1.2 | Breakup Formula | ONGOING

06 | balance

0 6

b a l a n c e

As the days went by, my friendship with Eloise progressed. So when she came to me one afternoon, asking me to reserve the corner booth so she could meet up with her ex, I did it no questions asked.

"Declan knows about this," she explained, that afternoon, "But he figured it would make things a lot less awkward if he didn't tag along."

"Are you sure you've forgiven Parker?" I asked, surveying her with an air of suspicion.

"Of course," she replied, without missing a beat. "But it's hard to forget him. And some wounds will always hurt."

I knew exactly what she was talking about. Empathy this time, not sympathy. Some memories and pain never seemed to fade, no matter how much time had passed.

So I watched out for Eloise that afternoon, when Parker came and sat opposite her in the corner booth. His expression was contrite, he seemed like he was honestly sorry. And Eloise was both pleasant and cordial, and things were going well.

Until Joey finished his inventory check and came to the front of the diner. Whereupon he spotted Eloise and Parker and immediately went berserk. "What the hell is he doing here?" he hissed angrily, heading straight for them, and I hastily pulled him back.

"No need to get yourself all worked up. Parker's just here to apologise. He's terribly sorry about everything."

"Oh, trust me," Joey said grimly, as he tried to disentangle my fingers from the hem of his shirt. "He will be sorry."

"Stop acting like an idiot," I snapped, and turned him so that he was no longer looking at Eloise and Parker. "And listen to me. You have no business interfering with this. Even Declan's not bothered by it - well, he is, but he trusts Eloise to settle it on her own - and you should too."

"What if he hurts her again?" And Joey sounded a little too vulnerable at that. It was the kind of tone that came only from a person who had been hurt once before and couldn't stand the thought of anyone else going through the same thing.

"That's a risk everyone has to take," I replied, matter-of-factly, "When you trust someone, there's always a risk you need to take. They might hurt you, they might backstab you, but you go ahead and trust them anyway."

The words were barely out of my mouth when I realised how duplicitous I sounded, telling Joey one thing while doing the other. I was like a balloon, full of hot air. Once pricked, the air fizzled out of me and I was nothing but a shell. An empty, pricked shell with not a single ounce of courage left.

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But here was the funny thing about life - it often threw curveballs at you. And with each curveball, life gave you a dozen and one opportunities: To be strong. To be patient. To be brave. So that night, when he threw little pebbles at my window, I obligingly opened the latch and pushed the window open. Joey was standing in the garden - he'd probably climbed over the fence as he usually did.

I noticed a box in his arms, a familiar label glossing the top and frowned. "What do you want?"

"But, soft!" he began, exaggeratedly. "What light through yonder window breaks - "

"Oh, shut up," I snapped, before heading downstairs. My mother wasn't home from work yet and I pulled Joey into my room. "You'd better have a good reason for coming over so late at night."

"Oh, come on, it's part of the breakup formula," he said, dismissively, before settling down on my bed. "I've done this with Fiona before."

"Yes, but doing the same thing with a different person makes a world of difference." I felt him push my legs aside so that he could have a little more space, and setting the bottles of beer in between us. My nose automatically wrinkled with distaste. "You know I don't drink."

"Oh, come on, live a little," and he slanted me a gaze that looked positively challenging.

Never being one to turn down a challenge, I sat up and grabbed one of the bottles. "Kindly tell me why we're drinking at ten in the night?"

Joey didn't answer. Instead, he continued to chug the beer with a strange desperation that made me frown.

I carefully shifted closer to him. "What's wrong?"

He sighed and leaned back, against the wall. His eyes fluttered shut for a brief moment, but when he opened his eyes, I knew exactly what had went wrong. It was a look he'd given me several times in the past. It definitely had something to do with Fiona again. On all other occasions, Joey was ridiculously carefree and cheerful. But when it came to relationships or his family problems, he always seemed lost. So lost, in fact, that I wished I could navigate him through it.

But I hadn't a map or a compass, so I couldn't. This wasn't heading down the usual cliché route and I couldn't say that I just understood him, and neither did he get me. There were so many things we didn't know about each other. This was just one of them.

So, instead of rationally evaluating the situation like I normally would have, I pushed my bottle towards him too. "Here," I said, softly, when he gazed at me in surprise, and repeated what he'd said earlier to me. "Bottoms up."

In retrospect, getting Joey to drink wasn't the best idea. It never was. Things took a turn for the more emotional when he began to talk about Fiona. There was something incredibly raw and brutal about his honesty when he was drunk. And so, it came to me as no surprise when he reaffirmed the suspicions I harboured once, a long time ago.

"Remember how I told you that Fiona broke up for me with no reason?" he said at last and when I glanced over at him, I noticed that his eyelids were droopy with sleep and his voice was slurred. "Well, here's what really happened."

I held my breath and waited.

"Fiona broke up with me for a reason," Joey continued, and I could feel his warm breath against my collarbone, since he had moved to sit beside me awhile ago. "The day of our breakup, she told me the reason why. I'd broken several of her friends' hearts before, you see, and she'd made an agreement with them that she could date me and then break up with me."

His words took a good five seconds to register in my head, and when I finally did, I was struck by the sheer absurdity and heartlessness of Fiona's plan. Granted, Joey was an arse to break girls' hearts, but she'd broken his too, on purpose.

Perhaps I was blindsided in this matter, because I wasn't one of Fiona's friends. And if I were, I supposed I would've been supportive in her quest for revenge and thought that Joey deserved it.

And there I was thinking these sort of things only happened in fiction. But in fiction, I failed to consider the aftermath of revenge. Just because a boy was insensitive didn't mean he didn't have feelings as well. Just because a boy could break hearts didn't mean he couldn't have his broken as well. And a broken heart was a broken heart. Nothing more, nothing less.

And, as the person who had to clean up the mess she'd made, I was appalled by what she'd done. "Were you mad when you found out?" I asked, carefully.

He shrugged, and seemed to struggle through with his next words. "I was too stunned to be mad," he admitted, his voice muffled through his drunken haze. "It was like - like I wanted to believe she wouldn't do something like that, and so I kept convincing myself that she'd broken up with me for another reason altogether."

"You're better off without her," I murmured, "Trust me."

He looked at me for a long moment, before laying his head down on the other pillow so that our faces were levelled. "You know something?"

"What?"

He pulled me close, so that my forehead was pressed against his, the tips of our noses touching. And when he spoke, his voice was barely audible. "I think you're my breakup formula."