A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

by Kristen Tracy

  “So you caught Veronica talking to Hamilton?” she asked.

  “You’re so stupid,” I said. “It was Boz.”

  Corky raised her eyebrows in amusement. “If you actually believe that, I’m not the stupid one.”

  I backed into my room and locked the door. When I heard Corky start the shower a moment later, I figured I ought to use the opportunity to get some fresh air. So I grabbed my bag and scampered out of the suite.

  I only made it three strides before I nearly ran smack into Roger.

  “I was coming by to see if you were all right,” he said. “That was a pretty erratic move back there in workshop.”

  I had no desire to talk about workshop. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “You should have stayed. It would have been a good discussion.”

  “No, it wouldn’t have,” I said. “For several reasons. Hey, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to get as far away from this dorm as possible. Want to walk?”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but then said, “Sure.” We set off toward the dorm lobby.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked. I glanced up at his face. He seemed more concerned than judgmental, but still, I was wary of telling him anything. Did a college guy want to hear about roommate drama and issues related to high school infidelity? Would he care? Or even believe me?

  “Given the events of the past week, would you say that my credibility has been at all compromised?” I asked.

  He followed me out to the sidewalk and silently kept pace beside me. Every second he didn’t answer my question felt like a blow. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I’m curious about the thing with Waller’s foxes. And what happened at Kutná Hora was a little weird.”

  I felt myself shrivel.

  “But for the most part, you seem like a fairly even-keeled person to me,” he added.

  Even-keeled. If only he knew about my damaged trim tab. Suddenly I felt claustrophobic. And misunderstood.

  “Waller is a jerk,” I blurted. “And I didn’t give him Veronica’s fox idea. I think they just watched the same stupid nature show. And I feel bad about what happened at Kutná Hora, but that pales in comparison to what Veronica did, which was to sic a homicidal maniac on us.”

  “You mean Corky?”

  I didn’t say anything. We’d reached the metro tunnel, and I wanted to enter it and go somewhere. Alone.

  “I feel really bad about what happened with you and Waller,” he said, stepping out of the flow of metro traffic and pausing beside a small tree. I reluctantly joined him.

  “He has a screwed-up need for attention. Combine that with the fact that he has no idea what he wants, and it’s a formula for disaster. For some reason coming to Prague has only made it worse.” I didn’t want to hear any more, but Roger kept going. “He’s telling Brenda that he’s really interested in starting something, while he’s in the process of reconciling with Lori. I love him, but you’re right. He’s being a jerk.”

  “I have to go,” I said. Apparently, being around people could only make me feel more and more wretched. As I dashed down the escalator, I thought I might have heard Roger call after me, but decided it was just my brain tricking itself yet again.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Annie Earl found me the following evening attempting to buy a dinner of mini-pretzels from the vending machine.

  “You’re going to miss the big mid dinner?” she asked over my shoulder.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I’d forgotten all about the big mid dinner, a mixer with the faculty and the guest agent, Tiki Manza.

  “It’s supposed to be a lot of fun,” she said.

  I turned around and held up my pretzels. “I’m good.”

  “Good? Have you been crying?” she asked.

  “Some,” I said.

  “Is this about your fight with Veronica?”

  “How do you know about that?” I asked.

  “My new room is right above yours,” she said. “And I keep my window open.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I felt my bottom lip tremble.

  “Listen,” Annie Earl said, “I know something substantial has happened, or at least it feels that way right now. But you shouldn’t pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in order to sit by yourself and sulk.”

  I looked at her and tried to swallow the lump in my throat. I needed to talk to somebody, and Annie Earl was here. So I let myself spill. “Annie Earl,” I said, “my heart is broken.”

  “You do look rather forlorn. Is it your first one?”

  I nodded. “It actually got broken a couple of months ago, but due to some recent events, it feels re-broken.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Come to dinner with me. If things begin to feel too deep for you, you can leave early.”

  “Things feel pretty deep right now.”

  Annie Earl hugged me. She seemed experienced at dealing with emotionally bruised people. Then she led me by the elbow outside.

  “It’s too bad you left class early yesterday, because I had some things I wanted to say about your story.”

  “I’m not ready for feedback.”

  “Actually, I think you are.”

  “No!” I covered my ears.

  “Dessy. What are you afraid of?”

  I pulled my hands away from my ears. “Criticism, I guess. I want people to like it.”

  “Sounds like you’re afraid of rejection. That’s normal. People are going to have opinions. Learn to listen. Take what’s useful and disregard the rest. Remember, you aren’t your story.”

  What she said sounded so logical. Why didn’t I talk to logical people more often?

  “Now are you ready for some feedback?” Annie Earl asked.

  “Hit me.”

  “What your story captures so effectively is that moment of sacrifice that accompanies love. The car trip to Guatemala is a great metaphor for that.”

  We walked along the sidewalk in the pale light of dusk.

  “You’ve got a great sense for characters. And pacing. And relationships.”

  “Love sucks,” I said.

  Annie Earl laughed. “You’ll get back on that horse.”

  My mind flashed to Hamilton. Then Waller. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I know it feels like it will never happen again. But it will. I promise. It’s part of life.” Annie Earl gave me another hug. It felt like she was trying to transfer some of her good mood vibes onto me.

  “I think I’m stuck,” I said.

  “Broken hearts will do that.”

  “But I shouldn’t want this guy back at all,” I explained. “Logically, I know that. But I can’t help myself.”

  “Give it time,” Annie Earl said. “There will be another one.”

  “I’m not sure that I want to fall in love again,” I said. “I think I might make a good nun.”

  “Now is not the appropriate time to make that life decision. Heal first, live through your twenties, then consider pursuing lifelong celibacy.”

  “I hate making life decisions,” I said. “I’m so afraid that I’m going to screw it up.”

  “Well, the great thing about life is that it usually gives you a chance to correct your screwups,” she said.

  “But I don’t want to have to correct anything. I want to get it right the first time.”

  “That life strategy will lead you straight to a nervous breakdown,” she said.

  “I think I’m having one right now.”

  Annie Earl stopped me. She forcefully turned me toward her and looked me right in the eyes. “You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. A lot of times what feels like a mistake in the moment, one year, two years, ten years later, turns out not to have been a mistake at all.”

  I didn’t like thinking about how long life was. I was mainly worried about the dramatic condition of my present situation. Plus, did I even know Annie Earl well enough to take her ad
vice? She loosened her grip on me and we started walking again.

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said. “It’s about how I got my scars.”

  I almost felt guilty of something heinous because I’d been so curious about Annie Earl’s arms. “Sure,” I said.

  “One day, while vacationing in Boca Raton, I came across a burning car. It was parked on a patch of dry grass and had just caught on fire. I saw it happen. The flames licked the undercarriage for a few seconds and then quickly burst into the car itself. I raced to it. Inside I could see a child strapped into a car seat. So I punched out the rear passenger window with my bare hands and grabbed the child and pulled it to safety.”

  The story took my breath away. “You saved a child?”

  “No,” Annie Earl said. “I didn’t. It turned out that it was a doll.”

  “Oh my god!” I said. “Who puts a doll in a car seat?”

  “I don’t think the people could have anticipated the car catching fire and a passerby mistaking the doll for an actual child. I think people who have children have dolls. And it just happened,” Annie Earl said.

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t see it the way you do,” Annie Earl said. “I feel I made the right decision. Because not taking that risk would have meant I was a different kind of person.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But still.”

  Annie Earl frowned. “Breaking into that car meant that I was able to think about saving some helpless child before I thought about myself. That’s illuminating.”

  “But to be scarred for a doll seems unfair,” I said.

  “I was given an impossible situation. And I made my choice. And I’m happy with it.”

  I believed her. I looked at Annie Earl and saw a woman who was fully alive and unquestionably happy. This is not what I saw when I looked at most people. Not Veronica. Not my mother. Not me.

  “I don’t think I can go to the mid dinner,” I said. “I feel overwhelmed.” I needed time alone, to figure things out. How else would I be able to unravel the knot that had become my life?

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I sat in class, rereading Roger’s ending, trying to figure out the perfect thing to say. I wanted to sound smart. And mature. And even-keeled. I read the ending a seventh time.

  My father was never going to be who I wanted him to be, and I needed to let go of my hope that one day I would wake up and find a guy who had at last decided to behave admirably. He would never be that guy. Up ahead, what I thought was a poodle turned out to be a monkey. Wiry and irreverent, the monkey hurried through the alley like a small, jittery man. The sailor held the leash loosely and gave the monkey a lot more freedom than I would’ve given my pet monkey, if I’d happened to have one.

  The animal shrieked as it passed the Dumpster. The sailor smiled at me. He looked decent enough. Once they passed, I didn’t turn around. I kept moving forward, through the shadowed alley, toward the sun-splashed main street. Horns honked at a double-parked car. I kept going. I needed to set a good pace. This is how it was always going to be. No matter where I went, or how I arrived, my father was his own man and I was mine. North or south, east or west, the direction didn’t matter. From this day forward, I was the one who’d be picking the street.

  He had written about a trip he and his father had taken to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. At least I think the narrator was based on Roger. The two characters drive cross-country from Chicago to D.C. Along the way, the son witnesses several bungled attempts of his dad trying to pick up women. The story ends when the main character runs off and then wanders down an alley near Dupont Circle and finds a sailor walking with a small monkey on a leash. Roger’s ending spoke to me, but that wasn’t a classworthy comment. His closing was hopeful, but still true. I wanted to find that same sort of way out of my own story. Because what Roger wrote was honest and heartbreaking, and made me glad that I had a father who was interested in parking technology and not carousing. I stared down at my comments. Suddenly none of them looked legible.

  As people began arriving, I tried not to look at anybody. Brenda. Waller. Corky. Veronica. I didn’t understand how one workshop could have so many challenging people in it.

  “Why don’t we jump right in?” Mrs. Knox said excitedly. “Roger, where do you want to read from?”

  “The middle,” he said. “The lawn-mower scene.

  “I spotted the lawn from the highway before my father did. It was vast and overgrown, and the red brick house at the crest of the grounds was beginning to show signs of geriatric disrepair.

  “‘Looks promising,’ my father said. ‘We’ll get at least a Benjamin. Maybe a Benjamin plus a Ulysses.’

  “For all his flaws, he was well equipped with bargaining skills.

  “‘Just don’t go inside his house with him,’ he said. ‘If he wants to tip you, make him pay you in cash right out on the lawn.’

  “It didn’t matter how much money he charged for my lawn-mowing services, because I wouldn’t get to keep any of it. It would all go to Jack (Daniel), Johnnie (Walker), and Jim (Beam).

  “This is when the fantasies usually started. I didn’t want to be who I was, so I imagined other possible outcomes for myself. My dad could get arrested in D.C. I could join up with an old sea captain and cross the Atlantic on a schooner. Sure. Why not? That was possible.

  “The man of the house appeared after three insistent chimes of the doorbell. I almost choked. He looked like an undead veteran of the Civil War—crazy white hair, bloodshot eyes, silver stubble like metal shavings. He stared at us through the screen door.

  “‘My boy wants to know if you’d like to have your lawn mowed,’ my dad said in a phony drawl. ‘I’ve got to do some business in the city and could come get him in a few hours. Thought it’d be good to teach him the value of a day’s hard labor.’

  “The man appraised us for a long moment, then said, ‘How much?’

  “My father turned to me. ‘What did that gentleman pay you back in Jenkins County? I believe it was thirty an hour, but like I said, it’s more about the lesson.’

  “I wanted to punch him and run. I could have knocked him flat on his back. But instead I played my part and swore to myself that this was the last time. Tomorrow, I would make my escape.”

  After Roger finished reading, we took our traditional pause and looked back over the page.

  Then Annie Earl kicked off the comments. “You could publish this. Send it out.”

  “Yeah,” Brenda said. “It’s so masculine. Southern journals love that.”

  “When the father flashed the housekeeper in that elevator, I was furious,” Veronica said. “You made that scene feel so real.”

  “I love your dialogue,” Brenda said. “It was spare and direct.”

  “It’s always fun to read about maniac parents renting out their kids for petty jobs,” Corky said.

  I felt like I should say something too, so I dove in even before I had a fully formed thought. “I think you’re good at building sympathetic characters. Because as much as I didn’t like the dad, I still rooted for him. He wasn’t a total villain. I kept hoping that he’d turn a corner.”

  Mrs. Knox agreed. “A teacher once told me that when you write a villain, you have to make sure that your villain loves his mother. While you didn’t exactly address the father’s bond with his mother, you did give him dimensions and the ability to love, and I appreciated that. Like Dessy said, we need to be able to root for him too.”

  “I really liked the monkey,” said Kite. “I’ve seen lots of monkeys, and I thought you really nailed that monkey’s demeanor.”

  “I second that,” Frank said. “Awesome monkey.”

  “Thanks,” Roger said.

  “I agree,” said Mrs. Knox. “The monkey is so striking because it’s a three-dimensional character as well as a symbol. It’s a monkey before it’s a symbol.”

  At the end of the workshop, Mrs. Knox handed out a li
st of tourist attractions: Petrˇín Hill, the Mucha Museum, Lenin Wall, and Municipal House.

  “Next class we’ll meet here, but we’ll walk to Petrˇín Hill. I want you to bring in three images. Make sure that it’s not just a collection of adjectives and adverbs.” She looked right at Waller when she said this. “I want you to really study three objects and bring in precise descriptions.”

  I stayed seated until everybody had left. I wanted to revel in my loneliness. And it worked. When you feel depressed and send antisocial messages, the whole world will let you abandon it.

  The next week passed in a blur of pitiful solitude. Without Veronica, I grew so lonely that I bought online time in various cafés and spent hours on the Sasquatch discussion boards. Some accounts outside Yakima, Washington were so persuasive that after a few days I became convinced that Bigfoot really did exist. I pictured him lumbering through thick forests, aware of his legendary status, shunning civilization and all its gadgets.

  I steered clear of the dorms. My life barely intersected with Veronica’s. Or Corky’s. Or Waller’s. Or Roger’s. Or anybody’s. One day after class, trying to kill time, I decided to visit an interesting café in my guidebook. It took me a half hour to get there on foot, and when I finally swung open the door, I saw that it was filled with real locals. No tourists in shorts wearing backpacks, clutching maps. These were regular Prague people living their regular Prague lives. The paint on the walls was chipped, and the posters of alcohol brands were not meant to appeal to me. The cashier didn’t even try to speak English; I pointed to the roll I wanted, and she put it in a brown sack. I paid and walked out the door.

  I felt savvy and cool. I didn’t need Veronica to explore the gritty side of Prague. I’d found the underbelly all on my own. When I left out the side door, I stepped onto a dirt pathway and heard an eerie sound. I saw shadows zipping around on the ground. Crap! My footsteps had sent several rats scattering. No, dozens of them, and they were huge. They skittered around my feet, emitting sounds that resembled big machinery.

  I threw my sack at the vermin and ran. I lost one of my shoes, but I was too freaked out to go back and get it. As I reapproached the touristy area of Prague, with one socked foot holding me back, it was clear I needed to return to the dorm. I sat on a park bench and ate a Corny bar, which tasted like cornflakes and chocolate and marshmallows and salt. A pigeon crash-landed in front of me, trying to snag a french fry. It skidded across the sidewalk. I wasn’t used to seeing pigeons skid. That’s when I noticed its damaged foot. It was missing its front toes. Lacking traction, it skidded a little every time it landed.