1 “Don’t you just love goodbyes?”
—Mew, “156”
THE DAY I BROKE UP with my boyfriend Evan was the day he wrote the song. You know, the song. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Maybe you danced to it at prom or sang it in your car on a Friday night when you were driving and feeling like you must be inhuman to be this happy, the windows down and nothing but air around you. Your mom has probably hummed it while cleaning the dryer’s lint trap, and your grandpa has most likely whistled a couple bars. If he’s the whistling type.
According to the poll on the front page of USA Today, sixty-three percent of Americans blame me for the breakup, so let me clear the air right now: They’re right. Sixty-three percent of Americans are no fools when it comes to knowing about my love life, a fact which is really creepy and isn’t helping me sleep well. But it’s true: I broke up with Evan, and eight hours later, he had a song in his head and a guitar in his hand and it snowballed from there.
It took me forever to decide whether or not to break up with him, I can tell you that. It wasn’t like I just woke up one morning and was like, “Hey, let’s liven things up!” Please. I have enough on my plate without all this. I’m a junior, for God’s sakes! It’s not like I have to take the SATs this year or anything. But I had been thinking about it—breaking up—for a while.
“Make a list,” Victoria had said. She’s big on lists and has a folder full of them. They have titles like “Six Colors to Dye My Hair Before I Shrivel Up and Die” and “Five People to Banish From the Face of the Earth” (Evan, according to her, is now número uno). So the day I did it, I sat at Victoria’s kitchen table and wrote down the reasons why I should stay with Evan.
He’s a singer/songwriter with a band and actual talent.
He has excellent oral hygiene (That one is so important, I can’t even tell you. I can’t imagine ever kissing a non-flosser. So gross.).
He says he’s going to write a song about me.
And then I wrote the cons:
He smokes too much pot.
He’s always “practicing” or “gigging” with his band, the Do-Gooders, especially when I need him.
He says “gigging.”
He’s mellow about everything. Everything.
He makes me be the one to get condoms from the school nurse’s office.
He sucks his teeth after he eats, which makes horrible squeaking sounds, like a mouse dying.
And so on. I wrote so many cons that I needed a new piece of paper, and by the time Victoria saw me start a fresh page, she took it away and shook her head. “Audrey,” she told me, “save a tree.”
“Well, can we still be…I don’t know, friends? Or something lame like that?” Evan had been cross-legged on his bed when I broke up with him. I was on the opposite side of the room in his desk chair, sitting backwards. We were both crying, but he was the only one who needed tissues. Still, we passed the box back and forth.
“Friends would be great,” I said, and relief flooded through me. Friends were fantastic, friends were not angry at each other and wouldn’t reveal sexual secrets about each other in locker rooms. Friends still talked. Friends drifted apart. “I’d really like being friends.”
He fell on his bed for a minute before sitting back up. “Steve finally got the A&R guy to come to a show of ours. He set up a one-off tonight. You’re really killing my vibe.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I really did.
“Will you still come?”
“If you want me to, sure.” Anything to make this conversation end, I thought.
Evan nodded and hugged his guitar tighter to him, and I have to admit that in the eleven months we were together, that guitar practically got more action than I did. (Reason number fourteen on the list of cons, by the way.) “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m sure.”
We didn’t talk for a few minutes, and then I got up and said, “I’m going now.” When he didn’t respond, I left the room and was halfway downstairs before I heard him say, “Audrey, wait!” But I kept going, pretending I didn’t hear him calling for me.
That night, I enlisted Victoria and her boyfriend, Jonah, to come with me to the show for moral support. “Like I wasn’t already going?” Victoria said when I asked her. “I’ve already gotten about fifty million texts and thirty million Facebook bulletins about it. And besides,” she added, “I want details.”
During the drive over to the Jukebox in Jonah’s car (he has an awesome sound system with a subwoofer), she made me recount the breakup word for word, with Jonah wincing every few minutes. “Harsh, man,” he kept saying. “That is so harsh.” Victoria finally whacked him on the shoulder. “Can you please be more sensitive to Audrey’s situation?” she hissed.
“Sorry, Aud.” Jonah smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “Sensitivity controls now engaged.”
“And could you not sound like a dork when you do it?”
“It’s one or the other, babe.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jonah,” I told him. “It’s all good.”
Victoria just shook her head and hung over the backseat. “Either way,” she said, “I cannot believe you agreed to go tonight.”
Half an hour later, packed like sardines inside the Jukebox, we were still talking about it. “Did Evan actually say ‘kill his vibe’?” Victoria asked. By now, she was on her third Diet Coke and I could see the caffeine starting to shoot out of her eyes.