The Book of Love (2 page)

Jack reached into his vest and pulled out a little sheet of paper with a rocket drawn on one side and a bunch of words on the other. “Lyrics, my dear Lucicle,” he said, and handed the paper to Lucy. At the top was written
Things I’d Bring with Me to Space
, and Lucy smiled because, knowing him, it was less a song and more an actual list he’d made, y’know, just in case.
Tinfoil hats
.
Gravity mats.
Yes, Lucy thought, this would do just fine.

The first time Lucy was up on this, or any, stage was six and a half weeks ago, and it was the scariest moment of her life. It was the first time she’d ever sung in front of anyone other than Tristan. But she’d stood there with a thousand people watching her and closed her eyes and sung from the crack in her broken heart. Now her heart was solid as stone, and all her singing came from her shiny-glossed lips.

“Just make ’em sound pretty,” Jack said.

And Lucy nodded. “Of course.”

Here’s a thing about Lucy, which she’d always sort of known, but felt weird admitting, even to herself because it seemed so braggy (although lately it had felt less braggy and more just
true
)—Lucy was a damn fine songwriter. Not just when she was playing by herself on her own guitar (which she hadn’t done in a very long time) but when she was improvising with others. If someone was playing any kind of music at all, she could make up a song to go with it, right
on the spot, that would emerge from her mouth fully formed and beautiful.

The music started, first quietly: the crackle of static, the tinkle of bells. Lucy stared out into the crowd. Gil was next to Tristan now, smiling up at him. She stood on her tiptoes to whisper something in his ear. Liza was a few feet away. “POP YOUR TOP OFF, HOTTIE!!” she shouted, and toasted Lucy with her little silver flask. Lucy just grinned and shook her head. And then she began to sing:

Tinfoil hats

Gravity mats

Astronaut bats

Schrödinger’s cats

She went up high on the word
cats
, really belted it out from the center of herself. The crowd whooped and wooooed. She kept going down the whole long list. When she got to the line
And I’d bring a picture of you,
she lowered her voice, then brought it back up and rode a wave of clear falsetto right through to the final note. The crowd exploded, clapping, screaming. She could hear her sisters cheering louder than everyone.

Lucy stood there basking in it, basking only for a moment.

“Thank you, Lucicle!” Jack shouted.

Lucy walked offstage. She saw Robin trying to make his way toward her from across the room. As a Heartbreaker, Lucy knew this was the very sort of relationship she was supposed to be cultivating. She should have been thinking of him as less a creepy jerk to get away from, and more a
creepy jerk who had a heart she could grab, squeeze, and juice the magic out of. But in that moment, all she cared about was going anywhere he wasn’t.

The pumping dance music had started again, and Lucy headed back out on the floor, where Gil was laughing as Tristan spun her around and around. Lucy’s eyes met his, and just for a split second, Tristan’s smile faltered and Lucy saw what was underneath.

Lucy felt someone poke her in the side and then heard Liza’s voice in her ear. “My offer still stands,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t even mind. He’s hotter than I remembered.”

The “offer” Liza was referring to was her offer to make out with Tristan. “Otherwise he’s going to be mooning over you all night, pun intended,” was what she had said earlier that evening as they got ready for the party. Less than two months ago, the idea of Liza making out with Tristan would have terrified her because she’d have been worried Liza would break his heart. Now it was way too late for that.

“I don’t know,” said Lucy.

“Well, it couldn’t hurt,” Liza said with a grin.

In a flash, Liza was standing in front of Tristan and was grabbing him by his sweatshirt hood strings and pulling him toward her. She danced in close, then drew her face right up to his and caught his lip between her teeth, as if she was taking a bite of a delicious dessert that she planned to devour every bit of.

“Daaaaamn.” Lucy turned. Robin was standing right next to her now, holding two drinks. He let out a low whistle as Liza wrapped one gorgeous arm around Tristan’s neck. “Sign me up for some of
that
!”

Tristan put his hands on Liza’s waist, then slid them around the small of her back. Everyone around them was staring at them under the blinking lights—Liza’s luscious curves, Tristan’s tall lankiness. They looked, Lucy realized, beautiful together.

Lucy felt hot prickles on the back of her neck and deep in her belly. How weird it was to see Tristan actually kissing someone. He went out with plenty of girls, and although he wasn’t a big kiss-and-tell type, Lucy wasn’t stupid. Still, she had never once actually
seen
him kiss anyone in the six years they’d been friends. He looked good at it.

“Lucky guy,” Robin said. She felt his hot breath on her ear, and she shook it off, shook him away.

The music slowed, and Liza and Tristan finally separated. Liza was smiling; Tristan just looked kind of bewildered, and not necessarily in a good way.

“Here,” Robin said. He thrust a drink in front of Lucy. “I got you a girly drink.” Lucy looked down at a bright red concoction with a straw, a strawberry, and a little paper umbrella poking out of it.

“Save it for your girlfriend,” Lucy said.

“Who said I have one?” Robin looked away.

Lucy lowered her voice to a sultry purr, just barely audible over the thump of the music. “What’s her name again?” She leaned in close. “I want to know whose boyfriend I’m about to hook up with.”

Robin paused for a moment as though he couldn’t tell if Lucy was kidding or not, his girlfriend’s name resting unsaid on the tip of his tongue.

So Lucy reached into her purse for a small metal box, and poked around inside until she found what she was looking
for. “Breath mint,” she said. And she popped a Tip of the Tongue Tart between his lips. “You could use one.”

For a moment he was silent. His eyes widened. “Stacy,” he said. And then clamped his hand over his mouth.

Without another word, Lucy hooked her finger through one of Robin’s belt loops and pulled him forward. She slid her hand into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and scrolled to the S’s. And there was Stacy, a sweet-looking girl waving at the camera.

“What are you doing?”

Lucy held her finger up to her lips. “
Ssh
.”

Lucy tapped
TALK
. “What the hell!” Robin shouted. He tried to grab the phone away.

Lucy turned. Robin reached around her. Lucy dodged him. Red drink sloshed on his shirt. After a single ring, a girl picked up.

“Oh, good,” she said. She sounded so happy and relieved. “I’ve been trying to call you all night!”

Lucy’s heart pounded. She took a breath. “Hey, Stacy, listen, you don’t know me and I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but your boyfriend is a dick. He’s not at home with a cold, or out with the boys or doing whatever it is he told you he was doing instead of hanging out with you tonight. He’s at a party trying to cheat on you. Just thought you deserved to know.”

She locked eyes with Robin. He looked, for a moment, quite sick, then tried to smile. “I know you didn’t really call her,” he said.

“Didn’t I?” said Lucy.

She turned the phone toward Robin so he could see the talk time ticking and hear the girl’s shouts coming from inside the phone.

Robin opened his mouth in an O as the drink he had brought for her dropped to the floor, the liquid spreading out into a sticky circle.

Someone cranked the music, and Lucy walked away.

She saw Tristan standing against the wall, all alone.

Six weeks ago, Lucy made a silent promise to find him someone else to love, someone as funny and fun and sweet and brilliant as he was. But in that moment, Lucy suddenly understood with the force and clarity that only comes from finally facing a truth you’ve already known but have tried hard to ignore—finding Tristan a girlfriend wasn’t the answer.

Lovers fight, leave each other, lose interest, get bored, cheat. Sometimes love is yanked away all at once, sometimes it simply leaks out drip by drip. Even the perfect love that lasts a lifetime ends with death. They say time heals all wounds, but the truth is time also breaks all hearts.
Every love ends in heartbreak
.

It’s a scary, dangerous world out there for anyone with a breakable heart. It’s only safe for those whose hearts are unbreakable. Like Lucy, like her sisters. They were the only ones who were truly free.

And standing there in that dark room under a high ceiling twinkling with crystal, dance music pounding in her chest like a heart, Lucy felt a stab of intense longing so strong it almost knocked her over. It was as strong as the longing she’d felt the moment she first saw her ex-boyfriend, Alex, who’d broken her heart.
This
was what she needed for
Tristan—the freedom she had.
This
was how she could repay him. By finding a way to fix his heart forever the way he had helped her fix her own.

Of course this was the answer—it was amazing she hadn’t realized this earlier. It was perfect. It was the only way to make things right.

Now all she had to do was figure out how.

Three

O
n Lucy’s thirteenth birthday, her father gave her a shiny green bicycle with a million different gears. At the time, this gift only proved how little her father knew, and for the first two and a half years the bike sat at the back of the garage untouched; the only trips it ever took were a couple wobbly rides down to the end of the driveway. Lucy was not a bike person. She did not like riding down the road,
always feeling so unsafe. She did not like that there were no straps, was no seat belt. She did not like how easily she could fly off.

Lucy relied on her parents for rides. Then after Tristan got his license, he drove Lucy anywhere she wanted to go and said he was happy to do it. He loved driving! (Now Lucy realized, actually, he’d loved
her
, but she didn’t know that at the time.) When Lucy first met the Heartbreakers, Olivia would pick her up and drop her off. And when she needed her own transportation, she’d walk. But after a week of one-, two-, three-hour walks home from wherever the Heartbreakers had taken her, Lucy remembered the bike at the back of the garage and pulled it out. And suddenly it seemed like the perfect solution—a bike was sleek and simple, powered by nothing but gravity and gears, by her own muscles steadily sending blood through her veins and back to her impenetrable heart. She loved the freedom; she could go anywhere, didn’t need gas or to ask anyone. When she wanted to think, she went for a ride. Her brain worked best when she was in motion.

So an hour later, the party winding down, Lucy climbed onto the seat in her gunmetal gray dress, strapped her silver helmet onto her head, and pedaled off into the night, imagining that to anyone who passed, she’d be nothing but a silver
whoosh,
like the tail end of a comet. She loved the feeling of going so fast she couldn’t stop, of rushing down a hill at incredible speeds, of knowing there was real actual danger and that any second she could crash.

Lucy propped her bike against the side of the house and went inside. Her mother was sitting on the couch in the
dimly lit living room. Lucy missed the clean scent of trees and crisp fall air rushing past her cheeks.

Right away, she knew they were fighting again. The usual evidence was all there: her mother had a full mug of tea in front of her but wasn’t drinking it; the TV was on, but she wasn’t watching it; and she was wearing a pair of faded blue and white striped pajama pants and a threadbare gray college T-shirt that she’d had since she was a student. She always wore it after a fight, as if she was trying to remind Lucy’s father that she had a life before she met him and that she could have a life after. Even though, as far as Lucy could tell, her mother didn’t really believe this.

“Hi, Mom,” Lucy said.

Lucy’s mother turned and gave her this blank, blinky, questioning look, not one that asked where Lucy had been and why she was coming home after one on a school night, but rather one of more global confusion, like nothing in the world made sense and she was hoping someone could explain it to her.

“What’s going on?” Lucy asked because she knew she was supposed to.

Her mother took a breath. “Your father and I are getting a divorce.” There was forced flatness in her voice like she was trying to sound as though she was just stating a fact. But Lucy knew her mother was saying this as much for her own benefit as she was for Lucy’s. She just wanted to hear herself say it out loud.

The thing is, Lucy had had this same conversation at least a dozen times before, and her mother’s words could not shock her. It was only her own words that did. “I hope you
really do it this time,” Lucy said. And both she and her mother looked up in surprise.