Page 2 of The Breakup Artists

“The truth is, when I first got here, I hated it. I couldn’t wait to leave.” I give her a sad smile. “Then... I met you. And you were such a great friend. You made me feel so welcome.”

Now she sighs, a big dreamy one that lets me know I’m having the desired effect, that I can do this without hurting her feelings. “Fate,” she says. “The way we’d always randomly bump into each other.”

I nod.

“But now you’re leaving?” she asks.

I shove my hands in my pockets, studying my Chucks. “The call my mom was waiting for came last night. She got the job. Teaching in Indonesia. I’ll be doing my senior year there...” I break off my sentence.

“Oh no,” she says and hugs me.

I nod against her hair.

“How long do you have?”

“We leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!?” she says and steps back.

I make eye contact, letting her see my regret.

She exhales a long audible breath. “Okay. Okay,” she says, clearly trying to process it all, emotions flitting across her face. Sadness. Disappointment. Upset. Then... Determination. Happiness. Excitement. “That gives us tonight. We’ll just have to make it the best last night possible. And besides, we’ll keep in touch, right? I mean, it’s Indonesia, not Mars.”

The corners of my mouth pull up with her enthusiasm. “The internet is shoddy where she’ll be teaching. But I’ll do my best.” I open my mouth but close it again, giving her a small smile.

“What?” she asks. “What were you going to say?”

“I was just thinking what an amazing girl you are,” I reply, wanting to tell her all the things people often hold back from each other. There’s no acting here. I mean every word. “And how lucky I am that I got to spend these past few weeks with you.”

Her face lights up. She leans her head back and beams, her curls falling behind her shoulders. “Even the air smells different when you’re happy.”

Ismile, too. A job well done. In short, Valentine and I have a system that works. Every. Single. Time. Or at least it did, before I met Ella.

1

august

(a ridiculous name i blame my mom for)

Summer break—two of the best words in the English language—promising lazy days on the beach, waffle cones at Tony’s Surf Shack, and burritoing myself in my blanket until noon. The welcome end of senior year also means that Valentine (I call her Tiny) and I are back in business after officially removing the “be back soon” sign from the front page of our website. It only took forty-eight hours for the whisper network (as Tiny calls it) to realize we’d returned, it took five hours of interviewing worried parents and best friends to choose our first case, and it’ll take just three weeks of digging around in other people’s lives to complete it.

Tiny kicks off her flip-flops on the dock that connects our backyards and sits down next to me, letting her feet dangle above the calm water. Lights appear on her porch in preparation for evening and crickets hum in the brush. Illuminated, Tiny’s large house dominates our small inlet. In comparison, my family’s small Victorian with the peeling paint looks like an unkempt garage.

She opens the notebook she’s holding and pushes a stray piece of straight brown hair behind her ear. Her expression is smug. “Guess who just got off the phone with Katie’s best friends?” She wags her eyebrows at me. “Me, that’s who. They were gushing about us, August. GUSH-ING. They said she’s happier than they’ve ever seen her, that she’s excited about college again, that she actually started talking to her parents over dinner like she used to. They said they’re writing us a rave review.”

In our small harborside town in Massachusetts, summer jobs are easy pickings. Rich vacationers from Boston and New York flood rental properties with luggage piled high in convertibles, cash in hand, and the local businesses can’t hire fast enough. But Tiny and I aren’t applying at one of the waterfront restaurants. We aren’t trying to be lifeguards or gathering references to work on one of the yachts in the harbor. In fact, no one in our town knows what we do. Our friends think we’ve had some elusive intern job with Tiny’s dad’s music production company in Boston for the past year and a half. And our families think we work for a catering company. But really, we break people up for a living through a business with the cheesiest name imaginable—Summer Love Inc. —a combination of our names, August and Valentine.

Tiny (the creator) loves the name, and she loves love. She believes that we’re speeding people along on their path to finding their soulmates, steering relationships off a cliff so they can find better matches down the road. But me? I like the Inc.—a clinical suffix for a company that exposes relationships for what they really are so people can heal. And well, this job is personal, a service I wish had existed for my sister.

“Good,” I reply. It’s nice to know we helped Katie, the kind of nice that lifts your chin and bolsters your step. I smile at the water, the small ripples catching the last of the evening light and transforming it into a moving canvas. Without meaning to, I sketch a fast line drawing on it in my thoughts—a weird reflex that I thought had gone away.

Tiny laughs. “Will you stop being emo for five minutes and focus? I have some golden info here on our new case and I need you to appreciate my genius.”

I turn away from the water, my imaginary drawing dissolving into ripples, and I look at her. Her white T-shirt falls low on one shoulder, exposing the top of her bathing suit, and she wears a grin—all enthusiasm. I told her recently (in the middle of an optimistic rant about how she’d survive the zombie apocalypseandcreate a better world) that in her past life she was a Christmas tree or Fourth of July fireworks, something celebratory and neon and way over the top. To which she replied that inmylast life I was Oscar the Grouch, only I made art out of found objects.

“Our new case,” I repeat.

“Exactly. So excited to be back at it. All that time off for finals felt like a lifetime and a half,” Tiny says, not needing me to say more than three words to understand me—she’s been translating my nonspeak since we were toddlers. “How ready are you to swoop in, expose some crapjock boyfriend, and then cry about having to go back to Canada and return to your job shearing sheep nuts?”