Seven Ways to Lose Your Heart (9 page)

Annabel’s eyes are on her face, not her tits. Her eyes are on her face, not her tits. Look at Annabel’s eyes!

“It’s not always about winning,” I reply, hoping my voice doesn’t come off as high as it sounds in my own ears. ’Cause it sounds like I’m back in fourth grade sneaking a peek at my first pair of tits in a nudie mag I dared Annabel to steal from Stephen.

“Stop! Don’t sit there and act like this is some sort of game. She’s dying!” Annabel yells, her voice breaking painfully at the end of her sentence.

I take a step toward her. “I know it’s not a game. She is dying, but there’s nothing you can do about that. Nothing. It sucks. Big-time. I know you like to fix things, but you ain’t ever going to be able to fix that.”

Annabel’s chin starts to tremble. I reach out a hand to grab her and pull her close, but she turns her back to me. “Just go, Kennedy,” she says in between sniffles. Suddenly, all the air is sucked from the room. Her back. Fuck. Fuck that’s bad. How did I leave her to deal with that on her own? What scars did she have that I
couldn’t
see?

“Fuck no,” I reply. I swallow hard and take two steps toward her. She spins around and glares at me.

“Excuse me?”

“You said we would go take some pictures, so let’s go.” There’s no way I’m going to let this girl sit in her room and cry all afternoon. If she’s the artist I think she is, this is magic time. The time to channel all the dark inner muck and make something beautiful. Or hell, make something ugly.

Just make something.

“I don’t feel like it,” she retorts, crossing her arms to match mine.

“Well, I don’t care. So I’ll just sit right here until you’re ready to go,” I reply, moving to her bed. I’m not running again.

“Do not sit on my bed,” she warns.

“Why not?”

“Because…because that’s not appropriate.”

“Last time I checked, we were both asexual beings, so something like sitting on a bed doesn’t really have any hidden meanings,” I counter. “Besides, I’ve sat on your bed before. I’ve even slept over at your house. No biggie,” I say, hoping I’m managing to sound calmer than I feel. I stare her down and take a seat. It’s only now, leaning back on my elbows sitting on Annabel Lee’s bed, that I take a real good look at her room. Talk about the minimal look. There’re a few posters featuring the Smithsonian, but besides that nothing but beige, beige, beige. Beige desk chair. Beige curtains. Beige comforter and pillows. Perfectly organized and perfectly cleaned. Perfectly new Annabel.

“Ugh. Could you be any more annoying?” Annabel asks, clearly exasperated with me.

I sit up and shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I could try.”

“Please. Don’t. Let me get my camera, so we can go and get this over with.” Annabel walks over to her dresser, catching her appearance in the mirror. “Oh. My. God!” she exclaims, finally realizing that she’s in nothing but her sports bra. Her eyes go wide and shoot over to me on the bed. “Get out!” she screams. She attempts to cover herself with her arms.

“It’s a sports bra. And one you’ve been standing in for the past five minutes. Throw on a shirt and let’s go,” I reply.

“I said get out!”

“If I wanted to ogle your goodies, I so would have done it by now. But like I said, asexual—”

“Get out! Get out! Get out!”

Annabel doesn’t wait for me to move. She storms over to the bed, grabs my arms, and pulls me up. The haste in which she does so makes me fall forward…accidentally causing me to graze her boob with my left hand.

“Get out!” she shrieks.

This is going to be a fun afternoon.

Chapter Ten

Annabel

“I’m up for another one if you are,” I offer, nestling further into Jason’s arms. Even though I’ve had more
I object
s and
you’re out of order
s to last me a lifetime, I’d watch fifty more law-inspired movies if it meant I got to stay right here.

Here is safe. Here is what I know. Here there’s no sick grandmother or looming college departure to make me panic. I know exactly how this night will go. We have had this night a million times.

Here I don’t have to think about Kennedy. Or at least I shouldn’t be thinking about him.

I’ve never been tempted to try drugs. Not once. If anything, I fully subscribe to that whole
your body is a temple
belief. You know, considering mine almost shut down on me all those years ago. But being with Kennedy, I imagine that’s what drugs are like. I shouldn’t want to spend time with him. He isn’t good for me. He’ll hurt me. And even knowing this, despite knowing this, I still want our time together.

I reach for Jason’s hand and intertwine his fingers with mine, holding on as tightly as I can. “So, how about it?”

“Actually, I thought we could, maybe, do something different tonight.”

I shift so I’m sitting up. “Something different?” I ask, furrowing my brow. “What’s wrong with what we’re doing?”

Whatever he reads on my face causes Jason to pull me into his arms. “Nothing is wrong with this, Annabel,” he says quietly before kissing the top of my head.

And so we sit in silence for a while, neither one of us making the move to play another movie. Even though anyone looking in on us would see the same old Annabel and Jason, it just doesn’t feel the same. I sigh. “Okay, let’s do something different.”

“You sure you want to?” Jason asks as he puts his car into park.

“Yeah, why not?” I reply with a lazy shrug. At least I hope it comes across as lazy, nonchalant, like I’m used to being social and fun and carefree. Hoping I don’t look like I’m trying to button a pair of pants that are way too small.

I understand Jason’s question. Never in our entire relationship has he asked me to go to the lake. Not once. On hot summer days and nights, the lake was the happening place to be. From teenagers to adults trying to recapture their youth, people crowded the shores, setting out blankets and coolers. At night, the beach balls and rafts were replaced with tiki torches and flashlights. All manner of scandalous frivolity supposedly took place here, which never quite made it onto my list of things to do on a Saturday night.

Kennedy had mentioned it during our trek around town taking pictures after the mortifying bra incident. Of course, now that I think about it, he probably brought it up less as an invitation to come out and more as a way to not talk about the
other
thing. He had seen my back with all of its scars, ugly reminders of a past neither one of us seemed quite ready to talk about.

Jason opens the passenger door and holds out his hand. I plaster on the biggest grin I can muster and place my hand in his. “Come on, Annabel, time to go walk amongst the plebeians,” he teases. Jason always speaks like this, and I know it’s never meant in a condescending way; he’s just one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Smarter than me, definitely, and I spent the first couple months of my recovery reading any and every
National Geographic
magazine I could get my hands on. Where I have to work for it, Jason is naturally the smartest person in any room he walks into. It’s part of what made him so attractive in the first place. Never impulsive. Always practical. That’s exactly what I needed back then.

As Jason and I maneuver around the masses of people stationed near the lake, a few of the partygoers call out my name. No doubt some acquaintances from high school. I halfheartedly wave, but if I’m being truthful, I’m looking for one person. Ever since his visit to my house, I’ve had this nagging sensation that Kennedy was feeling sorry for me. He witnessed the fight with my grandmother and saw my back, and that would be enough for anyone to think I was some sort of victim of fate, but I am definitely not. At least not anymore. I am in control of my life now, and I need him to see that. I’m still standing. I can be social if I want to. I am in a healthy relationship. The accident tried to mess me up, but I won.

I squeeze Jason’s hand to make sure he’s still with me. He leans down and kisses the top of my head. “Hey, I see a few of the other interns from the firm. Let’s go say hey. Maybe score us a few beers.”

I’m about to respond when I hear Kennedy’s bellow of a laugh from behind me. I turn to see him bent over, howling at something. In one hand he holds a red Solo cup. The other is draped over some blonde’s shoulders. I can’t help but notice how his fingers rest directly above her breast. Like a soft breeze could blow and he’d be feeling her up in front of everyone.

For some reason, I suddenly find it hard to swallow. I nod numbly as Jason pulls me toward his friends. He doesn’t get ten feet before Kennedy yells out, “Holy shit! Annabel Lee? Is that you?”

“Who’s that? Some friend of yours from high school?” Jason asks.

I clear my throat. “No. No, that’s, um, Kennedy Harrison.”

Jason swallows and swallows hard. He clenches his jaw, giving a curt nod in Kennedy’s direction. He knows all about Kennedy. When Jason first came around back in the hospital, I spent a ton of time reminding him who he wasn’t. He wasn’t my partner in crime, so he had no right visiting my room. He wasn’t my best friend, so he had no right looking like he felt empathy for me when they tried to change the bandages. He had no right to any part of me because it all belonged to Kennedy Harrison. The boy who didn’t visit me. Not even once.

I told Jason that Kennedy was in my photography class, but I never told him about any of the other stuff. I don’t know why I didn’t, and now I wouldn’t even know where to begin. “He seems awfully friendly, all things considered,” Jason says through clenched teeth. It’s odd seeing him so tense, so aggressive. It’s not really Jason’s thing. He’s a pretty laid-back guy.

But he did always protect me. Always. He just didn’t know he no longer had to protect me from Kennedy. Hell, maybe he does. I don’t know anymore. Up is down and down is up, and old is new and new is old. As Kennedy begins to walk toward us, every muscle in my body tenses. I don’t quite know how to maneuver a meeting of my two worlds: the old and the new. Maybe the worlds aren’t completely in two different universes anymore.

“What brings a girl like Annabel Lee out to slum it at the lake?” Kennedy asks with a grin, a slight slur to his words. His eyes are bloodshot and dazed. This is Belltown’s Kennedy: all wild and drugged and free of responsibility. This wasn’t the Kennedy who talked about writing or analyzed my photos like they actually had meaning.

Something about his state really pisses me off. I pull my shoulders back, placing a hand on my hip. “As if I think I’m too good for it? Or are you just implying I’m too uptight to have a good time?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

Kennedy pales slightly and kicks at the ground. “Um, no, I mean, I wasn’t implying that. It’s just good to see you out here.” His eyes dart over to Jason, and he takes a deep breath. “Going to introduce me to you friend?”

Jason slips an arm around my waist, and I briefly wonder if one of them is going to suggest a drag race for my attention. I shift so I’m out of his grasp. I don’t appreciate feeling like I’m property. I’m not sure if that’s even what Jason intended, but for some reason, standing between the two of them, I feel all sorts of lines being drawn. “Kennedy, this is Jason. Jason, Kennedy,” I reply curtly.

“Ah…the boyfriend? Jason, is it? Sorry, for some reason, that name is so hard to remember,” Kennedy replies, zoning in a very,
very
pointed look at me.

Jason shrugs. “I’m not surprised. From what I understand, you have a real hard time remembering things…you know, like who your friends are and what friendship means. Or, you know, where the hospital is located.”

Now it’s Kennedy’s turn to do the whole clenched-jaw, macho-man thing, and I can’t stand another second of it. I’m about to tell both of them where they can go when a girl’s voice calls out for Jason.

“Did you hear that? Someone’s calling for you, Joe,” Kennedy replies, a special emphasis on the name.

I look up at Jason, who has gone a bit red in the face. “That’s Megan from the firm,” he says, nodding toward the group of friends he’d pointed out when we first arrived. Megan waves excitedly at us, and the redness of Jason’s face spreads to the tips of his ears.

Jason quickly recovers before I have time to ask him if that was the girl’s voice I heard the other night in the background when I called. He reaches down and takes my hand. “Come on, let’s go,” he says, pulling me toward his friends.

“Actually, while you’re here, I was wondering if we could talk about our final project for class,” Kennedy proposes.

“Our final project?” I ask.

“Yeah! You know, the final, final project? I got my camera in the truck. Now would be the perfect time to get some of those lighting techniques down. Don’t you agree? Unless you think you can’t do it? But I sure as hell
dare
you to give it a shot.”

My mouth falls open. Final project? Lighting techniques? None of that makes any sense to me, but that word, that all-magical word, something about the way he says “dare” means a whole lot. About a year into our friendship, I dared Jason to roof-jump between the bakery on Fifth and Mrs. Peterson’s bookshop, a small feat at best. He turned me down without hesitation, offering me all the logical reasons why I was insane for even suggesting it.

I haven’t had a good dare in a really long time. Maybe it’s the prospect of our time together in class coming to an end, or the possibility of a final separation when I go off to school, or maybe it’s the nagging feeling that I have zero desire to meet Megan, but I want, no,
have
, to know what the dare is. I pull my hand from Jason’s. “Oh, shoot. The project. He’s right, Jason. I probably should take a few shots. Go hang out with your friends. I won’t be long.” Before he can reply, I reach up, grab his face, and kiss him right on the lips. Long enough for both Kennedy and Megan to see.

I’ll draw my own darn lines.

“Come onnnnnnn. Just tell me a little bit about him,” Kennedy begs, bumping his shoulder against mine as we walk deeper into the woods. While Kennedy did lie about the project, he wasn’t making up the part about having his camera in his truck. Slung over my shoulder, it’s starting to feel more and more like my own, considering how much I use it.

“Whoa. Careful there, buddy, or I’m going to drop this,” I warn, wrapping my fingers tightly around the strap.

“Ugh. You’re avoiding the question, Le Chat! Apparently, we’re avoiding all sorts of things. That boy toy of yours has no idea we hang out, does he? Why wouldn’t you tell him about your favorite friend?”

“Wow, drugs and alcohol certainly don’t affect your self-esteem, do they? My favorite friend?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.

“Hey! I’m at the very least not your least favorite friend,” he teases, waggling his eyebrows.

“I think maybe I only have two friends, so you might be.” I laugh.

Kennedy’s grin falters. “Come on, you have tons of friends, Annabel.”

“Actually,” I say, clearing my throat, “I don’t. No one wants to be friends with the burn victim with the dead brother.” I stop walking and bring the camera to my face, adjusting the lens. I can’t bear to look at him after the admission. Especially since I forgot to add the part about how I was mad at the world and pushed away everyone but Jason. Well, I tried to push him away, too, but he wouldn’t let me.

Suddenly, Kennedy appears directly in front of the viewfinder, and the closeness of his face makes me yelp. He reaches up and takes the camera from my hands. “Annabel,” he says softly.

For some reason, I feel tears prick my eyes.

I reach forward and yank the camera from his hands. I pull it back up and snap a picture. “So, you mentioned a dare?” I ask, safely behind the camera.

Kennedy stares me down for a moment without speaking a word. I continue to snap away. Running a hand through his hair, he looks around. “I was just trying to get you alone, so we could talk. I couldn’t believe you showed up here. I thought, maybe…I don’t know what I thought. But hell, if the girl wants a dare, then the girl gets a dare. Just like the good old times, right? ’Cause you know we’re all good, right?”

Maybe his high is wearing off, because he looks exhausted and deflated, and there’s a note of bitterness in his voice. “We’re not far from the east end of the lake,” he continues. “A lot of kids like to skinny-dip, and I’m feeling like a dip. I dare you to join me.”

My stomach tightens. “Is this a joke?”

Kennedy furrows his brow. “Um. No. It’s a dare. I know it’s been a while, but the whole point of a dare is that it’s supposed to be a little ridiculous. If you wanted to do it, I wouldn’t have to dare you,” he explains like he’s telling me the benefits of my flossing every day.

Could he really be that dense? Of course he could. “Unbelievable. Like I could really do that? You’ve seen the scars. I’m not giving anyone a free ticket to the freak show.” I spin on my heels and begin marching back toward where Jason and his friends are waiting. With every step I take, the sound of laughter and music whispers to me through the air, mocking me.

“Whoa! Shit, Annabel! Wait up. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” he explains, having to run to catch up with me.

“Yeah, I think that’s a regular reoccurring problem,” I mumble, not slowing down my stride even a bit.

“Please walk a little slower. It’s hard to keep up. I may have had a few drinks earlier.”

“Define a few. Also, you reek of pot.”

“Come on, don’t be mad. Let’s take our time getting back, snap a few pictures along the way. We only have one session left in the darkroom,” he reminds me.

I sigh, slowing down my pace. “Fine. But no more talk about dares, and if you puke, I’m totally taking a picture of you.” I was foolish to think we could just go back to dares. There isn’t any going back.