Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  “You mean . . . you need to see Sam first.”

  “I mean, I need to think.”

  He slows his truck to a stop in front of the station. It looks dumpier than it did when I left. But the smell of gas and concrete and dust make me smile. The lights are on in the apartment upstairs, and I see Dad’s shadow move across the kitchen window. Home.

  “Pick you up Sunday—sixish,” Félix says. “Happy Thanksgiving, Poe.”

  I watch him drive off, my backpack at my feet. Shoes crunch the gravel behind me. Sam. Behind him, the store is shuttered, a sign posted up in his neat handwriting.

  CLOSED UNTIL FIVE A.M.

  FOR COPIOUS POULTRY CONSUMPTION.

  Typical Sam. I mutter a “hey,” which he returns, and then I just stare at him. Is he here? Is he real? Is he actually back? He wears his usual uniform—black jeans, a black T-shirt, and Chucks. His beanie is pulled low, and seeing him, so familiar—it’s like he hasn’t been gone and no time has passed at all.

  But then I see the curl of a tattoo sticking out of the bottom of his T-shirt sleeve. New. He doesn’t quite look me in the eye. And that makes me feel like a million years have passed.

  “Let me get that.”

  He reaches for my backpack, because he’s always been polite. He’s still not really looking at me. But his eyebrows, those beautiful black arches I know so well, they furrow, like he’s thinking up the answer to one of my crazy English 10A essay questions.

  His finger brushes mine.

  It’s barely a brush. Like an eyelash kissing my finger—that’s it. But it sends a shock like lightning through us both, and his whole body goes still. Everything but his eyes, which jerk up to meet mine, hot with everything he never said in his letters or texts or over the phone.

  I step forward, hooking a finger into his belt buckle and yanking him close as he drops my pack with a thud and pulls me toward him at the same time. As Sam’s eyelids drop closed, I realize distantly that Félix never had a chance. Poor Félix, I think.

  Then Sam is kissing me the way he kissed me months ago, the way I hope he will kiss me again and again. And I don’t think of Félix at all.

  Vega

  BRENNA YOVANOFF

  Las Vegas

  Pan in to show the flash and glitter of the Strip—eight lanes, twenty thousand people, a wide, unholy slice of magic. A miracle of color.

  The boulevard runs the stretch of desert like a vein, pumping with the fast, fierce pulse of cars and crowds and money. Promising festivals, carnivals, a horde of newly minted millionaires, a sea of glossy beauties and slick, smiling criminals. Luck that always comes through.

  Follow the camera as it moves, soaring down scorching avenues, finding its way through a sea of palm trees and swimming pools.

  The air is dry and hot, the city an impossible oasis, jeweled with pirate ships and castles. Oceans of bodies, waves of cars, a crush of neon lights and flying paper.

  The camera winds along narrower streets now, following cracked sidewalks, rows of stucco houses. It pans through low, sunbaked neighborhoods, sliding between chain-link fences and parked cars, and finally comes to rest on one small, knobby girl, so wild and electric she almost shines.

  She’s quick and fearless, hair a tangled nest. A slash of joyful noise and dirty jeans against the dull brown backdrop of the neighborhood, in the dusty yard under the acacia.

  Inside, her house is perfect, a confection of pastel-painted walls, fairy lights, gingerbread. Ancient pink refrigerator, swirling red carpet. A row of Aerosmith posters in the hall.

  In the summer, water beads on the air conditioner like sweat.

  Her mother comes home after bedtime, smelling like flowers and smoke, and kisses her. The kiss is a tiny, cherished gift. A ritual. It lands on her cheek like it’s landing on the girl in a story. One day, she thinks, she will be like the people on the billboards—lucky, gorgeous, dangerous.

  The city is a promise. A fantastical landscape of winners, beauties, criminals.

  She will belong here forever.

  Elle

  Most days, to most people, I was Elle, like the magazine, a smoky-eyed glam goddess, all smiles and wicked edges. Lizzie to teachers and kids at school. Libs, if Wendy was happy, and Elizabeth Marie when she wasn’t—a name like the clock ticking on a pile of dynamite, a tangle of rainbow-colored wires. Those days, the explosion could be for anything. Breaking the good casserole dish, crossing the street without telling her. Calling her Wendy instead of Mom.

  To Alex, though? To Alex, I was always Betsy.

  From outside, the house on Vine Street was as ugly as a codfish. Ugly as a potato. But the inside was beautiful and bright, and every night, Wendy came home from the High Roller Club wearing her spangled uniform, bringing candy-red cherries and tiny paper parasols. Her hair smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Net.

  She sat at the kitchen table, counting her tips into two piles. The big one for rent and gas and groceries, the smaller one for the mayonnaise jar on top of the refrigerator. The money in the jar wasn’t for anything. It was a just-in-case, a backup plan for the chance that maybe something good would happen.

  When I was little, I liked to sit and stare into the jar. It looked impossible. It looked like so much money you could own the world.

  “Whenever you win a hand,” Wendy always said, pressing the crumpled dollars flat, “you just take your chips and then walk away. People are so stupid about luck. They think when they’re up, they’ll always be up. Get all bent out of shape when their hot streak ends. Start thinking the world is against them when it’s not. The world doesn’t give a shit about you. Remember that, you’ll do just fine.”

  But Wendy was hard and quick and practical. She didn’t believe in luck or signs. She believed in staring down into that swiftly spinning wheel, and knowing your number when it came up. When she came home from work, the skin around her eyes was tired.

  I sat at the table and watched her count. I opened and closed the tiny parasols until the paper tore. When I put the wooden sticks in my mouth, they tasted like pennies. I knew that if I wished hard enough, someday my number would come up and something good would happen. I would do just fine.

  “And don’t be spending all day next door with that weird little Reilly boy,” Wendy said, but I always did it anyway.

  Alex was the one who taught me about magic, believed in it when no one else did. He was just that soft, awkward way, though, always ready to believe in something brighter and bigger.

  We played pretend and built fairy towns, sitting in his mother’s garden, where flowers spilled over the beds and the broken-down fence like a party, a flood of confetti and bloodred crepe paper.

  Your best friend is supposed to be the girl who sits next to you in math and has the same lunchbox as you, but a better haircut. Not two years younger, not a boy, not skinny and strange, with all kinds of ideas about magicians and G.I. Joes and God.

  His brother, Milo, was loud and mean, but Alex never tried to be like him.

  Sitting under the acacia tree, he’d reach his hands around to the back of my neck and press his forehead against mine, trying to make me see his thoughts, but I never could. When he leaned back, I would look into his eyes and see a pair of dark silhouettes, two tiny Betsys floating there, one at the center of each pupil.

  There’s a certain kind of magic to being a kid with someone. They always have this little private piece of you. They own your heart, even if you don’t remember giving it to them.

  There’s no point arguing, it’s how things are. You’re stuck together by all the things you’ve seen and shared—the day Max Holbrook said he saw John Cena at the gas station on Tropicana and everyone went down to look. The way the leaves flutter like pale green dollars in the spring, and how they turn all brown and crumpled in the fall. The time I cut my lip on the skate ramp and had to get four stitches.

  The day that Alex and Milo’s dad left, loading all his things into a U-Haul, and Alex climbed through my window and
curled up in my bed and couldn’t stop crying.

  I was twelve, still too young to know how to act when things stopped being okay. And anyway, the difference was hard to recognize. It seemed like he’d already been leaving forever.

  Next door, the house didn’t explode or collapse. It just got quiet. I had nothing to say. At my house, we didn’t whisper our sorrows.

  After that first night, Alex stopped acting like it mattered. He didn’t talk about it and I didn’t ask, because what was there to say? My dad had been gone since I was born. I had never lost anything.

  We grew like weeds in the heat, cooking like the dahlias that Donna Reilly planted in the gap between our yards and then let die when her husband left. We sat with the fence between us, trying to see our own blurry futures in the garden.

  “I’m the sunflowers,” I said, pointing to their stalks, how tall and strong they grew.

  Alex shook his head. “I’m morning glories.”

  The day was ungodly hot. The morning glories had all been dead for months.

  Their dad had always been the beigest, heaviest thing about their house, with sandy eyes, like the saddest dog. He sent a postcard once from Malibu—just once. A picture of surfers, sunlight washing out their faces. In it, everything was pale, the sky and water and sand. Even the paper was soft, all frayed edges and bent corners.

  I sat in the dirt, drawing fluffy clouds with a stick.

  “I hate it here,” Alex said, in a way that made me think he meant it.

  I leaned against the fence and hugged my knees, ashamed because I loved it.

  Wendy said that this was just the way things went. She put her cigarette out like the period at the end of a sentence. “Everybody leaves,” she said. “It’s good while it lasts, but everybody takes off eventually.”

  “If they just wait, though. If they wait for him, maybe he’ll come back.”

  But I could tell she thought the idea was a stupid one. She didn’t believe in people coming back.

  In the middle of the night when I was honest, I didn’t either.

  All that was before, though—before I got tall and heavy eyed. Before I got a waist and hips and a job at the outlet mall. Before I got untouchable and sharp.

  The days got short and the years got even shorter, like every part of me was speeding up.

  Summers were bright and brutal. Too hot in the house or at the pool or in the shade. Too hot to move, too hot to breathe. I didn’t mind. The sun felt like the stare of some giant, benevolent god, and anyway, the night would always roll in again, bringing a dry, flickering wind—not cool, never cool, but wicked and electric, making the city feel wide awake.

  Sometimes in the afternoons, Alex and I would walk along the Strip, not quite holding hands. The sidewalk was crowded.

  At Treasure Island, we stopped and leaned against the railing, looking out over the water.

  The lagoon was lined with plastic, full of scummy water and fiberglass frigates. The sails were ragged from the breeze that blew all summer. It had leached the color out of the mast flags, turning the boats into ghost ships. The air smelled black and greasy like gasoline. After a minute, I lit one of Wendy’s cigarettes.

  “That’s so bad for you,” Alex said. It was the first thing he’d said in a while. “It’s like sucking on a can of Raid.”

  “I wish I was a pirate,” I said, not meaning it, but just to say something. “I’d be a pirate captain with a parrot and everything. You could be my guy.”

  “The first mate?”

  “Yeah, that. We’d go all over the ocean and loot stuff.”

  “I don’t want to loot stuff. I think it would scare people.”

  “That’s kind of the point.”

  He didn’t answer, just leaned his chin on his hand.

  I’d started kissing boys. It didn’t matter where. In the backseats of cars, in the front seats. On the hoods at night, when the heat pressed down in waves. They never cared when our elbows made dents. They just pressed harder, and I pressed harder, waiting for summer to end.

  Alex didn’t know. Or maybe he did, but he never said anything.

  It wasn’t like the kissing meant something. They weren’t anything I wanted to keep. They were mouths, hands, shoulders, hips, but not like people.

  Some of them had bruises. Their eyes glittered like armor. Some of them shook like birds, electric, pulses racing.

  Under the streetlights, I would look down into the hollows of their palms. In the lines of their hands, I saw all the things they did to keep themselves from crying. When they drove me home, I never let them come up to the front door.

  Out in the lagoon, the frigates looked broken down and pathetic. All the mannequins were chipped and wore eye patches.

  Alex slid his hand closer to mine, like he was reaching for me and didn’t want to be reaching. His wrist was thin and freckled. His hand on the railing was palm down. I knew that if I took it, I’d be able to read the sadness there, so I didn’t. But he told me anyway.

  “I think Milo’s going to join the navy,” he said, all in one long breath. “He said if Mom doesn’t kick her stupid, scuzzy boyfriend out, he’s leaving.”

  That was pointless, though. We both knew Milo wouldn’t join anything. “Will she, do you think—kick him out?”

  Alex shook his head. “I think they’re going to get married.”

  I touched the base of my throat. “Oh.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Except that Milo will leave, right?”

  “Probably.”

  I looked out at the water and imagined seagulls picking over the wreckage. “I didn’t know he was thinking about it.”

  “Yeah. Neither did I.”

  “Maybe he should be a pirate too. He’d make a good one.”

  “But you wouldn’t.” Alex turned to look at me. I’d always thought he’d wind up taller than me eventually, but he was fifteen now, and still kind of like a kid. “You should be a mermaid.”

  “And sit out in the middle of that pond, with everyone’s Coke cans and candy-bar wrappers floating around me?”

  “Mermaids don’t live here,” he said. “I mean real mermaids, wild and rare.”

  “Real mermaids.” I laughed, blowing smoke out toward the water.

  “If I could do anything,” he said in a strange, husky voice, like he was trying hard to make me see, “anything in the world, I’d make you a mermaid. You could live in the middle of the ocean with the dolphins and the whales.”

  “That might be nice,” I told him, grinding out my cigarette on the railing.

  He nodded and moved closer, but we didn’t touch each other.

  After a while, we walked home.

  We went to parties, drank rum and Coke in crowded rooms. Not together, but not exactly apart.

  A small but certain distance had opened between us, the way planets orbit but never touch. The rum tasted sweet and poisonous.

  I never imagined I was in love with the boys I held down in cars, the ones who held me down in parks at night, the trees throwing heavy shadows. Cigarettes, cuts on their knuckles, a smell like tar, aftershave, exhaust. Breathing against their necks, I breathed asphalt, basketball courts, laundromat detergent, the wet ground, pressing up against my back. It was like the end of the world or something just as comforting. I breathed it in huge, rocking gasps.

  Alex was different, though, addicted to the girls who ran their fingers through his hair, sprawled in his lap. Their eyelashes were long and brittle, black spiders on their cheeks. To kiss them, he had to imagine he was in love.

  The party was at some rickety loft near downtown, all exposed concrete and empty, echoing ceilings.

  I was dancing right up next to the DJ, eating Skittles, wearing a sequined halter, cutoffs, and not much else.

  Alex was on the couch with a girl in a vinyl dress. I’d seen her at Crave and in the mosh pit at Hurricane. She was cute, in a squirmy puppy kind of way, with sweet, shiny lip gloss and high black boots. Skinny
legs, okay face. They laughed, Alex stroking her hair, the outside of her arm. There was a greasy smear from the corner of his mouth to halfway up the side of his face. It was clear and colorless, but I knew that up close it would smell like candy.

  I watched them. Her cheeks were round and berry pink, but her eyes had a hard, hungry look.

  When Milo came slouching over with his collar up and his hair gelled all the way to heaven, I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t sad. He hadn’t left town when he said he would. He was never going to leave. He was taller than Alex, with a mouth like a dangerous magic trick.

  He slid his arms around my waist and whispered, “You look hot.”

  The room was a hundred and ten degrees. “I always look hot.”

  He laughed, and his breath felt like static on my cheek. He was a game I liked to play sometimes.

  There was a little coatroom in the back. He bit my neck and then it was all dark room and hands and teeth and the high, white voltage of my skin.

  In the morning, I woke up on a dusty couch with stuffing spilling out. Milo was already gone.

  Alex and I drove home in the pink-gray dawn.

  He looked strange, hollow around the eyes. I wondered if that was how I looked when I came home in the dark with teeth marks on my neck, my mouth bitten, my arms bruised. I didn’t think so, somehow. I think I just looked normal. I think I felt okay.

  “Have fun last night?” I asked in a scratchy voice, full of gravel and rust. I sounded like I’d been screaming.

  He made a noise from the passenger seat, but it wasn’t a word.

  “Are you okay?” My voice was clearer, and I glanced over.

  He was staring out the window, watching the palm trees wash by in waves. He sat with his arms crossed and his elbows cupped in his hands. “That girl,” he said.

  “She didn’t look so bad.” The light glowed red, and I braked. On the radio, someone was singing a song about a girl who gets kidnapped by pirates.

  Alex cleared his throat, staring out the window. “I guess she used to . . . be with Milo.”

  I didn’t tell him that sometimes you just wanted to kiss someone who didn’t matter to you. How it was just a rule that where there were parties and drugs, you ran into all this other stuff too—lonely, hateful people standing on the edge of whatever thrilled or hurt them. “Everyone’s been with Milo.”