At the break I made my way over to where I had been told Corey would be. I quickly re-fluffed my hair and re- applied my dark red lipstick, making sure I looked as hip and fashionable as the girl who had hired me to eighty-six her boyfriend.
He turned out to be a slightly dimwitted boy, much to my pleasure. He knew more about clothing and fashion than I ever wanted to think about, and had absolutely no trouble believing I was interested in him. Just to test my own limits, I tried dropping the bomb on him during the break. I wanted to see if a ten minute meet, mingle, and break could actually be done.
It turned out that he had been hoping to ask someone else to the prom, which he told me without any reservations, so he welcomed the news of his relationship’s untimely death with great enthusiasm. He thanked me for making his job easier and I was done before the bell even rang for my sign language class. I almost felt like I could have gotten money out of him for the break up as well.
After breaking up with people for so long, I’ve come to realize two things: most of the time it’s not nearly as hard as people think, and half of the time the other person wants out just as badly, or they’re willing to pretend they want out to save their own reputation. Either way, both of these facts mean that breakups aren’t that difficult, and I’m being paid to do a really easy job. But it’s like I’ve said before: I have no problem helping people out and getting financial compensation for my efforts. After all, even if it’s not an emotionally distressing thing for me to do, it’s still time-consuming and that directly impacts my wallet and my social life, which is why I fully deserve the money I get.
Because American Sign Language was a class I actually had to pay attention in, I didn’t have much time to plot my next attack. I figured David could wait until tomorrow anyway. Besides, if I finished all of my clients up too early and didn’t find any others to fill my time with, I’d have some pretty boring lunch periods for the next three weeks. After class I grabbed a slice of pepperoni pizza and a soda from the lunch line and headed for a little hallway right outside the library. There weren’t usually many people there, so I didn’t run the risk of running into a 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.
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 assisted her at least twice a month in her breakups even when I had to do it from a different high school-so she was one of the five numbers I actually had programmed into my phone. The other numbers were my own house, my mom’s cell, my mom’s work, and the paint supply store down the street.
“Hey, Amelia. We’re still on for tomorrow, right?” Claire asked instead of the traditional “hello.” It felt nice to actually have someone my own age know it was me when they picked up the phone. Claire and I were almost friends, except that we weren’t, because she was my client and the only time we talked was when it was business. But it still almost felt like I had a friend.
“Yeah we’re still on for tomorrow but I have a quick question.” I didn’t quite know how to say, “Your boyfriend doesn’t look as weird as you. Are you sure I should dress like you?” So I just settled for, “I came to check on David today during lunch and he looks a bit… reserved.” That was a nice way to put it. “Are you sure I should go for the whole edgy and cool look tomorrow?” I thought it was a fair enough question and I had helped Claire out enough times that she should be able to trust that my concerns were legitimate. I heard a high-pitched giggle on the other end of the phone, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
“Trust me, David loves girls like me,” Claire assured me. “He just likes to dress like a stuffed-shirt for some unknown reason.” Claire was the one dating him, so I assumed she knew what she was talking about and made a noncommittal humming noise on my end of the phone as an answer to that statement.
“Was there anything else?” she asked, now becoming slightly impatient.
“Yeah, just one thing. You wrote on his interests that he likes culture? What exactly does that mean?” Claire was a smart enough girl, but sometimes she needed a push in the “understandable” direction. It’s like most things made sense to her, but she just couldn’t understand why other people didn’t understand what she meant when she would suddenly say “dancing hippos” during a phone conversation.
“Culture. You know, like why people do what they do and stuff.”
“Like psychology? Or anthropology? Sociology?” I asked, hoping she would just explain herself so I wouldn’t have to pry more information out of her using words she probably didn’t know.
“Yeah, like that,” she said after a long and thoughtful pause. Or at least, I assumed it was a thoughtful pause.
“Got it. That’s all I needed to know. Thanks, Claire. And I should have it done by tomorrow, so you’d better start developing a fever before school.” She giggled at this statement and then hung up the phone without a good- bye. She was always kind of off in her own world. The normal social rules like greetings and good-byes didn’t really apply to her. Claire just sort of flitted around life, dating every boy she saw and giggling at things that were never really meant to be taken as jokes. I shrugged at this unusual end to the conversation and began dialing the number for my other client to let her know Corey had been taken care of and she was free to pursue her potential prom date.
The note I found on the fridge last night was there again but the date was scribbled out with the current one
