How to Build a Heart

by Maria Padian

  Talk about luck.

  When the buzzer sounds, it’s Clayton County 87, Covington 84—and pandemonium erupts. The County boys mob John, the cheerleaders weep, the pep band blares, and the bleachers truly threaten to collapse from the stomping. Aubrey and I hug, scream, laugh, jump. County is headed to the regional finals. Hallelujah.

  Eventually, the teams disappear into the locker rooms and fans head out. I’m about to do the same when Aubrey grabs my hand and begins pulling me toward the exit doors.

  “So, are you coming? Please say yes. Otherwise I’ll have to hide in my room.”

  It’s still pretty noisy, so I can’t really hear her. Did she say something about hiding?

  But before I can ask her what she’s talking about, Melissa materializes. By herself. Barista Girl #2 is nowhere in sight.

  “Aubrey!” she trills. “Oh my god, girl, you were amazing!” Melissa throws her arms around Aubrey. She narrows her eyes at me over Aubrey’s shoulder. “Wasn’t she amazing?”

  “Amazing,” I repeat. Keep it simple, Izzy.

  Melissa releases her hold. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Remind me, who are you?” It’s not lost on me that this is very different from I’m-sorry-I-forgot-your-name.

  It’s also not lost on me that she damn well knows who I am.

  “Izzy.”

  She cocks her head at me. “And . . . how do you know Sam?” The sugar in her voice is almost overwhelming. Especially because it doesn’t match the venom in her eyes.

  “She doesn’t, actually,” Aubrey explains, jumping in. “Izzy’s my friend from St. V’s.”

  “Right,” Melissa says, stretching the word out like a long piece of sweet, sticky taffy. “For some reason I thought you knew him. Someone saw you at Perry’s together.”

  “Must’ve been my stunt double,” I fire back, flashing my biggest fake smile. “I’m constantly confused with her. And she gets in all sorts of trouble!”

  Melissa hesitates. Maybe because she didn’t expect pushback from me. Maybe she has no clue what a stunt double is. Either way: I can’t let Aubrey know I met up with Sam. Even though it was to talk about her. (Maybe especially because it was to talk about her.) She’d feel betrayed.

  For some reason, Melissa backs down. At least for now. She resets her sights on Aubrey. “So, Bree, what’s the story tonight? Your brother isn’t answering my texts.”

  Aubrey shrugs. “He’s probably in the shower. What do you want to know?”

  “People are saying everyone’s going to your house? But Sam never told me that.”

  “Oh, that’s because it’s just for the team. My parents and the Mayhews are buying pizza for the guys.”

  I finally realize this is what she’s been talking about: the team after-party at the Shackeltons’ tonight.

  And Aubrey wants me to keep her company so she’s not the only girl in a house full of boys.

  I can definitely do that.

  Melissa is not pleased. She tosses her hair in this “whatever” way that’s supposed to signal indifference but reminds me of a lizard displaying its spiky neck collar when it’s gearing up for a fight.

  “But friends of the team are invited, right?” she says to Aubrey.

  Aubrey glances at the clock over the exit door. “Melissa, I honestly don’t know. Ask Sam.” She places one hand on my arm. “Mom asked me to pick up some more soda on the way. Do you mind?”

  “We’ll stop at Four Corners,” I tell her. I turn to Melissa. “Nice seeing you!”

  “Wait! Why are you going?” Awful Melissa should have just fake-smiled and said nothing. But she couldn’t help herself, not even bothering to hide the pissed-offedness in her voice.

  As Aubrey and I walk out, I lean in and manage to whisper into Melissa’s ear, “Friend of the sister.” I wink.

  It’s on.

  16

  What’s with little dudes and big trucks?

  All week, every day after she picks him up from school, Mami has to take Jack to the house site. A crew has been leveling the ground for the foundation, and Jack can’t get enough of the heavy machinery. He comes home bursting with details about gravel and sand and backhoes and bulldozers. He’s even gotten friendly with the workmen, or trabajadores, as he calls them.

  Which is what Mami calls them. My little brother has a very different relationship with Spanish than I do. He speaks English, with an occasional Spanish word mixed in, but unlike me, he understands everything Mami says to him. I don’t know if he even realizes when she switches back and forth between languages.

  “He doesn’t fight it,” Mami explains when someone asks her why Jack understands Spanish and I pretty much don’t. “He relaxes and lets it sink in. Isabella closes the door.”

  Which is totally unfair. There was hardly any Spanish spoken in our house when I was little and Daddy was alive. Then for months after he died, when Tía Blanca came to stay with us? She and Mami spoke only Spanish to each other. I remember feeling left out of those conversations, the two of them going on and on for hours. One of them would always be holding Jack, their smooth Spanish words slipping easily into his baby ears.

  Jack bursts in through the front door now, startling me and Roz in the living room, where we’ve been waiting for him and Mami. It’s Pour Day at the site, which for Jack amounts to Christmas, his birthday, and the Fourth of July rolled into one.

  Basically: the concrete trucks are arriving. After weeks of just pushing dirt around, the real action begins. Big vehicles carting rolling cylinders of liquid rock will pour hundreds of gallons of gloppy gray gunk into the wooden forms that outline the footprint of our house. Jack has already informed me this gunk is like sticky oatmeal, and you should never, ever touch it with your bare hands. After the gunk is dumped, he says, the trabajadores will pack it down, then smooth it off. Then let it dry. Long enough for it to become a hard stone slab. Our foundation.

  For my brother, it’s a not-to-be-missed event and we all have to be there. Including Roz. She had popped over yesterday (at dinnertime, conveniently enough) when Jack invited her.

  “C’mon, we have to hurry!” he shouts now, then immediately disappears outside again.

  “Slow down, little man,” Roz says, laughing. “It’s only cement.”

  “Oh god, don’t say that,” I warn her. Just the other day I conflated concrete and cement. Jack spent the rest of the evening correcting me: apparently, they are not the same thing.

  “Jack, sit in the front,” I order him as we head outside. Mami’s in the car, the engine idling. Even though he’s still a bit too small to be riding shotgun, I want the back seat with Roz. She was on the verge of sharing some hot gossip with me when Jack arrived.

  As we pull out of lovely Meadowbrook Gardens and Jack talks to Mami about dump trucks, I nudge Roz.

  “You were saying?”

  She leans in close. “Sam dumped Awful Melissa.”

  I do my best to look surprised.

  But I’m not.

  Things didn’t go well the other night for Clayton County High’s First Couple. Aubrey’s “Ask Sam” about the pizza party resulted in “No,” which triggered a public spat outside the boys’ locker room. Which led to multiple angry texts after Sam and the guys drove off to the Shackeltons’. Which culminated in an actual phone call between them, with Sam overheard saying, “You’re being completely unreasonable right now.”

  All of which I either witnessed myself or pieced together from comments made by the guys. None of whom, it turns out, are big Melissa fans.

  “Whoa,” I say to Roz now, in my best fake-surprise voice. “What happened?”

  She shakes her head, baffled. “Rumor is he’s seeing someone else, but no one knows who.”

  Her words scramble my settings. He’s seeing someone else?

  “Really?” I manage. “He doesn’t seem like the
cheating type.”

  Roz sits up straighter. “How would you know what type he is?”

  Oh god. Here I go again. I should just wire my mouth shut.

  “I just got that impression from stuff you’ve said.”

  This seems to satisfy her. “Nothing those guys do would surprise me,” she comments. “Although you’re right. Sam’s definitely the least douchey douche.” I give her a soft kick and point front-seat forward. The best way to attract Mami’s attention is with vocabulary like “douche.”

  I scroll back in my mind to the after-party. It was well underway by the time Aubrey and I showed up with soda and snacks. When we finally walked in the door, our arms full, the boys were very happy to see us. And the food. More than a few of them made a beeline for me, offering to carry the full bags.

  “Who are you?” one of them asked. Extreme friendliness in his voice.

  Before I could reply, Sam shouldered in between us.

  “This is Izzy. She’s Aubrey’s friend from St. V’s.”

  I detected a little emphasis on “Aubrey’s friend.” Meaning . . . what? I’m off limits? Or not cool enough? Hard to tell.

  Sam shifted the bag from my arms to the guy’s. “Are there more in the car?”

  “Just a few.”

  “Lead on,” he said, and followed me out.

  As we stepped into the night air, we both began talking at once. Then we both stopped; then started again. Laughing, Sam gestured for me to go first.

  “I just wanted to say, great game! I don’t watch muchasketball, but that was amazing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think I caused permanent damage to my vocal cords from screaming.”

  Sam laughed again. He laughs easily, and often. “You and the rest of the town,” he said.

  “Especially that last play. When you made the steal?”

  “I don’t think it was my steal that prompted the shrieks at that point,” he said, revealing what he thought about John’s Hail Mary shot without being overtly critical.

  “I hear you,” I agreed.

  We were both reaching for the same bag and clunked foreheads midgrab. It actually hurt. A little.

  “Oh my god, are you okay?” he exclaimed. He stepped in close and placed his hand for a moment on the spot where his forehead had just whacked me. Like his instinct was to brush away the pain. “I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay. Now you know I’m a klutz.”

  He smiled. Then the two of us just stood there. Probably both afraid to go for the bags again.

  “I know you’re not into luck,” he finally said, “but I think my sister is very lucky to have you as a friend.”

  The blush that ignited my face at that moment could have set their house on fire. I felt more than a little grateful to be outside in the dark. “That’s a nice thing to say,” I managed. “Thanks.” I reached for a bag, but Sam put one hand on my arm, stopping me.

  “It was you, right? You convinced her to sing tonight? Don’t say otherwise, I know Bree would never have done anything like that. Before she met you.”

  “I might have encouraged her. A little.”

  Even though we were in shadow, I could see his mouth curve into an amused grin. “Define ‘a little,’” he said.

  “Catholic thumbscrews of guilt,” I said. “I borrowed them from my mother. They work every time.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” I hear my brother say now from the front seat, jerking me back into the moment.

  “People from school,” I say honestly. “You don’t know them. Talk to Mami.”

  “This is pretty,” Roz comments. We’ve exited the highway and turned onto the country road that leads into East Clayton. I kick her again. She’s been out here . . . what? Fifty times?

  “It’s very pretty,” Mami agrees.

  “You don’t go to the same school,” Jack observes. “You don’t know the same people.”

  “You know, it’s really okay to mind your own business,” I tell him.

  He gasps and turns to Mami.

  “Dios mío, must you two always fight in the car!” she exclaims. “Sometimes you make me wish I had a little button I could push so you would both fly out the roof!”

  Roz bursts out laughing. Like, a belly laugh.

  It’s a first.

  “An ejector button! Yes!” she crows.

  Jack looks hurt.

  “Why would you shoot me out of the car? Izzy was the mean one!”

  Roz digs an elbow into my ribs. “You’re so mean.”

  “I hate you all,” I mutter.

  As Mami tries to reassure Jack that she was (sort of) joking, we approach the Four Corners market.

  “What an adorable little store,” Roz says with exaggerated enthusiasm.

  “You’ve really got to cool it,” I say to her under my breath.

  As Sam and I were carrying the last of the Four Corners snacks into the house the other night, his phone rang. He shifted his bag to one arm and pulled the phone from his back pocket. I could see Melissa’s photo pop up on the screen.

  “What now?” he muttered. As if the caller was a solicitor asking for donations, and not the love of his life. He paused. “Go on ahead of me. I need to take this,” he said. As I rounded the corner I heard him say, “Hey.”

  It was not a warm-and-fuzzy “hey.” Which explains what I did next. Which I’m not proud of. But I don’t know a person on the planet who would have done otherwise.

  I stood behind a bush and listened.

  There was a long silence. Then, Sam spoke.

  “First of all, you are not being shut out from anything. This is a team party. It’s okay for me to have the guys over and not include the rest of the world. Second, I am not going to tell my sister she can’t invite her friends! Geez, you of all people! You know how huge it is that she’s being social. And third, no. I don’t have a thing with her.”

  Another pause. Then a short laugh.

  “So what now? You have spies planted all over town? Checking on me?”

  Pause. An audible sigh.

  “Because I don’t need permission from you every time I speak to someone!” Sam was getting louder.

  Pause.

  “Really? Are you really asking me that? Okay, fine. You’re right. She is hot. She’s gorgeous, in fact. But she is my sister’s friend. That’s why I was talking to her at Perry’s. That’s why she’s here tonight. End of story, okay? I’m done with this conversation. Actually . . .”

  I’d heard enough. And needed to get out of there before Sam found me skulking in the shrubbery. I returned to the party, my heart racing.

  The wink and friend-of-the-sister comment had bugged Melissa more than I realized. Launched her into unreasonable heights of paranoia and jealousy.

  Which wasn’t assuaged by Sam telling her I was gorgeous.

  Did that really happen?

  “Hello? Earth to Izzy?” Roz speaks to me now.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Your mother is asking whether you need to stop at the market.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because we might be at the site for a while,” Mami chimes in. “And you know how I hate you to use those portas.”

  “The what?” Roz asks.

  “The porta potties. Mami thinks they’re unhygienic.”

  “They are disgusting,” Mami says.

  “And the convenience store bathroom is better?” I argue. “Give me a break.”

  “At least there you can use my wipes,” she says.

  Now Roz looks completely confused.

  “Mami doesn’t go anywhere without sanitizing wipes,” I explain. “She’s a borderline germophobe.”

  Jack ducks to the floor and I hear him rummaging. When he reappears, he’s holding up
a cylinder of generic wipes bigger than his head.

  “This is them!” he declares.

  “Wow,” Roz says, impressed. “You know, I don’t think my mom has ever even heard of wipes. Let alone carted around an industrial size.”

  “She’d need an industrial-sized purse,” I tell her.

  “Like Mami’s!” Jack agrees. “Know what else she’s got?”

  “Enough in my purse!” Mami insists. “Jack, put those away. Look, we are almost there.”

  I haven’t been out to the site since the first time my mother showed me, so I hardly recognize it now. It’s crawling with workmen, earth-moving vehicles, and trucks. Most of the grass has been flattened into mud, and the makeshift outline of a cul-de-sac and temporary road have taken shape. Except for our lot, which has wooden forms set up for the foundation, red flags mark the spots where the other houses will eventually go.

  Jack jumps out the moment Mami parks the car, tearing off toward a group of men who stand alongside the concrete truck. I see them laughing and high-fiving him; they must be the guys who have been filling his ear about all things construction related. The trabajadores. My little brother is in heaven.

  As Mami chases after him, I turn to Roz. She’s stepped out of the car and is staring into the distance.

  “This is a beautiful spot, Izzy,” she says.

  “It is,” I agree.

  “I am really going to enjoy visiting you out here.”

  For the second time today, it’s like Roz scrambles my settings. For all the dreaming I’ve done since we got the official word about the new house, I have never pictured the two of us hanging out here. Roz in our home is as predictable and ordinary as rice for dinner or Paco on the Scrouch. Why didn’t it occur to me she’d be at the new house as well? It’s not that I planned to forbid her from coming by.

  I just never imagined it.

  Jack is jumping up and down and waving at us, so the pouring must be about to begin. As Roz and I walk toward the concrete mixer, she brings up the Sam stuff again.

  “Melissa is going around saying people have seen Sam with this new girl. But Sam and ‘the bros’ say she’s lying.”

  “What do you think?” I ask.