by Moe Bonneau
We scat and I feel more grown-up than I know I am.
I tell her how I sometimes—but mostly used to—cut, and show her the lines on my arm as proof. I tell her about counting steps and letters and feeling so Ophelia with anxiety I think sometimes my brain might crack. I tell her I got so hooked on alters last year I almost missed the train out of happytown and Eve says it’s all okay, I’m all okay. Eve and I, we scat and scat and then fall asleep on our towels with soft, sad smiles on our word-weary lips.
* * *
We heel it back to our campsite slow, counting together the now 162 steps where it used to be 240 of my own, small wee-Jack strides.
“This was Oma’s favorite place on the planet,” I say. “This land, washed-away dunes, lighthouses moaning, houses swept away in storms.”
And our nets swing with our steps, our digits spun fast together, knuckles and palms gritty with salty dust.
And I smile. “Remember that time when I came up to you on the beach and brought you a stinking white ray and you fed me cantaloupe and I asked you if you remembered all those times?” I say and Eve, she laughs liquid silver.
“I do,” she says. “I so do.”
How Can I Say?
How can I say what it is to feel the weight of the betty you love as she naps, her arms and legs draped and entwined with your own, her breath coming in short bursts of warm air against your neck?
How can I say what it is to think and see in poetry, to scope the sky and ground in short phrases that drip and heave with blood and bones and dust?
How can I say what it is to know the heat of your heart-Jack pressed hard into the corners of your own, moving and rocking, musk mingling with pine and wood smoke, the dew on her back shimmering and rising, meeting in a cloud the breath of a cool night’s air?
How can I say what one does with eyes so gray and clear you heel it on foggy sands and are lost and found and lost again, your reflection ebbing, mirrored in the glassy pool of her luminous hazy gaze?
How can I say what it is to hold someone so close they move through you and beyond and emerge sliding fast into an eclipsing vastness your steps can never retrace?
Starry Sheets
We’ve got one last night together. We’ve decided to spend it (illegally) on the beach.
We heel it with our sleeping bags, a picnic dinner, pillows, the Sunday paper, and three small logs over the still-warm dunes and onto the beach. The full moon is hung and its glow illuminates our pilgrimage from tent to shore.
We heel it by the water’s black slapping edge, the sand glinting silver specs, the palms of our feet knowing tumbled rocks and shells. We veer back into the dunes and scope a sheltered inlet where the breeze is hush and warm.
We dig together a small pit and our digits find damp, cool sand and crank little clear-skinned shrimps jump and scatter. We arrange crumpled newspaper, small drifted sticks, and our three logs like a tepee and spark it with a match. I blow massive careful on each pocket of flame as Eve pokes and prods. Our fire ripens and we smile happyfaces, and lean back on our heels, brushing sand from our mitts and knees.
We lay a sleeping bag down, unzip and spread it out. Pillows next. Then us. We pull a second, plaid-lined bag over our chilly skin and are a sandy sandwich and we squirm and smile and link legs and nets and lips. The fire spits and crackles and we roll and twist under our starry sheets.
We’re skin to skin and my hands trace her warm curves and chasms. She’s a smiling shadow as she squirms, pushing apart my legs, and disappears. She isn’t sight or sound or smell. She’s touch. Her fingers are on me first, light and slippery. Then her mouth, soft and sure, and my eyes slip closed and I find spaces in myself I didn’t know. Her fingers slide in and whole continents, green and rocky, desert and jungle, rise up from my core. Hot blushes pulse through me and my oceans open their shores. And soon I’m close, her hands joining my rolling rhythms, and I swim submerged, deep in my new planet’s waters. I can see land. And I submit and a final, powerful tide rushes in.
I have arrived.
I gasp and open my eyes and she rises to greet me, her nets wrapping sweaty and fast around my steaming frame. I laugh and she kisses my rosy face and my swollen mouth and she rocks me in time to the Atlantic’s steady roll.
Piss and Vinegar
With the sun’s morning mug comes reality. We’re two flip birds to daybreak’s one stone and dread circles high like gulls over a sinking ship.
We traipse back to our campsite mitt in mitt, salty beach dew clinging to our skin in crumbling white dust, our bedding slung in soggy heaps over our shoulders. We dismantle our campsite and pack our junk into my banger.
Rain falls in fat drops as we cut a wheel across the towering, fog-bound bridge and find chow in a crank little seaside café. I’m massive in-n-out, moping through breakfast and Eve says, “Let’s see that happyface,” and I scrunch my nose and show my teeth and we laugh and smile sad over a shared plate of grease, hash browns, and fried eggs. We take hot tea to go.
Back in my banger, we pass the steaming cup back and forth and slowly unwrap the hard facts of our sad state. Evil hit-Jacks, crossing enemy lines, small-town cogs jiving massive smack, ex-heart-Jacks. The vast unknowable future. College. We both leave in three weeks.
I laugh and say, “If we ever start a band, we can call ourselves A Rock and a Hard Place.”
“Or, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?”
“Word,” I say. “Or how ’bout Piss and Vinegar—but I call being Vinegar.” She laughs and her voice is cool aloe on my scorched heart.
But we’re no badrats. We’re true-blue betties wheeling it home in a banger speeding in two directions at once, and as I catch her smiling eyes over the steaming tea, I know she’ll always be my Misty Ginger Haze.
We pull back onto the main road and my speak buzzes in. It’s Dad.
“Oh,” I say when Marta’s voice is on the other line. “Word.”
She laughs. “Word to you, too, flap-Jack.”
“Oma?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Yeah. Miles all right?”
“He’s my human tissue.” I smile, glad she’s home. “So,” she says after a beat. “Rumor is you’re like some big lez-Jack now.”
“Um.”
“With Eve Brooks, nonetheless,” Marta says. “Such an ace.” And then we’re both cracking up. “That’s beat, Jack,” she says. “I gotta heel. Dad just wanted me to let you know. And check you’re still alive.”
“Still kicking.” I pause. “Thanks, Sister.”
“Word.”
We hang up and I look at Eve and I see in her eyes she understands Oma’s gone. She runs a palm up and down my arm and I surrender the helm. I’m speak, not think.
“Hey, Thumbs. Whaddya say?”
“Whaddya say what?”
“Let’s just jump in. See if we can’t make this thing work.” She looks back out her window and I plow on. “Long-distance phone calls, plane tickets, massive expensive speak bills. We gotta at least try.” But Eve’s gone hush. She sighs deep, hot steam billowing from her cup. “A Jack’s gotta think about her future every once in a while, y’know.”
Her lips curl into a small smile but her eyes are still down. I watch the road, my heart cage pounding away with the swish-swosh-swish of the windshield wipers. I tell myself I tried.
I’m getting good and sweaty-palmed and my crank heart’s a sinking ship as the dashed white lines whip under the hood of my wheeling banger. But then Eve’s nodding her head. Slow and then more quick, and she’s a massive smile out of the corner of my eye. I’m pulling off the road and P is for Park and she’s crying and pulling my earlobes, her eyes crossing just a tiny bit as she presses her beatstreet nose into mine. She’s kissing me, saying, “Yes. Yes, you.”
And then we’re hush again, nose to nose, and her eyes are big saucers and her mouth is moving miles a minute. She sits back in her seat and rattles off plans all ponies ’n’ pigtails about summer fun, Christma
s breaks to come, traveling the globe. Us—Bug ’n’ Thumbs. I smile, watching her, and start back up my banger and D is for Drive and we accelerate and we’re cutting a wheel forward.
“I love you,” I say, so softly she can’t hear over the crank hum of the engine, and I take her hand and it’s soft and warm, like dawn.
I take a massive deep breath.
I am anew.
About the Author
Moe Bonneau is the author-illustrator of the picture book Seven Bad Cats. She lives in San Francisco and works as a graphic designer. The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Never-Ending Pending Love
History
Sailors & Cowboys
Pack of Strays
Ancient History
In the Flesh
Loser Express
Thank You for Holding
Jazzed
Pretty Pennies
Light, Like Air
Baby Owl
Thumb War
Booze Pirates
On the Verge
No Big Whoop
Whirling Dervish
Into the Sea
Shrapnel
Miss Heartbreak Hotel
The Magician
Low Tide
Supercollider
Galaxies
Linkin’ Logs
Tag, You’re It
Soft Suns
Bull’s-Eye
Centipedes
Jive
Soft-Bodied Aphid
Man Down
Power Wash
Get on Up, Jack
Illuminated
Misty Ginger Haze
Like Home
Marco Polo
Free Fall
Mission Possible
Like a Rolling Stone
How Can I Say?
Starry Sheets
Piss and Vinegar
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Monique Bonneau
Lyrics to “Place to Be” by Nick Drake reproduced by permission of Bryter Music
Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866
Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
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All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bonneau, Monique (Designer), author.
Title: The pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel / Moe Bonneau.
Description: First edition.|New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.|Summary: When Lucy reconnects with her childhood best friend, Eve, in their senior year of high school, she is not prepared for the intense emotions—and attraction—that follow.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038777|ISBN 9781250170934 (hardcover)
Subjects:|CYAC: Best friends—Fiction.|Friendship—Fiction.|Infatuation—Fiction.|High schools—Fiction.|Schools—Fiction.|Lesbians—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B66925 Pur 2019|DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038777
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First hardcover edition 2019
eBook edition May 2019
eISBN 9781250170941
