The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,5
cat in my purse, didn’t have a third arm growing out of my forehead.
She held out her hand—I swore I had seen the elf queen do the same move in Lord of the Rings—and he took it, smiling his stupidest, charmingest Eph smile, and stood up, one perfect inch taller than her.
Several of the old ladies watching actually cooed.
Whatever.
I scooted around on my knees and began gathering the papers and crap that had spilled from his bag: his old copy of The Hobbit—the one he brought everywhere—a brand-new calculus textbook, a jumble of keys on a skiing carabiner, a Moleskine journal . . .
Without giving it a second thought, I opened the journal, expecting to see more comics like the ones he’d always drawn: crass and cartoony, plenty of fart jokes, with renderings of his favorite comic-book villains thrown in for good measure.
But these pages were different.
These were pages and pages of intricate city scenes: tiny metropolises, blue-inked lines intersecting at sharp angles, with small people moving their way through the world.
I recognized major cities—London with Big Ben and the Eye, Paris with Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. And then there were cities that defied logic: skyscrapers sprouting from clouds, waterfalls pouring under streets.
I snuck a glance over my shoulder. Eph was deep in conversation with Elf Queen Girl.
I rested back on my knees, flipped to the next page of Eph’s sketchbook.
The scene was Times Square, frantic and chaotic, a giant Phantom of the Opera sign, stock-exchange prices rolling by on an electronic ticker, the discount TKTS booth with a winding line, a little Naked Cowboy in the corner eating a hot dog, an Elmo impersonator scowling at the world around him.
I peered closer. There, in the corner of the page, waiting at a traffic light, was a stegosaurus wearing an I NYC T-shirt. Tiny spines poked through the back of the shirt.
It was so weird and incongruous, but so absolutely perfect at the same time, that I felt goose bumps rise up and down my arms. I met Eph the year I started first grade, right when my family moved to New York City for my dad’s new job at the American Museum of Natural History. Eph’s dad worked there too, and our parents introduced us in the lobby, a looming T. rex next to us. Despite Eph’s parents’ objections, at the time he only answered to Superman (and constantly wore the cape to prove it). He also swore that there was a real live dinosaur, a T. rex, living in the museum and that it wandered the halls at night.
The cape was long gone now, but it seemed like the fascination with dinosaurs and Superman had stuck around.
On a hunch I flipped back to a previous spread: Paris. I scanned the page, and there, wrapped around the base of the Eiffel Tower, was a brontosaurus, its long neck winding up but not high enough, trying to get a glimpse of the top.
In a roller-rink scene, crowded with people skating under a disco light—couples with linked arms, children sandwiched between parents, a small boy clutching the railing—there, in the middle of it all, a triceratops with oversize skates hunched down for balance or maybe to fit in better with the crowd.
At the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, actors participated in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, and behind the stage, by the turtle pond, a little T. rex pressed against a tree, its face pure longing.
They were the most magnificent things I’d ever seen.
“Did you find your surprise?” Eph asked.
Startled, I twisted around.
The Elf Queen was gone, but he was grinning, pleased with himself despite the presence of two skinned elbows, and I figured he must have ended up with her number.
“These?” I asked, holding up his notebook. “Eph, these are phenomenal. How long have you been drawing them?”
He looked up, a blush spreading from his neck to his cheeks. If I didn’t know better, I almost would have thought he was embarrassed.
He yanked the notebook out of my hands (I immediately felt the loss of its magic, my palms left open and empty). I watched wordlessly as he snatched his bag up and shoved the notebook deep in there, followed by the books I’d stacked neatly on the sidewalk.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. . . .” I stood up, brushed off my knees, tried to straighten. I was three degrees off balance, the whole world tilting slightly. Eph never kept stuff from me. “It’s amazing. You’re