Breaking Up Is Really, Really Hard to Do (7 page)

“Sure.”

“I feel that way, too, sometimes,” Holly said. “That's why I think maybe we should take a break. From each other.”

Rob didn't move. He didn't open his eyes. He didn't say a word.

Holly picked a blade of grass and nibbled it. What was he thinking? Was he about to leap to his feet and beg her to stay? Sit up and start crying? Calmly tell her he felt the same way?

“Rob? Did you hear me?”

He opened his eyes at last. “Yeah. Sure, I heard you.” He sat up and took a sip of iced tea.

That was it? Was that his reaction?

“So, what do you think?” Holly asked.

“Um, sure, whatever you want,” Rob said. “Sounds okay to me.”

This was too easy. She never expected him to be so cool about it. Frankly, she thought he liked her more than that.

“So we're agreed?” she asked.

“Agreed,” Rob said. He started gathering up the picnic things. “Great picnic, Holly. I'm stuffed.”

“Thanks.” This was almost weird. What was he, some kind of heartless Stepford boy?

He helped Holly fold up the blanket and they walked to his SUV. “I'm going to have to go for a run later,” Rob said. “Or I'll be floating like a beached whale at swim practice tomorrow.”

They loaded up the car and he drove her home. By now it was early evening. He sure was taking the breakup well. It was almost too good to be true.

They pulled up in front of Holly's house. Rob got out and opened the back so Holly could get her picnic basket.

“Thanks again for the picnic,” he said. “Mind?”

He leaned close and kissed her. She was used to kissing him, so it didn't surprise her at first. But in the middle of it she thought,
Better enjoy this, because it may be your last Rob kiss.

When it was over, she stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds, waiting for something to happen. He smiled and got back in the SUV “See you tomorrow,” he said. “Want to catch a movie or something this weekend?”

What? Catch a movie? Wasn't he taking this breakup thing a little too casually?

“Um, I can't,” Holly said. “I promised Lina and Mads—”

“No problem,” Rob said. “I'll call you later.”

She clutched her picnic basket as he drove away. Exactly what was going on here? Hadn't she just broken up with him? Why did he seem to be completely unaware of it? How clueless could he be?

8

Badminton Smackdown!

To: linaonme

From: your daily horoscope

HERE IS TODAY'S HOROSCOPE: CANCER: I look in my crystal ball and see…another crystal ball. That's weird. You figure it out.

Dear Lara,

How was your day today? Seen any good movies lately? Ha ha. I look forward so much to hearing from you every evening. Especially after a bad day, your e-mails really brighten things up.

Did your professor like your paper on Latvian animation? I have to admit I've never seen any Latvian films, so I don't know much about it other than what you wrote me, but it sounds fascinating. I had no idea that
Gilmore Girls
was based on Latvian folktales.

Today was one of those days where I wanted to walk out and quit teaching forever. One of my tenth-graders did an extra credit report (his midterm project was so hopeless I had to give him the chance to make it up with extra credit or he'd fail, god forbid) on a book he apparently found on his mother's night table called
Erotic Fantasies for Women.
I stopped him before he'd read too much out loud but it seems that every boy in the class has already memorized the whole book. They kept asking me leading questions about what they should do if a cute, shirtless handyman wants to comein and wash up or the pool guy wants to take a dip. It was a nightmare. I wonder if I should talk to the kid's parents but I'd have to go through “Rod” first, and I don't think I can take another half-hour lecture on the paradigms for empowering students to leverage their developmentally-appropriate higher-order thinking.

Sorry for going on and on about school—you must find it boring, but it feels good to have someone to vent the day's frustrations to. Write back and tell me all about your day. I love to hear about your world—it takes me away from my own dreary reality. I know you have your difficulties but you handle them so gracefully.

—Beau

Lina was hooked on Dan's e-mails like a hyperactive kid on sugar. They wrote at least once a day now. When Holly and Mads asked her about it, she told them the e-mails were petering out. She just couldn't share it with them anymore—not if Holly and Mads were going to make fun of them. And Lina knew they would. She couldn't bear that. The e-mails meant too much to her.

She could tell he was hooked on them, too, and that made her pulse race. She always knew he'd like her if he let himself get to know her—and she was right. She had proof. He clearly liked and admired her, or “Larissa,” anyway, and Lina thought she sensed a romance budding between the lines. He wanted to ask Larissa out, she knew he did. If Larissa gave him the tiniest crumb of encouragement, he'd snatch it up. But without her encouragement he was shy. Maybe she had made Larissa a little too glamorous. She had the feeling he was intimidated by her.

But that glamour was Lina's disguise, and she wasn't ready to drop it yet. Besides, she loved being Larissa, going to gallery openings and movie screenings and bistro dinners with visiting filmmakers. No wonder Dan had stars in his eyes. Lina did, too.

Meanwhile, back in “dreary reality,” Lina had been in the class Dan described, where Karl Levine tried to read from his mother's book. She'd seen the discomfort on Dan's face and felt terrible for him, but the boys just wouldn't let up. It was as if some bug had gotten inside them, all at once, and nothing would calm them down. But it felt so strange to come home and read about it in Dan's e-mail. He played it cool in class, but the problems that came up bothered him more than she'd realized.

Hello Beau,

I'm so sorry you had a bad day. Don't let your students get to you. I'm sure they like and respect you. But sometimes one boy starts trouble and it snowballs, and even the greatest teacher in the world wouldn't be able to stop it. It happened lots of times when I was in high school.

I had a frustrating day today, too. I really wanted to take a seminar called “Freddy Prinze, Jr.: From Shaggy to Shakespeare,” but the class was full before I had a chance to sign up. And Professor Stockhauser said he hasn't had a chance to read my Latvian animation paper yet. And a friend of mine is having a big party, but I have too much reading to do and can't go.

I hope you have a better day tomorrow. Maybe you should watch a movie tonight. I know that always takes my mind off my troubles, at least for a little while. Why do you think I'm going to film school?

—Lara

Where is this going?
she wondered as she sent her e-mail off to him. How would it end? She could hardly stand to think about it—yet she couldn't stop thinking about it.

“Can't anybody in this school write a decent poem?” Ramona complained. Lina sat in the
Inchworm
office with her and the other members of the Dan Shulman Cult, Siobhan Gallagher, Maggie Schwartzman, and Chandra Bledsoe. Together they made up the entire editorial staff of the magazine, except for Dan Shulman, Faculty Advisor. Ramona had invited Lina to sit in with them and read through some submissions.

Ramona and her friends all wore thin ties of various patterns knotted around their necks. It was their cult symbol, indicating their worship of Dan. Lina hated the ties at first, but they were beginning to grow on her. Still, she'd never wear one herself. It was too stupid. She wondered if Dan had noticed them yet, and if so, what he thought it was supposed to mean. She wished she could ask him about it in an e-mail.

“Listen to this,” Ramona said, tapping her ghostly white cheek with a green glittery nail. “‘Keith Carter's Wild Ride. I'm Keith Carter, that's my name, I ride my motorbike to national fame—’”

“Ugh. Reject,” Chandra said. She'd drawn a tiny pentagram between her eyes in red ink.

“Here's a good one.” Siobhan held up a piece of torn notebook paper covered in purple scrawl. “‘My so-called best friend/has abandoned me/she left a hole in me that hurts/like an infected tongue piercing/crusted over—’”

“Gross,” Lina said.

“But vivid,” Ramona said. “Put it in the maybe pile.”

“So far we have two maybes, tons of nos, and five yeses, all of which were written by us,” Maggie said.

“If we don't get enough material, we won't publish this issue,” Ramona said. “I won't publish motorbike epics just because we don't have anything better.” She glanced at Lina. “You're quiet today.”

Lina shrugged. “I'm just listening and learning from the pros.”

“Sure,” Ramona said. “I know you. You think we're idiots. There must be something else on your mind.”

Lina stretched her mouth into the most convincing smile she could muster. “No, really. Nothing on my mind. See? Empty.” She knocked on her head for emphasis. Ramona would die if she knew about “Beauregard.” An accidental discovery like the one Lina had made was the Holy Grail for the Cult, second only to getting Dan to profess his love for one or more of them. To this end they cast numerous spells on him and performed ceremonies and rituals meant to capture his heart, with meager results. Certainly nothing to rival a full-fledged, intimate e-mail correspondence with Dan.

Sometimes Lina was tempted to tell Ramona about it. She knew Ramona would understand in a way that Holly and Mads never could. Holly and Mads thought that writing to Beauregard was funny, a kick. But to Lina it was almost like a real love affair, and Ramona was the only other person in the world who could appreciate it.

But Lina knew she couldn't tell Ramona. She couldn't trust Ramona not to give her away, for one thing. After all, Ramona loved Dan, too, and she might get jealous.

“Does Dan ever have a say in which poems you publish?” Lina asked. “I mean, he's a guy. Maybe he likes motorbike epics.”

Ramona made a face. “Are you crazy? Dan likes what we like.”

“How do you know?” Lina asked.

“We know,” Ramona said.

“We can see him in our crystal ball,” Maggie said. She jolted in her seat as Ramona kicked her under the table. “What? Well, Ramona can, anyway.”

“Crystal ball?” Lina asked.

“Well, we're
trying
to see him,” Ramona admitted. “We have a crystal ball, and we look into it. Sometimes I swear I see him riding his bike or buying coffee.”

Lina glanced at the other girls, who wouldn't meet her eye. Nobody saw any such thing, she knew. But they were all going along with it, humoring Ramona.

“You should come to the museum this Friday,” Chandra said. “It's ritual night.”

“Let me guess,” Lina said. “You cast spells on each other to turn your hair unnatural colors?”

“I'll let that go,” Ramona said. “Because I know that somewhere in your future there's a bottle of magenta hair dye waiting. And when that day comes, when you realize you're really a magenta-head at heart, you'll look back on the silly comments you made to us and feel a pang of regret.”

Over hair dye? Talk about over-dramatizing.

“On ritual night we perform the SDLC,” Chandra said. Off Lina's blank look she added, “The Sacred Dan Love Ceremony.”

“Don't tell her about it, Chandra,” Ramona said. “She doesn't care about that stuff.”

Lina wanted to pretend she didn't care, but she was curious.

“We take one of his artifacts…” Chandra said. The Cult collected Dan memorabilia such as used coffee cups, uneaten pizza crusts, and stray hairs to put on display in the “museum.” “We put it on the altar, light it on fire, and chant ‘See the light as it burns, See the truth in the fire, You have but one love, Chandra, Chandra, She's the one that you desire.’ Except each girl puts in her own name in place of Chandra.”

“Really?” Lina said. It was even stupider than she'd imagined.

“We're starting to run out of artifacts, though,” Maggie said. “We've really got to hit the cafeteria tomorrow. He leaves all kinds of stuff on his tray. Used napkins are the best, because they burn so well.”

“That's disgusting,” Lina said.

“It's only Dan germs,” Maggie said.

“I think it's starting to work,” Siobhan said. “You should see what Dan wrote on Ramona's last paper. What did it say again?”

‘“Your reading comprehension skills are admirable,’” Maggie recited. ‘“But of course, I'd expect that from you.’”

“Wow,” Lina said. “Book a caterer—I hear wedding bells.”

“It's one of those things where you have to read between the lines,” Ramona said. “And know what came before. The context. It could be a secret signal. We'll do a handwriting analysis on it this weekend and find out.”

“I'd love to come,” Lina said. “But I've got some cuticles that need trimming, and you know how it is—you can't let that go for long. Whoops—that reminds me.” She jumped to her feet and gathered her bag. “I've got my first sportswriting gig for the
Seer
.” She'd gone to an editorial meeting the day before and received her assignment from Kate Bryson.

“Ooh, the
Seer
,” Ramona said in a mocking voice. “And they call that waste of paper news. What are you covering, fifty minutes of testosterone-crazed morons bashing each other with lacrosse sticks?”

“No, I'm covering girls’ badminton,” Lina said. “I doubt there will be much testosterone or bashing. Now if you don't mind, I've got to go.”

“You're hiding something, Ozu,” Ramona called as Lina left the room. “You think I don't have powers, but I do. I can tell when something's up, and something's up. But the goddesses will reveal all when it's time for me to know.”

Lina hurried down the hall to get away from that goddess talk as fast as she could. And she didn't want to be late for her first sports assignment, even though she'd been disappointed when she found it out was only a badminton match, and intramural to boot. In other words, nobody cared about it at all, except maybe the ten girls in the badminton club. And even that was doubtful.

“Fault!” the referee, Ginnie the Gym Teacher, called. Lina dutifully jotted it in her notebook. “Scintillating match-up between singles players Bridget Aiken and Lulu Ramos. Score: three-love, Aiken. Ramos faults on first serve—probably distracted by tiny cut-off top that rides up every time she lifts her racket.”