The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (5 page)

E
xcept for this: it was time to go to class, the one she’d signed up for with Alex.

“Our school administration is a bunch of idiots,” he’d told her the previous spring during class sign-up week. “They have some stupid rule that you can’t use the darkroom unless you’re enrolled in a photo class here, and they make you take the classes in order, which means I have to take Photo I if I want to use the darkroom here at all. It’s total bullshit because I probably know more than most of the teachers.”

“I could take it with you,” Lucy had offered quickly. “That would be fun, right?” She pressed her lips together, practically vibrating with excitement at the idea of it.

Alex nodded. “Okay, sure,” he’d said. He’d smiled. “Yeah, fun, definitely. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

Alex liked that, teaching her things. And Lucy liked being taught by him.

Alex had tried to show her the basic stuff in the week before he went away for the summer: how to focus, set the shutter speed, that sort of thing. “Take some good pictures for me,” he’d said. “You’ll need
something
to do while I’m gone, right?”

But during that entire week she couldn’t focus on anything other than how much she was going to miss him. All she heard was
I’m leaving, I’m leaving, I’m leaving
every time he opened his mouth.

He’d demonstrated on his own fancy, professional-type camera, which was very different than the embarrassing neon-blue-and-pink one (with
SAY CHEEZ!
printed on the strap) she’d borrowed from her mom, who had used it as a kid.

Basically this all added up to Lucy having pretty much no idea what she was doing. She just turned the knobs and poked at the buttons. She didn’t know anything about lighting or composition or any of the things Alex said were really important. But she figured that was okay; she wasn’t trying to be an artist. When she saw something that gave her that feeling, that strange
ping-y
feeling that made her want to take a picture—like a man in a business suit eating an ice-cream cone for example, or a kid running crazily for the bus—she took one. And that was it. But every time she pressed the shutter all summer long she’d reminded herself that when she saw that picture again, she’d be with Alex. That was why it mattered.

Only now, as Lucy hurried down the empty hallway toward the photo room, she realized the film canister she had clutched in her sweaty hand was all she had left.

Lucy pushed through the gray door to the photo lab. That weird darkroom smell curled up her nose. Mr. Wexler was at the front of the room lecturing. He was a grizzly-looking man with a bushy white mustache, always drinking out of a brown clay coffee mug. There was a rumor the coffee was actually whiskey.

No one looked up as she came in.

“A good photograph shows us as much about the photographer as it does about the subject,” Mr. Wexler was saying. “You give me a picture of a woman and I can tell you who took the picture, and how they feel about the woman just from the way the light catches her skin. A good photograph isn’t decoration, it’s a doorway into someone else’s . . .”

Mr. Wexler continued on. The entire class was watching him. Lucy stood near the front of the room searching for Alex.

And there he was, standing near the back. She could not look at him and see him as anything other than her boyfriend. When he’d broken up with her he hadn’t seen her in
months
but their connection was real and a connection like that doesn’t just dissolve for no reason
.
So maybe his memory wasn’t as good as hers, maybe he didn’t remember her quite as well as she remembered him. What if she just needed to remind him?

Lucy edged into the crowd, slowly started working her way toward Alex. She had no idea what she planned to do when she got there, but she couldn't help herself. She squeezed between two freshman guys and got caught on one of their backpacks. She stepped on a girl’s foot. “Sorry,” Lucy whispered. “Excuse me, sorry, sorry.” Her face was burning. She just kept going.

There was Alex, staring at the front of the room. He looked sort of lost.

She was almost there when Mr. Wexler started giving his tour of the room, and the class began to move. “Film closet!” he said. “Light box!” He probably said a bunch of other words too, but she did not register any of them. No, all she registered was the pounding of her heart as she made her way closer to her love.

“Alex,” she whispered. “I need to talk to you.” But Alex was watching Mr. Wexler. He did not turn.

“And now it’s time to visit the most magical spot in this whole damn school,” Mr. Wexler said. “The darkroom.” He led the class around the corner. “Crowd in, people,” he said. The room was hot, the lights were red. Someone made a club-music-imitation
nnnnnst nnnnst nnnst
sound and a few people laughed. Lucy worked herself in behind Alex.

“Hi,” she whispered. He still didn’t turn. Mr. Wexler was saying something about “stop bath” and “fixer.” She moved over a couple inches. Their arms were touching. Her fingers grazed his. He still did not turn, but he did not move his hand either. Surely, he had to have felt that. Surely he must have known she was there. She thought she saw him smile. Yes, he knew she was there and he was glad; he was relieved that she hadn’t given up on them so easily. He had probably just broken up with her because he missed her so much over the summer and didn’t like feeling that vulnerable. That was something that happened to guys sometimes, right?

Suddenly someone bumped into Lucy, tossing her forward into Alex’s back. Her cheek pressed against him, right between his shoulder blades. She could feel the soft fabric of his T-shirt against her skin. She closed her eyes. And she sighed.

Mmmmmm.

She could feel the vibration of the sigh working its way up from deep within her chest. A cross between a breath and a hum, that sigh. It said everything. How much she loved him. How much she missed him over the summer. How much she’d been looking forward to this moment,
needed
this moment. She stayed there, sighing against him.

Alex reached his hand back, touched her leg. Then turned around. She smiled.

Alex blinked in that red light. “Lucy?” he said. He looked confused. Then annoyed. Then like he just felt sorry for her. “What are you
doing
?”

Lucy gasped. Oh God. Her jaw dropped. She was filled with a sick and terrible panic, like she’d woken up from a nap to find that the house was on fire.

What
was
she doing?

All she could do was stare back, and raise her hand to her mouth and shake her head. “I have no idea,” she whispered.

L
ucy had had some embarrassing moments in her life:

When she was in third grade she’d fallen down in the mud and this really mean boy said it looked like she’d crapped her pants.

When she was in sixth grade, someone had bumped her lunch tray and she’d gotten ketchup all over her white sweater and that same awful boy had said it looked like she got her period out her boobs.

In seventh-grade Earth Science, while reading out loud in class, she had mispronounced the word
organism
in a very bad way.

But nothing
even came close
to what had just happened. To what she had just done.

Lucy rushed back through the crowded darkroom, into the photo lab, out into the hallway.

After this moment she knew nothing would ever be okay again.

She would need a miracle to fix any of this. To make the world a place she could live in. Or make her a person who could live in
it
. A miracle . . . or magic.

The problem was,
she had had her chance
. She had had her chance and she’d blown it. Surely she would not be given another.

Lucy flip-flopped her way into her homeroom, positioned herself over an empty chair, and crumpled down into it. She felt, if not relief, then a slight resignation. At least she was with her people now.

Homerooms at Van Buren were arranged alphabetically, and Lucy always felt a kinship with her fellow
W
s. They were the end of the alphabet people, the weirdos. They were the type of people who, if they heard a girl quietly humming to herself with a slightly frantic and desperate tone, wouldn’t question it. They’d know that that’s just what a person needs to do sometimes.

So, even though normally she would never hum where anyone could hear her, that’s what Lucy did as she leaned back against her seat, her Alex song vibrating through her closed lips. She let her head tilt slightly to the right, and then she saw something so strange that her mouth dropped open and her humming just
stopped
: sitting there with her fellow
W
s was someone who did not fit. Not a wacky, wistful
W
. But a sexy, suavely serpentine, maybe-even-a-little-bit-scary
S
right there amongst them:

Ethan Sloane.

Was she in the wrong room?

No.

Were
S
and
W
still different letters?

Yes.

So then what the heck was he doing there sitting between Shana Wilson, who always smelled like a sneeze, and Lucy herself, a girl who had just
sighed
all over the back of the guy who dumped her?

They
were
W
s.
He
was not a
W
 . . . yet, in that moment she felt weirdly close to him. In that moment he was not the Ethan who she’d heard all the stories about; he was Ethan whose heart was broken, just like hers was. Who maybe had been driven so crazy by his heartbreak that he had simply forgotten his own name.

“Jason Wolf?”

Ms. Eamon, homeroom supervisor, was up at the front of the room taking attendance.

“Here.”

“Jessica Wooster?”

“Present.”

“Lucy Wrenn?”

“Here,” Lucy said. She turned toward Ethan.
Poor guy,
she thought. In that face, in that formerly happy, always cocky face, she now saw a reflection of her own.

“Ethan Wrigley?”

“Yup.” Ethan Sloane raised one finger up in the air, like he was at a restaurant signaling for the check.

“Excuse me.” Lucy leaned over. Normally she’d be too shy to talk to him, but now she felt like they were just the same. Even if he didn’t know it. “Didn’t you used to have a different name?”

“My parents’ divorce became official over the summer,” he said. His voice was flat, like he’d told the story so many times he was repeating a speech from memory. He neither knew nor cared whom he was telling it to this time. “And we live with my mom now. She said she didn’t want to have to see or hear or say his last name ever again, so she made us change ours. She’s insane. So now I’m here.”

“Heartbreak can make people crazy.” Lucy lowered her voice meaningfully. She wondered if he knew she had seen him the night before.

He shrugged, tipped his head to the side, and smirked. He looked exactly like the old Ethan, the old Ethan she never actually knew. It was a look of casual not caring, so smooth that for a second she wondered if she had imagined everything she’d seen.

But broken hearts cannot lie,
at least not to each other . . .

He turned his head slightly, and then . . . there it was. Was it the quick twitch of the jaw? A tightness around his eyes? Something gave him away and her heart thunked in response.

“I guess so,” he said.

Lucy stared at him, forced herself not to avert her gaze because she could feel something happening between them. She could feel him beginning to understand that she understood. Even if he was not entirely aware of it.

“Well, welcome to the club,” she said slowly.

He blinked again. “What club?” He looked a little suspicious then and maybe even a little scared.

“Oh, you know . . .” She stopped.

He started to nod slowly.

She tried to smile. “The
W
s.”

“Right.” But he looked different then, his mask was gone.

Ethan brought his arm up to his face and coughed quietly into the crook of his elbow. And right then, Lucy saw something on the sleeve of his brown suede jacket—a matted area, darker than the rest. Around the edges of the dark stain was a faint white crust, like evaporated seawater.

Or whatever is left after tears dry.

An image flashed into Lucy’s head. Ethan, the night before, sobbing heartbreak tears all over his jacket.

She got an idea, a stupid idea, a crazy idea, but it was all she had so she had to try.

“Hey.” Her face was burning. “Can I see that for a second? Your jacket, I mean?” The words came out in a pinched jumble. She heard them as she said them.

Ethan gave her a funny look. “Yeah, sure,” he said. He held out his arm.

“No, I mean, can you take it off so I can see it?” What the hell was she doing?

He raised his eyebrows.

“Please. It’s just that it’s . . .” She paused.
What could she say?
“Important.”

And then how to explain what happened next?

Was Ethan just used to girls wanting his jacket? Was he so heartbroken that he wasn’t even thinking?

All Lucy knew was that Ethan Sloane was doing it. He took off his jacket and held it out. Lucy took it. It was heavier than she’d expected it to be.

In one swift motion she stood up, tucked the heavy suede jacket under her arm, and headed for the door.

Ethan was staring at her. “THANK YOU!” she shouted. “I’LL GIVE IT BACK LATER, I PROMISE!” Then she turned and ran faster than she’d ever run in her life even though she’d been doing an awful lot of running lately. She ran straight down the hall, and when she turned the corner she saw Ethan standing in front of the door to homeroom watching her. He wasn’t even trying to stop her. Over the stomp of her feet and the beat of her heart, she couldn’t hear anything else.