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

showered. Although you’d invited me upstairs. But I was afraid she’d come home, I didn’t know what the rules were, so I waited until you came downstairs still damp from the shower and we lay together on the cushions on the floor with the TV talking over us. I can tell you the truth, which is that I liked it better whenyou helped me touch you, running our hands over and inside your clean clothes, than when you touched me, so unsure I was about when Joan might come home and see us.
    “Are you going to the party after?”
    “Me?” Joan said. “No, I’m done with bonfires, Min. I go to some of the games, about half, don’t want to be a bad sister, but the parties afterward are his responsibility, I tell him. I tell him, no coming home so late he sleeps through Saturday; no not coming home; if he throws it up, he cleans it up.”
    “Sounds fair.”
    “Tell him that,” Joan said with a snort. “He wants no rules and breakfast in bed.”
    You bounded out as they said your name through a thing blaring professional with enthusiasm. My ears ached from how loud they loved you, the ball you caught from the coach throwing it sideways,
dribble dribble
as if the whole place wasn’t roaring, and then a layup and it looked iffy from where I sat but it went in and the roof blew off the place and you clowned and bowed and beat on Trevor grinning and then, like Gloria Tablet must have felt when she served coffee to Maxwell Meyers and found herself screen-testing the next day, then you pointed at me, right at me, and grinned and I froze and waved my flag until the next thing was announced and you threw the ball
hard
at Christian with an impy smile.
    “See what I mean?” Joan said.
    “Maybe I can whip him into shape.”
    She put her arm around me. She was wearing something, I could smell the scent of it, or maybe it was just the cinnamon or nutmeg of cooking. “Oh, Min, I hope so.”
    The rest of the team was announced. Blowing whistles. I thought for a sec, for some reason, that I’d cry at what Joan had said, and I flapped my pennant to evaporate my teary eyes. “But if you do,” she warned, “or if you don’t, don’t keep him too long past midnight.”
    “You’re not my real mom,” I was brave enough to say, and then stupid enough and realized it was the wrong joke. Yours, your joke with Joan, but she frowned and looked out at the pom-poms. There was a silence, except for everyone screaming.
    “These are good,” I said about the cookies, code for
sorry
.
    “Yeah, well,” she said, and patted my hand for
I forgive you
, but that was definitely the wrong joke, “don’t eat them all,” and the game started. The roar and the boom was like nothing I’d known, even when I was a freshman and went to the first pep rally because I had the wrong first friends and didn’t know any better. The whole gym was
alive
with it, cheering and waving and gripping their friends, bells when someone scored, drowned out by screams, delighted or disappointed depending whose side you were on. Whistles and then sweaty slowdowns, glares, shrugs, long-armed gesturesof
aw, shucks
when it was a penalty or an error. Everyone’s hands palm out on the court, the ball is mine, the basket, the point, the score, the team, the game, losing you in the skinny pack, finding you again, letting go of you to check the numbers up on the wall. It was a rush, Ed, and I loved the rush, stomping my feet on the bleachers to help with the thunder, until my eyes found the clock and it was only a meager fifteen goddamn minutes that had gone by. I’d thought maybe we were almost done, the air hissing out of me and the pennant suddenly a barbell too heavy to lift again. Fifteen minutes, just, how could it be only that? I blinked at the time to make sure, and Joan was grinning, catching me. “I know, right?” she said. “These take forever. It’s like the dictionary definition of hurry up and wait.” I’d lost track of you long enough that when I found