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“Hank did what?” Jean asked, because she couldn’t have heard that right.
“He broke up with me,” Bobby said, hiccuping a sob and wiping at his eyes.
“Why? You know what never mind, we’re coming over,” Jean said. “Your parents are out of town right?”
“Yeah.”
“Great, we’ll bring pizza and movies.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Bobby asked sitting up on his bed.
“Me, Maddie, and Alex.”
“Alex?”
“He and Maddie were having a movie night.”
“I wouldn’t want to disturb them,” Bobby said.
“Bobby, they’re going to want to come over after they know what happened, trust me.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“Of course,” Jean said. “I’ll see you in a little bit.”
Once off the phone with Jean, Bobby changed into his pajamas and washed his face. Then he went down to the living room to wait. He was in the middle of waiting when his phone buzzed with a text from Scott.
[To Bobby:] Alex told me what happened. I’ll talk to Hank and find out what’s going on. Are you alright?
Bobby sighed and tapped out a reply.
[To Scott:] Yeah, I’ll be okay I guess. You probably know that Alex, Maddie, and Jean are headed over.
[To Bobby:] Yes Alex told me. Warren stop
Bobby snickered a bit, he couldn’t help it. Text to speech worked pretty well most of the time, but sometimes things that Scott didn’t intend to text would get caught in there. Scott was presumably on a date with/or just hanging out with Warren.
Bobby wasn’t sure how to respond so he didn’t text back. It wasn’t long after that the doorbell rang signalling the arrival of his friends.
“We have pizza and popcorn and all five seasons of Bill Nye,” Alex said, shoving two boxes of pizza at Bobby as a greeting.
“All five seasons?” Bobby asked, taking the boxes from Alex.
“Yup.”
Bobby stepped back to let everyone in. “Where did you find all five seasons? The library only has the first one and Netflix only has a random selection of episodes.”
Maddie laughed a little. “He owns them.”
“Oh come on, don’t laugh, you knew I was a nerd when you started dating me.”
Bobby cracked a smile at that. “Well, I for one am not going to complain about Bill Nye, as long as we can watch the dinosaur one first, because the dinosaur one isn’t on Netflix.”
“That sounds great,” Alex said, dropping his bag on the couch. “Can I use your microwave to make popcorn?”
“Yeah, sure go ahead,” Bobby said. “Do you not want pizza?”
Alex shook his head. “I can’t eat it. I’m allergic to tomato.”
Ten minutes later they were all situated on the couch in Bobby’s living room watching Bill Nye.
“Thank for this guys, really,” Bobby said.
“Of course,” Jean said. “We’re your friends Bobby and what Hank did was totally out of line. It’s generally bad form to invite someone on a date just to break up with them.”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean if it was just that I don’t think I’d feel quite this bad.” Bobby still would have felt awful, but not really knowing why Hank had broken up with him made it feel all the worse.
“Wait, what else did he do?” Alex asked. “Jean only said that he’d broken up with you on your date.”
“That’s all he’d told me,” Jean said.
Bobby shrugged. “It’s not much more he just… didn’t really give me a reason as to why. He said it was for my benefit, cause he didn’t want me to be tied down with him in college.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Maddie said. “How could he even rationalize that?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said, a little miserably. “I was all for working out a long distance relationship and I thought he was too.”
Jean put an arm around Bobby’s shoulders and Bobby leaned into her. “Thanks Jean.”
“Not a problem Bobby.”
“I just texted Scott with the new info,” Alex said. “He will definitely be chewing Hank out when he gets the chance.”
“Yeah, he texted me to ask if I was doing alright,” Bobby said. “Can we- can we get back to watching? I kind of don’t want to think about tonight.”
“That’s fair,” Alex said grabbing the remote. “Do you want me to rewind so we can watch what we missed.”
Bobby nodded. “Yeah.”