Why We Broke Up Read Online Free PDF

the—the other girls.”
    “What do the other girls talk like?”
    “Not a lot,” you said. “Usually I guess I’m talking.”
    “Basketball. Layups.”
    “Not just, but yeah, or practice, or Coach, if we’re gonna win next week.”
    I looked at you. Ed, you were goddamn beautiful thatday and, you’re making me tear up in the truck right now, every other one, too. Weekends and weekdays, when you knew I was looking and when you didn’t even guess I was alive. Even with shiny stars bothering your head it was beautiful. “Basketball is boring,” I said.
    “Wow,” you said.
    “That’s another different thing?”
    “I don’t like that one,” you said. “You never even went to a game, I bet.”
    “Boys throwing a ball around and bouncing it,” I said, “right?”
    “And old movies are boring and corny,” you said.
    “You loved
Greta in the Wild
! I know you did!” And I know you did.
    “I’m playing Friday,” you said.
    “And I sit in the stands and watch you win and all the cheerleaders scream for you and I wait for you to come out of the locker room standing by myself for a bonfire party full of strangers?”
    “I’ll take care of you,” you said quietly. You reached out and brushed my hair, my ear.
    “Because I’d be,” I said, “you know, your date.”
    “If you were with me after the game, it would be more like girlfriend.”
    “Girlfriend,” I said. It was like trying on shoes.
    “That’s what people would think, and say it.”
    “They’d think Ed Slaterton was with that arty girl.”
    “I’m the co-captain,” you said, like there was some way someone at school could not know that. “You’d be whatever I told them.”
    “Which would be what, arty?”
    “Smart.”
    “Just smart?”
    You shook your head. “The whole thing of what I’ve been trying,” you said, “is that you’re different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don’t think about them, because of the way you are.”
    I stepped closer. “Say that one more time.” You grinned. “But I said it so lousy.”
    What every girl wants to say to every boy. “Say it,” I said, “so I know what you’re saying.”
    “Buy something,” said the first hag, “or get the hell out of my store.”
    “We’re
browsing
,” you said, pretending to look at a lunch box.
    “Five minutes, lovebirds.”
    I remembered to look at the Dream door. “Did we miss her?”
    “No,” you said. “I’ve kept an eye out.”
    “I bet this is another thing you never do.”
    You laughed. “No, I follow old movie stars most weekends.”
    “I just want to know where she lives,” I said. I felt Lottie Carson’s birthday, the back of the lobby card, sparking in my purse, a secret plan.
    “It’s fine,” you said. “It’s fun, something. But what will we do when we get there?”
    “We’ll find out,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be like
Report from Istanbul
, where Jules Gelsen finds that underground room full of—”
    “What is the old movies, with you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “What do you mean what do I mean? You talk about old movies with everything. You’re thinking about one now probably, I bet.”
    It was true: the last long shot of
Rosa’s Life of Crime
, another Gelsen vehicle. “Well, I want to be a director.”
    “Really? Wow. Like Brad Heckerton?”
    “No, like a
good
one,” I said. “Why, what did you think?”
    “I didn’t really think,” you said.
    “And what are you going to be?”
    You blinked. “Winner of state finals, I hope.”
    “And then?”
    “Then a big party and college wherever they take me, and then I’ll find out when I get there.”
    “Two minutes!”
    “OK, OK.” You rummaged in a bin of rubber snakes, look busy look busy. “I should get you something.”
    I frowned. “Everything’s ugly.”
    “We’ll find something, it’ll kill time. What’s good for a director?”
    You interviewed me down through the aisles. Masks for actors? No.