Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler Read Free Book Online

you for a second. Pair up, people. Two will do gym through library, the others the rest.”
    “I’m with Jordan,” Lauren said, taking half the stack. “I know better than to interfere with the sexual tension festival you and Min have going on this morning.”
    “
Every
morning,” Jordan said.
    “You think everything’s sexual tension,” I said to Lauren, “just because you were raised by Mr. and Mrs. Super-Christian. We Jews know that underlying tensions are always due to low blood sugar.”
    “Yeah, well, you killed my Savior,” Lauren said, and Jordan saluted good-bye. “Don’t let it happen again.”
    Al and I headed for the east doors, stepping over the legs of Marty Weiss and that Japanese-looking girl who holds hands with him by the dead planters, and we spent the morning excused from homeroom taping these posters up like they meant something, Al holding them flat and me zipping out pieces of tape over the corners. Al told me some long story about Suzanne Gane (driver’s ed, bra clasp) and then said, “So, you and Ed Slaterton. We haven’t talked much about it, really. What’s—what’s—?”
    “I don’t know,” I said,
tape tape
. “He’s—it’s going well, I think.”
    “OK, none of my business.”
    “Not that, Al. It’s just, it’s, you know, he’s—fragile.”
    “Ed Slaterton is fragile.”
    “No,
we
are. I mean. Him and me, it feels that way.”
    “OK,” Al said.
    “I don’t know what will happen.”
    “So you won’t become one of those sports girlfriends in the bleachers?
Good shot, Ed!
”
    “You don’t like him.”
    “I have no opinion.”
    “Anyway,” I said, “they don’t call it
shot
.”
    “Uh-oh, you’re learning basketball terminology.”
    “Layups,” I said, “is what they say.”
    “The caffeine withdrawal is going to be hard,” Al said. “No after-school coffee served in the bleachers.”
    “I’m not giving up Federico’s,” I said.
    “Sure, sure.”
    “I’ll see you there
today
.”
    “Forget it.”
    “You don’t like him.”
    “No opinion, I said. Anyway, tell me later.”
    “But Al—”
    “Min, behind you.”
    “What?”
    And there you were.
    “Oh!”
It was too loud, I remember.
    “Hey,” you said, and gave a little nod to Al that of course embarrassed him with his Halloween stack.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “You’re never around here,” you said.
    “I’m on the subcommittee,” but you just blinked at that.
    “OK, will I see you after?”
    “After?”
    “After school, are you going to watch me practice?”
    After a sec I laughed, Ed, and tried the ambidextrousthing of looking at Al with a
Can you believe this guy?
and you with a
Let’s talk later
at the same time. “
No
,” I said. “I’m not going to
watch you practice
.”
    “Well, then call me later,” you said, and your eyes flitted around the stairwell. “Let me give you the best number,” you said, and without a thought, Ed, the travesty occurred, and you ripped down a strip from the poster we’d just put up. You didn’t think it, Ed, of course you didn’t, for Ed Slaterton the whole world, everything taped up on the wall, was just a surface for you to write on, so you took a marker from behind Al’s ear before he could even sputter, and gave me this number I’m giving back, this number I already had, this number that’s still a poster in my head that’ll never tear down, before giving back the pen and ruffling my hair and bounding down the stairs, leaving this half in my hand and the other wounded on the wall. Watching you go, Al watching you go, watching Al watching you go, and realizing I had to say you were a jerk to do that and not being able to make those words work. Because right then, Ed, the day of my last coffee after school with Al at Federico’s before, yes, goddamnit, I started to sit in the bleachers and watch you practice, the number in my hand was my ticket out of the taped-up mornings of my life, my usual friends, a poster announcing