The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (21 page)

S
he told him to meet her out on the street behind Van Buren and by the time the final bell rang, she was already halfway across the back lawn. She squeezed through the hole in the fence, made her way through the woods, every breath pure focus, like a huntress out for the hunt.

She’d taken the gold vial from around her neck and wrapped the chain around her wrist three times. She’d tucked the Sparks into her bra, a flesh-inch away from her pounding broken heart.

I am calm,
she thought.
I am ready,
she thought.
It’s time.

When Lucy got to the edge of the woods, she saw him. On top of a green box of a car, knees up, forearms resting awkwardly on them. Sweet Colin was a flurry of tiny nervous movements—glancing at that red plastic watch, tapping his feet against the hood, chewing on his thumbnail, anxious eyes darting in every direction.

She stood for a moment a few steps back from the road, just watching him.

“Hey, Lucy!” he called out. He hopped off the hood and started making his way toward her, walking like someone who wanted to run but was trying so hard not to.

He reached out awkwardly and pulled her toward him in a half hug. She felt his face brush against the top of her head, very quickly, like he was smelling her hair, but didn’t want her to know.

“I was so glad when you called. I had been going to call you to see how you were feeling. Because I know you said your stomach hurt at Olivia’s yesterday. But I wasn’t sure when you got out of class. But, anyway, are you feeling better?” His face was flushed. She could not meet his gaze.

“I will be,” she said. “Soon.”

She climbed up on the car, aware of his eyes on her as she arranged herself cross-legged on his trunk. He walked over so he was standing right in front of her, facing her. Like that they were almost the same height.

“I was hoping if it’s okay with you that I could take you somewhere,” he said. “Like on a proper date. Out for ice cream or something maybe?”

“Let’s stay here for a bit,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day.” And she knew she had to do this quickly. She had to do this before she changed her mind. “So,” she said. She reached down the front of her dress as though she had an itch. “How do you know Olivia and all them?” Amazing that she could sound so calm when her heart was pounding so hard. “I just realized I never asked you that.” She felt the tiny packet there pressed against her heart. She slipped it out, held it in her lap in cupped hands.

“It was such a funny thing,” he said. “Such a random thing. I was at this party a couple weeks ago, I don’t usually go to parties that much. But I went to this one. And Gil just came up to me. She was so friendly. . . .”

Lucy nodded. Careful not to look directly at him.

“She said she had someone she wanted me to meet but that someone wasn’t there just then.”

“Uh-huh.” Lucy tore open the packet.

“And that someone was you,” Colin said. He blushed again. “The craziest thing is, I wasn’t even going to
go
to that party but . . .”

Lucy dumped the grains out in her hand. She could feel them tickling her palm. “A few weeks ago?” she said. “I don’t know, it probably wasn’t me she meant . . .”

“She must have meant you because as soon as I met you I . . .”

Lucy closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, lifted her hand up to her mouth, fingers curled.

She breathed out.

The Sparks lifted up with her breath, hung in the air glittering. Time slowed down. For a moment nothing happened. Then something did.

Colin inhaled.

He stumbled back.

“I felt like I’d been waiting my entire life for you,” he said.

He reached out and ever so gently rested the tips of his fingers on the bare skin of her knees. He looked down at his hand, like he could not believe he was really doing this, then started to lean in, slowly. His face was only inches away. Three. Two. One. The air between them melted.

She felt the soft skin of his lips against the soft skin of hers. Her lips began to tingle. She tasted cinnamon until she pulled away.

His eyes were closed and he kept them closed for a second too long, smiling slightly as if replaying the moment they’d just finished having. He opened them finally. She could not meet his gaze.

“Lucy,” he said. “You’re so . . .”

She raised her finger and pressed it against his lips. “Ssh.”

She stared at his chest; through the layers of gray T-shirt, skin, muscle, and bone was his heart. Thump, thump, thumping.

One slice. One swift cut was all it would take.

“Colin,” she said. “I don’t . . .”

But Lucy made a mistake then, she looked at him. She looked him right in the eye.

And there it was: the love. Naïve, guileless, and earnest. That pure kind of love that asks no questions and wants no answers. A love that leaks out onto everything, carries along with it the belief that people, the world, life is magical. And she knew then without a doubt that he had never had his heart broken before. That sweet Colin had never felt that pain. And that she could not be the one to make him feel it.

Lucy felt her own broken bitter heart heavy in her chest. She pushed herself off the hood. “I just remembered something I forgot to do,” she said. “Something back at school.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Colin said. “I don’t mind.”

“No,” Lucy said. “You should go home.”

He looked so confused. “I’m sorry, did I do something wrong?”

Lucy shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “You’re perfect.” She was backing up. “You are completely perfect and don’t ever change.”

“Can I . . . can I see you this weekend, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Lucy. His face fell. “I mean sure,” she said. “Sounds like fun.”

And then she turned and walked back toward the woods. She had made her choice. It was too late now. She looked back and he was watching her. He waved. She knew this would be the last time she’d ever see him. If she weren’t already so broken, she might have even felt a twinge of sadness about that, of concern about that. But her heart was too heavy to carry anything else.

A
t the end, there she was, Lucy Wrenn sitting on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest, staring at her own reflection in the window. That damn clock was ticking so loud now.

TICK TICK TICK

But in fifty-nine minutes it would finally stop.

It was fifty-nine minutes until midnight, fifty-nine minutes until the Magic Magnet took her memories away. She wondered if it would hurt when it happened. She kind of hoped it did.

Fifty-nine minutes. One class period. The length of a nap. Half a movie. That was all that was left until she was sucked headfirst through the door at the edge of the shimmering, glittering magical world she’d only just begun to know, thrust back into the flat, black place that was waiting for her. And the door would be shut and locked behind her. And then disappear entirely.

Fifty-eight minutes.

Fifty-seven.

TICK TICK TICK

Lucy lay back on her bed.

The worst part wasn’t the fact that Alex was not hers and he never would be now. The worst part was that she didn’t even want him anymore.

A week ago before she knew about the existence of magic or the Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers or
anything,
in those first terrifying moments right after Alex had dumped her, she had at least had something to cling to, the teeny-tiny possibility of one day maybe having Alex back. But the worst pain, she realized then, is not desperately wanting something you will probably never have.
The worst pain is not even having anything to want.

She closed her eyes, felt the whoosh of cool damp air rushing past her face as she fell down, down a tunnel that stretched straight toward infinity.

Bzzzzzz.

It took Lucy’s brain a moment even to process what the buzzing was, that it was not the inside parts of her brain but her phone on her nightstand. Tristan’s name was flashing on the screen.
Tristan.

Her hand reached for the phone before her brain had a chance to stop it, desperately grasped it like it was a rope dangling down the tunnel she was whooshing through.

She lifted the phone to her ear. “Hello.”

“Can you come outside?” Tristan said, so quickly it was as though she had caught him in the middle of a sentence; he would have said it whether she’d picked up the phone or not.

Lucy felt herself nodding. And although no words escaped her lips, she somehow knew that Tristan could hear her. “I’ll be here,” he said. And then he hung up.

Lucy stood up, walked out of her room into the dark hallway. She tiptoed out the front door. The gravel driveway crunched under her feet.

She looked up at the moon, and thought about how far away it was, how much empty blackness was between her and it, how much lonely empty space there was in the universe.

The music came then—a single, sweet mournful note stretching out into the night and curling back, like a long finger, beckoning. She followed it, down the driveway, down the street toward Tristan in his truck.

“Listen,” he said, “there’s something I need to show you.”

T
hey were going fast—Lucy had no idea where, but it didn’t matter. “I’m surprised you even want to see me,” she said to Tristan. “I’m so . . .” She wanted to apologize, to explain. But there was no explanation she could give.

He shook his head. He wasn’t smiling. “Don’t,” he said.

So she didn’t. And they just drove.

She looked out the window. They were in the industrial part of town where the big, flat buildings were pushed back far from the road. Tristan pulled down a wide driveway into a huge parking lot filled with row after row of school buses.

Tristan parked and got out. He snaked between the buses and stopped in front of one. He curled his fingers in the crack between the bus door and the edge of the bus and pried it open. Without saying anything, he disappeared inside, and Lucy followed.

Tristan walked to the back of the bus, sat in the last seat on the right, slid over to make room for Lucy. She sat. He took out his phone and used it to light up the seat.

There in black Sharpie on the green vinyl was written:
THE HAPPY SEAT.
“Remember this?” he said.

Lucy raised her hand to her lips. Of course she did.

In the middle of fourth grade, Lucy’s parents had told her they were getting divorced. It was the first time they’d said that, so she’d thought their proclamations meant something and had stayed awake most of the night crying. The next morning she’d boarded the bus with red puffy eyes, wanting to hide from everyone. And this kid Tristan was there, eating two lollipops. She did not know him then, just knew that he was the kid whose mom had died a few years before. That he always seemed to be joking and trying to make people laugh. “It’s your lucky day, you know,” he’d said. “No matter what you’re sad about, it’s no match for the happy-ing power of the happy seat.” And she’d asked him what the happy seat was. And he’d just smiled. “You’re sitting in it!” He’d taken a marker out of his bag then and started graffiti-ing on the seat to prove it. Lucy had been scared he was going to get caught but he didn’t seem to care.

They’d been best friends ever since.

Lucy turned toward Tristan, stared at him in the moonlight that was shining in through the dust-caked windows. She reached out and touched the sticky vinyl. “How did you find this?” she whispered.

“Fate, I guess,” Tristan said. And he sort of smiled since they both knew he didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. “Or maybe magic. I was driving around the other night and I saw this place and I just drove in. . . . I know you’re upset about . . . what happened and everything, but I thought if I brought you here . . . I don’t know.” He paused. “Here,” he said. He handed her his harmonica. “I don’t suppose there’s a cure for a broken heart, but I hear playing the blues helps sometimes.”

Lucy took it, so grateful for him, for his friendship. She pressed the harmonica to her mouth and blew it. A sad whine escaped. It didn’t sound sweet and haunting and mournful the way it did when Tristan played.

Lucy took the harmonica away from her lips. “I think it’s bro—” she started to say. But then something happened—her lips began to tingle. They started to warm and then just kept getting hotter.

Lucy raised her hand to her lips.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

She tasted cinnamon.

“No,” she whispered. She put her hand over her eyes.
No.

Tristan started to reach for her. “You okay?”

Lucy nodded.

“Lucy,” Tristan said. “I didn’t bring you here to show you the seat. I mean, that was part of it but . . .” And he sighed then, that heavy sigh that often comes right before someone says something they know they probably shouldn’t, as though their own lungs are trying to force them to wait one more minute, before ruining everything. “I have to tell you something.”

Lucy closed her eyes. She begged the world, Mother Nature, the universe herself to please, please, please not let him do it. Not let him tell her what she had just realized he was about to.

But anyone who has lived even one day knows that they seldom intervene in situations such as this.

Tristan was looking at her, looking at her so intensely. He reached for her hand.

“I’ve . . .” He looked down. “I . . . um,” he laughed suddenly. “There’s something I’ve needed to tell you for a long time. . . .”

Lucy started shaking her head and pulled her hand away.

Tristan was still staring. “Lucy?”

Her entire body was pulsing along with her heart.

“Wait!” Lucy called out. “Wait!”

Later Lucy would wonder if she had been wrong to stop him. Sometimes things need to be knocked down so they can be built back better. Sometimes fire needs to wipe out everything so new life can bloom. Sometimes people just need to say what they need to say even if what they need to say is “I love you” to their best friend who does not love them back
.

But she was not thinking of that then. All she was thinking was that if he told her, things would change, their friendship would be ruined. And in that moment, it was truly all she had.

Lucy looked at his profile. At the curve of his always-smiley mouth, at the reddish stubble growing out of his chin, at his brown hair flopping into his eyes. He was so sweet, and kind and funny. He had always, always been there for her. If only she could love him the way he wanted her to.

What would it be like if his face made her heart squeeze the way Alex’s did? What if it was his voice that made her stomach tighten with love?

Everything would be fixed.

The problem is, we can’t choose not to love someone just because they hurt us. And we can’t choose to love someone either, no matter how perfect they might be.

“Tristan,” Lucy started off. “You are my very best friend. . . .” And then she went from there, just opened her mouth and let the words fly out.

She thanked him for being such a good friend and apologized for being such a bad one lately. She told him how much she cared about him, how lucky she was to have him in her life. She took a breath and turned her head and stared out the dusty window at the moon. She wanted to get off that bus, to run out into the moonlight. To feel her legs pumping faster and faster until her body lifted up and she floated away.

But she had to finish this.

So she went on. She told him: So many things in life were messy and complicated, but what was between them was perfect and simple. A pure friendship, deep and true with nothing mucking it up. She told him gently, and with love, that what she was most grateful for, maybe in this entire world, was that in finding him on this bus all those years ago, she had not just found a best friend, but a brother.

She hoped that would never ever change.

She was finished then, emptied out. He was quiet and she sighed with relief. She had stopped him from saying something they would both regret. She had saved them both.

But she turned toward him and was suddenly struck with the horrible understanding of something. Her words had not been simply words to him, but shards of lead, sharp and heavy, shot like bullets from her mouth. They sliced through his skin, through every part of him, and clattered together, filling up his insides. She felt his body sagging against her shoulder, as though all of those shards of lead had given his body a sick and terrible weight.

He nodded numbly and turned toward the window. “But I love you,” Tristan choked. There was such longing in those words. Lucy gasped, she thought her heart was too broken to break again. But it did, right then it broke for him too. “I mean . . .” He paused. “You know, as a buddy, buddy. So, that’s what I wanted to say too so that you would never forget it. That I love you.”

They sat there together, the two of them. And they felt, for maybe the first and only time, precisely, exactly the same. That there was no hope, that it was all over.

By the glow of the moon Lucy could see Tristan wipe his eyes. And then, he reached out and just for a moment grasped her hand. She felt something on her finger, something wet.

He let go of her then. She raised her hand; a tiny droplet was on the tip of her finger. A single curved droplet shimmering in the light
.