The Book of Broken Hearts (14 page)

“Mari, I’m not sure . . .” Celi keeps shaking her head.

“You guys! It’s a pinprick. We did the same thing with the Birch sisters at Celi’s birthday party. Remember?”

“Yeah, to become blood sisters.” Celi crushes her spent cigarette into the sill next to Mari’s. “And I was, like, ten.”

“What ever happened to the Birches?” Lourdes asks.

“Hands,” Mari says. “Juju, you first.”

I hold out my hands, palms up. Mari pricks the first one right in the fleshy middle part. It stings at first, but I clamp my hand shut, waiting patiently for her to do the other hand, then Lourdes’s. Celi’s. Her own. When we’re all sufficiently bleeding, we press our palms together and form a tight circle around the candle, Archangel Michael staring at us blankly, his red sword pointed at the sky. My sisters each recite the solemn vow, and when it comes to me, they watch expectantly.

I square my shoulders and take another deep breath. “I, Jude Hernandez, vow to never, ever, under any circumstances, within or outside of my control, even if the fate of humanity is at stake, even if my own life is threatened, get involved with a Vargas.”

A breeze floats through the open window and the candle flickers, sealing our promise. My sisters smile at me; even Celi seems a little lighter.

“We have to sign this.” Celi loops her name at the bottom of the page. “Official and binding under penalty of—”

“Death!” Mari raises her fist like some kind of revolutionary.

“Holy
issues
, Mari. You seriously need therapy.” Lourdes signs her name and passes the book to our death-mongering
sister, waving the pen in her face. “Try not to stab anyone.”

My sisters giggle as Mari pretends to jab us with the pen, but at my turn, I’m deadly serious. My fingers tremble as I sign the page. I still haven’t fulfilled most of their “she who looks upon the book” requirements—never had a crush, never saw a dirty movie, never danced naked under a full moon—but tonight they handed it over anyway. It’s weighty and cold in my lap, and seeing my name there fills me with a new sense of belonging. I’m a part of them now, memorialized in the book, which Celi finally shuts and slides back under her bed with all the shoes.

She’ll give it to me before she leaves for New York. She
has
to. And I’ll keep it religiously, documenting every broken heart, tiny or significant. And even though I don’t know what it feels like to fall in love, I do know this: When I finally christen the book with the story of my first broken heart, it definitely won’t be from a Vargas.

No matter what happens after tonight, I will never, ever . . .

Five years later, Celi’s once vibrant orange flower had faded to pale yellow, crushed and forgotten like the ancient pages themselves. Remembering it now, beyond the innocence of my twelve-year-old self, I knew that Araceli was utterly devastated that night. The knife and blood and the burning of Johnny’s pictures were props, a temporary sideshow to cheer her up before the long and broken road she’d soon face: canceling the engagement party. Explaining to my parents and her friends why the wedding was off. Sorting through the rest of
Johnny’s things, the once-shared dreams that would have to be untangled and rerouted for one instead of two. After that night Celi had spent weeks in bed, hardly eating, never going outside. Mari extended her stay to help care for her, and Mom took time off work to do what she could.

Her sobs woke me at night. They seeped into my dreams, turned them into nightmares. I felt like a voyeur accidentally spying on her private pain.

Even now I couldn’t imagine what it had felt like for her, what it meant to be hurt by the one you loved most. Dylan and I hadn’t been in love. We basically got bored with each other, broke up mutually over lunch. We’d even stayed friends—at least until the BHS picnic. After Dylan, I’d had a few random dates, a few stolen kisses at play parties, but nothing close to Celi and Johnny. Nothing like love. Never.

I ran my hand over the page again, traced the papery flower. Even if they’d passed the book on to me when I turned sixteen, like I’d always wished, it would still look exactly the same. I never would’ve filled up the last pages.

I’d never had a broken heart.

Images of Celi flickered behind my eyes again, all those tears, all that pain etched in her face. But what remained now from that night in her bedroom wasn’t Celi’s pain. It wasn’t the Vargas threats or the smell of Mari’s cigarettes, the blackened photos or crushed flowers or all the spent tissues. It wasn’t our signatures scrawled in this relic of a book, or all the stories of heartbreak it chronicled.

It was the oath itself, the solemn promise that none of us would reopen Celi’s crippling wounds by falling for the brothers of the boy who nearly destroyed her.

As if to remind me, the pinprick scars in the center of my palms ached.

Emilio Vargas.
Regardless of whether he disappeared after we’d finished the bike and I never saw him again, regardless of whether Araceli ever knew he’d been here . . .

I broke the oath.

The day I walked out of Duchess knowing we’d just hired the last of the Vargas brothers, knowing that he and I would spend most of the summer together, knowing that we might even become friends . . . that’s the day I’d betrayed my family.

Hot guilt surged through my chest, but when I thought of calling it all off, when I imagined tucking the Harley under the tarp and telling Papi it was back to Scrabble and fishing, I saw Papi’s own broken heart bright red on his sleeve. I saw him giving up, succumbing to the demon and letting the memories of Valentina slip into the darkness, swirl into the confusing gray soup where everything else would one day, if the doctors were right, go to die.

And I knew, no matter what happened with my sisters, I’d never call it off.

Never, ever.

“He takes it black,” I said.

“Too acidic.” Mari sloshed a bunch of milk into Papi’s morning brew. “With all the meds, his stomach is more sensitive.”

How do I not know that?

Mari set the mug on the kitchen table with Papi’s new breakfast staples: lumpy oatmeal, a small bowl of applesauce, a hard-boiled egg, and a Sudoku book. His pills were there too—same ones I’d been giving him, but she had them arranged in a neat little row, smallest to largest.

“Order and repetition are important,” she said when I raised my eyebrows at the spread.

My shoulders tensed, and I had to remind myself that this was Mari’s way—swooping in, upending, reestablishing the rules.

Still, not everything needed to be reestablished. Maybe I messed up about the coffee. Maybe I let Papi cheat too easily at
Scrabble, watch a little too much television when he should’ve been puzzling out the crosswords to sharpen his brain. But Mari had to see that I was good for him, that the motorcycle project and our western marathons made him happy.

Didn’t she?

I looked at her hopefully, and Mari touched my shoulder as if she could read my thoughts. “You’re doing a great job, Juju. I’m just trying to help.”

“I know. You
are
helping.”

Mari tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry if I came on a little strong last night. I guess . . . I don’t know. Seeing Emilio Vargas all chummy with you and Papi? Talk about
Twilight Zone
.”

“Yeah, but the motorcycle’s super important to him,” I said. “Ever since I found it, it’s like he’s . . . younger again. Back in Argentina, maybe, like he can remember—”

“I know, Juju.” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder, but the light didn’t reach her eyes, and I waited for her to say something about the book she’d left in my bed last night, or maybe about my sisters—how we’d better cancel things with Emilio before Celi and Lourdes found out.

“Tell Papi breakfast is ready, okay?” Mari nodded toward the living room, where Papi was dozing in front of
Good Morning America
, and I did as she asked, no objections.

“After breakfast,” Mari said as we ate, “we’ll walk to the river, and then—”

“Papi watches the Western Channel after breakfast,” I said. Only it came out more like
pamphwafchanfast
because the oatmeal Mari’d dished up was like wet cement.

“He shouldn’t flop on the couch right after he eats.” Mari rested her hand on Papi’s arm. “You need to get in some physical activity every day, okay?”

He shrugged without looking up from the oatmeal, a few blobs of which he’d dribbled on his place mat, probably to avoid eating it.

“After that,” Mari said, “I have some manuscripts to review, so you and Juju can—”

“Work on the Harley?” I said.

Mari leaned over to refill Papi’s orange juice glass. “Tell you what. Let’s get settled into a routine, then we’ll think about how the bike fits in. Fair enough?”

I opened my mouth to argue, but she was being so uncharacteristically reasonable that I couldn’t speak. The coffee, the medications, the Sudoku book . . . Papi liked working on Valentina, but maybe she was right. Maybe we needed more time for exercise and puzzles.

Fishing and board games.

I stared at Papi’s face and wished I could read his thoughts, wished I could follow the demon’s path of destruction straight to its lair. I’d hunt it down, smoke it out, watch it evaporate through his ears. Then Papi would shake it off like a bad dream, stand up from his chair, and clap his hands once.
¡Bueno, queridas! Who’s ready for some fun?

“Mariposa, do you know what my odometer reads?” Papi stabbed his breakfast with a spoon like it was the least edible thing on the planet. “Nineteen thousand four hundred and six point one. All but three hundred and ninety are
my
miles. I rode through Argentina and Paraguay and Uruguay, nineteen thousand miles of roads and jungles and waterfalls and people. I started when I was about Juju’s age. Did you know that?”

Mari shook her head. Lourdes probably didn’t know the stories either; he’d never talked about his biking days until I’d discovered Valentina. I wondered if Mom even knew half this stuff, these formerly buried memories suddenly unearthed, yanked into the sunlight.

“It’s true.” He dropped his spoon into the bowl. “So I think I’ve earned the right to decide what to do with my afternoon, and today my decision is to work on that Harley, which has been waiting for some attention for, let’s see . . . How old is Lourdes, Juju?”

“Thirty.” Inside I was like,
Hells yeah, Papi!
But I totally sat on my hands because clapping might’ve been a little over the top, especially since it was Mari’s first full day.

“Thank you, Juju. Thirty years. And another thing, my butterfly.” He pushed his bowl toward Mari. “Is this what they call breakfast in the big city these days?
Dios mío
, it’s prison food.”

A full, genuine smile slid across Mari’s face, and Papi cracked up at his own joke. Mari hopped out of the chair and
rummaged for some half-moon pastries Mom had brought home from the bakery in Willow Brush.

“No use letting these get stale.” She set the bakery box on the table like an olive branch, a do-over on the whole day.

As our oatmeal crusted over, we dug into the
medialunas
. I was about to grab a second one when Pancake started spazzing with his nose up against the screen door.

Seconds later a low rumble announced Emilio’s approach.

Mari’s eyebrows shot up under her white-blond bangs. “He’s
back
?”

“We hired him. It’s his job.” I said it all cool and collected, but my nerves stood on end. My guilt over the oath hadn’t disappeared entirely—Mari’s trick with the book last night made sure of that—but a thin fog was creeping in, shadowing the details.

Attention, wayward travelers: You are now entering the twin cities, Moral Ambiguity and Gray Area. Enjoy your stay!

“That’s the only reason he’s here? Right.” Mari waited for him to turn off the bike, and when he reached the kitchen stoop, she pushed her way outside.

“Mornin’.” He tried to peek over her shoulder, but she shifted to block his view. “Jude here?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be working for my father?” Mari said.