The Brokenhearted (20 page)

While she talks, I scan the Wall of Power behind her and locate my mother’s picture toward the bottom left. She’s next to a young Maurice Dodge, now the jowly, gray-faced investigative reporter for Channel Ten who’s always shouting
Manny Marks is soft on crime!
My mother was gorgeous in high school, with fluffy blond hair and beestung lips that smiled sweetly, back when she was carefree and seventeen, back when her name was Helene Harkness instead of Helene Fleet.

“Fine. See you at the end of the week, I guess.”

“All right.” Bang nods good-bye and picks up her phone, where three lines have been flashing.

What happened to that girl
, I wonder as I walk out of Bang’s office. She looked so full of hope in her senior portrait. Nothing like the haunted, medicated woman I know as my mother.

I pause in the reception area of the wood-paneled main office. I’m going to be my mother, I realize. If I don’t drag myself out of this somehow, I’m going to be joyless and numb for the rest of my life. But the thought evaporates when I push open the heavy door to the hallway and see who’s waiting for me.

“There you are, Red.” Will wears his killer smile—all teeth, dead eyes. As if he’s being filmed. “That took for
ever
. I was starting to think you’d passed out in there. What’d the old hag want?”

I open my mouth to mumble something about making up my coursework, but he interrupts. “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. We don’t have much time, so lemme get you up to speed on our relationship.”

I nod miserably, letting him pull me along by the crook of my arm. I feel limp as a dishrag, completely unprepared to cope with Will and his twisted charade.

“We’re taking it slow for now,” Will says, lowering his voice as we walk toward the east wing, where we both have first period. He’s speaking so softly that I lean toward him to hear. From the outside, this body language probably looks intimate.

“Smile, Red!” he elbows me in the ribs, furious at my lackluster performance. “There’s no grace period. You need to get it right, or else you-know-what’s going online,” he says between clenched teeth.

“Fine,” I mutter, trying not to punch him.

“Now I’ll say something, and you laugh. Pretend you’re a nice girl who wants her boyfriend back.”

And because I can’t think of any way out, I open my mouth and do it. A barking laugh erupts from me like a cough. I even manage to smile. People are watching, waving, welcoming me back, processing the fact of me and Will together with their eyes.

With every minute that ticks by, I die a little more inside.

We pass Zahra in the hall, and I stop walking, reach a hand toward her, but Will pulls me forward, his hand clamped around my elbow. “Zahra . . .” I start, but the look on her face is pure, wide-eyed disgust, and it feels like a punch in the gut. I never should have returned to school, I realize. I don’t have the strength for the performance Will is demanding. I’m too lonely to be this alone.

As we near the physics lab, I hear whispers in the hall and feel a hundred pairs of eyes on us. Will feels it too, I guess, because he stops to grab my hand and whispers in my ear: “See their faces?” he hisses. “They’re relieved. The perfect couple is
back
. They need us, Anthem. Like peasants need their royalty.”

“You’re repulsive,” I whisper, trying to pull my hand away.

Will just snorts and squeezes my hand tighter, until it starts to cut off my circulation. I start squeezing his hand back, imagining ripping his hand off his arm, twisting it off like the lid of a jar, the bones and sinew snapping wetly in two . . .

“Ow!” Will yelps, almost falling on the floor as he pulls his hand away from me. My thoughts snap back into the hallway, where everyone has turned to stare. “What the hell was that, you freak?” he whispers, shaking out his hand and wiggling his fingers to make sure they’re not broken.

“Sorry.” I smile, for once enjoying the fact that everyone’s watching us. “Guess I don’t know my own strength.”

“See you after class,” he hisses. “Do that again and I take my footage public.” And then he’s striding down the hall, mingling with the “peasants.”

I walk into the physics lab, my jaw clenched with worry. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of Will or of myself for the violent thoughts I’m having. I don’t look at anyone as I slide onto my usual lab stool in the front row and take out my physics notebook, flipping methodically to the notes from a week ago. My last page reads:

REVIEW OF NEWTON’S FIRST LAW

An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.

An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.

As Mr. Shrum starts writing a formula on the board for a pop quiz that I’m sure to fail, I bite my pen and consider the words scribbled in my notebook.

I think of Ford pausing at my bedroom door, the disappointment in his eyes.
The world doesn’t need another brokenhearted girl
.

“Okay, everyone, let’s begin,” Mr. Shrum says, nodding in my direction and pantomiming the shutting of my notebook.

I pull out a blank sheet of paper and put everything else back into my knapsack. I write my name at the top of the page. I write the date. Then I stare at the paper until the blue lines blur into the white space, still chewing on Newton’s law.

I don’t want to be the object at rest anymore, I realize. I need to figure out how to get back in motion.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

CHAPTER 24

At a quarter after midnight, I slip from the passenger seat of Serge’s Motoko into the unmarked bar Ford took me to a few weeks ago. An old song wails from the speakers, a chorus of string instruments and a lone slow drumbeat behind a woman singing mournfully that
everything was black and blue, everything was me and you, when you was my man
. The air in the bar is thick with rollie smoke and something else—a chemical sweetness, a faint pink haze coming out of a few pipes of a group slumped in a corner booth.

As soon as my eyes adjust to the dim light, I zero in on the bartender. My body relaxes a little when I see it’s the same girl as before, with the blue pompadour and the red patches of acne on her otherwise pretty face. I move to stand in front of her as she fills three shot glasses with brown liquid. Her eyes flick toward me in acknowledgment before she walks to the other end of the bar to deliver the shots. I loosen the thick gray scarf I’ve wrapped around my neck and glimpse myself in the mirror behind the bar—under the black newsboy cap pulled low on my forehead, my face is painfully thin, my eyes gaze warily out from hollow sockets. I look almost as haunted as I feel.

When she comes back, I surprise myself by pointing to the unmarked bottle of brown stuff. “One more of those,” I say.

She nods curtly and pours it. “Nine,” she says.

I slide a ten along the bar and take the shot, tipping the liquid down my throat all at once. It tastes like battery acid, but I manage to get it down without embarrassing myself. A second later, I feel a pleasant heat in my chest. “One more thing,” I say when I regain my ability to talk.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Ford.”

She grabs a wet pint glass from under the bar and begins to dry it with a rag. “And why’s that?”

I pick up a tattered coaster from the bar, then quickly drop it when I see the words Blackout Vodka, remembering my last moments of consciousness in the bookstore after Gavin died, the bottle in Smitty’s hand swinging toward my head.

“I need his help.”

She studies my face for a beat, trying to decide if I’m okay. I notice a small home-inked tattoo on her wrist:
We will rise
.

“Don’t mess with him,” she says flatly as she scribbles something on an order pad. “Or I’ll find someone to mess with you.”

I nod slowly and wonder what kind of past this girl and Ford might share. “He’s a friend,” I say. “I promise.”

“Whatever,” she mutters, ripping the bar tab out of the book and folding it once before handing it over. “Here’s where he goes at night sometimes. If he’s not there, I can’t help you.”

I thank her and leave, floating a little from the alcohol. When I unfold it, the bar tab says
Jimmy’s Corner—Bergamot and Vine.

When I get back into the Motoko and tell Serge where we’re going, he just nods. “Thanks for driving me,” I say, trying to fill the silence of the car. I was about to head out by myself, but Serge intercepted me when I got out of the service elevator in the garage and insisted that he wanted to drive me.

“No need to thank me.”

I clear my throat. “Aren’t you wondering what I’m doing?”

“I trust that it’s important,” Serge says. He stares straight ahead, alert and seemingly not sleepy in spite of the late hour. “And necessary.”

“It . . . might be,” I mumble, then go back to staring out the window. As the scenery rolls by, I’m glad I’m in a car and not moving on foot through this neighborhood.

Bergamot Street is a wide avenue with old-growth trees that must have once been a shopping district. Now, every storefront is boarded up and their spray-painted walls read
BLACK MOLD
and
TOXIC—DO NOT ENTER
among the usual
SYNDC8
tags. Each storefront has two or three stories of apartments above it, also boarded up. Jimmy’s Corner is easy to spot—it’s on a shallow hill, on the second floor of the only building on Bergamot that still has electricity.

I tell Serge I might be a while and that he should go home.

“I’ll wait,” he says simply.

“Serge.”

He holds my gaze a long time, his wide nostrils flared with determination. I’m never going to win this argument, I realize, and finally look away and nod. “Okay.”

I stand outside on the deserted sidewalk for a few minutes, listening to the
thump-thump-thump
of fists hitting a bag, wondering if it’s Ford.

Only one way to find out, I tell myself, and press the buzzer for number two. The thumping stops, and I hear footsteps coming down the stairs, then the sound of a face being leaned toward a peephole. Nothing. No movement.

“Ford?” I call out tentatively.

Silence.

“Yeah?” he finally says.

“Hey, um, want to open the door?”

“I don’t know,” he calls. “Should I? I’m still thinking about it.”

“It’s cold out here, and dark.” Bergamot is in the neighborhood of Lowlands, famous in the papers as a bad area ever since a series of floods cut most of it off the electricity grid.

“Okay, okay. Sit tight,” he says. By the sound of it, he’s unlocked at least four bolts.

When the door swings open, he’s grinning. And sweaty. And shirtless.

“Sorry. I wasn’t really going to keep you waiting out there,” he says, pulling me inside to the narrow vestibule and sticking his head out the door to look in both directions. “You are alone, right?”

“Of course,” I say, squeezing into the tiny space as she shuts the door behind us, doing my best not to brush up against him. “Who would I come here with?”

“Dunno,” he murmurs as he relocks the bolts. Ford wraps his arms around his chest, as if he’s just realized he’s half-naked. “How’d you find me?”

“Bartender at that bar you took me to. She likes you, I think.”

“Oh, Michelle? We went out when we were in the seventh grade. She’s just an old friend.”

There’s another awkward silence.

“Listen, I thought about what you said.” I clear my throat, making sure my eyes stay on his face and not on his stomach muscles. “And you’re right.”

“What did I say again?” The bare bulb in the vestibule flickers, then goes out, and he bats at it with his hand to turn it back on. “Sorry. Jimmy steals all his electricity.”

“There’s actually a Jimmy at Jimmy’s Corner?”

“There are two Jimmies, actually, Jimmy Senior and Jimmy Junior. Jimmy Senior lets me train here after hours. I like to keep a low profile.” He pauses. “Anyway, you were about to tell me what I was right about.”

“You said you could maybe help me,” I remind him. “I . . . I was thinking it might be time for me to learn how to fight.”

He nods and looks me over for a minute, his expression serious. “Are you sure you’re ready to say good-bye to these scrawny excuses for arms?”

Then he grabs my upper arms and squeezes my biceps.

My face goes hot again, and before I know it I’m back to staring at Ford’s torso. “I guess so?”

“Then come on.” He starts up the narrow stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. He turns and motions for me to follow. “Let me show you my office.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

CHAPTER 25

“Again!” Ford shouts. I watch him in the mirror, standing at a safe distance behind me, doing his usual bounce from foot to sneakered foot, occasionally swiping a fist at the air as he watches me attack the six-foot punching bag bolted to the ceiling in the center of Jimmy’s Corner, which turns out to be kind of charming, for a decrepit old boxing gym that smells like the inside of a dirty sock. The equipment is all at least a hundred years old, but it’s unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before, with pictures on the walls of prizefighters and at least a hundred different objects to hit and kick and pummel. “Low jab, upper cut, then a kick to the stomach. Like you mean it, Green!”

I suppress an annoyed grimace and do the sequence, my eyes focused on the red vinyl bag, my ungloved fists punching the living guts out of it, the bag finally swinging up at a slight angle, responding to my relentless kicks and hits. The first night we began training, a week ago, Ford called me Red as he wrapped my hands with white surgical tape. I told him never to call me that again, explaining that someone I hated used to call me Red. So he switched to Green, “the color of your eyes when you get into the zone. And the color of all your money,” he grinned.