The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,29

unfurled. That mere seconds ago I had lived in a world where I didn’t know Audrey could hurt me. That now I lived in a world where I did.

“Listen, I can’t go into the details because she swore me to secrecy, but he really messed up Cherisse. He lies and he’s manipulative and acts down on himself so other people will build him up, making you feel like crap in the process . . .” She reached her arm across the table and squeezed my still hand. “I don’t want you to misinterpret anything and get hurt.”

I physically recoiled, yanking my hand out of her grasp. “You think I’m so pathetic that I can’t tell if someone likes me?”

She straightened, dismayed. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

“You’re happy I finally like a real person?” My voice broke at the end.

Her face was awake now, alarmed.

“Of course that’s not what I meant!”

“You think I’m pathetic,” I half said to myself, processing the words.

I grabbed the bag, shoved my half-eaten doughnut in, and stood up. “I need to go.” My voice was shaky, not brave.

“Wait, Pen, let’s talk about this.” Her voice was desperate, pleading.

“I need to go,” I repeated.

“Penelope!”

I walked hurriedly down the hall, crumpling the paper bag edges in my hand. As I passed the stairwell, Cherisse was coming downstairs, last night’s blond curls flat. She stopped mid-stretch and stared at me, and I resisted the urge to give her the finger.

“Pen, wait!” Audrey yelled, her voice close.

I pushed the door open and didn’t turn back.

The wind outside had picked up, and it was starting to rain sideways—sharp daggerlike drops. I thought about the first time Audrey slept over, how I woke up early in the morning to find her watching me intently, eyelashes fluttering.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

She pointed solemnly at the wall behind me. Evidently a black spider had decided to camp out there.

“You sleep with your mouth open,” she said. “I didn’t want the spider to fall in. I saw it at five twenty-three.”

It was 7:02. She had been keeping watch the whole time.

I rolled up, away from the spider. “Not counting Eph, you’re my best friend ever,” I declared.

“You’re my best friend Everest,” she said, holding out her pinky, crooked. I hooked mine in hers, believing then, unquestioningly, that it was true.

I tried to get back last night: the moonlight in Keats’s room, the way he was surprised to see me, and his hand holding mine, soft brown curls of hair on the nape of his neck, how he brushed an eyelash off my cheek, the way I felt pretty, noticed. But now everything felt ruined—the person I was ten minutes ago suddenly pathetic and childish, the magic from last night as dead and gone as the dinosaurs.

I tried to button up my jacket, when I realized it was not on me because I had left it on the coatrack at Audrey’s, which was terrible not only because it was insult upon injury or the temperature was dropping with the storm, but because it was my favorite jean jacket, the one I got from a stoop sale, perfectly worn in and soft, and it was lost to me forever because I was never going back to Audrey’s house, not ever, not if it was the last best jean jacket in the entire stinking world, not if my life (or evidently my body temperature; my teeth were clattering in my skull like they weren’t my own) depended upon it.

What if I had misinterpreted everything with Keats? I couldn’t contemplate that possibility one second longer without it crushing me completely.

I hunched my shoulders against the wind and huddled into the rain, becoming more wet and more cold with each step. I headed up Columbus and over to Eighty-First, stopping at the front door of a beautiful old brownstone. Using the door knocker, a brass fist, I tapped away, my fingernails tinted purple from the chill.

“Got it!” someone called from inside.

Eph swung open the door, the soft edges of his grin a contrast to the sharper parts of him, the elbows and cheekbones, angles and points.

“Good day for a walk, eh?” He pointed at his nose, slightly swollen from last night’s head smash. “Come to finish off what you started?”

But I hugged myself, biting my lip so I wouldn’t cry, teeth chattering, and his face shifted instantly into protective concern.

“What happened?”

I didn’t know how to say that in the twelve hours since I’d seen him, a boy had