Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak

by Adi Alsaid

  The man furrowed his brow. “Like what?”

  “Oh, could be anything,” Cal said, putting his hands on his hips. “Give you directions somewhere, write a particularly difficult email that you’ve been having trouble writing, clean your house.”

  “You want to clean our house?” the man asked in a monotone voice.

  “If it would make your life easier, sure!” Cal smiled warmly, and I tried to match his smile, though it was hard not to cringe instead.

  Not surprisingly, the couple shuffled away without another word. Cal turned to look at me, eyebrow raised. “That went well.”

  “Eh, at least they stopped and heard you out. Most people will do anything they can to avoid talking to a stranger on the street. It’s surprising they didn’t just keep walking.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle that.”

  “I’ll take the lead on the next few,” I said.

  A group of women pushing strollers, a guy standing on a street corner flipping a sign that advertised a good deal on cell phone plans or something stupid like that, a cook taking a smoke break in an alleyway. Every single one of them looked at us like we were exactly as socially challenged as we seemed.

  We kept tweaking our approach, trying to be as unintimidating and normal as possible.

  My legs were sore and sweaty, even with the sundress I was wearing. I thought about suggesting we go get ice cream, but I didn’t want to break our momentum. My mom had already called and given me a hard deadline of 7:00 p.m. for dinner, which was too quickly approaching. Heading away from the Hudson, we started meandering through the streets again, passing near Wall Street and its onslaught of suited bros hitting up the bars after work.

  “I don’t know how I feel about helping out finance dudes,” Cal said.

  “I mean, me neither. But helping someone is helping someone, right? Someone here might be really struggling with something heavy. Like, that guy,” I said, pointing to a semiattractive white guy in a blue suit, the top shirt of his button undone, his tie just a little loose, like he’d given it one good yank as soon as he left the office. “Maybe he’s second-guessing his career, and really hates the environment he’s put himself in. Maybe he’s begging for someone to tell him it’s okay to leave. Or maybe his parents are sick, maybe he’s lonely and...”

  “Okay, I think I get the picture. Wall Street bros are human too.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.” I walked up to the guy, who was looking at his phone outside of a generic Irish pub. I tapped him on the wrist. “Hi. Sorry to interrupt, and this is going to sound weird, but please don’t let the weirdness undermine the sincerity of the question. Is there anything nice I can do for you today?”

  He blinked, like so many others had. “Something nice?”

  “Yeah. Maybe something you can’t do for yourself. It doesn’t have to be big, just something that could help make your life a little better. Even if it’s just for today.”

  He looked at Cal. “Is she serious?”

  “Super serious. Me too.”

  Wall Street Dude considered us for a second, then reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of those unabashedly douchey vaporized cigarettes. He inhaled slowly and thoughtfully, then exhaled a huge puff. To his credit, he turned his head so that he wouldn’t blow it directly into our faces. “Actually, yeah. There is something.” He craned his neck back toward the bar, which was not quite full but getting busier. He could have been there alone, or a part of any of the groups hanging out in booths and those high-top tables that don’t have seats, but are only meant to rest your drinks on. “There’s a bartender in there. Charles. Tall, fit, cute as a button.” He took another pull from his e-cig. “I’ve been in love with him for months. But I don’t want to make him uncomfortable by hitting on him at work, and I’m not sure if he even knows I’m gay. I’m only ever here with coworkers, and it’s not like it comes up.”

  Of course it would be love related. Cal’s eyes were practically gleaming with joy. “Yeah, we’ll help. What can we do?”

  “You tell me, kid.”

  Cal bit his lip and looked sideways at me. “What do you say, love columnist? Have any ideas?”

  For a second, I thought they were messing with me. The solution felt so simple that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Then Cal and Wall Street Dude shared a look, and I realized that they really didn’t know what to do. People can be so stupid about love. I sighed, and walked into the bar.

  “Where’s she going?” I heard Wall Street Dude say to Cal, a hint of worry in his voice.

  The bar was as equally loud with music as it was with chattering. There were two male bartenders working, and it became clear quickly which one was Cute As a Button. He, however, was busy punching something into the electronic tablet that served as his register, so the other one noticed me first.

  “No!” I said when he locked eyes with me. “The other one.”

  The bartender continued his approach. “What?”

  “I said the other one!” I pointed at Cute As a Button, or whatever his name was. “Bring him to me.”

  The guy looked like he wanted to ask me for my ID. Then someone else approached the bar and so he shrugged, tapped the other bartender on the shoulder, and tended to the new customer. Meanwhile, my phone started ringing. I checked to see who it was. Leo.

  “ID,” Cute As a Button told me, as soon as he saw me.

  I hit Ignore on my phone. “That’s not important right now,” I said, waving him away. “Do you see that guy outside?” I pointed toward the door, where Cal was standing with his hands on his hips, looking so happy that just the sight of him made me break out into a grin. Wall Street Dude had been staring a moment ago, but as soon as Button looked over, he pretended to look at something very important on his phone.

  “Who? Scott?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He has a crush on you but is iffy about hitting on you at work. Are you interested in him?”

  He didn’t even have to answer. His smile said it all. “Great,” I said, matching his grin. A little flutter shot through my chest. “You want to write down your number or something? He seems like he’s so nervous he might run away waving his arms in the air at any moment.”

  I left the bar and handed Scott the napkin I had with Button’s phone number on it. “Wow, the classic digits-on-a-napkin,” Cal said. “I feel like no one’s done that since the early 2000s.”

  Scott grabbed the napkin, staring at it with mild disbelief, holding it gently, as if it were a butterfly that could flitter away at any second. “He says to call anytime,” I said.

  “That’s all it took?” Scott said softly.

  “‘People are vines, awaiting the chance to cling.’” Both he and Cal looked at me with eyebrows raised. “It’s a quote. From Look at Me by Jennifer Egan.” Scott returned his gaze to the napkin, but Cal kept his eyes on me, a slight smirk on his face. My chest flutter grew. “What? You and Iris are allowed to quote stuff all the time. I can be deep too.”

  Cal laughed, putting his hands up to say he wasn’t judging. Scott thanked us, a big smile on his face and a new glow to his skin, even though his hand was shaking when he took his next puff. Cal and I waved goodbye and started heading back to Chinatown toward my place.

  “You feel that?” Cal said, when we were a few blocks past the hectic streets of downtown.

  I did. I wasn’t sure if it was exactly the same thing Cal was feeling, if he meant just the fact that we’d helped Scott out, or if he meant something else. “Yep,” I answered, leaving it at that.

  “That was surprisingly simple. If we ignore the six thousand failed attempts before this one.”

  “We got lucky that it was love related.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because love’s pretty simple to figure out.”

  Cal laughed. “Is that
right?”

  “Not always. But when you’re outside of the situation, hell yeah. It’s easy to see the solutions to someone else’s problems. Especially an early stage. This was just the approach. Things may get messy later, but the approach is easy. You have feelings for a person, you try to see if they reciprocate. Then you get closer to each other.”

  “That’s all it takes, huh?” Cal said, scratching his chin.

  “In a nutshell.”

  Again, that stomach flutter returned. I checked my phone to see how I was doing on time, if I could stretch the day out any more, but I had about fifteen minutes before my mom threatened to disown me again, and we were ten minutes away from my place. Also, there was a voice mail on my phone. Probably from Leo. Which made sense, because who even left voice mails anymore, other than ex-boyfriends intent on making your life more confusing than it had to be.

  For the rest of our walk, Cal and I were quiet. I was wondering how much of what I’d said was true, that love is easy when you look at it from the outside. Like Iris and Cal. For me, it was easy. They should stay together. They should extend the rare thing they have until it can’t be sustained, not give up on it because there were obstacles in the distance. Was there some easy solution for me that I was failing to see? If there’s an easy solution for love, is there an easy solution for heartbreak too?

  “Well, this is me,” I said because that’s the thing everyone says when you’re walking and you arrive at your house. It’s practically a law that those are the words that leave your mouth.

  Cal looked up at my building because that’s what his role dictated he had to do. Then he smiled at me. “Well, Lu, thanks for hanging out and doing nice things with me today. It’s always great hanging out with you.”

  “You too,” I said, averting my eyes in hopes of quelling my overactive blushing mechanism. Pete’s accusation flashed through my mind, not for the first time that day.

  Then Cal took a step toward me. “Are you a hugger?”

  I shrugged. “I could be.” I stepped forward into his arms.

  Goddamn, was it a good hug. I could feel it on me long after it was gone, long after we’d said goodbye and I went upstairs and had dinner with Jase and my mom. It clung to me like a scent, like a feeling, refusing to let go.

  In my room, later that night, I listened to the message Leo had left on my voice mail. His voice was cracked with hurt and regret, which was enough to convince me that the words he was saying were honest. “I fucked up, and I’m sorry, and I think I want you back. I don’t think, I know. I want you back.” A beat on the phone, no static because the quality of the call was good, but I could imagine it hanging in the silence, just like I could still feel Cal’s touch on me. “I can’t believe I’m leaving soon and that I might not see you again.” He sighed into the phone. “I hope it’s not the last time. I’m sorry.”

  Then, a click.

  21

  WHY NOW?

  How had I arrived back on deadline day without having written a word?

  Well, Lu, as soon as you find yourself in an emotionally healthy state, ready to tackle the task set before you, your idiot ex-boyfriend says or does something that throws you back into a confused place where thoughts are the last thing you want to face.

  Also, your words have probably left you for good, revealing to the world that all you are is a love-obsessed teen. You don’t pay enough attention to your family, or your closest friend. You allow a job, and therefore a scholarship, and therefore your ability to attend an institution of higher learning, to slip through your fingers. Because of something as superficial and, frankly, nonexistent as writer’s block. Writer’s block is nothing but cowardice. The fear of facing what you should really be writing about, or the fear that what you will write won’t be good enough to meet some lofty and vague standards that only you yourself have set. Either way, you put yourself here, so don’t blame stupid Leo and his change of heart.

  Blame, maybe, the memory that lingers of that incredibly silly, stupid, and wonderful thing he used to do when you found yourselves in a room all alone. He’d rush over to your backside, place his butt against yours, then do a little side-to-side shimmy.

  Blame, even, the fact that every story about heartbreak you’ve ever read has made you expect his smell to cling to your bed. Except he only lay on it a handful of times, and never slept in your room overnight, so no matter how much you burrow your nose into the pillow, you cannot reclaim those moments spent lying next to him.

  Blame your stupid desire to address yourself in third person.

  It was Friday. The morning light slipped in through my blinds, weak and gray. I woke up right before my alarm went off. It felt like I was waking up from a bad dream, but the truth was that I was waking up into a bad dream. This was it. I was going to lose my job and my scholarship. My whole life from that day forward was going to look very different from what I had imagined, and it was all because Leo suddenly agreed with me that he was an idiot and that we shouldn’t have broken up.

  I hadn’t responded to him yet, but as soon as I’d had a sip of water and had a moment to adjust to being human in the morning, I grabbed my phone.

  LU

  Why now?

  Someone started knocking on my door.

  “Lucinda, are you awake?” my mom shouted, clocking way too many decibels for the morning. “You have work, right?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I’m awake and capable of meeting my responsibilities, thank you!”

  “Except for making yourself available for an adequate amount of family time!” Mom yelled. “Come have breakfast before your brother eats it all.”

  I kicked the sheets off and stumbled to the shower, putting on a podcast so that I wouldn’t have to listen exclusively to my thoughts. That didn’t work out great though, as I just ended up peeking my head out of the shower every thirty seconds when I imagined I heard my phone buzz. I wondered if Leo would respond at all, or if in the course of the night he’d changed his mind again.

  My mom knocked on the bathroom door this time. “Lucinda Philomena Charles, stop wasting water and come out to have your breakfast!”

  “Mother, you named me, and you know that’s not my middle name.”

  “I’m trying to annoy you so that you come join us.” She knocked again. “Love you!”

  I toweled off and went back to my room to get dressed, pausing the podcast and rewinding it to the beginning so that I could actually listen to it some other time.

  Mom had made strawberry-basil French toast. If you need something to further illustrate the state I was in, I only managed to eat two pieces. Jase ate the other fifty-one.

  I kept doing math in my head, trying to figure out how much time I’d have to write my column (not counting the previous three weeks or so). My shift would be over at three, and Hafsah had given me until the end of the workday, which ostensibly meant 5:00 p.m. I could maybe stretch it to six, but it probably wouldn’t behoove me to stretch anything at all with this last chance I’d been granted. I could also add thirty minutes for my lunch break, plus a few stolen trips to the bathroom which could be productive, especially if I came in announcing I’d eaten a bad kebab and was feeling queasy and could sneak away to the bathroom more than usual.

  Oh right. Faking an illness. That was a thing people did.

  “Mom,” I said, “I’m not feeling great. I think I might call in to work.”

  “You better be sick, to only eat two slices.” She stopped doing the dishes and walked over to me, placing the back of her hand on my forehead. She frowned, then touched my cheek. “You don’t have a fever.”

  “I think it was something I ate.”

  My mom gave me a look that I was breaking her heart.

  “Not the French toast. Or last night’s dinner. I think something before that.”

  She put her hand over her heart and started looking ser
iously wounded. “You ate something before dinner? Do you not like my food?”

  I said it wasn’t that, and then stammered to think of some other thing I might have eaten between leaving the house and coming back for dinner, but my brain was still not in tip-top shape and I failed. Then my mom took a seat next to me, her eyebrows angling with so much worry I was afraid that if I kept thinking up excuses, she might never recover from the heartbreak. “So you are depressed, then. Should I call Leo and yell at him? You want Momma to do that?”

  Oh good, I wasn’t going to have to fake throwing up. The thought of my mom confronting Leo made me queasy but also strangely emotional. There were too many feelings happening for the time of day. I didn’t have time to deal with feeling things.

  I groaned. “Never mind. I’ll go to work.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, your food is wonderful, I’m okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, still pouting. She put her hand back on my forehead. “Should I be worried about you?”

  I thought about the shitstorm that would come when I lost my scholarship, how I could possibly explain the reason why I had failed to deliver one stupid measly column. “No, I’m fine. I think I’m just gassy.”

  “Gross,” Jase mumbled as he chowed down on three slices of French toast at the same time, syrup dribbling down his chin.

  “Yes, I agree, chemical reactions are gross when they occur inside my body.” I pushed my chair out. “I guess I’ll see you guys later when my life is over.”

  “Sounds great, honey. Drink a mineral water when you get to work, it’ll help.” Mom smiled at me then went back to the sink, slipping on a pair of blue latex gloves. Jase was already deep into a game on his phone. I gave one last wave to my former life, then grabbed my bag, slipped my computer in, just in case I found time to type up the column, and headed out the door.