The Break-Up Artist

2

My mom still makes me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every morning. It was the only thing I ate for breakfast when I was in elementary school, and she stuck with it. Now that I’m older, I found my ideal get-up-and-get-’em meal: a large cup of coffee. Black, no sugar.

Sharp rays of morning sun pierce through the kitchen windows. My dad sits at the table with his coffee and oatmeal, watching a guy shout on TV. Apparently, the fluctuation of Chinese currency can make some people quite flustered. My mom hands me a cup of coffee, and I push aside the sandwich with my mug. She picks it up and takes a bite. And so goes our morning routine.

“Busy day today?” my mom asks.

“Kinda.” I have a new couple to break up. Oh, and I have a math quiz. “Where’s Diane?”

My mom heaves a sigh, then gives me a look like I should know better. “Still sleeping.”

Which I should’ve known, but I hold out hope that one day the answer will be better. My dad shakes his head and mutters to himself.

“Hey,” my mom says to my dad after taking another bite of my former breakfast. “Why did you get one-ply toilet paper last night?”

“It was on sale,” he says, his focus returning to Chinese currency.

“You couldn’t spring for two-ply?”

“Not if it’s not on sale.”

“We don’t live in a tenement.”

“More like a Turkish prison,” he says with a half smile.

She rolls her eyes and takes a bite of the sandwich. My dad eats a few more spoonfuls of oatmeal then gets up. He puts on his suit jacket, then his winter coat. He kisses me goodbye, and gives my mom a pat on the shoulder while she wipes down the counter. It’s like this every day, every year, the same motions. Way to keep the romance alive, guys. If it was ever even there to begin with.

My dad pauses at the door, and for a second I wonder if he’s going to pick my mom up in a hug and plant one on her, like lovey-dovey parents in a cheesy sitcom.

“I’ll be on the 5:57 train tonight. I’ll just pick up a roast-beef sandwich at the station for dinner,” he says.

“Okay,” my mom says, washing out his oatmeal bowl in the sink.

Yep. So much for love.

Before I break up a couple, I have to do my research and examine their dating history. I have to know their past if I want to understand their present. Having a significant other will put any student at Ashland High School on the social radar, and chances are if you’re in a relationship, someone else is talking about it.

In history class, I use the middle section of my three-subject notebook to build a dating dossier on Bari and Derek, tucked in between U.S. history and trig. I don’t like to build dossiers when one of my targets is two rows over from me, but she’s so engrossed in texting someone (let’s be real: Derek), she won’t even notice. Nothing our teacher Mr. Harrison says elicits a reaction from her. Bari clutches her phone against her stomach, as if waiting for the next message to inject her with another ounce of life.

Usually, I’m able to list off a person’s past relationships from memory.

Bari Mandell

Dating History:

• Joey Pollaro: fall freshman–spring freshman.¹

º Joey—JV basketball. Bari—freshman cheerleading. Equivalent caste. Presumably met through games and parties.

º PDA Level = HIGH²

• Regularly held hands in hall.

• Ample kissing and petting in public.

• Rumors of having sex in the bathroom at Matt Wachtel’s party.

º The dumper = Joey

• Break-up occurred over Spring Break. He “just wasn’t feeling it anymore,” according to Nneka Jeffries.

• He began dating Courtney Liu over the summer.

Derek Kelley

Dating History:

• Tessa Colletti: summer junior–fall senior

º Tessa—volleyball jock, so-so student. Derek—cross-country, in all AP classes. Began dating while lifeguarding at Munsee Lake.

º PDA Level = ELEVATED

• Kept a low profile in school, but were all over each other at games and parties and at the lake.³

º The dumper = Derek

• He wanted to focus on college applications, according to Bryn Levin.

• Bethann Mancuso: winter sophomore–spring junior

º AP power couple. Ran against each other for student council president.

º PDA Level = GUARDED

• Some quick kisses before/after class.

• He always ate lunch with his arm around her.

º The dumper = Derek

• Broke up because of natural causes?

Bari’s dating history is straightforward. When a guy on the basketball team asks out a lowly freshman, it’s hard to turn him down. That was almost two years ago, though. I find it surprising that Bari went boyfriendless for that long. She’s what every guy wants: petite, skinny but curvy (the good kind). But amid the fierce competition for coupledom, that doesn’t always cut it.

Ashland High has an overabundance of girls. It’s a sixty-five, thirty-five split, the biggest gap of any school in New Jersey. Something must’ve been in the water fifteen years ago, give or take. This gives guys a huge advantage. They can be fat, lazy and pimply and still get to be choosy. Finding a suitable guy to date is a study in Darwinism. Survival of the hottest. The options dwindle with each year. Upperclassman girls don’t date freshman guys in some unspoken, outdated and totally gender-biased rule. Lelaina Ryder went out with Troy Hawke for two months last year and received an endless barrage of cougar jokes until she graduated. No wonder Bari jumped at the chance to be with Derek. He’s a definite catch. He’s one of the few guys at Ashland who is both smart and cute. He has ins with most cliques in school. Half the auditorium swoons at his sparkly smile and wavy hair during student government assemblies.

Spend five minutes talking to him, though, and you’ll notice how many times he manages to slip “Princeton early decision” into conversation and how hard he worked to scrub his voice of his New Jersey accent in favor of some affected, faux-aristocratic inflection.

His break-up with Bethann was felt throughout the AP hallway, where they had a mini fan club. They told their classmates that their relationship had run its course, but I’ll never forget overhearing Bethann talking to her friends a few weeks before the break-up. She’d done better than she thought on her SATs and had decided to apply to Princeton. The girls, and even some guys, swooned at the prospect of Derek and Bethann going to the same Ivy League college, getting married and then popping out smart babies a few years later. I glanced at Derek, who was smiling like the rest of them. But he had this despondent look in his eyes, almost like dread. I was the only one who wasn’t that surprised about their split. I guess Derek couldn’t stomach Bethann being as smart as him. Tessa was a step down in that department, but at least she was off to University of California, San Diego, in the fall.

I wonder if he likes Bari because he knows he’s smarter than her. I wonder if she minds.

I glance over at my target, who has taken a brief rest from her phone. She smushes together two paper hole reinforcements and slides the result onto her left ring finger. She gazes at her fake ring with stars in her eyes, clearly forgetting for a moment that it’s a piece of plastic worth three cents. It’s never too early to start planning your wedding, I guess, though I hope she hasn’t booked a band yet.

Mr. Harrison ends class a few minutes early. As I shove my notebook in my backpack, a paper football falls out of the trig section. I unfold the football and instantly roll my eyes when I see what it says: I NEED A BOY!!

¹ I only have rough time periods of when two people began dating. Not exact dates. That would be weird. It’s not like I know them personally.

² Based on a scale from LOW–SEVERE that I copied from the Department of Homeland Security website.

³ Derek looks really cute without a shirt on.