Jessa grinned. The ABC game. The point of the game was to make a conversation that took you as far into the alphabet as possible using each letter of the alphabet to start the next sentence.
“Do you think you guys could not play this stupid game?” Lizzie spoke up, her eyes never leaving the book in her lap.
“Even though you think it’s stupid,” Blake called out, “the rest of us are bored and this helps!”
“Forget it,” Lizzie countered.
“God only knows,” continued Mr. Campbell, “that there’s no such thing as boredom, only boring people.”
A few more whistles as Tyler high-fived Mr. Campbell. Blake turned, bowed, and said, “Honestly, touché, Campbell.”
“I didn’t mean it personally, of course.” Mr. Campbell’s eyes sparkled.
“Just about me as a person is all,” Blake shot back.
“What are they doing?” Madison, flipping through a Vogue, squinted out from her seat a few rows ahead of Jessa.
“Some drama thing,” Cheyla said, sniffing, her face buried in her BlackBerry, her thumbs whirling. Jessa had never seen anyone text as fast as Cheyla.
“They’re doing the alphabet,” Jamal said, then called out. “Klondike bars are my personal favorite, not hot dogs!”
Williams Peak cheered, and Jamal’s face broke into a bright smile.
They narrowly avoided the dreaded X as the bus pulled to a stop in a small parking lot in the town of Bologna, where they would eat lunch before heading the rest of the way to Venice. Everyone stood, stretched, pressed fingertips to the bus windows, pulled backpacks from the overhead storage.
The energy of the alphabet game dwindled, and the whole bus seemed to sag a bit, everyone looking tired, like they were starting to feel the trip in their bones. Jessa felt like her body’s seams were pulling slightly, splitting tiny threads around her joints, the skin around her eyes dry and tight. She sniffed, hoping she wasn’t getting a cold. Tipping one of the vitamin packs her mom sent with her into a water bottle, she watched the now-yellow liquid fizz and shift, then switched off her iPod, cutting off the strains of “Sun and Moon” from Miss Saigon in mid-wail.
Francesca clapped her hands at the front of the bus. “Today is National Picnic Day, Easter Monday, so Bologna’s market will be closed. But we have almost two hours here. Meet your teachers outside.” She went down the steps and off the bus. Francesca seemed agitated this morning, robotic, and Jessa could hear strain in the clipped edges of her voice.
Jessa pulled her bag over her shoulder, slipped on a pair of sunglasses, and made her way down the bus aisle. She tucked Carissa’s Reason #7 into her pocket. She hadn’t opened it last night, Ms. Jackson’s warning ringing in her ears as she fell asleep.
“What are you drinking? Pee?” Tyler waited for her outside the bus.
“Yeah. I’m drinking pee. It’s vitamins.”
“It looks like pee.” Tyler headed with her toward the tree where the other students from their group were waiting. “Are you hungry?”
“Sure.”
Dylan Thomas fell into step beside him. “What…?”
“It’s vitamins,” Jessa told him, tucking the bottle into her bag. “And your group is over there.”
“OK, grumpy.” He didn’t make a move to join them.
A gorgeous Italian woman passed in front of them. She wore a tight white dress with huge black sunglasses and pin-thin heels that click-click-clicked on the cobblestone. Her dark hair gleamed. “Wow.” Dylan Thomas let out a whistle. “My Bologna has a first name. It’s F-I-N-E fine.”
Tyler followed his stare, jaw literally dropping.
Jessa rolled her eyes. “You are both revolting.”
“I’m just admiring all the beauty Italy has to offer.” Dylan Thomas finally tore his eyes away as the woman disappeared around a corner.
“Yeah, well, be careful not to slip in your drool.”
The Williams Peak group gathered in the shade of a tree. Jessa studied her friends as they stood, waiting in the dappled light. Mr. Campbell counted heads. Then counted again. “Are we…?”
“Permission to come aboard, Captain,” Dylan Thomas clarified. “It’s like an IQ suck over there.” He motioned to where his group still stood by the bus.
Mr. Campbell had that eating sour soup look he got when he was trying not to laugh. “Go check in with Bob. He needs to know you’re jumping ship.”
Dylan Thomas gave a little salute. Jessa watched him stroll over to where Cruella’s husband and Quiet Guy were chatting near the bus. Jessa had been right with her initial history teacher impression. Mr. Cruella taught, as Dylan Thomas said, “the world’s most boring world history class.” He said he would rather rub sand under his eyelids than listen to one of his lectures on the First World War. The other chaperone wasn’t so bad, though. Quiet Guy taught art, kept to himself. Dylan Thomas took clay for his visual art so he’d never actually had Quiet Guy as a teacher, but he seemed nice enough. At least he didn’t offend people and ask a zillion stupid questions.
“OK, one hour, you guys, and then we’ll meet back at this tree.” Ms. Jackson waved them off.
Jessa noticed most of the other group heading straight for the McDonald’s. She followed Tyler and Dylan Thomas toward one of the little side streets, winding their way around a crowd of parked Vespas.
All she wanted was cheese, bread, and a small table in some shade.
***
Zero for three.
Somehow, they’d ended up at a tiny café table in a blinding spill of suddenly too-hot sunlight. For National Picnic Day, the café was sure busy. Shouldn’t more people be picnicking? Dylan Thomas nabbed one of the two tables left, then begged Jessa to hold down the fort while he and Tyler went in search of bathrooms.
Jessa didn’t even have time to blink before a couple sat at the other empty table next to her. It took her a second to realize it was Cruella and Bob, the world’s most boring world history teacher. At first, she couldn’t see Cruella under a ridiculous hat that made her look like the man with the yellow hat in the Curious George books her sister used to make her read endlessly. Fidgeting in her seat, Jessa wondered three things simultaneously. One: who would buy a hat like that? Two: who would pack it all the way to Italy? Three: would the woman be snatching any monkeys out of their natural African habitat and then passing them off as pesky but well-intentioned pets?
Cruella noticed her staring. “Well, hello.” She slapped her husband’s bare arm to get his attention. Rubbing it, he nodded in Jessa’s direction. “That’s the girl who threw the drink,” Cruella hissed.
“Yes, yes, I know.” He smiled, almost apologetically, though he could just be squinting into all that sun.
“Hi.” Jessa scanned the café for her friends, sweat dripping down her back.
“You’re a fidgety little thing aren’t you?” Cruella snapped her fingers at the waiter walking past her who pretended not to notice, holding his black tray like a shield.
Jessa stopped fidgeting.
Bob scanned the menu. “Why is everything here so expensive? What they charge for a Coke? Criminal.”
“So did he deserve it?” Cruella flipped the menu onto the stone table. “That boy.”
“Not sure anyone deserves an orange soda in their face.” Bob’s eyes never left the menu. His voice had a way of dipping under the air, as if he could make it inaudible at a moment’s notice.
Jessa licked her dry lips, saw Tyler starting back toward them, a look of alarm crossing his face when he saw the couple at the next table. Jessa stood up. “No. He did.”
“Well, good for you.” Cruella pursed her lips, then went back to studying the menu.
Spotting Dylan Thomas, Jessa jumped to her feet, hooked Tyler by the sleeve, and led them both out of the café.
***
Jessa found her shade, under the tree they had first gathered by with the group. She studied the slip of white paper in her lap. With Reason #7, Carissa had written only one w
ord:
Blank
No reason with this one. And no instruction.
Tyler bit off a chunk of the cheese they had bought at a small market.
“Gross,” Jessa told him. “At least break it off.”
“It doesn’t break.” He studied Carissa’s page. “She probably wants you to do one of your own.”
“I figured.” Jessa took her pen out of her backpack. She crossed out “Blank” and wrote:
What we deserved
“What are you writing?” Dylan Thomas chewed a piece of baguette and sipped from his soda.
“My reason is: I didn’t deserve this. And I’m writing a list for my instruction.” Jessa made a line down the center of the paper, then titled each column.
What I deserved
What Sean deserved
A breeze skittered across them and it ruffled the paper a bit. She held her face up to it for a minute, let it soak her skin. Around them, the sun stippled the ground through the trees, the tiny diamonds of light shifting and changing.
She noticed their bus waiting for them in the lot across the way, the driver leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. Francesca sat in the first seat. Jessa could see her through the window talking on her phone, gesturing wildly.
Under her column she wrote:
honesty
time
a key to Frodo
Sunday mornings
friendship
love
your soccer jersey to sleep in
answers!
Under Sean’s column she wrote:
love
dreams
my locker combination
attention
friendship
gas money for Frodo
She hesitated for a moment, remembering what she’d told him at the Palazzo Pitti, that he didn’t get to miss her, then wrote:
to miss me
She stood up.
“Where are you going?” Tyler bit off another hunk of cheese.
“I’m giving him the list.”
***
Jessa lugged her bags up the narrow stairs of the hotel. She pushed open the door of her room and crossed the small space to the window. They were staying a bit outside of Venice, across from a beach and a wide blue stretch of the Adriatic Sea. Jessa took a deep breath of sea air. It felt good to be out of a city.
Before third grade, Jessa’s parents moved them out of San Francisco and into the small foothill town of Williams Peak. Jessa sometimes missed the buzz of the city streets, the whirl of lives. As a child, she would often stare out at the street of their first floor window at the passing shoes. All those shoes hurrying by, year after year. Her mother would bake cookies in the small kitchen behind her, slipping chips into Jessa’s waiting mouth. But she wouldn’t take her eyes off the shoes: red heels, sneakers, flip-flops, glossy black business shoes.
In Williams Peak, they bought two acres, rescued a puppy named Taco from the local shelter, trimmed their apple trees. Jessa made forts out of twisting manzanita bushes and helped her dad string twinkle lights from their outdoor gazebo each spring. But she always felt straddled between those two worlds, that hurried city life and the taffy-stretched days of her life in Williams Peak. Something about Italy cinched those worlds together inside her like the strings of a purse. Her breath came more easily here, her senses more into focus as if even the colors here were more defined, the world suddenly drawn straight and right.
“Hey, Jessa.” Hillary stood in the doorway behind her. “Guess I’m your roomie for this stretch.” She wheeled in a green bag behind her. “Can I have this one?” She motioned toward the bed closest to the door.
“Sure.” Jessa turned and hefted her own bag onto her bed, the soft mattress giving slightly. Hillary flopped onto the bed with her iPod and closed her eyes. She must have sensed Jessa staring because she opened an eye. Jessa never understood that one-eye instinct. It actually seemed harder to open one and not the other.
“What’s on your mind, Jess?”
Jessa shrugged, kicked her shoes onto the ceramic tile, and sat cross-legged on the bed. “Nothing.”
“Liar.” Hillary sat up, pulling her knees into her chest, tossing her iPod aside on the bed. “Spill it.”
Hillary had one of those big-sister things going for her even if she was actually the youngest of four, the only girl. The roles she got were always the best friend, the comic relief, or the old man whenever they needed an old man. She’d been Polonius in Hamlet, the mother in Brighton Beach Memoirs, the janitor in The Breakfast Club, a role that seemed larger and more important because Hillary played it that way.
It had been Hillary’s words at the salon that had stuck to Jessa like gum on her shoe, that she’d been trying for the past day to scrape off against the stone streets of Italy. She told Hillary that—not the gum part. That would be weird. Just the part about her words, how they’d hurt her.
“You said I brought this on myself.”
“I said maybe you brought this on yourself.”
Jessa failed to see the difference. “What did you mean by that?”
Hillary ran her fingers through her short, blonde hair. “Look, Jessa.” The way she said her name, the breathy patience of it, annoyed Jessa. That big-sister thing had its drawbacks. Jessa made a mental note never to talk to Maisy like that. Finally, Hillary said, “Look, Sean’s not a jerk.”
“I think he’s a jerk.”
“Right. OK. But he’s not. Not empirically.” Hillary and her SAT words and her whole I-just-found-out-I’m-going-to-Cal-next-year superiority. Jessa was starting to wish she could just sleep in the hall. No more roommates. “Look, he’s not going to end up one of those guys who beats his wife and hangs out at Lit Lantern after work instead of going home to his three kids.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Hil, if I think there are a few more levels of jerk above that particular scenario.”
“You’re a busy girl, Jessa. Your drama stuff, your honors stuff, your sports stuff, your choir stuff.” Hillary stretched her arms above her and yawned. “A bunch of us have always wondered how you even had time for a boyfriend, you know?”
No, she did not know. What did that mean? A bunch of them wondered? And who was Hillary to judge anyway? She could medal at the Olympics in over-achieving. Jessa’s stomach turned, like when she ate one finger dip too much of Tyler’s magic cookie dough, the one with the M&Ms, the marshmallows, and the gummy bears.
“Don’t get mad.” Hillary watched her closely, her liquid eyes filled with what seemed like genuine concern. “I say more power to you, Jess. I think you’re fantastic. You’re a girl who’s going places. You’ve got a future ahead of you. I get that. I just think Sean got tired of always being last on your things-to-do list. No offense.”
Jessa frowned. Hillary dropped back again on the bed, her iPod spinning, closing her eyes, and for a tiny, delicious moment, Jessa imagined tossing her and the whole bed out the window.
#8: something real
In honor of National Picnic Day, Ms. Jackson suggested dinner on the beach that night, although Jessa wondered if it was just a sly way for Ms. Jackson to get a break from the other group. Francesca found blankets for them to use and managed to have their whole meal packed up into baskets that they carried across the busy road to the beach.
Jessa sat on the cold sand, watching water that churned like melted pewter. Storm clouds gathered. The game of Frisbee playing out in front of her at the water’s edge was turning rapidly into contact Frisbee as Tim and Tyler dove at the same time, colliding into one another. Of course, to boys, this collision was something like gossiping. They seemed energized by it. Sean snatched a high toss from Mr. Campbell out of the air, whirled, and soon the Frisbee was out against the sky again, a spinning red saucer.
So athletic. The whole length of Sean’s body leaned into his throw, then unwound from it, his eyes searching out where it landed, skittering into the water. He still hadn’t said anything to Jessa about the li
st she’d handed him that morning outside the bus, his hair dipping into his eyes as he took the folded note.
Natalie had stayed back at the hotel, claiming a migraine. Probably a reaction to the implants. Only even now as she thought it, Jessa felt a tiny stab of guilt. Natalie had seemed really pale on the bus, sullen. Still, it was nice to have a break from having to watch her maul Sean. Sitting here on the beach, Jessa got to imagine the trip through the eyes of what might have been—her boyfriend playing on the sand with his buddies, her journal and a half-read novel nestled at her feet. No pesky boobs in the way, obstructing everyone’s view.
But Carissa’s envelope reminded her. No easy lean into the evening here, no pretending for a minute that the boy with the long, lean body in his jeans and hooded sweatshirt would throw one more toss, head over, and kiss the top of her head.
As if nothing had happened.
As if he hadn’t shredded her heart with the thin, metal blades of his lies.
Reason #8: I HAD seen something real. He was showing signs well before the costume barn.
Carissa had seen it coming. Or so she said. Had seen him with Natalie once before, tucked into the shadows of the little alley out behind the gym after an assembly two Fridays before. Had seen him run his hand over the curve of her forearm, wondered if she’d seen something real—or imagined.
She apologized in the letter.
I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you about Sean and the Boob Job—I just wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure I’d really seen anything. AND I had just had a conversation with him after class the day before I saw them where he said how there was just “something real” about you. How much he loved that about you. How “real” you two were.
Why had Carissa been talking to Sean about her anyway?
Something real. Her new instruction. Do something real. Whatever that meant.
Instructions for a Broken Heart Page 9
