Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend

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BROKEN HEARTS,

FENCES, AND

OTHER THINGS

TO MEND

KATIE FINN

BROKEN HEARTS,

FENCES, AND OTHER

THINGS TO MEND

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REVENGE, ICE CREAM,

AND OTHER THINGS

BEST SERVED COLD

Coming in 2015!

HEARTS, FINGERS,

AND OTHER

THINGS TO CROSS

Coming in 2016!

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BROKEN HEARTS,

FENCES, AND OTHER

THINGS TO MEND

Katie Finn

Feiwel and Friends

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New York

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A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK

An Imprint of Macmillan

BROKEN HEARTS, FENCES, AND OTHER THINGS TO MEND. Copyright © 2014 by Katie Finn.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley

& Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia. For information, address Feiwel and

Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Feiwel and Friends books may be purchased for business or promotional

use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate

and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221- 7945 x5442 or by e-mail at

[email protected]

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Available

ISBN: 978- 1- 250- 04524- 9 (hardcover) / TK (ebook)

Book design by . . .

Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

First Edition: 2014

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History repeats itself. First as tragedy, second as farce.

—Karl Marx

abc

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The Wednesday afternoon that it all started, I was thinking

about how great my life was going.

Actually, to be totally truthful, it didn’t start that Wednes-

day. It started earlier than that— fi ve years earlier. But I didn’t

know that then. I was just wandering around the aisles of the

Putnam, Connecticut, Target with no idea what was coming, like

the blond girl heading down to the basement in horror movies.

I was blissfully unaware that disaster was looming, and thrilled

with the way everything was working out.

After all, I had made it through my sophomore year with de-

cent grades— including a passing grade in Chemistry, which was

in itself a minor miracle. (I’d been against Chemistry since the

fi rst class, when I noticed the safety station at the back, complete

with chemical shower and eye- wash station. These things didn’t

seem to be necessary in Algebra.) School was over for the year,

and the whole summer was stretched out in front of me. I had a

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wonderful best friend. And most important of all, I had an amaz-

ing boyfriend. Everything was perfect.

Well, except for the fact that I’d made the very grave mistake

of wearing, to Target, a red tank and khaki skirt. I’d forgotten

that all the employees there wear red shirts and khakis. And so

every few minutes people were coming up to me and asking where

they could fi nd the toothpaste, because they thought I worked

there.

“Okay!” I said, tracing my fi nger down the items on the list.

“Let’s get started.” I smiled across the aisle at Teddy Callaway, my

boyfriend. Of all the things that were currently good in my life,

Teddy was number one. We had started dating my second week of

ninth grade at Putnam High School and had been together for

the past two years. Teddy was older— eighteen to my sixteen—

and would be starting his se nior year in the fall. He’d been sopho-

more
and
ju nior class president, and had been elected se nior

class president for the coming year. He was consistently being

featured on the front page of the local paper, the
Putnam Post,

looking serious and humble, as a result of all the ser vice groups

he had started and all the good he was always doing for the com-

munity. And Teddy’s altruism was actually the reason we were at

Target together. We were leaving in a week to do volunteer work

in Colombia, and we needed supplies.

Teddy swallowed hard, cleared his throat, and said, “Gemma?”

“Yes?” I asked as I looked down at the list and tried not to

wince. When Teddy had fi rst told me about this volunteering pro-

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gram, I had assumed it would mean doing things like planting

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gardens and maybe teaching children to sing, until my best friend,

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Sophie Curtis, pointed out that I was actually thinking of
The

Sound of Music
. I hadn’t realized until I got the application forms

that this program involved things like building houses and dig-

ging latrines. The fi ve- page list of supplies included items like

work gloves and fi rst- aid kits (extra gauze) and antimalarial pills.

But I wasn’t going to let that dissuade me. I had been on board

to go on this trip ever since Teddy told me about HELPP (Humani-

tarian Education Learning through Progressive Programs).

Well, technically, I had been on board once it was clear he was

going with or without me. My parents had only agreed to let me

go after I’d shown them the literature, proving that there would

be supervision and that guys and girls stayed in separate cab-

ins. I needed them to agree, because it seemed there were actu-

ally a lot of costs involved with volunteering. We’d had to pay for

the program, something my dad hadn’t been too thrilled about.

He said that if I really wanted to learn about construction, he

would happily let me work on the addition to his house, and for

free.

But I pressed hard to be able to go, because this way Teddy

and I wouldn’t have to spend three weeks apart, even if we were

staying in separate cabins and digging separate latrines. We hadn’t

been apart for that long since we got together, and I didn’t see

any reason for us to start now.

“Okay, we need gauze,” I said, grabbing some from the shelf

and dropping it into my basket. “And . . .”

“Gemma,” Teddy said again, a little more loudly this time. I

looked down at the list and saw what he must have been pointing

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would need gauze for. I glanced over at Teddy and noticed that he

looked a little pale.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I looked for the Band- Aids. In the

two years we’d been together, I’d learned to read him really well,

and I could see that he had something on his mind. Possibly he’d

been wondering the same thing about the gauze I had. After all,

we were usually on the same wavelength.

And, okay, if we sometimes weren’t on
exactly
the same wave-

length, I let him think that we were.

It was actually how we met. I’d spent the first week of my

high school experience wandering the halls, bewildered, going

to the wrong classes in the wrong classrooms, sometimes not re-

alizing this until the class was over. My sense of direction had

never been great, and Putnam High, with two thousand students,

was huge compared to my middle school. I had been getting

through the fi rst week by basically clinging to Sophie like a bi-

valve. One day after school, I’d somehow gotten lost in the war-

ren of classrooms and was just looking for a quiet one to duck

into so that I could text Sophie and see if she could come and fi nd

me. It wasn’t until I’d shut the door that I realized I wasn’t alone.

“Hi,” a voice from the front of the room said. I blinked, sur-

prised, as a guy who looked older than me hopped off the desk he

was sitting on and walked forward. “Are you here for the Warbler

meeting?”

I just stared at him. The guy standing before me was incre-

dibly cute, with bright blue eyes and blond hair that was a touch

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When I realized he was waiting patiently for an answer, I nod-

ded, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes,”

I said, hoping he would tell me what this meant. I was hoping the

Warblers wasn’t some kind of a cappella group, as I had a terrible

singing voice. But this was the most dazzling guy I had encoun-

tered in a while, and I would have said anything to get to stay in

his presence. “I am.”

“Great,” he said, nodding. “I’m so glad you care about this. Too

many people at this school are apathetic.”

“I know,” I said fervently, as though I hadn’t been one of those

people until a few seconds ago. “But it’s something I’ve always

been committed to.”

He looked at me appraisingly for a moment, and his smile wid-

ened. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Teddy.”

I later found out that the Warblers was a group dedicated to

protecting the environment of the Marsh Warbler, a rare species

of bird that wasn’t even found in Connecticut. But that didn’t mat-

ter, because after a while I really did come to care about the Marsh

Warbler, even if I also secretly thought it was kind of ugly. Be-

cause as far as I was concerned, it had brought me and Teddy

together, and so I would always have a soft spot for it.

Teddy and I became a couple almost immediately after that.

And overnight, I went from being an anonymous freshman

accidentally attending the wrong classes to Teddy Callaway’s girl-

friend. I was no longer just Gemma Tucker, not particularly special