The Book of Love

by Lynn Weingarten

  Lucy reached out and grabbed a handful and tossed them into her backpack. She grabbed another, and another until the safe was empty. She closed the door, locked the lock, and put the floorboard back.

  Then she walked into Olivia’s room, placed Eleanor’s letter on her pillow, and draped the locket next to it.

  She headed for the door. She could hear the tiny glass vials clattering in her backpack. She rode home.

  She went upstairs and got into bed and lay there, silent and still, brain racing, body on fire. She lay like that, wide-awake until morning.

  Thirty-Three

  Before she left for school, Lucy hugged her mother good-bye. “I hope you have an okay day, Mom” was what Lucy said. But what she was thinking was If this doesn’t work, I am so, so sorry. Her mother smiled vaguely. “I’ll be okay, honey,” she said. “I feel better than I have in a very long time.”

  Lucy made her way through the day, and she wondered why she had even bothered to go to school at all. Maybe she just wanted to see it all—her school, her teachers, all those people who’d made up her days and been somehow a part of her life—and say good-bye, just in case. Then again, maybe she’d just wanted to see Tristan.

  Olivia hadn’t come to school again. Neither had Liza. Lucy saw Gil in the hallway, wild-eyed, standing alone. She spotted Jason and Jessica in the parking lot, holding hands, laughing. But there was no sign of Tristan’s lanky frame, his floppy hair, his smiling eyes. Which meant the last time she saw him might have actually been the very last.

  At the end of the day, Lucy got a cup of hot water from the cafeteria and then sprinkled in the tiny handful of petals. She waited until the water turned faintly purple, and then she took a sip. It tasted like perfume. Her tongue began to tingle, and her throat numbed as the liquid went down. She felt her insides lurch, like the room was an elevator going down. Everything around her went quiet. And then Lucy felt her mouth spreading into a smile.

  Sometimes the truth reveals itself slowly, like a flower gently blooming. Other times it will hit you like a punch in the gut, so hard and fast you’ll be lucky to catch your breath.

  Dizzy, gasping, giddy, Lucy packed up her things and stumbled toward the bathroom. Her body was buzzing with energy so intense she felt like she was about to fly right out of her own skin.

  The truth that had revealed itself was this: She was young and beautiful and powerful and free. And there was no way in hell she was ever giving that up.

  She pushed into the empty bathroom and locked the door behind her. She closed her eyes and felt the blood zipping through her veins, felt her gorgeous heart steel strong at the center of herself. She felt power shooting up from the center of the earth, up through her feet and legs, filling her entire body. She forced herself to breathe. And when her heart slowed ever so slightly, she opened her eyes and stared at herself in the cracked glass.

  She was absolutely stunning. A stunning, amazing, luminous creature. She’d gotten some sun at SoundWave, and her skin was the color of honey. Her hair hung down, shiny and white, and without her rock chick blowout it lay in soft loose waves. She looked like a surfer chick about to hit the beach, like someone who didn’t have a care in the world.

  How ridiculous that she’d spent the last seven weeks worrying about things. About everything! She’d worried about not hurting Colin’s feelings, about helping Tristan, even about getting back to the boring way she used to be. When all along, she should have been having fun.

  She looked at her phone. It was three thirty on a Tuesday. And that meant only one thing: time to party.

  Lucy wasn’t going to call her sisters, not this time. She didn’t want anything to do with Gil, who was a liar, and Liza, who was a mess. And Olivia, well, who knew what Olivia was. And who even cared. Lucy had almost sacrificed this amazing gift simply because she didn’t like what and who surrounded it. Well, that made no sense. She could throw them out so easily. She already had.

  She was more powerful than any of them now, all on her own.

  Of course, she didn’t have to stay on her own. She started scrolling through her phone. There were so many guys’ numbers in there now, all but one from just the last seven weeks. Adam S, Adam T, Brian, Colin, Darien, Dex, Diego H. The list went on and on. She closed her eyes as she tried to picture their faces. Problem was, she barely remembered meeting most of them. Many of them were guys her sisters knew, a few she’d met out at parties and such. None of them were people she knew intimately. But now there was time for that. . . .

  She hovered over a name: Hotness. Who the hell was Hotness? She had no idea. But she was about to find out.

  Lucy reached in her bag, pulled out a crushed cherry gloss, and slicked it on. Then she used her phone to record a little video of her lips blowing a kiss at the screen.

  She played it back. In the video her lips were all you could see. She looked luscious, sexy, and completely mysterious. She wrote, Plans this afternoon? And then with no hesitation at all, she hit SEND. She took a breath and started to count.

  One broken heart, two broken hearts, three broken hearts . . . By the time she got to ten, he’d written her back.

  Meet me at Merchant Park in twenty minutes?

  Lucy smirked. Make it fifteen.

  Thirty-Four

  When their eyes met, she let her lips curl into a smile. Hotness held her gaze, then held up one finger, and beckoned, as though she would do what he told her to.

  Well, he could think that. For now . . .

  She leaned her bike up against a lamppost, then started walking toward him, letting her hips sway. She could feel him watching her as she realized two things: One, she had absolutely no idea who this guy was, and two, his name was a serious understatement.

  Hotness wasn’t simply hot. He was smoldering. He was tall, easily six foot three, and strong-looking. He had huge hands, sparkly eyes, and a sexy mean-looking mouth. There was energy coming off him; she could feel that from fifteen feet away, something pure and raw. He looked like he was in his late teens, or even early twenties.

  This was going to be more fun than she’d thought.

  “So,” Hotness said. His voice was low. “I’ve seen your lips, now let’s get a good look at the rest of you.” He gave her the slow up-and-down, lingering on her bare legs, then her mouth. His eyes were teardrop blue. “I knew lips like that had to be connected to something good. Now, who the hell are you?”

  Lucy started to laugh. “So you don’t know me either?”

  But Hotness wasn’t laughing. “Either?”

  Lucy shrugged. “I just picked your number randomly out of my phone, I don’t even know how I got it.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “You have good timing there, sweetheart. Your message was kind of impossible to resist.”

  He reached into his pocket then and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He placed one between his lips and lit it. The blue smoke curled up. Usually Lucy hated the smell of cigarettes, but in that moment it was completely delicious, harsh and sharp and real.

  And then suddenly Lucy remembered how she’d gotten Hotness’s number: Six weeks ago when Lucy was just a brand-new baby Heartbreaker, her sisters had taken her to a party at Jack and B’s. They’d all been on the steps out front, and Hotness had been smoking, which Lucy remembered because the smoke had made her cough, and she was worried it sounded gross. Liza was sloppy drunk that night. She’d dropped her own phone into the toilet and had demanded Lucy hand hers over. Then she’d fished Hotness’s phone out of his pocket, called Lucy on it, and stored the number, without even asking him. Hotness had just stood there, smoking his cigarette, shaking his head. It was the first time Lucy had ever seen Liza chase a boy, and the only time, apart from the debacle with Beacon, that it hadn’t worked. “He’ll be glad when I call him,” Liza kept slurring, for the rest of the night. “He was just trying to play it coooool.”

  But the next morning Liza had forgotten about him, or at least sobered up enough and decided to pretend to. And Lucy
had forgotten about him as well. Until now.

  “So,” Lucy said. “Now that we’re both here, what are we going to do this afternoon?”

  “Maybe we should buy some lottery tickets,” said Hotness. “Because I can already tell you’re a very lucky girl.”

  “Oh?” Lucy said. She arched her back slightly and looked down at her body as though to imply it was a product of her luck. Then smirked slightly. “To what specific aspect of my luck are you referring?”

  “To your very lucky timing,” he said. And he took a step forward. “Because if you’d sent that video an hour from now, you’d have missed me completely. I’d already be gone.” He pointed through the window to the back of the car. There was a big black duffel bag on the seat.

  “Heading on a vacation?”

  “More like I’m leaving.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Hotness twisted his lips into a smirk. “If you really want to know, I broke a heart.”

  “Naughty boy,” Lucy said. “Whose?”

  Hotness looked kind of proud. “My girlfriend’s. We were living together. So now it’s time to go.”

  “And where are you headed?”

  Hotness shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “L.A. maybe? Austin? Miami? Seattle? Mexico? The future is wide-open.”

  Lucy closed her eyes. She tried to imagine herself in all of those other places. And suddenly she realized something—she could go if she wanted. She could leave forever. No one could stop her.

  “And you’re going by yourself?”

  “That was the plan,” he said.

  “That’s too bad,” said Lucy. “I think we could have had some”—she raised her eyebrows—“fun together.”

  “Well . . . ,” he said slowly. “I could probably be convinced to take a hitchhiker with me. Know anyone who might be up for an adventure?”

  Lucy paused. She was floating far away. She wondered what she was going to do. What’s Lucy doing now? she thought, like she was some other person. The surge of power she’d felt when she drank the violets was flickering. If it went out, she’d be plunged into darkness.

  And just like that, the decision was made.

  “Well, when do we leave?” Lucy said.

  Hotness’s face spread into a hesitant smile, like he wasn’t quite sure what was happening. “Seriously? Aren’t you scared, going off on your own with a guy you don’t even know?”

  “What do I have to be scared of?” She felt the world shift under her feet. “I’m magic.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Hotness. He was fully grinning now. “How’s that?”

  “I break boys’ hearts,” she said. “And I use their tears to perform magic.” She could say anything; she could do anything. There were no rules at all anymore. “I am powerful beyond anything you could ever imagine.”

  “Is that right?” Hotness wasn’t smiling quite as wide anymore. “So what are you, like a witch or something?”

  “Not exactly,” Lucy said. Her voice was smooth and low. “Then again, not exactly not.”

  “Well, not-exactly-witch woman . . .” Hotness blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth, then tossed his cigarette onto the pavement. “Are you going to cast a spell on me?” He started to lean in.

  “Maybe I already have.”

  He moved in closer. She felt his breath on her face. She closed her eyes for a single split second. A face flashed in her mind. This—right here, right now, this kiss with this guy—was not what she wanted. It was so, so far from anything she ever had wanted.

  She pushed Hotness away. His eyes popped open.

  “Actually . . . ,” she said. Her voice was shaking now. She was very cold. Something was happening. Inside her some part of her was trying to get out. “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

  Hotness laughed. “Well, of course it isn’t a good idea, but why the hell would that stop us from doing it?”

  “You need to leave, leave now before I make a terrible choice worse than I’ve already done.”

  He snorted. “You’re a freak, you know that?” Hotness gave her a last look, a final up-and-down. “Too bad. You hot ones are always insane.”

  He got into his car. His tires screeched as he drove away.

  Lucy looked around her—at the empty parking lot, the sky, the sun, his cigarette butt on the asphalt, still curling up smoke. She felt the violets buzzing inside her. What the hell was she doing?

  She was floating through space, tethered to nothing. She was going to float away. She could feel it happening. She’d be lost forever. She needed something or someone to bring her back.

  Tristan. She pictured his sweet face, his squinty blue eyes, the way he looked when he said good-bye.

  She could call him and ask him to play her a song on his harmonica, the way he always used to when she was upset. He would bring her home. She reached for her phone. She scrolled to his number. She was about to dial.

  She stopped, finger frozen in the air.

  Tristan had said he couldn’t be friends with her right now. And she had to respect that. He deserved at least that much. But it wasn’t just that.

  All along she’d been looking for someone else to make it okay, to make her okay, Alex, Tristan, the Heartbreakers. Only in that moment, she finally understood something: If she needed a song to save her, she could make her own.

  Thirty-Five

  Art Cavanaugh, Jesse Quartermaine, Sebastian Clark.” As she unpacked each vial, Lucy whispered the name printed on the side. “Mark Colby, Mark Rutherford, Mark Durante.” One by one she laid them out in front of her. “Hector Dean, Zachary Hynde, Ben Gordon.” She kept going until her backpack was empty and there were 103 vials on her bed—103 boys who’d had their hearts needlessly broken.

  Lucy wondered where each of them was now. Who had let go and moved on? Who was still waiting for a phone call that would never come?

  She pinched a vial between her fingers. Andres Pink. “Thank you,” she whispered, “and I hope I can help.” She unscrewed the top and upended the vial over her measuring cup. A single drop dribbled out. She put the empty vial aside and reached for the next one, and the next one. She did this with each vial, whispering the same thing each time, until they were all empty and there was a little pond of tears at the bottom of the glass.

  She held up the cup and tipped the tears into the base of the mold. Then she closed her eyes. She concentrated on channeling the energy up from the center of the earth, out through her hands as she squeezed that cold smooth stone. She took a breath and felt a flood of relief as the power from the enchanted violets left her body.

  It meant the blade was ready.

  And then, only then, did she allow herself to finally really face what she was about to do: She was going to stab herself in the heart.

  The thought made her sick with a fear so deep even her Heartbreaker heart could feel it. But there was no other choice; there was no other option. That Lucy knew for sure.

  Because it wasn’t just about her anymore. No. It was about everyone she’d come across for the entire rest of her life, and the ripples she would spread.

  If she didn’t do what she needed to do, her Heartbreaker heart would just get harder and harder. And no matter what vows she might make now—to only use her magic for good, to never hurt anyone on purpose—it was useless to pretend she was in a position to make promises. The Lucy who made these vows wouldn’t exist as soon as one of her sisters broke another heart. She couldn’t trust herself not to change her mind. And then what? She would stop caring about the state of anyone else’s heart. She would spread pain wherever she went and convince herself it was okay. And there were too many people like that already. The world did not need any more.

  Lucy walked down the stairs quietly in the dark. She went into the backyard and laid the amethyst out on a rock. Then she lifted a large heavy stone and brought it down, smashing the purple casing to pieces, revealing what was underneath. She took a breath. There right in front of her, shimmer
ing and swirling, was a blade made of tears. Lucy touched the tip with her finger and watched a bead of blood rise up like a jewel. It was ready, it was time. And she could not lose her nerve.

  She held the blade in two fists, then pointed it toward the smooth skin of her breastbone.

  She gave herself a countdown.

  Five.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  But at the last second Lucy froze. If she really wanted to make things right, she couldn’t do this. Not yet. There was still one more thing she needed to do.

  Thirty-Six

  There was a tangle of drunk people on the steps. Someone tried to give Lucy a plastic cup. Someone else tried to grab her hand and get her to dance. Lucy barely even saw them. She pushed past into the party.

  “Hey, Lucicle,” a voice said. There was Jack. He had his arm around a girl who looked like a female version of him. “I heard you weren’t coming out tonight.”

  “I’m on a mission,” Lucy said. She tried to smile. “Have you seen my friends?”

  He pointed toward the back of the house. “Follow the trail of brokenhearted boys,” he said with a grin. But really he had no idea how right he was.

  Lucy made her way forward, through a small group playing a game that involved an empty fish tank and a bunch of bouncy balls, some girls singing karaoke, and a girl giving a guy a buzz cut with her eyes closed.

  Lucy walked out the back door, and there were Olivia, Liza, and Gil sitting at a little table, with no one else around. For a moment she stopped and just looked at them, the three of them so luminous out there in the night. It felt like years since she’d first seen them, since this had all begun. She had a sudden urge to turn and run to her blade and never look back. But she closed her eyes and reminded herself of all those boys out there in the world whose hearts would one day be crushed by a Heartbreaker. She thought of Eleanor’s sad eyes. She thought of twelve-year-old Olivia and her happy hopeful face. Lucy forced her feet forward.