The Museum of Heartbreak (19 page)

“If you don't want to spend the day with me . . . ,” he started, his face falling.

“No, why would you think that?” I squeezed his hand gently. “There's nothing I'd rather do.”

“Good,” he said, giving me what I decided that moment was my official favorite Keats smile: the wry one with the eyebrow raise. Keats grabbed my hand, inclining his head toward the exit down the hall. “Let's go.”

As soon as we rounded the corner, I saw Eph and Audrey talking. She looked surprised by something he was saying, until she met my eyes, and her face shifted, suddenly unreadable. She muttered something under her breath to Eph, and he turned, took in me and Keats holding hands, and his face darkened, chin jutting out.

Audrey squeezed Eph's arm before leaving, offering me a rueful smile. I lifted my free arm just a bit—not a wave, an incline, an acknowledgment.

The first bell rang.

“Keats, you met my friend Eph, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”
He stretched his hand out to shake Eph's. “Good to see you, man.”

Eph's nostril curled at “man,” and I could practically hear the scoff as he shook Keats's hand. He turned to me. “Can we talk?”

“Now?”

He raised an eyebrow and I shook my head.

Keats nudged me. “It's almost second bell, Scout. We gotta go if we don't want to get caught.”

Eph laughed, looking right at me. “
You're
cutting?”

“So?”

“So, that's not very you.”

“Well, maybe you don't know me so well after all.”

Eph tilted his head back, running his hands through his hair, clearly exasperated.

“Pen, I just want good things for you. That's all.” I bristled at how he was parroting my words from the Flea right back at me.

The second bell rang.

Eph waited, irritable and tall and all broody like a thundercloud.

Keats waited, his face open and handsome and expectant and new.

I took Keats's hand and didn't look back.

•  •  •

We busted out the side doors and onto the sidewalk, merging with the rest of the world like it wasn't a school day, like we weren't students. It was gray and stark outside, the breeze tinged with an unfriendly edge, and my teeth chattered.

“So, that guy Eph is kind of an ass,” Keats said as he looped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me close. “He looked like he wanted to beat the crap out of me.”

“No . . .” I didn't know what to say, exactly. “It's not you. We're just not getting along—sorry you got caught in the middle of it.”

“I don't mind. If you guys aren't getting along, it means I get more of you to myself.”

I blushed hard, trying not to smile too much, and we walked down the steps of the nearest subway station, me still tucked into his side.

When the train came, we squeezed into the crowded car, finding two suspiciously empty seats next to a gray-haired woman in a frantically flowered dress.

After a few stops, the woman sniffed loudly, leaned over, and got close to my face: “I hope you have a terrible day!”

I rolled my eyes. “I should have known these seats were empty for a reason,” I said to Keats, but he pulled me up and over to the other end of the car, glaring at the woman over his shoulder.

I was charmed at how chivalrous he was. This would not be a terrible day.

We transferred to the F at Rockefeller Center, and after a much more peaceable ride this time, got out at Second Avenue.

“Let's get coffee,” Keats said.

I followed him along past a string of bodegas and restaurants and a hardware store and a Starbucks and a bagel store. I liked the way he held my hand and told me things: the time Beckett snuck him into a punk rock show, how his parents met at a fraternity party, how I should read Richard Brautigan after
On the Road
(okay, maybe not that one). We turned on Seventh Street and, somewhere between First Avenue and Avenue A, stopped in front of a small divey storefront labeled
HELVETICA
, a place I never would have noticed on my own.
Maybe, I thought, it was like something from Harry Potter and only existed today, right now, just for us.

When we walked through the door, a small bell tinkled, and from behind the counter a tattooed, pierced girl with blue pigtails gazed up disinterestedly. “The back open?” Keats asked, and she grunted and returned to her
Village Voice
.

Keats led me between cluttered old thrift-shop tables with mismatched chairs. Lamps with kitschy shades threw light warmly around the room. If this coffee shop were a person, it'd be a little old lady with lots of secrets—like a spinster aunt who used to be a dancer in the circus.

As soon as I saw the back room, I gasped. It was covered with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Hundreds of used books filled the space: old leather spines, cheap paperbacks.

“I love this place,” I said to myself, but maybe I said it out loud because Keats said, “I figured you would.”

He gave me that Keats smile. “What do you want? The usual?”

I raised my eyebrow.

“You know, hot chocolate, skim milk, no whip?” he offered.

Ahhh! Keats knew my “usual.” “Yes, please . . .”

As soon as he left the room, I plopped down on a couch in the corner. Everything around me smelled musty, like when you open an old book and it smells like words. I rested my boots against the coffee table, watched halfhearted sunlight filter in from the one window, tiny dust specks lazily floating around me, and heard Keats talking with the coffee girl, heard her laugh—Keats could charm surly tattooed girls—and then the whistle of the coffee steamer. Old Depeche Mode started playing
over the speakers. Keats must have talked her into turning on something.

I studied the books on the shelf behind me.

Lady Chatterley's Lover
. It was an old pulpy paperback festooned with red roses and a sultry, cleavagey woman with lips parted, as if she were breathless. Lady Chatterley, I assumed. I flipped through the wavy pages—the book had clearly been dropped in water—and found a folded slip of paper tucked in the back.

I unfolded it, read the cursive script:
Sometimes I miss her more than I can stand.

“You find one of the notes?”

Keats carefully placed our two mugs on the coffee table and settled right next to me on the couch. Thanks to the broken cushions he sank in perfectly close to me.

“The notes?” I took a small sip of the hot chocolate. It was unsweetened, and the roof of my mouth would again totally be raw after this, but I didn't care too much as the warmth trickled down into my belly.

“Yeah, people leave notes in the books here.” He read the one in my hand. “Damn,” he said, wincing. “That's hard-core.”

I thought back to the photo from his room—the one of him and evil ex Emily—and I returned the note to the book and shoved the whole thing back on the shelf. “So there could be more notes in here?”

“Yep, most definitely.”

I pulled out a copy of
Wuthering Heights
, held it up excitedly. “This is one of my absolute favorites. Have you read it? God, it's so terrible and romantic at the same time.”

“Eh, lady writers, not really my thing.”

“What?” Surely he didn't mean that. Surely I misunderstood him.
But before I could ask him to explain, he triumphantly held up a brightly colored hardcover of
Love in the Time of Cholera
in one hand and a note in the other
.

“Score.”

He sat back on the couch, pulling me into the curve of his side as he unfolded the note.

He was warm. And he smelled like a Christmas tree. And I thought to myself:
I am with Keats, a beautiful boy, in a coffee shop filled with books. Don't freak out, Pen.
This
is a big deal.

He handed me the note, nuzzled his head against mine.

I blew on the chipped edge of my hot chocolate mug as I read.

Oatmeal. Rosemary. Cat food. Arcade Fire. Heartbeats. Tulips.

“Grocery list, you think?” he asked.

“Hmm. Heartbeats on a grocery list?”

“Good point,” Keats said.

I chewed on my lip, thought about the Bearded Lady and my NYC subway token, giving me luck even though it was currently residing at the bottom of my purse with the lint and a stray aspirin. “Maybe it's some secret coded message, from spies, you know? They're on opposite sides, but they met—in Paris—before they knew they were spies, and they fell in love, and now they have to meet secretly, all Romeo and Juliet like. So they write grocery notes with code words in them and leave them here.”

Keats was watching me with an amused expression. “What does the list mean?”

“Well, she wrote it—you can tell by the handwriting. And she
wants to meet him after breakfast—oatmeal—by the Shakespeare garden in Central Park. Rosemary.”

“The cat food?”

“Um, he has to bring some, in case there are stray cats there.”

“Arcade Fire?”

“That's how he knows it's not some regular old grocery list. They first saw each other when an Arcade Fire song was playing, and her heart beat so fiercely, she said it was like tulips were blooming . . .”

I stopped talking, feeling a little dorky, but when I looked at Keats, he was watching me intently. His eyes were different—not amused, but soft and serious. He put his arm behind me and brought his lips to mine.

I closed my eyes, ready for dinosaurs to roar.

Instead I got Keats's chapped lips.

I pulled back, not sure what to do next, and Keats gave me a half-lidded sleepy smile, and he kissed me again, more insistent this time. It wasn't like when Eph kissed me, mint and salt and lightning and wonder.

This time it was chapped lips and a boy with a dimple as deep as a well, a boy who seemingly didn't like lady writers, a boy with his hand pressed against the small of my back.

Thoughts flashed through my mind:
This is different—this is for real—maybe I'm not doing it right?
But Keats's tongue slid into my mouth, and mine moved into his, and it was better then, my body relaxing into it, taking care of things for me.

At some point I felt myself crumple the secret spy grocery list in my hand and shove it in my pocket.

No one else came into the cafe, and the girl from the counter didn't
bother us, so we stayed there for the next hour, occasionally talking but mostly kissing.

I thought about Eph only once, when Keats went to the bathroom. I stood up, stretching, and browsed the shelves. In a corner so high I had to stand on my tiptoes, I found an old, wrinkled copy of
The Hobbit
, its pages yellowed and rippled, like someone had spilled something on it. It didn't have any notes in it.

Without thinking twice, I pulled a scrap of paper from my purse and wrote
Eph
, the letters hard, leaving an imprint on the other side. But then I didn't know what to say after that—words not exactly working.

I heard the murmur of Keats's voice from the next room, talking with the girl at the counter, so I dropped the scrap of paper in the pages of the book, and then shoved the book back in its impossible spot on the shelf, where all the other forgotten secrets lived.

Keats came in, paused, looking at me, taking me in from top to bottom, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, felt them useless next to me. But then he stepped forward, strong and decisive and pulling me into a kiss, and both of us sank back down onto the couch like an exhale, like things held back and then released.

•  •  •

After a bit, when my lips started to feel bruised and puffy, we left, nodding at the waitress on the way out, shuffling on coats and walking into the cold air. Keats took my hand, and we walked through the East Village to Washington Square Park, watching skateboarders maneuver around, and I thought,
This boy. This boy, not anyone else. This one, holding my hand.

We listened to a man play old ragtime tunes on a standup piano,
right under the arch. We stopped at a food cart to get hot dogs and ate them outside, sitting on a wood bench, watching pigeons and kids flutter around, and we nestled together, and I thought,
This is the boy I pick.

I couldn't calm my beating heart, couldn't stop my mind from racing through the possibilities.

Oatmeal.

Rosemary.

Cat food.

Arcade Fire.

Heartbeats.

Tulips.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I WAS
in a full-fledged Keats Haze, my lips puffy from consecutive days of near-uninterrupted make-out sessions.