Somebody Please Dump Me

The Breakup

The date was set for the breakup. Marco and I decided we could each bring two friends. We would make a day of it.

I chose Yulia and Caleb. Yulia because she was Yulia, and we’d sworn years ago never to do anything important without each other. And Caleb because I was pretty sure he had a crush on me. Not that I wanted Marco to be so jealous he changed his mind about the breakup. I just didn’t want it to be too easy. I’d been to breakups that were excruciatingly civil, just so boring. We all deserved to feel something.

Marco invited Geoff and Cooper, but they were both in bed with hangovers from some other breakup I wasn’t invited to (there were a lot of them that summer, before we all left for college), and we couldn’t postpone. Yulia, the first of us to leave, would be two time zones away tomorrow, and I couldn’t do this without her. It was our last chance.

I’d assumed I would be the one to break up with Marco. But without Geoff and Cooper there to support him, I wondered if that would be unnecessarily cruel. Plus, at the burger drive-thru, when we teased Caleb for ordering orange juice instead of an espresso shake, he said, “Have you tasted orange juice?” with such surprising sensuousness that it wasn’t really fair to Marco at all. Yulia even caught my eye and fanned herself. We both knew it was ridiculous to be attracted to these boys—especially when the whole reason for this breakup was so I’d be free to pursue the real men waiting in college and beyond—but we couldn’t help ourselves.

So there it was. To preserve his dignity, Marco was going to have to be the one to break up with me. Honestly, it was a relief. I didn’t have to worry about finding the right moment. I could just sit back and enjoy the day. After all, it was our last together. Once Yulia left, it would be Marco, then Caleb, then me, in quick succession.

We took our shakes to the public pool. Yulia and Caleb sat under the oak trees while Marco swam laps, plowing head-down through clumps of leaf litter. I claimed the next lane over. I tried to keep pace, coming up for air exactly when he did. He could have broken up with me then, one word every time we surfaced for breath. Maybe he thought it was too early in the day. In the car, sitting on our towels, I wondered if Yulia could tell it hadn’t happened yet.

Then we drove to Target. We looked at the dorm room display, piled with things that promised to be essential to our impending, separate lives: a plastic basket for carrying our shampoo to the shower, a miniature vacuum, a rice cooker in which we could supposedly bake a pound cake. Yulia ran her hand over a subdued pinstripe comforter. I tried to imagine her in a room I’d never seen, with a roommate I’d never met, surrounded by unfamiliar objects.

While we stood before these things and tried to divine from them our futures, Marco had gone off and bought a necklace with my initial on it. He peeled the price tag away with his teeth and gave it to me in the Target parking lot.

The necklace came in a little plastic packet. It was heavier than expected. “Why would you give this to me?” I said, because he was making this breakup extra weird. “Go back and return it.” But he wouldn’t. I thought about tucking it discreetly between the seat cushions in Caleb’s hatchback. Then I thought about putting it on and never taking it off for the rest of my life. Instead, I turned around and offered it to Yulia. She hesitated. 

“If I had a boyfriend, maybe I would keep him,” she whispered to me, behind Caleb’s car. “Then if I was awkward at college, everyone would think I was just pining.”

“Take it,” I said, placing the necklace into her palm, “and pine for me instead.” She shook it out of its packet and I held her hair up while she put it on.

Next we went to the cineplex to see a movie. I was trying to enjoy myself, I really was. But what if we made it through the whole day and didn’t break up? And what if that opened up a wormhole at the other side of which we were neither together nor apart? What if I had to go to college like that, not knowing?

The movie ended and I was annoyed. Everyone seemed to have forgotten this was a breakup. Who kept suggesting all these activities? Marco couldn’t wait too long, or the others would leave—and wasn’t the point that we’d all be together when it happened? After the movie we went to the shave ice truck, and after the shave ice truck Caleb invited us to his neighborhood, which had its own basketball court. 

We sat on the court and Marco dealt cards. I said, “We should do this every summer. Even if we lose touch, or whatever. We should all get back together and have a day like this, once a year.” 

Yulia nodded like she was on board, which frustrated me. I didn’t actually want to relive this day every year. I’d only said it to see if Marco would call me a hypocrite. You’re the one who didn’t want to leave the door open, I wanted him to say. You said it was like a refrigerator. When you leave the door open, even a little, everything gets spoiled. 

But he didn’t. “Your turn,” he said.

It was getting dark. I could see Caleb’s house on the other side of the high chain link fence that completely enclosed the basketball court. His dad was moving around in the kitchen.

I didn’t play a card. “Caleb,” I said. “Break up with me.”

“What?”

“Pretend you’re Marco, and break up with me.”

“Why?”

“Because someone needs to!”

“Okay, uhh, ‘I’m Marco, and I don’t want to be your boyfriend anymore.’”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” I said.

“What do you mean?” said Caleb.

I didn’t say anything. What did I mean?

Caleb dropped his cards face up on the blacktop. “I hope you get your breakup,” he said, walking off the court. The gate clanged shut behind him.

Yulia, who was sucking on the letter T of my necklace, spat it out. “Wait,” she said, “does it lock both ways?”

Marco ran to the gate, rattled the handle. It didn’t open. “Hey!” he yelled after Caleb. “Let us out!”

Caleb, without turning around, gave a salute-like wave.

“I’ll call 911!” Marco yelled. 

“No, you won’t,” said Yulia. She got up, steered him to the center of the court, and pressed on his shoulders until he sat back down. “There’s something we need to do first.”

In the distance, I saw Caleb open the door to his house. Yulia sat down and took my playing cards from me, collapsing them into a neat stack. Then she held both my hands in hers.

“You trust me?” she said.

I did. Yulia understood what I needed: more than Marco, more than anyone. Oh, I was terrified, though. This was not how I’d imagined it. Yulia’s hands were a little sweaty. The charm of my necklace—her necklace—glinted in the fading light. She could say it would never be the same again. She didn’t have to, because I already knew.