The Breakup Artist Page 7

  “Yeah, see you later,” I muttered.

  I booked it out of there, but I had no intention of going home. No, I was going to the other side of the school where they couldn’t see me.

  I needed to get out my phone and check out those boards. Immediately. In private.

  I needed to figure out what the hell they were saying about me online and how close they were to the truth.

  9

  Bad Reputation

  Ashley Timmons Says

  I think just about everybody has seen that famous song that talks about how the Internet is for porn.

  That might be the case. Maybe the adult industry did drive the greatest technological innovation to hit our society in decades, but at the same time I have a corollary I’d like to add to that.

  The Internet is for gossip.

  Remember all that stuff I said about talk being cheap and gossip being currency in my last post? Well never has that been more true than on the Internet where you get a bunch of assholes who can say whatever the hell they want completely anonymously.

  And never did that become more apparent to me than that fateful day when I moved around to the other side of the school to lean against the gym’s brick wall and pull up those boards on my phone.

  It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I wasn’t exactly feeling comfortable. No, if there were people out there talking about me, talking about my business, then that was bad.

  One of my chief principles was I operated in secret. I was a ninja going around breaking up couples who needed it, and a ninja couldn’t very well do their job if the world knew who and where they were, could they?

  It didn’t take long to find the wretched hive of scum and villainy Carrie was talking about. With a little bit of tapping I was on the board for our school.

  Carrie hadn’t been lying. There was a board for every school in the area, and it looked like some were more active than others.

  There were several topics on our school’s board dedicated to Kylie and Thomas breaking up. Damn.

  I tapped one of those threads. Scrolled, but it was mostly people talking about either what an asshole Thomas was or what a surprise it was that they broke up. Nothing about me yet.

  Nothing about my alter ego, that is. The Wonder Woman to my Diana. The Supergirl to my Kara. You get the picture.

  Finally I gave up and searched for “breakup” and hoped I was getting the spelling right. If the writing on this forum was anything to go by there weren’t many people getting a great English education at our school.

  A bit of swiping and I finally found somebody talking about the breakup artist. Everyone was anonymous, which meant there was no way to figure out who the hell was talking about me.

  At least I could read what they were saying. Maybe I could figure something out from the context.

  I’d have to have Craig take a look at this. He was always better with the computer stuff. Maybe he’d be able to figure something out. Or maybe this was beyond him too.

  Speaking of Craig…

  “I heard there was some strange guy watching them at the food court while they were breaking up. Do you think he was the breakup artist?”

  I cursed a couple of times. Then I cursed a couple more times for good measure.

  This is why I always told Craig to stay the hell away from these jobs. That he needed to resist the urge to get a front row seat to the breakups as they were happening.

  I’d been willing to forgive him yesterday seeing as how he grabbed those pictures. There was no way I was going to get pictures like that without a telephoto lens on an expensive camera, and I wasn’t willing to spend my breakup artist money on that.

  Not to mention camera kit like that would be a hell of a giveaway that I was the one everybody was looking for, and judging from all the responses talking about me, or talking about the hypothetical me everybody couldn’t stop talking about, it would seem there were more than a few people out there who were interested in finding out who the breakup artist was so they could tell me exactly what they thought of me. In person.

  Okay. Maybe it was a good thing Craig was there throwing people off the scent. They wouldn’t come after a girl if they thought the breakup artist was a dude, after all.

  Maybe I was getting a little more of a reputation than I thought. Not good. Very not good.

  There were people on these boards blaming every breakup at the school on me. People who thought the breakup artist was a convenient excuse that meant their breakup wasn’t their fault. It was easier to blame some sinister person working in the shadows than take a good look in the mirror.

  I pulled out of that topic. Clicked on another one farther down that explicitly named me. The breakup artist, that is.

  Oh yeah. This wasn’t good. There were a hell of a lot of people who were out for blood. Who wanted to know who the hell I was.

  Now let’s stop and think for a moment. We’re in high school. High school relationships, by their very nature, don’t last all that long.

  I mean seriously. People who stay married for seven years or more are considered to be doing a pretty good job of things in today’s world.

  In high school that’s ratcheted up to eleven. People count their relationships in weeks and months. If you’ve been dating for a semester then you’ve been dating forever. If you manage to date for a year then you’re one of those couples everybody looks up to as an example of how to do it right.

  Unless you’re a couple like Thomas and Kylie where everybody knows that one half of said couple is playing around behind the other half’s back.

  The point is there are a lot of people getting together, and that means there are a lot of people breaking up. There’s a natural churn of relationships, and I only had something to do with maybe five to ten percent of those relationships breaking up depending on how you counted it. Tops.

  Now everybody who’d had a breakup in the past year was blaming it on me.

  I moved to another thread. My eyes went wide. There was even more speculation about whether the breakup artist was a guy or a girl, though mostly it was a sexist rant where people on both sides were saying the gender they were sexist against couldn’t possibly be the breakup artist because that gender wasn’t clever enough to do it whereas the gender they were sexist for was totally capable of that sort of thing.

  Basically your typical Internet argument that resorted to name calling and mudslinging.

  I made a disgusted noise in the back of my throat as I saw that particular debate. I guess there were people who were willing to take anything and twist it to their stupid ends. The jerks.

  I backed out again. Looked at all the topics. As far as the eye could see, or I guess as far as my finger could scroll, it was nothing but people speculating about the breakup artist. Who he or she was. What his or her motivations were.

  And there was one common thread uniting everyone who was posting. Even the ones arguing with each other.

  They hated me.

  Like I said, it’s impossible for one person to be responsible for the sum total of every breakup that’s ever happened in our school, but it seemed like everybody was more than happy to blame me.

  The way y’all are going on in the comments on this post it looks like that hasn’t really stopped, either.

  I sighed. Put my phone down. I couldn’t take any more of it. I was going to have some serious issues if I kept reading all that hate directed my way.

  I knew if I kept doing what I did, if I kept giving people a reason to hate me, then it wouldn’t be long before some enterprising person tried to discover exactly who I was. And that dark day was going to be a very bad day indeed.

  For me. From the way everybody was talking about my secret identity they’d be happy to rip me to pieces. Visions of a zombie movie I saw once where somebody got pulled into a crowd and ripped to pieces came to mind.

  I’m sure anyone who’s ever been in high school could tell you that wasn’t all that far from the truth when it came
to what people were capable of. Sure they’d be doing it to me socially, not literally, but it would still suck.

  I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t take it.

  How did so many people find out about me? I was always careful to keep things on the down low. I was always careful to make sure nobody had any idea who I was. It was all anonymous, and on a referral basis.

  I figured that would be more than enough to keep people from talking. Especially when they had their own reasons for staying quiet and anonymous. They were asking me to break someone up, after all, but what can I say?

  Someone had blabbed. Operational security had been compromised.

  I was getting too big for my britches. That’s all there was to it.

  This wasn’t the kind of job where I was supposed to get famous. No, this was the kind of job that could only be done correctly when I was working in the shadows. When nobody knew I was out there working.

  Not only would this be terrible for me if my identity got out, something I still wasn’t particularly worried about even if people were out for blood, but it was going to be terrible for business.

  I couldn’t very well break people up if everybody who found themselves barreling towards one of those breakups suddenly started second-guessing themselves and asking if they were being manipulated by the infamous breakup artist.

  Okay. This was going to be okay. Sure I was hyperventilating just a little, but I could get over this.

  I had to come up with a plan. Planning was what I was good at. Planning was what I used every day to come up with ways to break up couples who seemed otherwise happy.

  Though I wasn’t the wizard, or witch, they made me out to be in some of those posts. No, I’ve made it clear I only went after couples when I was sure there was a legit reason for breaking them up. Even the ones who’ve been busy in the comments swearing up and down how sweet and innocent they were.

  Like, for example, Blake Reynolds and Sarah Arnold? I totally know that black eye she came to school with last August wasn’t because she had a four wheeler accident. You’re a piece of shit who hits girls, Blake, and you deserved more than what you got. You’re lucky the cops didn’t get involved.

  Everybody knows it now, though. If you’re going to shoot your mouth off about me in these posts then it’s going to come back and bite you, you woman hitting piece of shit. That’s a lesson for some of you other jerks out there shooting your mouth off too. Something to think about before you hit “send” on your comments.

  Sorry. I get carried away. There are so many people out there acting all high and mighty looking down on what I do, and I know your dirt. Maybe think about that before you start slinging shit in the comments on these posts, is all I’m saying.

  Sorry. I got a little distracted there, but it’s hard to separate the story from everybody piling onto me in the comments.

  Okay. Deep breath. Back to the story.

  I needed to come up with a plan. More than that I probably needed to take a break. After all, if there was a lot of heat then it was a good idea to lie low. That was going to hurt my bottom line, but I figured it was a smart move.

  After all, what would hurt my bottom line more? Not taking jobs for a little while, or taking so much heat from all the screaming monkeys online yelling about how they’d been wronged that I had to shut down my business entirely?

  Besides, I did provide a public service. I couldn’t do anything to endanger that.

  I was so preoccupied with thoughts of how I was going to dig myself out of this that I let her sneak up on me. Not that I was upset that Maddie was able to get the drop on me.

  Quite the opposite, actually. I’d never seen her around school before, but we went to a big school.

  A shadow fell across me. I panicked and hit the sleep button on my phone. The last thing I wanted was for somebody to see what I was looking at, though of course there was no way they’d know I was the breakup artist just because I was reading threads about the breakup artist.

  I looked up. Blinked a couple of times. Realized I was staring up at Maddie who was smiling down at me.

  I smiled back. Now this was a pleasant surprise.

  10

  Caught

  Ashley Timmons says

  I need to get a couple of things off my chest here. Things that are obviously bothering people out there reading this.

  One. It’s totally true that I do have a bunch of research I did while trying to figure out which couples were deserving of being broken up and which couples weren’t.

  Do you have any idea how much all of y’all are putting out there on social media? Seriously? It’s like nobody out there knows privacy settings exist. It’s like everybody out there thinks everything they do online is somehow a secret.

  Nothing could be farther from the truth, and that’s part of what made my job so damn easy. That’s freebie number one.

  Number two. No, I am not going to reveal any of the information I discovered in the course of my research. Unless you’re somebody who’s shooting your mouth off in my comments section and saying nasty things about me.

  Like Thomas. Or Blake the Beater.

  Blake the Beater. That has a nice ring to it. I think we should all start calling him that, don’t you? It describes what he did to his girlfriends and it describes his sex life ever since that came out and no girl will touch him!

  Yeah. I saw you threatening me in the comments on my last post Blake. Does that mean you’re going to come after me? You’re going to try and hit another girl for telling the truth about what an asshole you are?

  I’d like to act all big and bad, or maybe play on societal expectations about how you wouldn’t dare hit a girl, but everybody already knows you’re more than willing to do it so maybe I should watch myself like you told me to.

  Does that make you feel like a big man threatening a girl a third your size? I guess it’s the kind of man you are considering you already did it to at least one girl.

  Which brings me to point number three in this post. A lot of people were wondering if I had some secret bullshit going on like a dead man’s switch that would release all of my research files if something happened to me.

  I don’t think I have to worry about somebody going that far in their hatred of yours truly, but I did think it was a good idea. So I went ahead and had Craig whip that up.

  Thanks so much for providing me with that idea, commenters!

  Turns out I wasn’t the terrible kind of person who’d do something like that before, but I totally am now that you gave me the idea!

  Think about that Blake. If anything happens to me, including some asshole guy who likes to make himself feel big and bad by beating up on women taking a swipe at me, then all those files are going to be released and it’s going to be your fault.

  There might not be anything on you in there, but I’m sure there’ll be enough people who get pissed off at what’s released on them that they’ll come after you, and there’s always a bigger fish even if you are the current women’s boxing title holder in our school.

  Enough about threats going both ways though. I think it’s time we get back to the story. More specifically, to Maddie approaching me.

  I blinked a couple of times as I looked up at her. She was the last person I thought I’d see out here.

  “You go to this school?” I asked.

  “Totally,” she said.

  “I…”

  I had no idea what to say. After all, I figured I would’ve noticed a girl like her walking around.

  Then again the school was big enough that it was entirely possible we could spend our entire high school careers at opposite ends of the school and never run into each other.

  “Don’t feel too bad about not noticing me,” she said. “I tend to keep to the performing arts side of the school whenever I can. I only emerge for required classes like English and math.”

  She sat down next to me. Leaned against the brick. The gym wall wasn’t exactly the most comfort
able thing, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  I didn’t mind either. I’d been distracted from the discomfort earlier because I was so busy looking at all the nasty things people were saying about me. And now I was distracted from the discomfort by having Maddie next to me.

  Sitting next to her felt right. In a way that it never felt right sitting next to Steve.

  I knew I should’ve felt bad about that, but I was having trouble working up the energy. After all, I still had the anger from our little movie date over the weekend.

  Even if, again, I felt like I couldn’t be totally mad at Steve for what happened there considering getting mad at him was what led me to run into Maddie.

  “So what brings you around here to this side of the school?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Usually the only people who hang out on this side of the gym are people who want some privacy or kids who are trying to sneak a smoke.”

  “Kids smoke out here?” I asked.

  “Well yeah,” she said. “It’s not like the old days when you could sneak a smoke in the bathroom and get away with it, so they have to go somewhere.”

  “That’s a disgusting habit,” I said.

  “Agreed,” she said. “But that doesn’t stop my parents from talking about sneaking a smoke between classes like it was the most wonderful thing ever back when they were in school.”

  She fixed me with that look again. The look that said she was curious what I was doing out here. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get away with making an excuse.

  “So?” she asked.

  “So what?” I replied.

  “So are you going to tell me what you’re doing out here on the other side of the gym? I would’ve figured you’d be over with everyone else.”

  I grinned. I figured she’d screwed with me just a little bit when we were at the theater together, so why not screw with her just a little bit?