Hummingbird Heart (3 page)

I wrote Jax's name on the back side of Toni's note, over and over, in perfect letters so tiny that you'd need a magnifying glass to read them. I wrote it the way I always saw it: the
j
and the
x
small, the
A
capitalized and oversized, a tall point between them. A precisely balanced pyramid.

Then I crumpled the paper into a ball.

Jax would probably go for a girl like Toni: someone outgoing and fun. Someone who wasn't getting frown lines already. Someone who drew smiley faces on her notes.

Lunch hour. I sat on the school steps, breathing in the crisp fall air. Across the street, a woman sat in the driver's seat of a parked minivan, engine idling while she waited, toxic emissions spewing from the car.

I hugged my knees to my chest. The sky was a clear blue with a few white puffs of cloud. It was strange, the way an ordinary day could suddenly seem so beautiful and so fragile it made you ache. Lots of things were like that though. Odd things, like a pair of white skates in the sports-store window, or a lone wildflower at the side of the road, or a glimpse of a Ferris wheel at night. Things that were so perfect they made you catch your breath. When I was younger, I'd tried to explain it to my mom and to Toni, but neither of them understood what I meant at all. I learned to keep my weird thoughts to myself.

Toni sauntered over, thick brown curls bouncing, a wide grin on her round face.

I shook off my thoughts. “Do you enjoy torturing me?”

She giggled. “Did you guess?”

“No.”

“Jax.” Toni's cheeks dimpled.

I'd probably be too shy to talk to him anyway. “How did you hear that?”

She drumrolled her hands against her thighs and paused dramatically. “He told me.”

“You guys were talking?”

“I just saw him in the hallway with a bunch of guys from one of my classes and we all got talking.”

It figured. Guys always talked to Toni.

“What? What's wrong?”

“Nothing. So, is Finn going too?”

“Course.”

I studied Toni's face. I liked Finn. It would be hard not to: he was smart, interesting and a genuinely nice guy. Finn wasn't the problem. The problem was that since Toni had gotten together with him, she hadn't had a lot of time for me. I forced another smile. “Great,” I said.

TH
ree

When I got home from school, Karma was sitting on the front porch steps, taking apart her bicycle. Technically, we shared the porch with the couple who lived in the main floor—our apartment was the upstairs half of an old house that been converted to a duplex—but they were hardly ever around. Just as well, I thought, looking at the chain and gears and tools that littered the stone walkway.

“Again?” I hopped off my own bike.

Karma adjusted her baseball cap, leaving a streak of grease across her forehead in the process. “The gears keep slipping.”

I wouldn't have had a clue how to fix my bike's gears when I was eleven. I still didn't have a clue. I looked past her to the open front door. “Is Mom home?”

“Nope. She went out with Scott.”

“Oh.”

Karma's voice was quiet. “You don't like it, do you?”

“What?”

“Amanda and Scott.”

She always called Mom by her name and that was fine with me. In a weird way, it made me feel less like I had to share my mother, though of course I still did. Mom didn't mind either. In fact, she'd suggested that I call her Amanda too, but I'd refused. No one I knew called their parents by their first names.

I shrugged. “I don't care.”

“You do too.”

I hated it when she acted like she knew me better than I knew myself. “Shut up, Karma.” I pushed past her and walked into the house.

“Check out her new tattoo design,” Karma yelled after me. “She left her sketchbook in the kitchen.”

I dumped my bag in the front hall, kicked off my shoes and then picked them up again and lined them up neatly side by side. It was different for Karma. Amanda wasn't really her mom.

In the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water and eyed the closed sketchbook on the table. Obviously, it was none of my business. My mother was big on respecting privacy. On the other hand, it wasn't like a tattoo design was exactly private. And Karma had already seen it. I ran my finger across the cover of the sketchbook, trying to decide. If I didn't look, I'd wonder about it all evening, and if I did, I'd feel guilty. I looked out the window and started counting. If a car drove by before I got to fifty, I'd look. If not, I'd just go up to my room.

One, two, three…It bothered me that Karma thought I had a problem with Scott. I wasn't narrow-minded or anything. Seven, eight, nine…I wasn't. I hated it when people made judgments based on appearances. Twelve, thirteen…A blue
SUV
zipped past. I walked over to the sketchbook, flipped it open and turned pages to find the most recent sketches.

There it was. A skeleton playing drums. My breath hissed out from between my teeth.

“I figured you'd look,” Karma said from the kitchen doorway.

“Karma, you are such a pain in the ass.”

“Nice, isn't it?”

“No. It's stupid.”

“I knew you had a problem with Amanda going out with Scott.” Karma's chin was set, lower lip sticking out, eyes narrowed.

Karma had made it quite clear that she adored Scott. She'd met him first, and when he and Amanda hooked up less than a month later, she seemed to think she had engineered the whole romance herself.

“I don't have a problem with that, okay?” I looked at the drumming skeleton again. I had to admit, my mother could draw. “I just have a problem with her getting a tattoo that is going to announce it to the whole world,” I said. “Especially since she and Scott will probably break up in a few weeks anyway.”

“No, they won't.”

“Yeah, they will.” I knew exactly how it would all play out. They'd start arguing, Mom would say she needed some space, et cetera, and they'd take a break from seeing each other, which would turn out to be permanent. Mom would hang out with Julia, hit the bars, drink more than usual for a month or so, and then she'd meet someone else and start the whole process all over again. Only this time around Karma's heart would be broken, which made me furious. Mom should know better.

“I'd give it two weeks, max.” I jabbed my finger at the sketch. “This is as stupid as getting a tattoo of someone's name.”

“My mom did that,” Karma said softly. “She had my name tattooed on her arm.”

“I meant a boyfriend's name or whatever.” I thought about the tattoo of a hummingbird that Mom got when she was pregnant with me. “Getting your kid's name is different,” I said. “That's a permanent relationship, not just a temporary one. You're supposed to love your kid forever.” I looked at Karma's dirty face and wished I could snatch the words back. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean…”

“It's okay,” she said. “I know what you meant.”

I looked down at the sketch again. At the bottom of the page, Mom had written in small block letters:
MW, OCEAN FRONT INN,
214
. I raised my eyebrows. Pretty ritzy. Mom's friends were more the Motel 8 type. “Who's staying at the Ocean Front?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

Karma glanced at the paper and shrugged. “MW? No clue.”

A car pulled into the driveway. Mom. “She's home,” I said, snapping the sketchbook shut.

Karma craned her neck to see. “With Scott?”

“Alone.”

“Are you going to ask her about the tattoo?”

“No.” I eyed Karma's face and wondered what she was thinking. It was always so hard to tell. “Are you?”

Karma shook her head. “Don't tell her we looked.”

Mom shrugged off her denim jacket and dumped a pile of photos on the kitchen table. “I'm making some of these into greeting cards,” she announced. “Julia's started working at that gallery near your school. She's going to try to sell some for me.”

Julia was an old friend of Mom's. She used to work in a vintage clothing store downtown, and she'd tried selling Mom's art from there too. The problem was that there just wasn't a huge market for Mom's photographs. Mom scorned anything that she considered “commercial,” which seemed to mean anything that might actually earn money. Greeting cards were a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

“That's great,” I said, a shade too enthusiastically. I scanned the pictures on the floor. Fire escapes and telephone wires. I wondered how many people really wanted greeting cards like that. What kind of occasion would you want them for?
Congratulations on getting your new
phone connected? Condolences on your recent house fire?

Mom looked up, caught my eye and quickly looked away. “Well, we'll see. I hired someone new today, anyway.”

Mom had a cleaning business called Urban Organics. The
Organics
part was my idea—I thought she should be using all-natural cleaners, so when she and Julia started the business a few years ago, I helped her make all her own products. It wasn't really much of a business, just Mom and Julia and a few other women, mostly mothers of kids I'd gone to elementary school with. Mom did all the scheduling, and she still cleaned houses most days as well. She'd kept the old name, but these days, her cleaning products came from Costco, and there was nothing organic about them.

“Yeah? What's she like?” I asked. Mom tended to hire people either because she liked their politics or because she felt sorry for them.

“Nice. Friend of Julia's. Her ex had a drug problem and she's on her own, trying to support the kids. Anyway, she hasn't done cleaning before, but she needed the work, you know?” Mom grinned at me. “I think I'll pair her up with Katie. She can show her the ropes.”

“I have to go,” Karma said. “I have a baseball game. And I'm sleeping over at Ashley's, okay?”

“I remember. Have fun.” Mom turned to me. “Just you and me tonight, chickie.”