The Winners!

We’re pleased to present the winners of Harvard Book Store’s “Love and Dumpsters” Writing Contest. We asked participants to tell us a story, in 350 words or less, about being dumped and what they may or may not have learned from the experience. The resulting entries ranged from hilarious to heartbreaking to mildly inappropriate. We thank everyone who participated. You can find the winning entry and the first two runners-up below. Enjoy!

A Fistful of Goobers

by Matthew Sandel

West Side Story was cancelled. And I really wanted this date with Tracy, a bubbly freshman, to go well. We walked down the steps of Blake Science Center.

‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ I asked, not suspecting that she would compound my disappointment with her response.

‘I better get back to my dorm and finish some reading,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Well, the movie is cancelled.’

‘Right. But I thought we were going to, you know, spend the evening together.’

‘I mainly wanted to see West Side Story. I’ve never seen it.’

‘So I wasn’t part of the attraction,’ I said.

‘I hate going to movies alone.’

‘Wow, I feel ten feet tall.’

‘What did you want me to say?’

‘None of the things you just said. I don’t believe this.’

‘I really should go,’ she said, her trademark ebullience icing over.

I just stood there and thought.

‘Okay, go. But give me my Goobers back.’

‘What?’

‘You’re totally blowing me off, but you want to keep my candy? Sorry.’

‘This was never a date, you know.’

‘Apparently not.   So.   Are you going to give me my Goobers?   I can wait all night.’

‘Here!   Take your fucking Goobers!   Look, I’ve got to finish The Great Gatsby by tomorrow morning, so-- whatever.’

‘Hey, thank you for the most beautiful eighteen minutes of my life.   By the way, George Wilson shoots Gatsby.   In his pool.   And he dies.   Happy reading.’

She fumed but said nothing.

‘I’m sorry.   Did I spoil something?’   It was beneath me, but sometimes you just gotta go there.   ‘Oh-- and Chino shoots Tony and he dies in Maria’s arms.’  

As I walked to my dorm, I ate a fistful of Goobers, and I learned that candy tastes twice as good when it’s been rightfully confiscated.

When I got back to my room, I put the candy on my desk and pulled out Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits.   Three tears fell onto the album cover, but they were tears of anger and disappointment, not sadness.   Swear to God.

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by Katherine Critelli

At fifteen, I got my first job, scooping ice cream at a little fry joint.   I felt like somebody new in my uniform, a faded t-shirt with a green logo scrawled across my heart.

There was a rhythm to those summer nights. The parking lot filled, lines stretched and we rushed to deliver cones through the slide window.   Then the crowds thinned, cars pulled out as the sky turned orange and the air began to cool.   Carol, the red-head supervisor, would tell us to begin cleaning as she divided up the tips.   Her freckled face concentrated on the coins but she swayed her hips to the music.  

We cleaned to the sounds of classic rock, moving our rags in tempo with Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead.   I scrubbed the freezer doors until they mirrored the reflection of Darren; there, I could memorize him privately.   He was the fry cook -- a college boy -- with gangly arms that lifted the baskets from the bubbling oil and dumped crispy fish into Styrofoam containers, in one swift motion.   He danced the mop around as he belted lyrics of Thunder Road, Penny Lane, Truckin’.   If he caught me looking at him, he’d smirk or say something in his gravelly voice.   When my mom picked me up, I’d hang my sticky arm out the window and think about those white teeth, that voice.  

Labor Day was our last night.   When we closed, I went into the dark restaurant to grab my forgotten paycheck.   They were silhouetted against the window, two shadows moving toward each other.   Darren tilted his head down, Carol leaned up, rising onto her toes.   Their lips met and stayed pressed together.   I felt everything I did not have:   red hair, freckles and the sweet destiny of being a mop.   I convinced myself that never again would I find someone so perfect: a man who frisbeed grease-spotted paper plates toward the trash, who knew the words to almost every song, and who could crisp the French fries to golden perfection, nearly every time.

Dumped

by John Urban

Hardly more than a year out of the Air Force, and still marinating my life's contents in an anomalous mix of flight patterns, Freudian adhesions, Village Vanguard jazz, and the shards from a good middle-class American upbringing, I moved into a tiny space in Greenwich Village's Sullivan Street. Within the last half year my wife of only a couple of years, dream of my dreams, had been sweet-talked and baited out of my bed, through Reno, then into an alien bed to which was attached a bank account far fatter than mine. And I watched it happen.

Time to rejigger.

Ah, Katie.

Slender, lithe, companionable, natively sexy, Katie could not have been more for my moment, nor, I thought, I for hers. Friends in our teen years; we had landed in New York at the same time – two rejiggerers, for whom an old friendship slipped easily into romance.

Alfred University, a small, chummy boondocks college maybe two hundred fifty miles west of Manhattan, was rich in arts and crafts, and the source system for Katie's next life. OK. If she's at Alfred, I commute. Each Saturday I load my tent, sleeping bags, Coleman stove, and stuff to eat into my car. Life is good. And on Sunday evening I leave her with a book or two. Each time. Each book carries a piece of my expanding universe, an offering to her. Huxley (Aldous, of course), D. H. Lawrence, Auden, Ouspensky (yes, Ouspensky), Bertrand Russell (for wisdom), Henry Miller (to help excise our bourgeois ballast), Man Ray, Erich Fromm, John Rewald, Max Weber, Sartre, Philip Wylie, Kenneth Burke – well, there's the idea. Making a world in common, a larder of ideas and experiences salted away for our future.

Back in Manhattan. Sullivan Street. On a Sunday afternoon. Katie.

She brings a big grocery box, puts it on the table. It's books. It's all the books.

“I didn't read them,” she says. “It's not me.”

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by Rachel Grashow