The Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder Page 0,73

be friends again?”

I didn’t know how to respond—everything from the past twenty-four hours, the past two months, whirled around me like some stupid Wizard of Oz tornado, uprooting all I ever believed in. “I messed things up with Eph,” I said, my voice crumbling, the sad words coming out of me, something held back now released.

“Oh, Pen,” Audrey said, rushing to sit next to me, bumping Ford, who yowled, and pulling me into a big hug. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head, trying to hold back all the sadness in me and failing.

I rested my head on her shoulder and cried and cried, thinking about everything I’d lost: Vivien and Delphine, my unwavering faith in fairy tales and happy endings, the dream that was Keats, the reality that was Eph.

When I wore myself out, the sobs softening and easing into an occasional tear-filled hitch of breath, Audrey leaned across the bed, pulled something out of her bag, and held it out to me.

“Oh my God, is that the . . . ?”

She nodded, and I took the Tonka truck from her hand—the one that got tangled in her hair all those years ago, the one that started our friendship.

“You still have it?”

She nodded again, and I dropped my head against her shoulder without thinking, turning the truck in my hand.

“As soon as the nurse cut my hair, she handed it to me and I kept it. I wasn’t going to lose all that hair without something in return.” She poked a finger out and spun one of the wheels, and we listened to it whir. “Of course, I didn’t know I’d get you from that deal too.”

“I wish we could go back to then,” I said.

“We’re not the same people anymore, Pen.”

I thought about that truck whirring in Audrey’s hair, how terrified she was, how it tangled and pulled, how she was trying so hard not to cry.

Be brave, I thought. Be brave for the people you love. “I’m sorry I got so mad at you for what you said—you were right, about me and Keats and everything. I’m sorry I made you watch David Lynch movies and that I have too many rules and that I make it hard to be my friend.”

“I didn’t mean all that, not really,” she said. “Okay, maybe the David Lynch stuff, but, Pen, I was just hurt. And you know I don’t think you’re pathetic, right? Please tell me you know that. That was the worst part of all of it, that you believed I’d think that about you. I would never . . .” She shook her head.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, realizing as she said it that I did know, that everything she had said that day had come out of love, out of multiple viewings of Titanic, of gleefully smelling giant bags of M&M’S, of August nights spent spotting fireflies at her grandparents’ house, of slumber parties and whispered dreams, that all that history didn’t just disappear, even if the people we’d been then no longer existed.

“But, Pen,” she said, her voice quiet. “I can’t not be friends with Cherisse. I’m not going to choose between you guys. I want you both, okay?”

I tried to figure out how to say what I wanted to say next. “I get that. But I can’t be friends with her, Aud. Not with the Keats stuff.”

She sighed. “I know. I just wanted my best friends to be best friends . . . I wanted everything to be perfect.”

“I don’t know what that’s like at all,” I said, nudging against her lightly.

“I’m sure you don’t,” she replied, smiling.

“But I get it now, what you were saying about bigger social circles and all that stuff. I met these guys, Grace and Miles, and it’s like . . . well, it’s like they know me already.”

Her smile faltered, and I wondered then if we’d stay friends forever, or if we’d drift off into our new groups, and if maybe that was okay.

I didn’t know what would happen.

I held the truck out to her, but Audrey shook her head. “Hold on to it for a bit. You need it more than me right now.”

And I leaned over, gripping the truck hard, and gave her a hug, my arms moving on instinct, from history, letting go of all we’d lost, holding on to this small, fragile new thing we’d found.

Pottery shard

Pars testae

Dead Horse Bay

Brooklyn, New York

Cat. No. 201X-22

AFTER AUDREY LEFT, I BRUSHED my hair—kind of—and