Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend (2 page)

or memorable. I had an identity. His causes (and there were, I

soon found out, a
lot
of them) became my causes. His friends be-

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came my friends. Teddy was my fi rst boyfriend— though not my

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fi rst kiss, which was a fact he didn’t necessarily know. He’d been

in my life so long now, and was such a part of it, that I really

couldn’t imagine it without him.

I smiled at him across the aisle, and he gave me a weak smile

back. He opened his mouth like he was about to say something,

when a harassed- looking woman, pushing a toddler in a cart,

rolled into the aisle. “Where are the paper towels?” she demanded

of me.

“Sorry,” I said, wishing for the umpteenth time I’d worn blue

that day. “I don’t actually work here.” She glanced at Teddy, and

at my own basket of items.

“
Clearly,
” she said, rolling her eyes and pushing her cart away

as she muttered about shoddy work ethic these days.

“Oh,” I said, leading the way to the gardening aisle to look for

bug repellant as Teddy trailed behind me. “Sophie and Doug won-

dered if we wanted to see a movie this weekend. I told them yes,

okay?”

Sophie and I had stayed close, moved out of our bivalve stage,

and my best friend had morphed into a class- A heartbreaker by

the end of sophomore year, leaving besotted guys and a string of

exes in her wake. Doug was her latest victim, but he’d actually

lasted a whole month, which was a record for Sophie, who tended

to cycle through boys in two- week increments. I’d said yes to the

movie without checking with Teddy, because when you’ve been to-

gether as long as we had, some things were assumed, like the fact

we’d always have a Saturday- night date. It was one of the million

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reasons I loved being with him. I didn’t have any of the anxiety

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and stress that I saw Sophie going through with all her various

boys. Instead, I had Teddy, who was constant and brilliant and

wonderful.

“Gemma,” Teddy said, shaking his head.

“I know,” I said quickly. “Doug is kind of a meathead. And I

know you think he’s insensitive to the plight of the, um, worker.

But they promised we could pick the movie this time, so I thought

about that documentary you wanted to see. The one about the . . .

plight of the worker?” I mumbled the last part. I could never re-

member the details of the documentaries Teddy wanted to watch.

All I knew was that they were never the ones I wanted to see,

which were mostly about penguins.

Teddy shook his head again and took a big breath. “Gemma . . .”

“But we won’t have to have dinner with them again! It can be

just the two of us. What do you say?” I picked up a citronella candle

in a glass jar and gave it a cautious sniff.

“Gemma.”

“We can go to that raw vegan place that just opened, and—”

“Gemma!”

I stopped talking when I realized I’d been interrupting, smiled

at him, and thought, one last time, about how wonderful our sum-

mer together was going to be. How everything was falling into

place. How great my life was.

Teddy looked at me, right into my eyes. He seemed to be strug-

gling with something, and let out a long breath before speaking.

“I . . .” He paused, then took another breath and said in a rush, “I

think we need to talk.”

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“We are talking,” I said. Then the impact of his words— and

the tone of his voice— hit me, and I noticed again how pale he

looked. The world seemed to wobble for a second, and it was like

I was suddenly having trouble catching my breath. “What . . .” I

started, haltingly, hearing how shaky— how scared— my voice

sounded. “What do you mean?”

“Gemma,” he said, his voice choked, “I think we should break

up.”

I dropped the candle I’d been holding, and the glass shattered

into pieces at my feet.

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“And then what happened?” Sophie asked from her seat the

kitchen table, eyes wide.

It was two days later, and Sophie had shown up that after-

noon, bearing tissues and chocolate and her “life coach”— otherwise

known as
Cosmo
— clearly believing that I would be in a despe-

rate, sobbing state. Which couldn’t have been further from the

truth. I was fi ne. This was just a temporary situation, and as

soon as Teddy realized he’d made a mistake, we’d get back to-

gether. It was as simple as that. In the meantime, I was baking.

I’d always liked to bake, but I’d gotten much more into it over

the last two years, and had started providing the refreshments

for Teddy’s various clubs and meetings and protest marches. Bak-

ing calmed me down, and I liked the order of it— the idea that

when you mixed certain ingredients together, chemical change

occurred, and you ended up with something else. And ever since

I’d come back from Target, baking was the only thing that had

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appealed to me. If I wasn’t baking, I found that I kept reaching

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for my phone, either to check if Teddy had called or to start to call

him and try to fi nd out what he’d been thinking. And since I

knew that neither of these were good options, I’d been keeping

myself— and my hands— occupied. My mother and stepfather,

clearly understanding that I was on a tear, had been staying out

of my way in the kitchen. And so far, I’d made three kinds of

muffi ns, four kinds of cookies, a coffee cake, and an iffy batch of

snickerdoodles. I had just put my double- chocolate- chip cookies

into the oven when Sophie had shown up at the door, despite me

texting her repeatedly that I was fi ne and that she didn’t need to

come over.

“Gemma?” Sophie prompted.

I looked up from the fl our I’d been sifting for the next batch—

white chocolate macadamia nut this time— and tried to focus on

my best friend. Sophie and I had looked a lot alike when we were

younger— it was uncanny, actually, people were always asking us

if we were sisters, which we loved— but puberty had changed all

that, and Sophie had gotten curvy while I’d gotten tall. We both

still had brown hair and freckles, but Sophie tended to cover hers

with makeup, and her hair was cut in a stylish, choppy bob while

mine was kind of long and shapeless. We no longer looked like

the doppelgängers we’d been when we were kids, especially after

I broke my nose last year. When the doctor fi xed it, he shaved off

the bump that had always been in the middle. He just assumed I

wanted it that way, but I actually missed it, especially when I saw

the identical bump still on Sophie’s nose. It seemed to have more

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character than my perfectly straight nose now did.

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Setting us apart even further at the moment were our outfi ts.

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I was wearing jeans and an oversized pink T-shirt that had once

belonged to my stepfather but that I’d appropriated years ago

as an apron. SALMON FESTIVAL! THE KICK- OFF OF SPAWNING SEASON! was

emblazoned across the front.

Sophie, on the other hand, was decked out in her go to sum-

mer style—fl ip- fl ops and a sundress that hugged her curves, her

sunglasses pushed up through her hair like a headband. The only

thing we currently had in common, looks- wise, were our neck-

laces. We’d splurged on them together last year. Sophie wore a

gold
G
charm on a chain around her neck, and I wore a gold
S
on

mine. We thought they were much better— and more unique—

than traditional best friend necklaces. The two of us had prom-

ised never to take them off, and I knew it was a promise I’d

keep.

“What?” I asked, trying to get myself to pay attention. “What

did you say?”

“I just wanted to know what happened next,” Sophie said, lean-

ing across the kitchen table. “After Teddy said he wanted to break

up and you dropped the candle.”

“Oh,” I said, as I set the fl our aside and started mea sur ing out

the white chocolate chips. I really didn’t see why I had to go through

this whole recap; when Teddy called— which he would, of course,

any minute now— it would all be moot. “Well, then this manager

came up and handed me a broom and told me that the candle was

going to come out of my pay.”

“No,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “What happened next

with Teddy?”

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I looked away and started chopping the macadamia nuts. “He

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just said that he thought we were getting too serious too young,

and that we should slow down.”

Sophie snorted. “That’s a new one.”

I knew what she meant. Slowing down was something Teddy

had never seemed to want before. Quite the opposite, in fact. He

was always telling me that it was crazy we hadn’t slept together

after two years and never seemed impressed by my argument that

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI didn’t sleep together for
seven

years, even after they were married.

But it wasn’t like this had even come up recently. Things be-

tween us had been great . . . or so I’d thought. I’d spent the last

two days— when I wasn’t mea sur ing out nutmeg and softening

butter— trying to fi gure out why Teddy would have done this. It

was a mistake, of course, and it would all be resolved soon, but

something
must have happened to make him think we needed to

end things. I’d fi nally come to the conclusion that maybe I’d taken

our relationship for granted, and maybe expected too much of

his time when he was so committed to different projects.

But this was at least understandable, since Teddy and I had

gotten together just as I’d fi nally begun to accept my parents’

divorce was actually going to last. My mom had gotten engaged

to my stepfather, my dad had moved across the country, and just

when everything in my life seemed to be changing, forever and

for the worse, Teddy was a constant, something I could hang on

to. And so maybe I’d just held on a little too hard. But I would

change. I knew this wasn’t the end; we were still going to Colom-

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bia together, after all. Soon, we’d get back together and every-

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thing would be like it was before, except better, because we both

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would have grown and matured from this experience. Everything

was going to turn out okay. But in the meantime, I had cookies to

frost.

“Okay!” Sophie said as the timer
ding!
ed and I pulled the cook-

ies out of the oven. I set them on the table as she fl ipped through

her dog- eared and annotated
Cosmo
and tapped her fi nger on the

page for emphasis. “So this article says that, post- breakup, the

worst thing you can do is get into a new relationship too soon. It

says you need to be in a mourning period for at least half the

length of the relationship. And since you and Teddy were to-

gether two years, that would mean . . .” She tilted her head to the

side, clearly doing some mental arithmetic. “A
year
?” she said,

frowning down at the magazine. “No, that can’t be right.”

“This is irrelevant,” I insisted, as Sophie reached for one of

the just- out- of- the- oven cookies. “I don’t need a mourning pe-

riod. Teddy just needs to cool off. Like those cookies,” I said, just

as Sophie took a gigantic bite.

“
Haaaagh,
” she yelped, fanning her mouth.

“Exactly,” I said, pointing to the cookies, glad to have a visual

meta phor to back up my idea. “But as soon as he cools down a

little and can see things rationally, he’ll see he made a mistake.”

Sophie just looked at me as she took a big drink of water. “Oh,

man,” she said after a moment, shaking her head. “You’re
so
much

further gone than I thought.” Before I could ask her what she meant