The Break-Up Artist

3

I wait for the note writer outside her locker. I hear her cheerful voice booming from down the hall. Val—never Valerie—is midconversation with a classmate; her green eyes light up when she sees me. She has bright blond hair and a smile on her face even when she’s upset, which is rare. Her childhood pudginess is slowly morphing into a more mature figure, but she dresses herself well to hide any trouble spots. Right now, she’s all about blazers.

I hold up the note and raise my eyebrows; she hangs her head. We both bust out laughing. Yet more proof that I have a really weird best friend.

I crumple the note up and toss it into the trash. “You love cutting to the chase, don’t you?”

“If I can’t say that to you, then who can I say it to?” she says.

“Nobody else, I hope.” More classmates funnel into the hall, pushing against us. “Ready for lunch?”

Val makes her midday book exchange at her locker. She only carries two books and a notebook with her at one time. According to her unofficial research, this makes her appear studious yet willing to have fun. Carrying three books is nerdy. They are hard to hold in one arm, and she would die of embarrassment if she spilled them in the hall. Val refuses to wear a backpack. They don’t suit her, she claims.

We cut through swaths of students en route to the cafeteria. “I hope you don’t truly feel that way,” I say.

“What way?”

“That you need a boy. You don’t need a boy. The only things you need are oxygen, food, water and a dozen pairs of shoes.”

“I know, I know.” She waves her hand, cutting me off. She won’t listen when I’m right, but she won’t refute me either. “So PB&J was a bust. None of my prongs worked.”

“Not even prong three?”

“Nope. When I invited him over to do homework, I didn’t expect him to actually do homework!”

Val had a three-pronged plan to make Patrick Burroughs Jr., aka PB&J, fall for her. Prong one was to switch lab partners so that they’d work together. Prong two was to download some of his favorite music and casually listen to it during lab, piquing his interest. Prong three was to invite him over to work on the write-ups together, with the music setting the mood in the background. I tried telling her that she and he were too different. He’s very serious—buzz cut, steely eyes, always talking in short, terse sentences—and she’s fun and bubbly. Her opposites-attract theory did not pan out. But she was dead set on this. She even made charts.

“He smelled so good, too,” she says, letting out a ginormous sigh. She checks the time on her phone. “And because of Michigan, aka Evan Lansing, I have like a hundred more captions for the stupid yearbook to write by Friday. Note to self—never join a club to meet a guy again.”

I nudge her elbow. “Hey, it’s his loss.”

“And his yearbook’s gain.”

“In ten years, all he’ll have in his life is that overpriced photo album, and he’ll be clinging to it in an alley and whispering your name to himself.”

Val gives me a strange look.

“Was that too creepy?” Some girls are highly adept at giving the cheer-up talk. Even if they know what they’re saying is 100 percent well-worn cliché, it still manages to brighten their friends’ moods. I am not blessed with that skill. But maybe if Val stopped making the search for “True Love” her main mission in life, she would have more luck.

A cacophony of conversation bounces off the walls in the cafeteria, a hotbed of gossip. Stories and social reputations are getting confirmed, denied or shared, information traded as if it’s the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Val and I put down our books and my backpack at our table and head to the lunch line. A loud, perky yelp comes from the entrance, and we swivel around to watch the daily yuckfest. Steve Overland carries Huxley Mapother through the double doors, past admiring subjects and adoring lunch aides. After four years, I’ve gotten quite good at ignoring them, making myself forget that I ever had a past with Huxley. But Calista’s tear-streaked face flashes in my mind, and suddenly I’m back in the middle-school cafeteria, watching Huxley abandon me to sit with Steve, refusing to make eye contact. Nothing is more definitive than lunchroom seating.

“Excuse us.” Addison, Huxley’s friend and lieutenant colonel, shoves me aside, creating a wide path for the couple. I rub my shoulder. Just because she said it nicely doesn’t mean it was a friendly push.

Steve sets Huxley down at their corner lunch table, the one bathed in natural light at which all students must crane their necks to gander. They are a sight to behold, a Seventeen photo shoot live in our school. Huxley hides her face in embarrassment, lightly slapping Steve on his broad shoulder. But I can detect the pure delight radiating from her olive skin as she soaks in the stares of her kingdom.

“They are so cute,” Val says with an added aww.

“They probably rehearsed that all weekend. And why is he wearing his football jersey in March?”

Val leans against the wall and takes a breath. She’s tired, and not from our walk.

“I need a boy.”

“You want one. But you don’t need one.”

“Want, need. You say tomato, I say ketchup.” We each put a premade grilled-chicken salad on our tray. Val grabs two Diet Cokes from the cooler. “I want to do couple-y things. I want someone to walk to class with, and a guy who’ll be waiting for me at my locker and text me when I wake up saying he had a dream about me. And I don’t care how that makes me sound because it’s you, and no matter what I say, you’re contractually obligated to be my friend.”

“So you just want a boyfriend to show off in school? Flash him around like the new Cynthia Swann bag?”

It never bothers me when Val complains about wanting a boyfriend, which does happen often. It’s my duty as a best friend to listen and bite my tongue. I want her to be happy, even if having a boyfriend ultimately won’t achieve that. I know she’d never ditch me like Bari ditched Calista. She’s a real friend.

“That is a nice bag,” she says.

“They sell really nice knockoffs of them by my dad’s office. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Becca Williamson, don’t you dare. Do you really want to settle for a knockoff over the real thing? Don’t make me wash your mouth out with off-brand soap.”

“Fine. You’re right. No fakes for me.”

We laugh and fantasize about that Cynthia Swann bag. After I break up Bari and Derek, I’ll be able to buy it. I’ll just tell Val I pooled together multiple birthday and Christmas checks from my grandparents.

“Five ten,” the cashier says to Val.

Val hands her a five and rummages through her bag for some change. Her face flips to a deep-hued red. Avoiding any type of humiliation in the cafeteria is essential. “Do you have a dime?” she asks me, but I’m already searching my pockets and coming up empty.

The lunch lady starts ringing me up, leaving Val to continue her frantic search. “Do you got it or not?” It’s like the cashier’s voice is engineered to be loud and maximize embarrassment.

“I have it,” a guy says from behind me in a deep radio-deejay voice. Ezra Drummond and his puff of black hair waltz up to the register with two nickels.

“Thank you so much!” Val says.

“My pleasure. I couldn’t let a fellow student starve...or go without caffeine.”

“And they say chivalry is dead.”

“I don’t think anything under a quarter can be considered chivalry, per se.”

“Uh-huh.” Val’s gift for gab goes missing.

I pay for my meal and step out of line, waiting for Val to join me.

“Thanks again.” Val speed walks to our table. I scurry to catch up, making sure I don’t spill or hit anyone.

“So I totally got a vibe from Ezra,” she says. She does the 1-2-3-look as he makes his way back to his pack of theater friends.

“That was really nice of him.”

“That was more than nice. You have to admit, there was definitely some kind of vibe there.”

Ezra’s a generally friendly guy. We randomly had a bunch of electives together sophomore year, and he still gives me a nod when we pass each other in uncrowded corridors. I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.” I don’t have the energy to go this path with Val. I’m hungry.

But we can’t eat just yet.

We reach our table to find it dotted with comic books and Capri Suns, and instead of empty chairs awaiting us, we have three scrawny guys.

“Hi.” That’s the first word I’ve said to Fred Teplitzky and his patch of acne in about six years. “Um, we were sitting here.”

“We saved your seats.” The other two guys, Quentin Yao and Howard Langman, pat the chairs next to them. Is this a date ambush?

“Can you please move your magazines?” Val asks. They grab their comic books away from Val’s incoming lunch tray.

Fred jumps out of my chair. I’m face-to-face with his beaming smile and surprisingly straight teeth. Props to his orthodontist. “Listen, there were some fisticuffs at our usual table, and we need a new home. We could all squeeze and make it work here.”

“Fisticuffs?” I ask. When was the last time somebody used that word?

“We went to sit at our table today, but it was taken by the D’Agostino twins and their girlfriends,” Fred says, nodding his head to the table. Lucy Dorsett and Gina Janetti are snuggled in with equally ripped John and Jack. “We tried to tell them that we’ve been sitting there since September, but they aren’t the type of guys to listen to reason. They have those arm-chain tattoos.”

“Don’t they usually spend their lunch period smoking in the parking lot?” I had to sit next to Lucy in sixth period last year, and I almost died of secondhand smoke.

“I guess they wanted to add more fiber to their diet,” Fred says.

“There’s a table by the kitchen,” Val says. She firmly believes that you are who you sit with, and sharing a table with these guys—even though they’re all nice guys—will not help her social profile.

“It smells like lard and grease over there,” Quentin says.

“Invest in potpourri.”

Val turns to me for solidarity. I can’t tell the D’Agostino twins apart, but they each have their right arm around their girlfriend. I never noticed how many couples populate the cafeteria. Why do they get to dictate the seating chart? You never hear of a gaggle of girls or a group of guys evicting a twosome from their table.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Join us.”

Val shoots me a nasty look, but before she can say anything, I whisper into her ear: “I think Ezra and Fred are friends, or friendlyish.”

Val’s face lights up and she reverts to her 1-2-3-look.

“Really? We had speech class together freshman year, and he was always really nice. Hmm...Ezra Drummond.” Val smiles to herself. She’s coming dangerously close to a neck cramp. “And the hemp choker necklace really brings out the hazel in his eyes....”

If I have to spend a lunch period listening to people talk about crushes and comic books, my head may explode.

“Whoa, they’re eating each other alive!” Quentin points to Derek and Bari at a side table. His mouth swallows her tongue whole. His hands dig into her hips.

PDA = HIGH.

They stand and stroll up to the garbage cans with their trash, holding hands and keeping one eye on each other the whole time. Calista eats with other cheerleaders, but isn’t engaging with them. The newly minted couple pass Calista’s table, completely oblivious to the loneliness in her eyes. Bari could probably decipher Calista’s exact mood with one glance, if she’d only pay her friend a speck of attention.

I glance across the cafeteria and watch my former best friend have the lunch period of her life. Huxley nestles her head against Steve’s shoulder. She doesn’t even notice I’m staring.