the Art of Breaking Up Read online

  “And, just where have you been?” Koby suddenly demanded loudly, making me jump.

  I looked up at him quickly, feeling far guiltier than I really had reason to.

  Then, proving it the joke it had been intended, he laughed goofily. “Chillax, Young Linc.” He gave me a lop-sided grin as he thundered down the stairs towards me then ruffled my hair on his way to the kitchen.

  But chillaxing was hardly on the radar. My heart pounded, both from his intentional and teasing scare, and from my parents’ words. They echoed in my head as though they were bouncing off the walls of my skull. Like that old Windows screensaver the school receptionist still used.

  “Koby,” I heard Mum chuckle as he walked into the kitchen.

  It might have just been me, but she sounded nervous, like he’d caught them out.

  “Was that Norah you were talking to?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah. Regular bad girl, that one. You’re gonna have to put bars on her windows to stop her sneaking out at night,” he snorted.

  “Leave her be,” Dad said fondly as Mum said, “Like we almost did with you, you mean?”

  I started running up the stairs, wanting to avoid seeing them for as long as possible.

  “I hope you and Lis didn’t fill up on junk,” I heard Dad say and turned to see him at the bottom of the stairs, smiling ruefully.

  I forced a smile of my own. “Nope. Just enough to still have room for dinner.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “I’m serving up now, then.”

  I nodded my head once. “Okay. Be right back down.”

  He paused, watching me carefully. I felt my heart flip-flop in my chest again and forced my smile wider. It wavered and I felt my eyes get hot. Just as I thought tears were about to fall unbidden, Dad gave me another smile and headed back to the kitchen.

  There was noise again in the house. The noise of a family going about their business as though it wasn’t all going to come crashing down around us in the near future.

  I released a big, shaky breath and took the rest of the stairs two at a time.

  I threw my backpack on my bedroom floor and ripped my phone out of my pocket. Lisa’s chat thread popped up and my fingers hovered over the keyboard. I felt frozen. No words. My head was a numb buzzing. I shared everything with Lisa. I always had. But I didn’t know how to put this into words. I didn’t know how to start a conversation I wasn’t sure I wanted to have. After all, words gave a thing power. And maybe, if I didn’t give words to it, I could – like the people downstairs – pretend it wasn’t happening.

  Chapter Two

  Life somehow didn’t quite make sense anymore. Like it did, but it didn’t at the same time. I felt like I could see the way life was supposed to be. It shimmered over what now seemed to be a new reality – a reality I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge – like I’d been given the gift of Sight. Except, instead of magic being wonderful and opening up my world, it was terrifying and made my world feel narrow and small.

  I could see through the bullshit to the truth, but the grass wasn’t greener. It was black and full of thorns that tore into me, ripping gouges out of the armour that protected me from all the bad in the world.

  “...or I could do a nudie run through next assembly,” Lisa mused pointedly and I realised I hadn’t been listening.

  “That would definitely save me having to sit through Wade doing the announcements,” I commented dryly.

  “I thought you weren’t listening?”

  I shrugged as I shoved a chip in my mouth. “I wasn’t. What did you say?”

  “I was asking you what you knew about Hollard,” she said, picking up my Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee – going theory was that, if it didn’t belong to her, the calories didn’t count. Suffice to say, she saved me quite a few calories. She also cost me a buttload extra to account for her non-calories.

  “Hollard?” I clarified and she nodded mid-sip.

  My gaze roved over the common room until I saw him standing with his friends by the kitchenette.

  Hollard was, by and large, your typical male jock – a type Lisa stuck to with avid devotion. Sometimes I wondered whether she thought she’d make Wade jealous by making her way through the soccer team. Other times I just admired her choosing athletic lovers.

  Personally, I found the smart boys were more...attentive. And that definitely wasn’t off the advice of a twenty-something year old Dolly magazine I’d found in my mum’s old stuff. Honestly, the fact nothing had changed for teenage girls in twenty-odd years was both a comfort and a concern.

  But I wasn’t meant to be thinking about Wade or jocks or nerds. I was meant to be focussing on Hollard.

  “Abound, rumours do. Elusive, fact is,” I answered, putting on my best Yoda voice.

  “Elusive to all but you, Master,” she said with a smirk.

  Speaking of rumours, one of them seemed to be that I had the downlow on the sexual – or lack thereof – prowess of everyone relevant. Not from personal experience. I apparently just had all the goss. That whatever nonsense I spouted had yet to be refuted was either a miracle or a worry. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be the instigator of a bunch of lies – or worse, false hope – just because I had a faulty brain-mouth connection.

  However, on this occasion, I did have some possibly helpful info.

  “Word on the street is Amy dumped him for being impatient. But Malin,” Amy’s best friend, “let slip that he dumped her for hooking up with Dave.”

  “So, he’s not only available, but desperate?” Lisa mused.

  I could concede that. “Why try to discern the truth? I too choose to believe all the rumours are true.” Look, it wasn’t totally wrong.

  Lisa whacked me companionably, her hazel eyes fixed on Hollard. The fact he stood with Wade hadn’t passed me by, I’d just chosen to ignore it in favour of not letting the shit-head in my head more often than necessary in any given hour.

  “Okay. So, do you think I go up to him now? Or wait until after school?”

  I shook my head as I swallowed. “There’s this brilliant invention. Called Messenger. I vote you use that.”

  Lisa looked at me like I’d grown two heads and had just asked if she thought a third one would be a solid choice.

  “He’s right there. Why not ask him in person? You know you can talk to people in real life, right?” she asked.

  The horror. “The Society of Ostracised Introverts Languishing in Existential Dread resist your new-fangled hokum. We will not be seduced by witchcraft and heresy.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “Soo...?” She tried guessing the anacronym.

  “We think of ourselves as SOILED, thank you.”

  She rolled her eyes and fought an encouraging smile as she got up. “I’m going to ask him now.”

  I watched her walk away.

  I didn’t have to ask her what she was going to ask him. She was going to do what she always did and end up with a date at the end of it. I was less of the ‘date first, kiss me later’ kind and more the ‘it just happened’ type. Sometimes with an ‘oops’ at the beginning of it.

  Although, at that point in time, neither scenario was particularly enticing. There seemed something weird about engaging in anything of an even vaguely romantic nature with the knowledge that my parents had apparently given up on theirs.

  But there was Lisa, going about her usual business like everything was normal. It wasn’t normal. It was... Well, it was difficult to put into words exactly what it was.

  It felt like final exams were already here, only I hadn’t been to any of the classes and they were going to be entirely in French – of which my grasp was minimal at best.

  It felt like those times your body twitches when you’re almost asleep and you come back to full consciousness feeling like you’re falling. Only the sensation of heightened adrenaline and racing heart didn’t pass, it hung around like a GIF on repeat.

  I’d never before felt so restless and coop
ed up. My hands fidgeted non-stop. I’d chewed a raw patch on the inside of my bottom lip. I kept picking up my phone, although I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it when I was looking at it.

  I was in the midst of a sea of people and yet I felt lost. Uncertain. Alone. Scared. But, at the same time, I felt surrounded. Confined. Cramped. Scrutinised.

  It was the first time I’d felt that way and I didn’t care for it.

  “He’s going to pick me up at seven-thirty on Friday night,” I heard Lisa say.

  I blinked and wondered how much time I’d spent stressing out about the new feeling of freaked out dread that seemed to now make up who I was as a person.

  “Friday?” I said as I cobbled some kind of coherent thought together. “Nice.” It was then I noticed the person standing next to her and waved.

  Lisa nodded. “I also picked up a stray.”

  Erin and I grinned.

  “Wondered where you’d got to,” I said to her.

  She sighed as she joined us. “Line at Tuck was massive.”

  Erin made three in our little inner circle. Others came and went as they flitted about the Common Room, spending a bit of time with everyone. It hadn’t always been that way. But, it seemed, put a whole year level in a room together and it inevitably breaks down the majority of those resentments or feuds or disjointedness between cliques. As an inherently introverted person, I tended to stick to my spot. As my best friend, Lisa stuck to it with me. As an avid fan of Lisa, Erin was found with us more often than not.

  “Is his backseat as roomy as they say?”

  I wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, but they did tend to be proverbial in these circumstances. Besides, that was something I didn’t know.

  I shrugged. “I haven’t seen it.”

  Lisa frowned. “I thought you hooked up with Harry back there?”

  I shook my head. “That was Tiff.”

  One reason Harry pissed me off greatly.

  Not that I thought he hooked up with Tiff. I couldn’t care less about that. It was the fact he thought he’d hooked up with me. At least that’s what he’d said when I accused him of lying about hooking up with me; ‘Honest mistake, Norah. I was pretty parro.’ Like, yeah nah, mate. No worries. Drunkenness is definitely a good excuse to keep telling everyone it was me after I set you straight. Cue eye roll.

  It’s not that I wasn’t the sort of girl to hook up with a guy in his car. And I wasn’t about to deny there were sometimes some drinks involved. But I did have a problem with a guy saying we hooked up when we didn’t. Which I thought was totally justifiable. Most of the guys at our school seemed to think it was one of those things you just got over and let go.

  When I slept with a guy, it didn’t have to be the One or anything, but it wasn’t totally meaningless and I didn’t appreciate him running off to give his friends the play by play. And it wasn’t like there was a line around the block of them. There’d only been a couple to score the proverbial homerun. Very few of my hook ups even involved clothes removal.

  For someone better at and more serious about the whole dating thing, Lisa had far more notches in her… What conveyed less machismo connotations than a belt or a bed post that wasn’t a lipstick case? Phone case? Corset?

  I’ll come back to that.

  The point was Lisa had slept with more people than I had.

  I was proud of her for it.

  After the whole Wade debacle, I hadn’t known where she stood on the whole sex and virginity thing; having it, losing it, doing it.

  At the time, I hadn’t been quite sure if Lisa and Wade had done it or not. After he dumped her, she was vehement they hadn’t and I’d wondered if it was wishful thinking on her part – although, I’d left out any comments about methinking she doth protested too much. It hadn’t been until Trent that I’d been sure who’d been the one to do the deed. It had been obvious in the way she’d been somewhat hesitant and regretful under her outward excitement.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d wished I’d pulled her up on her warring emotions. Maybe if I hadn’t, like her, been expecting/hoping the Trent experience to magically make her get over Wade, we could have had a conversation that maybe actually got her over him instead.

  But, alas, wishes weren’t fishes and I liked to think I was far less naive – especially in matters relating to Wade – than I’d been then.

  “Norah?” Lisa nudged me.

  “Huh?” I looked at them as I pulled the sleeves of my Matric jumper over my hands and buried in for comfort.

  “I said, Erin’s got a date Friday night. What are you up to?”

  What was I up to? Once a month, my parents insisted we have a family movie night. There were tacos or burritos, tonnes of popcorn, a dozen blocks of chocolate, and an overabundance of soft drink involved. No one ever went to bed feeling at full health. It used to be one of my favourite nights of the month. I somehow didn’t really have any interest in family movie night anymore.

  I shrugged. “Dunno. No plans.”

  No plans except trying to make sure movie night wasn’t that Friday and probably sitting in the park on my phone for a few hours to make the parents think I was out with friends. I would have been actually out with friends, but no one liked being a third or fifth wheel.

  “Hollard and I are probably going to see a movie,” Lisa said. “You can come if you want? I’m sure Long or Martin are free?”

  “Oh, hard pass, but thanks.” I shook my head. No way did I need a pity date.

  Quite aside from me not wanting a date of any sort just then, I was also quite capable of getting my own dates without the need to be set up.

  “Who’s your date with?” I asked Erin.

  I forced myself to focus on my friends until the bell rang and we all split off to class.

  It was both easier and harder than I’d expected it to be. It was easy enough to latch onto their words and their faces to drown out the uncertainty and discomfort rattling around my head. But it was hard to stop those thoughts – those feelings – constantly trying to work their way into the front of my mind.

  One little ten-minute conversation and I was about ready for a nap. Shame then that we still had two more lessons to go.

  Outside the Common Room, Erin went right and Lisa and I went left.

  As we came around the corner, we sidestepped to avoid running into the person on the other side and found Wade sidestepping to miss us as well. The actual look of apology on his face fell as he saw it was us.

  “Oh, my bad. Is this the part where I throw on my blinker?” Wade asked sarcastically.

  Lisa lay a hand on my arm. Her eyes said, ‘Please, not today, Norah’. I knew I should heed the eyes. I knew it. Just because Lisa didn’t lash out at Wade for being a prat, didn’t mean someone had to. Didn’t mean I had to. Not really. No matter how unfair his treatment of her was. I could be the bigger person and just walk away.

  So, I did.

  “What? No scathing remark from the oh-so witty Norah Lincoln?” Wade called.

  There was something in his voice that made me want to go back there and rub his face in the dirt. Something about it that had more to do with the fact it would make me feel better than that he deserved it. A part of me was convinced it would make me feel better. All of my parental drama would pale into insignificance if I just got one up on stupid Wade Phillips.

  But my love for Lisa won out.

  If she wanted to just bask in the knowledge she had a date coming up, then fine. I wouldn’t ruin it for her. I just flipped him the bird as we slipped away into the crowded hallway.

  Chapter Three

  I glared at Mrs Finch. She’d been on me all lesson. So, what if my essay was a little behind on her timeline? I’d get it done. I always got it done. Would I benefit from getting it done with time to look over it? Sure. But it would get done and it would pass.

  “It’s okay,” Lisa said to me. “Just let it go.”

 
“Why?” I huffed. “Why should I let it go?”

  “Um, how about because it doesn’t matter?” she whispered.

  I could see Wade over her shoulder, smirking at me. Like I needed any more antagonism for one day.

  Between my parents having a completely unnecessary fight that morning over who was picking me up from sport practice, Mrs Finch nagging me about bad grades I didn’t even have, and now Wade and his self-righteous arrogance, I was done. I was so over it all. I wanted to punch something.

  At the end of the lesson, Mrs Finch finished with her trademark, “And essays due on my desk on Monday, remember.”

  With my nerves at DEFCON 1, I snapped as though the woman had been targeting me specifically. “Yes. My god. It’ll be ready by then!”

  Mrs Finch looked at me with a look of bemused shock on her face before frowning and waving us all out of the classroom with a generalised reminder about manners and how far they got us in life. I picked up my books and strode out of there as quickly as I could, ignoring the way the back of my neck prickled and I was sure the whole class was staring at me. Lisa, as always, kept up with me just fine.

  “What is up with you?” Lisa asked me after a few silent heartbeats.

  I looked at her like I had no idea what she was talking about, that now-familiar jolt of adrenalin making a stress zing run down my arms. I swallowed before answering, completely on the defensive.

  “What makes you think something’s up with me?”

  I’d worked out why I kept picking up my phone aimlessly, why I felt so alone and cramped. I couldn’t deal with the contents of my head so I was looking for a distraction. I didn’t care if I was scrolling through weird and repetitive videos on my feed. I didn’t care if I wasn’t getting any better at that super simple bowling game I downloaded for whatever reason. I didn’t care if I refreshed my news feed six times in as many minutes because I ran out of article titles to read.

  I just needed to not be in my own head for too long.