She was no longer sure that she wanted to break up. Her brain was being invaded by the same alien virus that had corrupted the room, infecting her with conflicting impulses. What she actually wanted to do was get married. She wanted to pull him down to the floor and have sex among the tissue paper and shopping bags. She wanted a drink of water, she wanted him to say something, she wanted to stand here in silence and hold him.
She wanted to run away.
There were no #lifehacks to apply, no YouTube tutorials to consult. No sense of how to navigate this moment. He was still holding her hands, and that felt terribly wrong, but breaking contact had the air of cold finality—a slap in the face—and she couldn’t bring herself to pull away.
The TV said, Side effects may include drowsiness, nausea, restless-leg syndrome, and in rare cases, color blindness.
“Okay,” he said finally. He dropped her hands. Her fingers were very cold. In seconds they’d be numb.
He was still looking in the mirror, and she had the urge to tilt his chin toward her. He took a deep breath and seemed to draw on some deep reserve of acceptance—as if he’d been waiting for this and only needed to inhabit the role.
“Okay,” he said again. Then he walked to the bed and sat down and looked at the TV.
Melissa was gathering tissue paper. There seemed to be a gap in her memory between making the decision to clean up and actually starting to do it. She opened her hand, and the paper floated back down to the floor. Things were happening out of order. Events had been reshuffled.
She found herself in the bathroom running hot water over her numb hands, trying to scald them back to life.
She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered why she looked puffy and spent as if she’d been crying, when she hadn’t shed a single tear.
She had once read that getting over a breakup—really, truly putting it behind you—took half as long as the relationship had lasted. Did that mean she’d be feeling messed up and disconnected through her entire freshman year of college?
She leaned against the bathroom counter and looked through the open door at Daniel on the bed and tried not to want him so badly. She tried to be angry at him—all he could muster was a single word, fucking okay? What kind of boy just says okay and stares off into space after his girlfriend dumps him in a hotel room in Nashville?
A boy with a hornet’s nest of issues she’d never attempted to poke. He was so obviously losing his way, and instead of helping him, she’d just given him a kick in the wrong direction.
She had to get out of this room. She felt like if she stuck around another minute, she’d peel off her Aketha leggings and climb on top of him. She’d heard hundreds of breakup stories from other girls and never once did they mention feeling horny. When Caroline Murphy suspected Jake Fusco of cheating, she’d waited until biology class and launched a fetal pig at the side of his head. Movie and TV breakups resounded with the snap of vicious zingers, long-simmering resentments boiling over into screaming matches. She had no frame of reference for whatever was going on in this room. She had just blundered into the weirdest breakup in human history.
She shut the bathroom door and closed her eyes and rehearsed her next steps: locate shoes, place feet into shoes, walk to door, exit room, descend via elevator, get front desk to call taxi, say to driver Airport and step on it, buy ticket, fly home, contact NYU about moving in, like, right now, pack stuff, get ride to school from parents, begin new life.
She rested her hand on the door handle and let her plan sink in, one word at a time, so that it became a list of mindless tasks. She could perform them without thinking. The next time she had a conscious thought, she’d be in her dorm room, and it would be easier to sort everything out. Until then, she’d cruise on autopilot.
She opened the door, and Daniel was standing in front of her, radiating spontaneous anguish. He looked into her eyes with such startling intensity that she had to force herself not to slam the door in his face just to break contact. He’d apparently come back to himself while she’d been in the bathroom, rehearsing her exit strategy.
“Tell me what I have to do to make things go back to the way they were, and I’ll do it,” he said. “Anything you want. Just say it.”
“Daniel—”
“I’m sorry for how things have been. I know it’s my fault, and I swear to God, I don’t mean all the stupid shit I say. I honestly don’t even know what’s coming out of my mouth half the time, but I can work on it.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I completely understand why you’re doing this.”
“I don’t think you do!”
Daniel stepped back. Her hand went up to cover her mouth. She’d escalated to the Yelling Phase so abruptly, it took them both by surprise. She took her hand away and tried to keep her voice steady and calm.
“I’m so sorry for this. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way.”
Daniel looked stricken. “How long have you known you were gonna do this?” He held up a hand before she could speak. “Actually I don’t want to know. All I want to know is how we can fix it. That’s it. That’s all that matters. I also think either I should go into the bathroom or you should come out here, because this is like a symbol of something.” He pointed to the empty doorway separating them. Melissa walked past Daniel and sat down in the armchair in the corner. Then she changed her mind and stood
