Heart (4 page)

Arriving outside the lecture theatre for my Introduction to American Studies class, I paused, took a deep breath and walked in, trying to project an aura of confidence I didn’t feel. Scanning the rows, I saw a space next to a girl who reminded me of Cass. Taking it as a sign, I walked over and sat in the empty chair.

“Hi,” I said, pulling out my notebook and pen.

“Hi,” she replied, but angling her body away slightly. Unwilling to give in yet, I persevered.

“I quite like this tutor, don’t you? I could listen to his voice for ages.” God, where did that come from? Probably the place called Make Yourself Look Inane in One Easy Step.

“Uh, suppose so. Personally, I find it a little bit grating. I can’t believe how many of the tutors are American.”

“Well, it is an American Studies course.” I tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Yeah, but why on Earth would they come over here to live, you know, like, when they could be, like, in America?” At this point she (I never did find out her name) took out her mobile and started texting. Taking the hint, I titled my notes page and waited for the lecture to start. Cass she certainly wasn’t.

I let the tutor’s Southern drawl wash over me, pen on auto-pilot for the hour. At the end of the lecture, I watched others leave, trying to identify who could be the next victim of the Neve-Needs-Friends initiative. Spotting a couple with no discernible sociopathic tendencies, I resolved to sit by one of them next time and left without acknowledging Cass-she-isn’t.

I wandered out of the building but, knowing I couldn’t cope with the quiet solitude of the library, I had nowhere to go and nobody to be with. They didn’t show moments like this in the glossy university brochures and cheesy online adverts. No, it was all about the exciting places you’d visit and new friends you’d meet. Bollocks. Jake had been the only thing to get me through the first couple of weeks and now even he was gone.

With a few hours to fill before my English class, and from some perverse need to relive one of my few treasured Brighton moments, I took the campus bus and got off at the seafront. Walking along toward the West Pier, I remembered the time I had spent on the beach with Jake. Especially the night I had fallen asleep on him, shattered after hours dancing at one of the beach-front clubs.

Crunching my way across the shingle, I recalled the comforting weight of his arm draped across my shoulder and the way he dangled my shoes from his hand so I could walk barefoot. We had sat on the pebbles, me nestled between his thighs, looking out over the skeletal remains of the West Pier, hauntingly stark against the pre-sunrise sky.

The warmth of his arms around me had calmed me to sleep. He was my gravity, keeping me centred. I hadn’t considered how weightless, how un-anchored I would be without him by my side. Was I really that naïve to have believed it would last forever? Of course I was; everyone falls in love believing, hoping, they have found the one person who will complete them until they draw their last breath.

Sitting down in almost the same place we had watched the sunrise, I looked out to sea and realised the enormity of what had happened. The tears started but, as I gave in to them, I felt the panic of being alone overwhelm me. What had happened to my life? I was miles away from everyone who cared, who loved me. I had lost the person who mattered most to me.

I was adrift.

Like a tight band around my chest, the pain was constricting. As I gulped mouthfuls of air around hiccups of tears, I knew I needed to stop myself from having a panic attack, out here, cold and alone on the beach.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

In. Out.

In.

Out.

I used the rhythm of the waves’ ebb and flow to regulate the heaving of my chest as I struggled to calm down.

Hugging my arms around my knees, I recalled my English teacher telling us about Virginia Woolf’s suicide: how she had filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the river. At that moment, I thought about how easy it would be to do the same: surreptitiously sneak handfuls of pebbles into the pockets of my parka and my bag, and then walk into the sea. Running my fingers over the smooth roundness of a pebble, I considered the impact on others. Sure, it would be painful, but they all had someone to rely on to help them get through: Mum and Dad, Flynn and Cass. They’d cope.

Looking round, I could see there was nobody close by on that windy, autumnal day. Nobody who would feel obliged to risk their own safety. Nobody to make a frantic 999 call.

Could I do it? Did I have the guts?

It was almost like a dare.

Opening my bag, I scooped up pebble after pebble, dropping them into its dark interior. Scoop. Drop. Shifting the bag closer to me, I revelled in its newfound weight and shape. Would it work? Scoop. Drop. I paused in my secret endeavour when someone walked behind me, my sea-gaze now concealing a deeper secret. As I waited for them to pass, I realised the enormity of what I was doing.
Was I actually considering killing myself?

Shame flooded me. I wasn’t that girl, the one whose whole life revolved around her boyfriend.
Was I?
Maybe I was. Maybe I had been, at any rate. Shit. This was
my
life. My
life
.

My phone vibrated in my pocket as my brain tried to compute the last few minutes of madness. I looked at the screen: Cass. What was she, a bloody mindreader? Knowing she wouldn’t stop until I answered, I tapped the screen.

“Christ, Neve, you had me worried then!”

I gave a brittle laugh before replying, “What did you think I was doing? Finding a bridge to jump off?” Oh, the irony.

“Nah, that would be too messy. Doing a Plath would be more your style, babe. You know, something dramatic but less painful.” Although there was a smile within her voice, it was worrying how well she knew me; it was only the writer she had got wrong. “I’m only kidding. I just wanted to check how you were doing. You sounded so sad earlier, I couldn’t think of anything else in my lecture.”

“I did a stupid thing and came to the beach. All it’s done is remind me of him. We sat here one morning—”

“Stop that. It won’t do you any good. Get up and get walking. Now.” Why did everyone suddenly think it was okay to start bossing me around? “I can’t hear you moving.” Even though she was almost two hundred miles away, it was like she was right there with me. I stood, the weight of my pebble-filled bag making me lean to one side. “Okay, walk away from that place. Talk to me. About anything. Until you can’t see it anymore.” The band around my chest loosened as I walked, telling Cass about my classes, Kema, everything that I hadn’t yet shared with her.

The further I got from that spot on the beach, the easier it was. I stood at the bus stop, still telling Cass every minute detail of my life away from her. When the bus pulled up, I thanked her and promised to ring her that evening. Carrying the burden of my bag in both hands, I took a seat on the bus and vowed to keep the stones as a reminder to never let myself give in like that again.

After a quick detour to my room to drop off the pebbles, I grabbed a drink from the coffee shop and made my way to the lecture hall. Being early gave me a choice of seats and, after opting for an empty row near the back, I texted a quick thank you to Cass and drank my coffee. A shadow cast across my notepad alerted me to the arrival of a neighbour. Looking up, I found myself staring into a pair of aquamarine eyes, framed by the longest lashes I had ever seen.

“Hey, is this seat taken?” His gorgeous American accent made me avoid the obvious, sarcastic response.

“Uh, no, umm, feel free,” was my wonderfully articulate reply. However, Yankee Boy smiled as if I had just said something witty and sat down. Taking a sip of my coffee to give myself something to do other than stare, I shifted to allow him more space on the bench seating.

“I’m Garrett,” Yankee Boy—sorry,
Garrett
—said, hand extended. I mean, who shakes hands at our age? However, I took his hand and shook it, my brain briefly registering that it felt bigger in mine than Jake’s did.

“Neve.”

“Is that Irish?”

“Yeah, my dad’s family comes from Ireland. You know, all potato farmers and Guinness drinkers. So, Garrett… is that American?” His laugh was like music.

“No. It’s an old English name. It’s been around since the twelfth century,” he added, as though it would impress me.

“Oh. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone called Garrett before. Weird.”

“Weird, why? Weird that you haven’t met anyone with my name, or weird name, period?” The seriousness of his face was belied by the crinkle around his eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m only joking. I’ll just have to make sure you don’t forget the first time you met a Garrett, won’t I?” As he pulled an iPad out of his leather messenger bag, I noticed how well-dressed he was, especially in comparison with the proliferation of hoodies which surrounded us. The light-grey sweater, worn over a blindingly white shirt, looked like cashmere and fit his lean body perfectly, as did the dark indigo jeans which embraced his thighs. I looked up to find Garrett smiling as if pleased to see I had been checking him out.
Had I
? Pretending to swap my pen, I hid my embarrassment in my bag, fumbling around until the chatter turned into a hush, signalling the lecturer’s arrival.

Successfully managing to ignore Garrett for the first few minutes, I got suckered in to the lecture on Victorian poetry and the love story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whilst I was thinking that this week’s reading might be quite interesting, even if a little depressing given my current state of mind, I felt Garrett move closer and whisper, so close I could feel his breath.

“Garrett, Barrett, what other
arretts
are going to make an appearance this afternoon? Will a row of carrots dance across the stage? Will a parrot start following you, repeating your every word?”
This was how he was trying to impress me
?

“Just how long have you spent working out words that rhyme with your name?” I asked, with enough of a smile to tell him I wasn’t being wholly snarky.

“Long enough to mean I’ll have to borrow your notes as I haven’t got anything down so far,” he admitted. I chuckled and went back to my own note-taking, smiling at the realisation that he hadn’t moved away.

“Do you fancy grabbing a coffee?” Garrett asked as we packed up at the end of the lecture. I was on the verge of refusing when he added, “I could get a copy of your notes, as well.” Never one to stand in the way of another person’s study, or the chance for coffee with a handsome American stranger, I agreed and we walked across the lawned quad to the coffee shop I had sat in with Kema less than twenty-four hours before.

Again I found myself being told to sit, but this time I was at least given a choice of drink. When Garrett returned, my skinny mocha had a heart-shaped sprinkling of cocoa powder on top. A sudden sense of what I was apparently doing worried me. Did he think this was a date?

“I didn’t ask for that, honest!” he said as he drew a chair close to me.

“So, do you want my notes to copy?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation in a neutral direction.

“Sure.” Before he had finished replying, I had my notepad out of my bag and passed over the pages. He opened up his camera app, took a photo of each page and then handed them back. “Thanks.”

“Really? That’s it? You’re just taking a photo of them?”

“I’ll download them into the notes I made later. I’m not one for scribbling out reams of notes I won’t ever read again,” he said, arrogance colouring his tone.

“You could have done that in the lecture! We didn’t need to come here to do that,” I pointed out.

“I know,” he said smoothly, “but then you wouldn’t be sat here with me, would you? I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to get to know you better.” His smile was somewhere on the scale between smarmy and endearing. I wasn’t exactly sure where yet.

“What course are you following?” I was determined to maintain a distant friendliness.

“English and Media Studies.”

“Why here?”

“Why here as in Sussex, or why here as in England?” His tendency to look for double-meanings was in danger of becoming annoying.

“Either. Both.”

“Well, as soon as it was clear I wasn’t quite cut out for the Ivy League, my grandmother, who is English, offered to fund me studying in the UK. It was a no-brainer, really. I get a few months at a time away from my Wasp of a mother and all I have to do is drive up to London every couple of weeks and pay the old girl a visit. I chose Brighton as it was far enough away to mean I couldn’t be expected to stay at her house. I love her, but only in small doses. What about you?”

“American Studies and English Literature. I liked the uni and was supposed to be coming here with my best friend, but her plans changed. I like being by the sea,” I added, realising it was true; subconsciously I had always been drawn to it.

“You must be missing her, right?”

“So much,” I admitted before stopping myself from pouring out my tale of woe. “I have to go. Thanks for the coffee.” I stood and slung my bag over my shoulder.