The Museum of Heartbreak (6 page)

He placed a folded-up paper square in my palm.

“Later, killer,” he said.

As my mom walked them out, I unfolded the paper, its edges torn.

My breath fled, a startled swoop of birds taking flight.

Eph had drawn a tiny T. rex holding a heart, and in small capital letters underneath he had written, apostrophe missing and all:
DONT BE ABSURD
.

“SO, ON SATURDAY . . . ,” I STARTED
to say.

I tried to sneak a glance at Eph's notebook, wondering if he was drawing his dinosaurs. I hadn't brought them up since family dinner at our house last week, but I was dying to know if he was working on more. That afternoon, however, he was hunched over on his Chipotle chair in a way that prevented any peeking.

“. . . what time are we leaving for Saint Bart's Fall Festival? Four?”

Without taking his eyes off his notebook, Eph made a fart noise, his de facto response anytime anyone mentioned a word that rhymed with fart—a habit honed to perfection since we'd attended Saint Bartholomew's Academy since kindergarten.

“You're disgusting. Audrey?”

Audrey started slurping her Diet Coke hard, avoiding my eyes.

“Wait a minute, we're going, right?”

Audrey raised her eyebrows at Eph.

He shrugged, mouth still full of chips. “I thought you were going to tell her.”

“Tell me what?” I asked.

The three of us had gone to the Saint Bart's Fall Festival since we met Audrey back in third grade, not because it raised money for our school, though there was that. When we were little, we went because everyone in our class went. We'd get our faces painted like Spider-Man and eat so much cotton candy and caramel apples that our teeth felt tingly and rotten in the first half hour. We won goldfish in water-filled bags and instant grade-school cred by riding the Scrambler. I loved it so much, I actually looked forward to it during summer vacation.

Sure, it had gotten less cool as we got older, but we had still gone every single year. It was tradition, history.

I glanced between my two best friends, waiting for someone to crack.

“I'm going to Saint Ignatius's homecoming dance,” Audrey blurted out.

“With Gregory?”

Her face scrunched in confusion. I pointed at my neck—you know, now that I was completely familiar with the world of hickeys.

“Oh God, no. It's with this guy named Ethan. Cherisse is going with his friend Hunter. Wait a minute . . .” She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “You know, maybe I could see if one of their friends needs a date. . . .”

“No, that's okay,” I said quickly, the thought of going on a blind
date in front of Cherisse less appealing than eating those bug-egg beads in tapioca pudding.

“Are you mad? Please don't be mad.”

Last week's conversation about French Club and social circles came ricocheting back. “No, not at all,” I said, my voice going artificially cheery.

“I'm sorry, Pen. I meant to tell you earlier this week. I figured we had outgrown the festival and weren't going to go anyway. I shouldn't have assumed.”

She didn't mean it as an insult, but I immediately felt like a giant baby-faced baby for still wanting to go to the festival.

I remembered last year, how Eph and I finally talked Audrey into riding the Ferris wheel, how even though she was sandwiched between us, she was terrified the whole excruciatingly slow way up—white-knuckled, slightly green-faced—but when we got to the top, she let out this sweet little exhalation of wonder, surveying all the flashing festival lights below. “Why didn't you ever tell me it was this lovely?” she asked indignantly.

I shook my head, making myself return to the present moment, trying to seem breezy and okay, like their bailing on tradition was not a big deal. For some reason deep inside me,
that
was important—that no one know how my insides were sinking faster by the second, how I felt completely alone.

“So you're out too, I'm guessing?” I asked Eph, my mouth twisting into this phony super-gracious smile.

He gave me a weird look. “What's wrong with your face? And why are you getting all splotchy again?”

“Are. You. Going.”

“Sorry.
Autumn got us tickets to this interactive
Macbeth
thing in a warehouse.”

“That sounds awesome,” I lied.

“Trust me, I'd
much
rather hang out with you. Autumn's in a constant hand-holding phase. It makes my hands sweat.”

He held up his palms, as if to prove his point.

“Okay, okay.” I chewed on my lip, brainstorming. I could fix this. “Maybe we can hang out next Saturday instead. I know, let's go to Coney Island! It'll be like the Fall Festival but a little tackier. And with the ocean.”

There. Totally natural, breezy. Nice recovery, self.

Audrey's face fell. “Next Saturday? I promised Cherisse I'd go to that new guy Keats's First of October party with her.”

Oh.

Keats was having a party.

“First of October party?” Eph snorted.

“I would bring you guys, but it's invitation only . . .”

(Of course it was.)

“. . . and Cherisse has been crushing on Keats forever . . .”

(Of course she has.)

“. . . and it's this fancy costume party . . .”

(Ugh, so cool. Of course, of course, of course the beautiful new boy would have a fancy costume party.)

At that moment I was seconds away from having a crumbly meltdown about hickeys and festivals and French Club and social circles and the fact that my life was an open book but Audrey's and Eph's lives had chapters I wasn't cool enough to read.

My melodramatic subconscious started playing “One Is the Loneliest Number” in my head.

My subconscious is the worst.

“I'll go to Coney Island with you, Pen,” Eph offered. “I heard last week that people got stuck on the Cyclone and had to walk down the hill. How rad would that be?”

“So rad,” I said hollowly.

Without all three of us there, it wouldn't be the same thing. It already wasn't the same thing.

Plus Keats was having a party.

Forget Coney Island.

I was pretty sure that everything I ever wanted, that everything I was currently missing out on, would be at that party.

A small and terribly traitorous sigh escaped my lips.

At the sound of it, the three of us halted all interaction. Eph frowned and turned back to his notebook, and Audrey tugged so hard on her hair I thought she might pull it all out. Meanwhile, my face was frozen in some uncomfortable, phony lunatic smile.

This was not how our afternoon at Chipotle was supposed to be going.

Be the better person, Pen. You love these people.

“Do you know what you're wearing?” I asked Audrey, forcing my voice to be positive, willing us all to change the conversation.

“To Keats's party?” she asked, face confused.

“No, to homecoming!”

Her face broke out in a relieved smile, and she whipped out her phone and flipped through pictures before pointing one out. “Here.
Cherisse and I found it at this new vintage shop downtown called Hong Kong Eight.”

The dress was beautiful—a pale, silvery-pink beaded sheath. “Very Audrey Hepburn. Living up to your namesake, yeah? That'll be gorgeous on you.”

“Sweet,” Eph muttered after giving the phone a perfunctory glance.

Audrey relaxed, explaining how she was going to do her hair (a professional blow-out so it was straight and shiny) and what shoes she was going to wear (silver Mary Jane wedges) and the boutonniere she was buying her date (a deep pink peony).

For the rest of the afternoon I tried to pretend everything was normal.

But after I waved good-bye, I rounded the corner where they couldn't see me and slumped against a building, relief rushing through me, my toes uncurling, my fists unfurling.

The feeling was terrifying.

I had never felt so out of sync with Eph and Audrey.

•  •  •

For the new few days, I worked on convincing myself that missing out on the festival wasn't a big deal, that our disastrous Chipotle interaction had been a hiccup.

I wasn't very persuasive.

Instead I became 100 percent absolutely positively convinced that the Fall Festival was a harbinger of doom, my friends were ditching me, and I would be alone for the rest of my life.

It didn't help that eleven chemistry classes after our initial meeting on the first day of school, there had been no discernible
progress regarding my crush on Keats. There had been no lab partner assignments, no random encounters in the hallways, no meet-cutes outside a coffee shop.

In fact, one could argue (if one were feeling really contrary and down on oneself) that I had actually made
negative
progress with Keats. On Wednesday of the second week, there had been a potential half wave sent my way, and my heart started to burst out in song, but when I waved back (too fast, too eagerly, too
everything
), I saw that the dude in front of me was returning a subtle cool-guy wave to Keats and realized that the initial greeting had not been for me after all, so I tried to make it seem like my wave was only a stop on the path to running my hand through my hair, that that had been my intention
all along
. But then my oversize amber flower ring snagged in my hair, so I had to run to the bathroom with my hand on top of my head to untangle it.

Insert definition of “hopeless.”

By the time Saturday, the day of the Fall Festival, rolled around, I felt lower than the rats that live in the subway tracks and eat garbage. I trudged into the kitchen wearing sweats, yesterday's mascara smeared under my eyes, my hair flat in the back but aggressively bushy in the front.

Dad lowered the
New York Times
, scanning my attire.

“Rough morning, darling daughter? Or maybe I should say afternoon?”

I looked at the clock—it was almost noon.

“I'm fine,” I said, the prickliness in my voice an unfortunate giveaway that I was anything but.

“Well, if you want to talk—”

“I don't.”

“Hmm. The darling daughter is distinctly lacking in darling today.” He chuckled to himself.

I rolled my eyes, wishing at least for the five billionth time that there was a moratorium on dad humor on the weekends.

“Your mother was looking for you, by the way.”

I wanted to point out that our apartment in the brownstone was only so big, that there were only so many places to look, but I bit my tongue instead.

Boy oh boy, was I was feeling ugly on the inside.

To cheer myself up, I pulled out my favorite glass—the one with the illustration of the boy holding his nose underwater—filled it up with skim milk, and added chocolate powder.

Sitting down next to my dad, listening to him hum along with classical music, I decided I needed to change my frequency. Sure, I wasn't going on a date with Keats or anyone else, and sure, I didn't have people to go with me to the Fall Festival. But I had a delicious glass of chocolate milk and a full Saturday afternoon ahead of me in one of the best cities in the world. Maybe I'd go to the Met and read by the pool at the Temple of Dendur. Or perhaps I'd pick up a sandwich at Chelsea Market and read on the High Line. Who needed boyfriends? Who needed friends? I had New York City and the e-book of the Complete Works of Jane Austen at my fingertips. What more could a girl want?

“Pen! There you are.” My mom stood in the doorway holding her cup of tea against her chest. She's always cold—even on sunny eighty-degree September mornings. “When you go to the Fall Festival today, can you make sure to bring the bag by the door? It has the
afghan I knit for the silent auction. Did you see it? It turned out nice.”

“That afghan could go for at least eight hundred dollars, Jane,” my dad suggested, totally unrealistically, right as I declared, “I'm not going.”

“Why aren't you going?” Mom asked.

My teaspoon clinked against the edge of my glass as I stirred the chocolate powder about two minutes longer than needed.

“I don't want to.”

“Aren't Eph and Audrey going to be disappointed?” she asked.

“They've got other plans,” I said, feeling sour again.

“Ahh,” she said, as if that explained everything, which okay, it totally did, but I wasn't in the mood to throw her a bone. In fact, I wasn't in the mood to throw anyone any bones—possibly ever again. I imagined myself as a ninety-five-year-old spinster, living in a decrepit old rest home with puke-yellow walls, whiskery and wrinkled and ornery, hollering at anyone who deigned to talk to me:
No bones for you!
That seemed about right.