The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,21
stickers on the papers she grades?”
“Yeah?”
“Get them!” Audrey said. She checked her watch and frowned. “I have to leave in like five minutes. I’ll meet you in the bathroom.” She started digging through my dresser, held a navy tank up, frowned, and discarded it on the floor.
I checked Eph to make sure we were okay, and he spun his finger, making a cuckoo motion in Audrey’s direction.
“Go, go, go, Pen!” she shouted over her shoulder.
I burst out into the hall and halfway down the steps, yelling over the banister, “Mom, can I borrow some of your teaching supplies?”
Once I had a packet of stickers, Audrey met me at the bathroom door. She shoved my black boatneck pocket tee, short pleated black skirt, black tights, and maroon-but-so-beat-up-they-were-practically-black Docs into my arms, while somehow pulling her jacket on at the same time.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said, grabbing the stickers and starting to put them over the skirt.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?”
“I wish I could! I told Cherisse I’d head over with her. But you can do this.”
She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
“You’re the best ever, Vivien,” I said to her.
“You’re the best Everest, Delphine,” she replied.
We hooked pinkies before she ran out the door, yelling, “See you at the party, Eph!”
Fifteen minutes later I emerged. Eph was sitting up on my bed, drawing, and from where I was standing in the doorway, I could tell he was working on one of his dinosaur cityscapes.
“Eph?” I asked.
He looked up from his drawing, his eyes going wide.
Picking up where Audrey left off, I had stuck gold and silver star stickers all over me. Stars on my boots, a few stars on my cheek, stars over my heart. I was covered in constellations, like Eph’s and my ceilings. I had three stars in a row on my sleeve, like the freckles across his nose, like backup. My hair was twisted up into crazy knots with sparkly bobby pins.
“The planetarium?”
“Or the Milky Way. Or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s an infinite number of costumes,” I said.
He nodded appreciatively, shutting his notebook and offering me his arm.
New York City subway token
New York City subway tessera
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-8
Gift of Ephraim O’Connor
I SHOULD HAVE ENJOYED THE journey to Keats’s West Village brownstone. I was going to a party, a party thrown by the potential love of my life. Several people, not counting the man on the corner muttering to himself about pork rinds, had already stopped to compliment me on my costume. Eph was in a good mood, chattering most of the way there about comic books and skateboard decks, and when we got out at West Fourth Street—“Holy crap, check out the moon!” And the moon was luminous: big and oddly, precisely circular, like it was a space hole-punched out of the sky. People in sweaters and boots were smiling pleasantly around us, all the frustration of the summer humidity suddenly forgotten.
Like I said, I should have enjoyed it.
The climate inside my head, though, was distinctly terrible.
My lip gloss was tingling unpleasantly, and I was pretty sure I was having an allergic reaction and would end up with lips that were swollen but not in an appealing Angelina Jolie way.
My Docs suddenly felt like the heaviest shoes in the world, like I was a fat horse clomping on the sidewalk.
A few stars had fallen off, and I felt bad about littering, but I was too busy second-guessing my costume to stop, thinking of how I’d appear amid all the sexy vampires and slutty Dorothy Gales and at least two hip Charlie’s Angels who’d be there.
Dinner was not sitting well in my stomach. I was heading to possibly the most momentous event of my sixteen years to date, and my breath reeked of the Chipotle that Eph and I had shoved down thirty minutes ago. Things were gurgling ominously down below.
Two doors from the address, I flat-out froze.
He looked back at me.
“Let’s go home.”
He waited.
I gnawed on my lip and bit at the sore spot on the inside, tasted the iron tang of blood, and wiped my clammy palms on my skirt. A few more stars fell off. I imagined a giant white hand hurtling through the universe, wiping out entire galaxies.
“I’m sorry for dragging you out. I’m sorry I made all this stupid fuss.”
He sighed, patiently exasperated. “You want to go. You dig Keats.”
“No, I don’t,” I said automatically.
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, so you’re