The Romantics(49)

Post:


When Harry Met Sally

Friday the 13th

Silver Linings Playbook

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Lovestruck: The Evolutionary Reasons Behind Why We Fall





scenes from a baltimore dorm room


My work is a bit like juggling. At any given time there are tons of people who need me. And I do my best to balance it all. But sometimes, I don’t. Sometimes, I focus so very much on diverting someone away from the wrong person and over to the right person that I lose sight of, well, the bigger picture.

This was one of those times.

While Sammy was running away from both the rainstorm and her own confusing feelings, her ex, John, was kneeling on a dusty linoleum floor, rummaging around in the chaos that lived beneath his lofted bed in Wolman Hall at Johns Hopkins.

John had once thought that his parents paying a boatload for him to go to school here would equal at least a semi-nice dorm room, but that certainly wasn’t the case—not that he and his roommate, Juan (yes, John and Juan and at Johns Hopkins, no less), had worked to make it any better.

His hand hit the edge of a Tupperware tub, and he pulled it out from under the bed. A range of gadgets that his mom and dad had thought would be useful lay inside in a spaghetti-like tangle of cords.

Juan shuffled into the room. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

“The panini maker,” John said, tossing his two Kraft singles onto a plate on his bed so he could better dig through the cords.

“Oh shit, man,” Juan said. “I just took it to Cayden’s this afternoon and forgot to bring it back . . .”

But John stopped listening. Suddenly he didn’t care about the panini maker.

There in the bin, peeking out from beneath the George Foreman grill, which still had its tags, was The Elements of Style.

John stared at the vacant-looking watercolor basset hound on the cover. How in the hell had this gotten in here? he wondered. He could’ve sworn he’d intentionally left it at home to make his decision to break up with Sammy a little easier.

He glanced up at Juan, who was still going on about the panini maker while opening a fresh bag of Cheetos.

“It’s okay, dude,” John said. “Forget it.”

He fingered the book in his hands.

“You okay, man?” Juan asked. “You look freaked out all of a sudden.”

John didn’t answer. He just stared at the book.

In the chaos of packing up his room, his mom or brother must have tossed it in last-minute.

All that summer, John had had the unshakable feeling of wanting to break up with Sammy, as he watched fellow high school couples dissolve in preparation for fall orientation. But she had been steadfast. She had asked him just once, right after graduation, if he thought they would stay together. It was in the middle of fooling around, and he’d said yes without thinking about much more than the fact that he wanted to get her top off. She’d never asked him again, instead frequently enlightening him on the average cost of flights from Baltimore to Raleigh and how long it would take to drive, with and without traffic.

John broke up with her on Labor Day, just before the second week of school. The long weekend had been a frat-party bacchanalia. On Friday and Saturday, he’d dutifully told every hot girl who tried to flirt with him that he had a girlfriend in North Carolina.

But then on Sunday, when AC/DC rang through a crowded, beer-stale basement, and a cute brunette leaned her head in close to his, he didn’t stop her.

He broke up with Sammy the next day. Told her that he needed to be independent, to figure out who he really was, all kinds of vague bullshit that he knew she’d see right through.

“You hooked up with someone else?” she’d asked, her voice rising in a way that signaled tears were on the way.

She’d hung up on him before he could hear her cry.

He hadn’t gotten to the chance to tell her that the drunken make-outs were less exciting each time. He longed to call Sammy and tell her about the antics of his dinosaur of a world civ professor, with his nasally voice and his Grateful Dead T-shirts and the hilarious way he had of saying “Byzantium.” He wanted to tell her that he often wondered whether he’d rushed too quickly to embrace the no-strings-attached spirit of college. What if he’d already had the perfect relationship and had stupidly pissed all over it?

Now, here it was, the book she’d given him just a couple of weeks before he’d broken her heart. His dad was pushing him to do premed, but he wanted to be a journalist, and so she’d bought him The Elements of Style, the writer’s standby.

He flipped it open to the first page and read the inscription:

J

Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t be what you want to be. You got this.

xxoo

Sammy

John glanced up, and Juan was staring at him, hand shoved deep into the Cheetos bag.

“What?” John asked.

“You wanna order a pizza?”

“No,” John said quickly, glancing back to the book.

Before he could stop himself, he grabbed his phone and headed to the balcony where both reception—and privacy—were better.

I watched in dread—it was too late for me to do anything. I could see how he was hoping she would give him a second chance.

And I had the most horrible hunch that she would.