One: I could walk into school acting how I felt—i.e., sewage seeping out of a gutter.
Two: I could walk into school acting how I wanted Jamie to think I felt—i.e., happily single, carefree, and one hundred percent over her.
I could pretend it no longer bothered me that she’d dumped me a month before we started our senior year, thus destroying all the elaborate—forgive me—promposals I’d already started thinking up, and the love letter I’d started drafting for her yearbook. Never mind how many hours I’d wasted mapping the perfect road trip course between NYU (where she’d be next fall) and the University of North Carolina (where I’d be), the perfect plan to keep us together even in the face of medium-long distance. Jamie would never have to know I’d begun the initial research on a surprise fall-break trip to Washington, DC, the natural halfway point between our colleges, because Jamie talked about it like it was Disneyland. She wanted to be the third woman president—third, specifically, because it would be pathetic and disgusting if there weren’t at least two other women presidents before she was old enough to run herself. Her words.
I looked at the dashboard and realized I’d been gripping the wheel of my parked truck in the student lot for eleven full minutes. And I was still too early. For the first time since I’d gotten my driver’s license, Jamie hadn’t ridden with me to school. After she dumped me, she texted me to say she thought it would be best if she caught a ride with Alexis for a while instead. I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet, hadn’t imagined all the things we did together that I’d have to start doing without her. It made me wonder how long she’d been thinking about breaking up with me before she did it.
Fine with me, I’d texted back. You’re pretty out of the way.
(Obviously, that was before I’d decided to be cool and mature and happy, honestly, about this whole thing.)
The upside to driving to school alone was that I could listen to any kind of music I wanted, and no one could complain, or ask me to play some horrible new indie band’s EP instead. The downside was that, so far, I’d used my newfound freedom to blast my Tragic Lesbian Breakup playlist sixty-four times in a row. A sampling: “One More Hour” by Sleater-Kinney, “Where Does the Good Go?” by Tegan and Sara, “Cliff’s Edge” by Hayley Kiyoko, “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman, “My Heart Will Go On” by Céline Dion. Maybe Céline Dion wasn’t gay (allegedly), but whatever. The song broke my heart in exactly the way I wanted my heart to be broken.
I thought about giving it one last listen before I left the truck, but I didn’t want to be the girl caught cry-mouthing whereverrrrr you aaaaahhhhh in the parking lot at 7:32 in the morning on the first day of school. Instead I closed my eyes and repeated in my head: I am happy. I am carefree. I am totally over Jamie. We were just going to be friends now, and someday, if not today, I would be completely cool with that, because I had promised her I could be. Of course, being friends was her idea. This was part of her very practical reason for breaking up with me. Jamie had told me that romantic relationships always ended, and most of them ended badly, and if eventually we were going to break up (and we would), we might as well do it early. Damage control, she called it. This way, she said, we could more likely stay in each other’s lives indefinitely. As friends.
Imagine being told the reason your girlfriend can’t date you anymore is that she likes you too much. It’s very confusing. I asked and I asked but she could never explain it in a way I understood. So eventually I had to stop asking.
And of course, a part of me had wanted to refuse, to tell her through tears that I don’t know how to be just friends with you anymore, because maybe if