Instructions for a Broken Heart

by Kim Culbertson

  Imagined Sean watching them too.

  Thing was, Carissa forgot to mention the end of the Narcissus myth. From the place Narcissus died grew a beautiful flower. Somehow, that seemed like the most important part of the story.

  #10: the night les mis

  came to dinner

  They weren’t sitting together at dinner. Jessa noticed that right away. Sean was sitting with Devon and Tim, his face blank, and Natalie sat between Christina and Maya. Jessa wanted to talk with Tyler, ask if he knew anything, but no one was really paying any attention to the others.

  They were too busy noticing the new boy. New man? He was somewhere between a boy and a man. A sudden addition to the group sitting across from Francesca in the hotel restaurant. The whole group just stared, and for good reason. He was beautiful, like some sort of Michelangelo statue free of its marble casing, emerging into flesh and blood and bone, into dark curls and liquid eyes and a jaw chiseled and smooth. Come to think of it, that jaw could still be made of marble.

  He drank a glass of dark wine and leaned in to hear what Francesca was saying to him. After several minutes, he shrugged and pushed his chair back away from the table as if he’d had enough of her words. He picked up the frog from where it leaned against her seat, spun it like a baton.

  Francesca snatched it away, settled it on her own lap, her eyes narrowed.

  Jade was the first to talk. “Yum.” She motioned toward the new arrival. “Let me be more specific: Yum!”

  Erika actually giggled, something Jessa had never heard her do. “I know, seriously,” she breathed as if Jade had said something profound.

  Dylan Thomas swallowed half his water in one gulp. “Not really my type.”

  Commotion at the door. Cruella bustled in, her face red. “Here you are!” She plunked her huge blood-colored bag onto a nearby table and pushed hair out of her face.

  “We were looking everywhere for you.” She glared down at Francesca, then noticed the brought-to-life David sitting across from her. “Who are you?”

  He pulled out a pair of aviator glasses and squinted at them, pulled his shirt up to clean them, exposing a smooth, tan stomach. Jessa was pretty sure she heard several intakes of breath at that tan stomach. Then he examined Cruella, his syrup eyes clearly asking her back, “wouldn’t you like to know?” before he slipped on the glasses.

  When he didn’t answer, Cruella rolled her eyes, moved her bag to another table near the back and plunked herself down in a chair. She snapped her fingers at the waiter. “A vodka tonic?” She caught the look from Ms. Jackson. “Oh, please. If I’m going to be marooned in this water-locked hellhole of a city, I’m going to have a vodka tonic.” She pulled off a designer flat and started massaging her insole.

  Jessa took a long drink of mineral water, feeling a bit like she was at sea, like the time her dad took her sailing out past the Golden Gate Bridge with all those inky, rolling waves. Something about Venice, about all the water and no cars, all that sky, made her wobbly at her center. On the ride back to the hotel, she’d flipped through her journal, read over what she’d written.

  She definitely didn’t like what she saw.

  In her even black lettering emerged a girl who didn’t really know who she was, why she chose things, what she even wanted. She was a laundry list of activities and triumphs, of awards and summer programs and parts in plays and job experience. She was a college application with all the little categories neatly filled in. Academics—check. Volunteer service—check. Extracurriculars—check. Clear career goal. All-fields-covered Jessa. But there was no category for just Jessa, nowhere to check that box off the list.

  And what made Jessa, Jessa? Something about Venice had made her ask that question, made her, for the first time in her life, fail to answer it, fail to check the right box. Just because she could do all those things, be all those different Jessa girls, should she? Did all those little pieces of Jessa add up to one complete girl?

  Tyler pushed Carissa’s envelope across the table at her. “I think Carissa’s running out of ideas.”

  The next reason read:

  The Night Les Mis Came to Dinner.

  Carissa’s birthday last November. They told Dylan Thomas about the night Les Mis came to dinner. They had reserved the back room at Village Pizza, where they could get Carissa her favorite pepperoni and pineapple pizza and they had decided to do a dinner theater for her, a reenactment of Les Misérables. Only they didn’t have a Javert. Sean wouldn’t play Javert because he wanted to play Jean Valjean, which was totally Sean, because he always had to be the hero.

  “The hero is the only character big enough for his ego,” Tyler said, winding pasta around his fork.

  “He was a good Valjean,” Jessa mumbled.

  Tyler snorted. Jessa was pretty sure, somewhere, an ocean away, that Carissa would be rolling her eyes.

  “Who did you play?” Dylan Thomas asked Jessa.

  “Éponine.”

  “Of course.” Dylan Thomas reached over and stabbed the mushrooms she had pushed aside on her plate.

  “This is why the other group doesn’t like you.” Jessa pulled her plate toward her, not that she would have eaten those mushrooms in a million years, even if they were the last food on the earth and someone had coated them in dark chocolate.

  “Why didn’t you play Javert?” Dylan Thomas asked Tyler.

  “Because I played, like, every other guy character in the whole play.” He leaned back to let the waiter set a bowl of steaming soup in front of him.

  “What does this have to do with anything anyway?” Dylan Thomas motioned toward the envelope. “Why is she bringing it up? Sounds to me like these envelopes are becoming a little more about Carissa than they’re supposed to be.”

  Something snagged in Jessa’s chest. Had she been feeling that too, staring down at Carissa’s insistent handwriting? “It’s not a reason.”

  “It is a reason.” Tyler swirled his soup with his spoon. “Carissa is addressing the very relevant fact that Sean is a self-absorbed jackass.” He glanced at Dylan Thomas. “Judge’s ruling?”

  Elbow on the table, Dylan Thomas propped his chin on his hand. “I’ll allow it.”

  “Good man!” His eyes were back on Jessa, who was rolling hers at Dylan Thomas. Tyler continued, “The guy who ended up playing Javert got the chicken pox the night before the birthday party.”

  “Does anyone even still get the chicken pox?” Dylan Thomas interrupted.

  “Not the point.” Tyler jabbed his spoon in the air. The point was, he told him, that Jessa stepped in at the last minute and played both parts, that she sang “Stars” in the back room of Village Pizza and other diners came in from other rooms to hear her. She made people cry, it was so beautiful. She made everyone cry.

  “It’s a really beautiful song,” Jessa whispered.

  “I always thought it was kind of judgmental,” Dylan Thomas said, wiping some stray soup from his face with a napkin. “With all its ‘you’re wrong and I’m right and I have God on my side blah blah blah and when I find you you’ll be sorry…’”

  “Point is,” Tyler said, interrupting, holding up the envelope. “She wants you to sing it somewhere where Sean can hear it. To remind him.”

  Jessa peered at the paper. “Where does it say that?”

  Tyler paused. “It says.”

  Jessa checked again, turning the note over. “No, it doesn’t. It says to sing it. It doesn’t say anything about singing it where Sean can hear it. It doesn’t say anything about reminding him.” She held out the note for inspection.

  Sing the song again, Jessa!

  A grand symbol of why you’re you and he’s, well, him.

  “Oh.” Tyler fiddled nervously with his napkin, pretended to look for something under the table, like suddenly there was some sort of government summit going on right under the table that Tyler really needed to witness.

  “Tyler?”

  “What?”

  “What exactly did Carissa say to
you about this reason? Since you two have obviously been on the Batphone about this.”

  He emerged from under the table. “Nothing.”

  “Just tell me.” A dull ache started creeping behind her eyes.

  Instead of answering, he pushed back his chair, mumbled something about getting his water bottle—apparently it had been his water bottle he’d been conveniently rummaging for under the table—and left the room.

  ***

  Jessa followed Tyler out to the hotel courtyard. “Why are you acting all weird?” The courtyard echoed with the sound of her voice, muffled only slightly by the drone of the ocean across the street.

  Tyler turned around, his features shadowed in the feathery evening light. “I’m not.”

  “Tyler, you’re obviously talking to her or you wouldn’t have known that thing about reminding Sean.” He was lucky she’d adopted a no-throwing policy because she seriously wanted to hurl something at him right now. Maybe that water bottle he’d gone looking for? He didn’t answer her. “You know what? Forget it. If you’re going to lie to me, you can just climb into one of those envelopes right there alongside of Sean. I’m used to it!” Jessa hurried out of the courtyard toward the beach, the sea air stinging her eyes.

  “Jessa!” Tyler’s footsteps behind her. “Wait…would you just wait!”

  Looking both ways, she crossed the street toward the little strip of beach where they’d eaten the night before.

  “I got my own envelopes!” he shouted behind her.

  Jessa stopped but didn’t turn around. In a minute, he was beside her, the buckles on his jacket ringing like tiny bells in her ears as he removed the stapled index cards from his inside jacket pocket.

  “Well, not envelopes exactly.”

  He showed her the cover.

  INSTRUCTION MANUAL TO MISS JESSA GARDNER

  For Tyler, in case of emergencies

  and cases where Jessa will be prone to act like, well, Jessa

  “Instruction manual?” Jessa’s head started to spin. “What? Like I’m a lawn mower? Some predictable machine?” She reached out to take the papers from Tyler.

  He pulled them back. “She really, really didn’t want you to see this.”

  “Too late.” She reached for the manual.

  Again, he pulled it away.

  Head throbbing, Jessa felt the wind come off the water cold and quickly, and she shivered. “This isn’t some reality TV show you guys get to have a good laugh at. I’m your friend.”

  Tyler was shaking his head before she’d finished talking. “No one’s laughing. We’re trying to help. And Carissa’s not here. She just wants to help. We’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “Well, guess what? This isn’t about Carissa for once. Or you. I don’t need you stage managing my life, OK? Both of you are officially off Jessa watch!” Without waiting for his reply, she turned and ran toward the silver strip of beach.

  ***

  A soccer tournament had come to Venice, or at least to the outskirts of Venice. To their hotel, to be precise. And the place crawled with boys in soccer jerseys—cute boys in soccer jerseys.

  Later that night, Jessa found one of those boys dangling from a sheet out her hotel window.

  She had walked the beach until about an hour before curfew, her mind spinning with Carissa’s manual. Staring out at the churning water, she had tried to focus on what Carissa must have meant, that she must be thinking in some sort of twisted-Carissa-universe sort of way that she was helping or that she and Tyler were being funny, but Jessa’s whole body kept settling on a feeling that was some sort of mashed up version of anger and bruised feelings and betrayal, that clenched-up gut feeling she got before she puked. She wanted to trust her friend, wanted to appreciate her trying to help, but mostly she just wanted everyone to leave her alone. She could find her own way without notes, without some stupid instruction manual, without Tyler’s manic, stage-managery control issues.

  Staring out at the sharp, churning water, she’d never felt so far from the worn quilt on her bed, the feel of her favorite blue mug in her hand, the view of pine trees out her own window.

  Exhausted and cold, she’d headed back to the hotel to take a shower in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall. She had expected to come back from the shower, crawl into bed, and sleep. Instead, she found her bed jammed up against the window, its sheet and the one from Hillary’s bed tied together, wound around a bedpost, and draped outside—and their room was on the fourth floor of the hotel.

  “What are you doing?” She stared down at the dangling boy, puzzled, as he tried to gain some footing on the slick side of the building.

  “Hillary,” he managed in a thick Italian accent, clearly holding on for dear life, his feet gaining and losing ground.

  Jessa pulled him into the room.

  He tumbled in, gasping for breath, “Grazie.”

  They blinked at each other.

  “Wait here,” Jessa told him.

  ***

  Hillary had been waylaid at the roadblock that Mr. Campbell and Ms. Jackson had set up at the entrance to their floor sometime after Jessa had come home to take a shower. Hillary stood under the arched doorway, arms crossed, glaring at the floor. Ms. Jackson waved a bottle of some sort of clear alcohol at her. “What were you thinking, Hillary? I mean, really—what were you thinking?”

  Jessa noticed the pile of alcohol bottles at their feet, some empty, some still capped. For a horrified moment, she thought they were all Hillary’s until she realized that her teachers must have been collecting them from all the students as they came back in for curfew. Ms. Jackson added Hillary’s to the pile with a dangerous clink of glass.

  “Um, Hil?” Jessa started when Hillary looked up and caught her eye. “Um…”

  “Oh, damn it! Bruno!” She raced toward their room.

  “Bruno?” Ms. Jackson followed her down the hall.

  Mr. Campbell raised weary eyebrows at Jessa. “Who’s Bruno?”

  “We didn’t have much chance for introduction.”

  He groaned, sinking down against the hotel doorway. “This is going to be a long night.”

  ***

  Jessa peeked at her watch—4 a.m. So much for going to bed early. She leaned on the wide windowsill, the curtains billowing behind her, the sea air cool on her face. No one had really slept yet. After hours of tears, of doors slamming, of urgent texting, Mr. Campbell and Ms. Jackson had almost everyone accounted for. Then came all the phone calls home to parents. Jessa was pretty sure they were all being sent home—Mr. Campbell had suggested as much when she passed him in the hallway.

  Somewhere around two, she and Hillary had finally untangled the sheets, scooted the beds back into their rightful positions, and Hillary had gone to sleep wrapped in Bruno’s jacket.

  An hour ago, she’d heard Ms. Jackson’s door across the hall click shut after rounding up the last of their group—L. E., who’d been taking a moonlit run on the beach with a tall midfielder from one of southern Italy’s premier teams. At least that’s what she told Ms. Jackson (and her mom via cell phone) in heated whispers in the hall. Hillary and Jessa had pressed down on the floor to listen through the crack under the door. Jessa believed L. E. She’d seen them come in through the courtyard, walking hand in hand, two sets of running shoes side by side. She probably was taking a run, knowing L. E., and it seemed like Ms. Jackson believed her too. But she’d been chasing them into their rooms all night, sorting through lies and truth like mismatched socks.

  Technically, most of the group had broken the behavior contracts they’d signed before leaving. Still, Jessa didn’t believe her teachers would send the whole bunch of them home. Besides, the other group was in more trouble than Williams Peak. Two of them had even come back to the hotel in Italian police cars. Those two were definitely going home. Quiet Guy had stood in the courtyard nodding along to whatever the officer told him, his jacket over a pair of red plaid pajamas. When Jessa passed Bob-the-world’s-most-boring-world
-history-teacher in the hall, she thought he looked so worried he might throw up, called to the lobby in his robe, face green as an alien, Francesca hurrying behind him, spouting Italian into her phone. For once, there was no sign of the frog.

  Jessa watched most of it unfold from her window. Madison, Cheyla, and a few other girls laughed their high hyena laughs with a pack of soccer players, passing a glinting bottle back and forth. Kevin and Rachel wandered through the courtyard, his arm around her shoulders. When had that happened? Even Cruella wobbled in alone around 3 a.m. on spaghetti legs, her sunglasses still perched atop her head, looking thin, worn.

  Now it was quiet. A hush had settled over the hotel, a cloak of sleep around its stone shoulders. Jessa could see the ocean from her window, a dark, moving thing. The sky was choked with stars, the storm clouds having passed through. She thought of Carissa’s instructions. She had told Tyler to make Jessa sing where Sean could hear her. A ribbon of anger fluttered through her stomach, then settled like a feather. As much as she hated to admit it, Carissa did know what made her feel better. And singing always made her feel better, replenished something in her, her own little electrolyte tonic. Even if she didn’t need him to hear, she needed to sing.

  Quietly, like mist, she started to sing “Stars.”

  There was movement behind her. Hillary pulled the curtain aside and leaned next to her against the window. “Pretty,” she murmured, rubbing her eyes.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t really sleep.”

  Jessa started from the beginning, Javert’s song about chasing his fugitive, the despair of his failure, because really, it was less about judgment and more about being a slave to his own dogma that sent Javert leaping to his death. Her voice picked up, sent the song up and out, and she heard a movement at the window of the next room. Suddenly, Jade’s voice joined hers, floating out, then falling into the courtyard below. Jade shifted the words around, catching onto the underbelly of Jessa’s voice, adding dimension to her song.