Audrey, Wait! (Thorndike Press Large Print The Literacy Bridge) - Hardcover

The day I broke up with my boyfriend Evan was the day he wrote the song. You know, the song. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Maybe you danced to it at prom or sang it in your car on a Friday night when you were driving and feeling like you must be inhuman to be this happy, the windows down and nothing but air around you. Your mom has probably hummed it while cleaning the dryer’s lint trap, and your grandpa has most likely whistled a couple bars. If he’s the whistling type.

According to the poll on the front page of USA Today, sixty-three percent of Americans blame me for the breakup, so let me clear the air right now: they’re right. Sixty-three percent of Americans are no fools when it comes to knowing about my love life, which is really creepy and isn’t helping me sleep well. But it’s true: I broke up with Evan, and eight hours later, he had a song in his head and a guitar in his hand and it snowballed from there.

It took me forever to decide whether or not to break up with him, I can tell you that. It wasn’t like I just woke up one morning and was like, “Hey, let’s liven things up!” Please. I have enough on my plate without all this. I’m a junior, for God’s sakes! It’s not like I have to take the SATs this year or anything. But I had been thinking about it—breaking up—for a while.

“Make a list,” Victoria had said. She’s big on lists and has a folder full of them. They have titles like “Six Colors to Dye My Hair Before I Shrivel Up and Die” and “Five People to Banish From the Face of the Earth” (Evan, according to her, is now número uno). So the day I did it, I sat at Victoria’s kitchen table and wrote down the reasons why I should stay with Evan.

1. He’s a singer/songwriter with a band and actual talent.
2. He has excellent oral hygiene (that one is so important, I can’t even tell you. I can’t imagine ever kissing a non-flosser. So gross.).
3. He says he’s going to write a song about me.

And then I wrote the cons:

1. He smokes too much pot.
2. He’s always “practicing” or “gigging” with his band, the Do-Gooders, especially when I need him.
3. He says “gigging.”
4. He’s mellow about everything. Everything.
5. He makes me be the one to get condoms from the school nurse’s office.
6. He sucks his teeth after he eats, which makes horrible squeaking sounds, like a mouse dying.

And so on. I wrote so many cons that I needed a new piece of paper, and by the time Victoria saw me start a fresh page, she took it away and shook her head. “Audrey,” she told me, “save a tree.”

* * *

“Well, can we still be . . . I don’t know, friends? Or something lame like that?” Evan had been cross-legged on his bed when I broke up with him. I was on the opposite side of the room in his desk chair, sitting backwards. We were both crying, but he was the only one who needed tissues. Still, we passed the box back and forth.

“Friends would be great,” I said, and relief flooded through me. Friends were fantastic, friends were not angry at each other and wouldn’t reveal sexual secrets about each other in locker rooms. Friends still talked. Friends drifted apart. “I’d really like being friends.”

He fell on his bed for a minute before sitting back up. “Steve finally got the A&R guy to come to a show of ours. He set up a one-off tonight. You’re really killing my vibe.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I really did.

“Will you still come?”

“If you want me to, sure.” Anything to make this conversation end, I thought.

Evan nodded and hugged his guitar tighter to him, and I have to admit that in the eleven months we were together, that guitar practically got more action than I did. (Reason number fourteen on the list of cons, by the way.) “You sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m sure.”

We didn’t talk for a few minutes, and then I got up and said, “I’m going now.” When he didn’t respond, I left the room and was halfway downstairs before I heard him say, “Audrey, wait!” But I kept going, pretending I didn’t hear him calling for me.

* * *

That night, I enlisted Victoria and her boyfriend, Jonah, to come with me to the show for moral support. “Like I wasn’t already going?” Victoria said when I asked her. “I’ve already gotten about fifty million texts and thirty million MySpace bulletins about it. And besides,” she added, “I want details.”

During the drive over to the Jukebox in Jonah’s car (he has an awesome sound system with a subwoofer), she made me recount the breakup word for word, with Jonah wincing every few minutes. “Harsh, man,” he kept saying. “That is so harsh.” Victoria finally whacked him on the shoulder. “Can you please be more sensitive to Audrey’s situation?” she hissed.

“Sorry, Aud.” Jonah smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “Sensitivity controls now engaged.”

“And could you not sound like a dork when you do it?”

“It’s one or the other, babe.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jonah,” I told him. “It’s all good.”

Victoria just shook her head and hung over the backseat. “Either way,” she said, “I cannot believe you agreed to go tonight.”

* * *

Half an hour later, packed like sardines inside the Jukebox, we were still talking about it. “Did Evan actually say ‘kill his vibe’?” Victoria asked. By now, she was on her third Diet Coke and I could see the caffeine starting to shoot out of her eyes.

I crossed my arms in front of me and stood by the side of the stage, hoping the Do-Gooders would hurry up and play so we could go home and skip the traffic. “Those words exactly,” I told her. “Plus some other choice phrases.”

“What? Like, ‘Fuck you’?”

“No, more like, ‘How could you do this to me?’ ‘I thought we were gonna be together forever.’ That kind of stuff.” I stirred my melted ice with my straw.

Victoria rolled her eyes in solidarity. “Please. He must be a closet romance novel reader. I’m surprised he didn’t break out a lute and try to woo you.”

“If he had done that, I would’ve been more interested.” I took her drink from her and set it down. “You’re making me nervous with all the addictive stimulants. Don’t you know that NutraSweet can give you cancer?”

“So can sunlight.” She took her drink back and made a big deal out of slurping the rest with her straw. “I hope Jonah’s getting me another one of these.”

“I hope he’s also getting you a side of tranquilizers.” I looked over my shoulder and saw a third of our class standing behind us. No one seemed too interested in me. Yet. “Do you think people know we broke up?”

“Have you told anyone besides me and Jonah?”

“Nope. But Evan might have.”

“You’ve totally ruined the pool that people had going for Cutest Couple in the yearbook, by the way. Not to guilt you out or anything.”

“What?”

“Not me, I mean. I saw this one coming a long time ago. But people were laying two-to-one odds that you and Evan would be cutest couple.”

“People are betting on yearbook superlatives? Really?”

Victoria nodded. “Now the smart money’s on Dan Milne and Janie Couper. She’s worse than static cling.”

I was about to comment on Janie Couper’s static-clinginess, but just then I saw Sharon Eggleston across the room. Even if you’ve never met Sharon, you know her. Every school, I’m sorry to say, has a girl like her. She’s pretty or hot or whatever word you want to use, and she has this weird ability to make every guy worship her.

Every guy, that is, except Evan.

At least, that was the scuttlebutt (PSAT word) when Evan and I first hooked up. Sharon had apparently set her sights on him, he set his sights on me, I set my sights right back on him, we got together, and Sharon found herself on the outs before she was even on the ins. As you can imagine, she wasn’t thrilled. Even to this day, she still shows up to all the shows and smiles at Evan in the halls and generally is an annoying little gnat. And when I saw her across the room at the show that night, she smiled and did that little wave thing that showed off her French-manicured silk tips.

“What are you looking at?” Victoria asked, craning her neck to see, but luckily Jonah elbowed his way back to Victoria and me with her Diet Coke and my cranberry juice with lime. “See, now, Evan wouldn’t have done this,” Victoria pointed out as she took her drink. “He wouldn’t have noticed that you were even thirsty, much less that I was. I mean, you could both be walking in the goddamn Sahara desert and you’d be dying of thirst and he’d be like, ‘Hey, Aud, I’ve got this killer idea for a song.’ Totally useless.”

I swirled my ice with the straw. “Evan used ‘killer’ last year. This year, everything’s ‘fool-ass.’”

“Okay. Audrey? Let me introduce you to something called The Point. You are missing it.”

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