Instructions for a Broken Heart (6 page)

Ms. Jackson placed a hand on his arm. “Maybe we should talk to her. Maybe have the adults meet to discuss this.” She spoke quietly, the way she might talk to a student who’d come to her desk to ask a question during a test.

He nodded, and Francesca brightened. “Yes. Very good, then. We go? Dinner now.” She kissed the tips of her fingers, then turned on one pointy black-heeled boot and escorted the frog back to the bus.

One by one, with shoulders at varying degrees of defeat, Jessa and her classmates followed the frog onto the bus.

As Jessa passed Cruella, their eyes met briefly, and Jessa’s heart sagged.

The woman’s eyes were filled with tears.

***

The restaurant walls were too close, pressing in at Jessa at odd, fragmented angles. The tables all seemed a bit too snug, the chairs too small, and Jessa felt suddenly like Alice, fumbling her way through Wonderland. She was crammed at a table with Dylan Thomas, Tyler, Erika, and Blake in the middle of the small room. Erika, in between bites of
caprese
salad, argued with Blake about vampires in the 1800s, something about how women vampires had more power then than now, because apparently, vampire rights were going through a rocky phase or something. Bad time to be a girl vampire in Erika’s opinion. Blake didn’t agree.

Jessa tugged her jacket off and hung it on the back of her chair. The room sweltered; sweat beaded on her upper lip. She nibbled at her salad, but it tasted like paste. At the next table, Sean laughed at something Natalie leaned in to say, brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She fed him tiny balls of mozzarella with her fingers.

Tyler watched them too. Jessa could see his eyes dart back to them every once in awhile when Erika started repeating herself. He pointed his fork at Jessa. “You want to switch places with Erika?” Erika looked momentarily surprised to hear her name, then dove back into Blake’s argument like it was the hazelnut gelato Jessa had devoured after the Uffizi.

Jessa shook her head, tried to focus on Blake’s words, but she couldn’t quite get them to stay in one place. They’d spill from his mouth and then dissipate before she could put them in her ears, form an opinion about them.

Dylan Thomas lost interest in the vampires. He studied Jessa, drank his soda, studied her some more. His coal-black eyes took on heat, bore into her skull.

“What?” She finally asked him, wanting to hose his face down to extinguish those eyes.

“What’s with the PDA at the next table?”

Jessa stabbed at a tomato on her plate.

“Former
amore?
The garbage boy?”

“Garbage boy?” Tyler looked confused. Jessa shrugged and ate the tomato out of her salad.

Tyler cleared his throat, leaned in a bit. “A week ago, he was with Jessa.” Erika and Blake stopped talking instantly. Even vampires were no match for Jessa’s mangled heart. Tyler filled him in.

“What a wanker!” Dylan Thomas said a little more loudly than Jessa would have liked. Of course, the wanker in question was too involved feeding buxom Barbie to notice.

“Total wanker,” Tyler agreed, sipping his Coke.

“Are we even allowed to say ‘wanker’ if we’re not British? You guys sound like posers.” Erika fiddled with one of the million safety pins on her jacket.

“Right,” Tyler drawled. “
We’re
the posers.”

Erika flipped him off.

“Can we talk about vampires again?” Jessa leaned back as the waiter set the pasta she had ordered in front of her. The slender noodles twisted through a sea of red sauce, her heart on a plate.

“You should slap him right in his face,” Erika suggested, tucking into her lasagna with meat sauce. She wiped some red sauce from her lips, looking more like a vampire than ever before.

Dylan Thomas’s eyes widened. “Excellent. Yes. You need your moment.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “My moment?”

Dylan Thomas nodded, curling his arms in front of him on the table, his pasta untouched. “Sure. When you found him—did you give him a good smack? Did you scream at him? Did you break something of his that was especially important? A favorite CD? An arm?”

Tyler laughed and slurped some pasta into his mouth. “Jessa would never do that.”

Jessa frowned. What had she done? When Carissa split up with John Marshall, she’d papered his locker with magazine ads about erectile dysfunction. And with Tom Levy, she’d swiped his phone and set the ringtone so that it played Beck’s “Loser” over and over, knowing that he had no clue how to reset his ringtone. Seriously, he’d had that ringtone for a week before he could convince anyone to change it for him. But what had Jessa done? The door of the costume barn had swung open. She saw them there, all blurry and kissing and tangled in the red dress she’d worn to play Kate. Kate would have broken his arm. Mr. Campbell had said something about giving it a rest. Said something to stop them, but he’d swept her away into the theater. Sat her there on the metal chair. She’d stared at the smooth cement of the floor, at a smash of gum like a tiny handprint there next to a crack. She hadn’t screamed or slapped or broken anything at all.

“I didn’t do anything.”

Dylan Thomas shook his head. “To quote our friend here,” he pointed at Tyler, “dubious.” Tyler slurped some more pasta and wiggled his eyebrows at Jessa.

Reaching into her pocket, Jessa ran her finger over the velvet edge of Carissa’s note. “Excuse me,” she said to the waiter as he passed with a tray of steaming rolls in a basket. “Can I get a drink? An orange soda?”

“What are you doing?” Tyler asked, his forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth, his face suddenly flushed.

“Buying myself a very belated Valentine. Carissa’s orders.”

Tyler set his fork down.

The table watched silently as she waited for her drink. Watched as the waiter set the clear glass of toxic orange liquid down in front of her. Their eyes grew wider as she took a sip, then stood, squeezed through the chairs between their tables, and without preamble, threw the entirety of the glass into Sean’s shocked face.

“What happened back there?” Mr. Campbell placed his hands on the curve of stone next to Jessa and tipped his face toward the cool wind coming off the water.

She leaned on the stone bridge railing, looking out on the darkening waters of the Arno River. The dusky evening light was turning the water pink and yellow and blue. “I was having my moment.” She sighed, the colors all around pressing against her, her ears buzzing with distant scooters, the murmur of restaurants, somewhere a woman’s laughter ringing out.

“Feel better?”

“Actually I do.” Only she didn’t. The orange soda had soaked his white T-shirt, flattened his hair. That look of complete shock, the way his face had cracked like an egg into surprise, then understanding, that must have been how she’d looked last Monday framed in the doorway of the costume barn; he’d mirrored it right back to her.

“That boy’s going to need a shower.” Was it her imagination or was Mr. Campbell smiling a little, just at the corners of his mouth. “But for the record, I’m officially against you throwing drinks in people’s faces.”

“I broke the rule.”

“Little bit, yeah.”

He stayed there next to her, leaned his body against the edge of bridge. Jessa liked the way the stone curved with her body, as if the designers of the bridge knew how many people would lay against it, stare out at the water, wonder where it had all gone wrong.

“The light is different here.” She glanced sideways at her teacher.

“Not hard to see how Michelangelo got his palette.” His eyes searched the water, and the hills glazed with twilight.

“I’m sorry about all that. I actually thought it might make me feel better.” Jessa wiped at her eyes. Seriously, how much more would she cry about it? Ridiculous. She tried to laugh, but it came out a hiccup. “No more drinks. I promise. Are you guys going to send me home?”

“What? No. Of course not. You need to apologize, but no, we’re not going to send you home.” His hands found the pockets of his jacket. “Besides, it’s not exactly the best landscape for a broken heart.”

The city spread out around Brunelleschi’s burgundy dome standing majestically over the brick-colored rooftops. Jessa turned at the clop-clop-clop of a horse and carriage along the cobbled streets near the bridge. A man and woman clung to each other, eyes wide with each other. Mr. Campbell wiggled his eyebrows up and down at her. She burst out laughing. “Seriously, right?” he said. “You don’t stand a chance here. It’s like we’re extras on a set for a musical called
Love Me!
”

She watched a bird glide out over the water. “Well, I’m happy to play Rosalind, the scorned lover.”

“Are you?” His smile vanished.

Jessa sighed. “Sure. I mean, it’s a more interesting part right?”

“Maybe in theory.” He pressed his palms into the stone, his fingers arching up with the strain.

“Do you miss her?” she asked.

He let his breath out, sending it over the shifting water. “Very much.”

“Maybe you should throw a drink at her.”

“Not my style.”

She leaned into the stone, welcoming the solid feel of it against her. “That’s what Carissa thought would help me. But it didn’t. Not really.”

He nodded. “Didn’t think so.”

“So what should I do? Why doesn’t this get easier? Each day, I think I’ll wake up and hate him. I’ll be so mad at him that I just won’t care.”

“It hasn’t even been a week, Jess. You need time to grieve.”

“But why? He’s a jerk. He cheated on me. I should just be done. Over him.”

“He’s not a paint color. You don’t just swipe on Sunset Red over the Meadow Green you’ve had for a year and be done with it.” The wind caught Mr. Campbell’s hair, fluttered it, and his hand instinctively smoothed it down. “A friend of mine gave me a quote from John Updike about death, but she meant it more for the death of a relationship. Updike said death is a ‘ceasing of your own brand of magic.’ What’s painful is that what you had together, all your inside jokes and favorite restaurants and that movie you both loved but everyone else hated—that’s gone, and there’s no replacement for it, you never replicate it, never get to have it ever again…” His voice trailed off. He shuffled his feet a little, cleared his throat.

Something dark and shadowed filled Jessa’s belly, made her light, feel like she would float away. Grief. Because there
had
been a special brand of magic with Sean, their own brand. She wanted to ask Mr. Campbell why he and Katie broke up. Did she cheat? Jessa studied his veiled expression. Had he cried into the night like she had with only the shadows for company? Maybe it didn’t even matter why they broke up, maybe that wasn’t the point. Because you can’t have what’s already gone. You can only grieve for it, walk around with a huge hole in your gut knowing you will never be the same again.

Standing there on the bridge, his body warm next to her, he somehow melted from her teacher to just a guy. Not standing on stage directing them. Just a guy nursing a broken heart like she was. He must know her better than anyone else on this trip, know the deep, hollow shadow of her heart.

“Why do people leave people when nothing’s wrong? It doesn’t make any sense.” She searched Mr. Campbell’s eyes, thought of the way he laughed at their stupid improv games, the way he got there early every day so they’d have somewhere to go before the first bell, how he listened with his whole body when they came to him with their problems. Why had Katie given that up? Why had Sean kissed Natalie?

Finally, he shook his head, his eyes slipping to her face. “I wish I could answer that. Maybe human beings search for what is wrong, pick through what is right until they find the scrap of wrong and then blow it up to life size. It’s all part of this dark nature of ours. Unanswerable questions. Why do we betray someone? Why do we love at all? It’s the mystery of the ages, isn’t it? It’s why we have music and art and theater—it’s all about love, about losing it, finding it, wanting it, betraying it. We love. We cause pain to the ones who love us. It doesn’t get easier—you start playing the game differently maybe. Each time, maybe, you take a tiny piece of your heart and you save it for yourself just in case. So you always have something left.”

“OK, that is like the most horrible thing you could tell me right now.”

Mr. Campbell’s laugh was a bird suddenly released from a cage. “Yeah.” He seemed surprised by his outburst but lighter somehow. “Sorry. But I mean, here we are in Florence—the heart of the Renaissance. All these paintings, all these buildings—there’s so much love and betrayal here. As humans, we haven’t figured much out, have we?”

“Doesn’t seem like it.” Jessa studied the great dome, such a feat of engineering, especially at the time it was built. “For how smart humans can be, we’re a remarkably stupid species.”

Mr. Campbell closed his eyes against the cool wind. “But we keep choosing love. Over and over. Across time. You’ll love someone else. Someone who isn’t Sean.”

Jessa closed her eyes too, tried to imagine the ache in her chest gone. “My dad told me that the heart regenerates. Like a lizard that’s lost its tail—it grows back. But I’ve never had to grow mine back before.” Monday night, she had curled her body in on itself, rocking through her tears on their deck, the stars splattered out above her, had cried into her father’s shoulder while her mom made tea and her favorite butter cookies inside, the ones rolled in powdered sugar she usually made only at Christmas. Under that dark sky, her dad had told her it would grow back. He’d promised.

“The first time’s the worst. Your heart doesn’t know, doesn’t have the muscle memory of it.” Mr. Campbell put his hand on her shoulder, held it there, warm and reassuring. “But your dad’s right. It’ll grow back. Some people think it’s stronger in the broken places.” She felt Mr. Campbell’s hand through her thin shirt, its heat spreading through her. His face was a blur of concern.

Before she knew what she was doing, she leaned forward, kissed his mouth. Soft. Warm. For a second, it seemed he kissed her back, then, like ice, he cracked, pulled back, wiping his mouth as if the kiss could be given away to the air. Disintegrated. Untraceable.

“Oh, Jessa. I…” He put actual distance between them, stepped backward a few steps. “I didn’t mean to…”

Her face must have pulled in all the colors of the sunset at once. “Oh my God, Mr. Campbell. I don’t…” Her head whirled, her heart pounding. “I’m sorry. That was my fault. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He shook his head, his eyes darting about, his face flushed. “No, Jessa. I’m sorry. Damn.” He had made it most of the way off the bridge now, backing up, turning around, a strange choreography of uncertainty, like a fumbling toy soldier who’d lost his way.

She watched him stop abruptly, study her for a moment, then turn and hurry back toward the restaurant, and in that moment, Jessa wondered how many people had thrown themselves off this bridge.

***

“That,” Tyler told her, sitting cross-legged across from her on the bed, “is one hundred percent jacked up.”

“I know.” Jessa dipped her hand into his gummy bears, chewed a huge wad of them in her mouth. “He was so nice, you know. Totally trying to help me. All philosophical and open.”

“So you kissed him. Good form!”

“Yeah, right? Not crossing any lines there. I’m such a mess. I should give seminars. How to screw up your life in one week or less.” She smoothed out a wrinkle in the quilt on the bed and glanced around the small room. The shower was at least in a bathroom this time. When they got home from the quiet bus ride back to the hotel, she’d stood under the hot spray until it had run cold. Through the bus window, she’d watched the lights blink on across Florence and tried not to notice people whispering, staring in her direction. Mostly, people tried not to gawk at her, the girl who threw an orange soda at her ex-boyfriend. Cruella had even smiled at her a bit, given her a thumbs-up when she’d gotten off the bus. Great.

Jessa began to braid her damp hair, smiling wryly at her friend. Tyler wore black sweats and a T-shirt that said “Genius by Birth, Slacker by Choice.”

“Wow,” Tyler whistled softly. “Even Carissa wouldn’t have told you to kiss your teacher.” He shook his head. “What’s gotten into you? I thought, ‘No way is she going to do that drink thing.’”

Jessa stopped braiding. “I don’t remember showing you that instruction?”

Tyler hesitated. “What? Oh. No. But of all the things so far, it’s the most un-Jessa-like thing to do. It had to be one of your instructions.” He tugged at a loose string on the hem of his sweats.

“Are you talking to Carissa about me? What is she saying?”

“I’m not, actually. You’re doing the instructions. My job was to make sure you’re following them. For the most part.”

Jessa held his gaze for a minute. “I’m doing them.”

He held up his hands. “Don’t get defensive.”

She wrapped a hair band around the end of her braid. “OK, sorry. I’ve just had a really weird day.”

“Speaking of weird.” Tyler held up Carissa’s Reason #5 with a poem taped to it. “A quote from a Dylan Thomas poem?” Tyler started to read the note out loud.

Reason #5: Quicksand—

“The force that drives the water through the rocks/Drives my red blood…The hand that whirls the water in the pool/Stirs the quicksand…”—Dylan Thomas

“The hand that whirls the water in the pool stirs the quicksand.” Sean is your quicksand. You lost yourself in him.

3 Examples:

1. Office Fest. You bailed on me the second he called. You bailed on Casino Night.

“Casino Night?”

Jessa plucked the letter from his hand, scanned the reason. OK, that was true. She had bailed. Jessa and Carissa had this huge crush on Jim from
The Office
. The American one. They had decided to spend a whole Friday night watching key Jim episodes, especially the one where he first tells Pam he loves her after Casino Night. “Sean called,” she explained to Tyler. “Wanted me to come over. Huge fight with his stepmom or something. And I just left.”

Tyler nodded, but quietly he said, “How many times has Carissa bailed on us for a guy?”

“Number two is not fair at all.” She passed the letter back to Tyler.

2. Santa Cruz!!

“I didn’t go to Santa Cruz because I knew we’d get busted, which she did, and now she’s baby-sitting to pay her parents back instead of here with us in Italy.”

“I don’t think she was ever planning on going to Italy.” Tyler frowned at the letter. “I’m not sure I really get this Dylan Thomas quote?”

“Carissa wanted to talk about quicksand so she probably Googled ‘poems with quicksand’ and got this one.”

Tyler squinted at the quote. “Or maybe she feels like Sean sucked you in.”

Jessa shrugged. “Whatever. Santa Cruz was not about getting lost in Sean. Santa Cruz was Carissa pissed at me because I didn’t want to hop on her little train of bad behavior.”

“At least you were invited.” Tyler set the letter on the bed. “What about number three. His band
is
lame.”

3. Dracula. You chose his lame-ass band. That
SUCKED
!

Jessa let out a whoosh of air. “They’re not lame.”

Still,
Dracula
had been a serious bone of contention between her and Carissa since last summer. Instead of auditioning for the SummerArts! production of
Dracula
with Carissa, she’d spent any time she wasn’t working that summer holed up in Sean’s garage listening to him, Kevin Jones, and Hunter Parks cover a random mash of old Green Day, Radiohead, and other bands—and rereading all of the Harry Potter books. Carissa spent much of that summer in her Lustra costume, a permanent scowl on her face, even though she’d hooked up with the college guy directing and spent any time they weren’t rehearsing with him at the river. So Jessa didn’t really know what she was so pissed off about.

“I needed to work. Not be an undead sister.” Jessa stretched out across the bed on her belly. “What’s the instruction?”

Instruction: Water is the shifting of the elements, it is always moving and changing. You are water. Be water. Water heals itself.

Tyler handed the paper back to her. “Be water? What—is she Zen now or something?”