How To Get Your Heart Broken (21 page)

My eyes widened in alarm, I was trying to
hold on to her, grip my arms around her so she could have some hold on the
present. Her eyes were so far away and I

could almost see her reliving the moment,
willing the scene to change so that he could be part of the present instead of
a painful reminder of past regrets.
 
She
pushed me away as I tried to hold on to her, and my arms froze as I ran out of
ways to comfort her. Then I noticed Ash’s horrified face on the porch.

I quickly gathered enough to realize she’d
heard more of the conversation than Rachel would have ever wanted her to know.
But it was too late.

“Don’t give me that look. Some loser just
dumped you and your mom’s a whore. I feel sorry for
you.
”
 
I felt the jagged
edges of each word as if they’d been meant for me. Ash retreated into the house
faster than I could react and Rachel remained unmoved, as if the words hadn’t
even come out of her mouth.

My mouth hung open as I stared at her in
astonishment, and she turned only to shrug at me before returning her gaze to
the water. It made me wonder if she thought I found her words acceptable. I
wondered if I had ever looked to anyone the way she did to me in that moment.
Somehow I knew I had, and it made me think that for us, hope would never be
anything more than an illusion.

Memories Will
Haunt You

Haunted

I stopped dead in my tracks, staring at the
dark cloud ahead of us. I could hear my heart pounding.

“No,” I said firmly. “I’m not going in
there.”

He had been walking ahead of me, he was
almost at the front door when he turned around.

“Come on, don’t tell me you’re afraid of
ghosts!”

“Don’t tell me you’re not!” I protested.

 
“There are already so many dangers in our
world, why are you going to worry about the ones in another one?”

I continued shaking my head. His reasoning
made no sense to me anyway. Anyone that had ever been in that haunted house
came back a different person.

“Come
on Ash, I promise I won’t let anything hurt you.”

He walked back towards me and took my hand.
Stupidly, I followed him into the dark.

I wondered now, if this was the moment
where it all went wrong.

“Look,” I said, trying to put some measure
of confidence into my words. “I did something really awful and I wish I could
take it back but I can’t. So I’m just going to tell you. When I‒”

He used his fingers to cover his ears and
started screaming, “La la la la I can’t hear you!!!!!!” at the top of his
lungs, just like I had done the day before.

I stared at him in bewilderment, waiting
for him to stop.
 
Eventually he did.

“Don’t tell me, okay?”

I stared at him in confusion. “What?
But‒”

“No. No buts. I don’t want to know. Please
don’t tell me.”

He gave me a disapproving look when I tried
to argue. I protested halfheartedly, it wasn’t like I wanted to tell him
anyway.

“Okay,”
I agreed reluctantly.

I sighed in frustration, trying to shake
the memory out of my head. I was growing accustomed to these interruptions; no
matter what I was doing my mind always reverted back to thinking about
him
. I especially couldn’t shake that
memory. I couldn’t stop wondering what might have happened if I hadn’t used his
ignorant protest as a reason not to tell him the truth. Where would we be now?
The diary hadn’t helped either, reading about Ash and Julian made me wonder how
it all could have been different if I were more like her. Her life seemed so
much simpler, her relationship a lot less dysfunctional, especially since its
downfall was more my fault than hers.
 

I’d only opened her journal to pass time
while I waited for her (and maybe to try to decipher what was real from what
wasn’t). The entry I’d been reading, “Haunted,” made it a little obvious. It
was written like a story rather than a journal entry, and then I realized it
wasn’t the first time I’d seen an entry like that. It still puzzled me the way
she mixed reality with fiction, but who was I to tell her how to organize her
diary?

I hadn’t seen Ash since Rachel had yelled
at her this morning, and I was starting to get worried. I’d found the entry
she’d written about her and Julian’s breakup.

July
26
^th
, 2015
                          
Ackey
Breakey Heart

 
I lost Julian. The rest is too sad to
tell.
   

I was fairly certain she wouldn’t be mad at
me for reading her diary this time (afterall, there were no secrets left
between any of us). And in my defense, I was at least partially using it to try
to guess her whereabouts, she’d been gone since this afternoon and I was
starting to get worried. I’d debated going to check if she was with Julian, but
this entry made me doubt the possibility. Besides, I figured the only person he
wanted to see less than her was me. I glanced back down at the diary, figuring
there was nothing more I could do but wait.

I tried to make my steps as quiet as
possible, irrationally thinking that this would keep the ghosts from knowing we
were here.

We were standing in a dusty living room
now. We had only the light on Julian’s phone to guide us. I had a firm grip on
his hand; if anything tried to get me, it would have to take him too.

“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!” I screamed before I
even knew what had scared me. I was completely hidden behind Julian now and
almost on the verge of tears.

“Relax, it was just the front door,” He
whispered, the quiet of his voice a calming contrast to my ear-splitting
scream.

“We’re stuck?”

“No, we’re not. It was just the wind, no
ghost. Let’s go upstairs.” He was already pulling me towards the creaky
staircase before I had a chance to protest. The last thing I wanted to do was
go upstairs, but I certainly didn’t want to be alone, not even for the brief
seconds it would take me to run down the stairs and out the front door.
  

I carefully avoided the holes in the wooden
steps, hoping that the whole thing wouldn’t crumble beneath us.

Julian led me to an empty room directly
ahead of the stairs. There were two wide windows in front of us and the intense
brightness of this room was an apparent contradiction to the rest of the house.
I felt a lot less frightened here; I could see the surrounding houses, and I
felt like part of the world again.

“There are no ghosts here.”

I stared quizzically. I wasn’t sure if he
was referring to this room or the entire house. Either way, I wasn’t ready to
go that far. But he sounded so confident. I noted the way he seemed comfortable
here.

“You’ve been here before,” I stated.

“Fear is in your head. The world is only as
scary as we make it,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken.

I smile escaped me. I walked towards him
and stared up into his eyes. Maybe he was right, maybe the only thing we had to
fear was ourselves. I placed my hand on his neck and pulled him towards me.
Then I kissed him.

“What I should have said is that I’m here
for you. And if you ever need me to tell you how incredibly beautiful I think
you are, I’m at your service.”

I stared back with astounded eyes. Those
were better than any words I’d ever heard before.

Somehow, Jessie had gotten me to confess my
disappointment at his handling of the whole bonfire incident
.
I
hadn’t even realized how much it bothered me until I’d said it out loud. I kept
admitting things to him I didn’t mean to, but he never used it against me. And
even if his response hadn’t been right the first time, it had been perfect just
now.

A familiar smirk face over his face. “I
could show you too,” he winked. And just like that he was back to his normal
self.

I
continued staring at him like a weirdo. For once, I wasn’t quick enough to
recover as he made his abrupt transition from intense to playful.

Eventually,
he looked away. Then, he kicked his legs up, sending the porch swing flying. I
barely had enough time to grab the mug that had been sitting between us. It had
become something like a tradition now that Jessie would make me a cup of tea
whenever I came over. The reindeer mug was practically mine.

“Watch
it,” I half-heartedly murmured.

He
looked over at me. “You really like that mug?” He asked.

“More
than I like you,” I said smartly. I was relieved that we could fall so easily
back to our usual banter; I didn’t want to be serious anymore.

He
leaned towards me. The porch was dim, but I could still feel his eyes.

“We
both know that’s not true,” he whispered.

I closed the journal in frustration,
deciding it was time to give up. I hadn’t seen Rachel in a while either, and
I’d realized she left her phone in the living room, so

there was no hope of reaching her. I was
suddenly struck with the fleeting thought that perhaps her and Ash had gone to
try and kill each other.

My eyes widened when the front door burst
open. Though I blinked furiously, I couldn’t seem to correct the scene before
me. Rachel’s arm was flung casually around Ashton’s shoulder as they stumbled
through the front door giggling and singing a drunken, terribly off key version
of the latest pop song.

I was frozen on the couch, my mouth almost
to the ground, my eyes so wide my eyebrows blended into my hairline.

---

“Keep drinking,” I interrupted tensely in
the midst of Rachel and Ash’s drunken conversation.
 

This was the third glass of water I’d given
her but nothing had changed, and I began to grow very nervous at the thought
that Ash’s first time getting drunk was with Rachel.

“You should have seen her dancing on the
dinner table; she skipped right into their fine china, that’s how she got that
cut on her leg. Man I hope I remember that tomorrow,” Rachel mumbled on as I
found the large gash on Ash’s foot, covered in a mess of dried blood.

“I can’t even feel it,” she proclaimed
cheerfully as she raised her glass of water to Rachel.

I was still too disturbed to react, even as
she spilled half of the icy water on my head before managing to set it back
down on the table.

“Any tattoos you want to tell me about? Do
you have a man in your trunk or a gorilla in the closet?” I asked, alluding to
The Hangover.

“I think it was a tiger…” Rachel chimed in
as Ashton, oblivious to the reference giggled, “How would we have sneaked it
in?”

I stared hopelessly at Ash after I’d
bandaged her leg. Her eyes remained unnaturally red, her jaw slack in a way
made her seem both completely oblivious and happy, and I wondered if alcohol
was the only thing Rachel had introduced her to. I couldn’t even bring myself
to ask the question I’d been wanting to since she’d stumbled through the door,
‘
What were you thinking?’

“Do you want to see the sand castle Rachel
and I built?”

“Hate to break it to ‘ya, but it’s more
like a giant pile of sand,” Rachel said as she sprawled herself across the
couch, her limbs spread wildly so that she resembled a giant starfish.

Ash made a face, her expression changing
just as quickly back to that wide eyed stare, “We left our boom box!”

“It’s not ours!” Rachel shouted back, but
in a calmer tone. Thanks to all the years she’d had to build up tolerance, she
was clearly not as affected as Ashton.

“Wait,” I said, trying to process this,
“Were you guys the ones making all of that noise outside?”

“Oh,” Ashton began to whisper, “Rachel
thought we shouldn’t wake you from your nap, so we stayed outside for a little
while.”

“I wasn’t taking a nap!” I exclaimed,
trying to dismiss her nonsensical explanation.

“I thought someone was having a party!” I
added.

“We were having a party, a party for two,”
Ash was laughing so hard at her own joke she started coughing.

“Well, why didn’t you just go outside and
check?” Rachel, apparently the voice of reason, questioned.

I swallowed, thinking of the reason I’d
been unable to venture outside of the confines of this house for days, and how
what happened with Rachel this morning had only reinforced my current fear of
the outside world.

I found myself unable to stop thinking of
him
again as Ash and Rachel’s
exclamations seemed to fade out.

“Have you turned into a kleptomaniac or
something? It’s wrong to take people’s diaries and read it like it’s a soap
opera,” Ash said, noticing her diary where I’d been sitting.
 

“Sorry, Ashton,” I said as I tried to snap
out of it, sounding a bit like a child who’d just been reprimanded by her
teacher.

“I’m flattered you find my life so
fascinating though!”

I smiled distractedly, watching her trip
onto the couch as she attempted to pull it out from under where Rachel lay.

“As of today, I find your life quite
fascinating too,” Rachel said, easily pulling the diary out of Ash’s hands.
They began a tragic game of tug-of-war, in which drunken Ash could not seem to
keep the thing in her hands.

The game was driving me to retreat into
another memory, when I was saved by a knock on the door. I hopped up and opened
the door eagerly, already knowing who it
wouldn’t
be.

I stood frozen as I tried to take in the
two figures before me.

This night was about to get a lot more
interesting.