The Museum of Heartbreak (2 page)

The beautiful boy—Keats, evidently—flushed and raised his eyebrows. “Hey, Cherisse. I was wondering when I'd see you.”

He pushed his jacket sleeves up and leaned over to give Cherisse a cheek kiss, and I saw one red-and-white-striped sock peeking out from under his cords. The other was a navy blue one with giraffes on it.

Cherisse blushed and flicked her hair over her shoulder, playfully toying with the charm on her gold necklace, leaning close to Audrey, effectively using her back to block me from the conversation.

“Aud,
this
is the guy I was telling you about! His dad and my dad have known each other for forever.”

“Wow, that's forever,” Audrey murmured politely, meeting my eyes and smiling apologetically.

I shrugged, looking back down at my notebook.

“I've known Keats since before we could even talk,” Cherisse continued, smiling coyly at him, and I felt disappointment settle over me like a weary sigh. Even if I hadn't blown it with my epic monologue on
Watchmen
, if Cherisse and her shiny hair and smooth conversational skills were in the picture, I didn't stand a chance.

Cherisse pointed at Audrey. “Keats, this is my bestie, Audrey. You will love her.”

I wanted to say,
Audrey's
my
best friend,
but I wasn't seven years old, so I bit down on my lip instead, watching the introductions.

“Nice to meet you,” Keats said, reaching across the aisle to shake Audrey's hand, which seemed really gentleman-like and polite, and
she shook his hand back and said, “Charmed,” and not for the first time I wished I had half the conversational grace Audrey did.

Cherisse pointed at Eph. “And the tall, handsome hottie over there is our friend Eph.”

Tall, handsome hottie? Who talks like that?

Eph glanced up from his drawing. “Hey, man,” he said, jerking his chin up at Keats, then leaned back over his picture.

Cherisse smiled, evidently done with introductions, and I felt that familiar mix of embarrassment and general badness I got every time it was clear she was merely putting up with me because my presence was a side effect of being friends with Audrey. Why did I care what Cherisse thought? I didn't, right?

I was turning red on the outside and cringing on the inside, because it is terrible to be purposefully overlooked when there is a cute boy in the vicinity, and that, coupled with the previous epic flirt fail—scratch that, epic
life
fail—was making fleeing to the solitary research station at the penguin-friendly pole seem better and better.

But then Audrey placed her hand on his arm and gestured toward me. “Keats, you have to meet my friend Penelope.”

If I could have nominated Audrey for high school sainthood right that second, I would have.

Cherisse batted a dismissive glance over her shoulder, so quick I was sure I was the only one who saw it.

I smiled weakly at Keats. “Yeah, we met already,” I said.

Audrey raised her eyebrow appraisingly at me, like,
Well, what's this?
and Keats's eyes rested on mine, and my heart fluttered, like it was waking up from an enchanted sleep.

He started to say something to me—so maybe all wasn't lost after all?—but
Cherisse interrupted him. “What classes do you have? You're in AP, right?”

His eyes lingered on mine a second longer as he gave a rueful shrug and turned to Cherisse. “Carroll for chemistry.”

I started to say, “I have her too,” but Cherisse squealed dramatically. “She is cray! Audrey, didn't she freak out on your biology class last year?”

I shifted back as Audrey started to relay Mrs. Carroll's historic meltdown, one complete with tears and abandoning her classroom after someone sang out the lyrics to “Tiny Bubbles” during an experiment.

There was a nudge on my shoulder.

“You like?” Eph asked, sliding his notebook onto my lap and pushing his hair behind his ear.

He had sketched himself, gangly and knobby, bangs in his eyes, chin-length hair, with a name tag saying
HI, MY NAME IS TALL HANDSOME HOTTIE
, wearing a clearly bored expression while picking his nose.

At the bottom he'd written, in all capital letters and minus any proper punctuation or actual hashtag symbol,
HASHTAG TALL HANDSOME HOTTIE ALERT
.

Sometimes the sheer fact of simply knowing Ephraim O'Connor makes me feel like the luckiest girl in the whole Milky Way.

“Fuckin' rad, yeah?” He stretched back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.

“Language, Ephraim.” I took the drawing in, admiring how in such a quick sketch he'd managed to capture the rattiness of his Superman T-shirt and the inked-in bubble tags on the rubber rims of his checkered Vans. “It's pretty frakking rad.”

Eph ignored my f-bomb substitution. “
Pretty
rad? Come on, Pen. It's completely fucking rad.” He leaned closer, grinning. “You know I'm a tall, handsome hottie. Say it.”

I stifled a laugh, which turned into a snort, which tragically morphed into the sound I imagined a seriously constipated (and angry about it) wild boar would make.

No.

My face went cherry red. I couldn't bear to turn around to see if the new boy had heard it.

Eph stared at me, mouth twisting. “
What
was that?”

I decided to pretend that that sound had not come from me. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I can't confirm your tall, handsome hottie status. That's Summer's job.”

“Her name is Autumn.”

“I get all your girls mixed up,” I said, trying to remember if Autumn was the one with the dreadlocks or the one with the nose ring.

Something neon pink shifted in the corner of my vision, and I saw Cherisse taking off her sweater and stretching like a cat in the tiny white T-shirt underneath. She giggled, then leaned over to squeeze Keats's knee and whisper in his ear.

I could never flirt like that. Keats was smiling at whatever Cherisse was saying—and his grin was sly and handsome, like a fox, or a character from a Wes Anderson movie, or that fox character from that Wes Anderson movie, and at that moment, I would have given all my future birthday and four-leaf-clover and stray-eyelash and falling-star wishes to get someone like him to smile like that at me.

I would have given anything to finally be the one someone liked back.

I chewed on my lip—my worst, grossest habit—and glanced at Eph.

He was studying me, his eyes darting between Keats and me, like he knew something I didn't. He raised an eyebrow.

“Nothing,” I said, digging in my bag for lip balm, trying to sound all casual and easy-breezy. “It's nothing at all.”

THAT AFTERNOON, I WAS EMERGING
from the front doors of school, hugging my backpack straps against my chest, scanning the crowd for Keats, hoping to “bump into” him, when someone came up from behind me and belched loudly right in my ear.

I smelled Doritos.

Eph stood next to me, his favorite navy-blue knit hat on, straight brown hair tufting out underneath, cheesy orange residue around the corners of his shit-eating grin.

“Did you seriously just burp in my ear?”

He smiled bigger, shrugged, and purposefully chewed Doritos with his mouth open.

“Why would you do that to me? You're disgusting. Apologize.”

“Come to the park with me.”

“Apologize.”

“Come to the park with me.”

I turned and started walking down the steps, not in the mood.

“Come on, Pen. It's a perfect day to go to the park with a tall, handsome hottie. . . .”

His skateboard clattered against the concrete, and I heard the wheels whirring right behind me.

I ignored him, pointedly marching ahead.

“So what was up with you this morning? Your neck was kind of splotchy.”

Great.

Hands on my hips, I spun around. He jerked his board to the side to avoid running into me, skidded to a stop.

“Apologize.”

“Come to the park,” he said, giving me his winningest smile.

I frowned, and started walking up Central Park West again.

“I heard Joss is going to be more involved with the next run of the
Buffy
comics,” he said.

He was right over my shoulder—I smelled the Doritos and the sweaty-guy stink and, underneath, the other parts of Eph: mint, fresh-cut grass, the ocean.

He needed to apologize.

“I think maybe one of the actors is involved too? And get this: The guy at the comic-book store said he heard a rumor that they're finally bringing back Marcy, the invisible girl. Awesome, yeah?”

I resisted the urge to point out that while Marcy was fine, they should have been bringing back the witch Tara. Now
that
would have been awesome.

Eph continued to talk while I waited to cross Sixty-Ninth, watching a curly-haired woman talking to a bald man, her small
black-and-white dog eagerly running circles around his giant gray Muppety one, making me dizzy. Ford would have stood for absolutely zero percent of any of that.

“. . . and I'm thinking that now is maybe when they'll finally end the Angel and Buffy crap once and forever.”

WHAT?

Eph knew how I felt about Buffy and Angel's cosmic destiny, how they were meant to be. He was 110 percent picking a fight.

I bit my tongue, forced my gaze forward, refused to be baited, and watched the dogs run into the park.

“Because Angel? The
worst
. Mr. Existential Crisis. I'm glad she shoved him into the fucking Hellmouth. Now, Spike? He's her real friend.
That's
who Buffy should be boning.”

I whirled around to shoot Eph the stink eye. He kicked the skateboard to his hand, and I could tell he was being all purposefully tall, looking down at me with the sun shining behind him so it was right in my eyes and making me feel like I needed to squint.

I refused to grant him the satisfaction.

My index finger was pointy against his ribs. “Buffy shoved Angel into the Hellmouth to
save the world
. And don't be vulgar. It's
frakking
.”

He stood one foot on his board again, rolling it back and forth. “She wouldn't have had to save the world if he hadn't turned all evil, thanks to her sleeping with him.”

His figure was dark in front of me, and the sun spots floating all around him made me dizzy. He was ruining my afternoon. “Stop slut-shaming Buffy,” I said, pushing against his chest for emphasis.

I pushed harder than I planned.

With a look of surprise on his face, he toppled backward, the board shooting out from under his foot, and crashed hard on the sidewalk, his elbows slamming against the concrete, his half-zipped backpack spilling open.

“Eph!”

I dropped to my knees and leaned forward, too anxious to touch him in case something was broken.

“I'm so sorry,” I said under my breath, mentally counting the three freckles across the bridge of his nose, his Orion's belt, scanning his arms and legs for anything that seemed jagged and broken, counting his freckles again, the bridge of his nose crooked from when I punched him in fourth grade for lifting up my skirt on the playground.

What if he'd broken something?

“Are you okay? I didn't mean to push that hard, I . . . I'm sorry.”

His eyelashes fluttered, like he was dreaming, but the rest of him was dead still.

What if he had a concussion?

“Eph . . .”

He slowly opened one eye; the other one stayed scrunched, shut tight.

“Pen,” he whispered. “Do you . . .”

I leaned closer, so I could hear him.

“Do you admit you're wrong about Buffy's one true love now?”

Wait. WHAT?
I straightened as he opened both eyes and pulled himself up, examined his elbows (both skinned), and smiled his infuriating cocky smile.

A few of the onlookers (because we had onlookers
plural
now,
as if the whole thing weren't embarrassing enough) started clapping, while a short, dowdy, disapproving woman murmured loudly to her friend, “
She
pushed
him
.”

Right then a super-tall, thin, strawberry-blond-haired, willowy girl, who probably had traveled on a unicorn straight from some mystical elven city to this particular moment, kneeled down next to Eph, handing him his skateboard like she was paying tribute to some king, and I barfed a little in my mouth.

“Are you okay?” she asked; even her high cheekbones were all concerned. “I'm Mia.”

“Ephraim,” he replied. “And I am now.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” I muttered.