Beautiful Breakup
BEAUTIFUL BREAKUP – October 4, 2025 – Waco, Texas, USA
If she was the flirty type, Susannah Rivera could have had infinite dates. She was sweet and interesting, with attractively symmetric features, dark wavy hair, and a petite build. But her quietly reserved personality kept her mostly worried about her engineering classes at Baylor University. She occasionally agreed to go out with people, but did not have time to chase or obsess over boys. She left that kind of thing to girls with easier majors.
Susannah was most definitely not looking for a date when she sat next to Drake on a bus headed to campus. Yet there was something mesmerizing about him. He spent the entire twenty minute ride in conversation. He made her laugh and wanted to know everything about her, like why she was holding a textbook on her lap.
“I’m supposed to be reading for a class. Statistics for engineers.”
“Oh, I knew you were smart,” Drake replied with a smile that showed off his bright white teeth. “Math isn’t my thing. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out my thing.”
Susannah smiled back. He was easy to look at, with his clear mocha skin and hazel eyes. When he asked her to meet him for a movie at a classic film screening, she said yes as if under a spell.
Thirty-six hours later, she greeted Drake outside an on-campus auditorium equipped with a film movie projector. He wore a fedora hat, white tank top, and ultra-wide bell bottom polyester pants. He looked to be playing a character in an old-time movie, although Susannah was not sure which character it was. She did know he was trying hard to look different.
Drake knew people waiting outside the auditorium. They gathered in a pack and then followed him inside, choosing seats that surrounded him and Susannah. The hangers-on talked about things like painting checkerboard designs on their fingernails. One of the girls next to Drake was auditioning for the play, Othello. She recited her lines and Drake knew enough of the dialogue to be a useful practice partner. Behind Susannah, two other girls recorded each other inventing dances for social media posts. Susannah was glad when the classic movie started and everyone sat down and stayed relatively quiet.
           The black and white movie was Citizen Kane. Susannah had never seen it but Drake assured her it was the most classic of all classic films. When it was over, they walked away from the auditorium and Drake talked about what he was feeling at the moment.
“What character did you resonate with?” he asked Susannah.
“Resonate with? Uh, well maybe Emily.”
Drake chuckled and said, “Emily. Yes, I guess that’s right. And you must already know I’m drawn to Charles Kane.”
When they were done walking and ready to part ways, Drake tipped his hat to Susannah and asked, “May I call on you again?” It was goofy and charming and he looked very handsome in the glow of an overhead light.
“Yes, you may call on me again,” she said with a crooked grin.
For their second date, they rode in a minivan to what Drake called a bonfire poetry slam in a plowed field. A stack of wooden pallets burned while amateur poets screamed verses into the night sky. A few people rapped with the assistance of a boombox. An audience of fifty people cheered the poets and the fire while enjoying smores and Frito Pie made with homemade chili. Susannah loved the chili but concluded the bonfire was one of the strangest things she had ever experienced.
Drake dressed in a baggy suit he must have bought at a thrift store. A can opener hung from a chain around his neck. Susannah did not ask him why. When he was not sharing poems next to the fire, he was very attentive and introduced her to everyone in the crowd.
“She’s a genius,” he said freely and Susannah blushed in response.
“May I hold your hand?” he asked in mock formality.
“Yes, you may,” Susannah replied in a matching tone.
He admired the complex lines on her palm and her slender fingers. His hand was soft and warm. He was weird and sweet and had the most amazing white teeth. By the end of the night, he told his friends he was smitten with and “courting” Susannah.
           About the time she first caught Drake’s eye, Susannah switched where she usually sat in her Engineering Statistics class. With a new perspective on the left side of the lecture hall, she also met someone new named Oscar who habitually sat next to her. Oscar was outspoken and loud compared to the average student taking Statistics. Before every lecture, he joked that he was on the verge of withdrawing from the class. As the professor wrote equations on the dry erase board, Oscar leaned over to Susannah and said things like, “This made more sense when I saw it in K-Pop Demon Hunters.”
Another one of Oscar’s favorite lines was to playfully ask if he could copy Susannah’s notes and homework. Before one lecture, he said, “I’m on the football team and need time to practice.”
“Oh really? You don’t look like a football player.”
“Am I supposed to take that as an insult or a compliment?”
“Any way you want,” Susannah replied with a little laugh.
“Then I’ll take it as a compliment. I don’t look all huge and meaty because I’m a kicker.”
“Then you don’t lift weights or anything?”
“Yes, but it’s harder to tell.” Oscar smiled in an endearing way. He had a smooth, boyish face and naturally wavy brown hair that hung over his ears. “Are you going to the next home game/”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Maybe we could go together.”
“I thought you were on the team,” Susannah said with a teasing smirk.
“I’m only a backup kicker and they don’t need me. So, we could sit together and I can explain the rules.”
“I know the rules.”
“Then maybe you can explain things to me.”
Susannah smiled as she shook her head. “Fine. We can go together.”
The Friday night before the football game, Drake continued courting Susannah by taking her on a third date. For someone like her who did not date much, she felt more than a little squeezed by the attention and time commitments.
Given that it was the beginning of October, Drake obviously had Halloween on his mind while planning his time with Susannah. They started with a trip to a supermarket.
“We’re going to carve gourds,” Drake revealed.
“You mean pumpkins?” Susannah replied with a laugh.
“No, gourds. Anyone can carve a pumpkin. You have to be creative and uncommon to carve a gourd.”
When they arrived at the supermarket’s produce section, Drake complained about the selection. He picked through different squashes looking for one with an interesting shape. As Susannah looked for the roundest squash possible, she heard someone call her name. She looked up to see Oscar.
Wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt like he was headed to a gym, Oscar walked straight toward Susannah and gave her a hug. Drake watched menacingly, at least as menacingly as he could manage while wearing an outfit best suited for Latin ballroom dancing. Oscar and Drake sized each other up over a stack of Mandarin oranges.
“You must know Susannah,” Drake said in an uncharacteristically possessive way.
Susannah quickly broke in with introductions. “Uh, Drake, this is Oscar from my math class. Oscar, this is Drake. We’re carving gourds together.”
“You mean pumpkins?” Oscar asked with a grin.
“No, gourds,” Drake replied with a straight face. “It’s nice to meet you,” he added, with a tone that said exactly the opposite.
Oscar returned a friendly smile and said, “Same here. Then he looked at Susannah and added, “Well, have fun with the gourds. I’ll see you later.” He walked away like he had spotted someone handing out free food samples.
Drake brooded for the rest of the evening, but not in a quiet way. He spoke almost nonstop, sometimes to Susannah and sometimes to himself. They carved their butternut squashes in a campus art studio. Drake used needles to create an intricate forest scene highlighted by a stag with a massive antler rack.
“I go out with a lot of girls,” he said to his carving while Susannah sat next to him. “I can’t seem to meet the right one, so I also break up with a lot of girls. After every first date, I write a note that can be used as a break up note.”
Susannah interrupted to say, “That’s a pessimistic way to look at things. It’s like you’re expecting it not to work out.”
“That’s not why I do it. I want to remember the girl in the best possible light. I write down nice things. All the best things I see in her. I might even write a poem.”
“Does that mean you’ve already written a note for me?”
Drake ignored the question and instead said, “There’s something singular about you that gives me hope. I think we should move forward in our relationship and make it more exclusive. We don’t have to say boyfriend and girlfriend yet, but maybe we say we’re a pair.”
“A pair? A pair of what?”
“A pair of like souls. A pair of beating hearts.”
Susannah checked his expression to make sure he was serious. He looked very determined. When she tried to say she did not quite understand what he meant, he grew persistent and clingier. He asked to admire her hands again and repeated, “Please say we are a pair.” He was beautiful and deep and strange.
When Susannah said, “Okay, yeah, I guess we can be a pair,” she could not define what it meant, but it made Drake happy. It also seemed to be the only way to finally be done with gourd carving. If she let Drake go on and on about his feelings, they might have been in the art studio until morning.
The next day, a Saturday, Susannah tried not to think about gourds or Drake’s pair label as she scrambled to finish homework assignments. She was done with everything but a computer coding project before leaving for Baylor’s football stadium. As they had pre-arranged, she met Oscar near a ramp that led to the student seats in the south endzone.
“You’ve been here before, right?” Oscar asked as they found a spot.
“Not this year.”
“Well, it could get loud. I brought some earplugs in case you can’t handle it,” Oscar said with a sarcastic grin.
“I think I’ll be okay.”
The game against Kansas State was loud. Oscar, Susannah, and the students around them stood the entire time. They shouted themselves hoarse whenever Baylor was on defense. In the fourth quarter, Baylor staged a furious comeback to pull ahead 35-34. With only a few seconds left in the game, Kansas State’s offense leapfrogged down the field and lined up for a game winning field goal.
Susannah and Oscar nervously clenched their fists and screamed for the Kansas State kicker to miss. When the ball flew well away from the goalposts, the stadium wildly erupted. Everyone in the student section raised their arms and jumped up and down.
While Susannah jumped, she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She retrieved it to find a stream of incoming text messages. They all said basically the same thing: I saw you on TV!
Right before the missed kick, the camera operator for the national broadcast of the game panned through the student section and paused for three seconds on Susannah and Oscar. Some of Susannah’s text messages included a screenshot that showed her face. She held her phone up to Oscar and said, “We’re famous!”
“Yeah, I got the same picture,” he replied happily. “How does fame feel?”
“Pretty good, actually. I wasn’t expecting it, but I guess that’s how it happens sometimes.”
They laughed and showed the pictures to people standing around them. Then they stayed in their seats to enjoy the euphoria until most of the stadium was empty.
“I’m glad you made me come,” Oscar said in his teasing voice.
“Yeah, me too,” Susannah answered.
On her way home, a trickle of texts arrived from slower responding family members who also saw her on TV. She thought about who else might have been watching and remembered Drake. If he saw her and Oscar together, he would likely react in the same pouty way he did at the supermarket.
“Nah. There’s no way he was watching,” Susannah said to herself with a chuckle. “Football? That was too mainstream. He was way more likely to be glass blowing or counting stars.” She did not give him another worry as she wistfully reached her apartment.
The next afternoon, as she was hacking at her computer coding assignment, Susannah heard a knock on her apartment door. By the time she answered, no one was there, but two envelopes lay on the floor. On the front of one were the handwritten words, “Read Me First.” The other envelope read, “Read Me Second.”
Susannah tore open the first envelope and read the letter inside. It described her in astounding detail. Using the letter, a descent sketch artist could have reproduced her face like a camera. And the flattering insights into her personality sounded like the summary of intensive lab tests. The letter gushed over her quiet confidence and joyful core. It ended with a poem. It was not one of those childish poems that struggled and contorted to rhyme words. This one was deep and beautiful and flowed like a river. Halfway through, and on the brink of a blissful tear, Susannah remembered how Drake wrote breakup notes after first dates. She was reading a breakup note!
The poem’s final lines read, “The sweetest note that evening holds is Susannah.” She read the words a half dozen times as she sorted through conflicted feelings. Then she read the letter in the second envelope. It bluntly stated they were no longer a pair because she did not take his offering seriously and it would be best to break off contact. Drake also asked to be reimbursed for tickets he purchased for an upcoming play. Since they could no longer attend together through no fault of his own, it seemed fair for her to Venmo him some money.
Susannah shook her head to clear her thoughts. It only took a few minutes to decide she was relieved to get the letters. She did not have the emotional depth to handle Drake, especially not with her heavy class load. She did not Venmo him any money. But she did continue to like his poem. She liked it so much that she printed it out with an elegant font and put it in a frame. She felt self-conscious over displaying something so overly complimentary, but hung it up anyway.
When Oscar first visited her apartment, he gravitated toward the framed poem like he was caught in a tractor beam.
“Is this about you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Susannah admitted with a blushed face.
“Who wrote it?”
She did not want to explain the awkward truth, so she said, “My dad.”
           Oscar liked the poem too. Two years later, when they were married, he read it during the ceremony as part of his vows. Susannah winked at her dad who had been warned he had to accept the credit.
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