The Brokenhearted

by Amelia Kahaney

  Every morning my mother comes in and sits at the foot of my bed, feeling my forehead, her face pinched with concern. Still so hot, she says wonderingly, pulling her hand away quickly, as if I’ve burned her. It seems my new heart has given me the ability to generate heat in my body just by concentrating hard, holding my breath a little, and balling my hands into fists.

  I mumble something from deep within the three extra blankets my mother has piled onto my bed, trying to reassure her just enough to avoid a visit from Dr. Sprogue, but not so much that they’ll question my skipping school. I dutifully swallow the fever-reducing pills she brings me, gulping water from a glass already starting to sweat on my nightstand and smiling weakly, whispering Thanks, Mommy before shutting my eyes again to sleep the “flu” off. Mostly, my parents leave me be, relying on Lily to check in every couple of hours while they’re at the office. Some evenings, both of them come home so late that they skip coming in to see me altogether.

  I mark the start of each day by deleting whatever text Will has sent me in the night. Usually it’ll say Miss your face or Can’t wait to hold your hand again, but by the morning of the fourth day, he’s grown tired of waiting. The latest text, sent at 2:00 A.M., says, You can hide, but not forever.

  When Lily comes with a bowl of rice porridge for me, I can tell by her expression that I’m a sorry sight. “Ant,” she says gently, her green eyes soft and sympathetic, “I’m going to run you a bath. I have some lavender oil—it’ll be just the thing to heal you. And if you ever want to talk,” she says, lowering her voice, “about anything—I’m here.”

  I shake my head and turn toward the wall. “No thanks,” I mumble, unable to meet Lily’s compassionate eyes.

  She runs it anyway, and the smell of lavender oil fills my room. My hair is greasy and my scalp itches, but I just lie there, stuck like a fly trapped between a window and a screen. I can’t find the energy or the will to get up and do it. The weight of Gavin’s death pins me to the bed, so heavy I still can’t summon the energy to cry.

  On Friday, after I’ve stayed home from school nearly a week, Zahra tells me she is coming over. She’s been texting and calling, but I don’t have the energy. The phone sits in my bathroom on its charger, vibrating. Once or twice a day I write back, something along the lines of:

  Still sick

  Or, when she asks if something bad happened:

  No, just sick as a dog

  This is the kind of text that sends Zahra into a rage: the unspecific information, the lack of detail, the obviousness of the excuse. It reeks of me keeping secrets. And I’m supposed to be done with all that, after my disappearance. I’m supposed to be the same Anthem I always was, the girl who tells Zahra everything. Before, no detail was too small to share with Zahra. If I was stuck somewhere without a tampon and bled on my jeans, she’d want to know how big the spot was. That was how things used to be, anyway. But now I’ve got nothing to give her but lies and half-truths. I’m as incapable of being a friend as I am of showering, of eating, of bothering to raise my blinds and look out the window.

  Before I can write back to her and tell her not to come, she arrives, carrying a bouquet of purple dahlias so big it obscures her head.

  “That was fast,” I croak. She must have texted me when she was already standing outside the building.

  Z lays the massive bouquet next to me in bed, looking down on me as if I’m a corpse and she’s come to pay her final respects. “When’s the last time you opened a window in here?” she says, wrinkling her nose.

  She heads to the sliding glass doors that lead to my balcony, yanks the cord that opens the wooden blinds, and slides both doors open. “Much better. You need air, sweetie. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look terrible.”

  I recoil from the light, shielding my eyes with my hands, and sit up in bed. “I guess. I’ve been sick.” I want to die is what I’m thinking.

  “Uh-huh. So you tell me. Funny how you’ve never, ever been too sick for school before, and now it’s been days. Remember when you won the spelling bee in seventh grade and then passed out onstage and it turned out you’d been hiding a 103 fever?”

  A sigh spills out of me. “Yeah. I’m older now,” I say. “Or maybe just sicker.”

  “Uh-huh,” Z says again, her hand smoothing and twisting chunks of her short hair as she studies me. I can tell she’s not convinced. “Listen, I can’t even imagine how awful you’re feeling, waiting to hear about Gavin. I just wish you felt like you could talk to me about it.”

  A silence opens up between us, and I spend it biting the inside of my cheeks, wanting desperately to tell her what’s happened. But if I begin to tell the truth, I won’t be able to stop. I’ll uncork everything I’m working so hard to keep buried. My visits to the South Side. The trips to Hades. My chimeric heart. Will’s threats. Z would never let me go along with Will’s scheme. She’d do something—threaten him, expose him—and in turn, he could expose me. Oh, Z, I think as I smile weakly at her. Forgive me.

  “I’m fine, Zahra.” My voice sounds more hostile than I mean it to. “I told you, I’m just sick.”

  Zahra looks down at the bed, and I can see her trying to decide if she’ll sit on it. She doesn’t. “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,” she says flatly. “But maybe you just . . . don’t want me in your life anymore. That’s what it feels like lately.”

  She stares down at the carpet, then looks at me for a second before turning to look out the window, daring me to answer.

  “Of course I do,” I say. “I’m just . . . I’m going through a lot. And, um, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what’s right for me, because—” I pause.

  Don’t say his name, I tell myself. If you say his name, your heart will break open and you will never be able to gather yourself up again. But then I say it. And the lies start pouring out of me. “Because, actually, Gavin and I broke up . . .” I trail off, my throat closing like a stopped drain.

  “Broke up?” Zahra comes closer to my bed. “So they let him go?”

  I nod. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just . . . I’ve been so confused. They let him go a couple of days ago. He got in touch. He’s fine. But I decided it just wasn’t going to work. My parents . . .” I wave my hand in the air, too exhausted and disgusted with myself to finish the lie.

  Zahra bites her lip, her eyebrows knitted in sympathy as she stares down at me. “But it might still work out with him. Maybe when you’re a little older and your parents aren’t monitoring your every move.”

  I nod and squeeze my eyes shut. Nothing will ever, in any way, work out with Gavin, I want to shout. Instead, I open my mouth and keep lying.

  “Maybe someday. But for now . . . I’m moving on.” I feel my face flush with shame, as if I’m desecrating Gavin’s memory, as my words fill the room.

  “Moving on?” Z says, surprised.

  I can’t look at her. “I’m thinking of getting back together with Will, actually.” My voice barely a whisper, my mouth fills with a sour taste just saying the words, like I’ve drunk a glass of spoiled milk. “I know you won’t approve, so I’ve been kind of distant because of that, too, maybe.”

  What a crock. The words out, I stare miserably up at the ceiling for a beat before I dare to look her in the eyes. Zahra will never believe me.

  But she does. She recoils visibly, as if I’ve punched her. “You’re not thinking straight,” Zahra mutters. “Like, at all. God, Anthem, do you realize this is classic codependence? The definition of codependence”—Zahra begins to pace the room, her hands gesticulating as she makes her point—“is when you wake up in the morning and you don’t know how you feel without looking at your boyfriend.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I manage, my voice far away and thick.

  “‘Will is the biggest prick among a sea of contenders at Cathedral,’” she says, blinking back tears and shaking her head. “That’s a quote from Anthem Fleet, circa two weeks ago. He treated you like dirt. Have you forgotte
n all that?”

  “I changed my mind,” I say numbly, willing her to storm away so I can stop lying. I stare at her shoes, big shit-kicking combat boots laced up to her thigh. “I was wrong.”

  “I’m going to go now,” Zahra says slowly, as if she’s not sure I even understand English anymore. “Call me when the Anthem I know returns, if she ever does. Because this?” She waves her hand over me like I’m a plate of inedible food, a ruined painting, a stained dress. “I don’t know who this person is.”

  You’re right, I think sadly as Zahra runs out, slamming my door hard behind her. Zahra has no idea what I’ve become. And I don’t know, either.

  CHAPTER 22

  That night I’m awoken by a hand pressed lightly around my shoulder, shaking me. I’m up like a shot, leaping out of bed and onto the floor, racing to get to the door. They’ve come to finish what they started.

  A voice inside me whispers no.

  I scoop a discarded leather belt from the floor and I have one hand on the door when a voice breathes my name.

  “Anthem. It’s me.”

  I lower the belt to my side as my eyes adjust to the darkness. Ford’s teeth glow in a slice of moonlight coming in through a couple of twisted slats in the closed venetian blinds. My fight-or-flight adrenaline instantly morphs into anger.

  “How did you get in?” I whisper, my heart still ricocheting through my chest. I move to lock my bedroom door in case my parents heard something and decide to check on me.

  He shrugs, like it was so easy it’s not worth talking about. “I’m good at breaking and entering. Don’t worry, I didn’t come through the lobby. Nobody saw a thing.”

  I stand there in boyshorts and a tank top flecked with carrot soup, openmouthed, a tiny part of me impressed that he found some other way into this fortress of a building. But a bigger part of me is furious.

  “What the hell, Ford?” I ask. But then the effects of low blood sugar start to hit me: I feel dizzy, my vision dims, and I’m about to fall over. I stagger to my desk and open the bottom drawer, where I keep a stash of carbs. It’s the opposite of a ballet dancer’s diet, all of it, but my new heart and the fear of torpor has done funny things to my eating habits. I pull out a box of SugarKrisps, digging into it for a few handfuls of flaky cereal, a bunch of it escaping my hands and falling onto the floor, like snow atop the mountains of dirty clothes.

  “Whoa,” Ford says, staring at me. “Your lips are blue.”

  I nod, shoving cereal in my mouth.

  “My fingers too,” I mutter, putting a hand in the air for Ford to see. My fingertips look as if I’ve dipped them in light blue ink.

  I blink at Ford, chewing a final mouthful of SugarKrisps, the cereal scraping painfully down my throat. Just leave, I think. I want to fall back into bed again and lay there, numb and sleepless and alone until the morning comes.

  Ford looks around my moonlit room, then back at me. “You look . . . um . . .”

  “Not good,” I croak, cutting him off. “I know.” I rest my hip on the corner of the desk and wait a beat, but Ford stays silent. “Why did you come here? Just checking up on me?”

  “I heard about what happened,” Ford says, sitting down on the edge of my bed, a dark shape in the mass of white covers. “When you didn’t come around again, I went to Hades. I found the kid, Rufus. He told me everything, after I paid him seven fifty, of course. I came to see if you’re okay.”

  “Thanks. I’m not.” I drop the box of SugarKrisps on the floor, the cereal spilling out onto the carpet. I leave it there, making no effort to clean up the mess. “How did Rufus seem?”

  “The same. Cute.”

  “Too bad he’ll probably die in there or get hooked on drugs by the time he’s twelve,” I say bitterly.

  “I know how this feels, you know.”

  “How what feels?”

  “When someone close to you dies. How dead inside you feel. How hopeless and angry and totally, shittily alone.”

  “I thought you said you lived with three other people,” I say flatly.

  “I do. My uncle and his two daughters. My parents were droopie addicts. It killed them in the end. If my uncle hadn’t stepped in to raise me, I’d be dead, too, probably.”

  “I’m sorry, Ford. That’s awful.” Chastened, I look down at my fingers, the blue tinge already receding.

  I walk over to the window and open the venetian blinds a little, filling the room with bright moonlight. The scythe-shaped moon is enormous, so close it looks like I could reach up and break a piece off it. I turn away from the view—I don’t want to see anything beautiful.

  “You shouldn’t have gone there,” he groans. “Not alone, anyway. I told you not to.”

  “It’s too late now,” I say, too tired to stand anymore. I sink to the floor, next to the spilled cereal. “He’s dead, and rethinking what happened can’t change that. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  Neither of us says anything for a minute. Now go away, I think as I pull my knees up to my chin and rest my head on them. I want my bed and the crack in the ceiling and my tiny silent bubble where nothing moves. “So see you around, Ford. It’s over now.”

  He shakes his head and pushes himself up off my bed, then walks toward me. He stands in front of me and offers me both hands. I don’t take them. I look down at the carpet, pluck a few SugarKrisps from the shag, and drop them into the box. “Come on. Get up,” he says. “It’s not over. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Even if you’re not acting like it right now.”

  “I’m not in the mood for a pep talk,” I mutter. “Just leave.”

  “No,” he says simply, his hands still outstretched, close enough to me now that I see the tiny cuts on his knuckles, a callus on his thumb. I remember what Jax told me: He used to box, until he landed on the wrong side of a few bets. I shake my head a little, but he doesn’t move. Ford may be a fighter, but all the fight went out of me the moment the bullet left Rosie’s gun.

  “The last thing you need right now is to be left alone,” he says firmly. He looks like he might throw me over his shoulder if I don’t cooperate.

  “When we found out my dad overdosed,” Ford continues, “I didn’t speak for a month. My mom was still alive at that point, totally high and living in the subway tunnels with my dad until he died. My uncle got her cleaned up enough to come to the funeral, and she tried to put her hands on my shoulders. I ran away, hid behind a gravestone for the rest of the funeral. I just wanted to die right along with my dad.”

  He grabs my arms, and I reluctantly let him pull me up from the floor and onto my feet. “And then after some time went by, I started talking again. My uncle taught me how to box. I decided to live.”

  “I don’t want to decide to live,” I croak, my voice like a rusted hinge. “I’m in mourning.”

  A car backfires, the sound echoing in the empty streets below. I cover my ears, sick of my supercharged hearing.

  “This is how you mourn him? By going catatonic?”

  “And how would you suggest I do it?” I snap.

  “By fighting back,” he says, daring me to doubt him. “Especially if I could run a hundred miles an hour.”

  “I’m done fighting.” My chest and ears begin to burn. I flutter my hands up to my chest, wondering if he can see my scar in the moonlight. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  I hear his heavy sigh, his footsteps moving toward the door.

  “You know what?” he says. When I face him again, his eyes are hard. “The world doesn’t need another brokenhearted girl.”

  Before I can respond, he slips out of my room. I stare at the door with my mouth hanging open, a paltry comeback lodged in my throat. I don’t care what the world needs. And then, because I let my guard down, the memory of Gavin crumpling to the floor rears up again. The bloodstain growing wider on his shirt, the lifelessness of his hands in mine. And Rosie looking down at him and smiling—could she really have been smiling?

  I bite the insides of my cheeks and struggle to brea
the, to shake off the image, to forget about Ford and relax enough so sleep might be possible tonight. But when I look down, I find my hands have curled into fists.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Welcome back, Anthem,” Principal Bang says, sizing me up from behind her enormous desk. She scoots her short, round body closer to me, and her professional smile falters.

  “Thank you,” I say warily, waiting for her to tell me why I’ve been pulled out of homeroom on my first day back at school. I’ve showered and combed the knots out of my hair, but I can’t wash away the hollows in my cheeks. I swallow what feels like a mouthful of gravel and zero in on the mole above her right eyelid. The mole is safe. Her small, dark eyes set deep into her pudgy face—eyes that are looking at me a little too carefully—are not.

  Principal Bang purses her lips, her chubby hands tented under her chin, her elbows propped onto her desk blotter. Behind her is the Cathedral Wall of Power—a grid of hundreds of framed pictures of successful politicians, CEOs, talk show hosts, athletes, and other luminaries who have passed through the school’s hallowed halls since it opened two hundred years ago. “You do not look terribly well,” she sniffs. “Are you sure you’re well enough to be here?”

  Nothing about me is well, but after Ford’s visit, I started feeling like maybe enough was enough. I announced my “recovery” to my mother yesterday, then spent all day cleaning my room, furiously scrubbing and vacuuming between long bouts of staring blankly into space. And today, despite the sadness wrapped around me like a lead overcoat, I scraped myself out of bed early and got to school an hour before the morning bell.

  “I’m fine.” My voice sounds hollow and far away, like I’m hearing it through water. I clear my throat and force my spine to straighten up from my slumped position in the uncomfortable chair facing Bang’s desk. I curl my mouth into a smile, hoping I’m doing it correctly. It’s been so long.