Sirina turns toward me. “Maybe we can do a little write-up on Kipper? He’s pretty good. What do you think?”
“Remember, we’re supposed to be keeping it as boring as possible,” I joke. Sort of.
“Well, he’s got talent. Plus, he’s nice. Maybe he deserves a little attention. Remember when Amelia didn’t have money on her lunch card?”
He’d been standing right behind Amelia in the lunch line when she tried to run her card and it came up with a zero balance. And he’d just given the cashier his card and told her to put Amelia’s lunch on it.
“I remember,” I say.
“And in P.E., when he has to choose a team, he always picks the kids no one wants—and he picks them first. Anyway, why not, you know? It’s kind of nice when you can use the power of the press for good.”
Kailey finishes up, and we have to clap for her, too, and Mr. Greer calls up the third soloist. Colby Ahrens steps up front and positions his flute, but the sound that we hear is something that even the worst flautist in the world couldn’t achieve.
EEEEEEE. The mechanical scream of an alarm, not too far away.
CRAAAAASSH!
The window shatters with a sound so sharp and ringing that it overwhelms his senses, leaving him feeling like his ears have been stuffed with cotton. Before the last of the glass finishes its tink to the ground, Thad tucks his bleeding fist farther up into the sleeve of his sweatshirt and rams his left hip against the emergency exit leading out to the school’s back field. An alarm cries out, and for a second he freezes. Go, GO, he tells himself, and falls forward into a run. He flies right past the new rubber track at a pace that he’s sure would make any P.E. teacher proud.
Anger is like a high-octane fuel. He feels his heart pounding too high in his chest, his breath too full in his lungs, but he can’t stop now. Nick Wainwright, you smear. Thad runs even faster.
He reaches the woods, his path now full of rocks and trees. He trips on a root, and finally feels the pain in his right hand. For the first time, he looks back. The school is in the distance; there’s no one chasing him. His scalp feels itchy with relief, and his breath slows some as he trots along the winding path.
A pebble jabs through the sole of his shoe, and he hops around, letting out a few pent-up words—words he can’t get away with at home, words that feel good coming out. But then a thought makes him suck the words back in—practically gasp them into his lungs. He’s left something behind. He’d been so angry, he must have run right past it. It’s still back there, somewhere. Hopefully not too close to the window he just punched out.
His skateboard.
Crap. Crap. Holy, holy crap.
It was an old board, but it had belonged to his father. He can’t go back for it without getting caught. It’s just another thing he has to say good-bye to.
me duele
te duele
le duele
nos duele
les duele
The EEEEEEE noise continues. Mr. Greer starts shooing everyone toward the exits.
“But it’s not a fire alarm,” Colby says, still standing at center stage with his flute. “That’s just one of those emergency exit alarms. And anyway, there’s no smoke.”
“Colby, you’ll have your chance,” Mr. Greer says. “But an alarm’s an alarm. Let’s move, boys and girls!”
We file out of the cafetorium with the band. When we get outside, Sirina huddles close. “Look.” She shows me a shot of Mr. Greer over-reacting to the alarm. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open. His arms are outstretched.
“That’s funny,” I say.
“Oh, come on, Mabry—then laugh, okay? Laugh!”
“I would, if such a thing were possible.”
The alarm continues. Everyone’s getting restless. A piccolo player starts chasing around a horn blower, and some shrieking begins, and a tall bassoonist bumps into Sirina, nearly knocking the camera out of her hands.
“Watch it!” I yell, momentarily happy to have an outlet for my terrible mood.
Sirina looks at me. “Hey, we have everything we need. And school’s already over. Let’s just go.”
It seems like anywhere I go, I feel restrained, confined, a prisoner to heartbreak. “Fine, let’s go home.”
“No, not home. Let’s go for ice cream.”
“I told you ice cream’s not going to help this time.”
“Mabry, listen to me. You need to get over him. If you can’t do it for you, do it for me. Your best friend. Who knows what’s best for you.”
“Well, I love him, Sirina. It’s real. What am I supposed to do?” I ask her.
“How long have we been friends, Mabry?”
“Forever,” I say. Well, close enough—it was really the third day of kindergarten. On that day, she fell down while standing in the playground line. Her eyes rolled back into her head and her body started shaking and twitching. Some people screamed, some people laughed, but I knelt down right next to her and held her hand. It wasn’t because I was so great or anything. It was because I was struck with guilt: she had been right behind me in the lunch line earlier. There were two Jell-Os left—one red, one green—and I was definitely eyeing the red. Cherry! Yum! But then I saw it—a fly landing right on the red Jell-O’s whipped-cream center! I had looked around and realized I was the only witness. So despite wanting the red, I chose the green, secretly leaving her with only the contaminated option.
And there, on the asphalt, in front of my own eyes, she was dying, and I was sure it was my fault. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I whispered to her, under all the commotion. Soon after, she was diagnosed with epilepsy, which she now takes medicine for. It took me three years to confess to her the true story behind my playground compassion—but by that time, we’d already decided we were fated to be friends forever.
“Yes,” she says now, with all the authority of Someone Definitely In Charge. “We’ve been friends a long time, a very long time. So now you’re going to trust me when I tell you what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to close your mouth and stop talking about Nick Wainwright”—she says his name like it’s a dirty word—“and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Until we get to the mall. Dairy Queen awaits.”
“But I—”
“Uh-uh!” She wags her finger. “No talking. Just walking.”
I try to remind her that it’s useless, but she puts her fingers on my lips and clamps them together.
“Now, the next time that mouth opens,” she says to me, “it needs to be for the sole purpose of shoveling in a Blizzard.”
“You can talk now, Mabry,” Sirina is saying, now that I don’t want to. We’re at the mall, having our therapeutic Blizzards, and, for this moment—this fleeting moment—I’m free from the torment of heartbreak.
She continues. “Now, this is love. In food form.”
Oh, Sirina, I think, if only love were that simple.
I finish off my Blizzard. I not only finish it, but scrape the bottom with my spoon, and lick the edges. And when the ice cream rush just abandons me, like Nicolás has, I sink back down into the same old Heartbreak Hole.
“What do you want to do now?” she asks.
“I want to figure out why every guy I’ve ever gone out with has broken up with me. I mean, I’ve been dumped nineteen times since fourth grade.”
Sirina is excavating the creases in her Blizzard cup with the corner of her spoon, apparently looking for any remaining pieces of Heath bar that could possibly be hiding.
Finally, she says, “Maybe it’s because sometimes it seems like all you care about is guys, and loooove.” She drops her jaw and actually rolls her eyes when she says The Word. “It’s a little weird.”
You know how most of the time when your best friend uses this word to describe you, you’re doing something like mixing Sprite with root beer and pretending it tastes great and she’s laughing and using the word weird in a way that makes you feel special? Funny? Appreciated? Unique?
This is not one of th
ose times. No. When she uses it this way, I start to feel embarrassed.
“Am I that bad?”
Her eyebrows lift apologetically, and she tries to smile and make it better. The fact that she says nothing more gives me all the information I need. And then some.
“Fine. I’ll swear them off. No more boys.” Then I have an idea. “Would you kill me if I asked my mom to send me to an all-girls school?”
“With a knife,” she says.
“I’m serious,” I say. And I’m starting to think I might be. I picture Hermana Ampuero, the nun on La Vida Rica. Well, she wasn’t always a nun. In fact, she used to have a boyfriend—okay, three—before she was a nun, when she was just a gorgeous stiletto-wearing nurse. But after she accidentally put her cheating lover into a coma by breaking a bottle on his head, she moved to Suelo and took her oath.
“Well, I just don’t think that would work. You’d be plotting your escape in two days.”
She’s probably right.
“You know what I think?” she continues. “I think you should stop idolizing Cristina. I mean, look at Mariela! She’s the one breaking hearts, not sitting there, like Cristina, sobbing all the time, like some sort of victim.”
“Victim!?” I say. “Cristina is, like, the lady hero of love.”
“Then why is she so miserable all the time?”
“Because—” I start to answer, but realize I don’t have anything good to say. “She’s, like, you know…” But my voice sort of trails off.
“At least Mariela doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself.”
“Well, that’s probably because she never gets her heart broken in the first place,” I say. “She’s the one doing the damage.”
“Even better,” Sirina says. “See? You could learn a lot from her.”
For few minutes, I think about it. How would a Cristina, such a devoted woman, suddenly become a heartbreaker like Mariela? I mean, it just might not be possible. It was a good idea, Sirina, I imagine myself telling her, with a mournful look in my eye. But you just can’t make a fruit out of a flower. That’s what I’ll say. A fruit out of a flower. I like that.
Knock. Knock. “Are you okay in there?” Aunt Nora asks from the other side of the bathroom door.
“I’m fine!” Thad’s words come out tight, a little angry. How the heck can such tiny little bubbles cause so much pain? He’s glad at least the cuts have stopped bleeding.
Aunt Nora doesn’t seem convinced. “I heard a swear word. It was loud enough to hear in the kitchen, you know.”
Thad lets go of the breath he’s been holding in. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.” He turns on the cold water and sticks his hand back under the faucet for a moment of relief.
“Thad?” she says. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he calls out. “I’m just cleaning up some cuts on my hand.”
“What kind of cuts?”
“Scrapes, I mean.” That sounds better. He’s gotten plenty of those lately.
The knob twists, but he’s locked the door. He doesn’t want her to see his hand and freak. Make him go to the doctor. Or worse, the hospital. If he never meets another doctor in his life, he’ll be happy. He’s sick of the blues and greens of hospital scrubs. The tubes everywhere. The beeps and buzzes of the machines. The patterns on the wallpaper that will be etched into his retinas forever. And he’s pretty sure he’ll feel a gagging in his throat at the sight of arranged flowers for at least a de-cade. Why do people send them anyway? They just sit there, demanding attention, and then they die. How does that make anyone feel better?
“I’ll be out in a minute!” he says.
“What are you cleaning the scrapes with?” she asks.
“The stuff in the brown bottle.”
“Hydrogen peroxide?”
He glances at the label. “Yes, Aunt Nora.”
“And make sure you wrap your hand with gauze.”
“I know. It’s not like I haven’t gotten scraped up before.” Which is true. Since he started skating two months ago, he’s gone through two rolls of gauze. But these are much more than scrapes. These are wounds.
“How bad is it?”
“Don’t worry!” Thad says. He knows that telling Aunt Nora not to worry is like telling a bear not to crap in the woods. “It’s not bad, okay? I’m still alive.”
She hums out an exhale.
Thad looks in the mirror and scowls at himself. It’s not Aunt Nora he’s mad at. It’s Nick Wainwright.
The floor creaks as Aunt Nora walks back into the kitchen. He waits until he can hear the clang of the dishes, and slips into his room.
There’s sixty dollars in the drawer of his desk. He’ll have to say good-bye to that today, too. He gets the cash out of his father’s old wallet and slips it into his pocket.
He passes Aunt Nora in the kitchen on his way out. She’s standing at the stove, stirring a pot of soup.
“Hey, wait,” she says, trying to get a good look at his hand. “That’s a lot of gauze.” Her eyebrows lift.
“Well, I’m not Tony Hawk or anything just yet. It’ll heal.” He gives her his half smile and changes the subject. “How’s Mom?”
“She’s okay. She’s sleeping.”
“Good,” he says. “I’ll sit with her when I get back.”
“You just got home. Where are you going now?”
“To the mall.”
“Again? You were just there a couple days ago!”
He shrugs. “I like it there. And anyway, I have to get something.”
She looks at the clock. “Well, I have to leave for work in two hours.”
“I’ll be back by then, okay?”
She studies him. “What do you need to get?”
“A new skateboard.”
“You broke the skateboard, too?” She looks at him with new worry. “How bad was this fall?”
“I didn’t break it,” he tells her. “I lost it.”
“You lost it? Where?”
Thad cracks a smile. “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be lost.”
Aunt Nora sighs, a slight look of surrender on her face. “I have to go shopping on Sunday. Maybe I can pick one up for you then.”
“Noooo.” He shakes his head. “Sunday’s a long way off. And anyway, you can’t just ‘pick up’ a skateboard, Aunt Nora. That’s like me ‘picking up’”—he waves his arm toward her—“I don’t know, shoes or something for you.”
She smiles and looks down at the thick black shoes she wears to her cashier job at the Buy-It-All.
“Thirteen years without a skateboard, and now you can’t live a couple days without one?”
Thad shrugs. “I need to get around.”
Her eyebrows lift. “So, did you get around to making it up to school today?”
He forgot that he’d told her he was thinking of going up there after classes let out. An unofficial tour, just to check it out without any teachers or principals or counselors breathing down his neck.
But he definitely doesn’t want to tell her about what happened when he did.
“I told you what I did. I fell off my board and I scraped up my hand.” He tries to turn it into a joke. “Those are my accomplishments for the day.”
She sighs and turns back around to stir the soup. Over her shoulder, she says, “I think it’ll be good for you to be back in school.”
It was actually something he had been kind of looking forward to. Kind of. Not being the new-old kid, and all the questions that come with that, but just pretending to have a normal life, if that was even possible anymore. But after today, he’s fine with staying right here. Here and the mall, places that feel safe. That’s good enough. His world definitely doesn’t need any Nick Wainwright in it.
“I am in school,” he tells her. “Mine just requires a username and password.”
“But I thought you were ready to enroll here at Frost. Your old friends would probably love to—”
“Well, I’m not.” He surprises himself w
ith his sharp tone. “Sorry,” he says, immediately regretting it. These surges of anger take some getting used to.
She gives him a soft look. He’s been getting a lot of those soft looks lately. He’s not sure he deserves them. In fact, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t, especially after today.
“Anyway, you and Mom still need me around during the day,” Thad says. He knows she can’t argue too much with that. “I better go now, so I can get back in time for you to leave.”
She relents. “Okay, fine. But be quick. And maybe you should get some of those gloves while you’re at it.”
“Gloves?”
“I’m sure they make them. To protect your hands when you skateboard?”
Skate. But he doesn’t bother correcting her this time. “Good idea,” he says.
Actually, it’s a great idea. Covering his hands means covering the key evidence that he broke the window. Brilliant idea.
He’s almost to the door when she adds, “Oh, you know? Maybe someone’ll return the skateboard to you.”
Sure, Aunt Nora. Some nice man in a blue uniform. Driving a fun car with a siren.
He hopes he never sees it again in his life, because with his luck, it’s already in the evidence room at the police station. He doesn’t know what kind of crime he committed by punching out a window on school property, but he’s pretty sure it’s something punishable by law.
But he just shrugs casually and says, “Yeah, maybe.”
“Don’t lose hope,” she tells him. “It’s definitely possible, you know. It was your dad’s, from when he was about your age.”
“I know.”
“Well, our mother marked everything with our names when we were young. Even our socks.” She laughs. “So who knows? It may make its way back to you.”
And then a memory jars him. In his mind, the memory is like an old photo, stuffed in the back of an album. A little blurry, a little off-center. And in that memory, on the underbelly of the skateboard, just behind the back wheels, in faded black marker, are the tiny blocklike letters: Bell.
How to Break a Heart Page 3
