The Breakup Artist Read Online Free PDF

client or one of their ex-boyfriends. As I sat and quietly finished off my lunch, it dawned on me that instead of just trying to beat my old records of jobs finished in a week, I might as well blast the record right out of the water. So what if I didn’t have anything to do during lunch for the next few weeks? People always ended up coming to me for a job, so beating my record was just my way of freeing up some time so that I could take a few extra clients on.
    I threw away the remnants of my now half-eaten and cold pizza and reviewed David’s file one more time. The picture on the file struck me as odd. Claire, short for Clarice, who had given me the file, was like all of the other cool punk girls I had been dealing with that week, but the boy staring up at me in the picture didn’t look anything like James or Corey or Taylor. This boy had shaggy dirty blond hair, bright green eyes, and a light blue shirt on. He looked like a mix between a preppy class president and a poetic boy you’d find skulking around a coffee shop. It just didn’t fit with what I had come to expect from these girls.
    Trying to put this unsettling fact behind me, I made my way through the busy school filled with hormones and greasy food to find David. I couldn’t do much about breaking up with him today since Claire wasn’t supposed to be “sick” until tomorrow, so I simply observed from a distance.
    There he sat, his hand lazily entwined with Claire’s, the two of them sitting next to each other and surrounded by their single friends. It was a typical scene; Claire talked animatedly with her friends, hardly acknowledging David’s presence, as if he were an accessory in her life who was only there until she decided to stop putting up with him tomorrow. The only unusual thing about this scene was that David looked just as bored. Rather than trying to joke with his friends to impress Claire or constantly attempting to get her attention, he looked around his small clique repeatedly, as if searching the crowd for someone. As he looked over the shoulder of a little blonde girl, our eyes met for a second. In a moment of panic, I quickly ducked behind the closest object I could find, which happened to be a senior on the football team. The jock looked down at me with mild interest, and then continued walking, destroying my shelter.
    When I straightened back up, however, David was no longer looking at me but had his eyes trained on the floor with an amused smile playing across his lips. This behavior was slightly distressing, but I attributed it, once more, to my pre-prom melancholy. For the rest of the lunch period, I sat a good distance from Claire and David, peeking over the top of the school newspaper at the “happy couple” to see if I needed to change my plan of attack. I mean, this boy certainly didn’t look like the type who would be into black skinny jeans and over-processed hair, but sometimes opposites really do attract. And he did seem to like Claire . . . a little. Either way, my chances of finishing the break up tomorrow looked good because either he was into those kinds of girls or he wasn’t interested in Claire to begin with. It appeared my job would be that much simpler.
    I left my little makeshift hiding spot right before the bell rang so that I wouldn’t accidentally bump into either of them, and made my way to math, my last—and worst—class of the day.
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    The house was empty when I got home from school, which wasn’t unusual, so I went upstairs and did my homework, which also wasn’t unusual. My life was pretty well compartmentalized. I went to school, I worked, I came home, I did my homework, I ate, I went to bed. That was my life in a nutshell. The occasional movie night with myself was there so I wouldn’t slip into complete routine nonexistence.
    After I finished my homework I decided to call Claire, just to straighten things up and put my mind at ease for tomorrow. Claire was one of my regulars—I