The Breakup Artist (24 page)

I stared at the note for a while, trying to determine if I was just really sleepy, or if my mom had actually said she’d like to spend time with me. I turned this over in my mind as I made my way to school that day. It felt almost surreal as I pulled into the parking lot. Today was the first day of my new life. David and I had reached an understanding that we could both live with: I had made a human connection so utterly and deeply significant to me that I might actually make it out of high school with some sanity, and I was coming to school today without the burden of other people’s problems on my shoulders. Granted, I was worried about what would happen with Nate and Karen, but the situation was entirely out of my hands. All I could do for them was attempt to keep dispensing sound advice.

I met David in the parking lot, and his warm smile was not lost on me. It was as if he too could see the future stretching out before us, full of the unknown and the exciting prospects that youth offers. I slipped my hand into his as we walked into the busy school, talking quietly about the various trivial plans that prom entailed: what color would my dress be, could he get his tie to match, what time he should pick me up. As much as I’d always made fun of other people for wasting their breath talking about those kinds of things, it felt nice to worry about something so unimportant. My decision on what color dress I would wear to prom probably wouldn’t affect the rest of my life, so it was a decision I was willing to make without much thought.

The day passed quickly and uneventfully, which made me happier than any excitement-filled day could have. I said good-bye to David in the parking lot and drove home, wondering if my mom would really be there waiting for me. There was no black car parked across the street when I pulled up, so at least I was safe on that account.

As I walked through the door, I dropped my black backpack on the carpet, peering into rooms as I made my way toward the kitchen. I found her there, sitting at the table with her head in her hands. She instantly brightened when I walked into the room, even if her smile was less than heartfelt.

“You’re going to prom,” she said with all the pride of a mother who’d finally married off her spinster daughter.

“Yep,” I said awkwardly. Though I felt that people were just instinctively good at things that should come naturally, like kissing and spending time with their families, my mother and I seemed to lack that natural ability to make small talk with one another. We got into her white SUV and drove through the winding roads of Thousand Oaks to the mall where my future prom dress was hiding. We didn’t say much in the car on the way there, though she made a comment about an old song on the radio, saying that she could remember listening to it as a teenager.

The mall was relatively crowded for a Thursday, though I attributed that to the upcoming prom. Teenagers roamed the tile walkways in groups, and most of them, I noticed, were not with their mothers. Then again, when had I ever done things the way everyone else did them? We searched through a few of the big department stores, thumbing through racks of hot pink silk before my mom finally asked what should have been an obvious question.

“What kind of dress are you looking for, Amelia?” She always liked to use my name when she spoke to me. When I was younger she told me that she had loved the name Amelia and had wanted to change her name when she was little. I figured that’s why she always used it whenever she could. She loved the sound of it.

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. It was rare for someone to ask me what I wanted, and even more rare for me to think about my own personal preference. After years of being a clone of whoever I worked for, it was difficult for me to determine what I, myself, actually liked and disliked.

“Well, what color do you want?” she asked, examining a pale blue dress. I thought of David’s eyes for a moment and seriously considered saying green, but I quickly decided against it, knowing the color would wash me out. I thought about colors that had appealed to me when looking through magazines, and things I’d seen in my everyday life that had caught my eye. The only thing I could think of was a word and not a color. Unassuming. That was what I wanted. And once the word came to me, the color did too, something that could be appropriately elegant while still remaining unassuming.

“I want a champagne colored dress,” I said finally. My mom looked at me skeptically for a moment.

“That’s not exactly a popular color, Amelia,” she informed me, and as I looked around at the racks of dresses, I could see that she was right. The closest thing this store offered was a sort of off-white or pale yellow. Not quite champagne. We looked through a few more big department stores before finding a store that carried only prom dresses. Surely this store had to hold the dress I was looking for. Browsing through the racks for only a few minutes, I found it. I found my size and put it on in the dressing room, examining myself in the mirror.

It was a floor-length silk gown that hugged my curves nicely. It had thick straps that crisscrossed in the back, and a sweetheart neckline. It was perfect, and it was champagne.

The grand total came to $300, which I paid myself, much to my mother’s protests. As a compromise she insisted that I let her buy the champagne heels to match. And with our purchases made, we were on our way home, our little mother-daughter bonding experience at an end. As we were stopped at a particularly long red light, however, my mother unexpectedly said, “I’m not a bad person, you know.” Caught completely off-guard, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. I hadn’t accused her of being a bad person—I’d just bought my prom dress and minded my own business. “I make bad decisions sometimes, but parents are people too, Amelia.”

I had no idea where this was coming from, but I decided it was something she needed to get out, so I simply said, “I know,” afraid that any other response would spark the wrong reaction.

“I don’t want you thinking I’m a bad person. Some people just deal with heartache differently.” Now I was starting to feel I knew what she was talking about, but I still couldn’t be sure.

“You mean Dad?” I asked as innocently as I could. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, my mother whom I’d never really had a relationship with. Her short, dark brown hair was cut in a bob, and her nails were always perfectly manicured. She was always well put together, never showing any vulnerability to me or anyone else. And here she was, crying in the driver seat of her white SUV. Not overly dramatic, heartrending sobs, but just a few, silent tears that she quickly wiped away.

“Sometimes when you face rejection it leaves you changed, and no one can bring you back to where you used to be, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying,” she said cryptically. And that was the end of our conversation. She didn’t say another word, and I didn’t try to coax anything else out of her. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would say if I did speak. We murmured the appropriate “that was fun” and “let’s do that again sometime” phrases that are polite after such an outing and then went our separate ways, back to interacting through post-it notes again. At least for a while.

Feeling overcome with the love I felt for this boy, I opened the box he had handed to me to find a small pink gold bracelet covered in champagne-colored stones. “It’s amazing,” I said honestly as he secured it around my wrist.

“I thought following tradition has never really been our style, so instead of a corsage, this would do nicely.” Entwining my hand with his, I gave him one long kiss that was interrupted by a knock on the door. David and I exchanged confused looks, but I answered the door since there really wasn’t much other choice, unless we wanted to spend prom night locked in my house . . . but we wouldn’t get into that possibility at the moment.

As the door swung open, I saw Nate standing on my front porch. He was wearing a suit much like the one David had on and looked as if he’d been crying for hours. His rosy cheeks were especially red today and they matched his bloodshot eyes.

“Nate, what’s wrong?” I asked urgently. David was by my side.

“I finally got Karen’s mom to really talk to me,” he said, between sharp intakes of breath, “I guess she’s really not doing so well.” I had never seen a boy cry—which was saying something since I was in the breakup business—and the scene before me truly broke my heart.

“What did she say exactly?” I urged, hoping to get more information out of him to help me assess the situation.

“I told her that I was on my way to pick Karen up for the prom whether she wanted me to or not, and she told me that Karen was too weak to even get out of bed. Her mom’s really worried about her.” A few tears ran down Nate’s rosy cheeks, and I looked at David for a moment as we silently exchanged an understanding between us.

“Nate, can you take us to Karen’s house?” I asked. David and I were both perfectly healthy at the moment, and I knew Nate would never compromise Karen’s health, so there didn’t seem to be too much harm in our visiting her. “If she can’t go to the prom, we’ll just have to take the prom to her,” I said resolutely.

Nate brightened slightly at this suggestion, and he jumped into his green car, with David and I close behind, and drove to Karen’s house.

☼☼☼

It took some convincing to get Karen’s mom to let us in to see her, but in the end I think she was happy that her daughter wouldn’t be left out of the festivities of the evening. As the night wore on and the four of us began to talk about our plans for the future, plans Karen might not ever get to live out, I wondered if maybe we all just wanted to belong somehow. Maybe the reason I had been so scared of sinking to the level of everyone else my whole life was because somewhere, in the back of my mind, I feared that I wouldn’t measure up. Maybe I worried that the experiences I thought I should have in high school wouldn’t measure up to my own expectations.

Though it should have been a sad occasion to see Karen lying in her bed, looking pale and weak as we talked about the trip we would all take this summer, just because we could, it was a happy moment. Karen laughed feebly as Nate held her hand, and I was immensely grateful for all of the things I had always taken for granted—the future I had always assumed everyone was entitled to.

In the end, I had come to terms with myself and what my life was. It wasn’t particularly bad or good. And as my mom tried to say, even with her poor communication skills, the individual journey of our lives doesn’t really label us bad or good. Life was whatever I chose to make of it.

And though I traded in what I thought was an important high school experience, almost pivotal to my feeling that human connection, what I gained was so much more than I could have ever imagined. Something much richer.

I discovered love.