BreakupBabe

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by Rebecca Agiewich


  But now, after an evening of intense flirting, during which SB had asked for my phone number and suggested, casually, that we “hang out,” he was about to disappear into the night. Who knew if he’d actually call? I remembered GuyPal #1, SB’s best friend, saying once, “SB is a nice guy, but he can be a flake when it comes to women.”

  Flake or not, SB was the only one to notice my downcast expression during the farewells. “Are you okay?” he asked, after hugging me good-bye in the doorway, his strong arms around me. He smelled of a clean, citrusy aftershave that made it hard to pull away. “You look kind of sad.”

  I suddenly felt self-conscious. I had no good reason to be sad. My housewarming party had been a smashing success. Amidst my sparse furniture and a few cheesy decorations—fish lights strung across the fireplace and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling—coworkers and former coworkers had mingled with friends and former roommates, getting cozier the more liquor and cheap red wine they drank.

  I’d felt so popular and lubricated by tequila that nary a thought of Loser had entered my mind except those of the “Fuck you, I’m so cool and you’re such a pathetic weenie” variety. But, with the departure of my thirty or so guests, the alcohol-induced giddiness was quickly morphing into self-pity.

  “Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I said to SB, not sounding fine at all. All the oomph had gone out of me. I didn’t even have the energy to pretend I was the sparkling hostess of half an hour ago. Besides, if I sounded lonely enough, pathetic enough, who knew what SB might do to comfort me? “Just tired.” I looked down at his black loafers shining against the scuffed hardwood floor.

  “All right.” He hesitated. He was standing only inches away from me, this six-foot-tall man with broad shoulders and a sculpted torso, who piloted planes through stormy Alaskan skies. I looked up into his eyes: big, lazy, watchful, seductive eyes. I held my breath.

  “Ask him to stay!” Needy Girl whispered suddenly in my ear, her alcohol-tinged breath hot against my cheek.

  “Jesus God, no.” Sensible Girl gripped my shoulder, startling me. Her nails looked so neatly trimmed compared to Needy Girl’s, whose were long and ragged and bore the scarlet traces of a months-old manicure. “You don’t need that kind of complication right now. Take things slow.”

  Needy Girl was whispering to him. “Offer to stay. Offer to stay.” But he didn’t hear her. “Well then, Miss R.,” he said, and the false cheer in his voice made my heart drop to my stomach. “I will call you soon.”

  I closed the door behind him, and stared at it for a few seconds. Then I grabbed Mr. Pickle from the bedroom and stumbled back to the couch—the only piece of furniture in the living room. Mr. Pickle had a pouch in his stomach that had come with a little piece of paper inside it. This piece of paper had said “Write your wish here and dream upon it!”

  And I had. Like some deluded six-year-old, I’d scrawled, “I wish that things with me and L. would work out.” Then I stuffed the piece of paper back into Mr. Pickle’s pouch, hoping no one would ever see it. Or hoping maybe, that one day, Loser and I could joke about it together. When I checked the pouch a week later, though, the piece of paper was gone. It had fallen out God knows where, and was now floating aimlessly around Seattle for strangers to laugh at.

  As I sobbed facedown on the couch, I realized I didn’t know exactly what I was crying about in the early hours of a warm September morning in my sparsely furnished living room lit by two red Ikea lamps ($5 apiece).

  Then my phone rang.

  My heart leapt. Froze. Hammered in my chest.

  Could it…? Was it…Loser?

  “R., it’s J.”

  “Oh.” Sniffle. “Hi.”

  “I just called to make sure you were okay.”

  And I knew, suddenly, what I’d been crying about.

  For the first time, I knew that I was going to get over Loser, that I was going to leave him behind, that, in fact I was already starting to leave him behind.

  And this knowledge made me both intensely happy and intensely sad. That is why the tears continued to slide down my face even as I talked on the phone with SB. As I tried to hide my sobs, he asked me out for a date—my first real post-Loser date—on Thursday night.

  E-mail Breakup Babe | Comments 3

  POST A COMMENT

  Are you sure you’re ready to start dating again? This all smacks of “rebound” to me. The Frenchman | Homepage | 9/15/02—3:18 P.M.

  Rebound schmebound, just let the girl have fun! nukie | Homepage | 9/16/02—12:10 A.M.

  When I was a kid, I used to kiss the TV when Davy Jones came on. Then I’d feel all trembly inside. Later I learned that the trembly feeling was just static.

  CandyCane | Homepage | 9/16/02—9:53 P.M.

  Chapter Seven

  The Monday after my housewarming party, my boss shocked me in our “1:1” by telling me that he was getting “good feedback” about me from all my coworkers.

  “What?!” I wanted to shout. “Are you people blind?” Lyle was, quite possibly, blind. He had the worst fashion sense of anyone I’d ever met, except for the hordes of Empire logowear wearing developers who swarmed the cafeterias, their French fry–fed paunches busting out of their extra-large T-shirts announcing product releases, “launch parties,” and various inside jokes. One popular T-shirt featured a line drawing of Rodney Rolands as God, brandishing a tequila bottle at his earthly workers and yelling down, “What about zero bug count don’t you understand?”

  At least Lyle didn’t wear Birkenstocks or tie-dye or have a beard down to his crotch. He favored polo shirts in colors such as lime green and royal blue (with a few too many grayish chest hairs poking out), tucked into black jeans about a size and a half too small and finished off with a pair of bright white Reeboks.

  Instead I nodded knowingly. Modestly. “That’s good to know,” I said. Good to know no one has noticed I’m only working five hours a day, half of which I spend crying on the phone!

  “And all the writers seem to enjoy working with you.”

  Aha. That was the key. All the technical writers were men. Nerdy men, married men, Xbox-playing men. Many of them had worked at Empire for years and had 10,000-square-foot houses in the suburbs, multiple BMWs, Cessnas, and dowdy yet appreciative wives.

  Most of them could have retired on their stock options, but they liked their geeky jobs too much. Nerds or not, married or not, I enjoyed their company because they were, after all, men. They clearly enjoyed me as well, and who could blame them? I was looking better than ever, and the old charm was apparently still alive and kicking. And thank God, because I needed this job. I needed it to pay for my cool apartment, my new furniture, and my exponentially growing size 6 wardrobe. The recession got worse every day and I hated to think about what would have happened to me had I still been a temp when The Great Unpleasantness unfolded.

  On this particular Monday, I’d been editing for two hours straight. Usually, each time I tried to buckle down and edit a piece of documentation, it felt like putting a straitjacket on. I would struggle against it at first—the strange language, the words I didn’t understand, the bad grammar. Then eventually I would stop resisting, concentrate, and realize that this was just language after all. I took a deep breath and looked at the words in front of me.

  In the following illustration, the serviceBusiness class represents the business service information type. The serviceBusiness class contains the class attributes servicePin, serviceCode, name, and properties. It also contains a class attribute called bindingGrids, which contains one or more bindingGrids class instances.

  As I added commas here, fixed tenses there, I imagined—for the hundredth time—my upcoming date with Sexy Boy. I imagined how, when he picked me up for dinner, we would embrace. The embrace would be long, significant. A recognition. Perhaps he would whisper, “Thanks for meeting me tonight, Rachel.” His breath would be hot in my ear. The vibe would be so intense, we’d almost start to kiss right away. But after the first heated brush of our l
ips, I’d pull away and say in my most sultry voice, “Why don’t we save that for dessert?”

  I was feeling so cheerful about my prospects with Sexy Boy that I actually had my office door cracked open. I was getting sick of being a blinds-drawn, door-shut mole, walled off against any memory, any hint of Loser.

  The problem was that I’d been shoved into a windowless office. Once upon a time, all the full-time employees got their own window offices, while it was the temps who got shoehorned into the windowless offices two or three at a time or, worse yet, into old test labs, cold as meat lockers, where several others worked in perpetual icy twilight. Now, though, just like the stock options that made you rich, window offices for all employees were a thing of the past.

  One day, after years of loyal service to “The Rod” (as Rodney Rolands was also known), I’d work in the light. But for now I was destined to dwell in this airless hole. Though the cafeterias and hallways at Empire were cheerful and decorated with a rotating multimillion-dollar art collection, these windowless offices—though preferable to the meat lockers—were still akin to Purgatory. So I’d started keeping the door open for short periods of time each day. Fifteen minutes. An hour. Today it had been open for two whole hours.

  There hadn’t been any Loser sightings in about two weeks. He was perhaps the farthest thing from my mind when a shadow suddenly darkened my doorway that Monday afternoon.

  I didn’t look up at first. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the paragraph in front of me:

  Over time, as a growing number of objects become registered in the PSID server, it becomes difficult to maintain a register of the allocated unique identifiers. Use the GetRegisteredKeys class to get the unique identifying keys for the entities you have registered.

  Something about the familiar sound of those footsteps gave me an uneasy feeling.

  Don’t look up.

  The Dixie Chicks blasted through my headphones. “To-NIGHT, the heartache’s on ME…”

  The shadow swept by. And though I knew I shouldn’t, I did it. I looked up. In time to see him looking at me over his shoulder, attempting an expression of nonchalance. When our eyes met, we both looked away.

  Still, I saw the dark circles under his eyes. The unnatural pallor of his normally tan skin. His hair looked greasy.

  The Dixie Chicks continued to wail in my ears. “Let’s drink a toast to the FOOL who never SEES…”

  I tore my headphones off. Then I jumped up from my seat and slammed my office door. Falling back into my chair, I faced the computer screen again and stared at it, my entire body trembling. The words blurred together on the screen. I waited for the tears to come.

  But they didn’t. Instead, something unexpected happened. My stomach and face got hot, and I felt like something was about to explode inside me. I grabbed a sheaf of papers on my desk and hurled them into the air as hard as I could.

  God damn it, what a fucking asshole.

  The papers fluttered to the floor in an unsatisfying manner. Suddenly I was high on anger. I wanted to get on one of the tables in the B40 cafeteria in my new black cocktail dress from the J. Crew sale rack ($55) and belt out that Gloria Gaynor karaoke classic “I Will Survive” to the delight and amazement of three hundred horny men. Loser would be there too, of course, cowering in the crowd with his piece of pizza, wanting to run, but unable to tear himself away from the sight of me, rising like a sexy size 6 phoenix from the ashes.

  Instead, I looked around for something else to throw. Something that would hit the wall. Hard. My dictionary? The ceramic bowl that Loser had bought me at a craft market in Thailand? I raised an eyebrow.

  I reached for the bowl and then stopped myself. You’re at work, remember? You need this job.

  But the adrenaline pumping through my body got the better of me. I flung my door open and marched to the kitchen, almost knocking over a pimply developer in a tank top and flip-flops (no doubt a millionaire). I grabbed a drink from the cooler, rattling all the cans inside when I slammed the door closed.

  I felt like I could run ten miles. Maybe that’s what I should do, I thought, as I stalked back to my office, clenching the can of Talking Rain in my hand so hard that my skin turned white.

  But after I got back to my office and slammed the door, I thought of one other thing I could do that might make me feel better. More and more now I turned to the blog when I felt down, just as in the past I’d always turned to my journals. Softbound journals. Hardbound journals. Flowered journals, striped journals. Boxes of journals that I’d been keeping since age thirteen, all about boys, boys, and more boys.

  Though I’d never blogged at work before, I logged on to Breakup Babe and wrote without stopping for forty-five minutes. I was so furious that I almost forgot to worry about what might happen to me for blogging at work or, worse yet, for blogging about a coworker. Trouble was, in my first innocent blush of blogging, I didn’t consider Loser a “coworker.” He was a villain first of all.

  Monday, September 16, 2002

  3:34 PM Breakup Babe

  Welcome to Loserville

  Well, today I saw Loser in the hall and it just made me MAD.

  He encouraged me to take this job in his group, and then promptly CHEATED on me and DUMPED me—me, the best thing that has ever happened to him in his whole, pathetic life—and now he has the nerve to walk down MY hallway as if he is man enough to be within ten feet of me.

  Do you know what this man used to do with his weekends before he met me? Play video games. I would come to work on Mondays and relate my own tales of outdoor adventure, and he would always tell me that he’d played video games and cleaned his house.

  But he was envious, and would tell me, “I’d love to do that kind of stuff.”

  But of course his loser girlfriend at the time had no interest in the great outdoors; all she did was read her horoscope and pop painkillers. Before her, his loser ex-wife considered it exercise to drive to the beauty salon for another bad bleached blond perm.

  When we started dating, though, he began using that fancy bike that he owned but never rode; he began socializing with MY friends (having none of his own); began traveling to exciting destinations near and far; and began to see that the world was not just work and loser women. And then, after our grandest adventure of all, during which he seemed (SEEMED) to blossom into a bold and inquisitive human being, trekking through jungles and snorkeling with sea lions, all the while telling me how lucky he was, how much he loved me, he came home (while I was still away) and, high on a wave of confidence, decided he no longer needed me.

  But the story doesn’t end there, of course. It’s one thing to decide you don’t need someone anymore. It happens all the time. It’s also one thing to cheat on someone. That happens all the time too. But it’s another thing entirely to cheat on someone, lie to them, and then for the next two months punish them by telling them they are selfish, unfeeling, and that the relationship has been all about THEM for the last two years.

  You know all about how I groveled. How I cried and begged and demeaned myself until I found out the truth from outside sources. And when I confronted him with it, he cowered—a small, weak animal caught in a deadly trap. And I almost felt sorry for him. In that moment when my rage took over, when I finally stopped cowering myself, he knew what the truth was. He knew that what he’d done was horrible. But all he could manage to say was “I’m sorry” in the smallest, most insincere voice I’ve ever heard, “I wasn’t getting what I needed.”

  Now this man dares to walk down my hallway, right past my door. Maybe he wants to see me. Maybe he knows what he’s lost and wants a glimpse of it, shimmering in the fog. Or maybe he’s just a f*cking idiot. All I know is next time I’m not going to avert my eyes. Next time I’m going to look him in his sad, pathetic face as he walks by, and watch him as he can’t meet my gaze.

  Loser.

  E-mail Breakup Babe | Comments 2

  I was filled with righteous anger and it fueled me after I wrote that entry. Nex
t time I saw Loser, he would melt under my withering stare! I went back to my editing and when that straitjacket became too much to bear, I comforted myself with a combination of caffeine and rock and roll blasting through my headphones. I was determined that getting over this breakup would be a piece of cake. Hell, it had only been three months, and I was halfway over it already.

  Besides, SB and I were going out in a few days. No doubt we’d get liquored up and fall into each other’s arms with unbridled passion, and…Well, I couldn’t imagine much past that. It would be something along the lines of fall madly in love, live happily ever after, and forget about Loser.

  POST A COMMENT

  Ooh, sister, the RAGE! I didn’t know you had it in you! Keep it coming—that’s how you’re going to get over it!

  Juliana | Homepage | 9/16/02—10:46 P.M.

  You know what they say: The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Or else take a gun and mow the f*cker down.

  Knut | Homepage | 9/17/02—8:33 A.M.

  Chapter Eight

  It was Sunday afternoon, 3:34 P.M. Sexy Boy hadn’t called. I was writing at Victrola. I kept turning my cell phone on and off, checking for messages. On the one hand, I didn’t want it to be on while I was writing, because I would keep waiting for it to ring and it would distract me. On the other hand, I was distracted anyway and kept turning it on every thirty minutes to see if he’d called.

  After our date, he’d said, “I’ll give you a holler this weekend.” And with those seven little words, my heart had leapt up into the air and done a little victory dance. But now it was Sunday and he still hadn’t called. Technically it was still the weekend, of course. Maybe he meant he’d call me today to make a plan for next week. I knew, though, that he had just flaked. My heart had been on a sinking trajectory ever since Saturday afternoon. Going lower and lower. Waiting for that call. “He can be a primo flake when it comes to women,” Guy-Pal #1 had said during that one, distant conversation. “He always wants what he can’t get, and what he can get doesn’t interest him.”

 

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