the minute, turning in on herself. I used to wonder how Mom could be so bad at talking to other people—watching her make stilted conversation with the PTA parents and the cheer moms or try to find a connection with our bright-faced, Buckley-bred teachers. I used to wonder how she could be that bad at talking to me, first like I was an adult when I was too young to know better, then like I was an acquaintance, after I was too old for it to matter. I remember a sign she used to keep over our kitchen sink in our apartment in Charlotte, before we moved to Buckley: ROUTINE ROUTINE ROUTINE, it reminded her. “You think it’s funny to talk to me like that?” she asks.

  “Deep down inside, I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe.” I swivel back around in my chair, adjust the picture of Ryan ever so slightly on my desk, and wait for her to leave. I know I should feel bad for what I said, but I don’t.

  “You’re welcome for dinner,” she tells me, and then slams the door so hard, the frames on the wall shake.

  That level of anger is practically unprecedented in our relationship.

  Ryan never got mad at me. Just disappointed.

  He got disappointed that time in ninth grade when Adrienne and I gave Daniel Smith a pair of Sheila Reeves’s underwear that we’d stolen from her house. I remember because it was the first time he looked
at me differently. I’d spent my whole life living for Ryan’s approval, and when we moved to Buckley, we’d become closer than ever, trapped together in the house on Main Street. Things had changed, though, when I’d met Adrienne. Ryan and I had stopped spending so much time together, the way older and younger siblings do. The truth was, somewhere along the way, Adrienne became as close to me as a sister. We had the same tainted blood running in our veins.

  But Ryan never minded. Liv is what he used to call me. I can always hear him saying it with a laugh in his voice, showing me the world from an angle only he saw, pointing out some Buckley hypocrisy or quoting a cult movie. I couldn’t ever be the type of person Ryan was, but I had Ryan and that was enough.

  I can still see the way he looked at me with so much devotion, as his most loved family member, the little girl he protected. But I didn’t see the look that day. I remember it, when his eyes met mine. I didn’t see the little sister he adored reflected back, but someone else. He looked at me that day the way everyone else did: like I was dangerous, and he had to stop me. Or get away from me.

  Mostly I remember because it was the day he got accepted into Michigan.

  12

  LAST YEAR

  I jimmied the lock on Meghan Stanley’s locker, trying to force it open. Meghan was Mrs. Baker’s teacher’s aide, and it was rumored she kept copies of old tests to create study guides. Everyone knew Mrs. Baker reused test questions. I’d been instructed to “fetch,” but I felt I’d been misinformed as to the locker combination that Adrienne got off Meghan’s boyfriend.

  The stupid thing was, I’d never even use the test myself. After two and a half years with us in a school this small, the teachers knew who the smart kids were and who the dumb ones were. The Mrs. Bakers of the world expected me to be a prototypical cheerleading dumbass, so if I did too well on the test, they’d know I cheated—that all of us cheated. Adrienne was the brains of this operation, clearly. She schemed the schemes and she made the grades. The faculty knew what kind of person Adrienne was; they just couldn’t catch her.

  I never understood why she bothered. Cheating wasn’t worth the hassle for me; if I wanted to memorize the answers, I’d study. No one cared about my grades anyway.

  “What are you doing?” I heard behind me.

  I jumped around, face-to-face with Ethan Masters, star fullback. I gestured at the locker. “Getting tampons. For Meghan. I think she gave me the wrong combo.” I smiled, pleased. I’d managed to totally put him off Meghan, and I didn’t look like a petty thief anymore.

  Ethan winced. “I think that falls on the side of too much information.”

  “I had a sign, announcing it.” I shrugged. “So no suspicious guys would come up behind me, asking questions. Must’ve fallen down.”

  Ethan smiled, and I loved it. He moved in a little closer to me. “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked.

  Of course. “What?” I returned coyly.

  “Some of the guys on the team told me not to mess with you.”

  His words took me aback more than a little. Sure, I hadn’t dated anybody seriously, but the guys seemed to like me. I was pretty, I was popular, and I looked great in our cheerleading uniforms. Why would they say that about me?

  I didn’t answer.

  “They said you serve Adrienne Maynard.”

  I leaned back against the locker, folding my arms, pretending it didn’t hurt. “They’re just mad I wouldn’t go out with them.”

  He shrugged. “I told them I’d talked to you before. And you weren’t like her at all.”

  I blinked, momentarily stunned. “I’m not,” I heard myself say.

  “I can tell.” He nodded at me and then turned as if he were going to walk away.

  “Why were you asking about me?”

  He looked back, grinning. “You can probably guess that.”

  I chewed my bottom lip, watching him go. Left the scene, test forgotten.

  That’s the part Adrienne knows. She still brings that up.

  13

  Anna Talbert is waiting in my parking spot at eight a.m. We’ve been at a tense truce since the party two years ago. She hates me—I know she does and I don’t blame her—but she stays in line for Adrienne. She smiles at me and compliments my clothes and invites me to parties for Adrienne.

  I hate everything Anna Talbert reminds me of, and it’s not even her fault.

  “Where have you been?” she demands, marching over to me in oversized knee-high boots. “I’ve sent you, like, a thousand texts.”

  I stare at her silently.

  “Haven’t you seen?” she demands, dropping the edge in her voice.

  “What?”

  “The texts!” Anna says. “People are about to fucking mutiny.”

  I twirl a piece of hair around my finger, maintaining my calm. “Where’s Adrienne?” I adjust my sunglasses and stare up at Anna. I watch her hate me and watch her tread carefully around me.

  “Over in the old building bathroom.”

  I spin on my heel to walk off through the parking lot. “Everyone’s saying she hooked up with Ethan!” Anna yells behind me. Even though I don’t turn, I know she’s smiling.

  Buckley High has two buildings, connected by a breezeway. The senior parking lot runs the length of the old building with the gym hanging out in the back. The newer building gets its name by virtue of being built in the eighties. People cluster together on the connecting sidewalks before school starts and between classes, kicking the ancient vending machines and trying to text on the low. The whole place is essentially held together with Central High’s unused budget and misplaced pride.

  I tear into the old building from the parking lot.

  Elona Mabry corners me in the hallway, clutching her cell phone in her hand until her knuckles turn white. “Tell her I quit. Tell her I can’t believe she knew that about Daniel and told Anna and tried to blame everything on Michaela. Tell her—”

  I put my hand up to silence her. “You think you’re the only one with problems?” I ask her, looking up and down the hall. “This isn’t about you. And don’t take this personally, but honestly, you should be grateful that you’re done with him.” After the words come out of my mouth, I realize they were likely not as helpful as I intended.

  “Do you know what she said about you?” Elona asks me then. “Do you know how pathetic she thinks you are?”

  I stare at her, stone-faced. No matter how pathetic Adrienne currently thinks I am, she finds the rest of them infinitely more so, and I can’t drop that persona now.

  Elona pulls her notebooks to her chest, eyes slitted at me. As she walks away, I hear a defiant bitch.

  I glance over my shoulder nervously, then push my way into the bathroom.

  Adrienne is in the corner, typing frantically away at her phone. Her dark hair cascades into her face, blocking her eyes from sight. But she looks up when I come in, and everything about her look is defeated.

  I should feel good. Finally, a victory.

  “Olivia. Thank God you’re here,” she say, and then she crosses the room and throws her arms around me, like she’s not even Adrienne anymore. She pulls back quickly. She knows she shouldn’t be showing me a sign of weakness. “Everyone’s saying they’re going to quit the squad and they’re hating me out loud and I totally don’t care, but I—” She stops mid-sentence, looking at a new message on her phone screen. She covers her mouth with her hand, then pushes her palm over the rest of her face. “Who would do that? Fuck around with my phone? The whole school has seen me sexting with Daniel Smith, and it was only because I wanted good gossip.”

  “He’s disgusting,” I say, because she wants sympathy and I won’t give it.

  She looks up at me, at the harsh words. “You hate me.” She shakes her head.

  I do. I want to tell her how I won this time. But “How could you do that to me? How could you sleep with Ethan?” is what comes out instead.

  My still stoic face is reflected back at me as tears well up in her
eyes. “O, I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything. But w-why is it always that I slept with Ethan?” She pushes the tears away from her bottom eyelash. “I did it, like I forced him or something. We slept with each other. I didn’t cheat on Renatta, and I didn’t force anyone to buy me alcohol, and I’m not a slut. He did it, too, O. Ethan did it, too. All these people are so pissed at me, but they made their own choices and did things themselves. They want to blame me. You want to blame me. I’m not some evil mastermind. I’m not anything except who I am, and I made a mistake, so stop looking at me like you’re so much better than me!” She’s yelling, and I blink, slow. “You’re all I think about, all I’m ever worrying about. I didn’t know what to do, and I was watching you withering away. He’s pushing you and I pulled you and no one can get to you. What was I supposed to do?”

  I don’t say anything.

  She steps so close to me, I have no choice but to stare straight at her. “It’s me and you against the world, O. That’s always what it is, right?”

  It almost feels physically painful for us to be this close because the thing is, I do want it to be us against the world again. I want it so badly that I can taste it, visceral and alive. I miss everything we used to be in that moment, in the before—the two of us, young and wild and not caring about anything. And even when it hurt, something about it still felt good.

  It was easier then, when I was so lost in where Adrienne ended and I began. I never had to think about if what I did was right or wrong, because if we were doing it together nothing ever felt out of place. Some people spend their whole lives waiting for someone to love them, the good and bad, and I wanted that someone to be Adrienne, from the moment she set eyes on me. Maybe I was always waiting for her approval, waiting for her smile. But I wasn’t waiting anymore.

  I finally beat her. Wasn’t that enough?