A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

by Kristen Tracy

  Hi, Hamilton. I’m still in Prague. I talked to my mom the other day, and she said you’d called. She said you were sending me something. That’s cool. I like getting mail. Hey. I’ve been thinking about what you said to me during our breakup. I want you to know that I see your point. I’m a little flimsy. But I think you were a little hard on me. I think we should talk when I get back, because I feel like we both have things to say. For instance, you aren’t perfect either. Your preoccupation with birds totally got in the way of our relationship. I mean, we never went bowling. Or skiing. Or dancing. And it was hard to walk around with you because every time we came across a bird, we had to get low to the ground and freeze and observe. I think it’s fair to say that we both have flaws. I think that’s the difference between you and me. I saw your flaws and looked past them. And you saw mine and laminated them. Anyway. I still think about you. A lot. Even here. I miss you. Dessy

  For the subject I typed “Your Globetrotting Ex Is Thinking About You.” And before I could question anything I’d written, or edit out any hint of desperation, I hit send. And then I immediately felt like puking. Why had I e-mailed that? Why not just tell him hello and send him a virtual postcard? Oh. My. God. All the compliments Veronica had paid me for not groveling back to him. All the restraint I’d shown in not picking up the phone before I’d left and blathering on and on about my feelings. All the heartache I’d endured in my best attempt to heal myself. It had all been for nothing. I’d just blown everything. I’d sent Hamilton Stacks the lamest e-mail ever. The only way it could have been more lame is if it had been longer.

  Then the worst thing in the world happened. Hamilton sent me a response. Right as I was sitting there in the café kicking myself, it popped up on my inbox. His subject line was “Dessy, You Need to Read This.” I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I felt all rubbery again. What had he written back to me? Whatever it was, I could tell that it was going to break my heart. Before I could stop myself, I clicked delete. Then I stared at the computer screen. And when my time ran out, I didn’t stop staring.

  Finally, somebody waiting for an open computer tapped me on the shoulder. I knew that it was time to go home. I stumbled out of the café into the night air, too distracted to look around me. Corky could have been standing right next to me with an ice pick and I wouldn’t have noticed. I’d never know what Hamilton had written to me. My life felt so over.

  I walked down the sidewalk, past couples nuzzling on benches. Everyone seemed to be in pairs. Even leashed dogs.

  The station was jam-packed. I got sandwiched between two couples on the escalator. The pair behind me was necking, releasing graphic squishy noises, while the two in front of me, wearing matching bandanas, kept staring longingly into each other’s eyes. They blinked at each other with nauseating tenderness.

  Once I reached the platform, I ended up sitting next to the larger, more reserved bandana couple. The public affection was inescapable. I could hear the train whistling down the tracks as it approached, but I didn’t stand up. I let the crowd pool near the yellow line. That’s when I saw a familiar head poking out above the rest.

  I watched Roger step onto one of the center cars, and I stepped on just a few passengers behind him. But I never got any closer. I felt like my karma was off, so I just hung back and observed him. He grabbed a seat by the door, but when a pregnant woman boarded the train, he quickly stood up. He didn’t sit down again. At the next stop, I watched him help an elderly man with his groceries. And when a child hit him in the chest with a misfired plastic projectile, Roger laughed and handed it back.

  Were people normally this polite on subways? Was it like this in Chicago? I watched an attractive Czech woman chat with him. They conversed so effortlessly. At one point she brought her delicate hand to her perfect mouth and laughed. Then Roger laughed too. He held on to an overhead pole with one hand, revealing well-defined biceps. The Czech woman kept laughing and lifting her hand, and I wondered if she was trying to get Roger to look at her mouth. Did Roger know her? Why was he being so friendly? Then I remembered the pregnant woman, the elderly man, and the boy. Roger was pathologically nice.

  When we got to our stop, I didn’t wait for Roger to get off the train. For all I know he stayed behind with his new friend. I hurried to the street level and began walking home. Clouds passed in front of the moon, making the world around me feel darker than dark. My skin goose pimpled against the cool night air. I wished I’d brought a jacket. I had no idea Prague could feel this cold.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Veronica was avoiding me. She’d come home after I’d gone to bed, and left in the morning without even waking me.

  I sat up and looked at her shoes. She’d lined up six pairs of them. They all had a sizable heel and looked ridiculously uncomfortable. There was one pair, yellow pumps, that were so pointy I was surprised Veronica was able to fit her big toe inside, let alone the other four.

  I walked over and picked them up. Then I grabbed another pair. Soon I was holding all of her shoes. Maybe if I hid them, I could convince Veronica that Corky had stolen them, and then Veronica and I could bond by trying to find them. It wasn’t a terrible idea, was it? A black ankle boot slipped from the pile and landed on the floor.

  “What are you doing with my shoes?” Veronica asked.

  I looked up. She had an apple in her hand with a big bite taken out of it.

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said.

  “It looks like you’re about to steal them or something.”

  “I thought you’d left.”

  “I went to the cafeteria.”

  “Oh.”

  “Put my shoes back,” she said.

  I loosened my hold and let them fall on the floor.

  “So in addition to being a liar, you’re also a thief. Fantastic!”

  “I didn’t take anything. I was just looking at them.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Veronica said. “And please don’t touch my stuff.”

  I bent down and began arranging her shoes back into a tidy row.

  “Stop touching my things,” Veronica said.

  “Okay,” I said. I stared out the window while Veronica changed clothes.

  “Is your story ready for workshop?” I asked.

  Veronica pointed her hair pick at me. “I am not talking to you.”

  She spent a few more minutes primping, and then she was gone. I got ready at my own pace. I even read through my story one more time. I was happy with it. My characters felt like real people.

  When I arrived at the university, I stopped by the computer lab and printed out ten copies. I slid them into my bag while they were still warm. Climbing the stairs to class, I realized how much I needed people to like it. What if they thought it was immature, or shallow, or dull? I’d be crushed.

  When I walked in, Mrs. Knox and Corky were chatting over pastries wrapped in napkins.

  “So true!” Mrs. Knox said. “Death scenes shouldn’t be easy to write or read. It takes a lot to extinguish life on the page.”

  “Yeah. And there’s no real comparison between a knife scene and a sword scene,” Corky said. “Because knives say ‘This is real reality,’ and swords say ‘This is exaggerated reality.’”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. Seriously. Wasn’t Mrs. Knox alarmed that a student would be so hung up on death and lethal weapons? Weren’t these subjects universally acknowledged as red flags? How many realistic knife scenes would she have to read before she notified authorities?

  Waller and Roger came in a few moments later. Roger looked different to me today. Deeper. Kite and Frank walked in behind him. Frank still looked very bald. And Waller, absent eyebrows, looked perpetually surprised. Roger sat next to me and patted my already cooled stories. I sat up straight. I wasn’t expecting that.

  “I’m excited to see how you deal with the Rapture,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. Why did Roger think I was writing a story about the end times? Did I look like
the kind of person who was hung up on writing a story about the end times?

  “In the car, Waller read the first sentence.”

  I nodded, wishing Roger hadn’t brought that up. “Yeah, I don’t really address the Rapture head-on.”

  “Not many writers do,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him that I’d seen him on the metro last night, that I’d watched him surrender his seat and help the old man and chat up the attractive brunette. I worried he’d think I had stalker issues.

  “The Rapture was a device,” I said. “A way to introduce early on in the story the theme of absolute endings.” I looked him in the eyes. “Theme is hard for me.”

  “Theme is hard for everybody,” he said. “Except people who write revenge porn.” He shook his head. “It’s an issue I have.”

  “Porn?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. Did Roger have a porn issue? And was he trying to talk to me in our workshop about it?

  Roger briefly glanced at Corky, then lowered his voice. “I think some violent urban fantasy is actually just revenge porn. It’s full of gratuitous torture and has one message: ‘How ya like me now?’”

  He bumped me with his elbow. An effort to cheer me up? Was he saying he could see through Corky? Whatever it meant, I appreciated the gesture.

  “Revenge porn is an apt assessment,” I said.

  Annie Earl and Brenda walked in, chatting up a storm. Probably about how much they loved their new rooms. Veronica came last and set her stories on the table, then plopped down in a seat on the other side of Roger.

  Mrs. Knox pulled herself away from her conversation with Corky. “Soon, we’ll be finished with our stories,” she said. “At that time we’ll be discussing all the exercises I’ve assigned. Next on the docket: image and dialogue. For the next week I want you to collect bits of conversation. Roommates. Salesclerks. Strangers on the metro. If somebody says something interesting or compelling, write it down. By next Monday you should have an entire page of found dialogue.

  “And for our next next assignment, I want you to write a scene. You’re at the grocery store. You’re shopping. The first line should establish that it’s a normal day.” Mrs. Knox lowered her voice and leaned forward. “But I want your second sentence to introduce a complicating circumstance. A man runs down your aisle without pants. A bagger sees somebody with a gun. A rabid raccoon gets into the store. Something like that. Something big. Your job is to write that scene.”

  Corky looked thrilled. “How many pages?”

  “At least four.”

  “Can we set the grocery store in a parallel universe?” Corky asked.

  “Sure.”

  “If it works for the story, are we allowed to obliterate the grocery store in our scene?” Corky asked.

  “No limits on destruction,” Mrs. Knox said. “It’s your scene.”

  “This should yield interesting results,” Annie Earl said.

  “Can the grocery store be a liquor store?” Kite asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Knox said. “But you can set your scene in the liquor aisle of the grocery store.”

  “Awesome,” Kite said.

  “All right, Corky? Do you want to go first?” Mrs. Knox asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’d rather Waller did.”

  “Sounds good,” Waller said. “I want to read from the middle.

  “Margot stood on the edge of the lake, frowning. ‘Stop looking at my butt,’ she said. ‘We’re not dating anymore. It’s off-limits.’ But I couldn’t stop. When she wore a swimsuit, looking at her butt was my favorite pastime. I made myself stare up into a pack of drifting clouds instead. It didn’t seem fair. Not Margot hastily dumping me. Not Margot emphatically declaring her butt off-limits. Not Chad Wilky randomly popping into her life with an amazing breaststroke and stealing her away.”

  I stopped listening. The genuine affection he felt for his last girlfriend oozed out of what he read. On the page it hadn’t seemed all that powerful, but hearing him read was a very different experience. Waller loved this girl. And it didn’t sound like Allie/sister love. It sounded explosive. It sounded real.

  I scanned the table, overtly staring at the faces of my classmates as he read. I caught Veronica’s eyes and she looked away.

  There was a brief moment of silence after Waller stopped reading, then the class started making comments.

  “I thought you did a great job of capturing a breaking heart,” Annie Earl told him.

  “I agree,” Brenda chimed in. “Dixon and Margot felt real to me—young lovebirds confused by the ambiguities and contradictions of modern relationships. I admired the message—love hurts. I mean, you delivered it. But I wanted Margot to have more depth.”

  “I liked your fox scene,” Corky said. “It was believable and well timed. I really enjoyed the contrast between the meaninglessness of the dialogue and the real animal desire that was simmering beneath it.”

  I could tell Waller wasn’t sure whether to take this as a compliment. To me it seemed brilliantly backhanded: signature Corky.

  “You’ve got an eye for image,” Kite said. “The way you describe the natural world makes it come to life. I’ve never seen lady’s thumb before, but now I feel like I have. What is it?”

  “It’s a common Michigan weed,” Roger said.

  Blah, blah, blah. Everybody loved Waller’s love story. Lori was so lucky to have dated a guy who was creative and talented and emotionally deep enough to write so powerfully about their relationship. Then Veronica spoke.

  “I like your story, Waller,” she said. “But I think you turn Margot into way too big of a villain. I mean, she’s young. She stops liking your main character dude. It happens. The part where your story says unflattering things about her feet. And that other part where you comment on her visible panty line. And that huge section where you criticize her kissing style. I’m sure you’re not doing this on purpose, but it sort of feels like you’re using your story as a chance to trash an ex-girlfriend. And those parts really turned me off.”

  No one responded at first. Roger was drumming his fingers on the table, clearly trying to decide whether or not to say what he was thinking. “I, um …” He coughed. “I liked the story,” he began. “I thought it was well paced and the setting was right on. The fox scene was a great ending because of the way it foreshadowed the next confused hookup between the narrator and his ex.” Waller listened warily. “But I was concerned that Dixon doesn’t really seem able to reflect on what Lori was feeling— sorry. Margot. Sorry.” Both boys’ faces turned red.

  “Anyway, Dixon seemed to have a blind spot about how much his refusals to go to her flute performances might have hurt her, and as a reader I felt like my perspective was being overdirected. The one weakness Dixon admits in the story is his weakness for Margot, and that seemed inconsistent with his abundant, sometimes really insightful criticism of her—so he came across as an unreliable narrator, but I wasn’t sure that was intentional.”

  I was astonished that he could say this right to Waller’s face. Telling your best friend that his narrator was unintentionally unreliable seemed like a huge slam.

  “I wouldn’t go as far as Veronica,” he continued, “but it did seem like the story was shaped around an earnest appraisal of Margot’s character. I thought it would have been a lot more powerful if it had been about how we selectively forget our own mistakes and how that gets in the way of honest communication.”

  Roger tried to look Waller in the eyes, as if to say, I meant it for the best, but Waller stoically stared past him.

  “That’s an interesting point,” Mrs. Knox said. “Dixon portrays Margot as a classic cipher. Inscrutable, seductive. We don’t get a glimpse of her thoughts and feelings, only her surface charms, which are left open for interpretation. In a way, you could view her flight to Chad Wilky’s arms as a transfer of ownership.” She chewed her pen for a second, thinking. “What’s your take? Was the narrator unfairly controlling our access to her perspective? Ultimately, was Dixon�
�s jealousy meant to be sympathetic, or were his flaws central to the story’s message? Was he a cautionary example?”

  “I’d be cautious before I dated that guy,” Veronica said. “At times I think he seemed psychotic.”

  I wondered if Veronica really felt this way or if she was just getting back at Waller for balding Frank.

  “Interesting word choice,” Annie Earl said. “Once you say psychotic, I can see psychotic.”

  “Yeah,” I jumped in. “When your heart gets broken, you can definitely feel psychotic. Because there’s your heart in pieces. It feels useless. But I wasn’t really sure Dixon’s heart was as broken as he kept saying. Because losing Margot didn’t make him feel wrecked or question what he could have done differently; it just made him self-righteous. The story seemed to take it for granted that we’d trust Dixon, and I don’t think that was quite fair.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that!

  “I’ll say it again. I think the narrator is a normal guy,” Kite said. “I don’t think he’s psychotic. His girlfriend just dumped him.”

  “I think we’ve brought these characterization issues to Waller’s attention,” Mrs. Knox said. “Let’s move on to something else.”

  I felt pretty terrible when Corky brought up how much she liked the fox scene again.

  “Its originality really stood out,” she said. “Two clever foxes copulating in the woods. Pretty brilliant.”

  Veronica didn’t visibly react to Corky’s comments in any way. I thought that showed real growth, though probably not forgiveness. Frank and Kite also chimed in on the fox scene. They liked it. But it didn’t surprise me that guys would like an animal-mating scene.

  “I thought the foxes were a little bit too anthropomorphized,” Annie Earl said. “I would have liked it more if they’d remained more foxlike.”

  Veronica smiled. “Totally.”

  “They were awfully fluffy,” Brenda said.