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We’ve all been there—even Anna Kendrick. She shares her heartbreak story in this exclusive excerpt from her new book, Scrappy Little Nobody.
The summer I turned 21, I dated a musician named Connor. Well, I thought he was a musician and that we were dating. He thought he was a screenwriter who occasionally played music and that we were “hooking up and not labeling things because labels cause drama.” He was 28 and something of an introvert. I took this to mean that he was deep and artistic and probably judged me for talking as much as I do. Once we broke up, I realized it just meant that he was kind of boring—and probably judged me for talking as much as I do.
But before that, I actually had conversations with friends that sounded like this: “Do you think I’m coming across as overeager?”
“Maybe? Why don’t you just not call him for a while and wait for him to get in touch with you?”
“Well, if I didn’t call him at all, we’d never talk again.”
(Oh. Sweet Anna.)
When we first started hooking up, I was 20. He played in bars at night, which meant that he’d spend most of the night without me and then invite me over once he got home. I reasoned it wasn’t a booty call since it was just the law that was keeping us apart; a fake ID was out of the question, since I looked like a fifth-grader on my best day. So at a certain point, my only goal became to not get dumped before I turned 21—because then I’d be able to really get my hooks in. Oh God, it hurts to write.
Looking back, it’s hard for me to understand what I was doing. Why on earth would I pursue someone who had no interest in me? It’s not like we had fun together; the man didn’t like me so much as tolerate me. I suppose the easy answer is that I hadn’t had a decent relationship yet, so I thought bagging a “cool” and attractive male was the whole objective. We would have made a terrible couple, but his indifference blinded me to all the red flags. He drove a BMW but slept on a futon. He watched the History Channel like it was a reliable source of information. Part of me knew I was only determined to bring him around because he was resisting, but the idea of acknowledging the rejection hurt more than pretending the relationship might be going somewhere.
I’d been so nervous when we met (and only got increasingly nervous as I tried to win his affection) that as a result I have no idea what I was even like around him. If I could see tape of us interacting, I doubt I would recognize myself. Who was I trying to make him fall in love with? My strategy was to just be agreeable. I had this fantasy of a braver parallel-universe version of myself, but around him I became the most sterile, inoffensive version instead.
When he said things to me like, “You use humor as a defense mechanism,” I should have said, “Yeah, and you use pithy proclamations that let you maintain your sense of superiority as a f--kin’ defense mechanism.” Instead I made a plan to be more serious from then on.
We saw each other sporadically. Sometimes I’d send a breezy text and spend the day staring at my phone until he invited me over. Our group of friends got together a few times a week, and I’d invariably end up going home with him after, so I didn’t miss one group hang-out that summer. At the time this group seemed impossibly cool; now I know their allure was wrapped up in my desire to stay connected to Connor. Also, I don’t know if being motivated by amazing sex would have made my desperation more pathetic or less, but I cannot say that was part of it.
As time went on I alternately gained and lost ground. He had some setbacks professionally, and he opened up to me about some of his fears and insecurities. This is awesome, I thought gleefully as I held him.
A couple of weeks later, he was still feeling down. To cheer him up, I offered to come over early one morning and cook breakfast. This was partially a gesture, something to make him feel cared for, and partially because he was so strapped for cash that I knew he’d appreciate a free batch of groceries. He’d taught me how to make his favorite breakfast burrito, and I went to the Gelson’s Market by my apartment to pick up everything we needed. Normally I walked there every morning to buy a Power Bar. That day, when the checkout girl saw my basket—the tortillas, the eggs, the spices—she said, “Trying something new?”
“Yeah…” I paused. “I’m making breakfast for my boyfriend.” What was the harm in saying it, right? Unlike, say, all my friends, this girl had no reason to believe I was kidding myself. She nodded conspiratorially. Yes, I thought, it is adorable.
I made the breakfast, and he was grateful, but it wasn’t quite how I’d pictured it. He had somewhere to be that afternoon, so we both headed out. I was in the car, waiting to make a left-hand turn, when my phone rang. It was him! He never called me first! I snatched the phone out of the cup holder. “Hi, stalker, just can’t leave me alone, can you?” Nice one, Anna, perfect play.
“I was just behind you. You’re doing my most hated thing—when people turn left onto Sweetzer but don’t signal, so no one knows why you’ve stopped. I just had to go around you.”
I’d thought he was calling to say thank you for breakfast, or to tell me something funny he’d just seen that made him think of me, or maybe just to say it was nice to see me and could we hang out again tonight. But no. He was calling to critique my driving.
Why was I trying to spend more time with this person! I debated even telling this part of the story because I hate admitting that I forgot to signal; on the upside, it shows what a spineless doormat I was, so it stays!
When I finally turned 21, the dynamic did not improve. Connor started showing interest in a girl named Erika, and I could feel him pulling away even more. The next time we had a vague talk about “what we were doing,” he seemed to debate himself Sméagol/Gollum style in front of me: “Well, we get along…and I’m not saying that I want to be with anyone else right now…but I guess I don’t want to miss out on any opportunities.” I should have screamed, “I’m the opportunity, you asshat!” But I clenched my teeth and convinced myself once again that I didn’t need a label. Before I left, I at least managed to ask the question.
“OK, so I have to ask…Erika…is there anything there I should be worried about?”
He furrowed his brow. “Erika the brunette? No, no, I’m not even attracted to that girl—I think she has a boyfriend.” It was enough for me. I figured if he hoped they might get together, he wouldn’t call her “that girl.” (Yes, reader, I know you know where this is going. You’re better at everything than I am.)
A few weeks later Connor broke up with me. I cried. So much. It was hideously embarrassing. What had happened to me? This guy so obviously wasn’t into me, we weren’t ever really together in the first place, and I was behaving like a messy trophy wife who’d just been told the prenup was ironclad.
He was sensitive about it and put up with a lot of waterworks from a girl who’d claimed she was fine with just “having fun.” Over the following days the finality of being dumped started to feel like a relief. After all, it could have gone on like that for God knows how long—being ignored, making myself available, swearing I was fine with how things were, too nervous to push for “girlfriend” status. I was angrier with myself than I was with Connor. On one hand, he must have seen I was more invested than he was, and arguably he should have let me down easy in the first few weeks of knowing me. On the other, I can’t blame a guy for believing me (or more likely, pretending to believe me) when I insisted I was happy keeping things low-key.
I left town a few weeks later to film an independent movie in Indiana. After work one night I logged in to MySpace on the slow motel Internet. I’d held out on cyberstalking for a while (two days) and rewarded myself by looking up Connor and everyone remotely connected to him.
In movies the dumped girl finds out about the new girlfriend through a picture: the dude and his new girlfriend smiling on a hike or kissing at a party. I found out because Erika wrote a blog post about it. There, on MySpace, was a half-page post about the new man in her life. She’d incorporated lyrics from his songs throughout, like sappy, stilted Mad Libs. You wouldn’t know the songs, but imagine if Paul McCartney had a new girlfriend and she wrote something like this: “I knew that If I Fell it would be a Long and Winding Road, but Do You Want to Know a Secret? I need him Eight Days a Week, because All You Need Is Love.”
I thought my skull was going to cave in. Thank the Lord that I’d implemented a “no matter how upset you are, sleep on it” policy regarding conflict. I drafted 10 different emails to Connor. They ranged from two-page diatribes to one word: “Wow.” I slept on it and sent nothing.
My poor coworkers in Indiana never heard the end of it. They had no obligation to cheer me up, but on days I was mopey, the director would say, “My landlord back in L.A. told me there’s a toothless prostitute named Erika hanging out behind the Dumpster, and she’s offering hand jobs for a dollar, but no one’s taking her up on it.”
“I know you’re trying to make me laugh, but she’s actually really pretty.”
“You’re right. She’s very pretty for a toothless prostitute who smells like a pile of dead rats.”
It’s amazing the way uncalled-for meanness warmed my loathsome little heart. It’s a strategy I’ve followed, perhaps at my peril, when my friends go through similar scenarios. I know it’s childish and lame, but you’re allowed to be a miserable shit for a while after you get dumped.
Recently someone who still knows Erika mentioned her to me. I cringed: that bitch. “You know she still thinks you’re pissed at her." This gave me pause. She still thinks what? How does she even know me? I was 20, a mousy girl she met one time. Suddenly, I realized, Oh my God, I’m not pissed at her. I’m so not pissed at her. I literally have no feelings about her. In fact I don’t think I’d recognize her if I fell over her! Oh, hello, fully dimensional human, you’re free to leave my brain now!
It was a real lesson in my endless capacity to hold a grudge. I do it so well, I don’t even notice that it’s happening. I walk around with these calcified resentments for years until someone points them out and I can go: “Good Lord, is that still in here? Let’s get rid of that. And throw out ‘pretending that watching boys play video games is fun’ while we’re at it.”
I had to take a moment to wonder who else fell into this category of default enemy. I went through a list of people who, in theory, I’d want to hit in the face with a meat tenderizer. You, the coworker from 10 years ago who owes me, like, three grand? It was 10 years ago! You were addicted to OxyContin! Go! Be free! My seventh-grade teacher, who told me that most child actors don’t succeed as adult actors? You just wanted to scare me into having a backup plan! Farewell! Good luck! Tori from fourth grade, who accused me of writing mean stuff about all our friends on the playground wall? BURN IN HELL, TORI. I KNOW IT WAS YOU!!!
I’m still working on it.
Anna Kendrick stars in The Accountant and is a voice in Trolls. This is adapted from her book, Scrappy Little Nobody.
Some names have been changed.