He stayed there next to her, leaned his body against the edge of bridge. Jessa liked the way the stone curved with her body, as if the designers of the bridge knew how many people would lay against it, stare out at the water, wonder where it had all gone wrong.
“The light is different here.” She glanced sideways at her teacher.
“Not hard to see how Michelangelo got his palette.” His eyes searched the water, and the hills glazed with twilight.
“I’m sorry about all that. I actually thought it might make me feel better.” Jessa wiped at her eyes. Seriously, how much more would she cry about it? Ridiculous. She tried to laugh, but it came out a hiccup. “No more drinks. I promise. Are you guys going to send me home?”
“What? No. Of course not. You need to apologize, but no, we’re not going to send you home.” His hands found the pockets of his jacket. “Besides, it’s not exactly the best landscape for a broken heart.”
The city spread out around Brunelleschi’s burgundy dome standing majestically over the brick-colored rooftops. Jessa turned at the clop-clop-clop of a horse and carriage along the cobbled streets near the bridge. A man and woman clung to each other, eyes wide with each other. Mr. Campbell wiggled his eyebrows up and down at her. She burst out laughing. “Seriously, right?” he said. “You don’t stand a chance here. It’s like we’re extras on a set for a musical called Love Me!”
She watched a bird glide out over the water. “Well, I’m happy to play Rosalind, the scorned lover.”
“Are you?” His smile vanished.
Jessa sighed. “Sure. I mean, it’s a more interesting part right?”
“Maybe in theory.” He pressed his palms into the stone, his fingers arching up with the strain.
“Do you miss her?” she asked.
He let his breath out, sending it over the shifting water. “Very much.”
“Maybe you should throw a drink at her.”
“Not my style.”
She leaned into the stone, welcoming the solid feel of it against her. “That’s what Carissa thought would help me. But it didn’t. Not really.”
He nodded. “Didn’t think so.”
“So what should I do? Why doesn’t this get easier? Each day, I think I’ll wake up and hate him. I’ll be so mad at him that I just won’t care.”
“It hasn’t even been a week, Jess. You need time to grieve.”
“But why? He’s a jerk. He cheated on me. I should just be done. Over him.”
“He’s not a paint color. You don’t just swipe on Sunset Red over the Meadow Green you’ve had for a year and be done with it.” The wind caught Mr. Campbell’s hair, fluttered it, and his hand instinctively smoothed it down. “A friend of mine gave me a quote from John Updike about death, but she meant it more for the death of a relationship. Updike said death is a ‘ceasing of your own brand of magic.’ What’s painful is that what you had together, all your inside jokes and favorite restaurants and that movie you both loved but everyone else hated—that’s gone, and there’s no replacement for it, you never replicate it, never get to have it ever again…” His voice trailed off. He shuffled his feet a little, cleared his throat.
Something dark and shadowed filled Jessa’s belly, made her light, feel like she would float away. Grief. Because there had been a special brand of magic with Sean, their own brand. She wanted to ask Mr. Campbell why he and Katie broke up. Did she cheat? Jessa studied his veiled expression. Had he cried into the night like she had with only the shadows for company? Maybe it didn’t even matter why they broke up, maybe that wasn’t the point. Because you can’t have what’s already gone. You can only grieve for it, walk around with a huge hole in your gut knowing you will never be the same again.
Standing there on the bridge, his body warm next to her, he somehow melted from her teacher to just a guy. Not standing on stage directing them. Just a guy nursing a broken heart like she was. He must know her better than anyone else on this trip, know the deep, hollow shadow of her heart.
“Why do people leave people when nothing’s wrong? It doesn’t make any sense.” She searched Mr. Campbell’s eyes, thought of the way he laughed at their stupid improv games, the way he got there early every day so they’d have somewhere to go before the first bell, how he listened with his whole body when they came to him with their problems. Why had Katie given that up? Why had Sean kissed Natalie?
Finally, he shook his head, his eyes slipping to her face. “I wish I could answer that. Maybe human beings search for what is wrong, pick through what is right until they find the scrap of wrong and then blow it up to life size. It’s all part of this dark nature of ours. Unanswerable questions. Why do we betray someone? Why do we love at all? It’s the mystery of the ages, isn’t it? It’s why we have music and art and theater—it’s all about love, about losing it, finding it, wanting it, betraying it. We love. We cause pain to the ones who love us. It doesn’t get easier—you start playing the game differently maybe. Each time, maybe, you take a tiny piece of your heart and you save it for yourself just in case. So you always have something left.”
“OK, that is like the most horrible thing you could tell me right now.”
Mr. Campbell’s laugh was a bird suddenly released from a cage. “Yeah.” He seemed surprised by his outburst but lighter somehow. “Sorry. But I mean, here we are in Florence—the heart of the Renaissance. All these paintings, all these buildings—there’s so much love and betrayal here. As humans, we haven’t figured much out, have we?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” Jessa studied the great dome, such a feat of engineering, especially at the time it was built. “For how smart humans can be, we’re a remarkably stupid species.”
Mr. Campbell closed his eyes against the cool wind. “But we keep choosing love. Over and over. Across time. You’ll love someone else. Someone who isn’t Sean.”
Jessa closed her eyes too, tried to imagine the ache in her chest gone. “My dad told me that the heart regenerates. Like a lizard that’s lost its tail—it grows back. But I’ve never had to grow mine back before.” Monday night, she had curled her body in on itself, rocking through her tears on their deck, the stars splattered out above her, had cried into her father’s shoulder while her mom made tea and her favorite butter cookies inside, the ones rolled in powdered sugar she usually made only at Christmas. Under that dark sky, her dad had told her it would grow back. He’d promised.
“The first time’s the worst. Your heart doesn’t know, doesn’t have the muscle memory of it.” Mr. Campbell put his hand on her shoulder, held it there, warm and reassuring. “But your dad’s right. It’ll grow back. Some people think it’s stronger in the broken places.” She felt Mr. Campbell’s hand through her thin shirt, its heat spreading through her. His face was a blur of concern.
Before she knew what she was doing, she leaned forward, kissed his mouth. Soft. Warm. For a second, it seemed he kissed her back, then, like ice, he cracked, pulled back, wiping his mouth as if the kiss could be given away to the air. Disintegrated. Untraceable.
“Oh, Jessa. I…” He put actual distance between them, stepped backward a few steps. “I didn’t mean to…”
Her face must have pulled in all the colors of the sunset at once. “Oh my God, Mr. Campbell. I don’t…” Her head whirled, her heart pounding. “I’m sorry. That was my fault. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
He shook his head, his eyes darting about, his face flushed. “No, Jessa. I’m sorry. Damn.” He had made it most of the way off the bridge now, backing up, turning around, a strange choreography of uncertainty, like a fumbling toy soldier who’d lost his way.
She watched him stop abruptly, study her for a moment, then turn and hurry back toward the restaurant, and in that moment, Jessa wondered how many people had thrown themselves off this bridge.
***
“That,” Tyler told her, sitting cross-legged across from her on the bed, “is one hundred percent jacked up.”
“I know.” Jessa dipped
her hand into his gummy bears, chewed a huge wad of them in her mouth. “He was so nice, you know. Totally trying to help me. All philosophical and open.”
“So you kissed him. Good form!”
“Yeah, right? Not crossing any lines there. I’m such a mess. I should give seminars. How to screw up your life in one week or less.” She smoothed out a wrinkle in the quilt on the bed and glanced around the small room. The shower was at least in a bathroom this time. When they got home from the quiet bus ride back to the hotel, she’d stood under the hot spray until it had run cold. Through the bus window, she’d watched the lights blink on across Florence and tried not to notice people whispering, staring in her direction. Mostly, people tried not to gawk at her, the girl who threw an orange soda at her ex-boyfriend. Cruella had even smiled at her a bit, given her a thumbs-up when she’d gotten off the bus. Great.
Jessa began to braid her damp hair, smiling wryly at her friend. Tyler wore black sweats and a T-shirt that said “Genius by Birth, Slacker by Choice.”
“Wow,” Tyler whistled softly. “Even Carissa wouldn’t have told you to kiss your teacher.” He shook his head. “What’s gotten into you? I thought, ‘No way is she going to do that drink thing.’”
Jessa stopped braiding. “I don’t remember showing you that instruction?”
Tyler hesitated. “What? Oh. No. But of all the things so far, it’s the most un-Jessa-like thing to do. It had to be one of your instructions.” He tugged at a loose string on the hem of his sweats.
“Are you talking to Carissa about me? What is she saying?”
“I’m not, actually. You’re doing the instructions. My job was to make sure you’re following them. For the most part.”
Jessa held his gaze for a minute. “I’m doing them.”
He held up his hands. “Don’t get defensive.”
She wrapped a hair band around the end of her braid. “OK, sorry. I’ve just had a really weird day.”
“Speaking of weird.” Tyler held up Carissa’s Reason #5 with a poem taped to it. “A quote from a Dylan Thomas poem?” Tyler started to read the note out loud.
Reason #5: Quicksand—
“The force that drives the water through the rocks/Drives my red blood…The hand that whirls the water in the pool/Stirs the quicksand…”—Dylan Thomas
“The hand that whirls the water in the pool stirs the quicksand.” Sean is your quicksand. You lost yourself in him.
3 Examples:
1. Office Fest. You bailed on me the second he called. You bailed on Casino Night.
“Casino Night?”
Jessa plucked the letter from his hand, scanned the reason. OK, that was true. She had bailed. Jessa and Carissa had this huge crush on Jim from The Office. The American one. They had decided to spend a whole Friday night watching key Jim episodes, especially the one where he first tells Pam he loves her after Casino Night. “Sean called,” she explained to Tyler. “Wanted me to come over. Huge fight with his stepmom or something. And I just left.”
Tyler nodded, but quietly he said, “How many times has Carissa bailed on us for a guy?”
“Number two is not fair at all.” She passed the letter back to Tyler.
2. Santa Cruz!!
“I didn’t go to Santa Cruz because I knew we’d get busted, which she did, and now she’s baby-sitting to pay her parents back instead of here with us in Italy.”
“I don’t think she was ever planning on going to Italy.” Tyler frowned at the letter. “I’m not sure I really get this Dylan Thomas quote?”
“Carissa wanted to talk about quicksand so she probably Googled ‘poems with quicksand’ and got this one.”
Tyler squinted at the quote. “Or maybe she feels like Sean sucked you in.”
Jessa shrugged. “Whatever. Santa Cruz was not about getting lost in Sean. Santa Cruz was Carissa pissed at me because I didn’t want to hop on her little train of bad behavior.”
“At least you were invited.” Tyler set the letter on the bed. “What about number three. His band is lame.”
3. Dracula. You chose his lame-ass band. That SUCKED!
Jessa let out a whoosh of air. “They’re not lame.”
Still, Dracula had been a serious bone of contention between her and Carissa since last summer. Instead of auditioning for the SummerArts! production of Dracula with Carissa, she’d spent any time she wasn’t working that summer holed up in Sean’s garage listening to him, Kevin Jones, and Hunter Parks cover a random mash of old Green Day, Radiohead, and other bands—and rereading all of the Harry Potter books. Carissa spent much of that summer in her Lustra costume, a permanent scowl on her face, even though she’d hooked up with the college guy directing and spent any time they weren’t rehearsing with him at the river. So Jessa didn’t really know what she was so pissed off about.
“I needed to work. Not be an undead sister.” Jessa stretched out across the bed on her belly. “What’s the instruction?”
Instruction: Water is the shifting of the elements, it is always moving and changing. You are water. Be water. Water heals itself.
Tyler handed the paper back to her. “Be water? What—is she Zen now or something?”
“Carissa is whatever she is that day.” She pulled a pillow from behind her onto her lap, leaned into it. A breeze rustled the linen curtains at the window. She welcomed it on her face; it was cool and slightly wet. Outside, clouds gathered in the dark sky, blanketed the moon. Tomorrow, she would spend her last day in Florence, with its stone streets, its wide river, its buildings stuffed so full of art that even after so many hours she hadn’t even started to see it.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Ms. Jackson peeked her head in. “Lights out. Tyler, back to your room now, OK? Where’s Erika?”
“Mine and Blake’s room.” Tyler hopped off the bed. “I’ll get her.”
“Thanks.” Ms. Jackson opened the door a bit wider to let him by. She licked her lips, leaned her head against the doorway. Jessa picked lint from her pajamas.
“Mr. Campbell told me what happened.”
“He’s probably worried I’ll throw a drink in his face tomorrow.” Jessa felt a tear slip down her face, saw it fall on the letter in her lap, blurring two of the words.
Ms. Jackson sat on the bed next to her. “He’s worried about you. So am I.”
“It wasn’t his fault, Ms. Jackson. If you’re wondering. I don’t want to get him in trouble.” She folded the note quietly, concentrating on smoothing each bended edge with a slow pinch of her fingers.
“Well, it’s not good that it happened. But he told me. You’ve told me. There’s nothing else we can do. It would be best if you two weren’t alone together.” Ms. Jackson pushed her glasses on top of her head, rubbed her eyes. “And you really need to start reeling in your behavior.”
The sob started low in Jessa’s gut, rattled around there, pushing and plying at the confines of her body, checking for weak points, for a place to break through. It prickled underneath her eyelids and skin, bubbled to the surface like sulfur.
“Oh, honey…” Ms. Jackson held her, her arms around her, rubbing her back the way her own mother did the night before she left when she had told her, “You don’t have to go. You don’t have to go. You don’t have to go,” in the glow of the small table lamp Jessa had had since she was five, the one shaped like a milkmaid carrying water for her cows.
Jessa melted into her teacher, who smelled of pastries and a little like cut flowers.
Carissa knew. She knew, Jessa thought. This was mostly what her friend meant by the Dylan Thomas quote, not just the stuck-in-quicksand part. She knew Jessa needed to cry as much as she possibly could, to get him out through her tear ducts, until she couldn’t cry anymore. The force that drives the water through the rocks, drives my red blood… But maybe she didn’t know that the tears rolling down her face, water changing her, cleansing her, shifting, were just the start of something else—a river carrying her some
where else. She didn’t fight it, just leaned into her teacher, whose arms around her became the only solid thing in the room; everything else was water. Jessa was her tears—her whole body washing away, washing into nothingness, forever changed, heading somewhere completely unknown.
#6: the chicken
and the eggs: an
easter limerick
Of course, Carissa also had another side to her. It’s why Jessa loved her so much. She could be super intense and deep and dark and then turn around and write something like Reason #6:
There was a stupid boy from our town
Who decided to start messing around
He found that he cared
Not about what was upstairs
But the eggs in the front of her gown.
The bus had let them off at the Palazzo Pitti, a sprawling Renaissance palace. After a quick tour, they had an hour to roam, armed with the boxed lunches Francesca had passed out to them. Jessa, Tyler, and Dylan Thomas wandered through the Boboli Gardens, pointing out statues and funny tourists—what was with the guy in the leg warmers?—until they found themselves at the upper, southern edge of the gardens.
Jessa read the note again, shaking her head, still exhausted after the outpouring last night. She had avoided Ms. Jackson’s gaze at breakfast, could still feel the weight of her arms around her body, a body still partly liquid. But now there was this poem of a different sort. Jessa had to laugh even though the limerick was totally stupid. She handed it to Tyler.
“Frankly, you need no other reason than this.” Tyler gave it back. “He’s a big coward who opted for boobs over brain. Not only is that generic, hers are too big anyway. I mean, that just has to get in the way.”
“Seriously,” Dylan Thomas agreed. “More than a mouthful’s a waste of space.”
“That’s lovely. Charming. Both of you.” Jessa tipped her head toward the sun, watching the bustle of the Easter picnics all around them. The view of the palace and countryside stretched out in front of them. Jessa’s dad always told her a view was as good an education as anything, so they decided to sprawl out and soak up the lazy, Easter Sunday sky, the sounds of laughing families and lilting Italian all around.
Instructions for a Broken Heart Page 7
