The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers

by Lynn Weingarten

“Paisley, come meet our brand-new friend,” Olivia said.

  Paisley stood, lifting the girl up with him, then placed her back in the chair. She held on to the headphone cord. He took the headphones from around his neck and put them over her ears. Then he patted her on the head. She sat there blinking her enormous eyes, her mouth curled down into a pudgy little pout. He turned and made his way toward them, slowly and gracefully like he was doing an underwater ballet.

  “Hello, lovelies,” he said. He pulled Olivia, Liza, and Gil in for a hug.

  “And hello, brand-new friend,” Paisley said. “And who might you be?”

  “This is Lucy,” Gil said. “She . . .”

  “No, I’m not ‘the bitch’ who stole anyone’s anything,” Liza said loudly. Lucy turned. Liza had spun around and was pointing at a girl with a long, blonde braid draped over one shoulder standing a couple feet away with two friends huddled behind her. “Boyfriends are not brand-fucking-new MacBooks. If anyone’s boyfriend left anyone, he did so because he wanted to. And you”—Liza pointed to the friends—“would be wise to put a muzzle on your friend here, lest she embarrass herself with that mouth of hers.” Liza reached out and grabbed the girl under the chin and gave the girl’s face a little shake. “Anyway.” Liza turned just as she was slipping a container of what looked like lip balm back into her purse. She blinked innocently. “You were saying?”

  Paisley caught Lucy’s eye and raised a perfect black eyebrow. “They’re a nonstop party, these girls, no?” He smirked at Lucy. Lucy gave him a tiny smile back.

  “When are you going to Tokyo again?” Gil asked. She turned to Lucy and said, “Paisley is being flown in by the guy at Insurance Office.”

  “Why’s an insurance office flying you to Tokyo?”

  Paisley laughed.

  “Um, hellew, it’s a very important club?” the girl in white called out from her chair, where she’d been eavesdropping.

  Liza put her arm around Lucy. “Lucy probably hasn’t even heard of you.”

  Lucy stared at her feet. “I haven’t heard of a lot of things.”

  When she looked back up, Paisley was smiling at her. “The less random stuff you hear about, the more room in your ears for music, that’s what I always say. The show was supposed to be next week, but they moved it up a week. I’m leaving tonight. Heading to the airport in oh . . .” He tapped the empty spot on his wrist where a watch would have been. Then took a shiny black phone out of his pocket and poked at it. Then shook it. “Hmmm,” he said. “Guess it wasn’t fire resistant after all. Vivs, sweetie, how much time do I have?” he called out behind him.

  “You were supposed to leave fifteen minutes ago,” the girl yelled back.

  “In fifteen minutes ago, apparently,” he said. “Hey, does your bird speak Japanese, Bird Girl? You and birdie want to come to Tokyo?”

  “Um,” Lucy said. She knew she was expected to flirt back then. To sass it up the way Liza would have. “We can’t. Birdie has a fear of flying,” Lucy said. She cringed at hearing herself.

  But Paisley just smiled. “You—” He pointed at Lucy, swirled his finger around like he was stirring something in the air. “You are refreshingly adorable. I like you.” Then he turned back toward the girl in white. “Vivs, would you tell the car service we’ll be outside in, like, two minutes?” The girl in white nodded and smiled then, like being asked to do something for Paisley was the biggest honor of her life.

  “Finally,” she said. “We get to leave this lame place.”

  “Oh that poor girl,” Gil whispered to Lucy, shaking her head.

  Paisley turned toward Lucy as he passed. He looked straight at her, then up at the bird on her head. “Hey, little birdie, tell your friend I said it was very nice to meet her. Can you do that for me, birdie?” He reached out and pet it. Then turned to go.

  “Chirp chirp,” Lucy said. She wasn’t sure it was loud enough to hear.

  And as he walked, Paisley broke out laughing like this was the funniest joke he’d ever heard.

  “Too bad,” Liza said. “If it weren’t for the obvious, he could have been a good Chrys for you.”

  “Chrys?”

  “Chrysalis Heart,” Olivia said. “The one you break that changes you.”

  “But I’m . . . I mean, I’m sure I’m not his type. I’m not nearly . . .”

  “Cool enough?” Liza finished. “But that’s entirely the point. I think you misunderstand who likes who and why. I mean, what Paisley wouldn’t like about you is your lack of a penis, not your lack of coolness.”

  “Oh,” said Lucy. She blushed.

  “Aw, you thought he was flirting with you, didn’t you?” Liza said. And then she laughed.

  “There are two mistakes so many girls make when they get past the initial flirting stage and are trying to get a guy long term,” said Olivia. “She’ll think a guy will love her if she’s similar to him, so she’ll pretend to like the same movies or the same music or the same whatevers. Or she’ll think a guy will like her if she fawns over him and giggles and coos at everything he says. Thing is, you can maybe get a guy to like you that way, kind of, a little bit. But if we’re talking long-term love, it doesn’t really work like that.”

  Lucy felt her stomach tighten. “How does it work then?”

  Olivia smiled. “Pick someone, Li-Li.”

  Liza tapped her lip. “The dude over there, who thinks it’s open-mic night.” Liza pointed through the glass doors toward a tall, painfully skinny guy, in a bright green T-shirt with a picture of his own face printed on it. Both his real face and his T-shirt face showcased a mouthful of crooked teeth and a pair of enormous ears. He was standing in the center of a little group of people talking animatedly.

  “Gil,” Olivia said. “Show her how it’s done.”

  Gil nodded, then looked at Lucy and winked.

  “Watch and learn, ginger chew,” Olivia said.

  They walked through the sliding-glass doors and stood off to the side about fifteen feet away from where he was in the middle of telling a story. The half-dozen people surrounding him were hanging on his every word. “So, this is me,” he was saying. He started dancing, arms up, eyes squeezed shut. “And this is her . . .” He stuck his butt out and shook it around. “Moral of the story?” He did some complicated hand gestures that made no sense to Lucy. “Guess that’s just what the ladies like.” Then he winked. Everyone burst out laughing. A guy reached out and gave him a fist bump. A pretty girl with wavy, brown hair, who’d been standing up near the front laughing loud and hard, was staring up at him blinking her big, round, googly eyes.

  “You are soo freaking funny,” she said. “Seriously, I just peed a little!”

  The guy raised his eyebrows.

  “I mean, not in a gross way,” she said quickly. “I’m just kidding. I was making a joke too! But yours are funnier.”

  The guy shrugged. “Thanks, babe.” He gave her the up and down, but looked bored.

  Olivia leaned over toward Lucy and whispered, “A guy might kind of like a girl at first because she seems to like him for whatever everyone likes him for, for the obvious stuff, but if you want him to feel like you are his air, his water, and his light in the long term, that’s not really gonna cut it.”

  Gil slipped between the guy and the girl. Gil’s face had transformed, every bit of sweetness and warmth was gone. “Good job with the jokes there,” Gil said. Her voice sounded different too, deeper. “Very clever.” But the way she was talking, it sounded like she didn’t think he was clever at all.

  The guy stared at her with this strange look on his face, part surprised, part hurt, part interested, and entirely confused.

  Olivia was standing right next to Lucy; she could feel her breath when Olivia whispered, “For anything more than that first spark, you shouldn’t be asking yourself what is he like or what does he like, but what is he missing. What is he insecure about? Show him you have what he lacks or lack what he wishes he didn’t have. Or that you can appreciate the part
s of him that no one else seems to or the parts he hates but feels stuck with.”

  Olivia motioned with her chin and they looked back up at Gil. “You’re cute enough not to need the jokes though.” She said it not like she was giving him a compliment, but like she was just stating a fact.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m a spicy-hot man steak.” He flexed each of his skinny arms and kissed his walnut-sized biceps.

  Gil stared at him, blinked, and did not smile, just shrugged. Then turned and walked back to her friends.

  “Okay, so on one hand what Gil just did was a little off-putting. The thing is, he’s a guy who’s used to being in control socially, who’s used to being a step ahead of everyone. And what she just did shook him out of that. He’s trying to seem unaffected,” said Olivia. “But look at the tips of his ears.” His ears were bright red. He said something to his friend, then scratched the back of his neck. “Five-four-three-two . . .”

  Olivia whispered “one” and the guy looked up at Gil’s back. And the tips of his ears got redder.

  “He’s a guy who’s used to being told his best quality is that he’s funny,” Olivia said. “He’s probably convinced himself that being funny is more important than being hot, that hot guys are idiots anyway. He has decided not to want what he thinks he can’t have, which is hotness. It’s something a lot of people do as a defense thing, decide they don’t want something just because they think it’s un-gettable. But Gil has just given him the idea that maybe it’s okay to want it. Look at how he’s standing now. His back is straighter and his shoulders are back farther. His perception of himself is already changing. If we stand here for long enough, he’ll find a reason to come over. He’ll find it impossible not to.”

  “If Gilly wanted to she could have him sobbing onto his skinny little arm in a month,” Liza said. She put her arm around Gil.

  Olivia shook her head. “Two weeks. When someone’s whole perception of himself shifts because of how you see him, you suddenly become very, very important. When people love you, it’s because you’ve made them fall in love with themselves and the rest of the world. And that’s not accomplished through telling them how wonderful they are, but through making both them and the world seem more how they wish it was. Show the bored-by-everything guy how exciting life can be if he’s with you. Show the dumb guy who’s insecure about his dumbness that he understands the world on a primal level that no one else quite gets. This is a long-term thing; you can do that for your entire relationship.”

  “But what if . . .” Lucy took a breath. “What if the person is someone you already know? So . . .” She coughed and looked down. “So meeting you can’t be what changes things for them?”

  Olivia shrugged. “It’s never too late to start things over. People have awfully short memories when it comes to feelings. They’re practically goldfish.”

  “And while you’re making him suddenly feel like the guy he always wanted to be,” Liza said, “little fishy won’t even feel your hook sinking deeper and deeper into him, all the way to the center of his heart. Which is where your hook will stay. Until you decide to yank it out.”

  Lucy winced.

  Gil leaned in close. “Just because you know where a soft spot is doesn’t mean you have to aim for it. You don’t ever have to do anything you think is wrong.”

  “It’s not about right and wrong.” Olivia shook her head. “It’s about nature and how it works.”

  “Besides”—Liza shrugged—“it’s fun.”

  “We kind of have . . . different philosophies about some of this,” Gil said with a small smile.

  “But this is all so . . .” Lucy stopped. The idea that something that felt so magical could have a formula, a recipe, struck her as both fascinating and terrible.

  “It feels weird to think about it like that,” Gil said. “I know. But there are a lot of things that feel like magic just because we don’t understand them yet. But understanding them doesn’t make them less magical . . .” Gil’s phone buzzed and she looked down at it. When she looked up, Olivia said, “Now?”

  Gil nodded.

  “All right then. Good luck, Popsicle,” Olivia said. “We’ll see you in a bit.”

  Liza and Olivia started walking toward the back patio. On the way, Liza snatched a guy’s drink right out of his hand. He smiled and followed them.

  “Come on, Lu,” Gil said. “You’re . . .”

  “Gil?”

  Gil turned. Lucy turned too. There was a guy standing there, staring at her.

  “Oh, wow!” he said. “I can’t believe it’s really you.” He grinned at her from behind thick glasses. He was wiry and small, unremarkable looking, except for the fact that his face was blooming into a face-splitting smile. Lucy could practically see the light coming off of him, shimmering gold.

  “Hey,” Gil said. There was something strange in her tone, something Lucy couldn’t place. “Good to see you. But we were just on our way somewhere.”

  “Okay,” the guy said. He paused. “But I miss you, you know.” He smiled again, but the light was gone from it now.

  “We’ll hang out soon, okay?” Gil said. But it was obvious that she didn’t really mean it. Gil’s face was expressionless.

  Lucy stared at the guy’s back as he walked away. After a few seconds, he turned and waved. He looked so sad.

  “Who was that?” Lucy said.

  “Will,” Gil said. “We were best friends once.”

  “Did you . . . ,” Lucy started to ask. She bit her lip. She wanted to ask if Gil had broken his heart.

  “The opposite.” Gil smiled. There was no bittersweet sadness there, nothing in that smile but teeth. “I made the mistake of falling in love with him. I loved him for years, and he loved me too, but only as a friend. And there was nothing he could do about that. So he . . .” She pointed to her heart. “He didn’t mean to.”

  “And that’s when you became . . . ?”

  “That’s when I became a Heartbreaker. My Chrys was this friend of his who I didn’t know very well but who always had a crush on me. I still feel bad about that; it really hurt him. We don’t have the same rule about Chryses that we do the rest of the time. Anyone’s fair game for that.”

  “And you and Will aren’t friends anymore?”

  Gil shook her head. “We couldn’t be,” she said simply. “Will never even knew what happened, that he broke my heart and all that. I think he just thought we grew apart.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway!” She took Lucy’s hand. “Come on. Someone’s here to see you.”

  “To see me?”

  “Yup,” said Gil. “Let’s go get him. I think he’s nervous about coming inside.”

  Gil led Lucy toward the front of the house.

  They passed a girl and a guy talking on the stairs.

  “It was really awesome though,” the guy was saying. “Like they didn’t end up taking our tickets so we got to use them again the next time.”

  “You know, that’s like this time my sister and I . . . ,” the girl started to say.

  But the guy kept talking. “And so the next time, we went in but we had to change the date on them. I have a friend with really neat handwriting so he . . .”

  “They’ve just met,” Gil whispered, “and he’s really nervous. He likes her and he’s trying so hard to impress her. She thought he was cute at first but now she’s thinking he’s a narcissistic ass because he won’t let her get a single word in. In three minutes, she’ll get up and pretend to have to go to the bathroom and she won’t come back. Which is too bad because they would have been perfect for each other. But that will be it. Or would have been . . .”

  Gil pulled what looked like a case of mints out of her pocket. As she walked by, she dropped a tiny, black pellet into the guy’s drink. He didn’t notice.

  “. . . we ended up getting to go backstage, which I was so excited about.”

  The guy brought his cup to his lips and took a sip. He put the cup back down and opened his mouth. But no wo
rds came out. He opened his eyes wide.

  “That’s cool. My sister and I got to go backstage at a Monster Hands show last week,” the girl said. “It was . . .”

  Gil linked her arm through Lucy’s and pulled her away. “For five minutes he’ll be silent, and she’ll finally get a chance to talk. And if they manage not to mess it up, they will fall madly in love.” She grinned at Lucy. “Oh, look!” Gil pointed. “There he is.”

  Standing under a tree near the end of the driveway was Colin from the day before, playing with the strap of his red plastic watch.

  Gil leaned over and whispered in Lucy’s ear. “Just do what we taught you, okay?” And then she gave her a little push.

  “You’re not coming?”

  Gil shook her head. “He’s here to see you. I’ll just be over there on the phone. If it starts going badly, just motion to me and I’ll come help, okay?”

  Lucy felt her stomach tighten. She didn’t want to do this. But Gil was watching and Gil had the magic. Which meant that if she wanted Alex back, somehow this guy was the route to him. So Lucy would try her best. She had to.

  Lucy studied Colin, took in all she could.

  He was slouching the way he had been the day before, like someone who didn’t know how tall he was. And he had his shoulders slightly raised, like he was bracing himself for something. He was fiddling with his watch uncomfortably. So what did that all mean? It meant he didn’t feel the six foot two inches of his height. He didn’t feel powerful. He felt small. He was scared and uncomfortable.

  Lucy cocked her head to the side. She forced herself to smile and in her head she said, I own this place. When their eyes met, he blushed.

  “I like your bird,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Lucy. “I’ve trained her to just sit there. As you can see, she’s really good at it.”

  Colin laughed. He looked down at that floppy piece of rubber on his shoe. “So, um, how do you know Gil?”

  “From school. We were in a class together last year,” said Lucy.

  Colin nodded. “I think she might be trying to set us up,” he whispered.

  “No way,” Lucy said. She smiled. Colin was smiling too. Lucy felt something warming inside her.