The Museum of Heartbreak (3 page)

She smiled, all eyelash batting and lip puckering, and I felt my hackles rise in protest, full of self-righteous indignation. She was hitting on him right in front of me. What if Eph and I were together? Was that so hard to imagine? I was of dateable age, wasn't carrying around a stuffed cat in my purse, didn't have a third arm growing out of my forehead.

She held out her hand—I swore I had seen the elf queen do the same move in
Lord of the Rings—
and he took it, smiling his stupidest, charmingest Eph smile, and stood up, one perfect inch taller than her.

Several of the old ladies watching actually cooed.

Whatever.

I scooted around on my knees and began gathering the papers and crap that had spilled from his bag: his old copy of
The Hobbit
—the one he brought everywhere—a brand-new calculus textbook, a jumble of keys on a skiing carabiner, a Moleskine journal . . .

Without giving it a second thought, I opened the journal, expecting to see more comics like the ones he'd always drawn: crass and cartoony, plenty of fart jokes, with renderings of his favorite comic-book villains thrown in for good measure.

But these pages were different.

These were pages and pages of intricate city scenes: tiny metropolises, blue-inked lines intersecting at sharp angles, with small people moving their way through the world.

I recognized major cities—London with Big Ben and the Eye, Paris with Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. And then there were cities that defied logic: skyscrapers sprouting from clouds, waterfalls pouring under streets.

I snuck a glance over my shoulder. Eph was deep in conversation with Elf Queen Girl.

I rested back on my knees, flipped to the next page of Eph's sketchbook.

The scene was Times Square, frantic and chaotic, a giant
Phantom of the Opera
sign, stock-exchange prices rolling by on an electronic ticker, the discount TKTS booth with a winding line, a little Naked Cowboy in the corner eating a hot dog, an Elmo impersonator scowling at the world around him.

I peered closer. There, in the corner of the page, waiting at a traffic light, was a stegosaurus wearing an
I
NYC
T-shirt. Tiny spines poked through the back of the shirt.

It was so weird and incongruous, but so absolutely perfect at the same time, that I felt goose bumps rise up and down my arms. I met Eph the year I started first grade, right when my family moved to New York City for my dad's new job at the American Museum
of Natural History. Eph's dad worked there too, and our parents introduced us in the lobby, a looming T. rex next to us. Despite Eph's parents' objections, at the time he only answered to Superman (and constantly wore the cape to prove it). He also swore that there was a real live dinosaur, a T. rex, living in the museum and that it wandered the halls at night.

The cape was long gone now, but it seemed like the fascination with dinosaurs and Superman had stuck around.

On a hunch I flipped back to a previous spread: Paris. I scanned the page, and there, wrapped around the base of the Eiffel Tower, was a brontosaurus, its long neck winding up but not high enough, trying to get a glimpse of the top.

In a roller-rink scene, crowded with people skating under a disco light—couples with linked arms, children sandwiched between parents, a small boy clutching the railing—there, in the middle of it all, a triceratops with oversize skates hunched down for balance or maybe to fit in better with the crowd.

At the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, actors participated in the
Romeo and Juliet
balcony scene, and behind the stage, by the turtle pond, a little T. rex pressed against a tree, its face pure longing.

They were the most magnificent things I'd ever seen.

“Did you find your surprise?” Eph asked.

Startled, I twisted around.

The Elf Queen was gone, but he was grinning, pleased with himself despite the presence of two skinned elbows, and I figured he must have ended up with her number.

“These?” I asked, holding up his notebook. “Eph, these are phenomenal. How long have you been drawing them?”

He looked up, a blush spreading from his neck to his cheeks. If I didn't know better, I almost would have thought he was embarrassed.

He yanked the notebook out of my hands (I immediately felt the loss of its magic, my palms left open and empty). I watched wordlessly as he snatched his bag up and shoved the notebook deep in there, followed by the books I'd stacked neatly on the sidewalk.

“I've never seen anything like that. . . .” I stood up, brushed off my knees, tried to straighten. I was three degrees off balance, the whole world tilting slightly. Eph never kept stuff from me. “It's amazing. You're so good.”

“That's what she said,” he replied, so automatically and smugly and insufferably that I remembered why I had just, albeit accidentally, pushed him over.

“You are the worst, Ephraim O'Connor.”

“I'm not the one who tried to kill me.” He zipped and shouldered his bag, effectively ending the dinosaur conversation.

“Hardly.”

He squinted, pushing his hair off his face and back under his hat. “Come to the park with me.”

“Apologize.”

He let out this long, aggrieved sigh, dug in the outside pocket of his bag, and tossed me a small, red-orange-wrapped square.

“Your surprise.”

I barely caught it.

“Holy cow, where did you get this?” I breathed, holding it reverently in both hands.

Dark chocolate Kit Kats were my favorite candy in the entire
world, nectar of perfection, the candy of the gods, rarely found in stores in the US and usually enjoyed only when my dad brought them back through customs at Heathrow. Finding them in person in New York City was like finding the holy grail.

“Bodega in the West Village. Now come to the park with me?”

I thought of the tiny dinosaurs I'd seen in his notebook, imagined them standing on his shoulders, protecting the secret parts of him, the parts that still believed in dinosaurs.

“Okay, apology accepted,” I said, turning toward the park. “For now.”

“SO FRENCH CLUB IS SPONSORING
a monthlong trip to Paris this summer,” Audrey said, sitting cross-legged at the end of my bed.

“That's cool.” I tossed her the giant bag of M&M'S we'd grabbed at the bodega and dropped my book bag on the floor.

“I
have
to go. My dad said if I can save half, he'll chip in the rest. I figure an August spent immersed in everything French will be killer on my college applications. Besides, it'll help take my mind off not being at Gram's.”

I sighed, flopping down next to her. After Audrey's grandfather passed away peacefully last year, her grandma Mary had decided she'd spend one more summer at their house on Lake George before moving to a retirement community in Pleasantville, making the past August that Audrey, Eph, and I had spent there with her our last.

“What am I going to do without you for a whole month?” I asked.

“You'll survive.” She opened up the bag and leaned over it, inhaling deeply. “Oh man, never disappoints.”

She handed it to me, and I sighed, smelling the chocolate too. Her grandmother had taught us the trick during one of our summer trips—how smelling an entire jumbo bag of M&M'S was
almost
better than eating the candy itself.

“Or better yet, why don't you come with me to Paris?” Her face brightened as the idea started to take shape. “You and me and Cherisse can share a triple. All you have to do is join French Club. And start saving.”

“Aud, I take Spanish,” I said, not mentioning that if Cherisse was going to Paris, I'd rather spend next August on NYC garbage patrol. I hugged a pillow against my chest. “French Club
no es bueno
.”

“But you don't
have
to speak French to join French Club. It's more about the culture and food and movies—next week we're watching this classic black-and-white French film about a girl who drives all around Paris on a Vespa with her cat in a shoulder bag. Doesn't that sound fun?” She flopped down on her stomach next to me, propping an elbow up. “Besides, it's a good way to meet cool people.”

Like Cherisse,
I thought with an inner grimace.

“Like Cherisse!” Audrey said brightly.

“I don't need to meet new people. I have you and Eph,” I reminded her.

She started to say something, thought better of it, and started again. “It can't be the three of us forever, Pen.”

“Sure it can!” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me we're breaking up?” I folded my arms in a mock huff.

“No, I'm trying to say—” she began earnestly.

“It's been great getting to know me, but you want to spend time with other people?”

She ignored me. “That expanding our social circle is really important, and I—”

“Our social triangle isn't fulfilling all your needs?”

“I love you and Eph, but sometimes—”

“It's you, not us?”

“Shut up!” she yelled, scooping up Barnaby, my favorite stuffed animal of indeterminate species origin (Dog? Bear? Unknown) and winging him right at my head.

“Ow,” I said. “I would have thought by now you'd have learned firsthand the dangers of toys around heads, young lady.”

She grimaced. “Tom and George
ran
that Tonka truck up in my hair. They didn't throw it at me. Besides, if they'd never done that, you and Eph might not have been my friends,” she said.

She was right. When Audrey joined our class in third grade, she was immediately known for four things: her sparkly silver shoes, her crazy-good double-Dutch jump-rope skills, the fact that she owned four American Girl dolls, and her beautiful, long, shining hair. None of which interested Eph or me very much. That is, until week two, when two boys in our class ran the spinning wheels of a battery-powered Tonka truck into her hair. Her sobbing was what brought Eph and me over to the crowd of gathering students. But it was the fact that she seemed so lonely, standing there in the center of the circle, that made me go over and say hi and, with Eph's help, lead her to the school nurse (who made short work of Audrey's long locks, hacking out the truck with blunt scissors).

Even though Eph and I thought dinosaurs trumped dolls, Audrey fit with us somehow, or maybe it was more that she stuck with us, and had ever since.

“Okay, I know you don't speak French. But listen for a second, okay?”

I nodded, resting my head in my hands in mock excitement. She ignored me.

“It's just that at French Club . . .” Her voice lowered. “There are guys there too, Pen. Hot,
dateable
guys.”

Oh.

Oh.

“Yeah?” I tried to tiptoe casually around the elephant suddenly sitting in the middle of my heart. “Is Cherisse's friend, that new guy, in French Club too?”

Audrey wrinkled up her pert little nose, a gesture I, owner of a “nose with character,” was desperately envious of.

“Wait, who? Keats? No. But there are other guys. . . . Come on, say you'll at least try it.”

I folded my arms against my chest. “You know peer pressure doesn't work on me,
mi amiga
. Besides, do you remember what I'm like with new people in general? I'm socially inept.”

“Pen.”

“I'm like the personality equivalent of . . .” I racked my brain. “Of crusted Norwegian scabies.”

Audrey groaned, hiding her head in her hands. “We should have
never
looked at my dad's issues of
Journal of Dermatology
.”