Hearts Made for Breaking

by Jen Klein

  At first I don’t know where I’m going. I only know I’m driving past house after house decorated with holiday lights, either red and green or blue and white. I don’t realize I’m in the foothills until something sparks a memory of being parked on the side of the road in Ardy’s minivan and about what he said when we were here. So I keep driving, but now I’m doing it with intention. Now I’m aware of direction. Now I’m going up.

  The Ridge restaurant is perched at the top of the hills, surrounded by lush greenery dotted with palm trees. I park in a back corner of the big lot because it seems like a place that would have a valet, and I don’t have any cash with me. I walk between the rows of luxury cars and electric vehicles and past the sign to the front entrance, where a man in a shiny vest gives me side-eye as I rush past him into the lobby.

  Once I’m inside, a friendly hostess—who doesn’t seem bothered at all that I’m here by myself or that I tell her I only want a drink—leads me through a room of white-draped tables to the outdoor patio behind the restaurant. Minutes later I’m seated by the railing, a hot chocolate in hand, looking out at the view.

  It’s beautiful.

  The entire San Fernando Valley is clear, and way in the distance, past the Hollywood Hills, I think I can see the ocean. The Hollywood sign isn’t visible from here, but the city it represents is spread out in all its varied, sun-drenched glory. I have been told that every day—literally, every day—hundreds of people arrive in Los Angeles, coming for a dream. Usually young people who are aspiring actors or writers or directors, they leave their families and friends behind and cross the Sierra Nevada or travel along the Pacific coast to reach this place of concrete and celebrities, of earthquakes and opportunities. It’s a journey that often ends in poverty, in broken dreams, in—worst of all—anonymity.

  Me, however. There was no traveling, no turmoil, no trying.

  I didn’t choose it.

  Now, as I sit on the deck of the restaurant, jacket wrapped around me, the city before me is huge and incomprehensible and complicated, like my feelings for Ardy. It says one thing but offers another. It has a dark, intense gaze and words of promise, but it holds out a hand filled with regret and confusion.

  The fact is, I like Ardy. I like him so much I’m having a hard time thinking straight, and yet I’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. He’s a giant, unlocked mystery. A world yet to know, a world I want to know. But here we are, where the depths of who he may have been, who he still might be…they terrify me. I don’t know if I can handle it.

  Nothing in the world makes sense.

  I don’t know how long I sit there, looking out at the view, but eventually I realize it’s been too long since I paid my server, and the sun has dipped low, turning downtown Los Angeles into a dark silhouette on the horizon. I pull out my phone and take a picture of it.

  Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I attach it into a text and send it shooting across the hills to Ardy. Along with a message:

  You were right, I love it up here.

  Cooper was right: having two weeks to think and breathe was a good thing. Of course, it’s not like I saw much of him, because his family is hard-core about Hanukkah, which this year fell right on top of Christmas. Katie, however, basically spent the entire time in my house. Her mom went to New York on some sort of whirlwind romantic holiday with a businessman she met online, and Katie got parked with me. Since we don’t have a true guest room, she and I shared my queen bed the whole time she was with us.

  Katie said it was great having her mom out of her hair over the break, but she didn’t seem great, and once I heard her crying at night. The next day I tried to ask her if she was okay, but all she said was “I think I’m coming down with a cold.” I didn’t push it, because I didn’t want to be pushed on my own family’s dynamic. Over those two weeks Katie was an audience to several tense moments between my parents, as well as one full-out shouting match. She had witnessed glimpses of the fireworks throughout our friendship, but this was the first time she had a ringside seat to the true war zone. When twin door-slams—my mother out the front door and my father out the back—echoed through the house, Katie blinked at me. “Dude, that was intense. Are you okay?”

  I stayed silent.

  Ardy waited three awful days after my text from the Ridge to text me back. When he did, it was simple:

  I knew you’d like it.

  Under Katie’s watchful gaze, I then typed and erased several dozen versions of a return message, finally landing on this:

  I’d like to come here again with you. When you’re ready.

  Of course, Katie thought I shouldn’t write back at all, especially after so much time had elapsed. “He’s ghosting you,” she told me. “He’s doing you a favor. Now you don’t have to figure out how to end it.”

  “I don’t want to end it,” I told her. This time she was the one who stayed silent.

  But I only got one more message from Ardy during the winter break:

  See you in the new year.

  * * *

  January. My final semester of high school. I signed up for Advanced Art, which means that now I get to enjoy a perk. The senior art students are allowed to hang out in the classroom during lunch. Today, once again, I play vending-machine roulette and this time take my haul (yogurt-covered raisins, organic apple slices, sunflower seeds) to the empty art room. I grab a hunk of moist clay from the bin and hunker down at a long wooden table in the back, slapping the clay onto a piece of cardboard to play with after I eat my lunch. I’m almost done when I get a text from Ardy:

  Where are you?

  Although I was terrified about our first post-break encounter and sort of came here to hide from him, what I was truly hiding from was him-with-an-audience. Him solo, on the other hand…it’s time for that. I text back my location and wait. It doesn’t take long. Only three minutes pass before Ardy’s in the open door, bag slung diagonally across his lanky body, hair uncharacteristically more mussed than styled. As he lopes toward me, I see that his face looks different, too. I don’t know how often he usually shaves, but he’s clearly missed a couple of days; there’s a fine dusting of shadow over his chin and along his jawline. The greatest change, though, is in his eyes. They’re red-rimmed and exhausted.

  He pulls back the chair across from me and drops into it. Wordlessly, I hold out my half-full bag of sunflower seeds. He shakes his head.

  I shove my food aside, ripping off a piece of clay so I can start rolling it between my hands, trying to give my nervous energy a place to go. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Roughly a million years go by before I finally speak again. “Did Trissa lie?”

  “No.”

  My insides twist.

  No.

  But I don’t say it out loud. I only stare at him.

  He shakes his head, disgusted. “Apparently, I don’t have the luxury of moving on. I have to talk to you about it. I don’t have a choice.”

  I flash through my list of ex-not-boyfriends. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Ardy to do some digging of his own, to get a look at the parade of lies that make up my own history. Maybe he’s right. Maybe none of this is fair.

  “No one is forcing you.” I peer at his haunted eyes. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Really?” Ardy looks skeptical.

  I want to say it would be okay. But we both know that would be the biggest lie of all, so I stay silent. I shake my head.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” We gaze at each other, both of us so hurt, so upset. We don’t possess the words to fix what’s broken between us. He glances at my hands, then back to my face. “What are you making?”

  I look down at the clay in front of me. I’ve rolled out a flat circle topped with a little room. There are nondescript pieces of furniture around the ed
ges, and in the center there’s a little round table with four chairs. Sitting on one is a tiny, crude rendition of a person.

  Before I can answer, the bell rings loud and harsh. We both jump, startled. Ardy gives me a faint smile that breaks my heart. He reaches over and tears off a little piece of the unmolded clay chunk, fiddling with it for a second before setting what he’s made onto the chair across from my person. It’s another little person, this one with a bag crossed diagonally over its body.

  Ardy stands, shifting his own bag as he does. “I’ll come over after school.” I hesitate because, of course, my house can be a place of serenity or an absolute battlefield. But Ardy’s already seen—or at least heard—the war being waged. There won’t be any new information for him there. “Please.” His voice is low and soft, and my heart breaks again.

  I nod, and he turns and walks out of the room, leaving me with my tiny clay Lark and Ardy, still sitting across from each other in Ardy’s tiny clay kitchen.

  * * *

  When Ardy knocks, Dad is at work and Mom is mowing the backyard. I assume Leo is upstairs or playing video games in the TV room. Since no one is around to see, I motion him toward my bedroom. “Okay if we do this in whispers so we won’t get interrupted?”

  Ardy doesn’t move. “Are you allowed to have boys in there?”

  “No, are you kidding me? That’s why we have to whisper.” I roll my eyes. “Mom doesn’t even want Cooper to go in, and God knows he’s not going to get me pregnant.”

  Ardy still doesn’t budge. “I’d rather go with parental guidelines on this one.”

  Right. He’s a rule follower. I motion him into the sitting room. “Be my guest.”

  This room always seems so strange and formal. The chairs aren’t very comfortable. There’s no TV. It literally is intended just for conversation, which I guess in this case is fine because that’s what we’re here to do.

  Ardy sits in the uncomfortable green chair, and I lower myself into the uncomfortable orange chair, and then we gaze at each other for a long moment. I’m expecting him to start the discussion, but when he doesn’t, I ask the one word that means the most: “Why?”

  “Of course you’re asking that.” His lips twist in the faintest approximation of a smile. “You can’t imagine a world where you’re not beloved by everyone.”

  Um, who does he think he’s talking to right now? Hope?

  “You can do no wrong,” Ardy continues. “It was different for me.” He fixes his eyes on the worn carpet, his fingers twisting a button on his jacket. “In eleventh grade, the kids started saying I was weird. I don’t know why. Because I was in the bowling club, maybe. Or because I wore beanies and played paintball? Or just because they needed someone to say that about? No idea.”

  It’s not what I expected him to say, and I don’t know how to react, so I keep waiting. His face is tense, like he’s angry or hurt or both, and I want to hug him. But this doesn’t feel like a time when we should be hugging.

  Or when he would want that from me.

  “I heard the word that was used,” Ardy says. “Undateable.”

  I manage not to cringe visibly.

  “Still, it seemed like a joke,” Ardy says. “Or at least not a big deal. And it didn’t matter anyway, because I did date, a little. I went to dances, hooked up with girls.”

  There’s my jealousy again.

  “I could call two or maybe three of them ex-girlfriends, I guess,” he says. “They were offbeat types. Not like you, you know?”

  I do know, but only because I tracked down emo Krista and angry Elle before meeting Trissa.

  “Is that what you like?” I ask in a small voice. “Offbeat types?”

  Ardy pulls his gaze up and levels it at me. “I like people who are interesting,” he says. “You fit the bill.”

  I nod, taking the compliment even though the tone it’s delivered in is not exactly…complimentary.

  “Then Trissa came along,” he says. “She was different. Not because she wasn’t interesting—she was—but because she’s…I guess the word is mainstream. Everyone liked her, and she liked everyone. I thought she liked me, too.” He stops, running a hand through his hair. “This isn’t exactly something I wanted to talk about with you.”

  “Why?”

  He cocks his head, staring at me. “Maybe you don’t know this about guys, but we tend not to like it when our girlfriend thinks we’re a weirdo.”

  “I don’t think that.” I say it automatically, but then I scoot forward in my chair, keeping my eyes trained on his. Wanting him to really hear me. “I think you’re—”

  Amazing.

  Adorable.

  The best thing that ever happened to me.

  “—great.” It sounds weak the minute it comes out of my mouth.

  Ardy doesn’t exactly roll his eyes, but he does something close to it. “Trissa was into me, and then she wasn’t. I wish I could explain it more than that, but that’s all I have.”

  Makes sense. That’s all she told me, too.

  “I was upset,” Ardy says. “Not only because I liked her, but the day she broke up with me, her friends doubled down on the Undateable assholery. I never heard Trissa say it, but maybe she did—I don’t know.”

  I stay still, searching his face. It sounds awful, all of it: the name-calling, the breakup, not being able to explain any of it. It hurts to think of Ardy being in that kind of pain. The kind of pain that could lead him to…

  “What did you do?” I ask in a whisper.

  “I skipped school for a day or two,” he says. “I didn’t want to deal with it, you know?”

  Oh boy, do I know.

  “Seeing Trissa in the hall and not knowing what to say,” he continues. “Or hearing crap from her bitchy friends. My mom was shooting a pilot for a cable series, something about a paranormal investigator. She was at work more than usual, so I knew she wouldn’t notice if I was gone. I left her a note in case she got home before me, and I drove down to La Jolla.”

  “For the hawks?” That makes sense. If Ardy was upset, I can see how he’d want to do the thing that he loves.

  “Yeah, I was already a volunteer, and they had just started letting me fly alone.” Ardy shakes his head. “Except I went farther than I was supposed to. I wanted to try the actual falconing, where you take the bird out to catch animals. Rabbits or mice or whatever.”

  “Quail?” I ask.

  “If you can find them,” Ardy says. “But we didn’t. And when we were trying, my hawk took off. I guess we weren’t bonded enough.”

  I stare at him. “Your bird flew away?”

  “His name was Goliath.” Ardy nods. “Into the forest. I ran after him, and I even found him on a tree branch, but he wouldn’t come to me. I couldn’t get close.”

  “Were they mad? At the falconry, I mean?”

  “Yes,” Ardy says. “But I didn’t have to hear about it until later. Goliath eventually flew home by himself, whereas I got lost.”

  “In the woods?”

  “Yep.” Ardy gives me a wry look. “I got turned around while I was chasing him, and there was no phone service. I don’t know if I was going in circles or what, but it got darker, and I couldn’t find my way out, and eventually I realized I had to stop until the sun came up the next day.”

  “Are you serious?” It sounds like the scariest thing in the world.

  “Yeah, it sucked,” Ardy says. “It was cold and there were noises. Before I stopped walking, I tried to find the ocean so that I could follow the shoreline back to the falconry. Sometimes I thought I could hear the waves, but then it occurred to me that in the dark I could fall over a cliff. So I curled up next to a tree and hoped I wouldn’t get eaten by a bear.”

  I realize my mouth is open, and I close it.

  “When the sun came up, it still took a wh
ile—maybe three or four hours—but I finally came out by a road. I tried hitchhiking, and some couple picked me up. Thankfully, they were lovely, law-abiding citizens and not murderers, because I fell asleep in their backseat.”

  “How far away were you?” It’s close to making sense now: Ardy didn’t run away from Trissa; he was running after a hawk.

  “Five or six miles,” he says. “I got turned around in the forest. In the future you probably shouldn’t count on me for any navigational advice.”

  He’s talking about the future.

  “I won’t.” I give him a tiny smile, and this time he returns it. “Was your mom mad?”

  “No.” Ardy’s smile slips. “She was scared. I wasn’t clear in the note I left, because I thought I’d be back before her. I figured I’d throw it out and she’d never see it, so I scribbled something about how things sucked at school and I was going to fly away. When she came back and I was gone—and then I didn’t come home—she called the police. They read the note and found out I was known as a weirdo who’d gotten dumped. With my dad’s history, everyone assumed the worst.”

  My heart aches for him. It was all a big mistake. The cops coming to school, questioning Trissa, everything. “Why didn’t you tell Trissa?” I ask. “I mean, when it was over.”

  “I tried to,” he says. “She didn’t want to have anything to do with me. When I realized she’d blocked my number, I thought…why do I care what she thinks, anyway?”

  “But everyone else,” I say. “You could have told them.”

  “Tell them what?” he asks. “That it’s not just bowling and paintball, but sometimes on weekends I also like to go play with birds? It wasn’t their damn business, and I didn’t want to hear about how it made me even less dateable.”

  “You took me to play with the birds.” It comes out in the smallest of whispers. “You let me know about it.”

  “Yeah.” His smile is back. It’s only a half smile, but it’s there. “I guess that was kind of a test. To see if you were too cool for my weirdness.”