The Breakup Artist Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have to go. Something came up.”

  Maddie looked up at me with a frustrating knowing smile. A simple gesture, but one that communicated so much. It told me she didn’t believe a word I was saying, and she was calling me out without actually calling me out.

  “You do what you have to do,” she said.

  I felt a flash of anger. I’m not sure why I should be mad, but there was something about the smile plastered on her face that made me mad. Maybe it was because that smile seemed to say she knew I was going to come around to her way of thinking eventually.

  And looking back on it she was absolutely right. I did eventually come around to her way of thinking. But standing there being confronted with the reality of what was going on with Steve…

  I wasn’t exactly ready to come around to her way of thinking just yet. I reacted in the way I think a lot of people do when they find themselves confronting feelings like that. I got mad at the person who was the source of those feelings, even if she didn’t deserve it.

  At least I had the self-control to walk away from it though. Hey, what can I say? The long process of coming out of the closet can make you crazy. All the nerves of your first crush coupled with the crushing anxiety of knowing that first crush is something that’s going to cause you a whole lot of complications, socially speaking.

  Then again life is one big complication, socially speaking, when you’re in high school.

  12

  Business

  Ashley Timmons says

  Let’s talk business, because after all I was running a business.

  There are a lot of people speculating about how I operated, and I figured I should dispel some of the myths being spread out there. Like, for example, all you people out there who talk about how I was doing the kind of things that you’d see in a bad gangster movie or something? Totally wrong.

  You couldn’t summon my attention by leaving a piece of tape stuck to a garbage bin in the lunchroom between the hours of 3:30 and 5:30 after school let out but before they closed up the building because of sports. Nothing ridiculous like that.

  All you conspiracy theorist types who believe that kind of stuff really need to get a life.

  No, it was a lot simpler than that. I had an email account that wasn’t tied to me in any way shape or form. I only logged onto the thing using a virtual private network. I have no idea what that is, but Craig set me up with the thing and Craig is the kind of guy who seems to know what he’s doing when it comes to technology so I trust him when he says nobody can track me if I used that.

  Not that I think anybody at any major tech companies hosting my email would be interested in what I was doing. It’s not like I was doing anything illegal, but I figured better safe than sorry.

  So someone emails me and lays out their case for why they think a couple needs to be broken up.

  The email can be anonymous, or not. There were some people who sent me emails from obvious accounts that had their first and last name right there in the send field. There were people who were anonymous by accident because they’d chosen something profound when they first got onto the Internet like cockmaster69, or something equally descriptive that really showed off their personality.

  Sometimes it was obvious they were emailing me from an anonymous address they’d created just for the purpose of getting in touch with the infamous breakup artist who they still didn’t quite believe existed even when they were sending that first email.

  My business was strictly on a referral basis. At least until the end.

  From there I accepted payment in the form of whatever cryptocurrency they preferred to send my way. I didn’t really care as long as the market for that currency was strong enough that I could translate it into the appropriate dollar amount for my services.

  Or sometimes I just hung onto the stuff if the idiots pumping money into a particular cryptocurrency market were making it a worthwhile investment to hold onto. I'm sort of rich, for a high school kid, thanks to riding a couple of bubbles and jumping before they popped.

  That was another little tip I picked up from Craig. Basically I wouldn’t be able to do the anonymous side of my anonymous business without him. Not that all the technological anonymity did me a damn bit of good in the end.

  But there you have it. That’s how my business worked. That night, while I was still fuming from the conversation I’d had with Maddie, I heard a ping on my computer that let me know I had a new business email, and it was time to get to work.

  I sat down at my computer. I needed a nice distraction right about then, and work seemed like just the ticket.

  I scoffed and rolled my eyes when I saw the byline. It had been sent from none other than [email protected]. Talk about encapsulating all of society’s online toxic masculinity problems in one email address.

  Also, if you try emailing someone at whatever.com it probably won’t work. Or maybe it will. Hey, I might not like the asshole when I eventually realized who was behind truegentleman69, but at the same time I don’t want to pass out identifying information. The point I’m trying to make is I made up the whatever.com part so if y’all try to email Darrell at that address you totally won’t find him because I want to keep things nice and anonymous.

  Wink.

  It was the subject more than the email, though, that caught my attention. Because right there at the top of the line was the name of one of my best friends: Sandra.

  I immediately didn’t trust truegentleman69. It was impossible that Sandra’s name could be there. It was impossible that someone could want her broken up with…

  Then I thought of Darrell. I guess there was at least one person out there who’d want Sandra to break up with her boyfriend, but I had trouble imagining anyone who had reasons that were totally pure.

  No, if someone was doing this then they clearly had an ax to grind.

  I’d seen it before, of course. It was sort of an occupational hazard in this business. When your business is breaking people up naturally you’re going to attract the kind of people who want someone broken up for less than pure reasons, and that had to be what was going on here.

  They were so happy together. I refused to believe that Sandra’s boyfriend would ever be the kind of guy who’d do something to deserve the breakup artist driving a wedge between them.

  Not to mention I refused to believe that Sandra could ever be the kind of girl who’d be such a heinous B to her boyfriend that someone would want her to break up with him.

  So it was easy enough for me to shoot back a quick email. A real no-brainer. I didn’t even have to do any research. Not even a basic cursory look at their online footprint to see if there was a good reason for breaking them up.

  I knew without doing a search because I was already friends with them on just about everything. Why search when it was right in front of me on a daily basis?

  “Dream on asshole,” I typed. “I’m closed for business right now, and I don’t do happy couples.”

  I’ll admit I felt a small bit of satisfaction as I hit send. After all, I was irritated at everybody on those boards talking about me like I was a horrible person for breaking people up who totally needed it.

  Getting back at even one person, giving them a piece of my mind, felt good.

  It was like this one jerk who was trying to mess with my friend’s love life was representative of every asshole online who was out there talking smack about me.

  Now I can just talk to all you assholes directly by addressing your comments, but it wasn’t as easy back then.

  Whoever was on the other end of that email must have been waiting for me to send a response. They replied almost immediately.

  “Are you sure?”

  Three simple words. Words that mocked me. I squinted at the screen, and all the anger that had been threatening when I was reading those forum threads earlier came pouring out through my fingers.

  “Yes I’m sure you asshole,” I said.

>   I wish I could tell you sending that response left me satisfied, but that’d be a lie. A whopper of a lie. Those three words ate at me.

  “Are you sure?”

  This jerk was so confident that whatever they knew would be enough to get me on the case. That ate at me and made me wonder if there really was something going on with my BFF.

  I took that as a matter of professional pride.

  If there really was something so terrible that it warranted my best friend breaking up with her boyfriend and I’d missed it all this time? If all the signs had been there and I’d missed them?

  Well, that could mean I was wrong about some of the other couples I’d broken up. What if this one wrong call meant I'd potentially made other wrong calls? I'd have to completely reevaluate everything I’d done since I started this business.

  It was the uncertainty more than anything that bothered me. Partly it was the uncertainty of wondering if Sandra was in an unhappy relationship, but mostly it was the uncertainty of this whole thing calling my professional judgment into question.

  So I took the bait. I totally realize now that it totally was bait. A nice juicy tasty worm dangled on a shiny hook tailor-made to catch my attention.

  I put my hands to the keyboard. Stopped to consider if I really wanted to do this. Pulled my hands away.

  No. I wasn’t going to do this. I was going to trust that there was at least one relationship out there that was everything it seemed to be from the outside.

  They’d been an example of relationships done right, and I was afraid to see they were just another disappointment. One of so many.

  But if they were just another disappointment it would prove me right. It would…

  “Okay asshole,” I typed. “What do you have on Sandra?”

  I waited. It took a little longer for the email to come through this time. Maybe they’d stepped away from their computer or something. Maybe they’d…

  “You’re taking this couple having trouble awfully personally…”

  A chill hit me. I’d been so careful to cover up exactly who I was through making sure my email was anonymous. Making sure my connection was anonymous. Making sure there was no way somebody could possibly track me down through technical means.

  The last thing I needed was to accidentally give away exactly who I was by revealing that a certain couple breaking up was a little too personal for me. No, that would be the most ridiculous thing ever if I went to all this technical trouble, if I followed all of these rules Craig had outlined for me because he said if I didn’t follow one of them I might as well not follow any of them, and then I ended up giving myself away because I was too close to a job.

  Yeah, that would be rich. So I forced myself to take a couple of deep breaths. Forced myself to put my fingers to the keyboard even though they were shaking.

  I was taking this way more personally than I’d ever taken any other bit of business before, not a good thing, but I felt the way I felt and it’s not like I could stop it.

  “What I think about a couple is none of your damn business. Now you’re going to tell me everything you have on Sandra and her boyfriend, and I’m going to decide whether or not I think you actually have a case after I’ve had a chance to sift through all of that information.”

  I waited. This time it took even longer for the response to come through. And this time it was only one word, and what an explosive word it was.

  “Valerie.”

  What the hell?

  13

  Mall Walker

  Ashley Timmons says

  Question. Does anyone ever actually go to the mall anymore?

  Like if you look at a bunch of old movies from the ‘80s teens are going to the mall and hanging out. Heck, Fast Times at Ridgemont High has an entire opening sequence that’s a love letter to the mall, and all the important stuff that doesn’t involve Jennifer Jason Leigh making bad decisions also takes place at the mall.

  Like was the mall ever really as culturally important as it seemed to be to teenagers who grew up in the ‘80s? Or is it a thing where that’s what adults writing those movies thought teenagers were doing in the ‘80s and so that’s where all the movies put them?

  I ask because I can’t think of a single friend I have who voluntarily goes to spend time at the mall. Sure I go there when I have something to do. Like when I was going to the food court to break up Thomas and Kylie who were probably there for the same reason as me. To go to the movies.

  I’ve just never had a friend talk about how they want to go and hang out at the mall for the sake of hanging out. Maybe technology has changed that. Maybe being able to talk to all your friends any time through the phone in your back pocket has made it so people don’t need to congregate in person.

  I’m not sure if we’ve lost something or gained something from that. Or maybe it’s a little bit of all of the above.

  Either way, it was very weird for me to go to the mall without having a compelling reason to be there. But the next weekend that’s exactly where I was. I didn’t have any business, and I certainly wasn’t there to go on a date with Steve.

  We’d talked a couple of times in the week since we had that big argument, but that was it. And now here I was at the mall, pretending I was maybe in one of those old movies, except none of my friends were there that day. I sure as heck wasn’t going to text any of them and tell them to get over here.

  No, I was here on a mission, even if I wasn’t quite willing to admit that to myself. I’d already gone to a couple of different stores. A bookstore that I was always surprised was still in business in this day and age, though it seemed like they mostly survived by selling toys and knickknacks rather than books. I’d checked out a couple of clothing stores, but the last thing I needed was more clothes.

  Finally I found myself going past my true target. The one reason anybody actually came out here if they didn't need to shop. The movie theater.

  Okay, so maybe I was doing the whole crazy stalker thing. So sue me. I hardly think I’m the first person who ever modified my schedule or route just a little because I wanted to catch a glimpse at somebody I was crushing on.

  Not to mention I had no other way of finding the girl I was crushing on. As far as I could tell Maddie was some magical hottie who manifested whenever I went to the theater or when I was out behind the gym, and no other time.

  I was even willing to admit to myself that she was a hottie. It was terrifying. A complete change in how I thought about the world. I knew it was going to change everything between me and Steve even if I was afraid of addressing those feelings, but it was what it was.

  I looked at her and I was attracted to her in a way I wasn’t attracted to my boyfriend.

  I know I keep bringing up that comparison, but at the time it was the only basis of comparison I had so you’re just going to have to suck it up and deal with it. That’s where my mind was, and this is a story all about how I thought and felt in that moment, so deal with it.

  I took a deep breath. I needed to go down there. She’d sought me out twice now, and I figured the least I owed her was trying to track her down since I'd been such a jerk at the end of our last meeting.

  “Time to put on your big girl pants Ashley,” I muttered.

  I walked down to the theater. I passed by an empty husk covered by a dusty grating they put down at the end of the day to make sure nobody tries to break in. Only this grating had been down for as long as I could remember. There were names written in the dust that hadn't changed in a decade except now they were shallow dust names carved in the deeper surrounding dust.

  My parents told me it had been an arcade once upon a time. Back when arcades were filled with electronic bandits that stole quarters from people.

  I guess videogames moving into the home had killed that business.

  I finally reached the theater and it was amazing the transformation that came over the place compared to that former arcade. This part of the mall had been remodeled within the last d
ecade, and so it was like I was stepping from the 1980s, which ruled the aesthetic of the rest of the mall, to the modern era.

  I looked at the concession stand, hope rising in me. Maybe I’d see her there. Maybe I’d finally be able to chat with her again.

  Only those hopes were promptly dashed as I saw none other than her supervisor. The creepy guy who’d been trying to put the moves on me when I went up to get some snacks the last time I was here with Steve.

  As soon as he saw me staring a huge grin split his face. Damn.

  I seriously considered whether or not I wanted to get involved with this guy again. I wished I could remember his name, and then I figured it was a good thing I couldn’t. He’d take that as a good sign.

  I wanted to know where Maddie was, though. I needed to know if she was working tonight, and it’s not like I had any way of tracking her down since I’d left rather abruptly the last time we chatted.

  What can I say? I’d been a little perturbed at the time. I’d had time to think about it since. I was fully willing to admit I’d been kind of a jerk, but that didn’t help me get her contact information now did it?

  Not to mention I’d had about as much luck tracking her down online as all of you idiots in the comments section are having, and I actually knew her real first name!

  So against my better judgment I walked up to the concession stand. I didn’t lean across it like I had last time, but that didn’t stop him from leaning forward and leering at me.

  “My eyes are up here buddy,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe I actually had to use a cheesy line like that on this guy. I thought that was the kind of thing you only saw in stupid TV shows or something, but sure enough there he was with his eyes directly on my chest.

  Gross.

  He looked up at me and grinned. “I was just admiring your assets.”

  “Well you’re going to be admiring my fist here in a minute if you keep that up,” I said.