Why We Broke Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pinwheels for background scenes? No. Naughty board games for the party after the awards ceremony? Shut
up
.
    “Here’s a camera,” you said. “There we go.”
    “It’s a pinhole camera.”
    “I don’t know what that is.”
    “It’s cardboard.” I didn’t tell you that I didn’t know what it is either, just read it on the side of the thing. Or, until now, the truth of it, that I knew of course, of course I knew it, that there was a game and that you’d lost that night I met you in Al’s yard. But you seemed to like, I think, I hoped back then, that I was different.
    “Cardboard, so what, I bet you don’t even have a camera.”
    “Directors don’t do the cameras. That’s for the DP.”
    “Oh right, the DP, I almost forgot.”
    “You don’t know what a DP is.”
    Three of your fingers gave me a jumpy tickle, right in the belly, where the butterflies lived. “Don’t start with me. Alley-oops, technical fouls, I have a dictionary of basketball in my head, and you don’t know any of it. I’m buying you this camera.”
    “I bet you can’t even take real pictures with that.”
    “It comes with film, it says.”
    “It’s cardboard. The pictures wouldn’t come out right.”
    “It’ll be, what’s the French word? For weirdo movies?”
    “What?”
    “There’s a, you know, an official descriptive phrase.”
    “Classic films.”
    “No, no, not gay ones like your friend. Like, really, really weird ones.”
    “Al is not gay.”
    “OK, but what is it? It’s French.”
    “He had a girlfriend last year.”
    “OK, OK.”
    “She lives in LA. He met her at a summer thing he did.”
    “OK, I believe you. Girl in LA.”
    “And I don’t know what French thing you mean.”
    “It’s for super-weird films, like oh no, she’s falling up the staircase inside somebody’s eye.”
    “How would you know, anyway, if there was some film thing?”
    “My sister,” you said. “She was almost a film major. She goes to State. You should talk to her, actually. You remind me, a little bit—”
    “This is like hanging out with your sister?”
    “Wow, this is another time when I can’t tell if you’re mad.”
    “Better buy me flowers just in case.”
    “OK, you’re not mad.”
    “Out!” shrieked the second twin like a bossy curse.
    “Ring this up,” you said, and tossed her the camera for her to catch. And here it is back at you, Ed. I could see the little arrogance there, from co-captaining, how it really could be
whatever you told them
, like you said. Girlfriend, maybe. “Ring this up and leave us alone.”
    “I don’t have to put up with this,” she snarled. “Nine fifty.”
    You gave her a bill from your pocket. “Don’t be that way. You know I love you best.”
    That was the first time I saw that part, too. The hag melted into a fluttery puddle and smiled for the first time since the Paleozoic era. You winked, took the change. I should have seen it, Ed, as a sign that you were unreliable. Instead I saw it as a sign of charming, which is why I didn’t break it off right then and there, like I should have and wish wish wish I did. Instead I stayed out late with you on a bus and the stranger streets of a lost, far neighborhood where Lottie Carson was hiding out in a house with a garden full of statues making shadows in the dark. Instead I just kissed your cheek for a thank-you note, and we walked out opening the package and reading the instructions together for how to do it. It’s easy, it was easy, too easy to do this.
Avant-garde
was the term you were thinking of, I learned from
When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film
, but we didn’t know thatwhen we had this. There were a million things, everything, I didn’t know. I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy. I took this thing I’m giving you back, this thing you gave me as the star we were waiting for finally emerged.

“It’s opening!”
    “Where?”
    “No, the door!”
    “What?”
    “Across