What does it mean to wonder
what it would feel like…
What it would be like…
What she would say…
What they would think…
if they knew
I held your hand like that?
I think you know how it feels,
but if I ask you if it’s true,
will you laugh too?
Because maybe it’s all in my head.
Maybe it’s all in my old heart,
stuck like a memory that I can’t forget.
But if I have a new heart,
shouldn’t that mean that
I don’t wonder
what it would
feel like?
CHAPTER
19
I write the song in the public bathroom by the pier. Not the most inspiring place, sitting on a toilet lid in a little stall that smells like pee while scribbling out your totally-freaking-out thoughts, but it had to be done. I wouldn’t have made it to my house. I would’ve exploded or imploded or deploded or something.
On my way home, I stick the song into the hollow of an oak tree about half a block away from the pool, next to Kingston’s Pharmacy. I barely slow down enough to make sure it’s secure. I’m terrified Quinn will come after me. Or worse, Margot.
When I get home, I thank the stars above that Kate’s at the bookstore, because all I want to do is call Lena. I’m shaking, tears finally pouring down my cheeks. I don’t even change out of my wet swimsuit before I tuck myself into my room and dig my phone out of my bag. My hands tremble as I tap on Lena’s name.
But it just rings and rings and then goes to her voice mail.
I end the call. Quick.
I’m breathing hard and toss my phone onto my bed so I don’t call her back. Because what in the holy heck would I say anyway?
Um, hey, Lena, what does it mean to practice holding hands with a girl and feel all—
Nope.
Um, hey, Lena, you know when you’re with a girl and your stomach gets all fluttery and—
Uh-uh.
I groan and face-plant on my bed. Then I roll over to my side and see the auger shell Quinn gave me on the first day we met just sitting there on my nightstand, all la-di-da. I grab it and run my fingers over the swirls while I think, think, think.
Holding hands with Quinn like that under the waterfall, it was just practice. It didn’t mean anything. Even Quinn said that was what we could do if we ever found a boy to like. This new heart doesn’t wonder about girls like that. It doesn’t even matter what Margot told Eliza and the whole swim team. I like boys. Only boys. As in Step Three. I’ve got to stay focused.
A fresh wave of tears blooms in my eyes. I wipe them away fast. I don’t even know why I’m crying. Nothing happened. Old Sunny is gone. I’m New Sunny.
But I don’t feel like New Sunny. I don’t feel like Old Sunny either. I feel all mixed up, a thousand different Sunnys swirling together like a kaleidoscope.
I put the shell back and shove my hand under my pillow, taking out Lena’s journal. My chest gets all tight just looking at it. I know I should give it back, but it feels like a little peek into Lena’s brain. It feels like… maybe it’s not so wrong to read it, because I missed out on eight years of having a real mom, so in a way, her journal is just helping me catch up.
I take a deep breath and flip through the inked-up pages, searching for that first day Lena showed up in my hospital room back at the beginning of May. Surely, she wrote about that. It was pretty epic. Epically awful and awkward.
Finally, I find it. It’s scribbly, the handwriting way worse than the other entries. As soon as I start reading, I find out why.
I saw her today. I actually saw her. My Sunshine. She was so beautiful. She was pale and thin, but she was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. She wouldn’t talk to me. It broke my heart right in half, but I’m trying to stay positive. She just had a heart transplant, for crying out loud. J says I’ve got to give her time. D said the same, when she called to see how it went and make sure I wasn’t feeling tempted to drink. I’m not tempted. Not even close. If anything makes me never want to take another sip of alcohol again, it’s my girls.
I can barely read the last part, it’s so messy. I can tell Lena’s upset. I squint at the last word, figuring she must have accidentally added an s to girl. She was feeling a lot, just like I am. My heart beats faster and faster with every word. I touch my finger to the scar on my chest and keep reading.
But then I start thinking… why couldn’t I stop drinking when Sunny was a little girl?
D says that’s a useless way to think, but I can’t stop thinking it.
“You were a different person,” D says. “You didn’t have the support system you do now. You were drowning in grief. Everything is different now.”
And she’s right. I know she is. But, my god, Sunny had a heart transplant. She’s been sick, my baby, and her whole heart got replaced. I can’t believe I missed it all. I can’t believe I let her go through all that without me. I can’t believe I stayed away so long, that I didn’t know she was dying.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully forgive myself.
I don’t know if Sunny will either.
But I’m going to try. For S. For me. I’m going to put my family back together.
Tears flow down my face. They’re hot and mix with all the other tears I’ve already cried today, making my face feel tight with the salt. I hug the journal to my chest and try to get a grip, but I can’t stop picturing Lena in some rented house in Port Hope, scribbling all this down while she cried too. I want to hug her.
Or yell at her.
Because I can’t believe she missed it all either.
Next to me, my phone buzzes. I pick it up and my heart leaps up into my throat.
It’s a text from Quinn.
Hey. Are you all right?
I stare at my phone. No way I want to deal with this right now. My heart hurts so bad and I just want to dive back into Lena’s journal and figure her out. Figure us out.
Yeah, I text back, because if I ignore her, then that clearly means I’m not all right at all.
Okay, she texts. I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. Probably because we held hands in a weird way and now things are weird.
I shake my head, hoping the thoughts fall right out of my ears or something, and then my phone buzzes again, this time with a call.
I yank it up, terrified I’m going to have to talk to Quinn because I can’t really ignore her when she knows I was just by my phone.
But it’s not her. It’s Lena.
I slide my finger over the screen super-fast.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey, you,” she says. “I saw you called but you didn’t leave a message. You okay?”
In the background, I hear a bunch of noise. Some dishes clinking and a baby babbling, like she’s in some busy restaurant. But still, she called me. She saw that I needed her and she stopped whatever she was doing for me.
I get under my covers and sink down into my bed, breathing a whole lungful of air for the first time since leaving the pool. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Fine, huh? You know, whenever I tell my therapist I’m fine, she makes this really annoying sound in her throat, like a buzzer going off for a wrong answer, and tells me to try again.”
“Wow. She sounds horrible.”
Lena laughs. “She’s not. So, Sunny, try again.”
“You go to therapy?”
“Yes, I do,” she says. “I have for about three years.”
“Does it help?”
“It really does.”
I swallow, wondering what it would be like to spill all my wonderings into a stranger’s lap. Which, if I’m being honest, is sort of what I’m doing right now.
“Do you think I’m weird?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I just, well, you didn’t know me before, you know? When I was sick. Or e
ven before that.”
There’s a pause, but then she sighs and says, “I know, Sunny.”
“But you wanted to, right?”
She sighs and when she speaks, her voice is all shaky-sounding. “So much, you don’t even know.”
I smile a little, even though she can’t see it. I could tell she wanted to know me in her journal. But it’s a whole different ball of wax, hearing her say it.
“Okay,” I say, “but now I have another person’s heart in my chest.”
“Sunny, you’re still you.”
“But am I? Like, the one I was born with is totally gone. I like butterscotch pudding now. Isn’t that weird?”
“Butterscotch pudding is disgusting.”
“Exactly. Except it’s the nectar of the gods!”
She laughs.
“I feel different,” I say. “I mean, of course I do, because I can breathe okay now and do stuff and my doctor says I’m doing really good. But also, I feel the same sometimes too. Like, the old me is all mixed up with this new me and it just feels like I’ll always be weird and wondering weird things no matter what. Am I still me? Or am I just a different me?”
She’s quiet. So quiet that I say “Hello?” just to make sure she didn’t hang up on me.
“I’m here,” she says, and clears her throat. I’m freaking her out again. After all, she left me when I was only four, and four is a really cute age. I was totally adorable when I was four. But there must have been something, right? Something in me that made her choose drinking over me. Now I’m even worse because my heart isn’t even mine; it’s not the one she gave me.
My throat starts to ache. “We don’t have to—”
“No, Sunny, it’s okay. I’m just thinking through my answer.”
“Oh.”
“It must be hard,” she says. “All these feelings, all these thoughts.”
“Yeah. Sometimes. But I’ve had hard feelings and thoughts before.”
“Everyone does.”
“Not like me,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I shake my head, even though she can’t see me. Margot—not to mention every girl at that slumber party—made it super-clear that not everyone has the kinds of thoughts and wonderings I do. Or did.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just a lot sometimes.”
“I can’t imagine what it feels like to be you. But I do know what it feels like to start over. And, yeah, it can be a little weird. But that’s not a bad thing. It just means…”
She trails off and I’m holding my breath, but before I can beg her to finish, there’s a knock on my bedroom door.
“Sunny?” Kate calls.
I shove the phone under my pillow and pretend to be napping.
The door opens.
“Sunny, are you on the phone?” Kate asks. “I heard you talking.”
I don’t budge. I’m really, really good at looking like I’m asleep, thanks to all those times when I was sick and I was supposed to be resting but couldn’t turn my brain off and didn’t want Kate to worry that I couldn’t sleep on top of everything else. The key is to keep your eyes closed, nice and loose, without squeezing them. Also, relax your mouth and breathe deeply.
Kate walks over to my bed and pats the sheets a little, probably looking for my phone, but she doesn’t go searching under my pillow. For a split second, I think about opening my eyes and telling her everything I’m thinking about, but I’m afraid I’ll sound all ungrateful for my new heart and I’m not. I’m just… trying to make it fit in my head like it fits in my body.
Finally, she sweeps her hand over my hair and leaves. When I hear the door click shut, I yank my phone out from under my pillow.
“Are you still there?” I whisper, sure that Lena’s long gone.
A beat. Then, “I’m still here.”
“So… what does it mean?” I ask.
“What?”
“Starting over. What does it mean that it’s weird?”
Lena sighs. “It means that you get to do something that not everyone gets to do. That’s what weird means, doesn’t it? Doing something or being someone out of the ordinary. Not following the pattern everyone expects you to follow. That’s all.”
I think about that and Margot’s stupid party comes back to me. How all those girls laughed at me and made me feel like the worst girl in the history of girls, all because I wondered about something they didn’t. I think about Quinn holding my hand under the waterfall and how… how… I didn’t really feel weird at all.
I felt scared.
“You know what helps me sometimes when I start thinking about stuff like this?” she says.
“What?”
“I write it down.”
I grip her journal in my hands and swallow hard. “You do?”
“Yeah. Journal entries, songs. It helps to get it all out.”
“Actually, I sort of do that too.” And then for some reason, I tell her all about my songs and how I’ve started sticking them around town. It makes me feel even weirder as I’m explaining it, but I guess it is kind of weird. When I’m done talking, Lena doesn’t say anything for a second, which also makes me feel weird.
“I think that’s amazing, Sunny,” she finally says, and I breathe out a big breath.
“Yeah?”
“Brave.”
“Well, not as brave as trying to surf.”
“Braver, I’d say.”
“I’m not sure if they’re even songs. A melody never comes into my head when I’m writing them and they don’t rhyme. Like, at all. I guess they’re really bad songs.”
“They sound like poems to me.”
I blink at my ceiling, my mouth dropping open, because of course they’re poems.
“Free verse poems,” I say.
“Exactly.”
“Like Emily Dickinson.”
“And Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda.”
“Who?”
She laughs. “Look them up. It sounds to me like they’re your people.”
I smile, tucking the names away for later. “Can we go surfing again soon?”
“Of course. I told you we would.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Absolutely. But we’ll have to do it in the afternoon. Is that okay?”
Again, I wonder what in the world Lena does when she’s not with me. I know she’s renting a house somewhere near the Methodist church in Port Hope and that she’s giving some private voice lessons, but that’s it. How long is she really staying here? Does she miss Montauk? Does she talk to J or D on the phone? Do they visit her here? Thinking about Lena’s whole other life without me, all the people who might have replaced me, makes my stomach hurt. I can’t bring myself to ask any of my questions.
I turn onto my side, Lena’s journal hugged close to my chest. “Yeah, okay,” I finally say.
“I’ll pick you up around noon,” Lena says. “See you tomorrow, weirdo.”
I can hear the smile in her voice and my heart feels all warm and steady. It feels good. It feels… normal.
“See you tomorrow, weirdo,” I say back.
I lost my heart but kept on breathing.
Now all the mirrors show the same face,
but I don’t know the girl inside.
Does anyone know her?
A thousand years ago, she was lost in the ocean
but now she walks on the land.
Is she me?
Or am I her?
Or is she a new girl
who looks like
someone I used to be?
CHAPTER
20
Over the next few days, I write about ten more poems and stash them all over the island. I tuck them away in that little blue birdhouse in the park and in the tip jar at the coffee shop where Kate buys her sachets of lavender green tea.
They’re all about… stuff.
Wondering kind of stuff.
Handholding, kissing kind of stuff.
I try not to write about
it—I’m done wondering, after all—but it’s like my hand or my brain or maybe even my heart takes over. Every time I lie on my bed or sit on the front porch with a piece of paper and a pen, I mean to write about, I don’t know, the mind-blowing double chocolate cake doughnut from Yeast Juniper Island Bakery that Kate has finally started letting me eat, but that’s not the stuff I end up thinking about.
But think, I do. And I write and write and write until my head feels nice and empty, until my heart feels slicked clean like all the gunk got washed out. Then I start thinking about Quinn again and I have to start the whole process over.
Let’s just say I’ve written a lot of poems.
Today, it’s rainy out, the sky a puffy gray. I’m sitting on the front porch and waiting for Lena to pick me up to take me clothes shopping when my phone buzzes in my bag. I choke down a sip of Ensure and set the can down next to me, then dig out my phone.
Hey, Quinn texts. Want to go to the beach today?
My Ensure threatens to come right back up. I haven’t seen Quinn in a week. Not since the pool. She’s texted a bunch, always asking me to hang out, and I take forever to answer her. I want to say yes. Every time, I want to say yes, but then I remember holding hands with her under the waterfall and the way my stomach felt all funny. Then I remember that all the wondering about kissing and handholding I’ve been doing lately isn’t about boys. It’s not even about girls, really.
All my wondering is about Quinn.
I shake my head, trying to knock all those wonderings right out. They’re too scary, too risky.
I can’t, I text back. I’m going shopping with Lena.
Not a lie.
Okay, she says. Text me later?
For sure.
Maybe a lie.
I mean, I want to text her. I want to see her. She’s my BFF and I don’t want to mess that up, but what if I feel… and what if she doesn’t feel… and what does all that mean…
I groan and rest my forehead on my knees.
“You okay, sweetie?” Kate says, coming out the front door.
I snap my head back up and grab my Ensure, sipping dutifully. “Yeah, fine. I just… don’t want to finish this gross drink.”
Kate sits down and nudges me with her shoulder. “I wish I could go shopping with you,” she says. She’s dressed in her raincoat with a ratty Nirvana T-shirt and tattered jeans, because today is inventory day at Cherry Picked Books. She and Dave and the staff go through every single book in the whole store and make sure they’re all in the computer and figure out which books aren’t selling and need to be sent back to the publisher. It takes all day and a lot of the night and sounds so boring, I almost fall asleep every time Kate tells me about it.
The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James Page 15
