Read Online Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler - Free Book Online Page A

to be free all weekend, it was a busy weekend for me. My calendar was full, not that I have a calendar. You slumped stretched out on the cushions, what they were doing on the floor, with cereal and dumb TV I could see but not hear from the kitchen. Cooking with Joan like she was my sister too, kind of, simmering and warm and scented like pepperand sweetness and smoke, dancing finally next to her. Hawk Davies giving me the feeling, giving everybody the feeling that afternoon in your kitchen. Letting my hair down with my hair up, in a rubber band from your doorknob, and your shirt riding up as you hung out on the floor, your shorts loose and low, the small of your back I’d watched all day.
    Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

I guess I was supposed to put this up, I guess it should have hung over my bed in a crisscross diagonal like it was X-ing out anything else: HELLMAN HIGH SCHOOL BEAVERS . And I guess I could say the reason it never went anywhere was that the Beaver colors of yellow and green clashed with what is over my bed, the poster of my favorite movie in the world,
Never by Candlelight
, Theodora Sire’s eyebrows forever raised in the poster Al gave me last birthday that took him forever to find, like she wasn’t going to say anything but that what went on in my bedroom was inelegant and unworthy of me. I didn’t put it up, didn’t want it up, should have known then.
    It might as well have said HELLMAN HIGH SCHOOL ED’S NEW GIRLFRIEND when I found it Friday staked in a slat in my locker, waving in the breeze of the stale vents like when the diplomats arrive in
Hotel Continental
. It took some wiggling to get it out, and I felt my flushy face grinning and fighting not to grin. Everybody knows that even though the pennants are always for sale on game days with the second-string cheerleaders assigned to hawk them desperate and smiley in the cafeteria, they’re only for freshmen and parents and any other clueless souls and for the girlfriends of the players who snitch them to give out like long-stemmed roses Friday morning. And people saw and worked it out. Jillian Beach had nothing flying at her locker, and enough people had gossiply seen me with you at practice that week after school to figure who my flag was from. The co-captain, must have been somewhere in the gasping, and Min Green. People must have asked Lauren, asked Al if it was true. They must have said
yeah
, just
yeah
, or maybe they said worse, I don’t like to think.
    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 coursehe 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