Revenge Plot

A break-up meet-cute.

I teetered on the edge. The soles of my sandals––the ones my mother called please throw those disgusting hippie things away––were so worn with overuse that as I got to the high slope of the curb, my fingers just grazing the edges of the stupid baby blue poster with Hayden’s face that I was attempting to tear down, I slipped. My brain swarmed with images of cracked teeth falling onto the ground like confetti, bloody gashes (I over consume medical dramas while heartbroken to remind myself it could be worse), and the deep ringing voice of probably God rang in my ears: WHO WILL LOVE YOU NOW?

I didn’t fall. There were no teeth on the ground.

There was the warm smell of oatmeal and sweat that I remembered from Hayden’s body, the smell that reminded me of being outdoors and sunburned and happy, a smell that made me feel far away from Portland and the rain. Some people described their partners as someone they felt like they’d known forever––I felt I knew Hayden’s smell from my childhood, that he harbored in his cells something of the days I spent laying on the cracked sidewalk letting lady bugs pretend to eat me alive while my grandma fried eggs with the window open. And he was there, catching me from certain death (a five foot fall) in the middle of tearing down his band posters.

“Why did I never run into you while we were dating?” I said, shrugging him off.

“Whoa there cowboy,” he said, laughing, “are you forgetting thank you for saving my life or nice to see you or––”

“Or leave me alone forever and ever?” I said far sharper than his sing-song tone. I couldn’t look at him, just my feet, but I felt his head tilted towards me, all that attention that I had wanted and wanted, laid up at night hoping for. We were wearing the same shoes. I gave his toes a little tap. “You can’t break up with me and steal my style,” I said. He shook his head and smiled.

“Technically, you broke up with me.”

“Not technically, not figuratively, no way.”

“You said the words,” he said, crossing his arms, with a stupid grin. It hurt.

“Only because I’m braver than you.”

I remembered the first movie we went to. I had walked five miles in the incessant drizzle our city was known for to meet him because I couldn’t bear cutting the journey’s length by biking; I had to be on my way to him or I’d explode or disappear or melt like a girl in a fairy tale who kept doing what she knew she shouldn’t. When I got there, we were on opposite ends of the street, smiling at each other across a sea of cars. I got into a runner’s stance, ridiculous in my jeans and huge emerald raincoat, and spirited across to him as the light changed. When I reached him, I gave him a kiss on the cheek, and I whispered into his ear that I was the world champion of street crossing––he agreed.

“And,” I said, “I have so many illegal snacks in my bag.”

“I knew you were a snack smuggler,” he said.

“When people say friends in high places they mean me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, now earn your keep and help me take off my coat without flashing anyone,” I said, showing him to hold down the edges of the see-through blue blouse I was wearing while I shimmied off my coat. His cheeks flushed the most brilliant red––like seeing a cardinal the morning after a snow storm: that sudden and clean and gorgeous.

I’d seen it once before, looking at a painting with him during a museum after-hours event before we’d kissed but after he’d insisted on seeing me three times in one week and written me a letter, when I whispered into his ear, is this is a date?

His cheeks were doing that same thing in the movie theatre lobby as when he nodded his head, looked at me, and said, absolutely. I felt absolutely. His fingers were lightly touching the skin over my ribs, and when I emerged from the tunnel of my jacket, I swear to God he was looking at me like I’d invented the moon, like I’d invented the concept of the moon. We made it into the theatre in time for the commercials––one of them being a horror movie that caused us both to scream and grab onto each other: the only two people in the packed room that were fazed at all. We laughed and sunk into our seats, eating smuggled sour watermelons. I remember thinking: I could love this boy who can’t handle B-movie horror.

Now, he was catching me outside of a dive bar tearing down the poster for his band’s free solstice concert––an event I’d been so excited about going to and now would be keeping a ten mile radius distance from. I was wearing the same green jacket, though it wasn’t really necessary anymore; it was no longer the winter of us.

“You did look pretty brave just now, as you were careening to your death,” he said.

“I didn’t scream, did I?”

“No you were stoic in your fall…almost as if you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself,” he raised his eyebrows, “almost like you were being sneaky.” He let the silence stretch out like it was a piece of gum pulled until it was translucent.

“That doesn’t,” I said, biting my cheeks and failing to suppress a smile, “sound like me.” Half of the poster was still in my hand, which I hid behind my back.

“Hmmm…” he said, reaching over my head to try and grab it.

“I am world renowned for my benevolence towards my enemies and for my…speed.” I took off, running past him and through a sidewalk thick with the pink shadows of cherry trees.

One of the first times he called me––he was on the way home from work and I was walking back from the library in the soft darkness of March’s newly long evenings––I was trying to guess why he liked me. He had been a college runner, was tall and handsome, and had a slight southern accent. He’d dated lots, was funny, had perfect hands––people liked him; my friend Riley, when she met him, squeezed my elbow and whispered he’s so pretty. I couldn’t believe that he liked me. He could have been with one of the thousands of skinny trail running girls who work in marketing for local ecological wines that our city was crawling with. They had perfect skin and brushed their hair and probably wouldn’t show up to his house in polka dot rain paints soaking wet from biking slowly in the rain. I remember on that first phone call telling him that, even though I wasn’t a run club girl, I could probably beat him in a footrace. He laughed. He said, “You know, Maia, that’s why I like you––you’d challenge me to a foot race.”

But of course, he was faster than me. He was a varsity athlete, and I spent college barefoot in the library trying not to spill chocolate milk on Jane Austen. He also didn’t have a tote bag full of torn down posters. He caught me almost instantly, and lucky me, because an errant teenager turned down the sidewalk at top speed on an electric scooter.

“Holy shit, how are you alive without me?” he said, both of us out of breath.

“I do just fine,” I said, removing his hands from my waist. He looked at me like I’d poured hot water on him.

“Am I really your enemy?” His voice was sad, a pebble thrown into the middle of a lake at night. Barely perceptable; downwards facing; blue.

“Hayden. You broke up with me and then tried to get with my roommate. Yeah. Enemies.”

“Woah, I didn’t––”

“She showed me the texts, and whatever. Do what you want, just don’t expect me to high five you in the kitchen.”

“I was not––”

“I seriously don’t care. The second she showed me those texts, I decided I just didn’t care anymore.” I turned to walk away, but then came back. “And so yeah, I’m taking down your stupid posters because I don’t want to see your face plastered everywhere I walk.”

“Wait, Maia––”

“No! I liked you,” I felt my eyes fill with tears, “I really liked you.”

“I really liked you too,” he twitched, like he wanted to touch the part of my face where the tears slid down my freckles.

“Then why’d you stop being nice to me? Why did you make me break up with myself?”

“I just––don’t you think it was supposed to feel different?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and I bet the answer to that made up feeling is somewhere deep in the Hinge app––it’s definitely not a fiction of your imagination that you use as a reason to dump girls for the dream you have in your head. Or…not even a dream. Just something new. Something you didn’t already have and boy,” I laughed the laugh of the truly pissed off, “did you have me.”

I felt anger so profusely it made my fingers numb. It was proportional only to the joy I felt for that Saturday morning in February he had invited me over to make crepes. I showed up with two matching pink strawberry printed headbands as a costume for while we cooked; when we wore them out to the grocery store for last minute baking soda, the cashier said to me: “I know who you belong to,” and pointed right at Hayden. We barely ate our crepes––we couldn’t stop laughing.

“Maia, I just think the way I feel about you is friendly.”

“Then why did you kiss me? Why did you sleep with me?”

“I wanted to!”

“Until you didn’t.”

“No, I never stopped wanting to. But, isn’t love supposed to be more serious? I mean, you couldn’t stop laughing when I kissed you.”

“Because I was happy. Because I was so, so, so happy.” I shook my head. “And, sorry, but what’s more serious than laughing? Really? I’ve always thought finding someone to laugh with would be the most serious thing I ever did.” I pressed my hands to my heart. “Hayden. I miss laughing with you.”

“Then be my friend,” he looked at me and it was like being real again, the stiffness in my body, that I can recognize now as waiting for him, left me, “That’s why I texted your roommate, I thought maybe if I saw her you’d come along and we could still be around each other.” He smiled. “We can take down my posters together, that sounds like something friends would do.”

“Hayden,” I said, reaching out to give him a hug, to smell the open sky of him, “we’ll never be friends.”

“But––” he started.

“But, we’ll always have been what we were,” I let go of him, “two people who laughed together in the dark.”

It was not nothing. For me, it was the beginning. For him, it was the end. But it was not nothing.