As the class erupts in the chaos of pre-lunch socializing, a shadow falls across my desk. When I look up, Olive Ann Bang and her two henchgirls, Clementine Fitz and Ronda Hatch, are lined up in a row in front of my desk. I’m at eye level with their plaid skirts, six inches shorter than Cathedral’s regulation dress code. Their shiny legs are dappled with colored light from the stained-glass windows, and a blurry imprint of the Virgin Mary’s face reflects off Olive Ann’s bare knees.
“Hey,” I say at last, flashing a noncommittal smile.
“Long time no talk,” purrs Olive Ann, pursing her lips in a glossy pout. Olive Ann is the youngest daughter of Cathedral’s principal, the grim and steely Winnifred Bang. Neither Bang likes me very much, probably because Olive’s been one spot behind me in the class rankings since freshman year. Now that it looks like I’ll be valedictorian in a few months, Olive’s usual disdain for me has gone from a slow simmer to a full-on boil.
“We heard you didn’t make it to the Orphans’ Ball,” Clementine says, her voice faux-sympathetic. “Will said he had to go without you.”
“I was sick.” I shrug.
“He told us to give you this,” Olive Ann says, glaring at Clementine for piping up without permission. “It’s sealed, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t worried,” I mumble as Olive Ann produces a small, cream-colored envelope with a stylized WH embossed on the back flap. “Don’t be a stranger, Anthem.” Olive’s nose wrinkles as she flashes me a tight smile.
“Okay.” I nod, my face a mask of neutrality. Then the three of them whirl around, sling their book bags over their shoulders, and walk, with near-perfect symmetry, out of the room.
After such an elaborate delivery, Will’s note is anticlimactic.
Missing you, Red. Meet me in the chapel. I’ll be waiting.
—Will
I’ve never liked being called Red. As I’ve explained to Will a dozen times, nobody’s ever called Brown. I stand up and press my books against my chest like a bulletproof vest. I haven’t returned Will’s calls or texts all weekend because I’m afraid something will slip about what I really did on Friday. Zahra doesn’t remember much—one of the few good things about feargas is the amnesia—but I can’t get the sound of her screaming out of my mind.
I also can’t stop thinking about Gavin Sharp.
I’m heading toward the intersection of Hemlock Street and Catechism Way, trying not to feel like a terrible person for blowing off Will. At lunch period, I took the coward’s way out and stuck a note in his locker saying I’d meet him tomorrow. When I round the corner onto Hemlock, my eyes are drawn to a flash of reflected sunlight across the street.
A boy in a black leather jacket is leaning up against a motorbike. He’s reading a book. I freeze on the sidewalk and stare, making sure I’m not mistaken. My eyes travel over his lanky, broad-shouldered frame, the sandy-brown swatch of hair falling jaggedly over his eyes. The sharp jawline ending in a cleft chin.
He folds down a corner of the page he’s reading and shuts his paperback, an ancient-looking copy of The Great Gatsby. A slow smile lights up his face as he looks up. “You’re here.”
I cross the street in three long strides. Standing just a few feet away from him now, I set my ballet bag down on the sidewalk and clear my throat, a mix of anticipation and nervousness tingling in my chest. “Doing some reading?” I ask lamely.
“Gatsby kills me every time.” He shoves the book into the back pocket of his jeans. There’s a charged beat of silence between us. “Guess I’m a sucker for an unhappy ending.”
Two bunheads wrapped in coats rush by us, and I break eye contact with Gavin to watch them disappear through the studio doors. It’s Constance Clamm and Clarissa Bender, both in level six, too worried about being late to look up and notice me. When the doors slide shut behind them, I finally ask the obvious. “How did you find me?”
“I asked a few friends where the best dancers in North Bedlam practiced. All roads led to Swans.” Gavin’s cheeks turn the faintest hint of pink. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind.” I look up into the glass-walled third floor of Seven Swans, where nine bunned heads tilt in unison above nine pairs of shoulders. Nine bare, sinewy arms reaching gracefully up, bending toward the windows, then up again. Like the legs of a giant, graceful caterpillar.
“They’re starting practice without me,” I murmur, transfixed for a moment by the scene. In twelve years, I’ve never watched this ritual from the outside.
“Take a ride with me,” Gavin says. “I want to show you something.”
My mind whirls with a million reasons I should say no, the main one being that I never, ever miss ballet. Two more: My parents would kill me if they found out I was on a motorcycle with a South Sider, and Serge picks me up from ballet every night at seven. A sharp gust of wind hits my back, as if urging me toward Gavin.
His voice is gentle. “Don’t think too hard.”
I squint up at the studio one last time, at the girls at the barre, a lifetime of routine beckoning me back into its safe embrace. I think of my parents, of my homework, of ballet, of Serge, of Will. And then I stop thinking entirely.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 4
I ignore the alarm bells going off in my head and tell myself to focus on the little details: the thrum of the bike underneath me, the wind in my face, the way my stomach flutters when Gavin’s warm back is pressed against my chest.
We hurtle through Bankers Alley and the Bank of Bedlam rears up before us, its mirrored façade slicing our reflection into dozens of tiny triangles. The downtown office of Fleet Industries is only two blocks away—my parents could be anywhere among the suited businesspeople bustling down the street.
We pass a cluster of twenty tents and my gaze fixes on a sign that says EAT THE RICH, a huge pair of garish lips around the words. Another sign reads THE REAL BEDLAM WILL RISE UP AGAIN. The protest encampment has been a fixture here since before I was born, its scruffy members chanting about justice and equality. Every couple of weeks, the police come and break it up, but the protesters always reappear the next day, stoic and bruised, with new signs that say things like COPS ARE NOT ABOVE THE LAW. When I look up again, we’re about to ride across the Bridge of Forgetting and enter the South Side.
“You okay?” Gavin yells over his shoulder as the bike idles.
“Yeah, I just haven’t been over the bridges in a long time,” I yell back, the wind sucking the words out of my mouth. Or ever.
“It’s safe, I promise,” he yells. “At least when you’re with me.” He guns the bike, and we take off across the bridge.
Hundreds of locks hang from the balustrade’s filigreed stonework, left by couples who have walked this bridge, locked padlocks to it, and tossed the keys into the river to symbolize their unbreakable bond. I wonder how many keys are at the bottom. Hundreds? Thousands? How many romantic declarations have been made here over the years?
Once we’re off the bridge, Gavin pulls the bike over to the curb and cuts the engine. “Let’s walk from here.”
The slate-gray sky is beginning to fill with faint streaks of pink and orange. Unlike in the north, with its industrial wall along the river to prevent flooding, the South Side is lined by a grassy embankment that slopes easily down toward the rocky shore. Circus birds, Bedlam’s neon-red-and-yellow finches, hop about on the ground, chirping and joyful.
As we travel along the sidewalk bordering the river, I take a closer look at the dilapidated townhouses and brick apartment buildings that line Feverfew Street to the south. There’s graffiti everywhere, scrawled over the bricks and fences, JUSTICE and THE SOUTH IS NOT AFRAID. And over and over again, a million different tags: SYNDIC8. LIVING IN SYN. SYNLIFE.
Gavin guides me down a narrow dirt path toward a thin footbridge jutting into the river, marked by a rusted metal archway that reads BRIDGE NINE in gothic script. At first, I wonder why I’ve never seen it before. But then I take a closer look and se
e that after a hundred feet or so, the bridge just . . . stops. It ends in the center of the river, as if someone sliced half of it off. Boards have been nailed haphazardly across the bridge’s abrupt endpoint. “What happened?”
“We call this the Bridge to Nowhere. When I was six or seven, they blew up the north half of it. This is what’s left.”
“They?” I ask.
Gavin shrugs, the light in his eyes flicking off the way it did just before the party ended the other night. “People who didn’t want South Siders walking to the museum district and scaring the tourists. Same people who killed the Hope, maybe.”
I shoot him a dubious look. The last time I heard anyone mention the Hope, I was in the seventh grade. He was a crusader for justice who supposedly almost ended the crime wave just before the South Side Riots started. Most people believe he was just an urban legend. At least that’s what I’ve always learned in school. He was killed before I was born, if he ever existed at all.
“But couldn’t it have been an accident?” I ask. I don’t want to suggest the other scenario that floats through my mind: that South Siders blew it up themselves during the riots.
Gavin stares out over the river. “Maybe. But then why didn’t they ever rebuild the thing?”
The path spirals past the bridge and slopes downhill, opening up a moment later into a circular courtyard with an ornate stone fountain at its center. It must have been beautiful once, with three mermaids at the center, their tails flung gorgeously into air. But their faces have crumbled, the stone chipped away. One mermaid has only a chin. Gavin puts a hand on each of my shoulders. “Turn around.”
In front of us is a curved wall, about ten feet tall and thirty feet wide, encircling the courtyard. A mural covers every square inch of it. Layers and layers of spray paint, but also oil paint, judging by the level of detail. The bottom half is all blues and grays, a mob of angry police, hundreds of them receding into the background, an infinity of cops. So much like my doodle in class today, it’s uncanny. But here, they’re looking up into the sky, at . . .
My hands cover my mouth as I take it in. A ballet dancer stands on one arched foot atop a raised police baton. She’s midturn, with one slender leg bent and her arms clasped above her. Her hair is red. She wears my Juliet costume.
And her face, slightly tilted and fierce with concentration, is mine.
Unconsciously, I’ve walked up to the mural to study it up close. I reach up and touch the hem of the ballerina’s tutu—my tutu. The paint is dry. There are at least four shades of gray layered together to form the folds of glittery tulle.
At last, I turn to Gavin, my face hot. “You painted this?”
He shrugs. “I was looking for a way to finish the mural. Once I met you, I knew how to do it.”
“Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me,” I say.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ve inspired a lot of admirers on the North Side.”
“Not exactly.” I turn away from him, hiding my blush as I gaze at the painting. Will once gave me a pair of earrings with a silly little card: You’re my Anthem, and you make me want to sing. But Gavin’s painting took hours of painstaking work. I turn around to face him.
“I need to tell you something. My last name isn’t Flood. It’s Fleet.”
He raises one thick eyebrow, pulling a hand through his hair. Then he shrugs. “Okay.”
I move to stand beside him and aim my index finger at the top of our building. “We live in that tall building with the spire. Fleet Tower. On the top floor.”
“Huh.” He nods, seeming indifferent, like it’s all the same to him. Like me and my address aren’t inextricably linked. “Must be nice to live somewhere like that.”
I sigh, relieved that he’s not mad at me for lying to him. “I guess.”
“You guess?” He grins. “I’m hoping it’s at least sort of nice.”
He flips his hair out of his eyes and stares at me playfully. I open my mouth to explain, but it takes me some time to find the words.
“It isn’t always . . . as nice as it seems,” I finish lamely, sucking all the flirtation out of the conversation.
“No?” he asks, turning to me, his face growing serious.
A cold blast of metallic air hits my face, and I flip my coat collar up. “My sister drowned when she was seventeen, and my parents never really got over it. My mom, especially.”
Gavin winces, then grabs my hand. “I wasn’t born yet.” I go on, conscious of his fingers resting lightly around my wrist. “The only reason they had me was to replace her. I think my dad hoped I would give my mom a reason to live again. But I’m starting to realize that no matter how perfect I try to be, I can’t ever make up for what they lost.”
A car alarm bleats in the distance. Gavin pushes his hair out of his eyes again. When he stops to face me, the smile he wears is sad. “It must be tough to not only live your own life but to try to finish someone else’s.”
“Sometimes, yeah,” I whisper, thinking of my mother’s episodes of immobilizing sadness, her monthlong bouts of depression that come out of nowhere, dragging us all down with her. I’d give anything not to turn out like her. Scared of everything. Too sad to really live.
“You’re enough, you know.”
“Enough?” I blink hard, the image of my mother vanishing, replaced with Gavin’s face earnestly studying mine.
He shrugs. “You’re amazing.”
Gavin carefully tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear and bends his face toward mine. We both go quiet. I rise onto tiptoes and my hands find the nape of his neck, his hair blowing against my fingers. Our lips come together, gently at first. Desire surges through my body, so powerful it weakens my knees as the kiss becomes more urgent and we move closer together.
I’ve kissed Will more times than I can count, but it’s never made me feel like this.
Gavin pulls back eventually. His arms stay wrapped around my shoulders. “Sorry,” he says. But the dazed grin on his face tells me he’s not.
“Don’t be,” I breathe, a dazed grin stretching across my face. I link a few of my fingers with his and steal one last look at the ballet dancer on the wall as we begin to walk back up the hill.
The sky has turned a purple gray in the twilight. Across the river, the old-fashioned streetlamps are beginning to flicker on. Here on the South Side, with no streetlights to speak of, the dark begins to wrap around us like a cocoon.
When we get to the top of the embankment, Gavin points toward the sky past the bridge. His hand finds mine again, the heat of it and the closeness of his body warming me. We watch hundreds of circus birds fly from west to east, a neon cacophony in the darkening sky.
CHAPTER 5
“Will?” My voice echoes softly in the cavernous stone chapel the next day. The flying buttresses and soaring ceiling designed a century and a half ago are supposed to make God-fearing Bedlamites feel small and awestruck, and even though I know it’s a trick of architecture, it works.
The chapel, I realize as I walk slowly up the aisle, is the last place I saw Will. I pause at the pew I was sitting in on Friday, the place where I realized I didn’t want to go to any party with Will Hansen ever again. The unpleasant memory dissolves as I notice a rustle of the burgundy curtain in front of the confession booth. I slip off my shoes and tiptoe across the marble floor. Two black shoes peek out under the confessional curtain. I slip soundlessly into the booth on the other side of the wooden partition and close my half of the curtain. Pulling back the screen in the wall between us, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
I clear my throat and adopt a stage whisper. “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.”
Will leans his forehead against the screen, so close I can smell the expensive cedar hanger his shirt hung on this morning. “And I thought the problem was you haven’t sinned enough.”
“Will,” I whisper nervously.
“I know. You were sick.” Though I can’t see Will’s face, I can almost hear him snee
ring. “It was a joke, what I said about other girls taking your place,” he says from the other side of the booth. “I sent you about thirty texts apologizing.”
I nod, dreading what I know I need to do, guilt sticking in my throat. Will may be kind of obnoxious, but he deserves better than this.
“You could have called me the next day to see how it went.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. There are no good excuses for ignoring him the way I have been. “I should have called.”
“You’re not exactly in the running for girlfriend of the year,” Will continues.
“Then break up with me,” I hear myself say.
Silence. I press my spine against the mahogany wall, letting out an involuntary puff of air through my nostrils.
The curtain rings scrape against their rod as Will leaves the confessional. He pulls back my curtain and stands in front of me, a wounded look clouding his broad face. “Seriously?”
“I—I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem—” I fumble, letting the sentence hang.
He turns away and looks at the huge fresco painted beneath the east-facing windows of the cathedral. I follow his gaze until I see it, the image of Judas betraying Jesus, his evil kiss on Jesus’s cheek. I turn away, but the kiss of the betrayer is imprinted on my vision.
“I had other options, you know,” he says, shrugging. “But I chose you. That should count for something.”
“I should be grateful, you mean, because a popular guy like you is interested in a loser like me,” I whisper, blood suddenly roaring in my ears. I force myself out of the booth.
“All I’m saying is you should think about what you want in life,” Will says calmly, his eyes dead and bored-looking. He sighs loudly. “I’m a patient guy. I’ll wait for you to realize what’s in your best interests. Until then, you might want to be more careful about where you go dancing.”
My mouth falls open, but no words come out. “What do you mean?” I finally manage.
The Brokenhearted Page 3
