Unbreak My Heart

by Melissa Walker

  “Mine too.” I’d noticed that when we were in the field. “They were probably straining to find a signal way out there.”

  I looked over at Ethan, but he just frowned and put his phone back in his pocket.

  He didn’t put his hand over mine as I shifted gears, he didn’t tell me a story or make me laugh, he didn’t even glance in my direction.

  By the time we got back into town, we weren’t even listening to music. Ethan hadn’t started up a new playlist after the last one ended. And as we got closer to home, the car got quieter and quieter.

  When we pulled into his driveway, it was almost 8:30 p.m., nine hours after I’d picked him up this morning. I wasn’t worried about Mom or Dad—I was sure they’d think I was out with Amanda, enjoying my first day as an official driver. But I felt a sense of loss as I drove into Ethan’s neighborhood, even before I turned into the driveway and saw them.

  Amanda’s car was pulled up to Ethan’s house, and she and Ethan’s mom were sitting on the front porch together. Mrs. Garrison must have made iced tea, because there was a pitcher and a plate of sliced lemons on the small table between them. It was such a nice scene. And it made me feel afraid.

  I wondered if something bad had happened to Amanda, if she’d needed Ethan or me for an emergency, but she couldn’t find either of us because we were together. I felt guilt gnaw at my stomach, and my face got red and splotchy before I even got out of the car.

  But when we stepped into the driveway, they both waved. No, they were just hanging out, waiting for us to get back because they couldn’t get through to us.

  I’m sure Amanda was suspicious about where we were, but we still would have been in the clear, probably, if it hadn’t been for the looks Ethan and I both had on our faces. We were guilty of something. Our hair was rumpled, we had that sheen of lusty sweat clinging to us, and our eyes were darting, shameful. We hadn’t done anything wrong—not really. But we both knew that we had crossed a line, somehow. And it showed.

  I could hardly stutter out a “We were driving on these country roads,” as Ethan said, “We got lost,” at the same time.

  Amanda—who’d been half smiling and only slightly annoyed that we weren’t back earlier—looked at me, then at Ethan, then at Ethan’s mom, who was standing up to go inside. She knew.

  “What’s going on, Ethan?” asked Amanda, almost shouting.

  She didn’t pay any attention to me, even as I looked to her for something—I don’t know what. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.

  I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t want to lie about anything. So I panicked. I turned to leave, getting back in the Honda. I didn’t look at Ethan, who was walking up on the porch to try to calm Amanda down. I didn’t look at Amanda again, but I heard her yelling and I could tell she had started to cry. I’d never seen her lose control like this.

  The last thing I heard as I reversed out of the driveway was, “With my fucking friend, Ethan? My fucking best friend?” And I wished Ethan and I had rolled up the windows on the way back.

  “Can you believe her?”

  “Someone told me they had sex in a field.”

  “She did that to her best friend.”

  “Amanda’s way prettier.”

  I zombie-walked through the last three days of sophomore year. We had exams, so everyone was just going from test to test, but still, I felt like a hollowed-out shell of Clem Williams.

  My parents knew something was wrong. After I got home from dropping off Ethan and facing Amanda, I pretended to be sick. Mom brought me soup in bed and I tried not to burst into tears in front of her. She knew I’d been crying, though.

  Olive asked to come in and watch our favorite ABC Family shows on the TV in my room, but I told her no, that I might be contagious, and she stayed away.

  All weekend I slept and cried. I stayed off-line because I was too afraid to see if anything was going around about me, but I checked my phone incessantly. I was sure Ethan was going to call, tell me what happened, tell me what he’d said to Amanda.

  But he didn’t.

  I was even more sure that Amanda would call to at least listen to my side of the story.

  But she didn’t.

  And so on that Monday morning I went through the motions—showering, drying my hair, putting on lip gloss and a little swipe of mascara. Dad made sure I had a good breakfast. “Can’t have you taking tests on an empty stomach!” he said. Then he kissed my forehead and headed to work, and Olive and I stayed at the table to finish our eggs. She chattered on about end-of-the-year cupcakes and asked me if I wanted her to bring one home.

  “No,” I said, moving my eggs around the plate with my fork.

  “There’s always extra,” said Olive. “Cameron Brown’s mother makes, like, a gazillion because she’s a bored homemaker.”

  I looked up at Olive.

  “That’s what Mom says, anyway,” she said.

  Of course Mom says that. She has lawyer-mom guilt because she leaves early and gets home late and doesn’t have time to make cupcakes for Olive’s class. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need the sugar.”

  And maybe because it was the first time I’d met her eyes since the Ethan incident, but Olive suddenly looked at me like she knew—really knew—that I was not okay.

  I saw what seemed like fear and concern flicker on her face, but then she smiled reassuringly.

  “Want to borrow my lucky pen for your exams?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, grabbing my plate and taking it into the kitchen.

  “It might help,” said Olive, ignoring my rejection. She walked to the entryway where her backpack was sitting, and I heard her rifling through the pockets.

  I leaned back on the kitchen island and tried to steady myself. I had no idea what I would face at school.

  “Here,” she said, coming into the kitchen with a pink pen. It had a feather on the end of it and looked utterly ridiculous.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  When I got to school, I was gripping the pink feather-pen in my right hand as I walked through the hallways. That’s when I heard the whispers. That’s when I felt the stares.

  I knew instantly that even though no one had called me this weekend, there had been a lot of talk. A few people came up to me and said things like “Ethan’s a jerk,” or “Amanda had it coming,” but it’s not like that made me feel better. Actually, those comments made me feel worse. Ethan wasn’t a jerk, I thought, and Amanda didn’t have it coming; that remark came from mean girls, mostly. Despite those wincing moments, though, I didn’t really feel anything at all. It was like I was watching someone else go through this, watching another girl’s life fall apart.

  I think Amanda’s therapist mom would call it “distancing”—avoiding emotion so I wouldn’t have to feel the devastation full on.

  I kept my head down, walking through the halls with a hunched back and a protective books-in-front-of-chest stance. But when I saw Amanda’s sparkling blue ballet flats coming toward me as pondered where to eat my lunch, I instinctively looked up. I caught her eye. She looked like she’d been crying too.

  “Stay away from me,” she hissed.

  I hunched back down and waited for her to pass.

  I ate lunch in the corner of the library, sneaking bites of the sandwich Dad had made for me and feeling thankful that he was on a PB&J kick—I couldn’t have hidden tuna fish from the librarian who walked the aisles looking for kids breaking the no-food rule. That was mean of her, I realized. Didn’t she know that some people didn’t have any other place to eat where they wouldn’t be exposed for being alone during the school’s social hour?

  I stared at the science books in front of me. I had wanted to sit in the fiction aisle, but it was crowded with kids who I guess sat here every day and read through lunch. Maybe that would be my life next year; escaping to another world didn’t sound so bad to me.

  I was about to get up and head to the biography shelves when I saw the sparkling shoes appear
on the tan carpet.

  Amanda knew where to find me. She hadn’t been ready to see me in the hallway, but now she was approaching me fully prepared.

  She said my name when she walked up to me.

  “Clem.”

  “Hi,” I said, pushing out the chair next to me with my foot, knowing this was my chance.

  But the thing was, I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t defend myself. “I like Ethan too” just didn’t seem to cut it. It wasn’t as if I’d just been through some trauma—like my mom dying or Olive being sick or even a really bad exam grade—and I needed to be comforted and Ethan was there.

  I’d thought of all the excuses that might have made my friends cut me some slack, but none of them were real. The truth was that I liked Ethan, and he liked me. We clicked. That’s it.

  It’s a paper-thin reason to start something with your best friend’s boyfriend, and I knew it.

  I deserved every whisper in the hall, I deserved Amanda’s scorn and all the tears I’d shed in my bedroom. I deserved to eat my lunch alone in the library. And I deserved the way that Amanda was looking at me.

  But it still hurt. A lot.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  “I didn’t, Amanda,” I said. “I swear I didn’t.”

  “I knew something was wrong,” she said, standing above me with her arms crossed. “I knew it, and you denied it, again and again.”

  “There wasn’t anything going on,” I said. “Friday was just—”

  Amanda held up her hand.

  “I don’t want to know,” she said.

  “No,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. “Amanda, we didn’t … I mean, I would never—”

  “I thought you would never do anything remotely like this,” she said. “Clem, I believed you.” She paused and bit her lip. “I was even happy that you and Ethan were friends. Just friends.”

  “We were!” I said.

  “Until you weren’t,” said Amanda.

  “It was harmless,” I said, looking down at the maroon-colored table and betraying what I was saying with the desperate way that I said it.

  “Stop lying, Clem!” she shouted, and I saw a skinny guy peek around the shelves to look at us. Amanda glared at him and he disappeared. “Ethan told me about how you’ve been trying to start something with him all year, how you flirt with him in class, and even at my house while we watched that movie.”

  “That isn’t true,” I said, my eyes pleading with her to believe me. “We were all crammed onto the couch, and so maybe my leg was touching his hand, but it was just that we happened to be close, and—”

  “Are you even listening to yourself?” asked Amanda, her volume lower now, pure loathing in her voice.

  “Amanda, please,” I whispered. “I even tried to tell him that I thought we were getting too close. I—”

  “You took him on a drive way out in the county for the entire day after this year-long back-and-forth that’s been going on under my nose, and I’m supposed to believe that nothing happened?” Amanda leaned in closer to me, leveling me with her eyes.

  I shrank back in my chair. “He just texted me back when I asked who wanted to go for a drive. That was all.”

  “It wasn’t all!” said Amanda, her voice growing louder. “He won’t tell me what happened, but I know something did—I can tell. And now I’m stuck in the middle of this mess! I have no idea what to do.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “Amanda, we didn’t do anything—”

  She was smiling at me, and it made me freeze for a moment.

  “You never liked Noah Knight, did you?”

  I shook my head no, tired of lying.

  Amanda let out an odd laugh that sounded like she was in pain.

  “Ethan’s saying that you were a big mistake,” she said, and I could see the darkness in her eyes, despite her smile. “He’s begging me not to break up with him.”

  I felt a sharp knife in my chest, and I hated myself even more for being upset by what Ethan said about me. I wondered briefly if Amanda was lying, but then I remembered how quiet he got in the car ride home. I shouldn’t be surprised; he was never mine. What right did I have to feel hurt that he was abandoning me now?

  “Amanda,” I said. “You have to forgive me, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Clem.” She silenced me with the intensity of her low whisper. “I can’t forgive you.”

  Tears rushed to my eyes—I couldn’t stop them.

  She looked at me, and this moment pained her, I could tell. But she kept a smile plastered on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You brought this on yourself.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded, knowing my face was twisting up into the ugly cry, knowing I’d throw the rest of my sandwich away because there’d be no way to choke it down past the lump of sadness in my throat. Knowing I didn’t deserve even the small pleasure of peanut butter and jelly.

  I opened my eyes after a moment, and Amanda was gone. She knew I was leaving for the whole summer, and that was the last time I saw her.

  chapter twenty-eight

  “Unfurl the jib!” shouts Dad. It’s the perfect sailing day, and he has Mom, Olive, and me all jumping at his commands this afternoon.

  Once we get cruising and we’re all sitting in the cockpit together with sodas, I bring up the fact that it’s not very girl-power of us to be following a man’s bellowed commands. Dad rolls his eyes, and Mom points out that this is practically the only time my father gets to be the boss.

  “Usually, the three-to-one girl thing rules,” she says.

  Actually, she’s right. I don’t know how many times Dad has had to sit through The Proposal instead of Training Day (his favorite) on family movie night. Although he and I do team up when it comes to college basketball. What can I say? He went to the University of North Carolina and made me a Tarheel fan, so March is our sacred time.

  “Enjoy your day in the sun, Dad,” I say. He laughs and tips his captain’s hat. He has hardly taken the thing off since we started this trip, though he claims that’s a protective measure for his skin.

  We spend all afternoon out on the water, and by 5 p.m. we’re ready to anchor for the night, so we take down the sails and Dad starts to motor in and out of small inlets until we find a good spot. There are a few other boats near us, but not Dreaming of Sylvia, I notice. And I feel a little disappointed that James isn’t close tonight. I wonder how far they sailed today.

  After a taco dinner (with canned beans, but woohoo!—fresh lettuce and tomato) I tell my family that I’m tired and want to finish my book. Both of those things are true, but I also want to write in my journal, so I close the door to my room and lie back on the bed, picking up the pink feathered pen.

  I’m getting to the last few pages of this journal, I realize. I may run out of room before summer’s over. I go through at least one journal every year. I don’t write every day, but when I do sit down with it, the ink flows pretty fast and furious. I’ll have to remember to pick up a notebook at the next dock deli. I can’t have all my genius thoughts and feelings go unrecorded. As if. But I do like writing things down—it helps, somehow, although I always had a hard time getting my friends to understand that.

  I flip through to see how many pages I have left.

  And that’s when I see it: Amanda’s handwriting. It’s on the second-to-last page. My heart starts beating fast, which is so weird, because why would your heart just start pounding like crazy when you see someone’s penmanship? It’s not like the handwriting is a tiger that should activate the fight-or-flight instinct, which is exactly what I’m feeling right now. It’s insane how bodies physically respond to stuff. All of this is running through one part of my mind while the other part is frantically asking, When did she write this? What did she write? Did she read my diary? Oh, God, why am I just seeing this now?

  My brain is a split-personality psycho.

  I started this journal at the beginning of sophomore year, last fall. Amanda wa
s there when I bought it at the fancy paper store in the mall.

  “Remind me why you need this again?” Amanda asked, as I handed a twenty-dollar bill to the cashier.

  “Because some things are private,” I said. “Not everything can live online.”

  “Why don’t you just set your profile so that only your best friends can see updates and wall posts?”

  “Because, Amanda, hard as it is to believe, some things are even private from you,” I said. Then I grinned at her and stuck out my tongue.

  She laughed and twirled a piece of my hair around her finger. “Impossible, darling, you tell me everything!”

  “True,” I agreed, walking out of the store with my new $8 so-pretty journal. It had an embossed fleur-de-lis pattern on the cover, but the coloring was a dark red, so it wasn’t too frou-frou. I loved it instantly.

  We walked around some more, peeking at the GAP sale rack and checking out the new designer collection from the discount shoe store. I stopped by Razzy’s to ask my boss Mike for my paycheck, and we walked by the movie theater to see if anything good was playing. No luck, so we got smoothies at the stand in the middle of the mall and sat down on a bench.

  “So what is it about the journal?” Amanda asked as soon as we got into prime I’m-watching-you-walk-by-but-not-at-an-angle-where-you-think-I’m-watching position.

  I was surprised she brought it up again, like she sincerely wondered why I needed it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess when I write things down, like, physically, it helps me figure out how I really feel.”

  “How?” asked Amanda.

  “Well, like, if I just write down something about us walking around the mall today, I’ll probably blabber on for a few lines,” I said. “But then maybe I’ll remember that when we went by Razzy’s you smiled extra big at Mike and then I’ll wonder if you have a crush on him or something.”

  Amanda slapped my arm.

  “I do not have a crush on Mike!” she said. “He’s, like, thirty!”

  “Okay,” I said, laughing at her. “But you did smile at him today, and I totally saw it.”