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“And she’s still this angry?” I asked incredulously. My eyes narrowed. “Were you still, umm…”
Brody turned over his pillow bitterly. It was slashed too. “Was I still what?”
“Hooking up with her?”
The words left my mouth reluctantly. As painful as it was, I had to know.
“Shit no,” Brody spat.
“Because maybe, you know, if you were leading her on…” I continued. “Gave her reason to think you two might get back together…”
It was another thing guys did: see you after the breakup. Sleep with you after the breakup, when you were lonely and vulnerable and looking for any reason to get your foot back in the door of your past relationship.
“Not even a little bit,” Brody said.
“He’s telling the truth,” Sayid offered, coming to his roommate’s defense. “Brody’s been avoiding her like the plague. We’ve all been, really, but he’ll basically leave the apartment whenever she comes home.”
The look of pure disgust on Brody’s face told me it was the truth. I began helping him pick up his room.
“Ask Darren if you need to,” Sayid added. “He’ll vouch.”
We grabbed the garbage, and the three of us went about righting whatever we could. Sayid explained how he and their third roommate had come home earlier to find Andrea going berserk, breaking his room apart. It took the two of them to drag her out, but by then the damage had mostly been done.
“She saw the… photo,” Sayid said meekly. “And she went nuts.”
I followed his gaze, to where a dozen pieces of a photograph lay shredded next to a broken glass frame. Even torn to shreds I recognized it: the photo of Brody and I together, on our first date.
“You put up that picture of us?” I asked, my heart melting a little. “And this is what happened?”
Brody nodded.
“Then call the police,” I said, suddenly more pissed than ever. “Get her arrested, or at least thrown out of here.”
“No,” he shook his head glumly. “No, I’m not calling the police.”
“This is bullshit, Brody,” I told him. “An ex-girlfriend from nine months ago? You don’t need to stand for this.”
“How did she get in here?” Brody asked his roommate. “What made her break into my bedroom, anyway?”
“I don’t know man, she’s psycho.” Sayid shrugged. “Like I said, we weren’t here. Maybe you left the door unlocked?”
Unfortunately, the room was a total loss. The only thing left unshredded was a single picture of Brody and his grandmother, a smiling blue-haired woman with her arm draped happily around her grandson. I recognized her immediately from some of the other pictures he’d shown me on his phone.
But down at my feet…
“What’s this?”
I was holding another photo, this one torn jaggedly in two. On one side was Brody, grinning from behind a pair of sunglasses. On the other, a raven-haired girl with wild eyes and dark, curly hair.
“This is her, isn’t it?” I asked, holding up the Andrea side of the photo.
Brody was in the kitchen at the time, getting another garbage bag. But Sayid looked up and nodded. “Yes.”
Wordlessly, I shoved the photo into my pocket.
It took another thirty minutes to put everything back the way it was. Or rather, whatever wasn’t broken. The bed was the worst part. It was a complete and total loss.
“Looks like it’s the floor for a while,” Brody frowned. “Or I could stay with grandma in Bayside for a bit. School’s done, so—”
