The Brokenhearted (18 page)

“What are you talking about?” I grab him by the collar of his oxford shirt, pulling him up off my bed until his face is an inch from mine, close enough so that I can smell a trace of the almond cookies my parents gave him. Did my shirt slip when I kicked him? Has he been watching me somehow?

“I know
everything
, freakshow. I know what you can do. And I have it all in my computer. Now, let go of me.”

“What did you do?” I whisper. I throw him down onto my sheepskin rug, where we once made out for hours.

I race over to lock the door, then return and stand over him. My body hums with the urge to fight and destroy.

But I don’t. I can’t. Certainly not here.

“I don’t think you want to mess with me too much right now.” Will grimaces. He crosses his legs and straightens up, hands on his knees, looking as if he’s about to do yoga. His sky-blue eyes twinkle with pride at whatever sick thing he’s dangling in front of me. “Considering the footage I have on you.”

“How dare you,” I whisper, suddenly exhausted. I sit on the carpet a few feet away from him, my shoulders sagging, deflated. Gavin is gone. What does anything else even matter?

“Oh, Anthem. You cannot imagine how easy it was. I came over one Saturday while you were out at ballet or wherever it is you go. I brought your mother some flowers. Told her my plan to get you back, to win your heart, blah blah blah. Made her promise to keep my love for you a secret. Your parents want us to be together—I’m sure you know that already. Then I zipped in here and planted an itsy bitsy camera when she thought I was in the bathroom.” He shrugs. “I guess I’m just the kind of guy who likes to know what people are up to.” He dangles his keys in front of me, a small red flash drive glinting on the ring.

“Where is it?” I whisper, blood roaring in my ears. My hands are shaking with fury.

“Oh, I’m not sharing the information. It’s all for me. The footage of you jumping around your room like a crazy-assed grasshopper? I’m keeping it all to myself. You just have to do one thing for me.”

“Where is the camera?” I hiss, lunging at him. He rolls away from me, flinching a little as he rights himself at the foot of my bed.

“You threaten me again like that, and the footage goes straight to a website. I was thinking anthemfleetisafreakofnature.com. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

“What do you want?” I whisper, sitting back on my heels with a thud. I look out the window at the thin slice of moon hovering uselessly in the black night and swallow a sob.

“People at school think you dumped me. Did you know that?” Will’s mouth twists into a grimace, his face flushed with the memory of this humiliation.

“No. What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t . . . now,” Will says softly, plucking hairs out of the rug and balling them up between his fingers. His eyes avoid mine. “Because we got back together, just like I told your parents.”

“But we didn’t—”

“But babe, we
did
. See, that’s how this whole blackmail thing works. You’re going to be my girlfriend again. You stand quietly like a good little ballerina by my side again. You hold my hand when we’re in front of people. You kiss me like you mean it before we go to class.”

“But why?” I cry. “Why would you want that? You
hate
me,” I remind him. But that’s the point, I realize, the force of what Will is after rocking through me.
Control
.
Dominance.

“Why? Because nobody breaks up with Will Hansen. And nobody kicks Will Hansen in the teeth. And mostly, Anthem? Because I
can
.”

“And if I say no?” I ask. But I already know the answer.

“If you say no, I post the footage when I get home. I’m pretty sure someone would be interested in the illegal activities of whatever back-alley nutjob did this to you. I’m quite certain you’d spend the rest of your days being studied by the medical community. And there goes your life.” Will smiles and sits back against the wall, grinning crazily.

“Get the camera,” I squeak. “And get out.”

“Tell me we have a deal first.”

A long beat of silence. We lock eyes, and there’s nothing but hatred between us. I look away first, all the fight suddenly gone out of me.

”We have a deal.”

“Great,” he says, and walks toward a framed picture I have on the wall above my bed, a black-and-white shot of two dancers midleap, their bodies flexed and straining, hands entwined in the air. He plucks a tiny piece of white plastic from the top of the white frame. “I’ll miss seeing you undress,” he smirks. As he brushes past me, he eyes my unmade bed. “But maybe I won’t have to wait too long before getting another look.”

He pauses, his hand on the door. “We have unfinished business there, don’t we?” His eyes travel to the bed and back to me, traveling slowly up my body.

“Get out,” I whisper.

I push him out the door and shut it hard, sliding down the back of it. As I do, my hair falls out of its bun. I move to touch the cut on my head, but aside from the dried blood in my hair, my head is healed. I can’t even locate a scab.

Hugging my arms around my knees, I wait for the tears to come. But they never do. There’s just a yawning emptiness, an icy cold inside me that never thaws.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER 21

I stay in my room for days, barely sleeping, barely eating.

Sleep delivers no rest, only blood-soaked nightmares, so I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, a faint crack in the plaster traveling from the light fixture in the center of the room to the crown moldings, watching the glowing red numerals on my clock move from morning to midday to night and back again. I eat a few bites of the food Lily brings me three times a day and push the rest away, my stomach recoiling. It all tastes like dirt and blood to me. I eat just enough to keep my lips and fingertips from turning blue, to keep away torpor, but no more.

Every morning my mother comes in and sits at the foot of my bed, feeling my forehead, her face pinched with concern.
Still so hot
, she says wonderingly, pulling her hand away quickly, as if I’ve burned her. It seems my new heart has given me the ability to generate heat in my body just by concentrating hard, holding my breath a little, and balling my hands into fists.

I mumble something from deep within the three extra blankets my mother has piled onto my bed, trying to reassure her just enough to avoid a visit from Dr. Sprogue, but not so much that they’ll question my skipping school. I dutifully swallow the fever-reducing pills she brings me, gulping water from a glass already starting to sweat on my nightstand and smiling weakly, whispering
Thanks, Mommy
before shutting my eyes again to sleep the “flu” off. Mostly, my parents leave me be, relying on Lily to check in every couple of hours while they’re at the office Some evenings, both of them come home so late that they skip coming in to see me altogether.

I mark the start of each day by deleting whatever text Will has sent me in the night. Usually it’ll say
Miss your face
or
Can’t wait to hold your hand again
, but by the morning of the fourth day, he’s grown tired of waiting. The latest text, sent at 2
A.M
., says
You can hide, but not forever
.

When Lily comes with a bowl of rice porridge for me, I can tell by her expression that I’m a sorry sight. “Ant,” she says gently, her green eyes soft and sympathetic, “I’m going to run you a bath. I have some lavender oil—it’ll be just the thing to heal you. And if you ever want to talk,” she says, lowering her voice, “about anything—I’m here.”

I shake my head and turn toward the wall. “No thanks,” I mumble, unable to meet Lily’s compassionate eyes.

She runs it anyway, and the smell of lavender oil fills my room. My hair is greasy and my scalp itches, but I just lie there, stuck like a fly trapped between a window and a screen. I can’t find the energy or the will to get up and do it. The weight of Gavin’s death pins me to the bed, so heavy I still can’t summon the energy to cry.

On Friday, after I’ve stayed home from school nearly a week, Zahra tells me she is coming over. She’s been texting and calling, but I don’t have the energy. The phone sits in my bathroom on its charger, vibrating. Once or twice a day I write back, something along the lines of:

Still sick

Or, when she asks if something bad happened:

No, just sick as a dog

This is the kind of text that sends Zahra into a rage: the unspecific information, the lack of detail, the obviousness of the excuse. It reeks of me keeping secrets. And I’m supposed to be done with all that, after my disappearance. I’m supposed to be the same Anthem I always was, the girl who tells Zahra everything. Before, no detail was too small to share with Zahra. If I was stuck somewhere without a tampon and bled on my jeans, she’d want to know how big the spot was. That was how things used to be, anyway. But now I’ve got nothing to give her but lies and half-truths. I’m as incapable of being a friend as I am of showering, of eating, of bothering to raise my blinds and look out the window.

Before I can write back to her and tell her not to come, she arrives, carrying a bouquet of purple dahlias so big it obscures her head.

“That was fast,” I croak. She must have texted me when she was already standing outside the building.

Z lays the massive bouquet next to me in bed, looking down on me as if I’m a corpse and she’s come to pay her final respects. “When’s the last time you opened a window in here?” she says, wrinkling her nose.

She heads to the sliding glass doors that lead to my balcony, yanks the cord that opens the wooden blinds, and slides both doors open. “Much better. You need air, sweetie. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look terrible.”

I recoil from the light, shielding my eyes with my hands, and sit up in bed. “I guess. I’ve been sick.”
I want to die
is what I’m thinking.

“Uh huh. So you tell me. Funny how you’ve never, ever been too sick for school before, and now it’s been days. Remember when you won the spelling bee in seventh grade and then passed out onstage and it turned out you’d been hiding a 103 fever?”

A sigh spills out of me. “Yeah. I’m older now,” I say. “Or maybe just sicker.”

“Uh huh,” Z says again, her hand smoothing and twisting chunks of her short hair as she studies me. I can tell she’s not convinced. “Listen, I can’t even imagine how awful you’re feeling, waiting to hear about Gavin. I just wish you felt like you could talk to me about it.”

A silence opens up between us, and I spend it biting the inside of my cheeks, wanting desperately to tell her what’s happened. But if I begin to tell the truth, I won’t be able to stop. I’ll uncork everything I’m working so hard to keep buried. My visits to the South Side. The trips to Hades. My chimeric heart. Will’s threats. Z would never let me go along with Will’s scheme. She’d do something—threaten him, expose him—and in turn, he could expose me.
Oh, Z,
I think as I smile weakly at her.
Forgive me.

“I’m fine, Zahra.” My voice sounds more hostile than I mean it to. “I told you, I’m just sick.”

Zahra looks down at the bed, and I can see her trying to decide if she’ll sit on it. She doesn’t. “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,” she says flatly. “But maybe you just . . . don’t want me in your life anymore. That’s what it feels like lately.”

She stares down at the carpet, then looks at me for a second before turning to look out the window, daring me to answer.

“Of course I do,” I say. “I’m just . . .I’m going through a lot. And, um, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what’s right for me, because—” I pause.

Don’t say his name
, I tell myself.
If you say his name, your heart will break open and you will never be able to gather yourself up again
. But then I say it. And the lies start pouring out of me. “Because, actually, Gavin and I broke up . . .” I trail off, my throat closing like a stopped drain.

“Broke up?” Zahra comes closer to my bed. “So they let him go?—”

I nod. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just . . .I’ve been so confused. They let him go a couple of days ago. He got in touch. He’s fine. But I decided it just wasn’t going to work. My parents . . . ” I wave my hand in the air, too exhausted and disgusted with myself to finish the lie.

Zahra bites her lip, her eyebrows knitted in sympathy as she stares down at me. “But it might still work out with him . . . maybe when you’re a little older and your parents aren’t monitoring your every move.”

I nod and squeeze my eyes shut. Nothing will ever, in any way, work out with Gavin, I want to shout. Instead, I open my mouth and keep lying.

“Maybe someday. But for now . . . I’m moving on.” I feel my face flush with shame, as if I’m desecrating Gavin’s memory, as my words fill the room.

“Moving on?” Z says, surprised.

I can’t look at her. “I’m thinking of getting back together with Will, actually.” My voice barely a whisper, my mouth fills with a sour taste just saying the words, like I’ve drunk a glass of spoiled milk. “I know you won’t approve, so I’ve been kind of distant because of that too, maybe.”

What a crock.
The words out, I stare miserably up at the ceiling for a beat before I dare to look her in the eyes.
Zahra will never believe me.

But she does. She recoils visibly, as if I’ve punched her. “You’re not thinking straight,” Zahra mutters. “Like,
at all
. God, Anthem, do you realize this is classic codependence? The definition of codependence”—Zahra begins to pace the room, her hands gesticulating as she makes her point—“is when you wake up in the morning and you don’t know how you feel without looking at your boyfriend.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I manage, my voice faraway and thick.