The Brokenhearted

by Amelia Kahaney

  DEDICATION

  For my parents, who gave me wings, and for Gabriel, who gave me someplace warm to land.

  EPIGRAPH

  Let us dream of blood and pulse and ebb and flow. Let us consider tide and beat and throb and hum. Let us unweave the web of artery and vein, the fluttering jetties of the valves, the coursing of ions from cell to cell, the sodium that is your soul, the potassium that is your personality, the calcium that is your character.

  —Brian Doyle

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  After

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AFTER

  A girl, alone.

  Legs tucked up inside a baggy black hoodie, she perches on a metal grate atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in Bedlam City. She is watchful, still and silent as a gargoyle. The city heaves beneath her, but all she can hear this high up is the whistling of an icy wind.

  This building, Fleet Tower, shares her name. When her parents die, she will inherit all eighty-seven stories of it. Lucky girl, the papers say. But Anthem Fleet’s luck ran out a long time ago.

  Beneath her, in the penthouse, is her bedroom. Inside it, objects she once loved. The varnished mahogany ballet barre bolted to the wall, where she practiced till her feet bled. The king-size bed she looked forward to crawling into each night, back when sleep came easily. Underneath the bed, a metal lockbox. The place she kept everything he gave her, until what he gave her turned into something no box could contain, something no girl would want to keep.

  Above her, an indifferent sky shot through with searchlights, long fingers of light groping at the purply dusk. Gray thunderheads forming over a bruise-colored lake. Scattered fires raging, always raging, downtown.

  And inside her, a cold steel ball. A ticking bomb that beats just like a heart. Pain and rage in equal measure. Tick tock.

  While she sits and watches, waiting for nightfall, she makes a list of lies.

  Time heals all wounds. Not all of them, it turns out. Some wounds cut too deep, and some kinds of heartbreak aren’t temporary.

  There’s something good inside everyone. Some people are born into this world to do harm. She knows this now but wishes she didn’t. Nothing matters to her more than keeping those people away from the ones who can’t fight back. Away from the kind of person she used to be, before.

  You only live once. What she’s been through these past months should have killed her, but it didn’t. She has a second life now, one she would never have chosen, but it’s all she’s got. Her life, her little square of rooftop, and a heart that beats too furiously.

  She narrows her green eyes to slits and stands up, swinging her arms a little, bracing herself for the jump. She turns her gaze to the darkening streets downtown, to the sprawling, seething mass of inhumanity beyond the Midland River, better known these days as the Crime Line. The jagged scar of the river is what separates the gleaming north side from the lawless south.

  Past the Crime Line, somewhere in the maze of the South Side, is where Anthem went from whole to brokenhearted. Where she stopped being the girl with all the promise in the world and turned into a shattered, damaged thing.

  And every day since then, Bedlam City and the people in it have managed to break her heart all over again. She’s learned this world is a beast, a bully that keeps on kicking you long after you’re down.

  In Bedlam, you either learn to take a beating, or you find a way to fight back.

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 1

  Here’s the choreography: school, ballet, homework, sleep. Repeat the steps until you turn eighteen, keep perfect time, twirl like the ballerina in a jewelry box, and someday it will all pay off. Keep the routine, and the routine will keep you safe. This is what I’ve been brought up to believe.

  But today, just this once, I can’t.

  As I walk through the front door of 87P, I compose my face. I shrug my ballet bag off my sore shoulders and drop it next to the statue looming next to the coat closet—a black marble griffin with its sharp teeth bared, oversize hundred-dollar bills clutched in its claws.

  “Stop staring,” I whisper to the marble beast, reaching up a hand to cover its beady eyes.

  I pass our sunken sitting room, the plush white of it blazing orange as the sun falls below the horizon, and spot my father through the sliding glass doors. He speaks in low tones to Serge, his right hand, driver, and bodyguard, while pacing on the balcony. Serge’s back is to the window, but I see his head nodding yes, his huge shoulders straining against his usual black suit. When my father turns around and sees me through the glass doors, he flashes me one of his showstopper smiles, his handsome, unlined face radiating an easy confidence that sells buildings all over Bedlam. Tonight he wears his black tailcoat and a white bow tie. The full penguin, he calls it.

  I pad down the long hallway toward the master bedroom, rolling my neck from side to side and listening to each vertebra pop and crack.

  “Mom?” I call as I take a few tentative steps inside my parents’ empty bedroom suite. I brace myself for whatever version of my mother awaits me. Will it be Vivirax-mellowed Helene? Liftivia-energized Helene? Giggly, flushed Helene, deep into a bottle of Amnesia Vineyards chardonnay? Heading toward my mother’s massive dressing room, I slide my eyes along the enormous oil portrait of twelve-year-old Regina sitting cross-legged in a field of wildflowers, a perfect miniature version of my mother. Regina with her big blue eyes, imperious lips above a pointed chin, white-blond hair hanging halfway down her back. The sister I never had. The daughter my mother wishes she still had.

  But when I enter the dressing room, Helene isn’t there. Instead, I’m met with my dress, light as air and fluttering a little on its hanger. I stare at the princess-cut gown, the iridescent material glowing white, blue, pink, and purple all at once, like the sky at dawn reflected off an ocean. This is more than a dress, I realize. It’s a promise. Of a certain kind of night. Of the right kind of future.

  And I can’t put it on.

  The evening was supposed to go like this: I would wash up after ballet practice, put on this dress my mother picked out, and head to the mayor’s house for the South Side Orphans’ Association Ball. I would nod, smile, make polite, demure conversation, and dance with my boyfriend of six months, Will Hansen, under a twinkling chandelier. Then Will a
nd I would slip off to a suite at the Bedlam Grande. He would lay me down on the bed, my long red hair fanning out in all directions, and deflower me. It would hurt a little, according to my best friend, Zahra, or maybe it wouldn’t. We would lie there together until the wee hours, my parents assuming we were out at the heavily secured Young Philanthropists after-party in the hotel lobby. As the sun rose over the Bedlam skyline, Will would drive me home in his silver Huntley. I would kiss him good-bye and watch his car crawl quietly away, rejoicing in my bright future with the district attorney’s son.

  The vision pops like a soap bubble when my mother joins me in the closet, luminous in her seaglass-colored ball gown. Her golden hair is wound into a low, loose bun, and her angular face glows in the pinkish light.

  “Hello, darling,” she murmurs when she sees me. Our eyes meet in the gilded, pink-lit mirror of her ivory vanity, where she keeps her gold-handled makeup brushes, her lipsticks and shadows, lined up with military precision. In one corner are five crystal jars that hold all her prescriptions. Her heavy-lidded gray eyes are full of Viviraxed calm as she gestures toward the dress. “I had it steamed.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I start, a hot blush crawling up my chest. “But . . . I can’t go tonight. I’m sick. I threw up in the middle of ballet.”

  I wrap my arms around my midsection and hunch over, willing my face to drain of all color. Staring back at me in the mirror is a damp-looking redhead, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, her pale skin covered in a constellation of ginger freckles. Next to the perfect human specimen that is Helene Fleet, I really do look ill.

  Her eyes narrow as she studies me in the mirror, but I can’t quite tell if she’s concerned or just annoyed. She walks toward me and places a cool, smooth hand on my forehead. “You feel fine,” she murmurs. “Maybe you just need to lay down for a little while. Have you had some water?”

  Just then, my father stalks into the dressing room, his skyscraper-shaped cuff links jingling in his palm. “Five minutes, my loves.”

  “She’s sick.” My mother frowns, her lower lip sticking out like a pouting child’s, her disappointment evident. “A stomach bug. She says she’s not going.”

  “Not going?” My dad’s smile droops. He turns and looks at me sideways, waiting for the punch line. “Of course you’re going. Chin up, kitten. The Fleets never get sick.”

  “I know, Dad,” I say, staring at the floor. I’ve been watching the parade of frail South Side children at the start of the Orphans’ Ball since I was ten. I can almost smell the prime rib, can almost taste the puréed peas dotted with flecks of gold the mayor serves us once the orphans are whisked away. “But I just don’t—”

  “Think of poor Will,” my mother chides, turning away to press a button beneath the vanity table. Instantly, her mirror slides up the wall, revealing dozens of steel jewelry drawers behind it, each one holding an individual necklace or bracelet or a couple of pairs of earrings. “He’ll be bored stiff without you.”

  Poor Will. My nose wrinkles. If only you knew what I was supposed to do with poor Will tonight. “Will is a big boy. I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say quietly.

  When Will first asked me out, it felt like winning a prize. At Cathedral Day School, Will is practically royalty: class president, debate champion, and the leading man in all the school plays. I’m the ballet nerd, the perfect student whose shyness gets interpreted as snobbery. When Will began to pay attention to me, I became visible. Not just a brain but a flesh-and-blood girl. So of course I swooned over the flowers he sent, the feeling of walking down the halls with his arm around my shoulder—any girl with a pulse would have done the same.

  But everything I felt at first has faded. The more Will insists it’s time we take things further, the less I want to. This morning during mass, wedged in the center of the fifth pew from the altar, I whispered to him that I might not be ready for the suite at the Grande. That maybe dancing under the mayor’s crystal chandelier was as far as things should go tonight. His expression froze, then twisted into a smirk. “I can think of a few girls who would be happy to take your place,” he said, and for an instant I saw in his faded blue eyes that he wasn’t joking. Then he put his school-president-perfect mask back on and smiled. “Kidding. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”

  Helene presses a series of numbers into a glowing panel next to the jewelry safe. After a low beep, she pulls out the bottom drawer and selects a platinum-and-diamond necklace set with seven rubies the size of peppermints. She holds it up to her neck, the jewels dripping down her collarbone.

  “Gorgeous, Leenie,” my father murmurs approvingly, moving to fasten the clasp at the nape of her neck.

  “It’s perfect,” I breathe. I think back to last Valentine’s Day when he gave it to her, whispering to me that night that it was a steal at $50,000. “You look beautiful.”

  My mother smiles wanly at me before closing the drawer and lowering the mirror again. “Thank you. But tonight is all about the orphans.”

  Tonight is definitely not all about the orphans. My parents rely on these events to get the ear of the mayor and other local politicians. The real estate market in North Bedlam is cutthroat. As developers, Helene and Harris have to constantly grease the political wheels—including schmoozing with District Attorney Hansen and Mayor Marks—for the best building sites. “I’ll just rest here awhile. If I feel better, I’ll take a cab to the ball later,” I suggest.

  “I hope it isn’t the flu,” Helene says. “You can’t afford a flu right now, with rehearsals for Giselle and your studies and—”

  “Let’s leave Anthem be, darling. She’s already a workaholic just like her parents,” my dad interrupts, winking at me so I know he’s on my side. “We’ll keep an eye on Will for you, kitten. Just take it easy tonight.”

  My mother sighs. “Lily’s here until nine.”

  I nod. Lily is our cook, and I can probably convince her to leave a little early. My parents check the mirror for one final appraisal. In this light, they look twenty-five. It’s as if they never age. I form my hands into the shape of a camera and squint through the imaginary lens.

  “Picture perfect?” Harris asks, his arm around Helene’s waist.

  “The perfect couple,” I reply. And in this instant, I almost believe it.

  If not for the drowned blond beauty found floating in Lake Morass eighteen years ago, anyone would think we had it all. But Regina is the fly in our amber, the error in our opal, the crack in our façade. Harris has his buildings to console him. Helene does, too, along with her charities, her pills, her chardonnay.

  Which just leaves me.

  A year after Regina’s life ended, mine began. I’m the replacement daughter, the girl who was supposed to make everything better. A living, breathing antidepressant. Two dry kisses and one cold compress later, the perfect couple is off to the ball, leaving their far-from-perfect daughter in the dressing room to rest. When they’re gone, I stay in the closet awhile, to stare at my all-too-ordinary face in the mirror.

  CHAPTER 2

  By ten, Zahra and I are far away from the tinkling champagne flutes at the Orphans’ Ball, racing through the black streets of the riverfront district—a once-industrial section of the North Side that abuts the Midland River—toward a warehouse party just east of the Bridge of Forgetting. We’re both wrapped in long wool coats, freezing in the drizzly late-February air.

  “This place is giving me Bedhead,” I mutter through chattering teeth. I shove a gloved hand into my pocket, my index finger searching out the round red button on my pepper spray key chain. Even fearless Zahra looks a little unnerved by the dimly lit neighborhood, chewing her cuticles and scanning everything around us for clues.

  “I think it’s this way.” Z aims her wide-set violet eyes in the direction of a street sign twirling on its pole like a weathervane. We’re at the corner of Arsenic Avenue and Thorn, both of which are unfamiliar streets. I almost never leave Upper Bedlam—the district made up of the neighborhoods of Lakes
ide, Church Hill, Museum Mile, and Bankers Alley—where things are safe and orderly. But staying home and brooding about Will was even less appealing than one of Zahra’s “underground” parties in a rough part of town.

  “Aha,” Z says triumphantly when we reach the corner. She grabs me by the crook of my elbow and pulls me toward a row of industrial warehouses scrawled with graffiti, hunched against the wind.

  The sidewalk is deserted but for a couple of drunk girls teetering past us on five-inch heels, their laughter whiskey-scented and high-pitched. The first four buildings on the block are semidemolished, their windows either shattered or covered over with rotting boards, but the last one in the row blazes with multicolored light.

  “Looks great, right?” Z says, her hips already swaying to the thumping bass of “Kiss Me on the Apocalips” by Suicidal Stepchild. It’s been this way since the first time I met her, when she snuck into my kitchen during a charity luncheon my mother was hosting. Six-year-old Zahra scandalized me by stealing a whole tray of petit fours before lunch was even served, demanding that I lead her to my room where we could devour the treats. Zahra’s always been daring, up for anything, anytime. Me, I need a lot of convincing to choose new and risky over safe and predictable. Always have.

  I shrug, wishing I’d stayed home with an Epsom salt bubble bath and my tried-and-true DVD of Olga Inkarova’s all-time best ballet performances. If I’d stayed home, I would be asleep by now, ready to get up early and head to the studio, with an hour of ballet to myself before our Saturday morning practice. This is the year I get to try out for the Bedlam Ballet Corps, when I find out if my twelve years of dedication to ballet have been enough to make a career out of it.

  As we walk closer to the massive warehouse, a rainbow of colored lights passes over us, and doubt starts bubbling up inside me like acid indigestion. Is this party really worth a sluggish day at ballet tomorrow? “Are you sure we should be here, Z? Because I don’t think—”