Shannen Camp - The Breakup Artist

“Well, I’m actually… um… maybe going with someone… a friend,” I said after a long and awkward silence in which Taylor stared at my shoes, more out of fascination for them than by embarrassment at the look on my face. I hoped springing this news on him wouldn’t hurt his desire to meet me at the coffee shop that night.

“Who?” he asked me, finally meeting my eyes. That was a good question-I had no idea. I didn’t even have a brother or a male cousin I could pay to take me. I hadn’t ever been to a dance.

“David,” I finally blurted out, quickly recalling one of the names on my fact sheet.

“David who?” he persisted. I had to hand it to the boy-he really didn’t give up without a fight. It was no wonder Heather wouldn’t just break up with him herself.

“I don’t know his last name,” I admitted lamely. “We just sort of met. He’s my friend’s friend and neither of us had someone to go with so we thought we’d go as friends. So I can’t really back out… for my friend’s sake… I don’t know much about him, but he likes photography and books and culture.” I was rambling off everything listed on my fact sheet for David and looking like a complete idiot while doing it. If I didn’t regain my cool and composed façade quickly, I might actually fail a job for the first time. Taking a deep breath, I rearranged my facial expression to one of composure. Taylor was just staring at me with that look that cool boys give to nerdy girls who have just confessed their love for them. I’d seen it many times but no one had ever given it to me. Just for this I decided I would have to pull out all the stops.

I let a little sideways smile creep onto my face as if there were some joke on Taylor that he wasn’t in on. “I’m kidding,” I said finally in a way that said, “Weren’t you cool enough to understand that?” This seemed to appease his wonder at my sudden fall from coolness. “I’ll call you later tonight and we’ll talk about it,” I lied smoothly. Then I got up from my spot beside him right as the bell rang and walked as quickly as I could to class without full-on sprinting.

Even though I had managed to secure the date in the allotted time I’d given myself, I couldn’t help but feel slightly shaken by my horrible performance. I had never lost my cool during a job before. I tried to blame it on my pre-prom depression and sat quietly through history, which wasn’t difficult to do since the teacher had a tendency to lecture at us while the class slept. I confidently told myself that it was a one-time occurrence and I wouldn’t let myself be thrown like that again.

That’s probably why, in the weeks to come, I didn’t expect the changes that came hurtling toward me.

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.