Broken Heart Club

by Cathy Cassidy

  I mean, look around you. You see it every day … sadness, loneliness, bullying, boredom. Friendships built on convenience, on fear. Kids bonded together by a shared interest in maths, or cheese and onion crisps, or desperation. It’s so random.

  And it doesn’t last.

  Yesterday you had a friend for life, but today you’re alone, on the outside looking in, wondering where you went wrong.

  I sound bitter, I know, but hey.

  You would be too.

  Losing one best friend, that’s unlucky. Losing four? Well, that’s just careless.

  It started with Andie, that whole best-friends-forever thing.

  I was four years old. It was my first day at nursery and Andie Carson (Andrea really, but nobody ever called her that) was just about the first person I saw. She was standing at an easel, all blonde spindly plaits and blue eyes, and wearing a shiny red apron. She was painting a big sunshiny picture with swirls of yellow, gold and orange, and as I watched, she leaned over with her brush and daubed a splodge of yellow paint right on my cheek.

  The paint was thick and cold and slightly gritty. I blinked and my lower lip quivered, but Andie just laughed and reached out with her brush to paint my other cheek.

  ‘You look like sunshine,’ she told me, and I started to laugh, too.

  By the time Miss Miller noticed, Andie had painted my cheeks yellow and my lips red and my palms white with blue spots, and I had streaked her blonde plaits with purple, pink and green. Miss Miller hauled us off to the bathroom to scrub us clean, the two of us holding hands tightly as if we would never let go.

  That was the start.

  We were best friends, even then, but the first time I went over to play at Andie’s house things got complicated. I thought it would just be the two of us, but when I walked into the living room there was a boy in jeans and a red T-shirt, sprawled on the carpet making a Lego tower and eating Jammie Dodgers.

  ‘Eden,’ Andie said. ‘This is Ryan. He lives next door … he’s my best friend. Ryan, this is Eden … she’s my best friend, too.’

  Ryan looked up at me, curious. I watched as he snapped a biscuit in half and offered us both a piece, and I took my half politely even though it was sticky with jam and a bit smashed up around the edges.

  ‘Hello, Eden,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’

  I wasn’t crazy about the fact that Andie had another best friend, especially a scruffy, smiley boy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Ryan lived next door to Andie and was often at her house, so in the end I got used to him. We built a den together that summer, at the end of Ryan’s garden … a wobbly tepee made of garden sticks and covered with climbing beans that burst into bright orange-red flowers. In the winter, when the beans died, we draped the garden sticks with polythene to keep the rain out. When it got really cold, we retreated to the garden shed and turned that into a den instead.

  Ryan was OK, really.

  By the time the three of us started in Reception Class, I liked Ryan almost as much as I liked Andie.

  The teacher sat Andie and me at a table with two other girls. Hasmita was shy, with flashing brown eyes and an armful of silvery bangles. Tasha was kind and funny, with tumbling braided hair and an infectious giggle.

  Before long, the four of us were a team. At playtimes, Ryan would hang out with us, thinking up crazy games and teasing us whenever we got too girly.

  We were together as much as we could be, but Andie was always in the middle of the group, at the centre of whatever was going on. She was like the sun, and we were like the planets, moving around her, staying close to the warmth and light.

  It was Andie who worked out the name thing, too.

  It was just before Christmas, the year we all turned nine, and Andie was writing our names out on scraps of paper to pull out of a hat because she had decided we should do a Secret Santa.

  ‘We all close our eyes and pull out a name,’ she explained. ‘Whichever name you get, you have to buy them a Christmas prezzie. You’re not allowed to spend more than a fiver … so everyone gets something good, but each of us only has to buy one present. Cool, right?’

  ‘Cool,’ I agreed.

  Then Andie’s eyes widened, and she rearranged the little scraps of paper so that Hasmita’s name was at the top, mine was under it, then her own, then Ryan’s and finally Tasha’s.

  ‘Look!’ she exclaimed. ‘I never noticed before! The first letters of our names … see what they spell? Look!’

  We looked.

  Hasmita.

  Eden.

  Andie.

  Ryan.

  Tasha.

  ‘It spells HEART!’ Tasha squealed.

  ‘Exactly!’ Andie said. ‘How did we never notice that before? We can be the Heart Club!’

  The Heart Club … that sounded awesome.

  Ryan pulled a face, but he was a boy; what did he know? He had typical boyish tendencies; weird obsessions with football and spiders and skateboards.

  ‘Best friends forever, right?’ Andie grinned.

  ‘Right!’ we agreed. ‘Forever!’

  Forever sounds like a long time when you are nine years old, but trust me, it can be a whole lot shorter than you know.

  3

  Ryan

  We said that nothing would ever change, that nothing would ever come between us. We said we’d stick together forever, but still we fell apart.

  We’d never really argued before, or not for long. Someone – Andie usually – would wade in and shake things up and pull us all together again. This time, that didn’t happen. After the sleepover, we shattered into about a million pieces, and there was no way of even starting to put the pieces together again.

  Andie’s family moved away and new people moved in. We didn’t see much of them, but they had two little girls, and sometimes I would hear them playing in the garden and be reminded of Andie.

  I don’t see any of the Heart Club now – not even Eden, who goes to the same secondary school as me. She’s a loner, these days. I see her skulking along the corridors with her head down, shoulders slumped. She might as well have her own personal rain cloud following her about; her body language says ‘keep away’ as clearly as if she’d scrawled it across her forehead in black marker pen. Most people get the message and leave her be, me included.

  She’s a different person from the girl I knew, but then I’m a different person, too, so I have no right to judge.

  What happened that summer was just too big, too awful; it turned everything upside down, left its mark on us all. My way of coping was to pretend the past had never happened. I reinvented myself as someone tougher, stronger, braver. I guess Eden reinvented herself, too, but in a slightly different way.

  She turned from a girl full of spark and fun into a sad-eyed kid practically drowning in ugly, baggy uniform, and I turned from class clown into school troublemaker. I’m on report pretty much all the time and I spend more time outside the head teacher’s office than in class.

  I have a short temper, lately. In the past, I always had a way of turning something bad into something funny, but after that summer my knack for finding the humour in stuff deserted me. These days, I react with anger and I don’t think too much about the trouble it might get me into.

  None of that seems to matter any more.

  I’ll never forget my first day at Moreton Park Academy. It felt like someone had torn the rug out from under my feet; turned everything upside down. I’d had the worst summer ever, and now I was trussed up like an idiot in an enormous black blazer, a starched w
hite shirt and a stripy tie that felt like it was choking me. Mum had taken me to the barbers the week before and they’d practically scalped me; when I looked in the mirror, I looked like one of those photofit pictures of dangerous criminals they show on Crimewatch.

  ‘Give it a chance,’ Mum had said. ‘It’ll be a fresh start!’

  There was not a single person from primary school in my form group – not one friendly face. A wave of nausea rose up inside me, and I loosened the stripy tie.

  ‘Sort that tie out,’ the teacher barked. Mr Benedict was a PE teacher, a big, beefy bloke in a tracksuit, and he was glaring at me. ‘You look like a scruff!’

  ‘Don’t feel well, sir,’ I said, and loosened the tie some more. ‘Can I go to the loo, please?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ the teacher said. ‘You’ve only just got here!’

  The class were watching now, wide-eyed. I stood up, a little shaky, and moved towards the door. Mr Benedict stepped in front of me, arms folded, face like thunder.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

  ‘Ryan Kelly,’ I said, and puked up all over his shiny new Adidas trainers. Two lairy kids on the back row began to cheer at my accidental revolt, and within seconds the whole classroom was roaring with laughter. Mr Benedict looked as if he’d like to strangle me.

  Fresh start? I pretty much aced it, right?

  I slammed out into the corridor, looking for an escape, and walked straight into a pale, sad-eyed girl with black hair and an armful of books. She did a double take, looking up at me through a dipping fringe, her blue eyes faintly accusing.

  I glared at the weird girl and broke into a run. I didn’t stop running until I was outside the school – two blocks away in fact. Then I slowed up, sank down on a garden wall and put my head in my hands.

  I’d worked it out by then.

  The weird girl was Eden Banks.

  4

  Eden

  I don’t need a best friend.

  That sounds harsh, but so what? It’s true. I am used to being alone. I mean, I get on OK with my classmates … there are kids I chat to, hang out with at break sometimes, text when I need to check which pages we have to answer for history homework. I don’t have to sit on my own in lessons, or not much, anyhow. I can sit with a whole bunch of people at lunchtime in the school canteen, if I want to.

  Usually, I don’t want to.

  The thing is, when you let people get too close, you end up getting hurt.

  You might not even see it coming.

  I didn’t know that when I was eight or nine, of course. I thought I was the luckiest girl alive … I had the four best friends in the whole known universe. We had so much fun. I try not to look back at all that, not now, but it’s true. We did.

  The Heart Club had the best sleepovers in the world, always. When we were at Ryan’s house there would be takeaway pizza and skateboard competitions in the garden, and cheesy Disney films with talking dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and mermaids and girls who turned out to be secret princesses or warriors or heroes.

  Ryan always ordered cheese and pineapple pizza, extra-giant size. That was good because Hasmita and Tasha were veggie, and I liked any kind of pizza at all – but the reason Ryan chose cheese and pineapple was because it was Andie’s favourite food ever.

  I noticed early on that he picked the chunks of pineapple off his own slices. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Pineapple – yuk!’ He grinned. ‘I hate it!’

  ‘So why not order a different kind of pizza?’

  Ryan’s eyes slid to Andie, who was hoovering up a second slice. ‘Isn’t this the best thing you ever ate?’ she sighed. ‘Cheese and pineapple pizza. What an invention!’

  That was why Ryan ordered the same pizza every time; he wanted Andie to be happy. Well, we all did.

  Anyway … sleepovers. At Hasmita’s house, we’d do makeovers, with Hasmita’s big sisters painting our eyes with kohl, decorating our hands with henna, draping us in silk saris shot with silver and gold. Ryan would yawn and roll his eyes and play computer games with Hasmita’s brother, Sandhu. We ate the coolest food at Hasmita’s house – soft, sweet naan bread, spicy dhal and curry that made your taste buds explode.

  We’d whisper our dreams and secrets long past midnight, giggling in our sleeping bags and watching the dawn light creep through the curtains.

  At Tasha’s, the food was wholemeal and slightly scary, but Tasha’s mum would make us apricot flapjacks and veggie kebabs and burgers made of strange things like tofu and Quorn. There was no TV at Tasha’s house, but her mum was a drama teacher at a college in town, and she let us loose on her boxes of props and costumes. We’d dress up as royalty or pirates or gypsies, and put on wild plays that went on for hours while Tasha’s parents and their friends sat round the kitchen table, sipping herb tea and laughing, asking for an encore.

  My place was a first-floor flat in an old Victorian semi, and the sleepovers there always involved baking – jam tarts and muffins and huge, towering cakes layered with fruit and cream and icing. We had a big kitchen with a huge pine table in the centre.

  ‘We could make chocolate cake,’ Andie said, the first time she saw it, and my mum laughed and helped us to make a soft, dark sponge that tasted awesome.

  Later on, Mum trusted us to bake by ourselves, and never seemed to mind if we left the kitchen littered with mixing bowls, the counter dusted with flour and spattered with jam.

  ‘Delicious,’ she’d tell us, even at the start, when all we could manage was burnt biscuits and sponge cakes that sagged in the middle.

  Sleepovers at my flat meant stuffing ourselves with cake and then working off the sugar high by playing on the trampoline in the shared back garden till it got dark. Later, we’d curl up in my room and watch DVDs – teen movies and chick flicks that made Ryan groan, even though he liked them secretly.

  ‘Watch and learn,’ Andie used to say. ‘You’ll learn loads about girls and how they tick, and that will come in very handy later in life.’

  Ryan snorted. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘I’m not interested in girls, just football and Harry Potter. Don’t know why I hang around with you lot, really. The Heart Club! You girls and your mushy films and your Indian feasts and chocolate cake and plays and make-up …’

  He never got to say any more than that, because Andie walloped him over the head with her pillow, and the rest of us joined in until we’d battered him into submission.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he admitted, laughing. ‘I like the films. A little bit. And I like the cake and the plays. But definitely not the make-up, right? And just for the record, I am really not interested in girls. Not yet. Yuk!’

  Ryan pulled a silly face and everyone laughed, and the pillow fight was over.

  The best sleepovers of all were the ones we had at Andie’s house, of course. They were chaotic and crazy, and there were no food feasts or extra-giant pizzas or cool iced cakes – it was more likely to be jam sandwiches on sliced white bread, but jam butties had never tasted so good.

  At Andie’s, we didn’t even get to sleep in the house, because she had two younger brothers and Andie’s mum said we stayed up too long and made too much noise, and kept the little ones awake. So Andie’s dad dragged an old bell tent down from the attic, and pitched it at the end of the back garden, and from then on, whenever we went for a sleepover at Andie’s we camped out.

  We loved it.

  We’d tell ghost stories in the dark; spooky, scary, bloodthirsty stories of headless horsemen and zombie teachers who might lose the plot and strangle you right in the
middle of a spelling test. We’d shriek with laughter and squeal with horror and make daisy-chain bracelets with quivering fingers. I always had to make Andie’s, because she could never get it right.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ I remember saying, bravely, one night. Ryan had just finished telling an especially chilling tale about a boy who’d drowned in the local river and had been taking his revenge ever since by luring local children into the water so he could pull them under to their doom. It was a river we all liked to swim in on hot summer days, so Ryan’s story really spooked us.

  ‘It’s all rubbish,’ I went on. ‘We just like scaring ourselves. There’s no such thing as ghosts!’

  ‘There might be,’ Andie’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘We just don’t know. He could be among us right now, the boy from the river, looking for his next victim, ready to lure them to a watery grave …’

  There was the sound of a gate clanking somewhere in the distance, and we just about jumped out of our skins, screaming so loudly that Andie’s dad opened the window and yelled at us to be quiet.

  ‘How will he lure us?’ Hasmita asked in a whisper.

  ‘Jam butties, most likely,’ Andie said, and Ryan laughed and threw a few jammy crusts at her and the whole thing ended up in a midnight jam fight.

  We had good times; we really did.

  I wish they could have lasted forever.

  5

  Ryan

  I have an appointment with the school counsellor. Clearly, this is the highlight of my week, the thing I look forward to more than anything. I slump on the soft chairs outside Mr Khan’s office and fold my report sheet into an origami paper crane.

  Andie had a craze for making them, back in Year Six. She made the rest of us learn. It took forever to master the technique, but once we’d got it, it was there to stay, like learning to ride a bike. It’s a skill that comes in handy sometimes, for disposing of homework, tidying up report sheets, turning school letters into objects of beauty. I tweak the paper crane’s wings and lean over to perch it in the foliage of the Swiss cheese plant next to the chairs.