A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

by Kristen Tracy

  “That’s true for Ohio too,” I said.

  “But in Ohio I never walk anywhere. I always drive. And when you walk, it’s easier to smell stuff. Because you’re going so much slower.”

  “I guess that’s one liability of traveling at cheetah speed,” I said. “You miss the smell of bread.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” Veronica asked.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I might be making fun of cheetahs.”

  “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

  “Fine.”

  Neither one of us said anything for a minute.

  “Jesus. Alexej and his friend are really late. What time is it?”

  I hoped they didn’t show up at all.

  That’s when I saw a shadowy figure approaching us. Oh god. It was Corky.

  “What are you two kids waiting for?” she asked.

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “We’re just hanging out,” said Veronica.

  “I should probably tell you the reason I’m here,” Corky said.

  “Or you could just leave,” Veronica said.

  “First, I have something for you, Veronica.” Corky handed her a Baggie filled with pieces of torn paper. “It might not look familiar to you, but it’s something very precious,” Corky said.

  “Did you break into my room?” Veronica asked.

  “That’s beside the point,” Corky said. “It’s a picture of you. I paid one of the German photography students two bucks to take it. I actually bought two pictures.”

  “You’re a pervert,” Veronica said.

  “Aren’t you curious to know what you’re doing in the picture?” Corky asked.

  Veronica dumped the pieces onto her lap. I could see her face and Alexej’s face. She rearranged the pieces until she unpuzzled the picture. Veronica and Alexej were kissing.

  “The one I mailed to Boz isn’t torn up,” Corky said.

  I inched closer to Veronica and put my arm around her. “Don’t do anything. This will work itself out.”

  “But it really won’t,” Corky said. “Also, I’m sure you’ll never hear from Alexej again. I told him how old you really are. Plus, it was obvious that he was just trying to get in your pants anyway.”

  By the look on Veronica’s face, I knew she felt the consequences of what she’d done.

  “And now I’ve got something else to tell you, and this is related to your hot-dudes,” Corky said.

  “It doesn’t even matter anymore,” I said. “Veronica took the man-wall down. The hot-dudes are behind us.”

  “What are you talking about?” Veronica asked. “I didn’t take the man-wall down.”

  Corky laughed. “You idiots. I took the man-wall down. I collected all the hot-dudes in an envelope and mailed them to Boz along with a letter explaining that every single paper cutout of a guy represented one of your hookups.”

  “But that’s not even true!” Veronica said. “I wasn’t hooking up with them. I was flirting!”

  “But with the picture I sent of Alexej, it doesn’t look like that,” Corky said. “And by the way, I feel like I’ve gotten everything I need out of this workshop, so I’m leaving for Slovenia, where I’ll be taking part in another writers’ program.”

  Veronica stared at the torn photo on her lap and then at Corky. Her hand shook with anger. “I’m going to hurt you,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but believable.

  “I doubt it,” Corky said. “Oh, and I almost forgot. I e-mailed Boz about the stuff that’s coming, so basically your relationship ended four hours ago.”

  Veronica narrowed her eyes and glared right at Corky. “I will hurt you.”

  “Then you will get sent home,” Corky said.

  “I don’t care,” Veronica said.

  “Sure you do,” Corky said.

  I kept my arm tight around Veronica.

  “Here’s the thing, Veronica Knox. You are playing out of your league. You screwed with me and now I’m screwing you back. You shouldn’t have looked at my e-mail. You shouldn’t have read my blog. And you should have given me back my ankle bracelet when I asked for it.”

  “I am never giving you anything!” Veronica said.

  “Which is precisely why I had to jack up your life,” Corky said. “Because you think you’re so ruthless. But really, you’re just another pathetic, mean-spirited American teenager.”

  Corky laughed and waved. “I think this exchange has been illuminating for everyone involved. Even your sidekick. Bye, Dessy!”

  She walked off in a very normal manner. At one point she even skipped a little, but not in a way that revealed her psychopathic tendencies.

  “Why didn’t you just give her back her ankle bracelet?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I’d already mailed it to Boz.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I wanted him to think I was living on the edge,” Veronica said. “I wanted to occupy every moment of his waking mind.”

  “Well, it looks like he gets to keep it.”

  “I can’t believe she did this to me,” Veronica said.

  “What’s done is done,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “Maybe you can fix it.” But I wasn’t sure if that was possible.

  “But how can anyone be that messed up?” Veronica asked.

  “Let’s just leave her alone,” I said. “She’s dangerous.”

  Veronica sucked in a breath so deep that I could see her chest expand. “I won’t let her leave Prague without feeling my math.”

  “Math?” I asked. “Do you mean wrath?”

  “Maybe,” Veronica said. “Either way, I’m going to teach her a lesson. I plan on bringing that head case to her ugly, chubby knees.”

  Chapter Thirty

  We arrived at the Church of Our Lady Victorious on Monday before the rest of the class.

  “Today I hate my life,” Veronica said.

  I saw no point in trying to cheer Veronica out of her desperate and depressive state. Because if I were her, I would have felt the same. Veronica hadn’t been able to rouse Boz in any way. He wouldn’t answer his phone or return her e-mails. His mother even politely admonished Veronica to stop calling until things cooled off. By all accounts their relationship looked over.

  “I’m nervous about seeing Roger.” I glanced down the street to see if he was coming.

  “I thought you said that things went good the other night. You told me he complimented your belt.”

  When pressed, rather than share with Veronica exactly what had happened, I’d once again opted for selectively withholding important information for the sake of creating a more pleasant reality.

  “Relax. Roger wants to kiss your face off.”

  Because Veronica had been so off the mark with her Waller assessment, I didn’t put much stock in her Roger one.

  “You aren’t going to do anything to Corky during class, right?” I asked. “Because that would be stupid.”

  “When the opportunity presents itself, I’ll take it.”

  “Not in front of your mother!”

  “You yell a lot more in Prague than you do in Ohio,” Veronica said.

  “That’s because you frustrate me beyond belief a lot more in Prague than you do in Ohio.”

  I pulled out my notebook to look over my images. I’d described three somewhat Prague-related objects: a wounded pigeon eating french fries, a gorilla from the zoo, and my new belt. Veronica had gone hardcore Prague with hers: a broken headstone at the Old Jewish Cemetery, an ornate doorknocker, her bare foot on the bank of the Vltava River.

  Veronica looked up at the towering church behind us. “I can’t believe Mom is making the whole class gawk at a doll,” Veronica said.

  “It’s a famous statue of infant Jesus,” I said. “It’s supposed to make miracles happen.”

  “But it’s so hot out,” she whined.

  “Maybe it’s air-conditioned inside.”

  “Dessy, this country doesn’t unde
rstand the concept of air conditioning. They only understand pig-sweat heat.”

  We sat on the church steps and continued to bake.

  “Corky is planning on leaving before anybody can find out that she’s certifiably insane. It’s not fair!”

  “I say we let her go without incident. I, for one, want to see Corky slip out of my life and never return.”

  “If I see her at the church, I’m going to take her down.”

  “Veronica. You can’t attack her during the Infant of Prague tour.”

  “I was thinking I’d do it afterward.”

  “You can’t! I won’t allow it!”

  “Fine. Fine. I knew that would be your reaction.”

  “Let’s just stay with the group.”

  Veronica smiled. “Okay.”

  This was very much unlike Veronica. She never surrendered this easily.

  “What have you done?” I asked.

  Veronica’s smile intensified until she was baring her teeth.

  “Let’s just say that Corky’s days of anonymously pestering people online are over.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hijacked her blog and posted her name. She’s out. She’s Corky Tina Baker.”

  “Veronica, why couldn’t you wait until she’d left town? If she finds out, she’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t know. She seems pretty hung up on both of us.”

  “Veronica, it’s gestures like these that make me question my ability to remain your best friend.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from. But I had to do something. I couldn’t let her win.”

  “Maybe the most important thing in life isn’t winning! Maybe it’s staying alive!”

  “I’d rather be eating a doughnut,” Veronica said.

  I liked that idea.

  There was a small sea of people streaming up the stone stairs to the church. They looked like tourists. Shorts. Cameras. Folded maps in hand.

  “Do you think we look less like tourists?” I asked.

  She looked at the crowd of people and then back at me.

  “We look like cool tourists,” she said. “You know, like we’re happy to be here and we’ll see what we see, but we’re not running around like tightly wound freaks on a schedule.”

  I never heard her coming. One moment I was watching birds milling around some sidewalk crumbs, and the next thing I knew they had burst into flight and Corky was standing right in front of me, screaming.

  “You idiots!”

  “Go away!” Veronica said.

  “In my world, squealers pay consequences!” Corky said. “Squealers get scars.”

  She was holding something silver in her hand. Was it a knife? A razor blade? Oh my god. How crazy was our crazy roommate?

  “Run!” Veronica yelled. “Run!”

  I leapt to my feet and shoved Corky. Then I followed Veronica. At first I was only a few yards behind her. But she quickly pulled ahead. I was stunned when I realized that she was an entire block ahead of me. I hadn’t known Veronica was so good at sprinting. Soon I could hear Corky behind me, but I couldn’t see Veronica in front of me at all. She’d left me. She’d infuriated a lunatic and then left me in that lunatic’s path. It was unfathomable.

  As I passed an alleyway, my arm nearly got ripped from its socket. I tried to scream, but a hand flew over my mouth. It was Veronica.

  “Follow me this way,” she said. “Even if she’s realized that we’ve turned off, she won’t be able to catch us. She’s too fat.”

  And so I let Veronica lead me through back alleys that I hadn’t even known existed, until suddenly we were back at the dorm.

  We ran into the building and raced up the stairs to our room.

  “She would never expect that we’d come back here,” Veronica said.

  As soon as she said that, the suite’s front door slammed.

  “I know you’re in there!” Corky screamed.

  “What should we do?” I whispered. “Should we call somebody?”

  Veronica lunged for the phone, then whimpered, “It’s been cut! It’s dead!” She held up the sliced phone line. Corky!

  I sat down and tried to mentally prepare myself for hand-to-hand combat.

  But Veronica took a different tack. I watched her dramatically throw open our window.

  “Are you going to jump?” I asked. I was sure leaping from this height would break both of her legs.

  “When you flip into survival mode, you ask the stupidest questions,” Veronica said.

  She gathered our bedsheets and tied them together. As she tossed them out the window I thought maybe she had gone insane. Did she think we were going to climb out the window? I had no climbing abilities whatsoever. At seventeen, I’d never even managed to make it up a tree.

  “Come help me tie it to the desk,” Veronica hissed.

  She looped her bedsheet around one of her desk’s wooden legs. Her desk was the sturdiest item in the room. Unlike mine, hers was actually bolted to the floor.

  “When she comes inside to attack us,” Veronica whispered, “she’ll see this and think we fled out the window.”

  “How will she think that when she sees us standing right here?”

  “She won’t see us. Because we’ll be inside our suitcases.”

  She was either brilliant or suicidally dumb. Either way, I couldn’t think of a better plan. So I zipped Veronica into her bag. But before I climbed inside I thought of something.

  “Where’s your lipstick?” I whispered.

  “Everywhere.”

  I pawed over the desk looking for a tube, until I found one: Maneater Red. I snatched the sheets and pulled them back into the room. Then I attempted to draw a circle with a dot in it by smearing the lip color as fast as I could over the cotton surface. It only took seconds. I tossed the sheets out the window again.

  “Is that some sort of weird tribal ritual?” Veronica asked, peeking out the corner of her bag.

  I didn’t I have time to explain. “I did it for luck,” I whispered as I ran to my suitcase and climbed in. With my thumbnail I was able to guide the zipper all the way around to the top.

  “Are you okay?”

  I didn’t answer. Was she being serious? My life was chaos, manwise and otherwise, and Corky wanted to permanently mark me as squealer with some weird scar. And I now was inside of my roller luggage.

  “My bag smells like crayons.”

  I still didn’t answer.

  “You know I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to get to this point. And I’m not just talking about Corky. I’m talking about Hamilton too.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Hamilton.”

  “I know. He’s a total jerk.”

  I didn’t argue. But dating one jerk doesn’t make all guys jerks. If I lived through this Corky crisis, I didn’t need to let my heart stay broken. Like Roger. He was kind and smart and spicy-smelling and genuine. There had to be other boys like him in the world. I couldn’t let Hamilton’s actions spoil my entire future.

  “How much longer do we have to stay in our suitcases?” I asked.

  “Until we know Corky’s gone.”

  “I’m going to get my master key!” Corky yelled. “And then I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t move,” Veronica said quietly. “She might be trying to flush us out.”

  “Do you really think she’ll hurt us? Don’t you think she’s just trying to scare us?”

  Suddenly I began to doubt all the threats. It seemed very plausible that Corky was invested in traumatizing us to the point where we’d hide and cower, but not actually intending to leave visible signs of an assault.

  “Maybe she’s bluffing. How come you’re so quiet?” Veronica asked me.

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Annie Earl.”

  “Hey,” Veronica said. “She told a bunch of us at the mid dinner how she got her scars. She broke into a burning car.”

  “She t
old me too,” I said.

  “When I first heard her story I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Veronica said. “It made me feel terrible about the entire world. For, like, twenty minutes.”

  “It altered her life.”

  “It’s good you missed the dinner. Because there were a ton of stories like that. It’s too bad that everyone has to go through such giant traumas,” Veronica said.

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I think that’s life.”

  “Screw that,” Veronica said. “I’m trying to avoid crap like that. I mean, I think that’s part of the reason I’m slightly dishonest and, at times, mean to people. I’m protecting myself.”

  I ignored this statement because it seemed pretty clear to me that our current trauma was the direct result of her actions.

  “I have a feeling that I’m going to experience four life traumas,” I said.

  “Four!” Veronica whisper-yelled.

  “Yeah. I have this feeling that I’m getting more than three, but less than five.”

  “Well, that’s four.”

  “But I’ll deal with them, you know?”

  “What if you lose both your legs?” Veronica asked.

  “I’m not going to lose both my legs. Don’t be stupid.” I gently punched the inside of my bag to imitate the gesture of punching her in the arm.

  “I don’t know,” she mused. “I’m sure people who lose both their legs always thought it would never happen to them either.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Veronica joke around. I was thinking about serious life issues.

  “Let’s just say you did lose both your legs. Would you use prosthetic limbs or would you just use a wheelchair or how would you handle it?”

  Only Veronica Knox would ask me that question. And even though it annoyed me on several levels, I also sort of liked it.

  “I’d probably use prosthetic limbs,” I said.

  “Yeah. Me too,” she said.

  “What I’m getting at here is that I’m going to make the choices that determine what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen to me. As much as Hamilton was a jerk for cheating on me and then laminating my flaws, there was some truth in what he said.”

  “If Boz ever tried to hand me my flaws like that, I’d either gouge his eyes out or force his mouth open and make him eat my flaws.”