Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios
FOR ZACH: HUSBAND, HAPPY ENDING, AND MENDER OF BROKEN HEARTS (TSATMAEO)
I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
I want your love
—LADY GAGA
JUNIOR YEAR
ONE
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.
That’s how long it takes me to start falling out of love with you. One year. Our own season of love. You do know which musical I’m referring to, right, Gavin? Because there’s no way you can be my boyfriend and not know that of course, of course, I would bring Rent into this. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes of your lips on mine and whispering in the dark and you picking me up and spinning me around and taking my virginity and fucking with my head and telling me I’m worthless, worthless, worthless.
If I were writing a musical about us, I wouldn’t start where we’re at right now, at the end. I would want the audience to really get how I was able to fall for you hook, line, and sinker. Girls don’t fall in love with manipulative assholes who treat them like shit and make them seriously question their life choices. They fall in love with manipulative assholes (who treat them like shit and make them seriously question their life choices) who they think are knights in shining armor. You rode in on your fucking white horse, aka 1969 Mustang, and I was all like, My hero! But I am so tired of being a damsel in distress. In my next life, I’m going to be an ass-kicking ninja warrior queen. And I will hunt shits like you down. Throw your ass in a dungeon and drop the key in my moat and my lady knights will be all, Huzzah! and I will sit on my throne like, Yes.
But I can’t daydream too much about my next life because I have to deal with you in this life. Before I break up with you, I want to reflect. I want to go back through us piece by piece. I want to remember why I was so ooey-gooey crazy in love with you. I want to know why it’s taken me this long to figure out that you’re poison.
So, I’m gonna Sound of Music this shit: Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start …
There I am, downstage right, finishing my breakfast at the dining room table. It’s my junior year. Winter. A Tuesday, which is better than Monday but not nearly as good as Wednesday. We aren’t together yet, Gav, but, as my lusciously crass best friend Alyssa says, I am so hard for you. I’ve just finished my peanut butter toast and I’m thinking about how yesterday I saw you eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and wanted to lick the chocolate off your lips. Because that would be the most amazing kiss—Gavin Davis tasting like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. YES. You are my super happy place and I am there, la la la, trying to ignore my stepfather (who shall hereafter be known as The Giant). He’s pounding around in the kitchen and muttering under his breath, and I know he wants me to be all, What’s wrong?, but I’m not going to because he is an absolute fuck nut (that’s an Alyssa expression, too—she’s very linguistically creative) and nobody should have to deal with absolute fuck nuts without caffeine.
The Giant is displeased.
“Where the hell’s my lunch?” he growls, louder now, as he paws through the refrigerator.
Today is the day that will change my life. But I don’t know that, of course. I have no idea what’s in store for me. What you, Gavin, have in store for me. All I know is that The Giant is ruining my Gavin daydreaming buzz and I really want some of that coffee in the pot, but I’m not allowed because they said so. Everything is Because we said so.
The Giant slams his lunch pail on the counter and opens it. It is only then that I remember what I’d forgotten to do last night before I went to bed.
I close my eyes and wish I had a Greek chorus to shake their fists at the sky for me (Oh, woe! Woe!) because this slight infraction could result in me losing my whole weekend.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I forgot to make it.”
My head hangs in shame. I am the picture of Contrite and Subservient Female because this is what The Giant needs to see at all times. But that’s on the outside.
On the inside, which The Giant can’t get to no matter how hard he tries: screw you, make your own damn lunch, and while you’re at it, clean your own car and do your own laundry, especially your boxers, and can I please stop having to clean your bathroom, because your stray pubic hairs make me nauseous?
I play this role of the beaten-down, cowed girl because I’m scared. Terrified, really. What little freedom I have is like a delicate piece of blown glass. The slightest push can make it shatter into a thousand million pieces. It wasn’t always like this. Before my mom married The Giant, there was laughter in our house, random dance parties, adventures. Not anymore. I live in a kingdom ruled by a tyrant bent on my destruction.
The Giant curses under his breath and I want to be like, It won’t kill you to make your own fucking sandwich. Seriously. Bread, turkey, mustard, Swiss: boom—you have a sandwich. Christ.
I hear a door open down the hall and then Mom is coming in with her own version of Contrite and Subservient Female on her face. My mom thinks invisible dirt is real, that disasters are around every corner. She thinks the Grim Reaper hides in the cracks between tiles, on top of baseboards, in the toilet bowl. She is unwell.
“What’s going on?” she asks, looking from me to The Giant. Her lips pull down as she glances at me, like I’m already a disappointment and it’s not even eight in the morning.
“Your daughter didn’t make my lunch again and so I’ll have to waste money today on getting lunch out again, that’s what’s going on.” He looks at me and I can almost hear the thought in his head: You aren’t my child—I wish you would get the hell out of my house forever.
“You better not be expecting to go to the movies on Friday with Natalie and Alyssa,” he adds.
Big surprise. Let me guess: babysitting.
Don’t get me wrong: even though Sam is half Giant, I love him to death. It’s pretty hard to hate on a three-year-old. It’s not his fault The Giant’s his dad just as much as it’s not my fault my dad is a former/possibly current cokehead who lives in another state and forgets my birthday every year.