He moans. He doesn’t even have the energy for a proper reply, and anyway, he’s sure from the looks of him, it’s not needed.
“Oh, honey.” Her voice is warm. Concerned. Good old Aunt Nora.
He stumbles inside. She places her hand on his forehead. “No temperature, so that’s good. Probably a bad cold,” she says. “Why don’t you go on up to your room and I’ll bring you some soup.”
He’s never had a cold like this.
He manages to ask how his mom is.
“She’s doing better than you, I think.” Aunt Nora gives him a smile, but it’s a weak and worried one. “You look pretty bad. You need some rest.”
Even though he doesn’t feel like he can rest, he goes up to his room and lies down on the bed without even taking off his shoes. He curls over on his side and listens to his own breath. His throat is tight, he realizes. That’s why it hurts.
Aunt Nora brings him some herbal tea. “It might help. It’s that lemon ginger.”
He’ll try anything. He takes a sip. “Thank you,” he says. He’s not sure the tea will make him feel better, but there’s something about her trying that does.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.” And that’s the weird truth. He couldn’t eat a single nacho, not even if it was put in front of him, not even if it was covered in extra cheese.
“When did you start feeling sick?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. And it hits him. It’s only been about thirty-five minutes. Since Mabry Collins yelled at him and then kissed Nick Wainwright right on the lips.
Oh. No. Oh no no no no.
Could this be—?
He doesn’t even want to let the word pop into his head. But it doesn’t seem to need his permission.
Lovesickness?
He heaves again. Aunt Nora scurries out and comes back with a bucket, just in time. He throws up the ginger tea, which still tastes gingery and pleasant, even as it comes out.
But this can’t be that. There’s no way. Just because he has feelings, it doesn’t mean that. Because that kind of love doesn’t actually exist. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. It does not.
In Mabry’s silly little world, love is hearts and flowers and candlelight and that kind of crap. But what does she know? If love is hearts, it is hearts that will never beat again. And sure, maybe love means flowers—mums dying in the windowsill of a hospital room. And maybe it means candlelight—of birthdays never had.
Death. Now that is the ultimate breakup.
Mabry knows nothing about love. Not. A. Thing.
If he’s sick of anything, it’s Mabry. Mabrysickness. Now that’s real.
Later, when his phone buzzes, he picks it up. He can’t sleep anyway. It’s a text. From her. Of course. It would be.
Sorry about tonite. I pooped. We can talk about it tomorrow.
She pooped? And she wants to talk about it tomorrow? Then her other texts come in. She’s trying desperately to cover for her mortifying typo. He feels the ghost of a laugh inside of him. Oh, duuuuude. He would have so much fun with this if he wasn’t done with her.
But he’s so done with her.
THE VINDICATOR
The Official News Blog of Hubert C. Frost Middle School
* * *
Girl’s Entire Life Ruined, Over
While other girls are busy buying dresses and shoes for the famed Cotillion, eighth grader Mabry Collins is slowly dying in her small upstairs bedroom. A recent turn of events, including losing her best friend, has turned her heart into a shriveled black pump—one that isn’t expected to last much longer.
There have been no crowds of well-wishers or get-well-soon cards flowing in through the mail, but Collins says she doesn’t hold that against anyone. “I’ve a had a full life [click for more]
IN OTHER NEWS…
* * *
There Really Is No Other News When You’re Dying
yo pienso
tú piensas
ella piensa
nosotros pensamos
ellos piensan
It’s Sunday night. At dinner, Stephen blathers on about something and my mom responds to all his blather. Then things get quiet suddenly and she says, “Mabry, aren’t you listening?”
It’s not even worth lying about. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Thinking?” Stephen says, getting his joke face on. “What’s that? There’s got to be an app for that.”
My mom just gives him a tight little smile. To me, she says, “I was thinking we could go dress shopping tomorrow. For the Cotillion.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?” My mom’s eyebrows pull together in confusion.
“I’m not going,” I say.
Even though I’m staring into my Brussels sprouts, I feel all their curious looks darting across the table. My mom puts her hand to my forehead. “You okay?”
But I’m not okay. I’m not, I’m not, even though The Former Man of My Dreams asked me to go the Cotillion with him. Even though I got what I thought I wanted.
“She looks tired,” Stephen says, like I’m not at the table.
“She looks ugly,” A-Bag adds.
My mom doesn’t even start berating him. I glance up. She looks too concerned about me. So I just say, “Your imaginary girlfriend is ugly,” to him, and he tells me how lame I am, and then my mom tells us both to be quiet and stop picking on each other, and everything goes back to normal, at least on the surface.
I check my phone. No Thad. No Sirina.
A little part of me is hoping that maybe Thad’s just having a Funyun moment. I mean, it’s possible, right?
Okay, probably not.
Well, Thad can go skate off the edge of the world, for all I care. He can laugh at all my poop typos and THEN go skate off the edge of a cliff. He can laugh at all my typos, IGNORE THEM, and then go skate off of Mount Kilimanjaro. For all I care.
And Sirina. I’m as lonely and miserable as I was when she went away to her epilepsy camp last summer and left me to fend for myself for four full weeks. No, wait. This is worse. There are no miles to blame for our separation. The thought makes me even more lonely and miserable.
Doesn’t she miss me at all? I hold the phone in my hand and stare at it. I will it to ring. Nothing happens, so I intensify my stare and start sending telepathic messages to Sirina. Call me. Call me. Call me. And then, for good measure, I throw in a Call me, please, my tufted-head paper cutter.
The only thing that happens is that I get confirmation that my telepathy skills suck.
No, under the surface, nothing is right in this world.
Later that night, when I’m curled into a ball on my floor, A-Bag passes by my room. He sees me and pauses at my doorway. “Sick again? What is it this time? Cholera? Consumption?”
“Shut up!” I say without thinking. Now I have to soften my words because I’m thirsty. “Sorry. Can you get me a glass of water?”
“What do I look like, Mom?” he says.
He’s just being his usual mean self, but right now I feel so awful that I just start crying. He walks in and flops to the floor next to me. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks, stretching his legs out and using my curled-up body as a footrest.
“I’m sure you could write up a pretty good list,” I mumble.
He gives me an evil laugh. Then he says, “Yeah, but I’d have to be pretty bored to do it. So just tell me.”
“Why do you care all of a sudden?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, it’s just crazy that you’re not going to that dance. You of all people. Even I went to that stupid Cotillion.”
Which is true. And normally it would really get to me, but now, I just don’t care about it. It just all seems so ridiculous.
“Is Sirina going?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not?”
“No.”
He lets out a big sigh. “Oh, man,” he groans. “This is serious, then.”
“Uh.” I give him
a look like he’s crazy. “This is not your problem.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks at me. “Well, it kind of is. I’m your big brother.”
“And?”
“I mean”—he puts the soles of his feet on my back and rocks me back and forth—“if you want to go, I’ll take you.”
“What?” I laugh. I actually laugh.
“Oh, is that funny?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
He thumps my back with the balls of his feet, so that my laughter breaks into staccato.
“But you’re off the hook. I’m not going. I don’t even want to go anymore,” I say, still being bounced around.
Finally, he stands up. “Fine, my work here is done. Glad I could cheer you up. And even gladder you don’t need me to go to that Cartellion with you.”
I crack a smile for him. “Thanks, though,” I call to him as he leaves my room. A few minutes later, he comes back with a full glass of water.
I can hardly believe it. Maybe Earth got a little heavier. Maybe the cosmos is shifting in some way. Maybe some of the stars are being written out of the universal script.
He puts it down on the table next to my bed. And then he pinches my cheek. Hard. “Aw, my little loser sister. She’s so cute! Such a little cockroach!”
Which would normally annoy the crap out of me. But today, it’s just nice to know that in this new, different world, not everything has changed.
yo sé
tú sabes
ella sabe
nosotros sabemos
ellos saben
It’s the night of the Cotillion. And my feet are moving. But not in the way I ever expected, no. Not at all.
Outrageous. This is outrageous.
My feet are doing things without the permission of my brain. They are playing this game where they trade off stepping in front of the other, almost like it’s some sort of race. I keep telling them to stop, but that only seems to make them go faster.
I try bargaining with them—just let me figure out what to say!—but they don’t listen. I don’t really know what’s in it for them. For the first time in my life, I hope they trip on something. An unexpected rise in the sidewalk, a rogue tree root, my own heel, something! I ask them very nicely to slow down; they rudely do not. I remind them that they’re in flip-flops, not running shoes, but it’s almost like they’re asking for blisters.
They don’t care. They just don’t care. I argue with them the whole way there. They finally come to a sudden stop in front of Thad’s town house.
“Now what?” I ask them. They offer nothing. In fact, it’s like they’re suddenly struck dumb. It’s like they’ve been set in cement.
“Seriously?” I look down at them, the stubborn things. The skin at the base of my left big toe has been worn through, sacrificed, I realize with annoyance.
“Move!” I tell them. They do not. “Come on!” I cry out. They just sit there like stubborn mules. I wonder if I can—
“Collins?”
It’s Thad’s voice that makes me freeze in place. I’m bent over with my hands on my right shin, trying to get the thing to budge.
“Uh, hi.”
“Are you lost or something?” He has stepped out onto his front stoop, and doesn’t sound all that happy to see me.
“No,” I say, still crouched.
“I know that, duh,” he says, shaking his head. “What are you doing down there?”
I stand up slowly. Very slowly. And self-consciously face him. “Nothing,” I say.
He starts to crack a smile, but it’s like his face wrestles it away. “It looked like your foot was caught in an invisible raccoon trap.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” I say.
A laugh crackles up through his throat. And even though it hits me how incredibly stupid my response was, I don’t laugh. Well, I try not to, but my chest and throat quiver a little, and my nostrils start to spasm. I try to breathe the laugh away, but it doesn’t work. It erupts from me. But it’s one of those laughs that feels inappropriate—a laugh that comes at the wrong time, embarrassing you and everyone around you, like when someone falls down but actually gets hurt. We both turn bright red.
“So, uh.” His laugh quiets, pretty abruptly. He steps off the stoop and onto the sidewalk where I am. “So why exactly are you here?”
“I thought you were coming back to school. You said you were.”
“I’ve been sick,” he says.
It doesn’t feel like he’s telling the truth exactly, but it doesn’t feel like a lie.
“Like, how sick?”
“I don’t know, just sick.”
“Like, on-medicine sick?”
“I don’t think there’s, like, an approved drug—” There’s a hint of a smirk, but it disappears quickly. “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“Sorry I yelled at you that night,” I say. “If I was a jerk or anything. I don’t want to be a jerk anymore.”
“So just don’t,” he says. So Thad-like.
There’s a word for how I feel right now. I don’t know why the poor sheep got saddled with this kind of word, but it did. Sheepish. “You don’t give lessons on how to get your best friends back, do you?”
“Best friends?”
“You and Sirina,” I say. “Like, how to unbreak hearts?” I make myself laugh at my own joke, even though it’s not really a joke at all.
He stares at me. “You should be able to figure that out on your own by now.”
And maybe I should. “Okay, I’m sorry I asked. I’ll figure it out.”
He’s still looking at me as if he’s waiting for me to start trying. Right now. So I exhale and say, “Okay, I guess I’m here because I’ve been thinking a lot.”
“Have you,” he says. “Well, good for you.”
But I continue. “You know how you wanted me to find those flaws in Nick?”
“Barely,” he says. He crosses his arms over his chest.
I remind myself that Thad’s been hurt. Really hurt, not just by me. Heartbroken by life, in a way that I haven’t. “Well, I finally came up with one—the only one that matters.”
He glances away. “Yeah, well, Mabry, he’s almost perfect, then. But I don’t really care about that anymore.”
“It’s that—”
He shuts his eyes. “Doesn’t matter.”
“The one major flaw—”
His jaw clenches. “Don’t care.”
“—is that he’s not you.”
He quickly turns to face me. “Well. Lucky him.”
This isn’t at all what I envisioned. Where’s his thankful embrace? Where’s his long-yearning kiss? I shift my weight from foot to foot. Inside the house, a woman passes by a window in a wheelchair.
I clear my throat. “Is that your mom?”
His turns toward his house and sees her. “Yep.”
“How is she?”
He takes a breath. “She’s, you know, a little better.”
Our eyes meet, and when they do, it’s like there’s some magical force keeping them connected. I can practically feel my pupils grow. Though we’re not touching, the nerves in my body start to magnetize, as if they’re all pulling forward, reaching for him.
A car drives by and Thad’s eyes snap away from mine, breaking the spell. His mother crosses back across the kitchen in her chair. “I guess you better go,” I say, and wait for him to argue. Or hope for him to argue. Whatever. I esperar. In Spanish, that one word means both of those things, which makes perfect sense right now. Waiting and hoping. Hoping and waiting. It is its own state of existence.
But he just says, “Aren’t you supposed to be at the dance tonight?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I told Nick no. I didn’t want to go with him.”
He squints at me. “You kissed him. I saw you.”
He saw me? Is that why he’s acting so weird? I shake my head. “Yeah, well, I did it for you.”
“Oh, wo
w,” he says, flatly. “Well, thanks. You’re so thoughtful.”
“He’s not such a smear, Thad. He changed his description of the guy who broke the window when he realized you were the one who did it.”
He takes a deep breath and looks away. “Okay, well, dude, please don’t do me any more of those kinds of favors, because that made me retch.”
“Fine,” I say. “Deal.” Then I dare myself to ask my next question. “Thad, did you—?” I look up at him. He is staring at me curiously. “Did you mean what you said?”
“You mean about the invisible raccoon trap? Collins.” He rolls his eyes and acts exasperated. “You should know that there are no such things as invisible raccoon traps.” Then he laughs a little. It’s not his normal feral cry, but it’ll do. For now.
Ha-ha. Hardy har har. I glare at him. “You know what I’m talking about. What you said that night. Your feelings.”
Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes.
But he lets his head drop sideways, and his smile goes all crooked, winding up almost apologetically on his right cheek.
“Never mind,” I exhale. I feel jellylike, exhausted. “Okay, I guess I’ll go.”
I turn to walk away.
He grabs my hand.
I whirl around.
“I also meant what I said about your earlobes.”
“My earlobes! Great.”
“More like, it’s easier not to crush on someone when you can focus on something stupid like that.”
My arms wrap around him just as quickly as his wrap around me. He pulls me tighter to him, and my cheek presses into his neck. A Cottonelle commercial blares from someone’s television through an open window. A car alarm goes off in the distance. And even though he does smell a little like jalapeños, I am certain that nothing in the history of the world has ever felt this good. I need all my senses to describe what I feel—orange and crackling and melodic and hot and safe and sweet. Like a new emotion has just been invented for us.
How to Break a Heart Page 23
