Why We Broke Up (9 page)

And inside my locker, the ticket. You probably didn’t pay for that either. I don’t know how it works, with the reserved section roped off for friends and family, guarded by the boys from the JV team all fluffed out with the importance of their security jobs. Those tickets are long gone now, torn and burned into nothing and smoke. You told me later that you were sorry there wasn’t an extra for Al but of course
he could come to the party after or wherever we went if we lost, but anyway Al told me he had plans, no, thanks. When I got to my seat, Joan was my date, with some biscotti in tinfoil, still warm.

“Ah, a pennant,” I remember she said. “Now everybody knows what side you’re on, Min.”

She had to yell to talk to me. A dad behind us put his hand on my shoulders,
Be seated, be seated, even though the game hasn’t started I need a perfect unobstructed view of a shiny wood floor with girls and pom-poms jiggling away
.

“Go Beavers, I guess,” I said.

“It’s the ‘I guess’ that makes it such a great cheer.”

“Well, it’s—” I wanted to say
my boyfriend’s
, but I was afraid Joan would correct me. “Ed’s thing. I’m trying to be nice. And he gave me it.”

“Of course he did,” Joan said, and folded open the tinfoil. “Have some biscotti. I tried walnuts instead of hazel, tell me what you think.”

I held them in my hands. Joan hadn’t been home the rest of our first week, leaving me alone reading in your discombobulated living room while you showered. Although you’d invited me upstairs. But I was afraid she’d come home, I didn’t know what the rules were, so I waited until you came downstairs still damp from the shower and we lay together on the cushions on the floor with the TV talking over us. I can tell you the truth, which is that I liked it better when
you helped me touch you, running our hands over and inside your clean clothes, than when you touched me, so unsure I was about when Joan might come home and see us.

“Are you going to the party after?”

“Me?” Joan said. “No, I’m done with bonfires, Min. I go to some of the games, about half, don’t want to be a bad sister, but the parties afterward are his responsibility, I tell him. I tell him, no coming home so late he sleeps through Saturday; no not coming home; if he throws it up, he cleans it up.”

“Sounds fair.”

“Tell him that,” Joan said with a snort. “He wants no rules and breakfast in bed.”

You bounded out as they said your name through a thing blaring professional with enthusiasm. My ears ached from how loud they loved you, the ball you caught from the coach throwing it sideways,
dribble dribble
as if the whole place wasn’t roaring, and then a layup and it looked iffy from where I sat but it went in and the roof blew off the place and you clowned and bowed and beat on Trevor grinning and then, like Gloria Tablet must have felt when she served coffee to Maxwell Meyers and found herself screen-testing the next day, then you pointed at me, right at me, and grinned and I froze and waved my flag until the next thing was announced and you threw the ball
hard
at Christian with an impy smile.

“See what I mean?” Joan said.

“Maybe I can whip him into shape.”

She put her arm around me. She was wearing something, I could smell the scent of it, or maybe it was just the cinnamon or nutmeg of cooking. “Oh, Min, I hope so.”

The rest of the team was announced. Blowing whistles. I thought for a sec, for some reason, that I’d cry at what Joan had said, and I flapped my pennant to evaporate my teary eyes. “But if you do,” she warned, “or if you don’t, don’t keep him too long past midnight.”

“You’re not my real mom,” I was brave enough to say, and then stupid enough and realized it was the wrong joke. Yours, your joke with Joan, but she frowned and looked out at the pom-poms. There was a silence, except for everyone screaming.

“These are good,” I said about the cookies, code for
sorry
.

“Yeah, well,” she said, and patted my hand for
I forgive you
, but that was definitely the wrong joke, “don’t eat them all,” and the game started. The roar and the boom was like nothing I’d known, even when I was a freshman and went to the first pep rally because I had the wrong first friends and didn’t know any better. The whole gym was
alive
with it, cheering and waving and gripping their friends, bells when someone scored, drowned out by screams, delighted or disappointed depending whose side you were on. Whistles and then sweaty slowdowns, glares, shrugs, long-armed gestures
of
aw, shucks
when it was a penalty or an error. Everyone’s hands palm out on the court, the ball is mine, the basket, the point, the score, the team, the game, losing you in the skinny pack, finding you again, letting go of you to check the numbers up on the wall. It was a rush, Ed, and I loved the rush, stomping my feet on the bleachers to help with the thunder, until my eyes found the clock and it was only a meager fifteen goddamn minutes that had gone by. I’d thought maybe we were almost done, the air hissing out of me and the pennant suddenly a barbell too heavy to lift again. Fifteen minutes, just, how could it be only that? I blinked at the time to make sure, and Joan was grinning, catching me. “I know, right?” she said. “These take forever. It’s like the dictionary definition of hurry up and wait.” I’d lost track of you long enough that when I found you again my brain said,
Why are you watching this guy? Who is he? Why this guy and not other guys, any other one?
because there was something wrong with the picture I was in. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit. I was cut and pasted wrong into a background you could immediately—or, anyway, after fifteen minutes—see didn’t match up, was how I felt. Like Deanie Francis in
Midnight Is Near
or Anthony Burn as Stonewall Jackson in
Not on My Watch
, wrong for the part, ill cast. My backpack, I wondered—with homework and the Robert Colson book I’d loaned Al that he’d finally given back added to the weight
heavy against my legs—would I have to take it with me for the loud night looming obvious ahead of us since the score had tipped overwhelmingly ahead? What to do with this pennant and its plastic stick to hold it, do you throw them in the fire, why did nobody ever have a pennant at a party? What was I, wrong, doing here in the gym, never a voluntary place for me? They didn’t even sell coffee and I wanted one, boy, did I want one then, ready to bash the exhausted mom and snatch her thermos of it. But there was no way to escape, out the windows too high and not even open, crumbs and walnuts at my feet, Christian’s brother leaning against me accidentally, Joan laughing with someone’s mom on the other side. You don’t leave; you stay. I thought I was keeping quiet, but gradually my throat was hoarse and hot from all my yelling. I spaced out and came to, caught you pointing at me again and hoped I hadn’t missed other times, you smiling up to find me only to see me scowling, bored, and eyes elsewhere. I tried, I tried again, waving my flag like a hostage. I gave you my spirit and you won.

The score was a billion to six, and no surprise. Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of
The Omega Virus
when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote. The biggest ones
for you, Ed, realizing as you victory-lapped that I should have bought flowers and hidden them someplace to shower them down upon you, now that the Beavers had won and, according to everybody but the boredom-stricken arty girl in the reserved seats who was fat from too many biscotti, saved the entire human race. I’m sorry—then I was sorry, but not now—but it was boring to me. “Not too late!” Joan reminded me as we crowded out, waving to her car as I waited for you to come out excited and clean, my brave boy with a new girlfriend, happy with your teammates. But it
was
too late. I had to stay and I stayed, knowing, understanding, liking none of it. Not until the other girlfriends slipped the pennant off the stick did I know to toss mine into the trash with the others. Then I rolled up my flag while they rolled up theirs, agreeing it was a good game, a fun time, a perfectly acceptable thing to do with my Friday night. I waited for you, Ed, to make it all worthwhile, and when you kissed me and said “I told you you’d like it,” that was the only part I liked. But I just kissed you, too, and let you hoist my backpack with yours onto your beautiful shoulders and walked next to you, my fingers sweaty on the scroll of the pennant, not knowing where to put my hands as we grouped up in the parking lot to carpool to Cerrity Park. What else could I do? There was no choice, as far as I could think. You won the game, we won the game, the party afterward, the drinking, the big blaze, and finally alone someplace too late, I had no
choice, not from the moment I first saw this flag fly. I had no choice. We weren’t going to sneak off to the movies instead, just talk anywhere, someplace else. Not the co-captain, not that night, not with me the new girlfriend, and that’s why we broke up.

This is like the truck I’m in,
never thought of that until now. I’m rattling along in this truck, writing to you with this tiny truck in my other hand, Al next to me keeping quiet and letting me finish breaking up with you, holding this toy and wondering if I can say everything about it, the entire truth. It makes me feel like an experimental animated film I saw as part of Annualmation Fest at the Carnelian, a girl in a truck holding a truck, inside the truck another girl holding another truck, etc. Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.

Who knows where things come from, really? When we
got to the park that night, the fire was already going, the hooting and hollering. We’d been in the back of somebody’s little car, scrunched and kissing even though there was one more person, Todd, I think, but not the Todd I know, in the backseat next to us. When the car stopped, it was something wondrous ahead of us in the windshield, the bright orange and the flicker-flicker of shadows dashing in front of it like a documentary about the lousy day coming up when the sun explodes and the human race calls it quits. But it was just the fire, and people running in front of it, drunk already or just wild and frantic and free. My face must have shown that I thought it was beautiful and gorgeous.

“I told you,” you said. “I knew you would like this.”

You kissed me and I let you think, wanted to agree, that you were right. “It’d be a great opening shot,” I admitted, staring out. “Wish I had a camera.”

“I bought you a camera,” you said.

“Slaterton spent money?” if-it-was-Todd said. “Like, his own money from his own wallet? This must be serious.”

“It
is
serious,” I said, and reached across you, opened the door, why not, let that rock ripple the pond this weekend. Stars were out, even, and the air cold from one angle where the night kept watch and the wall of heat from the fire coming the other way at us. You stretched your way out of the car and there was a roar, all hail the conquering co-captain, from the party. Two girls had a stuffed greyhound, a hulking
gray toy like a spoiling uncle would give, and threw it into the bonfire to spark and sizzle: the enemy mascot. The eyes gleamed plastic and unflammable,
Get me out of here
. But there was only another cheer and horns from arriving cars, and then of course the music sprang up, lousy rock as bold and dull as a giant potato. “Love this song,” Todd said, like it was unusually brave to like what was number one on the radio, and he started singing along,
There’s a storm raging inside my heart, tell me you and I will never part
, etc. The grunts who always bring the beer played invisible drums. Awful but perfect, I had to admit, I can see the movie with the exact same thing going. You held me then let go.

“Do
not
put this down,” you said, slipping my backpack onto my shoulder. “Don’t put anything down you don’t want in the fire. I’m getting us beer.”

“You know I don’t like it,” I said. By now I’d told you about dumping the Scarpia’s at Al’s Bitter Sixteen.

“Min,” you said, “you
really
don’t want to be sober for this,” and you jaunted off, having a point, I thought. I stood for a sec wondering
now what?
and thought about sitting on some logs felled nearby, like some pioneers had canceled a cabin last minute, but
don’t put anything down you don’t want in the fire
, I remembered, and, anyway, the great flames were beckoning with their sheer light, inescapable and mighty. I stepped closer, closer still, the camera I could see close on my face, letting the shivering light of the fire make a nice
visual on my brow. Searched my pockets for something I could add. Found my ticket, the one you left for the game, made it smoke in a sec. Kept staring, still staring, the fire so glorious in my eyes that the music started sounding good, even. Stared some more, my brain so deep in the bonfire that I startled hard at the hand on my shoulder.

“Almost too close,” said Jillian Beach, your goddamn ex-girlfriend. “Your first bonfire, right?”