by Meg Leder
I didn’t want to go home.
I texted Eph. Call me?
I wandered up the street, watching leaves crumble under my shoe, a plastic bag float around above me. It wasn’t beautiful, it was garbage, and I hated that it was there and that some pigeon might get stuck in it, and I hated that I wasn’t tall enough to reach it, and I hated that Eph was tall enough and he wasn’t there.
I dialed his number. Straight to voice mail.
I stopped on the sidewalk, the wind around me so chilly my nose was starting to run, and I thought, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
In a Jane Austen book this was when Mr. Darcy and I would stumble upon each other, our breath puffing sweetly in the cold in front of us, and we’d declare our love for each other, shyly, beautifully, purely.
In the world of Vivien and Delphine, this was when Jason North, the schoolteacher I had secretly pined after for years, would realize he loved me too, would run to the train station, trying to catch me before I slipped out of his life forever.
In Titanic this was when Leo would take my hand and we’d run until we found our happy ending or we’d die trying.
But I was standing alone on a New York City sidewalk that reeked of urine. My nose was running, and I didn’t have a tissue, and I was worried a pigeon might strangle itself on that stupid out-of-reach plastic bag.
I wasn’t getting a happy ending.
• • •
I didn’t tell my parents what I’d seen in the attic at the museum.
I didn’t tell anyone about what had happened with Keats.
Instead I got to school early on Monday and camped out by Eph’s locker. I didn’t know what I’d say about his dad. I didn’t know what I thought about the kiss. I only knew I needed to see him.
Leaning against the wall, still wearing the now extremely smelly sweatshirt, I waited.
Grace walked by, did a double take, and stepped back.
“Not my locker,” I said before she could ask.
“No, I was going to ask if you’re okay?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head and trying to smile, tears gathering. “Not at all.”
“Want to talk . . . ?” she started, and then her eyes narrowed at something behind me, her breath sucking in sharply.
I turned around, instinctively dreading whatever was about to happen.
My instincts were right.
Walking down the hallway, hair shining and brilliant, her confidence parting the crowds in the hall like she was the ultimate Queen Bee, like she was Victoria’s actual secret, was Cherisse.
Holding hands with Keats.
“Oh crap,” Grace muttered under her breath, and she grabbed my hand, squeezing it tight. “What a complete bastard person.”
Keats saw me and cringed, stopping abruptly in the hall.
Cherisse turned toward him, confused, and whatever he said to her must have involved me, because for one brief unbelievable human second an expression crossed her face that might have been shame.
“Pen, I’m sorry,” Grace said, leaning around me and giving Keats and Cherisse the finger. You suck, she mouthed at them.
I giggled, even though I was crying. Keats looked stricken, but Cherisse was pissed, narrowing her eyes at both of us and spinning Keats around, marching him the opposite way.
For some reason it made me laugh and cry harder.
I wiped my face on my sleeve, the soft gray of the sweatshirt, hoping I wasn’t simultaneously smearing snot all over it. “No, that’s not it. It’s fine. Seriously,” I said, realizing as the words left my mouth that it was fine, that I didn’t care about losing Keats.
She handed me a tissue and I blew my nose.
It was Eph who was breaking my heart, Eph who’d left an emptiness inside me that was as surprising and infinite and unknowable and terrifying as a black hole.
As if the realization had conjured him into being, I saw his long, slouched form round the corner and pause, taking in the scene in front of him. Me against his locker, blowing my nose and wiping my eyes, Grace huddled around me like she was protecting me from roving bands of blood-hungry Vikings, and walking toward him, holding hands, Cherisse and Keats.
It happened before I could say anything, a blur but in slow motion, too: Eph dropping his bag on the floor and racing forward like some superhero, straight at Keats, knocking him to the linoleum; Cherisse’s hand whipping loose, her face opening to scream; and Eph’s fist, pulling back, like grace, like the fury of gnashed teeth, landing a hard one right on Keats’s face.
Cherisse’s scream echoed through the hall, and people circled around them so I couldn’t see what was happening, and Grace pulled me forward, elbowing through the crowd, and everything was sweat and adrenaline and noise and I needed to find Eph.
When we broke through, Mr. Garfield was pulling him off Keats.
Eph’s eyes were wild, like he was ready to keep on fighting the whole world and every single person in it, but then he saw me.
A beautiful, horrible ache bloomed inside, all the nerves in my body tuned toward him, and I stepped forward, wanting to tell him I was sorry about everything, that I believed him, that I loved him.
He met my gaze, and his face flattened.
He turned away.
Grace held my hand.
Mr. Garfield led Eph toward the principal’s office.
Mrs. Carroll helped Keats up.
Keats moaned and cradled his nose.
Cherisse sniffled but still managed to fetchingly flip her hair, clutching Keats’s arm.
Students muttered and whispered and laughed and dispersed.
The first bell rang.
Grace held my hand.
The second bell rang.
Grace held my hand.
And then my heart broke.
I dropped to my knees and cried, the most absurd girl in Absurd Town, the one who didn’t know what she had until it was gone.
• • •
Eph was suspended for a week.
I didn’t hear that from him, though. The seventeen times I tried to call him on Monday, he never once picked up.
Instead I heard it from Audrey, who stopped by my locker that afternoon, Grace and Miles on either side of me like bodyguards. She told us that Keats’s nose was broken, that Eph should have been expelled, but that Keats had said he’d instigated it, which was one small point—the only one—in his favor, and that instead Eph was suspended for a week, and when he came back, he’d have to complete four weeks of community service.
Audrey walked me home after school, both of us quiet and cold, and she hung up my coat as I crawled into bed, Ford making himself as small of a ball as possible against my thigh.
That night I called Eph twelve times, sent him four texts. No response.
When I woke up on Tuesday, I couldn’t bear the thought of going to school, my bedroom seeming much less fraught, so I told my mom I had cramps.
That night I called Eph eight times, sent him five texts. No response.
When I woke up on Wednesday, every time I thought of what happened at the museum, I burst into tears, so I told my dad I had a stomach virus.
That night I sent Eph two texts, called him twice. The second time I got a computerized message telling me the user’s mailbox was full.
On Thursday I woke up to Ford bumping my head and purring.
I didn’t pick up my phone.
I told my parents my heart hurt. I could tell I was pushing the limits of playing hooky, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t getting out of bed ever again.
On Friday morning there was a knock on the door, and my mom didn’t wait for an answer, but entered the room and wrinkled her nose at the smell, eyeing the dirty piles of clothes on the floor.
Ford meowed loudly. Traitor.
“I’m not going to school,” I said from under the covers.
Her head was tilted sympathetically, but her arms were folded across her chest—a strategic pose of both understanding
(I’m here with you) and no-nonsense parenting (nothing was getting past those arms).
“Ellen called me late last night. I’m sorry you and Eph had to see that with George.”
I closed my eyes, focused on the lack of colors behind my eyelids.
“Have you talked to Eph?”
I shook my head, miserable. “I think I lost him.”
I felt her weight as she sat on the edge of the bed, smoothed the hair on my forehead. “Honey, do you remember the day you punched Eph at school and broke his nose? You were little kids and he lifted your skirt in front of everyone?”
I opened my eyes. “Yeah, his nose is still crooked.”
“Do you remember what happened after?”
I didn’t remember what happened, could only recall the stream of red coming down from Eph’s nose, the animal noise he made.
“The principal called me, and I came down to pick you up, and you wouldn’t talk to me. You kept crying and crying.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I thought maybe you were crying because you were so embarrassed. I kept telling you that it would be okay, that people change, that friendships change, and that if you didn’t want to talk to Eph or be his friend for a while, that would be okay.
“And you started crying harder. Your face was all red and your shoulders were shaking so hard that it scared me, Pen, so I had you lie down, and I stroked your back to try to calm you down. I was really mad—I couldn’t believe Eph had embarrassed you like that—but I was trying to be calm for you, and I kept rubbing your back.”
I remembered the soft press of my mom’s hand against my back, her whispers in my ear. It’s going to be okay.
“When I finally got you calmed down enough to talk, you told me you were sad, but not because Eph embarrassed you or because you got in trouble for hitting him. Pen, you were upset because you’d hurt Eph. You said it made you cry to see him cry. And you were afraid he wouldn’t want to be your friend anymore.”
My breath caught, hurt blooming in me again.
“Things change, Penelope; people change. Sometimes you get hurt. And sometimes you’re the one doing the hurting. You know, I look at George and Ellen . . .” She started chewing on her lip, and I realized I got the habit from my mom. “They’re both hurting so much. But I have to hope that the love they’ve built through the years, and the memory of that love, will be enough to get them through, whether they stay together or not. I hope that even with all this craziness and change, something of what they had remains.”
Her voice caught at the end, and that’s when I saw that she was crying.
I froze.
I’d never seen my mom cry. Even when my grandparents died, she always had a parent face on, never once letting me see her break down or not be my mom. But there she was: not just my mom, but a person of her own, someone who chewed her lip and worried about people and loved her friends so much that seeing them hurt made her hurt. It was weird and vulnerable and kind of scary, learning your parents weren’t just parents—that they were also people with breakable hearts.
The realization filled me with a crush of love, so I pushed myself up and hugged her shoulders, trying to hold my mom steady and safe, the way she’d always held me.
After a few minutes she drew back, sniffing loudly. “You don’t have to go to school today, on one condition: Get out of bed and come bird-watching with me and your dad. We’re going out to Dead Horse Bay.”
“Don’t you have to work?”
She shrugged. “You’re not the only one who plays hooky. Downstairs in a half hour, okay?”
She kissed my forehead and left.
I lay there for a few minutes longer, miserable and sad, lonely and heartbroken, then pushed myself out of bed and to the shower.
• • •
After the ninety-minute subway plus bus ride, and then forty hushed minutes of my parents waiting to spot the kestrel at her nest while I fiddled with my dinosaur charm, sliding it back and forth on its chain, all my listlessness was mostly gone. My bones were restless.
“I’m going to go read on the beach,” I whispered, holding up the copy of Emma I had shoved in my bag.
They nodded, shooting me relieved smiles (I was seriously cramping their bird-watching game), and I walked away, the tall grasses shushing around me, turning into reeds by the water.
I had heard about Dead Horse Bay before—the marshy area that had housed horse processing plants in ye olden times and had then been used as a landfill. It was now a weird stretch of beach where old bottles and leather shoe soles and the occasional creepy horse bone washed up at low tide. Ellen loved to wander there, bringing back old glass bottles for art projects, and Eph told me how he’d scavenge with her, the stretch of beach reminding him of something postapocalyptic—all the leftovers of lives long gone.
Yet despite everything I knew in advance, when I climbed the crest to the water, my mind blanked: no sadness, no anger, just the clean space of awe.
The beach was covered with bottles, a mosaic of glass where the tide had washed out—mostly browns and greens, the occasional cobalt blue and milky white. Mixed in were horseshoe-crab shells, indistinguishable pieces of leather, smooth driftwood, odd metal and plastic bits.
I began walking where the water met the shore. Even though the place didn’t feel toxic—only dirty—I was grateful for the thick soles of my Doc Martens as I navigated the shards poking up from the sand, covered in deep ocean muck.
I wondered what the beach would look like when the sun was shining. That day was gray and cold, with a winter-ready sky, and everything in front of me felt as lonely as I did, all these broken pieces.
I stopped and examined a small round cylinder, the glass creamy white once I rinsed it off, the word POND’S on the side, and I realized it had once been filled with cold cream. I thought about the woman who might have used it, what her hands looked like, if she’d put it on at night before she went to bed, if she’d ever cried herself to sleep.
Using a stick, I dug a deep green bottle out of the sand. It was filled with dark black filth, barnacles growing around the edge, but it was the same shape and size as a soda bottle, and I pictured a girl my age drinking from it, the tickling of the fizz on the edge of the nose, summer blazing around her.
I shuddered as I walked over a miniature plastic baby missing its arms—way creepier than the Santa that Eph had given me—but I thought of The Velveteen Rabbit and wondered what had happened to the child who’d surely loved it when it was new.
I settled on the edge of an abandoned, spray-painted old rowboat. It sat under an old, dead tree, but people had tied bottles and pieces of glass from the branches, and the brokenness chimed above me as I rested my chin on my knees.
Nudging the sand around me with my boot, I uncovered a small shard of pottery dotted with blue flowers. I wiped it on the edge of my jeans, marveled at the detail of the leaves, the brightness of the petals.
Maybe it had been a sugar dish or a serving plate, a vase or a statue.
It was hardly bearable then, all these objects loved and discarded, the history left behind.
I wished I could go back to the time before I ever knew things could be broken.
I would find Eph there, take his hand, not let go.
We would close our eyes, hold on to everything fleeting and bright and shining, listen to the dinosaurs around us.
But instead I had this:
A broken piece of pottery in my hand.
Everything that remained.
As I sat there, watching gulls dive, listening to the shush of the reeds lining the beach, the lapping of the water along the shore, the clinking of glass, imaginary good luck and a dinosaur around my neck, I started to wonder if that was enough.
Handwritten list
Tabulae manu scriptae
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-23
THAT NIGHT, I DREAMED ALL the dinosaurs left New York City.
They departed in w
aves and piles, flying and plodding, magnificent and terrible, each of them roaring in fury and sorrow.
And I let them leave.
When I woke at 4:13 a.m. on Saturday morning, my hand flew to my neck and found my tiny T. rex pendant right where it should be, rising and falling against my skin with each breath.
Maybe Keats and I would never talk to each other again.
Maybe Audrey and I wouldn’t find our way back to being friends like we used to be.
Maybe Grace and Kieran wouldn’t make it long-distance.
Maybe Oscar and Miles wouldn’t fall in love.
Maybe Eph’s parents would get divorced.
Maybe Eph would break my heart over and over.
Maybe I’d break his.
Maybe, in real life, there weren’t happy endings.
But as I glanced around my room, sliding my dinosaur back and forth on the chain, I thought that maybe that was the point—that instead of happy endings, you get beginnings. Hundreds of little beginnings happening every moment, each of them layering into histories deep and tangled and new, histories you count on to remain, no matter what changes the world throws at you.
I knew what I needed to do.
I knew how to win Eph back.
I turned on a light and grabbed a pen and notebook, Ford squinting groggily at me from the end of the bed.
Chewing on the pen cap (proud for once it wasn’t my lip), I started writing.
Welcome to the Museum of Heartbreak . . .
Once I started, I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with all my ideas. It was like I hit the memory jackpot. I chronicled history, scratched out things, made arrows and circles, created time lines, sketched memories, and it was totally my version of some crazy conspiracy-theory notebook, but that was all right.
I made a note to ask my dad about the museum attic.
I added an asterisk to the last item on the list, underlining it:
*Ask Grace about Nevermore Christmas lights.
At some point Ford relocated from the end of the bed to my side, snuggling against my hip, not minding my jerky energy, purring until he fell asleep.
I reviewed my list, petting Ford distractedly.
And then I wrote more. The snow fell outside, bathing my room in an eerie not-quite-white light. It was like I was the last person on earth after a zombie apocalypse, but I wasn’t sad . . . instead I couldn’t stop remembering how glorious life had been.
