The Brokenhearted (2 page)

“It’s beautiful,” I start, a hot blush crawling up my chest. “But . . . I can’t go tonight. I’m sick. I threw up in the middle of ballet.”

I wrap my arms around my midsection and hunch over, willing my face to drain of all color. Staring back at me in the mirror is a damp-looking redhead, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, her pale skin covered in a constellation of ginger freckles. Next to the perfect human specimen that is Helene Fleet, I really do look ill.

Her gray eyes narrow as she studies me in the mirror, but I can’t quite tell if she’s concerned or just annoyed. She walks toward me and places a cool, smooth hand on my forehead. “You feel fine,” she murmurs. “Maybe you just need to lay down for a little while. Have you had some water?”

Just then, my father stalks into the dressing room, his skyscraper-shaped cuff links jingling in his palm. “Five minutes, my loves.”

“She’s sick.” My mother frowns, her lower lip sticking out like a pouting child’s, her disappointment evident. “A stomach bug. She says she’s not going.”

“Not going?” My dad’s smile droops. He turns and looks at me sideways, waiting for the punch line. “Of course you’re going. Chin up, kitten. The Fleets never get sick.”

“I know, Dad,” I say, staring at the floor. I’ve been watching the parade of frail South Side children at the start of the Orphans’ Ball since I was ten. I can almost smell the prime rib, can almost taste the puréed peas dotted with flecks of gold the mayor serves us once the orphans are whisked away. “But I just don’t—”

“Think of poor Will,” my mother chides, turning away to press a button beneath the vanity table. Instantly, her mirror slides up the wall, revealing dozens of steel jewelry drawers behind it, each one holding an individual necklace or bracelet or a couple of pairs of earrings. “He’ll be bored stiff without you.”

Poor Will.
My nose wrinkles.
If only you knew what I was supposed to do with poor Will tonight.
“Will is a big boy. I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say quietly.

When Will first asked me out, it felt like winning a prize. At Cathedral Day School, Will is practically royalty: class president, debate champion, and the leading man in all the school plays. I’m the ballet nerd, the perfect student whose shyness gets interpreted as snobbery. When Will began to pay attention to me, I became visible. Not just a brain but a flesh-and-blood girl. So of course I swooned over the flowers he sent, the feeling of walking down the halls with his arm around my shoulder—any girl with a pulse would have done the same.

But everything I felt at first has faded. The more Will insists it’s time we took things further, the less I want to. This morning during morning mass, wedged in the center of the fifth pew from the altar, I whispered to him that I might not be ready for the suite at the Grande. That maybe dancing under the mayor’s crystal chandelier was as far as things should go tonight. His expression froze, then twisted into a smirk. “I can think of a few girls who would be happy to take your place,” he said, and for an instant I saw in his faded blue eyes that he wasn’t joking. Then he put his school-president-perfect mask back on and smiled. “Kidding. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”

Helene presses a series of numbers into a glowing panel next to the jewelry safe. After a low beep, she pulls out the bottom drawer and selects a platinum-and-diamond necklace set with seven rubies the size of peppermints. She holds it up to her neck, the jewels dripping down her collarbone.

“Gorgeous, Leenie,” my father murmurs approvingly, moving to fasten the clasp at the nape of her neck.

“It’s perfect,” I breathe. I think back to last Valentine’s Day when he gave it to her, whispering to me that night that it was a
steal
at $50,000. “You look beautiful.”

My mother smiles wanly at me before closing the drawer and lowering the mirror again. “Thank you. But tonight is all about the orphans.”

Tonight is definitely
not
all about the orphans. My parents rely on these events to get the ear of the mayor and other local politicians. The real estate market in North Bedlam is cutthroat. As developers, Helene and Harris have to constantly grease the political wheels—including schmoozing with District Attorney Hansen and Mayor Marks—for the best building sites. “I’ll just rest here awhile. If I feel better, I’ll take a cab to the ball later,” I suggest.

“I hope it isn’t the flu,” Helene says. “You can’t afford a flu right now, with rehearsals for
Giselle
and your studies and—”

“Let’s leave Anthem be, darling. She’s already a workaholic just like her parents,” my dad interrupts, winking at me so I know he’s on my side. “We’ll keep an eye on Will for you, kitten. Just take it easy tonight.”

My mother sighs. “Lily’s here until nine.”

I nod. Lily is our cook, and I can probably convince her to leave a little early. My parents check the mirror for one final appraisal. In this light, they look twenty-five. It’s as if they never age. I form my hands into the shape of a camera and squint through the imaginary lens.

“Picture perfect?” Harris asks, his arm around Helene’s waist.

“The perfect couple,” I reply. And in this instant, I almost believe it.

If not for the drowned blond beauty found floating in Lake Morass seventeen years ago, anyone would think we had it all. But Regina is the fly in our amber, the error in our opal, the crack in our façade. Harris has his buildings to console him. Helene does, too, along with her charities, her pills, her chardonnay.

Which just leaves me.

A year after Regina’s life ended, mine began. I’m the replacement daughter, the girl who was supposed to make everything better. A living, breathing antidepressant. Two dry kisses and one cold compress later, the perfect couple is off to the ball, leaving their far-from-perfect daughter in the dressing room to rest. When they’re gone, I stay in the closet awhile, to stare at my all-too-ordinary face in the mirror.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 2

By 10, Zahra and I are far away from the tinkling champagne flutes at the Orphans’ Ball, racing through the black streets of the riverfront district—a once-industrial section of the North Side that abuts the Midland River—toward a warehouse party just east of the Bridge of Forgetting. We’re both wrapped in long wool coats, freezing in the drizzly late-March air.

“This place is giving me Bedhead,” I mutter through chattering teeth. I shove a gloved hand into my pocket, my index finger searching out the round red button on my pepper spray key chain. Even fearless Zahra looks a little unnerved by the dimly lit neighborhood, chewing her cuticles and scanning everything around us for clues.

“I think it’s this way.” Z aims her wide-set violet eyes in the direction of a street sign twirling on its pole like a weathervane. We’re at the corner of Arsenic Avenue and Thorn, both of which are unfamiliar streets. I almost never leave Upper Bedlam—the district made up of the neighborhoods of Lakeside, Church Hill, Museum Mile, and Bankers Alley—where things are safe and orderly. But staying home and brooding about Will was even less appealing than one of Zahra’s “underground” parties in a rough part of town.

“Aha,” Z says triumphantly when we reach the corner. She grabs me by the crook of my elbow and pulls me toward a row of industrial warehouses scrawled with graffiti, hunched against the wind like squat old men in overcoats.

The sidewalk is deserted but for a couple of drunk girls teetering past us on five-inch heels, their laughter whiskey-scented and high-pitched. The first four buildings on the block are semidemolished, their windows either shattered or covered over with rotting boards, but the last one in the row blazes with multicolored light.

“Looks great, right?” Z says, her hips already swaying to the thumping bass of “Kiss Me on the Apocalips” by Suicidal Stepchild. It’s been this way since the first time I met her, when she snuck into my kitchen during a charity luncheon my mother was hosting. Six-year-old Zahra scandalized me by stealing a whole tray of petit fours before lunch was even served, demanding that I lead her to my room where we could devour the treats. Zahra’s always been daring, up for anything, anytime. Me, I need a lot of convincing to choose new and risky over safe and predictable. Always have.

I shrug, wishing I’d stayed home with an Epsom salt bubble bath and my tried and true DVD of Olga Inkarova’s all-time best ballet performances. If I’d stayed home, I would be asleep by now, ready to get up early and head to the studio, with an hour of ballet to myself before our Saturday morning practice. This is the year I get to try out for the Bedlam Ballet Corps, where I find out if my twelve years of dedication to ballet have been enough to make a career out of it.

As we walk closer to the massive warehouse, a rainbow of colored lights passes over us, and doubt starts bubbling up inside me like acid indigestion. Is this party really worth a sluggish day at ballet tomorrow? “Are you sure we should be here, Z? Because I don’t think—”

But then the double doors at the top of the building’s stairs swing open as if sensing our arrival, and my words evaporate on my lips. A thin blond man in a worn velvet top hat slithers out of them and extends a hand to Zahra, who’s standing a few feet closer to him than I am. He has a long, skinny black star tattooed beneath each of his eyes.

“Come inside, sparkly girls.” His smile reveals a missing tooth and several gray ones. “Be corrupted.”

A South Sider.
I take a reflexive step backward and freeze, the dumb smile of a foreigner in a strange land glued to my face, hoping my initial revulsion at his teeth doesn’t show. But Zahra grabs his hand and follows him in without a second thought.

“Let’s go, Anthem.” Z turns around for a moment and thrusts her pointy chin toward the party, a wicked little grin lighting up her face. “This is exactly where we should be.”

And then she’s inside, leaving me no choice but to follow. I let the man in the top hat pull me up the steps, his grip so firm it hurts a little. Then I walk with Zahra through two sets of shabby velvet curtains until we find ourselves on an enormous checkerboard dance floor.

A tickling heat travels along my spine as I ogle the revelers: guys in bespoke suits and leather pants, women in high heels and shiny vintage dresses, feathers and jewels dripping from their shimmery shoulders. On the edges of the massive room are stations for drinks, each staffed by bartenders in top hats like the doorman’s. Swooping from the ceiling are women on trapezes, wearing nothing more than a sticky-looking wax, each with a set of tattered black wings sprouting from her shoulder blades.

“Told you. Party of the year!” Zahra shouts over the music, stepping out of her boiled wool trench. Gold hot pants cling to her tiny butt, and a white cotton tank with a red-and-black silk bra beneath it is tasked with harnessing her ample chest. Five long strings of black pearls dangle from her neck. “Give me your coat.”

I fiddle with the last button still fastened at my collar, take a deep breath full of sweat and smoke and alcohol fumes, and finally unbutton it.

“How did I let you talk me into wearing this?” I scream, but my words are lost in the noise. Zahra insisted I wear my costume from last year’s ballet recital, so I’m dressed as Juliet. As in, Romeo and.

She looks at me and smiles tenderly. “You look beautiful,” she says, leaning into my ear so I hear her.

“The
costume
is beautiful,” I correct her. Juliet wears a purple-and-black corset with real whalebone in it, paired with a black lace tutu edged in zippers. It makes my waist even tinier than it already is and gives me the illusion of cleavage. It screams
Look at me
, and I’m not someone who likes to be looked at. Not unless there’s an orchestra playing and I’m onstage, having rehearsed my every move for months. In real life, I never quite know where to stand or what to do with my hands.

“I’ll stash these and find us some drinks,” Z shouts, taking my coat.

I nod and sway self-consciously to the music, my eyes glued to the angels swinging on their trapezes. Seconds later, I feel two women dancing too close on either side of me, feathers from a peacock boa scratching my right forearm, then fingernails digging into my left hip. I try to dance out of the way, but a third woman, this one short and stocky in a leather catsuit, steps in front of me, blocking my way, keeping me planted.

“Ballerina,” the one with the boa whispers in my ear, her breath hot. I step backward, but I’m surrounded. She’s got SYNDI tattooed on her bare shoulder, and the word ripples as she reaches for my tulle skirt as if appraising its value. “So young,” the one on my right hisses. She’s skinny but sinewy and strong, clad in a tuxedo jacket, frilly bloomers, and heels, her bobbed hair neon yellow on one side of her part, black on the other.

“She’s just the right size,” Catsuit says, twirling around to face me. Her pink hair is shellacked into a towering pompadour, and one of her eyes lists slightly to the left. She grins, and her teeth are sharp and small, feral.

I turn to look for Zahra, my heart racing, but her back is to me and she’s headed toward a row of speakers along the far wall. I start to back up, my lips frozen in a panicked smile.

“Don’t go,” Boa pouts. She’s the prettiest of the three, tall with flawless bone structure, but her head is shaved down to the scalp and her eyes are ringed in two-inch orange false eyelashes. Her hands are around my waist, pulling me toward her. “We like nice girls like you, don’t we, ladies?”

“My friend is there—” I say, too softly. I stick my elbows out and get ready to thrash, gulping in air. But just then the one in the catsuit takes a step away from me, motioning for her friends to do the same. “Forget it, bitches,” I hear her mutter.

Their eyes are glued to a tall, shaggy-haired guy in a crisp white shirt and a velvet jacket. His rangy body and sharp cheekbones are freshly torn from the pages of a magazine. He’s walking toward them. Toward
me
.