Why We Broke Up (2 page)

These are the caps
from the bottles of Scarpia’s Bitter Black Ale that you and I drank in Al’s backyard that night. I can see the stars bright and prickly and our breathing steamy in the cold, you in your team jacket and me in that cardigan of Al’s I always borrow at his house. He had it waiting, clean and folded, when I went upstairs with him to give him his present before the guests arrived.

“I told you I didn’t want a present,” Al said. “The party was enough I told you, without the obligatory—”

“It’s not
obligatory
,” I said, having used the same vocabulary flash cards with Al when we were freshmen. “I found
something. It’s perfect. Open it.”

He took the bag from me, nervous.

“Come on, happy birthday.”

“What is it?”

“Your heart’s desire. I hope. Open it. You’re driving me crazy.”

Rustle rustle rip
, and he sort of gasped. It was very satisfying. “Where did you find this?”

“Does it not,” I said, “I mean
exactly
, look like what the guy wears in the party scene in
Una settimana straordinaria
?”

He smiled into the slender box. It was a necktie, dark green with modern diamond shapes stitched into it in a line. It’d been in my sock drawer for months, waiting. “Take it out,” I said. “Wear it tonight. Does it not,
exactly
?”

“When he gets out of the Porcini XL10,” he said, but he was looking at me.

“Your absolute favorite scene in any movie. I hope you love it.”

“I do, Min. I do love it. Where did you find it?”

“I snuck off to Italy and seduced Carlo Ronzi, and when he fell asleep I slipped into his costume archives—”

“Min.”

“Tag sale. Let me put it on you.”

“I can tie my own tie, Min.”

“Not on your birthday.” I fiddled with his collar. “They’re going to eat you up in this.”

“Who is?”

“Girls. Women. At the party.”

“Min, it’s going to be the same friends who always come.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Min.”

“Aren’t you ready? I mean, I am. Totally over Joe. That make-out date in the summer, no way. And you. LA was like a million years—”

“It was last year.
This
year, really, but last school year.”

“Yeah, and junior year’s started up, the first big thing we’re having. Aren’t you ready? For a party and romance and
Una settimana straordinaria
? Aren’t you, I don’t know, hungry for—”

“I’m hungry for the pesto.”

“Al.”

“And for people to have fun. That’s it. It’s just a birthday.”

“It’s Bitter Sixteen! You’re telling me that if the girl pulled up in the Porcini whatever—”

“OK, yes, the car I’m ready for.”

“When you’re twenty-one,” I told him, “I’ll buy you the car. Tonight it’s the tie, and something—”

He sighed, so slow, at me. “You can’t do this, Min.”

“I can find you your heart’s desire. Look, I did it once.”

“It’s the tie you can’t do. It’s like you’re braiding a lanyard. Let go.”

“OK, OK.”

“But thank you.”

I fixed his hair. “Happy birthday,” I said.

“The cardigan’s over there when you get cold.”

“Yes, because I’ll be huddled outside somewhere and you’ll be in a world of passion and adventure.”

“And pesto, Min. Don’t forget about the pesto.”

Downstairs Jordan had put on the bitter mix we’d slaved over, and Lauren was walking around with a long wooden match lighting candles.
Quiet on the set
, is how it felt, just ten minutes with everything crackling in the air and nothing happening. And then with a swoosh of his parents’ screen door, a carload of Monica and her brother and that guy who plays tennis came in with wine they’d snitched from her mom’s housewarming—still wrapped in silly gift paper—and turned up the music and the night began to begin. I kept quiet about my quest but kept looking for someone for Al. But the girls were wrong that night, glitter on their cheeks or too jumpy, stupid about movies or already having boyfriends. And then it was late, the ice mostly water in the big glass bowl, like the end of the polar caps. Al kept saying it wasn’t time for the cake and then like a song we’d forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.

You looked strong, Ed. I guess you always looked strong, your shoulders and your jaw, your arms leading
you through the room, your neck where I know now you like to be kissed. Strong and showered, confident, friendly even, but not eager to please. Enormous like a shout, well rested, able-bodied. Showered I said. Gorgeous, Ed, is what I mean. I gasped like Al did when I gave him the perfect present.

“I love this song,” somebody said.

You must always do this at a party, Ed, a slow shrugging path from room to room, nodding at everyone with your eyes on the next place to go. Some people glared, a few guys high-fived you and Trevor and Christian almost blocked them like bodyguards. Trevor was really drunk and you followed him as he slid through a doorway out of view and I made myself wait until the song hit the chorus again before I went looking. I don’t know why, Ed. It’s not like I hadn’t seen you before. Everyone had, you’re like, I don’t know, some movie everyone sees growing up, everybody’s seen you, nobody can remember not seeing you. But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night. I squoze by that guy who won the science prize, and looked in the dining room, the den with the framed photos of Al uncomfortable on the steps of church. It was flushed, every room, too hot and too loud, and I ran up the stairs, knocked in case people were in Al’s bed already, picked up the cardigan, and then slipped outside for air and in case you were in the yard. And you were, you were. What would bring me to do such a thing, you standing grinning holding
two beers with Trevor sick in Al’s mom’s flower bed? I wasn’t supposed to be looking, not for me. It wasn’t
my
birthday, is what I thought. There’s no reason I should have been out here like this, in the yard, on a limb. You were Ed Slaterton, for God’s sake, I said to myself, you weren’t even invited. What was wrong with me? What was I doing? But out loud I was talking to you and asking you what was wrong.

“Nothing with me,” you said. “Trev’s a little sick, though.”

“Fuck you,” Trevor gurgled from the bushes.

You laughed and I laughed too. You held up the bottles to the porch light to see which was which. “Here, nobody’s touched this one.”

I don’t usually drink beer. Or, really, anything. I took the bottle. “Wasn’t this for your friend?”

“He shouldn’t mix,” you said. “He’s already had half a bottle of Parker’s.”

“Really?”

You looked at me, and then took the bottle back because I couldn’t get it open. You did it in a sec and dropped the two caps in my hand like coins, secret treasure, when you handed the beer back to me. “We lost,” you explained.

“What does he do when you win?” I asked.

“Drinks half a bottle of Parker’s,” you said, and then you—

Joan told me later that you got beat up once at a jock party after a losing game so that’s why you end up at other
people’s parties when you lose. She told me it would be hard dating her brother the basketball star. “You’ll be a widow,” she told me, licking the spoon and turning up Hawk. “A basketball widow, bored out of your mind while he dribbles all over the world.”

I thought, and I was stupid, that I didn’t care.

—and then you asked me my name. I told you it was Min, short for Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, because my dad was getting his master’s when I was born, and that, don’t even ask, no you couldn’t, only my grandmother could call me Minnie because, she told me and I imitated her voice, she loved me the best of anyone.

You said your name was Ed. Like I might not know that. I asked you how you lost.

“Don’t,” you said. “If I have to tell you how we lost, it will hurt all of my feelings.”

I liked that,
all of my feelings
. “Every last one?” I asked. “Really?”

“Well,” you said, and took a sip, “I might have one or two left. I might still have a feeling.”

I had a feeling too. Of course you told me anyway, Ed, because you’re a boy, how you lost the game. Trevor snored on the lawn. The beer tasted bad to me, and I quietly poured it behind my back into the cold ground, and inside people were singing.
Bitter birthday to you, bitter birthday to you, bitter birthday to Al
—and Al never gave me a hard time about
staying out there with a boy he had no opinion about instead of coming in to watch him blow out the sixteen black candles on that dark, inedible heart—
bitter birthday to you
. You told the whole story, your lean arms in your jacket crackling and jerky, and you replayed all your moves. Basketball is still incomprehensible to me, some shouty frantic bouncing thing in uniform, and although I didn’t listen I hung on every word. Do you know what I liked, Ed? The word
layup
, the sexy plan of it. I savored that word,
layup layup layup
, through your feints and penalties, your free throws and blocked shots and the screwups that made it all go down. The layup, the swooping move of doing it like you planned, while all the guests kept singing in the house,
For he’s a bitter good fellow, for he’s a bitter good fellow, for he’s a bitter good fellow, which nobody can deny
. The song I’d keep, for the movie, so loud through the window your words were all a sporty blur as you finished your game and threw the bottle into an elegant shatter on the fence, and then you started to ask:

“Could I call you—”

I thought you were going to ask if you could call me Minnie. But you just wanted to know if you could call me. Who were you to do that, who was I saying yes? I would have said yes, Ed, would have let you call me the thing I hated to be called except by the one who loves me best of anyone. Instead I said yes, sure, you could call me about
maybe a movie next weekend, and Ed, the thing with your heart’s desire is that your heart doesn’t even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted, the best gift. I hadn’t even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart’s desire kicking Trevor awake and loping off into the sweet late night.

“Was that—
Ed Slaterton
?” Lauren asked, with a bag in her hand.

“When?” I said.

“Before. Don’t say
when
. It was. Who invited him? That’s
crazy
, him here.”

“I know,” I said. “Right? Nobody.”

“And was he getting your number?”

I closed my hand on the bottle caps so nobody could see them. “Um.”

“Ed Slaterton is asking you out? Ed Slaterton
asked
you out?”

“He didn’t ask me out,” I said, technically. “He just asked me if he could—”

“If he could what?”

The bag rustled in the wind. “If he could ask me out,” I admitted.

“Dear God in heaven,” Lauren said, and then, quickly, “as my mother would say.”

“Lauren—”

“Min just got asked out by
Ed Slaterton
,” she called into the house.

“What?” Jordan stepped out. Al peered startled and suddenly through the kitchen window, frowning over the sink like I was a raccoon.

“Min just got asked out—”

Jordan looked around the yard for him. “Really?”

“No,” I said, “not really. He just asked for my number.”

“Sure, that could mean anything,” Lauren snorted, tossing wet napkins into the bag. “Maybe he works for the phone company.”

“Stop.”

“Maybe he’s just obsessed with area codes.”

“Lauren—”

“He
asked
you
out
. Ed Slaterton.”

“He’s not going to call,” I said. “It was just a party.”

“Don’t put yourself down,” Jordan said. “You have all the qualities Ed Slaterton looks for in his millions of girlfriends, come to think of it. You have two legs.”

“And you’re a carbon-based life-form,” Lauren said.

“Stop,” I said. “He’s not—he’s just a guy.”

“Listen to her,
just a guy
.” Lauren picked up another piece of trash. “Ed Slaterton asked you out. It’s crazy. That’s, like,
Eyes on the Roof
crazy.”

“It’s not as crazy as what is, by the way, a great movie,
and it’s
Eyes on the Ceiling
.
And
, he’s not really going to call.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Jordan said.

“There’s nothing to believe,” I said to everybody in the yard, including me. “It was a party and Ed Slaterton was there and it’s over and now we’re cleaning up.”

“Then come help me,” Al said finally, and held up the dripping punch bowl. I hurried to the kitchen and looked for a towel.

“Throw those out?”

“What?”

He pointed at the bottle caps in my hand.

“Right, yeah,” I said, but with my back turned they went into my pocket. Al handed me everything, the bowl, the towel to dry it, and looked me over.

“Ed Slaterton?”