The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (2 page)

“I’m really sorry,” he said. He took his hand away from his neck and tipped his head to the side.

He looked so beautiful like that with his head tipped to the side.

“Why?” Lucy’s voice went up an octave, like she was imitating a cartoon character.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said finally. “I just don’t feel like we should still be doing this.” He motioned back and forth in the space between them. The
this
that they should not be doing was
them
.

“But you were gone,” Lucy said.

His face softened. He took a breath and she felt a flash of hope because, wait! What if he was just getting ready to shout
GOTCHA!
or
SUPER EARLY APRIL FOOLS!
or to indicate in some way that they were on a game show where boyfriends and girlfriends get big prizes for fake-dumping each other?

He breathed out; the pause ended. He just shook his head and went back to fiddling with that damn leather necklace. They stood there until Lucy became vaguely aware of a bell ringing in the distance. It was the first-period bell signaling the fact that the first day of her sophomore year had officially begun.

“So this is just
it . . .
then?” she asked.

Alex put his hands in his pockets and raised his shoulders up to his ears, a slow shrug. “I guess so.”

“Oh. Well.” Her voice was still too high, not really her voice at all. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“We’ll be friends, okay?” he said. And it was that phrase, that sad and most pathetic of overused letdowns delivered in a voice still so sweet, that finally did it.

Lucy’s heart began ripping apart inside her chest. She could actually feel it, the heavy red meat of it stretching and stretching until one by one those tendons popped. Lucy looked Alex in the eye one last time; then she did the only thing she could think to do in this totally-not-sense-making world. She said, “Well! See you later, then! I guess it’s time for class!” And then she turned and started walking as fast as she could even though the thing was, actually, their first-period class was one they’d signed up for together. Lucy didn’t want to cry in front of him.

“Wait!” he said. “I just . . .”

She stopped. She didn’t turn but she held her breath, filled suddenly with the sick and terrible hope that he’d made a mistake maybe or changed his mind. It wasn’t too late!

“I just don’t want you to hate me,” he finished.

Lucy shook her head. Because what she was feeling was so, so far from that. Because of course she didn’t, because of course she never could.

So she just kept walking, and as she went something occurred to her, something so terrible and so perfect she actually laughed: Lucy had solved the puzzle wrong, her very own game on her very own stomach. The answer wasn’t I’M READY.

It was I = IDIOT.

L
ucy managed to hold it together until she reached the bathroom. She stood in front of those cracked enamel sinks and an anguished cry escaped her lips. Within seconds, she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.

As she was crying, what she was thinking was:
this just doesn’t make any sense.

She’d thought about him every second all summer long. During the day she’d seen his face everywhere, on the faces of strangers, in the corner of her vision. Once a hint of him in a particularly human-looking potato. At night she tried to remember the placement of every freckle on his skin, and one night, one night she’d missed him so much, Lucy lay in her bed and held her own hand, and tried to pretend she was holding his.

She’d sent him emails every day, and letters in the mail every few days, and a bunch of presents too—pop-up cards she’d learned to make by watching a video on the internet, a T-shirt she’d had printed for him with a picture of an old-school camera on the front, a semi-failed attempt at banana bread, and once when she was feeling particularly saucy her very cutest, newest bra, which she’d only worn once.

One night when she couldn’t sleep for missing him so much, she’d written a song for him on her guitar. The chorus went:

I feel you here when you’re not

I see your face in the sky when you’re not here

I hear your voice in my head when you’re not here

You’re always here, you’re always here.

You are you are you are

It was the only song she’d ever written. It was silly maybe, but it was from the heart and it was all true. Lucy loved to sing but she’d always been scared to sing in front of
anyone
other than her best friend, Tristan. But over the summer while she was missing Alex so much, she’d decided that maybe after they’d lost their virginities together, she’d finally be able to share the singing part of herself too. And this was the song she was thinking she could sing for him first.

She’d been practicing it all summer, had found herself humming it nearly constantly. It became a part of her as much as he was a part of her.

And he was as much a part of her as her very own damn heart.

Okay, so she hadn’t heard from him much over the summer, but she hadn’t really worried about that because he was not a very stay-in-touch type of person. And besides, he was on a ranch in Colorado and it was probably hard to get cell service and internet access there, what with all the horses and everything. Besides, all the while that Lucy was imagining him, she knew he was imagining her too. She felt it in her heart.

So then what had happened?

Lucy turned on the faucet, put a scratchy brown paper towel under the water, then lifted up her T-shirt and started scrubbing at the dark green letters.

Lucy was standing there like that, scrubbing and crying, when the door swung open behind her.

Her heart stopped. She froze.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” a voice said calmly, simply.

Lucy looked up. There stood a girl in a gray silk minidress, a pile of long chains around her neck with different things dangling off of them: an orange crystal, a green feather, a gold vial, a small black key. Her hair was bleached almost white and hung around her face in long layers. She had dark, arched eyebrows, light gray eyes, a pointy chin, sharp cheekbones, and a space between her two front teeth. She was striking and a little bit scary, like a wolf that had decided to take the shape of a person. Lucy had seen her around. Olivia something; she was a senior.

She was staring at Lucy.

“What doesn’t have to be like what?” Lucy said.

The girl then shook her head as though Lucy was a slightly slow child to whom one must explain things gently. “Whoever he is, however you feel now, it could all be different than it is.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, you don’t yet.” The girl smiled. “But you will.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a square of burnt orange silk, delicate like the wing of some exotic bird.

She held it out to Lucy. “Dry your tears with this,” she said.

Lucy stared at it.

“Go on.”

Lucy brought it up to her face. The material felt cool and smooth against her cheek.

The girl watched her and then gave Lucy this nod, as though they had a special understanding. Then the girl put her bag on her shoulder and turned to leave.

“Don’t you want this back?” Lucy asked.

The girl turned back toward Lucy with that same mysterious smile on her face. “Keep it,” she said. “I don’t cry over boys.”

Then she winked and walked out.

Lucy stood there, holding the scarf up to her cheek—it smelled like spices from someplace far away. She didn’t feel so upset anymore. She felt . . . strange. Like she knew something important had just happened. Only she had no idea what it was.

She stared at herself in the mirror for one moment more. And then, for reasons even she was not quite sure of, she ran to the door, pushed it open. She wanted to talk to that girl again to ask her what she’d meant by what she said. “Hey!” Lucy called out. “Wait!” But the hallway was empty. Somehow that girl was already gone.

L
ucy did not like to lie, but it was awfully easy to convince the nurse she was sick and could not go to her Photo I class. A few vague hand motions and a facial expression that implied “stomach problems” and there she was left all alone in the dimly lit Band-Aid-scented sickroom. She stayed there for all of first period, through homeroom, and second period and halfway through the next class too. She lay there, just curled up on a cot, staring at all the painted-brick, graffiti-covered walls:

I JUST BARFED IN THIS BED

E4 4eva

Hope yur enjoying the bio test suckaaaas

Someone had drawn a little parade of muffins, marching up the wall. And under that, two crabs holding claws with a heart drawn around them.

Bells rang. Time passed. When the nurse came in to check on her, Lucy pretended to be asleep. Finally around noon she emerged from the cocoon of the sickroom, blinking in the bright afternoon sun.

Out on the main lawn she saw the
WELCOME BACK, VAN BUREN VULTURES!
sign strung up on the lunch building, saw the other students milling around in their back-to-school outfits, saw a couple of freshmen standing in front of the main office, a short curly-haired girl tipping her head to the side, beaming up at a skinny boy who was gesturing wildly with his long, gangly arms.

The air was so full of newness, of excitement, of possibilities, of beginnings.

Just not for her.

It was when Lucy saw the guy reach out and touch the girl’s hair, awkwardly put a stray tendril behind her ear, and grin, embarrassed, because he just couldn’t help himself, that Lucy’s legs decided to start walking away. They walked her down around the side of the lunchroom, out back behind the school, past the track and the football field, and they just kept going. Her flip-flops caught on branches. She didn’t slow down. She walked and walked, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She took that scarf out of her pocket and brought it up to her face, dried her tears. But when she pulled it away, she caught a glimpse of something on the fabric. A flash of black.

There were words written on that burnt orange silk. The ink looked fresh, and although she knew this wasn’t possible she could have sworn those letters weren’t there before, as though somehow her own heartbroken tears made them appear.

Midnight tonight.

Old Orchard Road

The Big House Down at the End.

Come alone.

We can help.

SSH

I
f there’s an upside to having a broken heart it’s this: a broken heart makes you brave.

Just before midnight, with her parents lying in their bed asleep, Lucy, who’d never snuck out even once in her entire life, got up, walked right out her front door, and pulled it shut behind her. Down the driveway she went, heart aching, head swimming, the tiniest tendril of guilt curling in the bottom of her belly, but she did not look back.

When Lucy had finally gotten home from school that day, after almost two hours of walking, she’d gone up to her room, taken out her Alex Box, and looked at everything that was in there: all the hangman games, a letter he’d written her once during class and signed with what looked like a misshapen heart, a cashew, a framed photo he’d taken of a little bird sitting on a rusty nail and given her as a present, a book about a mountain-climbing expedition that he liked and thought she’d like too, a pair of socks he’d let her borrow when she’d walked on hers in damp grass.

She’d been looking for an explanation in that box, but all that she found was evidence of his having once liked her, not clues to why he no longer did.

When her mom got home from work and asked Lucy how her first day had been, Lucy just said she didn’t feel very well, had a stomach-something maybe. “But I’m sure I’ll be better by Friday,” Lucy had added. Her mother was all excited about the trip she was taking with Lucy’s father that weekend. Lucy didn’t want her misery to leak out onto their happiness, since theirs was so rare and would be, Lucy knew, so fleeting. Besides, Lucy did not want to talk about what had happened because in order to explain that Alex had broken up with her she’d have to first explain who Alex
was
. And she knew it would hurt her mother’s feelings to find out that Lucy had had an Alex in her life and never said a word about it. So Lucy let her mother bring her flat Coke and chicken rice soup, which Lucy would not be able to eat. Then Lucy texted Tristan, asking if he could drive her somewhere late that night. He said yes. She lay there and watched the clock.

And when it was time, she went.

Tristan was already waiting for her in the truck, leaning back, window down, two lollipop sticks sticking out of his mouth like skinny twin tongues.

“Well, hello,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.” He grinned as though being up and out at midnight on a school night was totally normal, which for him it kind of was. Tristan had terrible insomnia. So most nights while everyone else was in bed, Tristan was driving around, trying out the pancakes at a diner in a random town, or parked somewhere playing the blues on his harmonica. Tristan had gone to first grade twice (the first time had been the year his mom died), so even though he was just starting sophomore year with Lucy, he could already drive. And he didn’t even have to sneak out because his dad had only two rules: don’t get hurt, and don’t get arrested. Beyond that, Tristan could do what he wanted.

Lucy walked around the front of his truck to the passenger side. She knew how she must have looked to him then—eyes puffy, face blotchy. But Tristan wasn’t the kind of guy who’d pry about stuff, so all he said was, “Where to, little buddy?” and moved a couple harmonica boxes from the seat to the cup holder to make room for her.

“Old Orchard Road,” she said. “Some big old house down at the end.”

He crunched through one of his lollipops and put the stick onto the dashboard, where it lay with a dozen like it.

Lucy leaned back against the seat as the trees whizzed by, her hand stuck out the window to catch the wind. She knew he wouldn’t ask her anything else. But she supposed she needed to tell him.

She took a breath. “Alex broke up with me this morning,” she said. It was strange hearing herself say those words out loud. They both did and did not sound true.

She turned toward Tristan, who was slowly shaking his head. “Oh, buddy.” This was his serious voice. He didn’t use it often. “I’m really sorry,” he said. But he left it at that, didn’t try to pretend he understood what she felt like. Of course he didn’t. Tristan had never been in love. He’d never even had a girlfriend.

Not that he hadn’t had options. Although Lucy could never see him like that, she knew that a lot of girls thought Tristan was cute, in a lanky-body, floppy-haired, twinkly-eyed, mismatched-socks sort of way. He was friendly and liked to talk to strangers so he met people wherever he went, and some of those people were girls and some of those girls got crushes on him. Occasionally he would hook up with one if she was cute enough and chased him hard enough, but it never amounted to more than that.

Sometimes a girl he hooked up with would get it in her head that he was going to be her boyfriend and then get all confused when he didn’t want to be, even though he’d warned her from the start that he wasn’t interested in anything serious. “But people hear what they want to hear,” is what he’d always said. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in love at all, it was that he didn’t believe in love for
himself.
He didn’t think he was capable of falling in it, and he was fine with that.

When Lucy first started dating Alex she’d felt sorry for Tristan, sorry that he’d never gotten to know the beautifully delicious pain of loving someone so much. But, she realized now, as they drove down those dark streets, the flip side of that beautifully delicious pain was a pain that was not beautiful or delicious at all. Maybe Tristan was lucky.

“This
hurts
.” Lucy’s voice cracked. “I really love him.”

“I know you did,” Tristan said. He took a deep breath, like he was going to say something more. But then he just exhaled and drove.

Lucy wondered if what Tristan wasn’t saying had to do with something that Lucy knew that Tristan didn’t know she knew: he’d never really liked Alex. Not that he’d admitted that of course, but when someone’s your best friend, you can tell things like that. After the first time she’d introduced them, tried to make them friends, Tristan had said something about how it seemed that Alex bowled Lucy over a little bit. “I don't mean to judge,” he'd said. “I just hope that when the two of you are alone he lets you talk a little more is all. . . .”

Lucy had nodded and said that yes he did. But she’d felt protective of Alex and of their new relationship and did not elaborate. Tristan never brought it up again.

Tristan pulled over. They were there. Up ahead was a big, black metal gate and beyond that were dozens of tall trees lining a dark driveway so long that Lucy couldn’t even see what was at the top. “I guess this must be the place,” he said.

“I’ll just get out here,” she said.

“You don’t want me to come with you?”

Lucy shook her head, even though a part of her actually did.

“Hold on one second.” Tristan took some things out of his pocket—a harmonica, a few lollipop wrappers, a paper clip bent into a spiral, and a little cellophane-wrapped something. He placed the cellophane thing in her hand and closed her fist around it. “There,” he said. “For protection.”

She looked down. Resting on her palm was a plastic-wrapped toothpick.

“Y’know, in case there are very tiny vampires up there,” he grinned. “Or poppy seeds.”

Lucy got out of the car, shut the door behind her, walked up to the gate, and went through. Her hands were tingling. She didn’t know why.

Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. She concentrated on walking, on not feeling anything but the crunch of the gravel under her feet. She couldn’t see the house yet and when she turned back she couldn’t see the street behind her either. There was only blackness all around her, and the moon up ahead.

She kept going in the dark, humming her Alex song so quietly that even she couldn’t hear it. The driveway curved left and she followed it, and finally, finally, a house rose up in front of her, incredibly tall and very old. The front was covered in dozens of windows, beautiful, but eerie.

Alex would have loved to take pictures of this.

Lucy’s eyes adjusted. The front yard was filled with weeping willows that looked like giant beasts with their fur hanging down to the ground. She climbed up a slate walkway that led to the front door. She reached out and lifted the heavy brass knocker. She paused, frozen somewhere between knocking and not. As though somehow she knew even then that once she let go, there’d be no turning back.

And then let go she did. Metal slammed against metal.
Whatever is going to happen, let it happen.

The door swung open as though someone had been waiting for her inside. Olivia, the girl from the bathroom, stood there staring at Lucy. Her face spread into a slow, brilliant smile.

Then she grabbed Lucy’s wrist and pulled her inside.