Okay.
First of all, major drama here. We were attacked by insane snowballers. But that story has got to wait. I have to tell you something else.
Something has been bothering me, and I have to tell you about it or I’m going to go nuts. I don’t want to be that girlfriend who complains, but …
I know you’re busy, and I know it’s hard, but I really feel like we have to try to talk more. Actually talk on the phone. I love the sound of your voice, and I need more of it. We’re both busy, and I just feel like we both have to try harder to make contact.
I was thinking that maybe I can get frequent-flyer miles from my dad for my birthday and come out to Portland or something. Or you could come here. It’s in mid-March, so maybe for spring break? I definitely want to be there for the mold season.
Anyway, can you please call me when you get this, and I’ll call you right back?
Love,
Nina
The phone rang the next afternoon while Nina was halfheartedly working her way through a calculus problem. It was the Steve ring. She snatched it up.
“Hey!” she said. “I’ll call you right back.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. There was a strange tone in his voice.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Listen,” he said, dragging the word along. And then he didn’t say anything.
“Listening,” Nina said.
“We have to talk.”
“Okay.”
“There’s something …” He exhaled loudly.
“Something?”
“Something’s come up. There’s a … Something’s happened.”
“What?” Nina said worriedly. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, it’s …”
In that second Nina knew that this thing was about her—and it was something she wouldn’t like. As evil as this made her feel, she was kind of hoping he was about to say something like, “My mom has cancer.” Something outside of them.
“I know this is a bad time to be doing this,” he said. “I know this makes me the biggest dick in the universe ….”
Nina reached out and touched the colorful edges of the Post-its that popped out of the side of a nearby stack of books. She took a deep breath, but she couldn’t hold it.
Another loud exhale.
“I’ve kind of started seeing someone here,” he said. “Her name is Diane. She’s in Earth Share with me.”
Dead air for a good thirty seconds. Nina concentrated on the Post-its. They looked like tails of little tropical fishes hiding themselves in a reef.
“She kind of reminds me of you,” Steve said. He sounded a little desperate. “She kind of wears her hair the same way.”
“Don’t tell me this,” Nina said.
“Okay.”
He had to have something to add. He couldn’t just be calling her to tell her this—as awful as this was.
“Steve …” she said, her voice trembling a little.
“I still care about you so much. It was just hard being so far apart, you know?”
He was calling to tell her this. Just this. She sank down to the floor and sat with her legs apart, like a dropped rag doll.
“I managed,” she said.
Her voice was hard now. She couldn’t disguise it even if she wanted to. She felt herself trembling and steadied herself by taking a deep breath from her abdomen.
“So what are we going to do?” she said. “What does this mean?”
“I guess … I guess we’re breaking up.”
The conversation ended shortly after that. Nina couldn’t even remember what she said. It wasn’t angry. It was vague, a baffled and hasty goodbye.
Immediately after hanging up, she knew she had to call him back. She had to pin him down and make him talk because he would see that this made no sense, that it couldn’t be real. This Diane with the kind of similar hair was not who he wanted. This was just a phase, a little problem, and they could work it out.
His phone was busy. It was still busy five minutes later. And an hour after that.
Nina didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t even put on her pajamas. She sat on the floor and thought about the fact that nothing changes when the boyfriend who was never there suddenly goes away. It wasn’t like she had to go out of her way to avoid him or distance herself to forget him. She had all the distance she’d ever need.
She opened up her windows and let the freezing air come into her warm room until she couldn’t stop shivering. There was a dull pain in her head that she suspected would never leave her.
The next morning, her eyes red and puffy from the all-nighter, Nina got in her car and drove over to her hair salon on Broadway. They managed to find her an empty space in the schedule and took her right back. She yanked out the bands that held up her Princess Leias. Her hair sprang out on either side of her head in two slowly unfurling corkscrews.
“What are we doing here today?” the stylist asked, coming over and taking the curls in her hands.
“Cut it,” Nina said. “Change everything.”