The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (22 page)

W
e learn about ourselves from the tough choices. We might think we know who we are because of what we think is right, but we don’t really know if we’ll give the wallet back until we find one, if we’ll help that slow old lady until the building’s actually on fire.

Lucy had always believed, always wanted to believe, that when faced with a friend in pain she’d be able to put herself entirely aside for a while and do whatever she could to help.

But that night, sitting in that bus staring at that tear when she wished she would have been thinking of her friend and how best to help him, she was only thinking this: it was 11:51 and there were still nine minutes left until midnight.

Tick.

She pressed her lips together. And felt the rough and ragged hole in her heart. Later she would be tortured by her choice, what it meant that she’d made it. But she was not thinking of that yet.

“Tristan,” Lucy said. She watched herself and she learned just what she’d do. . . .

T
hey were back in the truck driving fast, the wind whipping in through the open windows. Lucy held on to the vial on the chain around her neck.

Tristan was staring straight ahead, jaw clenched, gripping the steering wheel tight. She was racing toward something. He was only racing away.

11:53.

11:54.

Lucy could feel the seconds ticking in her stomach, her chest, her head, her heart. A bomb was set to go off inside her. And any second it would.

It was 11:58 when they pulled up to Olivia’s house.

“Thank you, Tristy,” Lucy whispered. And she reached out to hug him. But when her hand touched his arm, he pulled back. “Thank you, Tristy,” she said again.

He tried to force a smile. “No problem, buddy.” His voice was all wrong.

“Don’t wait for me,” she said.

She got out of the car and shut the door behind her. By the time she got to the gate, he was already gone.

T
hrough the gate, up the driveway. Clouds had rolled in and the air was thick with a storm on its way. Velvet black sky and not even a moon to guide her. The pumping in her chest led the way. She ran.

TICK TICK TICKTICK

At the front door she flung her body at the thick old wood. The sound of her thunking against it echoed in the cavern inside.

She waited, breathless, for the door to creak open. It didn’t.

It was dark. The sky was dark. Her phone was sitting in her room at home. Tristan was gone.

She knocked again. Nothing. And there was no bell. She tried to turn the doorknob. Locked.

“Olivia!” she shouted. But there was no answer. “Gil!” she shouted.

She felt the ticking inside her still, harder, louder, faster. How much time was left?

TICKTICKTICKTICKTICK

It was happening now, to every cell within her.

Body pumping blood, face pumping sweat.

This was it. Something was moving through her muscles and her blood. Up through her skin. Working its way out.

For a moment she was aware of only pain, searing through her. How strange it was to feel this pain, how strange it was to have so many nerves right inside you capable of such things, but to never have them fire.
And then fire all at once.

She felt her body crumpling in slow motion then.

Gravity tugged her down and she did not resist.

On the ground, in a heap, too late, Lucy wondered,
What have they done to me? What have I let them do?

It was her last thought before the ticking finally stopped and everything went dark.

S
econds before midnight, there was Lucy on the ground in front of Olivia’s house. She could not move. She could not speak. But could feel everything. She was nothing but nerves now.

There was: the pinch of fingers under her arms as someone lifted her up, the feeling of her heels dragging lightly against the slate as she was pulled up the stairs, the feeling of her toes being bent back as the heel of her flip-flop caught against the step and was yanked off. She wanted to look up, to see who was pulling her, but the muscles in her neck did not listen when she told them to move. Her head bobbed heavy like an overripe fruit.

What had she done? What the hell had she done?

Panic seized her, but her heart didn’t speed up. It just pounded slowly, a drum for a death march. No sound left her lips, not even a ragged gasping. Air flowed smoothly in and out.

She heard voices, but her ears weren’t working right because all she could make out were foreign sounds blended together. Her brain would not turn these sounds to words.

The moon came out from behind the clouds. She could see her own body below her now, lit by that silver light. She felt grass under her feet, soft and cool. Then felt herself laid down flat on her back on something hard. They were inside the gazebo and now Lucy could see Olivia’s face leaning over her, surrounded by a halo of candlelight.

“Well, it’s about time,” Olivia said. “We’d almost given up on you.” Lucy tried to say something. But her tongue lay limp inside her open mouth.

Olivia lifted Lucy’s hand, which was still clutching the vial.

Lucy felt her fingers being uncurled and the vial taken away. Off to the side she heard the clink of glass against metal.

“Hurry,” someone said.

Liza was there then, smiling widely, holding a terrifying contraption made of copper and brass. It looked like a gun with a long needle protruding from the barrel. Olivia unscrewed the base of the vial, and passed it to Liza. Liza pushed it onto the end of the machine. Then flipped a switch on the contraption’s side. A sickening buzzing filled the air.

Someone pulled Lucy’s shirt down at the neck, exposing the skin over her heart.

Liza leaned over, her long hair tickling Lucy’s cheek. She held the machine up over Lucy’s chest.
This is it. It’s all over now,
Lucy thought. Somehow in that moment she knew that they were going to cut out her heart. That was what they’d wanted all along.

Lucy tried to close her eyes so she would not have to see the blood, the thick redness of her own beating broken heart. But eyelids stayed open.

“Don’t move,” Liza said sweetly. As though Lucy had a choice.

Olivia laughed. That tinkling, tinkling, terrible laugh. It sounded, Lucy realized then, nothing at all like a door being opened. It was the sound of the end of everything, of a door creaking forever shut.

And then that long needle went in, through her skin, and the muscle below it, popping her breastbone like a punch through leather.

The needle went farther, through all that inside human jelly, and finally, finally the needle pierced the slick, sloppy, flabby, fat, broken, bloody, ragged red meat of her heart.

It stabbed Lucy’s heart, again and again, over and over. Thick warm liquid pooled in her chest. Hot pain radiated out.

The buzzing and whirring went on forever, getting louder and louder.

And then finally there was a silence. A silence few people will ever hear—the silence that comes when that quiet but insistent pounding that you’ve heard every second for your entire life stops.

Lucy’s heart was not beating anymore.

But her eyes worked as they always had.

Lucy saw a thin curl of smoke rising up out of her own chest.

Images formed in the smoke.

First, a pair of lovers, in a swirling dance. Apart, together, apart. Their bodies moving in perfect harmony. Fingertip to fingertip and toe to toe, the space between them formed shapes. Apart, together, apart, together. Until they turned their backs on each other and twirled away.

Then there was Alex. The plane of his cheek, the sweep of his hair. His eyes shrunk down to gray dots. His face hung there, cartoonish now. Repulsive even. It collapsed in on itself. The smoke morphed into a translucent tornado swirling faster and faster. As it swirled, something was happening inside Lucy’s chest, something new was being built, one cell at a time clicking into place.

The smoke drifted into the shape of a heart—red and proud and stronger than anything. And behind it her own face, calm, powerful, and beautiful.

The smoke cleared then. The candles flickered.

And inside Lucy’s chest her new heart began to beat.

Lucy sat up slowly, blinking.

Everything was quiet. Olivia, Liza, and Gil were glowing in the moonlight.

She took a deep breath, breathed out as though exhaling smoke. She raised her hand up to her chest. She pressed where her broken heart had been. Where there had once been so much pain, there wasn’t any longer.

Her heart was beating, and that was all.

“How do you feel?” Gil said.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. But she reached up and felt her own face and it was smiling.

Gil reached out and squeezed Lucy’s hand.

Lucy looked down at the skin over her heart. There was a deep red heart, edged in gold, locked shut, a purple ribbon swirling across it with
SECRET SISTERHOOD OF HEARTBREAKERS
inked on in black
.
And dripping off the point of the heart was a topaz teardrop jewel.

Lucy touched the tear with her fingertip. She was one of them now.

“The tattoo is directly on your heart,” Gil said. “It’s invisible to everyone except for other Heartbreakers.”

“There are others?”

“Obviously,” Liza said. “What did you think? That it was just us?” She rolled her eyes, but her tone was jokey. She was talking to Lucy the way you talk to a friend.

Lucy looked at her and smiled. And she noticed something coming out of the top of Liza’s green-and-white-striped dress.

“Your tattoo . . . ,” Lucy said. It was identical to her own.

“We all have them,” said Gil. She pulled down the front of her T-shirt. Olivia pulled down the front of her dress.

“And now,” said Gil, “our family is complete.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means there’s no room for anyone else. Four seasons, four elements, four sisters.” When she said the word
sisters
, she smiled.

“But what happens now?” Lucy asked.

“Well, lots of things,” Olivia said. “But there’s time to talk about all of that later. Plenty of time now. Tonight go home and rest.” And then she smiled. “Tomorrow we celebrate . . .”

Gil reached out and hugged Lucy. “I knew you would do it,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting so long for you.” And she squeezed Lucy again. “We’re sisters now,” she said.

Lucy smiled as they helped her walk toward the car. “We’re sisters,” Gil said again. “We’re sisters!” She repeated it over and over. And by the time they got there, Lucy believed her.

T
hat night, alone in her room, for the first time since her heart broke, Lucy picked up her guitar. Then she sat on her bed and started to write her second song. It was different than the one she’d written for Alex. It was slower, more complex, with sweet warm notes emerging from the cracked wood and swirling over and under and all around her voice. It would take a while to finish, this song would. But Lucy was in no rush.

When she was tired, she lay in her bed, quiet and still, thoughts gently resting in her head. And a full and whole heart beating soundly in her chest. She felt the softness of the sheets under her skin, the smoothness of her pillowcase against her cheek. She opened the window, and a breeze blew, fluttering the curtains and carrying in the scent of night-blooming flowers that had probably been in her yard all week, but she hadn’t been able to smell them until now.

As she breathed in the sweet air, felt the soft sheets, she suddenly felt something that can only be described like this: she felt as though she was falling in love.

Deeply in love, but deeply loved too. Not with or by Alex, or her new sisters, or anyone in particular. No. She was in love with the whole world, the entire universe, every wretched, beautiful, lumpy, slimy, whispering, dark, sick, soft, twinkling, sharp, scented, smooth, rough, magnificent bit of it. Equally, wholly, and completely, every bit as much as she’d ever loved Alex. Maybe even more.

She thought: maybe this feeling was what we were before we were born—not bodies or spirits exactly, but just this feeling, this love.

The rest of what we are is just layers, wrapped around that feeling, layers of who we think we are and what we think we are. But at the core we’re all just this. The rest doesn’t matter. The rest isn’t even real anyway.

With this thought she smiled. And she wondered why she had never realized this before, felt this before, since it had always clearly been this way. Everything she’d ever worried about, or been nervous about or scared about or sad about didn’t matter. Not because life is meaningless, but because it’s too big and too wonderful and too precious to spend it like that.

Suddenly the feelings she’d once had for Alex—that out-of-control top of a roller coaster sick and crazy feeling seemed silly, juvenile. It wasn’t that she hadn’t really loved him because oh, she had, she had. She’d loved him the best she could then, but she’d loved him the way a baby loves, full of longing and need. It was a love that made the lack of him feel like death.

But she could not love that way anymore. She knew that then. And she was glad for it.

She thought of all the people out there in the night, their broken hearts beating as they lay in their beds, on their floors, curled in sleepless balls of ache. She felt so touched by all of this, so sad for all of them, that she wanted to cry in that moment, but laugh somehow too. She wanted to hug them all and hold them all gently and then let them go.

As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if this was now the permanent state of things for her. If
this
is what being a Heartbreaker meant? And if so, how would she go around in the world with a heart so full, with a heart just barely this side of bursting?