But she did not stay to see what happened next. The bell had rung and homeroom was over. The rest was up to them.
Five
Gil was waiting for Lucy under the big tree, just where she promised she would be. The sunlight was streaming through the branches, and her face glowed like someone in a commercial for face wash, or the after picture in an ad for antidepressants. She was sipping from an enormous cup of coffee.
Lucy approached, her stomach a jumble of nerves. When Gil caught her eye, she grinned. “So I’ve been testing out a new theory about half-and-half,” Gil said. “And how you can never have too much of it.” Gil handed Lucy the cup. “I think I may be onto something here.”
Lucy took a sip of coffee. It tasted like hot coffee ice cream. She handed it back. “You sound like Tristan,” Lucy said. And at the sound of his name, her insides clenched.
“Did he have fun last night? Pete and the boys thought he was a hoot. They wished he’d stayed later, but he left right after you did.”
“I don’t know.” Lucy took a breath. “Actually, that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What’s up?”
“Tristan’s heart,” Lucy said. “I broke it, which you already know, of course.”
Gil nodded.
“But what I’m wondering is . . .” Lucy closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see Gil’s face when she asked her. She let the words tumble out. “Can we fix it? Fix his heart, I mean. And then give him an unbreakable heart like we have?”
For a moment, they were both silent.
Lucy opened one eye, then the other. Gil’s head was tipped to the side, her expression unreadable.
Lucy looked down. Her whole body was tingling. “I don’t mean make him into a Heartbreaker or let him do magic. We wouldn’t even have to tell him what we were doing. I just don’t want him to suffer like this. Not now or ever again.” Lucy felt a prickling behind her eyelids, the kind that came when she was about to cry. But the tears didn’t come. What was the point of having powers if those around you were still in pain? What was the point of any of this if the people you cared about most were miserable?
When she looked back up, Gil had that same peculiar expression on her face. She leaned in slowly. “I’m supposed to say no,” Gil whispered. “I’m supposed to tell you that it’s not possible. And that even if we ever had magic that powerful, we’d never ‘waste’ it on something like that. But . . .”
Gil stopped. She was suddenly all smiles, staring at a spot behind Lucy. “Hey there,” she called out. “I was just telling our friend Lucy here how fun it was to have you at the party last night. . . .”
Lucy turned and there was Tristan, walking along, the sun in his face. He was grinning, just like he always was. But there were circles under his eyes. He looked tired.
“Party, you say?” He scrunched up his mouth and tapped his chin. “Hmm, I think you must be mistaken, Miss Gillian. I did not go to any parties last night. I retired at a reasonable hour, had a dream about a moon landing, and woke up with some glitter on my face. Same old, same old.”
Gil laughed, then handed him her coffee. “Finish it,” she said. “Those moon-landing dreams can be exhausting.”
Tristan smiled at Lucy from behind the cup.
“Hello, buddy,” he said.
“Hi,” said Lucy. She smiled back and tried to think of something else to say.
But a moment later the bell rang, and she was spared.
The three of them started walking toward class, Tristan a few steps ahead. Gil linked her arm through Lucy’s and pulled her in close. “I’m supposed to say no,” Gil whispered. “But there may be one tiny little chance. After all, we have magic on our side, which means . . .” Gil waggled her eyebrows.
Lucy felt hope bubbling up in her chest. She’d heard her sisters say this line before. “Anything’s possible?” Lucy finished. She bit her lip.
Gil nodded, then winked. “Everything is.”
Six
Lucy pushed open the door to photo class, and the sickly sweet smell of chemicals rushed out to greet her. Mr. Wexler was up at the front, leaning back in his black desk chair, reading a newspaper. “KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON” was written on the board in big block letters. When anyone walked in, he’d point to the board without looking up. This meant they were supposed to go back to whatever they’d been working on last class so he could read in peace. Lucy grabbed her film and headed into the darkroom, where the red light wrapped around her like a blanket. Gil’s words were still echoing in her ears. There may be one tiny little chance.
Lucy found an empty enlarger between a cute junior guy who gave her a shy smile and a freshman girl who was developing pictures of her own cleavage. Lucy put a strip of negatives under the enlarger and projected an image onto a sheet of photo paper.
She counted to seven, then took the paper and swished it in the vats of chemicals one after another, dropped it in the water bath, and walked out to the light side of the room. She fished the photo out and stared at it—there was Olivia in the driver’s seat of her convertible, jaw set, staring straight ahead. Beside her, Liza was pursing her lips and checking her lipstick in the rearview. It looked like a fashion shot from a magazine. Lucy never could have taken that picture even two months ago.
When she first started taking photos, she’d wait until she got that ping-y feeling in her gut and snap a picture of whatever was the source of it. Now she was more skilled at operating her camera, for one thing, but also more deliberate. The ping came much less often; she relied on her eye and she shot what was pretty. And what was wrong with that?
Lucy stared at the photo again and felt a little jolt of pride. Not because of its quality, but because of the girls who were in it, the fact that they were her friends now, her sisters. When she took this photo, they were waiting for her to get in with them.
“Nice shot,” someone said. It was Alex, standing next to her now. There was a time when his mere presence would have made her heart thud in her chest, her face flush, her whole body vibrate from his nearness. Then she only felt annoyed.
“Thanks.” Lucy didn’t even bother turning toward him.
All summer long, Lucy had spent nearly every moment of her waking hours thinking about this boy, who at the time had been her boyfriend. She wrote songs for him, and sent him presents and letters, looking giddily, breathlessly forward to his return. Then Alex came back from his summer in Colorado and promptly dumped her. And everything changed. Lucy now knew that while she had been pining away for him, he had been secretly seeing someone else.
“How are you?” His voice sounded tight.
“I’m fine,” she said. And she raised her eyebrows. They were not anything resembling friends. They had pretty much avoided each other until now.
“Look, I have to ask you something,” Alex said. “This is going to sound stupid.”
She finally turned. “What’s up?” He was looking at his shoes.
“When we were together . . .” He paused and took a breath. “Did you . . . did you think I was a bad kisser?”
Lucy wasn’t sure if she should laugh or just turn and walk away. “Wait,” she said. “Are you seriously asking me this?”
He was starting to blush. “Well, I was just wondering. . . .”
“You were fine, I suppose,” she said slowly.
“And . . . and did you think I was a good boyfriend?” He was practically whispering now. What the hell was going on?
“Well, not particularly,” Lucy said. And it was the truth, even discounting the way it had ended. He’d been self-centered and narcissistic. He hadn’t ever really listened to her. He assumed she liked whatever he liked, and yeah, she played along with that and that was her own fault. But still. This was probably the most interest he’d ever paid to her opinion about anything.
“But you really liked me at the time, though, right?”
Lucy felt her insides growing hot. What gave him the right to ask this, to ask any
of this? “What is all this about?”
Lucy looked at him more closely, and that’s when she noticed the blotchy skin, the puffy eyes. Had he been . . . crying?
Suddenly Lucy realized what must have happened. “She broke your heart, didn’t she,” Lucy said. But it wasn’t really a question.
Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “She who?” He was trying to sound casual.
“The girl you were seeing over the summer,” Lucy said calmly, as though Alex’s love life was something they always talked about.
“I wasn’t seeing . . .”
Lucy waved her hand. “Oh, please, Alex.” She never said his name while they were dating. Somehow it felt both too personal and not personal enough. Now she said it like it was an insult. “It doesn’t even matter anymore anyway, so there’s no point in lying about it.”
Their eyes met, and for perhaps the first time ever, they understood each other perfectly.
“I never meant . . . when I left for the summer, I didn’t plan on doing something like that.”
“I know,” she said.
Alex took a breath. “I met her in the middle of a thunderstorm,” he said. “It was one of those crazy ones that no reasonable person bothers trying to go out in.” He looked to the side, eyes unfocused, totally in his head then. “I was at the cabin by myself, just thinking about some photos I wanted to take down by the lake the next day, and I looked out the window and there was this girl running by. At first I thought something was wrong, because why else would she be out in that? Turned out she was just dancing in the rain like some . . . I don’t know what. And then the lightning started, and I went outside and said if she needed a place to wait until the storm was over, she could come in and . . .” Alex looked up then. “She did.”
Lucy tried to keep the tiny smile off her face. Despite the fact that he was kind of an idiot for telling her all of this unprompted, she was more interested than Alex could have imagined for reasons he never could have begun to understand. The girl Alex had been cheating with was another Heartbreaker, a fact that Lucy had only discovered by accident when looking at a photo Alex had taken of the girl—she had the Heartbreaker tattoo, which only showed up in the picture once Lucy herself had one. When she’d asked Olivia about it, Olivia hadn’t known anything. “Just a lucky coincidence, I guess,” Olivia had said. “We get around.” Then she’d smiled. “Good thing, though, I guess. It means he’ll get his.” And she’d left it at that. Lucy knew it didn’t matter anymore, but she couldn’t help being curious.
“Go on,” Lucy said.
“So she came inside and she was wearing this little sundress and it was all wet and like . . .” Alex’s face turned pink right up to the tips of his baby-sized ears, which she used to love so much. “I gave her a towel to dry off. But she just patted her face and stood there staring at me, standing there in this wet dress. And she had this smirk on her face and said, ‘Well, who knew you’d be this yummy.’ Then she dropped the towel and grabbed my hand and pulled me outside. The lightning was crazy, and I was actually kind of wondering if we were going to get electrocuted.” Alex looked up shyly, like a little boy. “I’m used to being the adventurous one, you know? Like the one who isn’t thinking about the safety of a thing. But she just didn’t give a crap. She made me dance with her, right there in the rain. It was, I don’t know . . . it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It felt like magic.”
Lucy nodded. The poor boy had no idea just how close he was to the truth.
They say love changes you. But maybe it’s heartbreak that really does. The Alex standing in front of her with tears in his eyes was a different person than the one she had known.
“Exactly when did all that happen?” Lucy asked. But she didn’t need to wait for him to answer. “It was the second night, wasn’t it?”
Lucy was flooded with memory. The first night Alex was away, she’d spent hours doing nothing but waiting to hear from him. She wouldn’t even take a shower, in case he called then and she missed it. But all she got was a single text around midnight. Long trip. It’s awesome here. Great photo-taking opps. She tried calling him right after, but it went straight to voice mail. “Just wanted to say glad you made it there okay,” she’d said. She’d rerecorded the message three times until she could stand the way her voice sounded.
The next day Lucy woke up queasy and anxious. She felt like he was so far away already, almost as though he was someone she’d imagined or made up. It was impossible to believe it had only been two days since she’d been kissing him good-bye. She’d reread every text message he’d ever sent her, and then she’d looked up the weather where he was in Colorado just to try and feel closer to him. When she saw that there was a tornado warning that day she’d felt worried for him but also weirdly relieved, because this gave her a good excuse to call him again. Somehow at the time it hadn’t occurred to her how wrong it was that she felt like she needed an “excuse” to call her own boyfriend.
“Um . . . yeah, that was the night.”
“Was she there when we talked on the phone?”
He nodded. He looked guilty. “I didn’t pick up at first because it felt weird to while she was there, even though nothing had happened or anything. I just thought it would be awkward to try to explain it.”
“To me or to her?”
Alex reached up and scratched the back of his neck. “Both, I guess. I was going to just try you back later, but you called and called. . . .” Lucy felt a prickling embarrassment for that other Lucy, the one who kept hitting the little green phone icon, four times in a row in fact, somehow unable to stop herself. She had had this strange and crazy jolt of worry when she couldn’t reach him the first time. It wasn’t because of the storm, even—the news said it was very mild. But rather this absurd and ridiculous feeling she couldn’t shake, that somehow in between when she’d last spoken to him and then, he simply stopped existing.
Ahead of time she’d written out a little list of things they might talk about—a very cute and friendly three-legged dog she’d seen on her street, the movie she’d gone to about mountain climbing (which she only went to because Alex liked it), and hey, by the way, what exactly did he think of hedgehogs as pets?
When he’d finally picked up, she’d felt her body flood with relief. But things got awkward quickly. Their “hey”s and “how are you”s overlapped and kept overlapping, and she could barely hear him anyway over the sound of the rain. The call was short. She hadn’t even gotten to bring up a single item on her list before he said, “Well, I won’t keep you.” Even though that was all she’d ever wanted.
She vowed that she’d let him call her next time. And so she devoted herself to taking pictures, to sending him presents, to waiting to hear from him. And wait she did. He texted every few days and sent an email here and there. Deep down she knew something was wrong, but she so didn’t want to believe it that she spent the entire summer trying to convince herself not to trust herself. It was an exhausting mistake.
“After you and I hung up was the first time we kissed,” Alex said. And she could tell by the rasp in his voice and the look in his eyes that Lucy’s presence was now completely irrelevant to this conversation. He just wanted to hear himself talk.
“So what’s she like?” Lucy said.
“She’s like . . . she’s just not like anyone else,” Alex said. “She’s completely fearless and spontaneous and crazy. When I asked her to come and visit me, she just hopped on a plane like it was nothing.”
“She’s here now?”
Alex nodded.
“Staying at your parents’ house?”
Alex shook his head, then looked embarrassed. “No, at a hotel. I’m paying for it, though. She asked me to find one for her when I asked her to come. I was excited about it. I thought it was just so that we’d have a place to be alone to . . .” He trailed off.
“Have sex?” Lucy finished. She’d assumed they had already done it, that he had lost his virginity to her, both from the way he’
d acted when he got back and from that picture she found. Still, it was weird to hear herself say it, to hear herself say it and have almost no feeling about it at all.
“Um . . . yeah,” he said. “I guess.” He turned away. “But I think she just wanted somewhere else to go so that she wouldn’t have to stay with me after she dumped me.”
“Hmm,” Lucy said. “Weird.” She did not like the way that she sounded now, so pinched, and sharp, and mean. She did not like the tiny smile she felt playing on her lips.
Alex looked so sad.
Lucy took a breath. Heartbreaker or not, she was still a human being. And the human response to someone’s suffering should never be joy, no matter how much of a jerk that someone might be. “It’s too bad that happened to you,” she said gently. “Having a broken heart sucks.”
“Thank you,” Alex said. And then tipped his head, as though something had just occurred to him. “Hey, so I was giving you space before because I thought I should or whatever, but you’re clearly okay so . . . does that mean we can be friends now?”
The Book of Love Page 3