The Brokenhearted (19 page)

“‘Will is the biggest prick among a sea of contenders at Cathedral,’” she says, blinking back tears and shaking her head. “That’s a quote from Anthem Fleet, circa two weeks ago. He treated you like dirt. Have you forgotten all that?”

“I changed my mind,” I say numbly, willing her to storm away so I can stop lying. I stare at her shoes, big shit-kicking combat boots laced up to her thigh. “I was wrong.”

“I’m going to go now,” Zahra says slowly, as if she’s not sure I even understand English anymore. “Call me when the Anthem I know returns, if she ever does. Because this?” She waves her hand over me like I’m a plate of inedible food, a ruined painting, a stained dress. “I don’t know who
this
person is.”

You’re right
, I think sadly as Zahra runs out, slamming my door hard behind her. Zahra has no idea what I’ve become. And I don’t know either.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 22

That night I’m awoken by a hand pressed lightly around my shoulder, shaking me. I’m up like a shot, leaping out of bed and onto the floor, racing to get to the door.
They’ve come to finish what they started.

A voice inside me whispers
no
.

I scoop a discarded leather belt from the floor and I have one hand on the door when a voice croaks my name.

“Anthem. It’s me.”

I lower the belt to my side as my eyes adjust in the darkness. Ford’s teeth glow in a slice of moonlight coming in through a couple of twisted slats in the closed venetian blinds. My fight-or-flight adrenaline instantly morphs into anger.

“How did you get in?” I whisper, my heart still ricocheting through my chest. I move to lock my bedroom door in case my parents heard something and decide to check on me.

He shrugs, like it was so easy it’s not worth talking about. “I’m good at breaking and entering. Don’t worry, I didn’t come through the lobby. Nobody saw a thing.”

I stand there in Gavin’s boxers and a tank top flecked with carrot soup, open-mouthed, a tiny part of me impressed that he found some other way into this fortress of a building. But a bigger part of me is furious.

“What the hell, Ford?” I ask. But then the effects of low blood sugar start to hit me: I feel dizzy, my vision dims, and I’m about to fall over. I stagger to my desk and open the bottom drawer, where I keep a stash of carbs. It’s the opposite of a ballet dancer’s diet, all of it, but my new heart and the fear of torpor has done funny things to my eating habits. I pull out a box of SugarKrisps, digging into it for a few handfuls of flaky cereal, a bunch of it escaping my hands and falling onto the floor, like snow atop the mountains of dirty clothes.

“Whoa.” Ford says, staring at me. “Your lips are blue.”

I nod, shoving cereal in my mouth.

“My fingers too,” I mutter, putting a hand in the air for Ford to see. My fingertips look as if I’ve dipped them in light blue ink.

I blink at Ford, chewing a final mouthful of SugarKrisps, the cereal scraping painfully down my throat.
Just leave
, I think. I want to fall back into bed again and lay there, numb and sleepless and alone until the morning comes.

Ford looks around my moonlit room, then back at me. “You look . . . um . . .”

“Not good,” I croak, cutting him off. “I know.” I rest my hip on the corner of the desk and wait a beat, but Ford stays silent. “Why did you come here? Just checking up on me?”

“I heard about what happened,” Ford says, sitting down on the edge of my bed, a dark shape in the mass of white covers. “When you didn’t come around again, I went to Hades. I found the kid, Rufus. He told me everything, after I paid him seven fifty, of course. I came to see if you’re okay.”

“Thanks. I’m not.” I drop the box of SugarKrisps on the floor, the cereal spilling out onto the carpet. I leave it there, making no effort to clean up the mess. “How did Rufus seem?”

“The same. Cute.”

“Too bad he’ll probably die in there or get hooked on drugs by the time he’s twelve,” I say bitterly.

“I know how this feels, you know.”

“How what feels?”

“When someone close to you dies. How dead inside you feel. How hopeless and angry and totally, shittily alone.”

“I thought you said you lived with three other people,” I say flatly.

“I do. My uncle and his two daughters. My parents were droopie addicts. It killed them in the end. If my uncle hadn’t stepped in to raise me, I’d be dead too, probably.”

“I’m sorry, Ford. That’s awful.” Chastened, I look down at my fingers, the blue tinge already receding.

I walk over to the window and open the venetian blinds a little, filling the room with faint moonlight. The scythe-shaped moon is enormous, so close it looks like I could reach up and break a piece off it. I turn away from the view—I don’t want to see anything beautiful.

“You shouldn’t have
gone
there,” he groans. “Not alone, anyway. I told you not to.”

“It’s too late now,” I say, too tired to stand anymore. I sink to the floor, next to the spilled cereal. “He’s dead, and rethinking what happened can’t change that. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Neither of us says anything for a minute.
Now
go away
, I think as I pull my knees up to my chin and rest my head on them. I want my bed and the crack in the ceiling and my tiny silent bubble where nothing moves. “So see you around, Ford. It’s over now.”

He shakes his head and pushes himself up off my bed, then walks toward me. He stands in front of me and offers me both hands. I don’t take them. I look down at the carpet, pluck a few SugarKrisps from the shag, and drop them into the box. “Come on. Get up,” he says. “It’s not
over
. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Even if you’re not acting like it right now.”

“I’m not in the mood for a pep talk,” I mutter. “Just leave.”

“No,” he says simply, his hands still outstretched, close enough to me now that I see the tiny cuts on his knuckles, a callus on his thumb. I remember what Jax told me:
He used to box, until he landed on the wrong side of a few bets.
I shake my head a little, but he doesn’t move. Ford may be a fighter, but all the fight went out of me the moment the bullet left Miss Roach’s gun.

“The last thing you need right now is to be left alone,” he says firmly. He looks like he might throw me over his shoulder if I don’t cooperate.

“When we found out my dad overdosed,” Ford continues, “I didn’t speak for a month. My mom was still alive at that point, totally high and living in the subway tunnels with my dad until he died. My uncle got her cleaned up enough to come to the funeral, and she tried to put her hands on my shoulders. I ran away, hid behind a gravestone for the rest of the funeral. I just wanted to die right along with my dad.”

He grabs my arms, and I reluctantly let him pull me up from the floor and onto my feet. “And then after some time went by, I started talking again. My uncle taught me how to box. I decided to live.”

“I don’t want to decide to live,” I croak, my voice like a rusted hinge. “I’m in mourning.”

A car backfires, the sound echoing in the empty streets below. I cover my ears, sick of my supercharged hearing.

“This is how you mourn him? By going catatonic?”

“And how would you suggest I do it?” I snap.

“By fighting back,” he says, daring me to doubt him. “
Especially
if I could run a hundred miles an hour.”

“I’m done fighting.” My chest and ears begin to burn. I flutter my hands up to my chest, wondering if he can see my scar in the moonlight. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

I hear his heavy sigh, his footsteps moving toward the door.

“You know what?” he says. When I face him again, his eyes are hard. “The world doesn’t need another brokenhearted girl.”

Before I can respond, he slips out of my room. I stare at the door with my mouth hanging open, a paltry comeback lodged in my throat.
I don’t care what the world needs.
And then, because I let my guard down, the memory of Gavin crumpling to the floor rears up again. The bloodstain growing wider on his shirt, the lifelessness of his hands in mine. And Rosie looking down at him and
smiling
—could she really have been smiling?

I bite the insides of my cheeks and struggle to breathe, to shake off the image, to forget about Ford and relax enough so sleep might be possible tonight. But when I look down, I find my hands have curled into fists.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 23

“Welcome back, Anthem,” Principal Bang says, sizing me up from behind her enormous desk. She scoots her short, round body closer to me, and her professional smile falters.

“Thank you,” I say warily, waiting for her to tell me why I’ve been pulled out of homeroom on my first day back at school. I’ve showered and combed the knots out of my hair, but I can’t wash away the hollows in my cheeks. I swallow what feels like a mouthful of gravel and zero in on the mole above her right eyelid. The mole is safe. Her small, dark eyes set deep into her pudgy face—eyes that are looking at me a little too carefully—are not.

Principal Bang purses her lips, her chubby hands tented under her chin, her elbows propped onto her desk blotter. Behind her is the Cathedral Wall of Power—a grid of hundreds of framed pictures of successful politicians, CEOs, talk show hosts, athletes, and other luminaries who have passed through the school’s hallowed halls since it opened two hundred years ago. “You do not look terribly well,” she sniffs. “Are you sure you’re well enough to be here?”

Nothing about me is well, but after Ford’s visit, I started feeling like maybe enough was enough. I announced my “recovery” to my mother yesterday, then spent all day cleaning my room, furiously scrubbing and vacuuming between long bouts of staring blankly into space. And today, despite the sadness wrapped around me like a lead overcoat, I scraped myself out of bed early and got to school an hour before the morning bell.

“I’m fine.” My voice sounds hollow and far away, like I’m hearing it through water. I clear my throat and force my spine to straighten up from my slumped position in the uncomfortable chair facing Bang’s desk. I curl my mouth into a smile, hoping I’m doing it correctly. It’s been so long.

“I feel I should tell you there has been talk of an anxiety assessment for you.”

My body recoils at these words. “It was just a bad flu. Mentally, I’m . . .” I tap the side of my head, groping for adjectives. “Clean. Calm. Collected.” There is no way I’m signing up for a day in the nurse’s office being interviewed and observed by a team of psychiatrists.

Bang narrows her piggish eyes and cocks her head. “With everything you’ve been through lately . . .” Traces of a knowing smile flash across her face as she leans closer. “Wouldn’t a little MoodEase help?”

I stare at her open-mouthed. I’ve never heard an adult speak so openly about Pharms, especially an adult who regularly goes on Channel Ten to rant about the illegal ones circulating in the city. The room starts to shrink around me, the smothering velvet curtains on the tall, narrow windows creeping closer. Can Bang force an assessment on me?

Assessments are for problem kids. I’ve never caused trouble at school, except for outranking Olive Ann in the senior class. The kids who are on MoodEase are easy to spot—their complacency shows on their faces and in their newly placid personalities—and there are dozens of them at Cathedral. At least a fourth of the upper school is on Pharms: MoodEase or Concentra or Stabiline. Each of them tinkering with neurons and brain chemistry to make them happier or more focused or less of a problem.

I don’t want any part of it. The anxiety assessment is a full day of interviews and stress tests. I would never make it through without spilling everything that’s happened out of me like water from a broken vase. But I also don’t want to be numbed out on Pharms. However agonizing my pain is, it is mine. It’s a part of me.

“Thank you for your concern,” I say tightly, looking down at my bitten-to-the-quick fingernails and picking at a ragged cuticle. “But I’m fine. I’m going back to ballet tomorrow.”

“And your classes? How will you catch up?” She asks, her brow wrinkled with false concern. I can almost hear her gleeful thoughts of Olive Ann’s potential ascent to valedictorian. I wish I could tell Bang that Olive Ann can have it—I don’t care about being valedictorian anymore. “A course of Pharmaceuticals could help you deal with the stress of all th—”

“I’m working out plans today with each of my teachers to make up all the work I missed.” My words get high-pitched and squeaky at the end of my sentence. “Really, I’m
fine
.”
So drop it.

“Very well, Anthem. Let’s talk again at the end of the week. I’ll hold off on scheduling anything until then.”

I nod curtly, staring at a paperweight on Bang’s desk, a scorpion frozen in amber. I stand up and pull my book bag onto my shoulder, my vision darkening momentarily due to low blood sugar. I have to eat more now that I’m not laying in bed all day, I tell myself. Then I remember the only thing I can use to get her off my back. “My father has always been very against the assessments,” I lie. I have no idea how he feels about the yearly assessments. We’ve never talked much about them. “He might be kind of upset if he hears about this,” I add.

Bang’s already-flushed cheeks flush a darker red. Dad is Cathedral’s biggest donor. Bang’s job could be in jeopardy if she gets on his bad side.

“We are only looking out for the well-being of our students,” she sighs, exasperated. “Let’s see how you’re doing at the end of the week. If we move forward, it will be a decision we undertake together, with you and your family.”