The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers

THE
SECRET
SISTERHOOD
OF
HEARTBREAKERS

LYNN WEINGARTEN

Dedication

 

To the brokenhearted . . .

Contents

I
n the beginning, there she was, sweet, little Lucy Wrenn, standing all alone out in front of her school on the first day of sophomore year, with a seductive little message written on her stomach in Sharpie marker.

Do you want to know what the message was? Well, just hold on there; that part is coming. First, you need to know why she was standing out there, at 7:44 in the morning, humming a very special tune very quietly, face flushed, stomach fluttering, bouncing from foot to foot: she was waiting for someone.

Alex. Her boyfriend. The first and only one.

He’d been away all summer and now, with him set to arrive
any second
she was so excited she truly thought she might puke.

But Lucy had no idea what was coming, that something monumental was about to happen, something that would change her heart, her life, her entire world forever. Something so huge that when she looked back at this moment she would only remember it as the end. Or the beginning. Or maybe a little of both.

But for now, back to Alex.

Oh, Alex, Alex. His image, his sound, his touch, his scent, his everything had been cycling through her head on a constant loop all summer long while he’d been at a ranch in Colorado. Everywhere she went he was as much in her mind as if he’d been standing there in front of her face shouting, “Me me me me me!” It was excruciating, really, thinking about someone that much, but it’s not like the poor dear had a choice.

From the very first moment Lucy saw Alex—when he walked into her American History class in the middle of her freshman year, him a new sophomore who’d just moved to town—she loved him. Really and truly, wholly and completely. And it wasn’t just because he had a million tiny freckles on his face as though someone had thrown a handful of sand at him, or because he had that adorable little gap between his two front teeth, or because his hands were so beautiful they made her consider the fact that hands
could
be beautiful even though she’d never really thought about that before. And it wasn’t just because he stood there, up in front of the class that day, smiling slightly, with a big-lensed, old-school film camera strapped to his shoulder, his hands in the pockets of his olive-green cargo pants, looking like he was on vacation or something. Or because standing there in front of a brand-new class, he looked so entirely comfortable in his own skin she could practically see the calm radiating off of him.

It was because when their eyes met as he scanned the room, she felt a flash light up her insides, like her heart was recognizing something she’d waited for her entire life.

From that day forward, every class period was fully devoted to studying Alex.

When he got bored he would tap his right foot and drum on his desk to a syncopated rhythm. His bashed-up cell phone was covered in a thick strip of green duct tape onto which he’d rewritten all the numbers in marker. Sometimes he would take out and eat a small bag of mixed nuts. He always ate the cashews first.

Each additional detail she discovered about him confirmed her suspicion that even the most mundane thing about Alex was more interesting than the most interesting thing about anyone else.

Looking at him filled her with a fizzling, frantic kind of joy and an almost sickening longing, like she was very hungry or very thirsty, only not either of those things.

But then, one day, something happened. She walked into class and the only empty seat was the one directly behind him. So she sat there, disappointed, because it meant she wouldn’t get to watch his face. Only right as class began, Alex turned around and wrote something on her notebook. Just like that, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

It was, Lucy was sure, a mistake. He must have assumed he was sitting in front of one of his many new friends. But still, just the fact that she now had marks from his pen on her notebook was very exciting.

When she finally looked down she saw what he’d written: a bunch of dashes with a big upside-down
L
next to them, the setup for a hangman game. She looked up at him and he nodded at her, a very small smile on his face.
This was no mistake.

Lucy’s heart exploded. She wrote an
A
at the top of the paper, which was, at that moment, the only letter she could remember. A minute later he turned around again; he didn’t even glance at her, just wrote the four
A
s where they belonged in the game. Then he grinned at them and turned back toward the board. Lucy picked
O
next and there were two, and then she picked
C
, but there weren’t any of those so he drew a head on the hangman’s pole. It looked like an egg. They went back and forth like that for the entire rest of class. She figured out the message just before the bell rang. It was MR. BROOME ALWAYS HAS A SPIT STRING, which was not only funny, but felt meaningful since she’d always noticed that too.

The next day, she sat behind him again, breathless, waiting, and the same thing happened, only this time he glanced at her and half smiled before he started writing. They played, and the message was: I DIDN’T DO THE HOMEWORK. When she’d solved the puzzle Lucy leaned over and whispered, conspiratorially,
“Neither did I.”

Even though she actually had.

The next class they played. And the next class. And the next. After three straight weeks of it, she finally let herself entertain the tiniest creeping tendril of a hope: what if maybe, just maybe, he liked her too? And at that point the game became less about figuring out the message and impressing him with her hangman skills, and more about figuring out approximations of date-invitations that would fit into the spaces he’d provided. SPIT STRING AGAIN could have been DEAR MYLUCY, ADATE? And IT SMELLS LIKE PEE IN HERE could have been OH LOVELY WILL YOU ME DATE. She bought adorable pens and tried to make her handwriting as sexy as possible. She waited and she waited. Now that she’d let herself consider him a real possibility, it was absolutely excruciating.

Finally, one day after class he turned around and said, “Hey, Laurie, are you busy after school? Think you’d mind if I took a few pictures of you?” He patted that camera, which was always dangling off his shoulder. And despite the fact that she had no idea if what he’d just asked her to do was in fact a date, she was so excited she thought her chest might explode. She didn’t even mind the fact that he didn’t know her name.

That day after school he’d driven them to the park and taken roll after roll of film of her crouching under a gnarled old tree picking dandelions, and feeding the ducks, and swinging on the swing set. He was almost completely silent while he took the pictures. The only time he spoke at all was when he was reminding her not to look at the camera, which she kept doing because he was behind it. When he was done, when he’d gone through three entire rolls of film, he had come over to the swing on which she sat.

“You’re fun to photograph,” he’d said.

Her heart squeezed in her chest. “Why?” she whispered.

He reached out then, and moved a lock of hair away from her face. “Because you’re beautiful.”

The thing was, she’d never felt beautiful before. Cute, maybe, or even pretty sometimes. Beautiful? Never.

But in that moment, she did.

Jump ahead five months and one week and there was Lucy standing out in front of the school, with something written on her stomach. Seven dashes and an upside-down L. A hangman game spelling out a mystery message just for him. And she had a fresh green Sharpie marker in her back pocket for him to play with.

Precious, no?

She’d spent the entire summer coming up with it.

So she put on her lip balm and popped a ginger candy into her mouth to settle her stomach. Then spit that candy out so that her mouth would be free for kissing.

And just when she thought she was going to
throw up
or
die
from sheer excitement, Alex’s scratched-up navy-blue Volvo with the ski rack on the top came creeping into the parking lot and pulled into one of the spots.

Alex got out. Lucy gasped. Even from fifty feet away he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

He started walking toward school. Her mouth grinned as big as it could grin. She felt her arm lift up and her hand waving on the end of it.

But he did not wave back. He wasn’t looking at her so much as right above her, as though he’d remembered her taller and that’s where he was expecting her head to be. Well, she would remind him. She would remind him right where her head was!

Lucy’s legs began trotting toward him. They broke into a run. Finally she was right in front of him, panting a little, her heart squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing. Lucy flung herself into his arms and pressed her body against his. Firecrackers of pleasure exploded up and down her spine.

“Lucy,” he said.

“Follow me,” she said, and she took his hand.

Lucy led him down the hill and around the side of the auditorium building, which she figured was a good place to go on the first day of school because no one would be there yet. His camera bounced against his hip as they walked.

“What are we doing?” Alex sounded confused, and not necessarily in a good way.

She turned toward him. “We’re going to play hangman!” She’d meant to sound sexy and mysterious but it came out sounding weird and maybe a little insane.

Alex looked at her like, “Huh?” and raised his eyebrows in a way that gave Lucy a queasy feeling in her stomach. She pushed through the auditorium basement door, then through another door and up to the wings of the stage. It was chilly and damp back there, like it was a whole other time of day, a whole other season. She flipped on the switch and a lightbulb glowed yellow over their heads. She reached into her back pocket for the brand-new Sharpie she’d tucked in there and then put the Sharpie in Alex’s palm and closed his fist around it. She lifted up the bottom of her T-shirt just enough.

She sucked in her stomach. “Okay,” said Lucy. “Pick a letter!”

Alex stared at her. For the longest time he just stared. She looked down to make sure he could see the dashes.

“Aren’t you going to pick?” She smiled. But he was not moving.

Lucy took the Sharpie back from him. “I’ll help,” she said.She drew an
I
on her stomach in the first blank. She tried to hand him back the marker, but he made no motion to take it. So she wrote the
M
too
.
It was hard since she was doing it upside down. The letter came out lumpy.

She looked at him and nodded. His face was frozen. She wrote the
R.
She hoped it looked okay. Her hand was shaking a little.

“You can guess at any time!”

But he didn’t guess, so she just kept going.

She wrote the
E
and the
A
and the
D.
She finished off the final letter—the
Y
with a curlicue flourish. She’d filled in the whole puzzle. “I guess I won,” she said. She grinned.

He was still just blinking at her, this confused look on his face. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. He squinted at her stomach, at the I-M R-E-A-D-Y. “What’s your stomach ready for . . .
you’re hungry
?”

Lucy started to laugh. “No,” she said. “I mean, it’s not my stomach that’s ready.
I’m
ready.”

He blinked.

“For . . .” She nodded and opened her eyes wide.
“You know . . .”
He must know. “. . . for us to . . .” She leaned over—did she really have to say it? “Lose our virginities together.” She lowered her voice for “virginities” even though there wasn’t even anyone else around to hear. As soon as the word was out of her mouth, she wished she’d chosen a cooler word for it, although she did not know what that would be.

She leaned back and looked at him then, his beautiful face dimly lit by the weak yellow light, the smooth slant of his cheekbone, the curve of his lip.

This was the part where he was supposed to be overcome with love, where he was supposed to take Lucy in his arms and tell her how wonderful she was and how much he’d missed her. How happy he was to be back with her. How he never wanted to be apart from her again.

But he didn't. So they stood there, just stood there, breathing together. Lucy imagined the air moving between them, filling his lungs, then hers, then his, then hers.

“Lucy . . . ,” he said slowly, finally. And he started shaking his head. “I can’t.”

“I know I had sort of not been ready before.” It was, she thought, so sweet of him to be concerned. “But I waited for you the whole summer and that was enough. . . .”

“Hold on. . . .”

“My parents are going away this weekend. It’s their anniversary so they’re going to some special place with a lot of fancy cheese to, y’know, rekindle things. I guess seventeen is the cheese anniversary or something, ha-ha. I spent most of the summer convincing them to go and to let me stay by myself. . . .”

“Wait . . . ,” he said.

“. . . just for this! So it would be the perfect time really. . . . You could come over and . . .”

“Stop . . . ,” he said. “Lucinda. Stop.”

And then finally she did stop, because he never called her Lucinda. No one did. Lucinda was a woman’s name and she wasn’t a woman. Not yet anyway.

“Listen,” he said. He took a breath. He actually looked nervous, which she’d never seen him look before. “We have to break up.”

She stared at him, waiting. She thought maybe he was setting up for a joke. “Why would we
have
to break
up
?” Lucy started to smile as she waited for the punch line.

“I wasn’t gonna do this until after school so I wouldn’t make the first day all weird for you or whatever. . . . But you’re standing here now and you just did all that stuff to your stomach, so I guess I should just . . .” He sighed and looked down and shook his head and reached up and started fiddling with this blue glass bead that was on a leather string around his neck, which Lucy had never seen him wear before. And suddenly something occurred to her—the necklace she’d sent him. The one she spent two hours picking out the beads and tiny pieces of carved shell for? The one she had strung on her porch by candlelight and moonlight because it seemed more romantic to do it that way, even though it made her eyes hurt, and she had whispered
I love you
to each bead and shell so that maybe when he wore it he’d know what she had always been too shy to say? How come he wasn’t wearing
that
?