Why We Broke Up

by Daniel Handler

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Amy and I used to hang out here. She lived up on Lapp, just one block there. You can see the lions from her porch.”

  “Amy?”

  “Amy Simon. Sophomore year. She moved, her dad got transferred. Real asshole, that guy, strict and paranoid. So we used to sneak here.”

  “So I’m not the first girl you’ve gotten naked in a park?” I said, smiling and thinking about this. I began to drop the shells one by one into this tin.

  You looked up at the curve of the band shell for a sec, perfect if it rains, you’d told me. You’d thought of everything, you’d been thinking about the party, all by yourself. “You are, actually,” you said. “You’re the only one. But you’re not the only one I tried to get naked in a park.”

  I laughed a little, dropped a few more in. “I guess I can’t blame you for trying.”

  “No other girl,” you said. “Nobody else ever did anything but freak out if I mentioned any other girl.”

  “I’m different, I know,” I said, a little bored of that.

  “I don’t mean that,” you said. “I mean, I love you.”

  Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn’t like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake, with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.

  “I love you too.”

  “I can’t believe this is what you want.”

  “What,” I said, “you?”

  “No, I mean planning a party. Finding a park, just showing it to you, and you act like I did something.”

  “You did. This is.”

  “I mean, with my friends—we buy stupid things for our girlfriends.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that around.”

  “Teddy bears, candy things, magazines even. Don’t say it’s stupid, because we all think so, everybody, but it’s what we do. What do you guys do? Poems or something, right? I’m not going to write you a poem.”

  Joe, actually, used to write me poems. Once, one of them was a sonnet. Those I gave back in an envelope. “I know. This is—I like this, Ed. This is a perfect place.”

  “And I can’t buy you flowers, because we haven’t had a fight yet, really.”

  “And I told you never to buy me flowers,” and I can see it, you rolling your eyes and smiling on the stage. I smiled back, an idiot who didn’t want flowers, the fucking flower shop where everything collapsed, why the bottom of this box is carpeted with dead rose petals like a shrine on the highway where there’s been a wreck.

  “Do we have to go?”

  We were skipping, but I had a test. “We have time, a little.”

  “Gosh,” you said, “what can me and my girlfriend do in a park—”

  “Nope,” I said. “A, too cold.”

  You leaned down and gave me a lengthy kiss. “And B?”

  “Actually that’s the only reason I can think of, is A.”

  Your hands moved. “It’s not that cold,” you said. “We wouldn’t have to take everything off.”

  “Ed—”

  “I mean, we wouldn’t have to do a lot.”

  I shrugged out of your arms, put the last shells in. “My test,” I said.

  “OK, OK.”

  “But thanks for taking me here. You’re right.”

  “I told you it was perfect.”

  “So for the party we have food—”

  “Drink. Trevor said he’d do it. But it can’t just be champagne, it’s too word-I’m-not-allowed-to-say.”

  “OK. And Trevor won’t be an asshole at the party?”

  “Oh,” you said, “I guarantee he will. But not, you know, too much.”

  “OK, so food, drink, music, lights. Everything but invitations and a guest list.”

  “Everything but,” you said, with a tiny smirk. I threw a shell at you and then stood up to get it. I didn’t know why, not then. There was no reason to keep them, unremarkable nothings, even now they look like anything else. But everything else is gone. I mean, I love you is gone, and your dance upon the stage, and all the perfection for the party. Even the party would have been gone, had we ever had it, the music back to Joan, the lights back in your attic, the food digested and the drinks thrown up, Lottie Carson driven home very politely and helped through her own sculpture garden to her front door late, late at night, tired from the lovely celebration, thankful and calling us dear. All gone, indelible but invisible, not quite everything but everything but. Mr. Nelson said it went on my permanent record, fifteen minutes late on a test day, but that’s gone too, along with my B- and the essay question I totally bluffed through, and gone is the reason I was late, how I ran to you and kissed your neck and pressed my hand against you, murmuring that it seemed like everything but felt pretty good to you. We didn’t do a lot, as you promised. We did a little, and the little is gone, those twenty-whatnot minutes scurried away wherever the actors go when the movie’s over and we’re blinking at the lights of the exit signs, wherever the old loves go when they move away with their asshole dads or just look elsewhere when I walk by in the halls. And the feeling, the real perfect of that afternoon, that you were thinking about me, that you’d remembered this garden and waited outside geometry to get me to skip class and see what you knew I’d love—that feeling’s gone forever too.

  But these are here, Ed. Look at them, weighty now and heavy-making on the heart when I open the tin and rattle them in my hands sore from writing you. They’ve been made indelible, Ed, because everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you’re the one keeping them, I’ll be the one feeling better.

  There’s that scene in Verdict Written in Tears, where Karl Braughton as the prosecutor throws down the bouquet of roses, and slowly, slowly the camera moves down the blossoms and the stems, past the leaves and thorns, to the ribbon that holds them together—pale blue they say, but it’s a black-and-white movie—down the lawyer’s book-piled table to the parquet floor, slowly, slowly crawling its way to the witness box. And all the while we hear Amelia Hardwick sputtering with indignation, accusation, justification, hysteria, and finally when the lens reaches her, the shame, the deep, horrifying shame of realizing it must be true. She is a murderess. She was in the gazebo that quiet afternoon. Her amnesia is real, not part of a frame-up by her mother-in-law. And she cries the helpless cry of the end of the movie, the evidence inescapable, like a curtain closing.

  I have amnesia about Goofballs III. If Karl Braughton, with his thumbs in his suspenders, said to me, “Min Green, do you swear you have not seen a single frame of the Goofballs franchise?” I would look first at the solemn jurors and then at Sidney Juno—who’s not in the movie but so gorgeous I’d slip him in there—and I would say yes, yes, I would say, because those movies are so fucking stupid my teeth ache to gnash them apart. But here are the tickets thrown in my face from this closet box of grief. So watch me grovel denying it.

  Al just saw and said “Goofballs III?!” in disbelief to me. I’d slap him, but it’s still delicate between us.

  You wanted to go, Ed, I will tell him, so go we went. I kept looking around the sparse theater until you asked me if I wanted a burka so none of my word-you’re-not-allowed-to-say friends would see me here seeing my first Goofballs movie. (I bet you say it all the time now, don’t you, Ed? Gay gay gay.) Really, I wasn’t looking for friends, I just wanted to see if there was another female in the audience. And there was. She was chaperoning a birthday party of eleven-year-olds. This I remember, but the movie’s lost to amnesia because, Ed, of what you said to me just as the lights went down and they started that catastrophic parade of commercials for automobiles and community colleges and whatnot that the Carnelian would never in a million years play before a movie but that the Metro does without thinking, though from a purely aesthetic point of view, I must admit the one for Burly Soda is pretty cool. You turned to me and said, the combat-ready vehicle flickering on your face,
“Remind me when we eat that there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “What?”

  “Remind me when we eat—”

  “No, what is it?”

  “Well, there’s something unavoidable coming up next weekend, and I think we should figure out how to do it.”

  It was like a giant spatula had descended hard and splattery onto me. I sat flattened, a sudden and stunned patty, piece of meat in the boy-filled theater. Unavoidable? Us having sex? Our fucking fucking, unavoidable? Like I couldn’t avoid it, the next weekend? You put your arm around me. I made sure my legs were together, even with my knee, the closest one to you, jumpy and jumping. How to do it? I was stuttery furious but too something else—meek, in love with you, something—to say something. Goofballs III descended and I saw none of it. Not one frame, gentlemen of the jury, not a single shot. If I pouted you’d think it was because of the movie, so I held still, tried to pause my brain, think of nothing, etc. I tried not to have a feeling, that I’d not known you’d get like this sometime eventually, what with being Ed Slaterton and everything, entitled to the unavoidable intercourse. But the movie, the horny movie of finger-clenching jokes, it is erased and forgotten. And what gets me now, Al staring at these tickets like he found my KKK membership card, is that I’m not the amnesiac I used to be. It’s you, I bet, who has forgotten this, Metro three-thirty show, you paid, I think. And Ed, everything else.

  “You thought what?” you said. We were at Lopsided’s, a return to the scene of the sugar heist, eating whatever the meal is that boys eat in the afternoon that’s not lunch or dinner or large popcorn at the movies, today a club sandwich and fries, for me tea, reminding myself for the foreverteenth time to put good tea in my purse for when we go to diners. “You thought, actually, that right before the movie started that I was like, next weekend you’re losing your,” hushed down and leaned forward so it would be none of Lopsided’s’s business, “virginity? Like, by the way, darling? What kind of cuckoo do you think I am?”

  “The kind that says cuckoo.”

  “And this is how you sat through that movie. That’s why? No wonder you didn’t like it.”

  I let my relief breathe all around me, like I’d jumped into a perfect pool and was waiting that lovely still moment before starting to swim. “Yep. That’s why I didn’t like Goofballs III: Look Out Below!”

  “Well, I’d be willing to see it again.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I would! For you, so you could concentrate.”

  “That’s awful sweet. No thanks.”

  “Maybe you should check in that precious film book of yours to see if it’s cool to like it first.”

  “Maybe you should check with that precious coach of yours to see if it’s good for your game.”

  “Coach loves those movies. He took the whole team to Goofballs II at the end of last season.”

  I looked at you, all I had. Al hadn’t even called me, even after I called and hung up when he answered. I couldn’t go over this with him and never will. “The sad thing is that I have no idea if you’re kidding.”

  “Yeah, you definitely can’t tell what I’m saying today. Unavoidable, criminy. I told you before we’re not on a schedule, there’s no prize.”

  “OK, then what did you mean? What’s next weekend?”

  “Halloween, you dope.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re going to want to do the thing your crowd does that’s all arty and word-I’m-not-allowed-to-say.”

  “It’s just a party.”

  “So’s mine.”

  “Yeah, on the football field, with three kids getting expelled every year.”

  You nodded, smiled, sighed, looking sad at your finished plate like you wanted to eat a club sandwich and fries all over again. “I still miss Andy.”

  I sighed too, and you poked your fancy, flaggy toothpick right on the boundary between us. Who knows why the Earth evolved the way it did, but after years of shameful Halloween drunken debauchery at high school gatherings every year, the Civic Whatever Association decided to take a stance against shameful Halloween drunken debauchery at high school gatherings by combining all of the high school gatherings into one morass of shameful Halloween drunken debauchery on a football field, this year Hellman’s football field, called the All-City Halloween Bash, with all the teams from all the schools, except swimming, coordinated in costumes and competing for stupid gift-certificate prizes in a contest on the risers that always degenerates into girls taking off their tops, the parking lot a whole carpeted ocean of vomit from the kegs lined up in trunks apparently invisible to the chaperoning coaches always dressed in the same pudgy Superman outfits with fake foam muscles looking lumpy and cancerous in the floodlights. Or so I’ve seen in the yearbook photos, because I’d never gone, because my allegiance is under the other flag, the other morass of shameful Halloween drunken debauchery, the one where all the drama and arts clubs from all the high schools pool the money they make selling candy every year at intermission in auditoriums and all-purpose rooms across the city at their productions of Don’t Tell Mummy! and Summer Clouds and My Town, Your Town and Gadzooks! to rent a space and force all the stupid student councils at all the stupid schools to rotate turns sitting in a room and on e-mail arguing over a theme and decorations and postering everywhere and let’s not even think about the costumes, elaborate with real machinery and feathers and dialogue performed on a makeshift stage to win stupid gift-certificate prizes in a contest that always degenerates into a lascivious pit of improvised dance when like always the Shrouded Skulls take the stage as they will until the sun implodes in a swirl of dry ice and mirror ball and start playing “Snarl at Me, Sweetheart,” the singer eyelining around the room looking for the ingenue costumed in angel wings he’ll take out to his hearse in a cloud of clove cigarettes when his set’s over. I was tired of it, I never liked it, but of course I was going, just like you were going to the All-City Halloween Bash, the Ball and the Bash, and everybody chooses sides.

  “Where is it this year?” you asked me.

  “The Scandinavian Hall.”

  “What’s the theme?”

  “Pure Evil. Do you guys, does it even have a theme?”

  “No.” We grinned grimly at each other, you thinking that it was worse to have a theme and me thinking that it was worse not to have one but at least both thinking that it was basically lame no matter what.

  “Will your friends freak,” you asked, “if you don’t—”

  “I have to go,” I said. “My friends hate me already, I have to go. But you won’t be noticed if you’re not there, right?”

  “Min, the team already has their costumes.”

  “I was kidding,” I said, unhappily and lying. “What are you guys?”

  “Chain gang.”

  “Isn’t that racist?”

  “I think they let anyone into a chain gang, Min. What are you?”

  “I don’t know, I always last-minute it. Last year I was yellow journalism, not my best. People thought I was the newspapers the dog pees on.”

  You laughed into your ice water and took two things out of your back pocket, one something very cute for you, the other a pen. “Let’s make a plan.”

  “We could call in sick to our friends. The Carnelian always has a Kramer Horror Marathon on Halloween.”

  “Nobody will fall for that. No, I mean a plan.” You pinched three napkins out of the holder and laid one flat. A new frontier. Biting your lip like you do, you sketched out a few things, unwavering and neat, though I was the one who moved your plate away so you would have room to see it through. I smiled and smiled at you and kept forgetting to look at the napkin until you caught me and tapped with your pen.

  “OK, this is school.”

  “You’re very cute when you do this.”

  “Min.”

  “You are. Do you do this all the time?”

  “You’ve seen me do this. Like my sketches for the party.”


  “You made sketches for the party?”

  “Oops, wasn’t you. I was trying to figure how the lights would get strung up. It was, um, oh yeah, in government, with Annette it must have been. But yes, I do it, it helps me think. You know how I am with the math and stuff.”

  “You know I love you,” I said. “OK, this is school. Wait, where’s the gym?”

  “Doesn’t matter, not in the plan.”

  “OK. So the yard is here.”

  “It’s a football field. Don’t call it a yard.”

  “Grass where people sit and hang out is a yard.”

  “We stole things here, but that doesn’t make it a bank.”

  You were getting better at talking like this with me, the bounce-bounce dialogue that’s so good in all the Old Hat movies. I ruffled your hair. “OK, there’s your precious football field. Now draw a gazillion drunks in costume.”

  “We’ll see them soon enough. Now way up here’s the Scandinavian thing, somewhere around here.”

  “It’s right at the edge of that cemetery, so that’s—”

  “OK, here,” you said, scritching the park in a neat shape, and then the whole neighborhood between. Perfect.

  “Do you always use that?”

  “This? Yes. Let’s not start saying the other one is a nerd, because I will win that game.”

  “I’m not. I like it.”

  You rolled your eyes and didn’t believe me, but it was true, Ed, I loved the way your mathy brain powered you on across the napkin. “There,” you said, finishing a line. “Now, too far to walk, right?”

  “From where?”

  “Between them. I mean, we have to go to both, right?”

  I leaned over our high school and kissed you.

  “But we can’t walk,” you said, thinking so hard the kiss just got a brief smile. “So, bus. But the bus goes this way, down here someplace and then around.” You must have looked the same way when you were a kid, I thought, thinking I should ask Joan to see old pictures. You just trailed off where the bus went when we didn’t care, half this map in strict order and the other half just loose ink, like how I knew you and how I thought I knew you. “That doesn’t look good either. The bus won’t work.”