A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

by Kristen Tracy

  I nodded. “I told her I’d call her on the second day.”

  “That’s weird. Why not the first day?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought it would take me a day to find a phone and figure out how to use it.”

  Veronica picked up the receiver and studied both ends of it like she’d stumbled across a never-before-seen species of fish.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I said. “I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to access phones in Prague.”

  “What did you think Prague would be like?” Veronica asked. “Burundi?”

  She was mocking me. I’d done a report on Burundi in Government last fall. I’d selected Burundi after learning that it was the poorest country on the planet and had the world’s lowest gross domestic product. The report had turned into quite a downer, especially the page on deforestation and soil erosion. Veronica had given her report on the Netherlands. I still remember her opening paragraph: The Netherlands are cool. It’s legal to smoke pot there. You can buy it in coffee shops.

  “Why are you just sitting there?” Veronica asked me.

  “I’m thinking about Burundi,” I said.

  “Let’s go!”

  I did as I was told. But sadly, before we could bolt, the phone began to ring. Veronica answered.

  “We’re coming,” she said. I could hear Mrs. Knox’s voice droning from the receiver.

  “Fine.” Veronica slammed the phone into the cradle. “I guess we scope later.”

  As I pulled our bedroom door closed, I noticed several hot-pink sticky notes fastened to it.

  “They’re from our suitemates,” I said.

  Veronica groaned. “Does this mean we have to leave them sticky notes?”

  “Come on. We have to read them.”

  “Wow. Our sense of obligation is triggered by very different things,” Veronica said.

  I pulled the first note off the door. “This one is from Brenda Temple. It says that she’s an early riser and from Maine and that she’s staying in room C. She’s already showered and we can eat some of her granola if we want. It’s in the cupboard.”

  “All that fit on a sticky note?” Veronica asked.

  “She writes small,” I said.

  “Is there anything else that’s actually worth reading?”

  “This one is from Annie Earl. She’s from Florida and she’s also in room C. She knits and she sleeps late. She welcomes us. And she says she brought extra blankets if we get cold.”

  “So we’re living with old women?”

  “Just because somebody knits and brings extra blankets doesn’t mean that they’re old. A young person can have poor circulation too. Okay. Here’s the last note. It’s from Corky.”

  “Corky?”

  “Yeah. She says that Annie Earl and Brenda made her write this note because they want everybody to get along. But she’s a loner. And we might not ever see her. Except in workshop. She wants to experience the counter- culture of the city. She’ll only be showering twice a week. Rock on.”

  “Did you say ‘rock on’ or did she?”

  “She said it,” I said.

  “Nobody says ‘rock on’ and only showers twice a week except for people who use hard drugs. Let’s avoid these wack jobs.”

  Had I been by myself, I would have written responses to Brenda, Annie Earl, and Corky. But considering Veronica’s current emotional state, I let her pull me out of the suite.

  A moment later we arrived at the double doors of the conference room on the ground floor.

  “After I open this door, the mystery is over. We will see clearly who is here and available. Their level of hotness will be quantified. No more daydreams. No more pipe dreams.”

  Veronica opened the door, and a flood of chatter tumbled into the hallway. “Oh my god!” She leaned her head into the room, and I leaned my head into the room, and we both took it all in.

  Dozens of college kids sat around tables eating pastries. And there appeared to be more guys than girls. Everybody looked young and athletic and happy.

  “There are a ton of brunettes,” I said. All my life I’d had a soft spot for guys with dark hair.

  “I probably should have worn tighter jeans,” Veronica said.

  I glanced at her. She was staring into the room, nervously chewing on her bottom lip. “You look great,” I said.

  Veronica squinted and then sucked in a big breath. “I know.”

  I turned my attention back to the room. I spotted Mrs. Knox sitting at a table.

  “There’s your mom!” I said.

  “Shh,” Veronica said, bumping me. “Why are you looking for my mom? Look for guys, Dessy.”

  She was right. Why was I looking for Mrs. Knox when the room was crawling with cute guys?

  “Hot-dude. Hot-dude. Hot-dude,” Veronica said, pointing. “Look, even that grandpa-dude is sort of hot.”

  I saw the grandpa-dude, but I did not find him hot.

  “This exceeds every expectation I had,” Veronica said. She walked into the conference room beaming like the sun. “This will be the best month of our lives. Follow my lead.”

  Chapter Seven

  I did exactly what Veronica did. I grabbed an unglazed pastry, stood against the wall, and applied some lip gloss. Mrs. Knox sat at the head of a table. A big placard in front of her listed her name and her genre.

  TABITHA KNOX: SHORT FICTION

  An older woman and an attractive college student were sitting with her, but Veronica held back.

  “We stay on the periphery,” she said.

  There were five other tables with placards.

  STEVIE BLOOM: POET

  DINO WASHINGTON: PLAYWRIGHT

  DORIS MOSES: THE NOVEL

  SYD COVERT: EVERYTHING

  AMY ALLEN: CREATIVE NONFICTION

  Students continued to trickle in and join their workshop leaders. It looked like the program had about a hundred students. The nonfiction table was twice as crowded as the others. Veronica noted this.

  “If we’d gotten into that class, we’d have double the dudes.”

  “Our table doesn’t have any dudes,” I said.

  Veronica glanced around and bit her lip. “Our table has to have dudes. We’ve already met them.” She leaned into me and whispered, “They’re already on my wall.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I turned my attention to the faculty. I’d been researching them for weeks, and now here they were. I felt like I was glimpsing celebrities.

  “There’s the playwright,” I said, pointing to the table where Dino Washington sat with fifteen eager students.

  “That guy sucks,” Veronica said. “He was rude to my mom at a conference in Tennessee.”

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Veronica said. “Something involving a pineapple. It doesn’t matter. He’s a dramatist. Nobody respects those clowns.” She kept looking around.

  I think Veronica could pick up on my star-struck excitement, because she immediately tried to puncture my mood.

  “Here’s the deal: these people are not real celebrities and you shouldn’t treat them any different than bus drivers,” Veronica said. “My mom is the most respected writer here. After that, Amy Allen is the second-most respected.”

  I didn’t say it, but Amy Allen was actually more famous than Mrs. Knox. I’d heard an interview with her on NPR about her memoir, which had recently been turned into an HBO movie, Kicking Apart the Moon. It was about her turbulent affair with a former astronaut who suffered from a neurobiological brain disorder.

  “She looks so calm,” I said. “I can’t believe she held that astronaut hostage at that Taco Bell in Houston.”

  Veronica’s eyes bugged out with enthusiasm. “I know. She’s brilliant and insane.”

  “The poet guy is big too, right?” I asked.

  Veronica made a gagging sound. “Poets are never big. They’re basically miserable and poor and eat organic cows and avoid gluten and crap like that.”r />
  “There’s Doris Moses,” I said. “I heard an interview with her on NPR too. She’s fluent in six languages and does humanitarian work in Bangladesh.”

  “Dessy, turn off NPR,” Veronica told me. “That’s a total geek station. Besides, Doris Moses is a one-hit wonder. She wrote a novel about an alligator that ate, like, nine people in Florida, and then she ended up on the Today show and her book hit the New York Times best-seller list. Her whole plot totally ripped off Jaws. She’s been working on her second novel about a group of genetically mutated chickens for twelve years.”

  “That sounds interesting,” I said.

  “Dessy, don’t grow up to be a writer. Because when you live too much in your own head, you neglect the people you love and become an insulated wack job.”

  I doubted this was totally true. Because I felt that to become that way you had to have a fair amount of wack-job impulses already.

  “What about Syd Covert? He’s the director, right? I heard he’s a nice guy.”

  Veronica shuddered. “That guy offended my mom worse than the pineapple playwright dunce. Basically, we avoid him.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had no idea that the literary landscape was such a political place. I felt like I’d been dropped into a field of well-read land mines.

  “Let’s move in,” Veronica said.

  I followed her as she briskly threaded herself through the room. She took a seat right next to her mom.

  “What did you think of your first European pastry?” Mrs. Knox asked me.

  “It was flaky,” I said.

  “We’ll grab some groceries later. This climate always makes me crave quinces and crackers.”

  I stared at Mrs. Knox. I didn’t know what a quince was.

  “It feels muggy in here,” Veronica said. “Can you ask somebody to crank up the AC?”

  Mrs. Knox shook her head. “There is no AC. It’s called natural ventilation.”

  I watched Syd Covert come up and tap Mrs. Knox on the shoulder. Veronica leaned in and whispered, “You’re getting sweat marks near your pits. Try to lower your body temp.”

  “What?” I asked. “How?”

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  I didn’t want Veronica to leave me alone at the table, producing grotesque sweat marks. “I’ll come too.”

  We crossed the room again, and I glanced at my armpits. I was wearing a white shirt, and the fabric under my arms was saturated. “This is awful.”

  “You’re lucky you’re wearing sandals. Heat primarily escapes through your head and extremities.”

  Veronica handed me a glass of water, and I immediately started sucking it down.

  “You look nervous,” she said. “Stop it.”

  “It’s my first time in a foreign country.”

  “Relax. It’s not that different.”

  I almost choked on my water. “Yes it is.”

  “Whatever.” Veronica took a swig of her own water and frowned. “I heard somebody at a table say that we have to take a tour after orientation. Bummer.”

  “That’s great. It’ll help us scope.”

  Veronica rolled her eyes. “You can’t scope in a huge group with a tour guide. Maybe we can ditch the tour.”

  “Don’t you want to learn anything about Prague?”

  “I already know everything.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Veronica cleared her throat. “It all started a million years ago with a hunting party. There were settlements. Wars. Religion was huge, and they built a castle and a bunch of cathedrals. A bridge went up. They put a bunch of saints on it. More wars. Puppets exploded on to the scene and stayed. Russia took over and forced everyone to be Communists. People got sick of that. There was a fight over a hyphen. The Slavs went one way. Czech people went the other. And now I’m here. There you go. History of Prague.”

  “I think you’ve skipped over some stuff.”

  Veronica took another drink of water. “Let’s get back.”

  When we returned, the Short Fiction table was still disappointingly guyless, and Mrs. Knox was still chatting with Syd Covert. Contrary to what Veronica had said, she didn’t seem too offended by him. In fact, it almost looked like they were flirting.

  Veronica pretended to ignore them. “Your pits look way better,” she said.

  “Stop referring to them,” I said. I fished through my bag to locate my pen and notebook. A million conversations were going on around me. My mom had told me to always be ready to write down good restaurant and sightseeing suggestions. Most of the people I saw were college-aged, but there were a few older people too. One woman at the Novel table, when she laughed, looked a lot like my mom.

  “Wow,” Veronica said. “You’re going to take notes?”

  “Someone might say something useful,” I said.

  “Yeah. I’ve been saying useful things for six years.” Veronica shot me a devilish smile, and I smiled back.

  “We have a small group,” the older woman at our table said to me and Veronica. She was knitting something pink. It looked like a tubular-shaped hat.

  “Oh, there’s guys in the group too, but they got plastered last night. They’ll probably stumble in late,” Veronica said.

  “Well, the beer here is pretty cheap,” the woman said. She continued to knit. She seemed unfazed by Veronica, and I liked that.

  “That’s probably Annie Earl,” I whispered to Veronica.

  “I bet the other one is Brenda,” Veronica said.

  I looked at the attractive brunette with pale skin and delicate features seated next to Annie Earl. She was reading a book by Philip Larkin. “Probably.”

  Veronica didn’t look too happy. “I was hoping the other girls would be potato-ugly.”

  “I know.”

  “Wow,” Veronica whispered. “Do you see them?”

  I did see them, and I couldn’t believe Veronica was going to comment on Annie Earl’s scars while she was sitting right there.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “When I see something like that, it makes me think of my own mortality,” Veronica said.

  “Shh,” I said.

  I didn’t think Annie Earl could hear us, but the idea that we were discussing her discolored arms right in front of her made me squirm.

  “Maybe she escaped from a burning hotel room,” Veronica said. “Maybe she was riding a train and it caught fire and she had to run through the flames and then jump off into a random field like a hobo.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “There’s a story there,” Veronica said.

  “Shh,” I repeated.

  And then somebody rang a bell.

  “Welcome to Prague,” Syd said from a podium. “A city of exceptional beauty.”

  At the word “beauty,” Kite, Waller, Roger, and Frank all rushed into the room. I sat up straight. Veronica’s beaming smile returned.

  When the conference room door slammed behind them, Syd stopped talking, and everyone turned to watch them find their seats. Syd said, “Welcome!” He seemed sincere, and I liked how forgiving this program appeared to be. I thought it boded well for Veronica and me.

  “Prague is a place wholly unlike any other. Here, I expect you to write and live. To explore and reflect.” Syd lifted his arms heavenward. “Here, you will dream. Here, you will drink. Except for our two high school students.”

  The audience laughed.

  Syd pointed to Veronica and me, and I felt myself blush. “They’re seated next to Tabitha Knox. Let’s do our best not to corrupt our underage colleagues.”

  The audience laughed again. I was mortified that he used the phrase “high school students” and “underage.” I already felt scandalously self-conscious about my teen status.

  “What a jerk,” Veronica said. “I feel so labeled now. Just like that woman we read about in freshman English in The Scarlet Number.”

  “Letter,” I said. “The Scarlet Letter.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I thoug
ht she had to wear a number that represented all the guys she’d slept with in the forest.”

  “No,” I said. “Her name is Hester Prynne. She gives birth after committing adultery and has to wear a scarlet A as a symbol of shame. But she ends up turning it into a symbol of identity.”

  Veronica looked at me like I was the seated embodiment of a fart. “Did you eat SparkNotes for dinner last night?”

  Syd had a lot of things to say about Prague. Goulash. Kafka. The plague. He briefly recapped the fall of the Iron Curtain. He then rattled off some vague warnings about pickpockets, money changers, and prostitutes. Something he said concerning the red light district triggered a short meditation about the journey of our souls. Finally, Syd closed by announcing that two tours were getting ready to leave the dorm. One was a historical tour highlighting sights of great cultural importance. The other focused on popular local establishments: restaurants, museums, clubs, cafés, bookstores. The latter sounded like stuff that was right up Veronica’s alley.

  Before Syd stepped away from the podium he called all of the instructors to the front of the room. After short introductions, followed by applause, the room filled with chatter. Veronica didn’t waste any time leaning over the table and waving to Kite, Waller, Roger, and Frank. Her eyes were bright and focused. Mostly on Frank. I wasn’t surprised: he was the sort of guy Veronica fantasized about. Tall. Blond. Athletic. Wholesome-looking, yet, based on the events of last night, most likely considerably flawed.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  But I thought he looked a little yellow.

  “My name is Veronica. This is my friend Dessy. My mom is Tabitha Knox,” she said.

  “I’m Frank. This is Kite, Waller, and Roger,” he said.

  “Yeah, we’ve met,” Veronica said. “Last night.” Veronica pretended to face plant into the table. Then she popped back up. Frank looked at the floor and wiped his nose with his hand.

  “Don’t worry. It’s cool,” she said. “I’ve been to college parties. I’ve seen plenty of guys pass out before.”

  I felt the sweat glands on my fingertips begin to perspire. Veronica and I had never been to a college party. It was alarming to see her so grandiosely fabricating our social history. What sort of reputation was she trying to create for us? And where was she hoping it would get us?