When I walked up to the car, I didn’t even see Lissa at first. She was balled up in the backseat, clutching a wad of those brown school-restaurant-public-bathroom kind of paper towels. Her face was red and tear streaked, and she was sobbing.

“What the hell happened?” I asked, yanking open the back door and sliding in beside her.

“Adam b-b-broke up with m-m-me,” she said, her voice gulping in air. “He just d-d-dumped me.”

“Oh, my God,” I said as Chloe climbed in the front seat, slamming the door behind her. Jess, already turned around facing us, looked at me and shook her head.

“When?”

Lissa took in another breath, then burst into tears again. “I can’t,” she mumbled, wiping her face with a paper towel. “I can’t e-e-ven-”

“Tonight, when she picked him up from work,” Chloe said to me. “She took him back to his house so he could take a shower and he did it there. No warning. Nothing.”

“I had to walk p-p-past his p-p-parents, ” Lissa added, sniffling. “And they knew. They looked at me like I was a kicked d-d-dog.”

“What did he say?” I asked her.

“He told her,” Chloe said, clearly in her spokesperson role, “that he needed his freedom because it was summer and high school was over and he didn’t want either of them to miss any opportunities in college. He wanted to make sure that they-”

“M-m-made the most of our lives,” Lissa finished, wiping her eyes.

“Jerk,” Jess grumbled. “You’re better off.”

“I l-l-love him!” Lissa wailed, and I reached over, sliding my arm around her.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“And I had no idea,” she said, taking in a deep breath, which shuddered out, all bumpy, as she tossed aside the paper towel she was holding, letting it fall to the floor. “How could I not even have known?”

“Lissa, you’ll be okay,” Chloe told her, her voice soft.

“It’s like I’m Jonathan,” she sobbed, leaning into me. “We were just living our lives, picking up the dry cleaning-”

“What?” Jess said.

“… unaware,” Lissa finished, “that t-t-tonight we’d be d-d-dumped. ”

“Speaking of,” Chloe said to me, “how’d that go?”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

Lissa was full-out crying now, her face buried in my shoulder. Over Chloe’s head I could see Bendo was fully packed, with a line out the door. “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Jess, and she nodded. “This night has sucked anyway.”

Chloe dropped down into the front passenger seat, punching in the car lighter as Jess cranked the engine. Lissa blew her nose in the paper towel I handed her, then settled into small, quick sobs, curling against me. As we pulled out I patted her head, knowing how much it had to hurt. There is nothing so bad as the first time.

Of course we had to have another round of Zip Drinks. Then Chloe left, and Jess pulled back out into traffic to take me and Lissa to my house.

We were almost to the turnoff to my neighborhood when Jess suddenly slowed down and said, very quietly, to me, “There’s Adam.”

I cut my eyes to the left, and sure enough, Adam and his friends were standing around in the parking lot in front of the Coffee Shack. What really bugged me was that he was smiling. Jerk.

I glanced behind me, but Lissa had her eyes closed, stretched out across the backseat, listening to the radio.

“Pull in,” I said to Jess. I turned around in my seat. “Hey Liss?”

“Hmmm?” she said.

“Be still, okay? Stay down.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

We chugged along. Jess said, “You or me?”

“Me,” I told her, taking a last sip of my drink. “I need this tonight.”

Jess pushed the gas a little harder.

“You ready?” she asked me.

I nodded, my Zip Diet balanced in my hand. Perfect.

Jess gunned it, hard, and we were moving. By the time Adam looked over at us, it was too late.

It wasn’t my best. But it wasn’t bad either. As we whizzed by, the cup turned end over end in the air, seeming weightless. It hit him square in the back of the head, spilling Diet Coke and ice in a wave down his back.

“Goddammit!” he yelled after us as we blew past. “Lissa! Dammit! Remy! You bitch!”

He was still yelling when I lost sight of him.

After a sleeve and a half of Oreos, four cigarettes, and enough Kleenex to pad the world, I finally got Lissa to go to sleep. She was out instantly, breathing through her nose, legs tangled around my comforter.

I got a blanket, one pillow, and went into my closet, where I stretched out across the floor. I could see her from where I was, and made sure she was still sleeping soundly as I pushed aside the stack of shoe boxes I kept in the far right corner and pulled out the bundle I kept there, hidden away.

I’d had such a bad night. I didn’t do this all the time, but some nights I just needed it. Nobody knew.

I curled up, pulling the blanket over me, and opened the folded towel, taking out my portable CD player and headphones. Then I slipped them on, turned off the light, and skipped to track seven. There was a skylight in my closet, and if I lay just right, the moonlight fell in a square right across me. Sometimes I could even see stars.

The song starts slowly. A bit of guitar, just a few chords. Then a voice, one I knew so well. The words I knew by heart. They did mean something to me. Nobody had to know. But they did.