The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (10 page)

“But wait.” Lucy could barely breathe. “When you touched his face before, and then he didn’t know who I was. Was that . . . ? I mean, that was . . . wasn’t it?”

Gil shot Lucy a look. Lucy immediately regretted saying anything at all.

Olivia spoke slowly, her tone was cold and hard. “Gil should not have done that.” And then she looked at Lucy. “And
you
should
not be asking about it.”

Lucy swallowed.

Olivia nodded. “Try them next?” She pointed toward two guys at the back of the room.

Gil grabbed Lucy’s hand and started walking her over.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered. “I didn’t realize . . .”

Gil just shook her head. “Ssh,” she said.

They were at the table now. The guys stopped their game when Gil walked up. The first one gave her a cheek kiss. The second one picked her right up so her legs dangled a foot from the ground. He put her down and Gil punched him in the arm.

“Lucy, this is Eric and Stephen,” she said. “They like to show off how tall they are.” Gil stuck her tongue out at Eric, the one who’d picked her up. Then she leaned over and mock whispered, “The reason they have the same face is not because they’re two versions of the same hotness robot, but because they’re twins. Stephen and Eric, this is Lucy. She’s our new friend.”

“Nice to . . . ,” Lucy said. But when she looked at their faces, she lost her words.

“Hey,” Eric said. “What’s up? You’re a new friend of the girls’, yeah? That’s cool. Always nice to meet a new friend of theirs. So, are you into pool?”

Lucy stared at them. They looked like a model or a famous person, only more so. And twice: bright green eyes, sculpted cheekbones, lush mouths. Their face didn’t stab her in the heart the way Alex’s did. But still.

Gil cleared her throat.

Lucy kept staring. She knew she was supposed to say something, but she could not get her mouth to go.

“Well, anyway,” Gil said finally. “We’ll let you boys get back to your game.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed each of them on the cheek. Then Gil led Lucy back to Liza and Olivia’s table. Olivia motioned for them to follow her. The four of them walked into the bathroom.

It was a huge room, all brown and orange tile like it had been decorated in the seventies and never touched since.

“Gil, lock the door,” Olivia said. She turned toward Lucy. “You were intimidated by what they looked like, am I correct in assuming that?”

“Scared, distracted, I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Are they models or something?”

“Well, obviously,” Liza said.

“Which means exactly nothing.” Olivia hopped up onto the counter and crossed her legs. “You know the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’? Well, that’s not true. Beauty is in the mind of the beholden.”

“What does that mean?”

“She who has the strongest reality wins,” said Liza.

Gil nodded. “People think about a person what that person thinks about themselves. If you think you’re hot, so will everyone else.”

“It sounds silly, I know,” Olivia said. “Meaningless because it’s been so repeated. But such is the nature of many truths.”

“Are you saying looks don’t matter?” Lucy frowned. “Then why the new hair and makeup and everything?”

Olivia shook her head. “It’s not that they don’t matter
at all
. It’s just they matter a whole lot less than people think. The most important thing is believing you’re beautiful. The benefit of improving one’s looks lies largely therein.”

“But what about people who think they’re hot but then no one else does?”

“Well, there are exceptions obviously, but usually when what you believe is someone’s perception of their own hotness seems out of whack with what the majority of people think, that person doesn’t
actually
believe they’re as hot as they’re trying to pretend they are.”

Lucy raised her eyebrows.

“If they
really
thought they were that hot, you wouldn’t think they were wrong to think it. Because you’d believe it too. The proof that they don’t think it is the fact that you’re not buying it. Be confident and believe in your own beauty. That’s the big secret. Turns out the deodorant commercials were right.” She smirked.

“But how do you get yourself to believe something you don’t actually believe?” Lucy asked. “You can’t just
decide
you’re the most gorgeous person in the world and then think it’s true.”

“It’s not about telling yourself you’re the
most
gorgeous person or the smartest person or the funniest person, because guess what, snap pea, you aren’t.”

Lucy looked down.

“I don’t mean that meanly; I mean that realistically. You’re just not. And I’m not either. And neither is Gilly or Liza.”

“Well, that’s debatable,” said Liza.

Olivia smirked. “There
is no contest
. You need to change your way of thinking. Stop putting everything in a hierarchy. There is no prettiest or ugliest or smartest or best. The world likes to pretend that there is to sell us stuff. But there isn’t. So stop buying the bullshit. Tell yourself a different message. Because you already
are
telling yourself things. Every day all day long you’re telling yourself things about who and what you are. But you’ve gotten so used to hearing the things you tell yourself about yourself that you’re not even aware that you’re doing it anymore.”

“It’s like how you can’t smell your own shampoo,” Gil said.

“Or your own shit,” said Liza.

“Stop looking in the mirror and thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, my nose is too round. Oh, my skin isn’t perfect.’ Focus on the things you like and ignore the rest. Look at yourself like you’re someone you love.”

Lucy stood there trying to process all of this, or any of it, but Olivia wasn’t done. She took a breath and lowered her voice.

“Whenever you feel insecure or unsure or self-conscious or scared, just focus on tapping into the energy at the center of the earth. You have a heart, the earth has a heart too, down below, bubbling with power and beauty. Suck it up into yourself, like a tree taking food from the soil. It’s there for you at any time. Just concentrate and close your eyes.”

“But I don’t . . . ,” Lucy started to say. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Well, of course not.” Olivia waved her hand. “Don’t try and understand it here.” She pointed to her head. “Somewhere deep in there”—she pointed to Lucy’s heart—“you already know all of this. This is ingrained in you and has been since before you
were
you. So just do it. Right now. Close your eyes.”

Lucy did.

“See that blackness that you think of as flat? Well, it’s not, it’s a tunnel and it goes down. And if you go down far enough into the darkness you will reach the other side, and beyond that is pure energy and light, an endless supply for you to tap into. With your heart cracked open it should be easier to get to it.”

Lucy breathed in. She looked at the back of her eyelids.

“Stop trying,” Olivia whispered. “Just let go.”

Lucy felt her eyelids twitch.

Lucy smelled something then, that spicy scent, gingery mixed with something else. The scent got stronger.

Someone touched each of her eyelids, just lightly. And they stopped fluttering.

Lucy felt herself inch forward. In the world she knew, it was not possible to be inching forward into mysterious blackness and at the same time be standing in the bathroom at a pool hall. Then again, in the world she knew, words did not appear on silk scarves, and faces did not appear in smoke, your voice could not be stolen, and when a boy met you and shook your hand he would remember you a minute later, even if you were as forgettable as Lucy.

Which meant only one thing: the world she knew was not the world she was in.

So if they said that she could somehow soar to the center of the earth, what was stopping her?

Lucy let go.

She moved faster and faster. Deeper into the blackness she went. Up ahead, there wasn’t a light exactly but there wasn’t not a light either. It looked like the moment before a strange kind of dawn that she’d never seen before. But somehow it felt familiar. She stared deeply into it until she couldn’t see it anymore. When she breathed in she felt it curl its fingers up her nostrils, into her lungs, filling her up.

Her eyes opened and her smile spread.

Olivia looked at her, calmly, coolly, from her perch on the counter. Something about her expression had changed. Lucy couldn’t pinpoint what it was exactly, but she could feel it when Olivia’s eyes met hers. And then Olivia nodded ever so slightly. A centimeter up, a centimeter down, it was almost imperceptible. But to Lucy, in that moment, it was everything.

Olivia hopped off the counter. They led her back out into the main room and over to a guy who’d just sunk the eight ball.

“Asher,” Gil said. “There’s someone here I need you to meet. . . .”

I
t’s not that no one had ever looked at Lucy before, it’s just that usually when they did it was by accident, or just briefly, or she never even noticed. But on the third day of her sophomore year, something was different—as she made her way up the slate walkway she could feel eyes on her. Lots of them. A tickle of a glance here, a tingle of a glance there, looks coming from every direction.

To her right two floppy-haired junior guys were staring at her. When they noticed her noticing, they nudged each other and smirked. To her left a senior was standing with his girlfriend, but he kept glancing at Lucy over his girlfriend’s shoulder. Up ahead the cross-country team was on an early morning run. Three of the runners turned back to look at her after they ran past.

But
why
?

Lucy looked down at her dress to check for embarrassing stains. But, no, the fabric was spotless. Okay, so the light-blue thigh-skimming jersey thing that Olivia had shoved into her hand the night before, which she’d yanked over her head that morning, was composed of significantly less fabric than she was used to wearing. But it was not any tinier than what lots of girls usually wore.

Lucy took out a little compact from her bag.

But everything looked fine. There was a line of charcoal pencil on each of her eyelids, a swipe of mascara on her lashes. Her lips were a red-y plumb-y color courtesy of a small pot of gloss she’d smeared on with her pinky. But it didn’t even look like makeup; it just looked like her lips had been recently kissed.

Only they hadn’t been kissed in a long time. Lucy remembered exactly when that was.

The day before Alex leaves for the summer, he and Lucy go to the hiking store to buy things he thinks he might need—a fancy aluminum water bottle with a mouth big enough to fit ice, a clip for his keys, waterproof sealant to spray on his hiking boots. She follows him around the store saying things like, “Oh look, a camping stove!” “Chicken and rice in a bag, who could believe it!” She is pretending to be excited because he so obviously is. But this feels like death to Lucy, like the end of the world, his leaving. And pretending otherwise is exhausting.

Eventually she can’t do it anymore. She becomes quiet and the corners of her mouth drag down. He catches her by the arm in front of the two-person tents. “Hey,” he says. “Don’t look so sad, okay?” She nods and forces a smile but neither of them believes it.

He’s excited for this trip, that’s the thing. She tries to imagine trading places with him, what she would feel like if she were the one leaving. But the truth is, it’s impossible to imagine that she would ever plan a trip that would take her away from him.

She follows him through the sleeping-bag aisle, through the belay-clip aisle, thinks about him leaving her. He touches items one by one, and it seems like part of him is already gone. It makes her feel that empty, starving, hollowed-out feeling she gets sometimes. She tries to control her face the best she can, but it is no use.

When they are done at the store the sun is falling and he tells her he has to go home. He’s getting up at 5:30 a.m.; 6:30 is when the taxi will take him to the airport. A taxi, not his parents, a fact that does not surprise Lucy given what she knows about his parents. But it still makes Lucy feel so incredibly tender toward him she almost can’t stand it.

They are quiet in the car. She does a silent countdown: five minutes left before he gets to her house, three minutes, two minutes. She cannot help but cry a little as he turns onto her street. He parks in the driveway, gets out of the car, and walks around to her side. He opens her door and takes her hand and helps her out of the car. He does not usually do this, but she cannot even enjoy the extra-special attention he is now paying her, because she knows how soon it has to end.

They stand there, holding hands, in front of his car in front of her house. He turns toward her then, takes her face and cups it gently, looks her in the eye. “It’s going to be okay, Luce,” he says. “It is.” He leans in. And then . . .

Lip to lip, hot breath and tongues. They have done this a hundred times before, but every time his lips touch hers, it feels like a surprise. No memory of a kiss, Lucy has decided, can ever do justice to what one actually feels like.

And there is nothing on earth Lucy loves more than kissing Alex. Her body tilts and presses against his, her arm snakes up around his neck, she runs fingers through his hair. He sighs into her mouth.

She smiles into his.

Because here’s the thing—Lucy, who is not cocky about anything on earth, who second- and third-guesses herself about everything, is sure of only this one thing: Lucy just so happens to be an amazing kisser.

She is not really sure how this happened since Alex is the first and only person she’s ever kissed. Then again, there are some things we do that don’t need to be taught—how to smile, how to cry, and for Lucy, kissing feels like this. Like something she was born to do.

She channels every bit of love for him from her heart, out through her fingers on the back of his neck, his lips to hers, in her saliva and tongue. She needs him to remember it, this, what it feels like, what she feels like. She puts everything she has into this kiss that they are sharing outside her house with the sun going down and a warm, late June wind swirling around them like ribbons.

And then the kiss is over and they lean back. He keeps her face in his hands and looks at her, as though he has just been returned to earth from somewhere far away. “I’m really going to miss you,” he says. His voice sounds thick, and in that moment she knows that he means it. Her insides fill up, no more empty spaces. Just like that.

Lucy shook her head and snapped her compact shut.

That was then. But she is here now, at Van Buren. Here. At school. And their last kiss was a long time ago.

But if she does everything right, the next one might not be . . .

Two senior guys walk past. They both stop talking and neither can take their eyes off her. And in that moment Lucy suddenly knew one thing for sure: it wasn’t the makeup that they were looking at, nor the dress. No, they were looking at her.

And they were not the only ones.

In the parking lot, Lucy gave Ethan Sloane back the jacket, which he accepted without even looking at, because he was too busy staring at her. He was full of questions like, “Are you new here? Do you want me to show you around? Do you want a bite of my apple?” If she hadn’t known better, hadn’t known his heart was broken, she would have sworn he actually seemed to be flirting.

As soon as she walked into school, this guy Xavier, who Tristan was friendly with, gave her a big hug. “Lucinda! Heeeeeey, babe, please tell me every little thing about your summer,” he had said. As though they were the sort of friends who discussed such things, even though he’d never spoken directly to her in her life.

While she was standing at her locker, a guy she’d shared an art class with two years ago, who everyone called Big D, walked up and told her a long story about his summer in Florida, and offered to show her a cell-phone slide show consisting of pictures of him at the beach with his shirt off.

And when she dropped her bio notebook as she shut her locker, this guy Mark, the volleyball team captain with the big, round, volleyball head, dove down onto the floor to catch it. Then he looked at the front where she’d written
bio
and said, “Hot handwriting!” without even a hint of irony.

It was fun, the attention was, she had to admit that. But they weren’t who she cared about. Who she cared about, she had yet to see.

Lucy stopped off in the bathroom, on her way to Photo I, stomach jangling like it was filled with a handful of pennies. She reapplied that berry gloss and looked herself in the eye. “Not bad, sugar face,” she said to the mirror. She winked at her reflection before she walked out.

Ten minutes later, the new Lucy walked into the photo room where the old Alex was snipping a long ribbon of negatives. His camo shorts hung loose on his hips, his faded olive T-shirt stretched across his shoulders. She remembered how soft that shirt had felt under her cheek that time when they’d been lying on a blanket in her backyard. But there was no trace of her face there, no trace of how much she loved him anywhere on his person in fact, which suddenly struck her as so terribly, incredibly sad, she had to turn away.

Lucy looked around the room, where everyone was bustling doing this and that; what were they supposed to be doing that day? What were all these people doing who were not standing there imagining their face pressed against Alex’s hard chest?

They were making contact sheets is what, those sheets of mini photos that showed a tiny version of every picture on the roll. Mr. Wexler had taught Lucy how to make them when she came in during her free period the day before.

Lucy took out her sheet of negatives. She didn’t care what was on there, just went into the darkroom, put a strip of negatives into the enlarger, flipped on the light so it shone down through her negatives, and projected tiny versions of all her photos down onto the paper.

She stared at the little pictures—she focused on one she’d taken in early evening in mid-July when Tristan had driven them twenty miles into the middle of nowhere where, strangely and wonderfully, two saxophonists and a drummer were set up in the middle of an empty field, playing music just as the sun was going down. It had been hot that day, so hot that nothing seemed real. She’d watched them in a daze, feeling the sweat dripping down her back.

“I was just driving around one day and saw them,” Tristan told her. And then he’d grinned, all big and cheerful. “That’s the thing I love about driving, you go for long enough you always find something, even if you weren’t looking for anything in the first place. They’re really friendly guys. I talked to them last time. They don’t have anywhere else to practice so they come out here to play.”

Lucy had taken out her camera and stood there shyly. Tristan had nudged her forward. “Seriously, Lu,” he’d said. “Go as close as you want. You don’t need to be scared. They really won’t mind.”

So she’d run up and snapped a picture. And that picture told such a story of something she’d planned to try to explain to Alex—about the beautiful cool of the music slicing through the thick, hot summer air, how she’d sung along quietly, words she made up right on the spot, and it felt like magic (although maybe she’d leave out the singing part, since he didn’t really know she did it).

And there were dozens of other stories for him on that roll. She’d hunted them out, swirled them around in her head, polishing them like bits of sea glass to give him when he got back.

Lucy flipped off the enlarger, then slid the photo paper into the different vats of chemicals, one by one, until the photos she’d taken began to appear. When she was done, she came back out into the main room. Alex was at the light box staring at his own contact sheet—she peeked over his shoulder. She caught a glimpse of a field, horses, a lake, someone in a barn. Photos from the summer he’d had without her.

She was still so embarrassed about the day before, but her embarrassment was overridden by the unbearable ache in her chest that only eased when she was close to him. Her face was burning as she put her stuff down next to his. She knew she needed to say something.

“About yesterday,” she started. “I’m sorry about that. That was an accident.” Except she said it so fast it came out like one long word: AboutyesterdayI’msorryaboutthatthatwasan-accident.

Alex turned slightly. “Oh, hey,” he said. “What did you say?”

“About yesterday . . . ,” Lucy whispered.

“Sure, fine, no worries.” But it sounded like he was just trying to appease her to get her to stop.

Lucy stood there. She closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated on pulling power up from down below, holding it in her belly, and radiating it out. Her hands began to tingle.

She inched in closer so her elbow was just barely grazing his.

He looked at her, then started backing away. She took a deep breath.

“I really love that photo!” she said too loud.

He smiled a little and then nodded.

“Which?” His voice softened.

“Um.” She stuck out her finger and pointed at random. “That one.”

They stood side by side staring at it.

It was a photo of a few people dragging a canoe into a lake. The shot had been taken from high up above, at the top of a hill perhaps.

When Alex took that photo, had he known he would be ending things with her? Had he known he would be coming back to break her heart?

Lucy felt heat on the back of her neck, sharp claws digging in, and was immediately sick with jealousy of everyone in those photos even though she could not see a single thing about them other than that they were people with arms and legs and that one was wearing flip-flops and two were wearing hiking boots.

“They look so tiny,” she said. “Like little toy people.” Her voice squeaked, as though she was just a little toy person herself.

She felt herself begin to deflate. She was projecting no power or glow. There was nothing but raw need oozing out of her.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “And I like the way I captured the light here”—he pointed—“through the trees onto the lake. And the composition is excellent because the focal point of the photo is . . .”

While Alex went on, Lucy forced herself to breathe. Sometimes when Alex was talking about something he cared about, it was almost like he forgot about the fact that he was talking to another person. But that was okay; Lucy had never really minded that. Her heart slowed, and as he talked, she tuned out and closed her eyes. She concentrated on breathing. On taking strength and power from the center of the earth, on radiating something else back out. She breathed in; she was beautiful. She breathed out; she was strong. She breathed in; she was a goddess. She breathed out; she was luminous.