The Break-Up Diaries

by Ni-Ni Simone

  “Here,” I say when I get back to the door. “I got you stuff, too.”

  He swallows hard and looks at me. “Um . . . Zoey . . . I’m sorry for breaking up with you on Facebook. My mom says it was cowardly. It’s just that . . . well . . . I liked Dorie before you and I got together.”

  “Listen. Don’t keep explaining. Sorry is enough.”

  I don’t want to hear how much he was in love with Dorie before we met, and how he just had to break up with me because she finally paid him some attention. That is not helping at all.

  “Okay. We can still be cool, right?”

  I give him my confused face. How are we cool? I just had what will probably go down as the most embarrassing moment of my life all because of him. Not feeling any motivation for coolness here. It actually annoys me that he asks this, like I’m some kind of idiot.

  “I’ll see you around, I’m sure. Glee club and stuff. You know.”

  He nods. “Okay, then. Merry Christmas.”

  Mario trots back to his mother’s car, and I can see her smiling. I guess she made him do the big boy thing and face his ex-girlfriend. Maybe she’s even proud of him. Okay, then. Whatever.

  I close the door and walk back to the family room to finish the stupid movie with my dad and sister. I am glad that I didn’t go to his house to take him those presents. Glad I listened to my mom on that.

  Somehow, I thought seeing Mario again would make me feel better. Kind of thought he might take one look at me and realize that he made a mistake, and that of course he should be my boyfriend. But hearing his lame excuse doesn’t make me feel better at all.

  I sit down in the armchair that I’d claimed earlier and open the package. Inside are two Aeropostale T-shirts. That I already own. Wow. He didn’t even pay enough attention to me to know which shirts I rock on the regular? This makes me sad.

  But it also wakes me all the way up. Mario was just not that into me.

  Big sigh.

  7

  I really don’t know why I have to start this job thing during winter break. I mean, I know Christmas is over and everything, but I’d really like to enjoy the rest of my vacation before I start getting fried chicken smell all over me.

  My dad drops me off here at seven o’clock in the morning. A completely ridiculous time to have to be awake during my break. Why couldn’t I do the afternoon or evening shift? I have to be here at the crack of dawn.

  But since my dad reminded me that me having to work here is all my fault because of my “horseplay” at GoKart Heaven, I really don’t have a leg to stand on. It’s funny, I think my mom is the only one who realizes that I was trying to crash into Mario’s go-kart. Everyone else just fusses at me for not driving the thing safely.

  As soon as I step in the door, there’s a teenage girl waiting. She’s wearing some really, really tight Apple Bottoms jeans and a tiny Aeropostale T-shirt. I didn’t know girls in the hood liked Aeropostale!

  “Are you Zoey?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Kellita. Follow me.”

  She leads me to a big kitchen with stainless steel appliances. The kitchen is actually bigger than the rest of the restaurant, which only had a counter space to wait for your food, a couple of tables and chairs, and a pop machine. It’s not really a dine-in establishment. You pick up your food and then you take it home to enjoy.

  In the kitchen, there’s a boy about my age, chopping a pile of vegetables. He looks up at me and nods, then goes back to his work. He’s kind of cute. Dark brown skin, low fade, rhinestone stud in his ear. Hood, but cute.

  “That’s Kellin, my twin brother.”

  “So, tell me why I have to be here this early,” I say.

  A loud booming voice comes from behind me. “Because this is when the real work gets done.”

  I turn around and find myself standing face to face with the meanest looking woman I’ve ever seen up close. Her face has folds of fat on the cheeks and chin, and her eyes seem to be swallowed up in the lumpiness. Like two little raisins pressed into brown bread dough. I swallow hard and wish I could make myself disappear.

  “I’m Mrs. Owens. Here is your apron. Kellita will show you the ropes. I hope you last longer than the last girl I had. She was disappointing.”

  Mrs. Owens turns and stomps out of the kitchen. With every step, each of her massive butt cheeks jiggles and shakes. It’s like a booty earthquake or something.

  I shudder at the thought of my behind ever looking like that. Then, I chuckle. Hopefully, when I see Dorie at our twenty year reunion her badonkadonk looks just like Mrs. Owens’s badonka-DANG!

  Kellita hands me a hair net. “Put this over your weave.”

  “I don’t have a weave!” I say, my hand subconsciously going to my long straight locks.

  “You are kinda bright yellow. Are you mixed?”

  “Like biracial? No. I’m just black,” I reply.

  “For real? Them light cat eyes and all that hair and you’re just black?”

  I shrug. “As far as I know.”

  Kellita walks over to the giant sink and motions for me to follow her. “Wash your hands for sixty seconds. Count to sixty while you do it. Mama likes her kitchen clean.”

  “Have you ever done prep cooking before?” Kellita asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t think so.”

  “Have you done any cooking before? What do you know how to prepare?”

  I think for a moment. “Well, I know how to make scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon, and macaroni and cheese.”

  “Hmmm . . .” Kellita says. “Let’s try you out on the macaroni detail then.”

  “No wait, let me explain. When I say macaroni and cheese, I mean out of the blue box. I don’t know how to make Good Eatin’ macaroni and cheese.”

  Which . . . let me say . . . is some of the best macaroni and cheese on the planet. That’s probably how Mrs. Owens’s booty got that big—grubbing on that macaroni and cheese.

  Kellin looks up from his pile of onions and says, “Just give her a knife and the celery. Don’t put her on no macaroni and cheese on the first day. You trying to get rid of another one?”

  Kellita snickers and hands me a knife and points at the pile of celery. “Chop those up into little pieces.”

  I guess I look confused, because she asks, “You don’t know how to chop celery?”

  “Can you just demonstrate one? I’m sure I can do it, I just want to do it right.”

  Kellita sighs and takes the knife from my hand. Swiftly and effortlessly, she chops up the celery stalk. In like fifteen seconds flat, the once whole stalk is now in tiny symmetrical pieces.

  “There you go,” Kellita says. “You try.”

  I bite my bottom lip as I attempt to chop the celery like Kellita. I am much clumsier, it takes me longer, and my pieces are nowhere near symmetrical.

  Kellita shakes her head. “Just keep practicing. I’m going up front to bundle money.”

  I hear Kellita chuckle under her breath as she leaves the kitchen. I want to go up front and count money! I’m much better at that than chopping celery. This is not what I had in mind.

  “Do we have to stay back here all day, chopping stuff?” I ask Kellin.

  He shakes his head. “No. After we finish the prep work, Mama Owens comes in. Then she wants us out of the way. She’s the chef and she’s got one assistant.”

  “So the prep stuff is just chopping vegetables?”

  “No. We have to make the cornbread for the dressing, boil the eggs for the potato salad and take off the shells, and clean the chicken.”

  “That sounds like a lot. How long do we have?”

  “Two hours. Kellita will come back and help. She’s preheating all of the ovens now. That’s for the cornbread.”

  I start chopping another piece of celery, because obviously, it’s not going to chop itself. I don’t want to do this, but I don’t see them giving me any other job. At least I don’t have to chop the onions. My eyes are watering and I’m at the
other end of the table.

  “It doesn’t bother you to cut the onions?” I ask.

  “No. It doesn’t burn me.”

  “Wow, you’re special. Most people can’t stand chopping onions.”

  He shrugs. “Sometimes when Kellita does it she uses the vegetable chopper. Mama Owens doesn’t like that though, because it mashes the vegetable. She wants us to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  “So where do you go to school?” I ask. “I go to Lewisville High.”

  “Skyline,” he replies. “Oak Cliff.”

  “You play any sports?”

  “Football. And I work here. That’s it,” Kellin says.

  He definitely looks like he plays football. He’s built like an athlete.

  Kellita pokes her head through the kitchen door. “Kellin, your little girlfriend is out here. You need to check her before I get at her. For real.”

  Kellin sighs. “Man, Lita! Tell her I’m working.”

  “Uh-uh, nope. You need to deal with this chick. She is getting on my nerves. And you know Mama Owens is fixing to cuss her out.”

  Kellin snatches off his apron and wipes his hands on some paper towels. “I’ll be right back Zoey,” he says.

  I’m curious to see what Kellin’s girlfriend looks like, but I don’t dare peep out of that door. Not with Kellita and Mama Owens waiting to pounce on me for doing something wrong. What would make a girl come up to her boyfriend’s job early in the morning? Sounds like drama to me.

  “Kellin, I know you were creeping with her! My girl saw you with her at the mall. Stop playing!” The girlfriend is loud. So loud that I can hear her through the big double metal doors.

  Kellin yells, “Stop tripping Desiree! We don’t even go together anymore, so how am I creeping ?”

  The alleged girlfriend, apparently named Desiree says, “We don’t go together? Since when, Kellin? We just went out the other night, but we’re not together?”

  “That was a group of people! Ooh! Can you just leave?”

  Kellin bursts back through the kitchen doors and I pretend to be cutting celery. He goes back to his chopping, and it’s like he’s trying to murder those poor vegetables.

  I shake my head and give him some serious side eye. Just another cheating boyfriend. Are all guys like this? Do they all just think they can play games with us and move on to the next girl?

  After chopping in silence for awhile, Kellin says, “Do you need any help on that celery?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Kellin comes and stands next to me. He wipes his knife down with a cloth and starts chopping.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I say.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Why does your girlfriend think you’re still together if you say that y’all aren’t?”

  “You heard that?”

  “I think the entire street heard it. Y’all were pretty loud.”

  Kellin sighs and sticks his knife in the cutting board. “Sorry about that. Desiree was tripping anyway.”

  “Clearly she thinks that y’all still have something. Why would she be up here tripping if she didn’t? Boys are so ignorant . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Kellin says. “You don’t know what went down between me and Desiree. Maybe you should ask before you make an opinion of me.”

  I roll my eyes and keep cutting the celery. As if I need to hear his explanation! He probably told her he wasn’t feeling her anymore, after he started kicking it with someone else. Boys are all the same. Why should this guy be any different?

  Kellita comes back into the kitchen cracking up laughing. “Mama Owens said that if that girl come back up through here, she’s gonna cut her. And you know she ain’t playing.”

  Kellin grumbles something under his breath and goes back over to his pile of onions. He starts scraping them into a huge metal container which he then sits next to the range top.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever attempted cornbread,” Kellita asks me.

  “Do Jiffy corn muffins count?”

  Kellita huffs out loud. “Oh, my goodness! Why did they hire you? I’ve been trying to get my girl a job up here for months and she can cook her butt off. Then, out of the blue, they hire your old non-cooking self.”

  “Why does she have to cook anyway?” Kellin asks. “She can take orders. Then, she won’t have to be back here with me since she thinks I’m so ignorant.”

  Kellita cracks up laughing. “Well, Zoey, we’ve got one thing in common. We both think Kellin is ignorant.”

  “Man, forget both of y’all, and Desiree’s hoodrat self.”

  “Whatever, Kellin,” Kellita says. “You just gonna have to get used to people thinking you’re ignorant, because there’s no way I’m giving up my post on the register to cut onions. Come on, Zoey. Let me show you how to make this cornbread. It’s easy. You’ll be making it by yourself soon.”

  I watch Kellita carefully as she mixes a whole bag of self-rising corn meal mix with buttermilk, eggs, and oil. After she’s done mixing she sets the bowl to the side.

  “It’s good to let cornbread rest a little bit before you bake it. It rises better. Oh, and make sure when you start in the morning to take out the eggs and buttermilk and set them on the counter. Then, they can be room temperature when we finally get to mixing the batter.”

  “How many pans do we have to make?” I ask.

  “We have to make ten big pans in the morning. On Sundays we make more because everybody comes here for Sunday dinner after church.”

  I nod. “I know. We come here all the time.”

  “Well, I promise you, after cooking and eating this stuff every day, you won’t want to look at another plate full of macaroni and cheese, greens or candied yams. I never eat this stuff anymore.”

  “I don’t think I can ever get sick of soul food. I love it!” I say. “And my mom doesn’t do much cooking because she works a lot.”

  Kellita seems interested. “What does your mother do?”

  “She’s a disaster recovery manager at a bank. So sometimes she has to be gone days at a time.”

  “What does a disaster recovery manager even do? Does she fix computers or something like that? Did she go to school for that?”

  “Yes, she went to school for it. She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.”

  “I wonder if I can get that at the community college,” Kellita says. “It sounds like your mother has a good job.”

  “Well, it’s a four year degree, but you could go to the University of Texas or the University of North Texas. They both have that degree, I’m sure.”

  Kellin sucks his teeth. “She is not taking both of her kids to a college like that. She’s gonna end up working here at the restaurant.”

  “And what are you gonna do if you don’t get a football scholarship?” she asks. “You’re gonna be right here with me cutting onions and making cornbread.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with working for the family business?” I ask. “I guess I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  Kellin replies, “That’s because this is your first day. Work here a week, or a month, and you’ll know why we hate it.”

  “Yeah,” Kellita says. “Every day before school we have to come here and chop vegetables before we go to school. Kellin goes to school smelling like an onion all the time.”

  “It’s hard to wash off. Eventually, by the end of the day, I’m straight, but then I have to come right back here and wait tables. Then, I try to get a jump on some of the prep cooking for the next day. It sucks,” Kellin says.

  “Except during football season! He gets a pass,” Kellita says. “No one makes him do anything during the football season. They’re all hoping that he goes to the NFL and that no one will have to work anymore.”

  “Who keeps your kids during the day?” I ask Kellita.

  “My mother. She’s got our baby brother at home. He’s got special needs, so she’s gotta take care of him all day. She just keeps mine too.”
>
  In this moment, I am so glad to have my life. I wouldn’t want to have to worry about being a mother, working, and having to choose community college if that’s not what I wanted.

  Compared to what Kellita has to deal with, this stuff with Mario is just a little bit unimportant.

  “Now, we put the cornbread in the ovens. It takes each pan about thirty minutes to bake.”

  “But the back of the package says twenty to twenty-five minutes.”

  Kellita shakes her head. “Girl, will you listen to me and stop being a know-it-all? These ovens, for some reason, cook a tad bit slower than average, so we cook longer. If you want to see Mama Owens flip out, give her some half cooked cornbread.”

  “Or some burned cornbread,” Kellin adds.

  “She’d rather it be burned than undercooked. She can work with the burned.”

  “This is too complicated,” I say. “I’m afraid I’m going to mess something up.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kellita says. “At first, I was gonna set you up to fail, but I actually kind of dig you. I thought you’d be stuck up, but you’re not.”

  My jaw drops. “Why would you think that?” “Because you live in Lewisville.”

  “Wow, you were just gonna judge me on my neighborhood?” I ask indignantly.

  “Yeah. Most black girls from over there are uppity,” Kellita says.

  Kellin interjects, “You can’t talk, Zoey. You judged me based on a conversation you overheard. Said I was ignorant based on Desiree acting a fool.”

  “He’s ignorant,” Kellita says, “but not because of Desiree. Desiree played him.”

  My eyes widen. “For real?”

  Kellita replies, “Yep. She messed with some other guy on the football team and got pregnant by him, then tried to blame it on Kellin.”

  “She’s pregnant?” I ask. “Wow . . . how do you know it’s not yours Kellin?”

  Kellin leaves the table and struts over to me and Kellita near the ovens. “Somebody is all up in my mix.”

  He smiles at me and I’m shocked at how attractive he is when he smiles. He’s incredibly cute.

  “So how do you know?” I ask. “Inquiring minds want to know!”

  “Because I know how to do simple math. The dates didn’t add up.”