Copyright © 2010 by Kristen Tracy
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Joann Hill
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN: 978-1-4231-4637-7
Reinforced binding
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
For Al Young and Stuart Dybek—
my Prague mentors
Chapter One
“Is that dust?” Veronica asked, reaching inside my giant duffel bag and running her finger along its flat bottom. She removed her hand and stared at her index finger’s powdery white tip.
I turned back to my notebook and my story. My protagonist had just entered a truck stop bathroom, and I was searching for the perfect adjective to describe the wash basin: graffitied. “My mom used it to carry supplies to her master baking class,” I said. “It’s probably flour.”
Veronica picked the bag up, hoisted it above her head, and then threw it onto my bedroom floor. A white cloud escaped from the bag in one giant puff.
“You’ll look like a drug mule,” she said. “Let’s go to the mall. You’re going to want something with wheels, trust me.”
And I did.
We were leaving for Prague in six days. And it wasn’t going to be a small stay. We’d be gone a month, attending a writing workshop led by Veronica’s famous literary mom, for school credit. Unlike Veronica, who’d spent much of last summer in Rome, I rarely voyaged anywhere. A senior in high school, I still hadn’t managed to leave the Midwest.
As soon as we were strapped in, Veronica threw her car in reverse and peeled out onto the road. Lakeland Parkway spread its uninspiring gray mass out in front of us, and we rolled along on top of it. Small swatches of greenery stuck to its asphalt borders, while a sad plastic grocery bag blew like a tumbleweed across the scene.
“What are you thinking about?” Veronica asked.
“Fulmars,” I said.
“Is that a fruit?”
“No. They’re seabirds. They mistake plastic bags for food and they eat them and die.”
“Gross. Near the mall?”
I shook my head. “Mainly on beaches in the Nether-lands.”
Veronica pulled to a stop at a red light and exhaled a frustrated breath. “You’re not lying to your inner self right now, are you?”
She adjusted her rearview mirror with one hand and reclined her seat back a few inches with the other.
“I don’t think so,” I said. But that wasn’t entirely true. It had been almost a month since the dumping. And even though I tried hard not to think about him, when darkness came, or long periods of silence, I became consumed by memories of my first love. Hamilton Stacks.
“It’s pretty common in the early stages of heartbreak for the dumpee to fixate on the dumper, and concoct all these crazy scenarios about how the two of you are going to reunite. Under streetlamps. On park benches. Riding bareback on the beach.”
“Do you mean on horses?” I asked.
The light turned green and Veronica slammed on the gas. Then she steered the car off the road into a bank parking lot. “Listen, Dessy.” She turned to me stiffly, as if she were going to deliver the worst news of my life. “Normally I don’t interfere with people and their heartbreak process, but I feel like I’m being asked to deliver an important message to you.”
“From Hamilton?” I asked.
“No, that creep is dead to me. Mess with my friends and it’s over.” She spit on her fingertips and wiped them on her jeans, I guess to communicate her “overness.” “This message is being sent from an entirely different power.” She scooped my hands up into hers. Then she dragged them onto her lap. “I know that you love Hamilton. You went through a lot of important milestones with each other. You picked buckshot out of that owl together. And his was the first man-stick you ever saw—”
I pulled my hands back and held them up, making the universal sign for “stop.”
“I never saw Hamilton’s man-stick,” I said. “I’ve never seen anybody’s man-stick.”
“Are you serious? My god, you dated for a year. I swear you said you’d touched it the night of the big power outage!”
“No. It was too dark to see anything clearly, Veronica. I touched it through his jeans. How is this related to the message?”
“Yeah, okay, listen. I know that you love Hamilton. And his was the first man-stick you ever touched through his jeans, but there’s no way on God’s green earth that he’s ever going to change his mind about this.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
Veronica exhaled dramatically and ran her fingers through her thick brown hair over and over, until the gesture released crackles of static electricity.
“Hamilton is on his way to college. He’s entering a whole new league.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t like to think of Hamilton leaving the state of Ohio without me. It made our future (which, even though I refused to admit it publicly, I still held out considerable hope for) seem kaput.
“Seriously, Dessy. You know me. I’m a total optimist, but Hamilton is very decisive. He wears that stupid T-shirt that says ‘UNWAVERING.’ And he’s the only person I know who’s declared himself a vegan and then stayed one. Not even cheese or bacon pulled him to his senses. And those two foods generally doom any vegan. He’s made up his mind on this one.”
I hated it when Veronica latched on to something with total certainty. She pulled back onto the road.
“I don’t think his T-shirt is stupid,” I said. I crossed my legs at my ankles and looked out the passenger window at the fast-moving, blurry scenery. So far it had been a rainy summer. The fields were as green as a crayon. And it was hot. According to Veronica’s mom, the weather in Prague would be warm and sunny. She said that during the peak of the day, some women carried small umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun’s damaging rays. I wanted to see that. In fact, I wanted to buy an umbrella and try walking down the streets like one of those women. The person I planned to be in Prague wasn’t the person I was in Ohio.
Seagulls squawked overhead, and I closed my eyes. Fowl always drove my mind right to Hamilton. It was, in fact, Hamilton’s personal essay on his lifelong interest in the woodland duck that had helped land him an acceptance to Dartmouth and a scholarship.
“You
’re still thinking about him, aren’t you?” Veronica said as she shifted into a faster gear.
“Maybe,” I said.
Veronica turned on the radio, and an old Madonna song pumped loudly through the speakers, electrifying the fine blond hairs on my thighs.
“He’s gone, Dessy. It’s like a wise, psychotic woman once said on Fox News: The only way to secure a man permanently is to lock him up in a trunk in your basement.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You’re not taking any of this seriously. We’re talking about my heart, Veronica. My heart.”
Veronica sped around a slow-moving Focus, honking as she passed, and ignoring my comment altogether.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m going a completely different speed than the rest of the planet,” she said. “Like me and cheetahs are the only ones who are moving fast enough to enjoy anything.” She rolled down her window and flung her arm into the wind. Damp summer air raced around me.
“You’re nothing like a cheetah,” I said.
“Of course I am,” she said. “Look at my hair. It’s wild!”
She shook her brown locks from side to side. They swam around her thin shoulders and smacked against the low roof. The car swerved right.
“Jealous?” she asked, looking at me.
I was, and she knew it. I flicked her two times on the thigh. My hair was too fine and too blond to amount to the seductive mass I longed for. Fate and genetics had determined I’d have short, barely shoulder-length hair.
“Watch the road,” I said.
Veronica flipped her head straight. “I might have even been a cheetah in a past life.”
“I doubt it. Veronica, you’re nothing like a cheetah,” I repeated.
“Look at you,” Veronica said. “You take one lousy course in zoology and you think you’re an animal genius.”
“It was two courses. I took a year.”
When Veronica hijacked the conversation, which was often, I tried not to take it personally. Her attention span wasn’t all that stellar.
“So how am I unlike a cheetah?”
“I’m really supposed to answer that?” I asked.
“Well, don’t bother with anatomical differences. I know I don’t have a tail.”
“Okay. You’re not like a cheetah, because it’s a vulnerable species. Out of all the big cats, it is the least able to adapt to new environments.”
“Sometimes new environments suck,” she said.
“Also, cheetahs are difficult to breed in captivity.”
“So? I probably wouldn’t be so good at breeding in captivity either. Having to do it on a cement floor with all those zookeepers gawking at me.” Veronica laughed and honked the horn for no reason. Then she roared like a lion.
“Well, unlike other big cats, the cheetah can purr as it inhales, but it can’t roar,” I said.
“Okay. You got me. That’s one way I’m not like a cheetah. But I was watching a show on Animal Planet and it said that female cheetahs in the Serengeti are sexually promiscuous and often have cubs with lots of different males.”
“You’ve been dating Boz for two years,” I said. “And you’ve never cheated.”
Veronica may have been a zealous flirt, but we both knew that Boz was her anchor.
“I know. I know. But I’ve got that potential.”
“To be a cheater?”
“To roam.” At a stoplight, Veronica uncapped her lip gloss and smeared on such a generous coat that it made her mouth look wet. “Dessy”—she squeezed my thigh hard, clamping down on my femur with tourniquet-like pressure—“any molecule of time you spend thinking about Hamilton Stacks is a total waste of your life that you’ll never get back.” She released her grip. Her hand left bright red finger marks on my skin.
“Time isn’t measured in molecules,” I said.
“Fine. My point is that his molecules have divorced themselves from your molecules, and you need to build a whole new future with another man’s molecules.”
I swallowed three times until the lump went down. “When did you start referring to our dating pool as men? We’re seventeen. They’re guys,” I said.
“Oh, Dessy, we’re not going to waste our time on guys in Prague,” Veronica said. “We’re looking for men.”
The moment she said this, I knew that finding a man wasn’t the solution. It’s like suggesting to somebody who just lost her beloved tabby that she should go out and track down a Siberian tiger.
“The downside is that, unlike male cheetahs, female cheetahs are solitary and tend to avoid each other.”
“Veronica, you’re nothing like a cheetah. We’ve been friends since seventh grade. That’s not exactly living alone.”
“You’re the only real female friend I have.”
I mulled this over. “Cheetahs can be taught to fetch,” I said.
“I could fetch.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t like it.”
“Who’s to say?”
“You’re insane.”
“I don’t think I’m insane. Look at me. I have everything. You. Boz. Great hair. Wicked-strong fingernails.” She tapped her index finger energetically against the dashboard. “And my Audi. I’ve got it all. I’m totally thrilled to be alive.” She punched me in the arm.
“I’m happy too,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Dessy, you need a man.”
“Whatever.”
Veronica jerked her car into a parking stall, sloppily taking up two spots. “Dessy Gherkin, unbuckle your seat belt. It’s time to recycle your heart.”
Chapter Two
“This looks like a keeper,” I said, tilting a practical-looking bag onto its rear wheels and giving it a pull.
“That looks like accountant luggage,” Veronica said. She turned and walked deeper into the forest of multi-colored bags.
“So no black at all?” I examined a dark gray bag that I thought could pass for non-black.
Veronica lifted a yellow suitcase over her head and then set it on the floor.
“That looks like a flotation device,” I said.
“I agree.” And she moved on.
For this trip, Veronica had already purchased three new pairs of butt-lifting jeans, two short skirts, multiple tops spanning a wide range of decency, flip-flops for our dorm shower, walking sandals designed for uneven terrain, dancing sandals designed for guy-populated terrain, and a reversible tote for carrying water and other essentials. But so far she hadn’t shown any interest in the writing part of our trip.
“So have you even started writing your story?” I asked. “Veronica?”
She’d disappeared. I spoke louder. “We can’t show up unprepared.”
The fact that we had been accepted into the program at all had been a minor miracle. It was affiliated with Northwestern University, and Veronica’s mom had been asked to lead a workshop. This news had upset Veronica considerably because she had no intention of spending the month of July in Columbus with her grandparents. So she determined to go to Prague too. And take me with her. Behind my back she’d assembled two applications and sent them in one envelope on the day of the deadline. For a writing sample she’d submitted a collaborative essay we’d written during metal shop, about the myriad ways a girl could die in the class. “Metal Shop: Fifty-four Ways a Girl Could Go.”
Taking shop had also been Veronica’s idea. She liked the potential guy–girl ratio; neither of us had contemplated the reality of working with sheet metal, auto- motive parts, or metal inert gas welders. We wrote the essay as a way to tune out our industrial surroundings.
But then the acceptance letter from Northwestern arrived, and Veronica showed up at my house to break the good news: we’d each been awarded a spot in the competitive July Prague Writers’ Conference.
There was one caveat. Veronica had applied for the nonfiction section taught by the celebrated American memoirist Amy Allen. Instead we’d been placed in her mother’s class, Short Fiction. Veronica wrote a charming e-mail to the dea
n, but it was no use. Mrs. Knox received her roster two weeks later, and there we were.
While Mrs. Knox was quite impressed, she wasn’t exactly thrilled. Neither was Veronica. But I didn’t mind. I thought she could teach me a lot. And I was overjoyed when she agreed to let us go.
Veronica’s mom wasn’t like my mom. Tabitha Knox was famous. She’d been nominated for the National Book Award twice, and writing conferences often asked her to teach. Mainly she wrote short stories. I’d only read one, in her second collection, Unlikely Dogs. It involved a three-legged German shepherd that commits arson. His name was Twix.
I spotted Veronica crouching beside an upright purple suitcase.
“What are you doing?”
“Measuring. We need to be able to fit inside our bags.”
I looked down at her, but she was completely focused on her measurements. Then I asked the obvious question: “Why?”
“Because I plan on having real fun!”
“Inside your suitcase?”
Veronica knocked over the suitcase and continued looking. “Listen, I don’t intend to play by the rules,” she said. “We’re going to be the youngest people there. I can predict right now that there’s going to be a ton of sneaking around. Therefore, we need to be able to fit inside our suitcases. Because that’s the ultimate sneak. Trust me. It’s how Boz sneaked me into his bedroom three times this spring.”
Boz and Veronica had a very exciting relationship. It was what I would call tumultuous. Except mostly the tumult seemed like fun. Separate, those two were already fearless. But together they had no inhibitions whatsoever, like nobody had ever clued them in on the fact that they were mortal. You could see it in the way they danced. And swam. And assembled sandwiches. And downhill skied.
It was just like Veronica to think of something as crazy as sneaking around in luggage.
I rejoined her beside a mound of bright bags.
“So who’ll be pulling us around?” I asked. “That could turn dangerous. Some crazy person could run off with us. We need to make sure we can unzip ourselves from the inside.”
“How lame,” Veronica said. “That totally deflates the thrill.”
A Field Guide for Heartbreakers Page 1