My first minimum-wage job was as a scooper at an ice cream store when I was a senior in high school. The store owners were perpetually in absentia so we, the just-barely-old-enough-to-drive staff, enjoyed free reign. I often worked with Joshua, who was the only semi-adult person around. Everyone tolerated his presence because he bought us beer and turned the other way when we gave out free scoops or invited friends to the store for afterhours parties. Joshua was what we hoped to never become: a twenty-three-year-old community college dropout who lived at home and scooped ice cream on a full-time basis. I thought he was kind of annoying, like the older brother I was glad I didn’t have. He had grizzly facial hair with a matching ponytail, and his conversations revolved around stereo speakers, the women who hit on him, and sage observations about how the world really worked. The one shining, glorious aspect of Joshua’s life was his girlfriend. Tanya was rich, a straight-A private school senior, a field hockey-playing Mediterranean beauty. Because Joshua had no close friends of his own, I became his unwilling confidante on all Tanya-related matters.

Discussions about their relationship intensified as Tanya’s prom night approached. During our shifts Joshua revealed every minute detail of the plan: Her dress, his tux, the limo, the requisite appearance at the prom, the getaway, and shielding her parents from the fact that Tanya would not be spending the weekend with her field hockey crew but tucked away with him in some beachfront bungalow. And then, of course, there was the mixtape with the carefully-selected songs that would provide the soundtrack for their prom weekend. If Joshua had applied the same time and intensity he put into that tape to his own life, he could have finished his associate’s degree and gotten a BA, MA, and possibly a Ph.D. Each song had to capture specific moments in their relationship: their first date, their first kiss, their first snuggle. For weeks he brought that tape to each shift we worked together and played me the latest version, explaining the true meaning of each song and its corollary to their relationship. As he tweaked it to perfection, the songs on each version changed – with the exception of U2’s “With or Without You.” That was their song, and hearing it was guaranteed to shut him up. Joshua would turn inward as it played, mooning over his Tanya, singing the chorus under his breath as he made a strawberry milkshake or a scooped a cone of chocolate chip.

Well, as clichéd endings go with romances in the senior year of high school, Tanya broke up with Joshua a few days after prom. That meant my shifts at the ice cream store (and my rides home, as I was license-less) were filled with tales of heartbreak and the loss of the beautiful Tanya. There were telephone calls, too, every other night. Their relationship of eight months took on dynastic proportions. Joshua told me over and over again all that he had done for her in the name of love. He had driven her to her SAT review course, made sure her cleats and field hockey stick were immaculately cleaned before each game, picked her up after school every day after she crashed her car into a fire hydrant, brought her dinner when she spent late nights working on the school newspaper. He even took her to Planned Parenthood so she could get the Pill. I exhausted my supply of “uh-huh,” “ah,” “really!” and “sorry to hear that” and began to feel like I was a third party involved in their relationship.

The day finally came when Joshua asked me what I thought about the entire situation. “Honestly, why did she break up with me?”

Now, up to this point in my own teenagedom, I had never been in a relationship. I had never had my heart broken. My ideas about dating and relationships were entirely warped by the Sweet Valley High twins and the soft-core pornography of Judith Krantz novels. So I was oblivious to the fact that when Joshua asked me to be honest, he wasn’t asking for me to feed his insecurities about the breakup. I was, however, sick and tired of the ceaseless conversation about Tanya, the phone calls he made to her during our shifts and the hourly hypothesizing about how she didn’t make the decision of her own free will. So I told him, honestly, what I thought. I spilled out my true thoughts and speculations: that she probably wanted to leave home without attachments, that she was eighteen and realized she had a whole lifetime for relationships, that the thrill of pissing off her parents by dating him had worn off. And, I added, she probably realized she was dating a guy who didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Asked to leave his car by way of an expletive, I rarely spoke or worked a shift with Joshua after that. By the end of the summer he had moved on to another job at a gym or a record store or something along those lines. I went to college, where I eventually had my heart broken and got my own dose of brutal honesty. Now every time I hear “With or Without You” I think of Joshua. At first I feel bad about my insensitivity. Then I’m annoyed at him all over again, mostly because I’ll never get the opportunity to have that song be mine and mine alone, to have it be ruined by someone I loved.