Instruction: Do something real—something that makes you feel like you’ve done something you can actually see, something you can touch.
She saw Dylan Thomas walking alone along the shore, his pants rolled to his knees. His hands were in his pockets and his head was tilted out toward the water, a stray ribbon of sun falling across his face. Dylan Thomas always seemed a little lost in his mind, a little pensive. Jessa started to gather her things. Maybe he’d like some company.
It started to rain.
The drops hit her face slow at first, then faster and faster. The Frisbee game disbanded. Mr. Campbell started folding up blankets. Hillary and Christina tucked unfinished food back into baskets. Jade picked up a few windblown pieces of trash. Ms. Jackson whistled, and like puppies, they followed her back across the empty street, now dark and spotted with rain.
***
The disco throbbed with techno music, mostly hits from the early nineties, tinny and hollow in the way that kind of techno pop could give the brain its own pulse. Tyler handed her a lukewarm soda, his head bobbing. They surveyed the room. The kids from the other group were decked out in full glamour gear. They gyrated and writhed on the dance floor, their bodies sending up a steamy haze in the smoky room. Most of the girls wore tight jeans or short skirts and halter tops, revealing bare midriffs, and heels.
Jessa didn’t even own a pair of heels. She had been planning to buy a pair for junior prom, though now she probably wouldn’t even go. She would stay home and have a Bourne marathon with Tyler, or maybe Freaks and Geeks. Make Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and 7-Up shakes. She studied her jeans, her black ballet flats, the gray long-sleeve shirt that had seemed cute standing in front of the mirror in the hotel room. She must look like a Gap ad for the nerd girl—the one who might let down her hair and be sexy—only her hair was already down and she wasn’t sexy, not even close.
“I’m going to dance,” Tyler told her, handing her his drink. He disappeared into the fray, reappearing minutes later, stuck to some girl from the other group whose name was something that rhymed with Sam—Cam? She was cute, like a little imp. White-blonde hair. Black pants, a tank that said “Rock Me” in tiny rhinestones. Sexy. Go Tyler!
Jessa pushed through the doors out into the street, her senses slipping into recovery mode, her eyes squeezing the smoke from them, her ears ringing. It took her a minute to register Mr. Campbell standing there, looking out into the dark of the narrow street. She saw him before he saw her and she almost dipped back inside. Almost.
Then he noticed her. “Oh, hey, Jessa. Having a good time?”
“No.”
He laughed, tucking his hands in his pockets. She noticed how far he stayed from her, the distance he put there. “Not your scene?”
“I hate these kinds of places.” She didn’t really hate them, that was too strong a word. But they weren’t for her. Something about dances, parties, clubs, always made her feel like an imposter, like she had been taking voice lessons when all the other kids her age met for their learn-how-to-act-at-parties classes. They graduated, got their membership cards. She got piano lessons.
“At least there’s no smoking in there. The only thing I’ve never liked about Europe. All the cigarettes.” He watched a couple zip by on a Vespa and moved closer in toward the building. Good instinct. Jessa had learned pretty quickly that Italians will drive on the sidewalk. For no apparent reason. Tyler was almost roadkill in Rome. Or sidewalk kill.
“You’ve been to other parts of Europe?”
He nodded. “France. Switzerland. Germany. I actually taught summer school in Switzerland in college. For two months.”
“I love it here.” Jessa surprised herself, tossing around all her hate and love that evening. Words she didn’t even actually like to use very often. Too extreme.
He started to say something, then seemed to rethink it. Turned instead again to the street. The rain had stopped, but there were tiny pools in the grooves and gullies of the cobblestone. They reflected the lights from the disco and the other buildings all around.
“I’m sorry about what happened, Mr. Campbell.” And she was. She flushed, though, remembering how soft his mouth had been.
It was dark but she saw his face flush too.
“You’re hurting. People do stupid things when they’re hurting.” He cleared his throat but didn’t say anymore.
“What stupid things have you done?” The rain started again, just a light mist. It coated her face like dust. “You know what—you don’t have to tell me that.” She listened to the hush the rain brought, the way it seemed to use up the air, pack it with cotton. What was he thinking about, her teacher? Standing there in the rain.
“You’re easy to talk to,” he said, so quietly Jessa was surprised she had heard it, as if it had been brought to her on rain fingers, pressed word by word into her ears. She didn’t speak, barely breathed. “And I wish I could talk to you, but it’s sort of…I just don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”
“I’m not going to jump you or something.” Jessa let out a strained laugh, tried to get him to meet her gaze. “I know about the whole teacher-student boundary thing. I mean, contrary to past displays of inappropriateness.”
He ran his hands through his hair, still avoiding her eyes. “Yeah, I know.”
“OK,” she said brightly, “so, I guess I probably shouldn’t ask you for a letter of recommendation, huh?” She broke into a formal voice, “Jessa Gardner’s a great kid, very studious, hardworking. But don’t let her near the new chemistry professor!”
Mr. Campbell’s face broke into a smile. “I will, of course, write you a letter of recommendation. And I’ll save the warnings for the last paragraph.”
Jessa felt the ice thaw. “Thanks.”
After a moment, he said, “You know, I’ve only seen her once since.”
“Katie?”
“Yeah. At Whole Foods. Buying milk. She was wearing my old Sharks jersey from college. The one she always borrowed to wear to yoga.”
Jessa remembered her list: Sean’s soccer jersey he never let her borrow. She cleared her throat. “Did she see you?” Jessa imagined little Katie in that huge jersey, buying milk. Maybe for a new boyfriend who drank lattes and liked to eat Applejacks in the morning.
“No.” For a moment, it seemed he might turn away, step off the curb into the street, but then he took a step toward her. “Thing is, I’ve only seen her that one time and it was the worst. And here you are, seeing him twenty-four seven. I don’t know, Jessa. I think you’re holding up pretty well.”
Jessa shrugged. “It’s like that kind of therapy where you overcome your fear of spiders by being stuck in a room crawling with spiders. It’s kind of like that.”
That fractured smile again and the silence of the wet, Italian night.
Finally, Jessa said, “Sean keeps wearing a shirt I bought him for his birthday. That blue one he wears all the time here. That was from me.”
Mr. Campbell sighed. “They shouldn’t be able to do that, huh? There should be some sort of clothing law against it. The Laundry Act of 2011. No more wearing of clothes bought or given by the one you betrayed.”
“I’d sign it.”
Carissa’s note had said, “Something Real. Do something real.” Something she could touch. Her mind was spinning off into the future. Tonight, she’d take that shirt off his back. Her own Laundry Act of 2011. Throw it into the sea.
That would be something real, right?
She caught Mr. Campbell’s eye and smiled what she hoped was a smile filled with all that she was filled with: understanding, hope, doubt. But really, maybe, it didn’t say anything at all.
Maybe this was as real as it got.
#9: it’s just
a reflection
(aka mr. narcissus)
“Has anyone seen my blue shirt?” Sean asked the whole group. They stood in Piazza San Marco, the central square of Venice, stealing some much needed time away from the other group after a morning of to
uring Basilica di San Marco. Jessa averted her eyes, studying a huge pack of pigeons that seemed to be winning the fight with the tourists for domination of the square.
Ms. Jackson squinted at him, confused. “Actually, Sean, I was wondering if anyone had any questions about the next couple of hours.”
“Oh.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, kicking his foot slightly at a pigeon who was getting a bit too friendly. “I thought you meant in general. Any questions in general.” He surveyed the group. No one had seen his shirt.
Well, no one admitted anything. Jessa remembered the way it had just bobbed there in the dark water, then washed up onto the shore, a wet mess, like a clump of seaweed. She had taken it easily. Gone into his room, pulled it from the chair he had slung it over, walked across the road, and thrown it into the night sea. Totally anticlimactic, not real at all. Actually, she had just felt stupid, standing there with the wind in her face, with the clump of blue shirt washing up on the shore. She had waited, willing a shark or something to snatch it in its jaws and swim it furiously away. No shark—just a waterlogged clump under a cloudy night sky.
Maybe she needed to be officially done throwing things—drinks, shirts. It wasn’t really working out for her.
Mr. Campbell pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head, snuck a quick look at Jessa, then returned to some notes on his clipboard. The light kept shifting behind a cloud, the world alternating stripes of light and dark. “The key thing to remember, you guys, is that we want you to just write without editing yourselves. Venice is a place of so much water, and water brings reflection. It brings clarity. This has been a busy trip so far, and we just want you to have some time to process it all.”
“You didn’t tell us we’d be getting writing assignments.” Devon pulled his eyes away from the mime entertaining a group of tourists sitting at one of the café tables in the plaza. The tables were eight deep at least. Jessa itched to find somewhere at bit more remote, the tables not so stuffed together. And maybe with not so many pigeons.
Mr. Campbell frowned. “You know what, Dev? Think of it as a time to jot down some ideas for sketches.”
“Bonus.” He whispered something to Tim, who smiled and nodded vigorously.
“We have our phones.” Ms. Jackson held hers up as if they had somehow forgotten what a phone was. “Call us if you need to.”
They splintered. Jessa noticed that for the first time Sean moved off by himself, away from Natalie, headed back toward St. Mark’s, a small notebook tucked beneath one arm.
***
As Jessa wrote in her journal, a cool rush of air hit her in the face, lifting the strands of hair from her forehead. She sat at a small café table just off the Grand Canal, the sound of gondolas shushing by, the lapping of water all around. She checked her watch. She still had an hour before the group would meet up again.
She sipped from her hot chocolate, long grown cold in the little ceramic mug. She watched a gondolier in his black-and-white striped shirt maneuver through the canal with an older couple snapping pictures below him in their seats. “Glorified bus drivers,” Dylan Thomas had called them that morning before their Basilica tour, “with a better outfit.” Jessa had wanted to push Dylan Thomas overboard into the green water. She had liked her gondolier.
Closing her eyes now, she just listened. Her ears had tuned themselves to Venice, no cars anywhere—just people moving by feet or water. Peaceful. She had started writing immediately, channeling the rush of this place onto the lined paper beneath her pen, pressing its movement, its green water, its sea wind onto the white of paper with her black pen. Black and white, like the gondoliers.
If only everything could be black and white, right and wrong, yes and no. Then Sean could just be wrong, and she wouldn’t have to think about how she missed the way he said her name, the way he used to laugh at her jokes, how she wished she could just kiss him again.
She didn’t want to think about what Hillary had said about how maybe she brought it on herself. Her busy life, no real room for Sean. Where had it gone off track? One minute, a quick kiss before he drove Frodo into a pale twilight, and the next day, the red dress. She wanted to rip open the rest of Carissa’s envelopes and find her answers before she was supposed to. But she didn’t. She followed rules. Stupidly. Blindly?
This morning’s reason:
Reason #9: It’s Just a Reflection (aka Mr. Narcissus)
The myth of Narcissus. Ring any bells? It’s why I call him Mr. Narcissus. The lovely youth is so captured by the image of himself in the pool that he DIES there. Hey, dummy! It’s just a reflection! But no, he DIES because he is so in love with himself. I’m surprised Sean hasn’t died yet—a tragic by-product of his love affair with himself.
Carissa had plastered a square of mirrored paper onto the page and beneath that:
Instruction (I know you hate this kind of stuff but…!):
Look at yourself. Do you like what you see?
Start by writing a list of everything you do.
What does it say about who you are?
Don’t freak out. It’s just a reflection. You won’t die.
Now Mr. Campbell and Ms. Jackson had them writing a whole reflection exercise, writing about what you feel, your dreams, your hopes—taking time to reflect.
It was a conspiracy.
Jessa opened her eyes. Reflection. Like the mirrored paper, Jessa’s reflection was rippled, distorted. She tried to write about what she was feeling, what she thought all of this travel brought out of her, but mostly she could just describe it all, the crumbled bottoms of the water-lined buildings, the hot chocolate grown cold, the bright metal gray of the sky here. Black and white. And gray.
As much as she wanted to, Jessa didn’t always like gray. She liked things to make sense. Have reasons, closure. It’s why she loved musicals, well, at least the older ones. She knew stuff was darker now, but she liked her musicals hopeful. In her favorites, even with all the conflict, all the pain, she was always left with hope at the end. Always left reaching for something. She could count on that. That hopeful future. Hillary’s words scratched at her brain, batted the word future like a cat with a ball of yarn, rolling it to the front of her mind.
Carissa wanted a list? Fine.
Quickly, Jessa wrote out a list of all her activities including hard classes. Twenty-one things. Could that be right? She counted again. Twenty-one things: Three sports, drama, choir, three AP classes, piano, voice, honors English, four clubs, two volunteer assignments, Little Pals tutoring, baby-sitting, and two other little jobs. That didn’t even include friends, daughter, sister, girlfriend, or reading for fun, which she almost never did, which used to be her favorite thing.
She tapped her pencil against the paper, wondering what she could give up, but she couldn’t bring herself to draw a line through any of them. She needed them all. She needed them all to get into the right college. She needed them for her future.
When she was seven, a friend of her father, another lawyer, had told her: “You’ll make a great lawyer, just like your dad.” Had that been it, then? She’d just fastened her future to those words, heading out across her childhood in the direction of Lawyerland. Easy answer, no gray. Did she even want to be a lawyer, or go to the right university? She’d been set on it for so long, was it possible that, somewhere along the line, she’d lost sight of what it was exactly she was working for? Would she get to the big bronze door of that land and wonder why she’d been traveling so far only to find herself not even wanting to knock? Wanting instead to settle in the patch of grass by the door, watching clouds move across a darkening sky, gray clouds?
Her iPod switched to a new track, her ears filling with “The Song of the Jellicles” from Cats. She thought of Alonzo, the tomcat—black and white. Her mom had taken her to see Cats when she was ten. Sitting there in the dark, she had watched all the cats emerging onto the stage, the Alonzo cat so confident, taking the stage by storm. All puffed up with feline confidence and grace. Each cat ha
d a place, each cat a purpose. Even sad, messed-up Grizabella got to go away at the end, whirled away to a better life.
Jessa clicked ahead to “The Naming of Cats.” She had always loved this poem best of all, had it plastered inside her English binder, highlighting the line:
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter when I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
Three different names.
Nothing black and white about that. She wrote the line into her journal under her activity list. Then wrote, “How many names do I have? How many people do I try to be?” Jessa the choir girl. Jessa the drama girl. Jessa the track girl. Jessa the smart girl. Jessa with the super résumé. Where did she make time for a boyfriend? She drew a line through Jessa the girlfriend. Was it possible to have too many names?
She picked up her cup, staring out over the Venice landscape, her head pounding. Her teachers had mentioned going to Harry’s Bar, and Jessa was tempted to seek them out, sit where Hemingway had sat, soak in the history of writers and artists who sat within its walls. At least she wouldn’t have to think about this stupid writing assignment anymore or future lawyer Jessa or the little mirrored paper in Carissa’s note. Too much gray.
Her eyes snagged on a couple on a nearby bridge. A blonde ponytail dangled down a narrow back, with strong arms around her. It took her a moment to realize that the ponytail belonged to Natalie, and another moment to realize those arms were not Sean’s.
She saw Jamal’s face when he pulled away, smiled down at Natalie, grabbed her hand, and pulled her across the bridge and out of sight. Jessa placed the cup slowly back onto the little table, her hand shaking slightly. She closed her journal.
Right answer: Tell Sean. Wrong answer: Sean had this coming.
Jessa’s stomach treaded somewhere in between, into that spinning gray pool of uncertainty she seemed to be swimming deeper and deeper into each day. She folded Carissa’s note back into its envelope and stuffed it inside her journal next to the list of activities, the list of names. She studied the place on the bridge where Natalie and Jamal had been kissing.
Instructions for a Broken Heart Page 10
