Love Among the Oddvalds
She promised not to smoke if I just came over. When I got there, she stank of mouthwash and she didn’t know what to do with her hands.
You could always tell the state of Amanda’s life by the state of her lips. As she moved in to kiss my cheek, I saw that that those absurdly plump lips were bitten, chapped, and raw.
“I broke up with him,” she said, walking to the window as I sat on the broken futon.
Him being Jimmy, who was an asshole. But he was tall and crooked and supposedly some fascinatingly morbid musician. I shrugged and asked if she was okay. She didn’t answer.
Most of the furniture was his, though the lease was in her name. A week before, when she threw him out, he paid some friends in cheap beer to move his stuff to his mother’s place in Jersey.
What was left was a bare but lived in New York apartment. A hundred layers of white paint cracked and peeling on the walls, softening the corners, blocking outlets, misshaping moldings. A radiator that spit and banged all winter. And looking as lonely and as miserable as she did, a futon sat sadly on the scratched hard wood floor. Against the wall were an array of unopened boxes from Ikea.
She had done the only reasonable thing to do after breaking up with a tall guitarist with beautiful hair, she bought a Malm and an Oddvald.
