dark, grounded, alarmingly practical Abigail—who once made a potential boyfriend read
The Feminine Mystique
before she would date him—would look perfectly at home in a basement office dissuading meth addicts from suicide.
“Oh, it’s not,” I assured her.
“It’s the job thing, right?” said Abigail, pulling thoughtfully at her Jew- fro curls. “You’re thinking that he’s got to be really committed to his job to have gotten where he is. And to be that committed, he must be passionate about it. Work passion is sexy, no question.”
“Plus,” Tag conceded, “he’s not anyone we know. I mean, he’s not a friend of a friend. He’s in the real world, not in our precious little circle.”
Mercedes glared at both of them.
“I’m not saying I approve,” Tag added hastily. “Not at all. Zeph’s gonna get screwed, no question. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled, closing my eyes just as the green letters “ER” began pulsing across the screen.
Despite the vote of no confidence, the Sterling Girls, otherwise known as the SGs, were there for me when the inevitable happened. A week after my reunion with Hayden, I found a bulky little envelope taped to the front door with just my first name written on the flap. I knew what it was before I opened it, but I still allowed myself a moment’s thrill over the fact that he had actually handwritten my name. It was so intimate.
My earrings were tucked inside a sheet of white of paper with a typed message:
i’m sorry i can’t do this
its me not you
i have things to work out
your great you know that right?
and god your hot
ill miss you, i’ll miss your blue eyes
thank you
We held an emergency convention at my apartment that night. I couldn’t stop pacing and shrieking, “Fucker!” at random intervals. Tag and Mercedes were mixing up a sickly sweet gin concoction that I’d be able to swallow in large quantities. Lucy was shaking her head over and over again.
Abigail was already in Palo Alto, so we put her on speaker-phone. “It looks like
archy and mehitabel.”
she laughed. I had faxed her Hayden’s infuriating attempt at a breakup note.
“Who?” Mercedes yelled from the kitchen.
“The book with the poetry- writing cockroach who couldn’t hold down the shift key to type capital letters. Mr. Petrone’s class. Tenth grade,” Lucy confirmed.
“That’s perfect,” Tag laughed, her face lighting up at the prospect of an invertebrate metaphor. “He
is
a cockroach, a literate cockroach.”
“Not even!” I yelled. “He can’t spell or use apostrophes or complete sentences or ANYTHING! It’s the most juvenile, simple- minded piece of crap I’ve ever seen! And he’s supposed to be
a journalist!”
“Shh, shhh,” soothed Lucy.
“And he thinks her eyes are blue,” Abigail cackled.
“They
are
blue,” Lucy said toward the phone.
“They’re green,” Abigail said firmly.
“People!” I shrieked hoarsely.
“What are you gonna do?” Mercedes carried in a pitcher of something purple and made me sit down in front of the coffee table.
“Nothing,” Tag answered for me, alarmed by the question. “It’s over. He’s a shit. It’s
over.”
She glared at me, as if she could burn this conviction into me with her eyes.
“Oh, it’s over,” I assured them, swigging a glass of the violet- hued drink. “Do you realize he orchestrated that little reunion just so he could dump me?!”
“Yeah, we picked up on that,” Abigail said dryly.
“Did he spend the last two months harping on the fact that
I
had dumped
him?”
“At least you know he was thinking about you,” Tag smirked.
“I want to humiliate him. I want to crack that cool cover and blow his brains out!” I shrieked.
“Humiliating and killing are two different things,” Lucy pointed out gently.
We rejected a number of plans that were technically illegal, and finally settled on using Hayden’s own idiocy against him. I made about fifty