The Book of Love (21 page)

B
efore she left for school, Lucy hugged her mother good-bye. “I hope you have an okay day, Mom” was what Lucy said. But what she was thinking was
If this doesn’t work, I am so, so sorry.
Her mother smiled vaguely. “I’ll be okay, honey,” she said. “I feel better than I have in a very long time.”

Lucy made her way through the day, and she wondered why she had even bothered to go to school at all. Maybe she just wanted to see it all—her school, her teachers, all those people who’d made up her days and been somehow a part of her life—and say good-bye, just in case. Then again, maybe she’d just wanted to see Tristan.

Olivia hadn’t come to school again. Neither had Liza. Lucy saw Gil in the hallway, wild-eyed, standing alone. She spotted Jason and Jessica in the parking lot, holding hands, laughing. But there was no sign of Tristan’s lanky frame, his floppy hair, his smiling eyes. Which meant the last time she saw him might have actually been the very last.

At the end of the day, Lucy got a cup of hot water from the cafeteria and then sprinkled in the tiny handful of petals. She waited until the water turned faintly purple, and then she took a sip. It tasted like perfume. Her tongue began to tingle, and her throat numbed as the liquid went down. She felt her insides lurch, like the room was an elevator going down. Everything around her went quiet. And then Lucy felt her mouth spreading into a smile.

Sometimes the truth reveals itself slowly, like a flower gently blooming. Other times it will hit you like a punch in the gut, so hard and fast you’ll be lucky to catch your breath.

Dizzy, gasping, giddy, Lucy packed up her things and stumbled toward the bathroom. Her body was buzzing with energy so intense she felt like she was about to fly right out of her own skin.

The truth that had revealed itself was this: She was young and beautiful and powerful and free.
And there was no way in hell she was ever giving that up.

She pushed into the empty bathroom and locked the door behind her. She closed her eyes and felt the blood zipping through her veins, felt her gorgeous heart steel strong at the center of herself. She felt power shooting up from the center of the earth, up through her feet and legs, filling her entire body. She forced herself to breathe. And when her heart slowed ever so slightly, she opened her eyes and stared at herself in the cracked glass.

She was absolutely stunning. A stunning, amazing, luminous creature. She’d gotten some sun at SoundWave, and her skin was the color of honey. Her hair hung down, shiny and white, and without her rock chick blowout it lay in soft loose waves. She looked like a surfer chick about to hit the beach, like someone who didn’t have a care in the world.

How ridiculous that she’d spent the last seven weeks
worrying
about things. About everything! She’d worried about not hurting Colin’s feelings, about helping Tristan, even about getting back to the boring way she used to be.
When all along, she should have been having fun.

She looked at her phone. It was three thirty on a Tuesday. And that meant only one thing: time to party.

Lucy wasn’t going to call her sisters, not this time. She didn’t want anything to do with Gil, who was a liar, and
Liza, who was a mess. And Olivia, well, who knew what Olivia was. And who even cared. Lucy had almost sacrificed this amazing gift simply because she didn’t like what and who surrounded it. Well, that made no sense. She could throw them out so easily. She already had.

She was more powerful than any of them now, all on her own.

Of course, she didn’t have to stay on her own. She started scrolling through her phone. There were so many guys’ numbers in there now, all but one from just the last seven weeks. Adam S, Adam T, Brian, Colin, Darien, Dex, Diego H. The list went on and on. She closed her eyes as she tried to picture their faces. Problem was, she barely remembered meeting most of them. Many of them were guys her sisters knew, a few she’d met out at parties and such. None of them were people she knew
intimately.
But now there was time for that. . . .

She hovered over a name:
Hotness
. Who the hell was
Hotness
? She had no idea. But she was about to find out.

Lucy reached in her bag, pulled out a crushed cherry gloss, and slicked it on. Then she used her phone to record a little video of her lips blowing a kiss at the screen.

She played it back. In the video her lips were all you could see. She looked luscious, sexy, and completely mysterious. She wrote,
Plans this afternoon?
And then with no hesitation at all, she hit
SEND
. She took a breath and started to count.

One broken heart, two broken hearts, three broken hearts . . .
By the time she got to ten, he’d written her back.

Meet me at Merchant Park in twenty minutes?

Lucy smirked.
Make it fifteen.

Thirty-Four

W
hen their eyes met, she let her lips curl into a smile. Hotness held her gaze, then held up one finger, and beckoned, as though she would do what he told her to.

Well, he could think that. For now . . .

She leaned her bike up against a lamppost, then started walking toward him, letting her hips sway. She could feel him watching her as she realized two things: One, she had absolutely no idea who this guy was, and two, his name was a serious understatement.

Hotness wasn’t simply hot. He was smoldering. He was tall, easily six foot three, and strong-looking. He had huge hands, sparkly eyes, and a sexy mean-looking mouth. There was energy coming off him; she could feel that from
fifteen feet away, something pure and raw. He looked like he was in his late teens, or even early twenties.

This was going to be more fun than she’d thought.

“So,” Hotness said. His voice was low. “I’ve seen your lips, now let’s get a good look at the rest of you.” He gave her the slow up-and-down, lingering on her bare legs, then her mouth. His eyes were teardrop blue. “I knew lips like that had to be connected to something good. Now, who the hell are you?”

Lucy started to laugh. “So you don’t know me either?”

But Hotness wasn’t laughing. “Either?”

Lucy shrugged. “I just picked your number randomly out of my phone, I don’t even know how I got it.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You have good timing there, sweetheart. Your message was kind of impossible to resist.”

He reached into his pocket then and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He placed one between his lips and lit it. The blue smoke curled up. Usually Lucy hated the smell of cigarettes, but in that moment it was completely delicious, harsh and sharp and real.

And then suddenly Lucy remembered how she’d gotten Hotness’s number: Six weeks ago when Lucy was just a brand-new baby Heartbreaker, her sisters had taken her to a party at Jack and B’s. They’d all been on the steps out front, and Hotness had been smoking, which Lucy remembered because the smoke had made her cough, and she was worried it sounded gross. Liza was sloppy drunk that night. She’d dropped her own phone into the toilet and had demanded Lucy hand hers over. Then she’d fished Hotness’s phone out of his pocket, called Lucy on it, and stored the number, without even asking him. Hotness had just stood
there, smoking his cigarette, shaking his head. It was the first time Lucy had ever seen Liza chase a boy, and the only time, apart from the debacle with Beacon, that it hadn’t worked. “He’ll be glad when I call him,” Liza kept slurring, for the rest of the night. “He was just trying to play it coooool.”

But the next morning Liza had forgotten about him, or at least sobered up enough and decided to pretend to. And Lucy had forgotten about him as well. Until now.

“So,” Lucy said. “Now that we’re both here, what are we going to do this afternoon?”

“Maybe we should buy some lottery tickets,” said Hotness. “Because I can already tell you’re a very lucky girl.”

“Oh?” Lucy said. She arched her back slightly and looked down at her body as though to imply it was a product of her luck. Then smirked slightly. “To what specific aspect of my luck are you referring?”

“To your very lucky timing,” he said. And he took a step forward. “Because if you’d sent that video an hour from now, you’d have missed me completely. I’d already be gone.” He pointed through the window to the back of the car. There was a big black duffel bag on the seat.

“Heading on a vacation?”

“More like I’m leaving.”

“Why’s that?”

Hotness twisted his lips into a smirk. “If you really want to know, I broke a heart.”

“Naughty boy,” Lucy said. “Whose?”

Hotness looked kind of proud. “My girlfriend’s. We were living together. So now it’s time to go.”

“And where are you headed?”

Hotness shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “L.A. maybe? Austin? Miami? Seattle? Mexico? The future is wide-open.”

Lucy closed her eyes. She tried to imagine herself in all of those other places. And suddenly she realized something—she could go if she wanted. She could leave forever. No one could stop her.

“And you’re going by yourself?”

“That was the plan,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” said Lucy. “I think we could have had some”—she raised her eyebrows—“fun together.”

“Well . . . ,” he said slowly. “I could probably be convinced to take a hitchhiker with me. Know anyone who might be up for an adventure?”

Lucy paused. She was floating far away. She wondered what she was going to do.
What’s Lucy doing now?
she thought, like she was some other person. The surge of power she’d felt when she drank the violets was flickering. If it went out, she’d be plunged into darkness.

And just like that, the decision was made.

“Well, when do we leave?” Lucy said.

Hotness’s face spread into a hesitant smile, like he wasn’t quite sure what was happening. “Seriously? Aren’t you scared, going off on your own with a guy you don’t even know?”

“What do I have to be scared of?” She felt the world shift under her feet. “I’m magic.”

“Oh yeah?” said Hotness. He was fully grinning now. “How’s that?”

“I break boys’ hearts,” she said. “And I use their tears to perform magic.” She could say anything; she could do
anything. There were no rules at all anymore. “I am powerful beyond anything you could ever imagine.”

“Is that right?” Hotness wasn’t smiling quite as wide anymore. “So what are you, like a witch or something?”

“Not exactly,” Lucy said. Her voice was smooth and low. “Then again, not exactly not.”

“Well, not-exactly-witch woman . . .” Hotness blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth, then tossed his cigarette onto the pavement. “Are you going to cast a spell on me?” He started to lean in.

“Maybe I already have.”

He moved in closer. She felt his breath on her face. She closed her eyes for a single split second. A face flashed in her mind. This—right here, right now, this kiss with this guy—was not what she wanted.
It was so, so far from anything she ever had wanted.

She pushed Hotness away. His eyes popped open.

“Actually . . . ,” she said. Her voice was shaking now. She was very cold. Something was happening. Inside her some part of her was trying to get out. “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

Hotness laughed. “Well, of course it isn’t a good idea, but why the hell would that stop us from doing it?”

“You need to leave, leave now before I make a terrible choice worse than I’ve already done.”

He snorted. “You’re a freak, you know that?” Hotness gave her a last look, a final up-and-down. “Too bad. You hot ones are always insane.”

He got into his car. His tires screeched as he drove away.

Lucy looked around her—at the empty parking lot, the sky, the sun, his cigarette butt on the asphalt, still curling up smoke. She felt the violets buzzing inside her. What the hell was she
doing
?

She was floating through space, tethered to nothing. She was going to float away. She could feel it happening. She’d be lost forever. She needed something or someone to bring her back.

Tristan. She pictured his sweet face, his squinty blue eyes, the way he looked when he said good-bye.

She could call him and ask him to play her a song on his harmonica, the way he always used to when she was upset. He would bring her home. She reached for her phone. She scrolled to his number. She was about to dial.

She stopped, finger frozen in the air.

Tristan had said he couldn’t be friends with her right now. And she had to respect that. He deserved at least that much. But it wasn’t just that.

All along she’d been looking for someone else to make it okay, to make her okay, Alex, Tristan, the Heartbreakers. Only in that moment, she finally understood something: If she needed a song to save her, she could make her own.

Thirty-Five