Unbreak My Heart
Authors: Melissa Walker
unbreak my heart
MELISSA WALKER
Contents
For June,
who has my heart
“Sit on it,” I say.
“Excuse me?” asks Olive, with an attitude that makes her seem way older than her ten years. Her tone plus her big angular glasses—green-framed rectangles that look more fancy-architect than fifth-grade—put her somewhere near forty in my book. She’s always been our family’s little adult.
“The suitcase, Livy,” I say sweetly. “Please?”
My sister reluctantly plops down on top of my raggedy plaid bag. It moves just enough so that I can zip it shut.
“Thanks.”
“You better get it downstairs right now,” says Olive, running ahead of me into the hallway. “The car’s almost full.”
I sigh and take one more glance around my room. It looks just like it always does—sunny, bright, clean; a bookshelf along the back wall filled with rows and rows of the series I love; a white wicker hamper in the corner with a stray gray sweatshirt on top of it; the flower-covered comforter I’ve publicly outgrown but that secretly makes me feel safe. I grab my journal off the nightstand and shove it into the front pocket of my bag. If I’m not going to have Internet or phone service for most of the summer, I need
somewhere
to record my status updates.
I stare in the big mirror across from my bed. My hair hangs down around my face, and my eyes are still a little puffy from crying. I pinch my cheeks to make them pink and try a smile. It looks more like the grimace of someone trying to pretend she’s not in pain. I frown again. At least frowns are honest.
I heave the suitcase off my bed. I’m going away for three months, but this is the only bag I’m allowed to bring, because I’ll be living on a boat. With my family. All. Summer. Long.
If my sophomore year had gone differently, I probably would have fought harder to spend this summer—the summer I turned sixteen, the summer of making out, the summer of memories that will last forever, the summer I always imagined would be the
very best one
—at home on my own. I’m responsible, after all, and my parents trust me. I could have had an amazing time working days at Razzy’s, the Bishop Heights Mall candy shop where I had a job this year, looking for my it’s-just-like-in-the-movies perfect guy, and spending nights hanging out with Amanda …
Amanda.
I feel a stone drop in my stomach.
I head downstairs, letting my big bag
plunk, plunk, plunk
on each step.
“There she is,” says Mom, smiling brightly. “Little Miss Sunshine.”
I don’t smile back. She’s being sarcastic, and she’s wearing a giant floppy straw hat, the kind that only almost-famous girls in LA and very old ladies in Florida can pull off. I guess now that she’s less lawyer and more boater she thinks it works. She is wrong.
Dad comes around to the back of the car and slides my bag into the one slot that’s left. It fits perfectly, and he sighs with satisfaction. It’s a real thrill for him when the sport wagon is well packed.
“How good is your dad?” he asks me.
“You have sunscreen on your nose,” I say to him.
He smiles and rubs it in. Nothing is penetrating the parents’ Good Mood today, not even me being grumpy. I guess they’re getting used to it.
I wasn’t always such a downer. Up until, like, two weeks ago, I was Clementine Williams, happy and upbeat and kind of hilarious, if I do say so myself. But that was before everything exploded in my face.
Now I’m Clementine Williams, outcast. And that’s on a good day.
“Come on, Clem,” says Mom, putting her arm around me and easing me toward the car. She’s been gentle with me this week, mostly, and I appreciate that.
I slide into the backseat next to Olive, who’s squished against a cooler that’s taking up most of our space. Good thing the drive to the marina is only twenty minutes.
“Let the Williams Family Summer of Boating begin!” cheers Dad. Mom gives a quick “Woot-woot,” and Olive raises her hands in the air and shouts, “Wahoo!” I add an uninspired “Yay” so they won’t get on my case. Then I stare out the window and watch my house, then my neighborhood, then my town, disappear.
As we pull into the marina, I see our boat—
The Possibility
. It’s a forty-two-foot Catalina three-cabin Pullman. My parents traded in our twenty-three-foot O’Day—
Night Wind II
—last year, and they’ve been readying
The Possibility
for this summer trip since then. At first it felt insanely roomy compared to the
Night Wind II
, where Olive and I basically had to sleep on narrow side couches in the main cabin of the boat. My parents’ V-berth bedroom didn’t even have a door, so my dad’s snoring chased me out to the cockpit to sleep under the stars pretty often.
Yeah, the
Night Wind II
seemed small and
The Possibility
plenty big on quick weekend sails. I even brought Amanda up here a few times when Mom didn’t come, and Dad let us have the master cabin so we could “stay up late and giggle,” as he reductively put it. It was fun.
But now that I’m faced with the prospect of spending three whole months on this thing, it doesn’t look very spacious. There are two
heads
—that means bathrooms—and three
staterooms
, which is a fancy word for teeny-tiny bedrooms. My parents have a master berth with their own head, and I have a double berth on the starboard side. Olive’s port-side room has bunk beds, but she’s still young enough to think that’ll be fun. (Wait until she falls out when Dad anchors us too close to a main waterway, and the waves from passing ships knock her right on her butt. It’s happened before.)
I lug the plaid bag into my
stateroom
and close the door. I just want to stretch out with my music for a while, so I put in earbuds and hope I won’t be able to hear Mom when she starts bugging me to help unpack.
I hit Shuffle just to see what comes up, and when I hear the strains of “Beautiful Girl” by INXS, I feel a tear well in my eye. Like, instantly. I thought they’d all dried up, but no. I swear I deleted this playlist, but I must have had another copy of “Beautiful Girl” stored. I let myself be sad for thirty seconds, and then I angrily wipe away the tear.
My mom gives me exactly six minutes to be antisocial and unhelpful. I know because I get to listen to “Must I Paint You a Picture?” by Billy Bragg, which is five and a half minutes long, and as it ends, I open my eyes to see Mom’s messenger.
“You can’t just bust into my room,” I say to Olive, who has her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face, which is way too close to mine.
“Yes, I can,” she says, pushing her angled glasses up on her nose. “These doors don’t lock.”
Her serious mouth breaks into a grin, like she knows she’s going to get so much time with me this summer because we’re in this majorly contained space and she can’t help but show her total elation about that fact.
I soften a little.
“Mom needs you,” she says.
“Fine.” I stand up and make her scramble to get out of my way.
I march into the main cabin—well, I take three steps into the main cabin, anyway, passing my dad in the nav station port side—and there is my mother, organizing the canned foods in the
galley
, which normal people call the kitchen.
“Did you get pickles?” asks Olive, kneeling on the couch in front of the galley and leaning onto the bright yellow counter.
“Yes, I did, Little Miss Dill,” says Mom.
“Yippee!” sings Olive. You’d think she won $100 on a scratch-off lotto card. Pickles get this reaction? My little sister is seriously high today.
“And I got the big marshmallows for you, Clem,” says Mom, putting up the bag of Jet-Puffeds that I always request for adding to morning hot chocolate.
I nod. I do not
Yippee
.
I watch Mom put about fifty cans up into the top cabinet above the stove. She has a cookbook called
A Man, A Can, and a Plan
. Obviously, this book is for a twenty-two-year-old guy who hasn’t learned to make a meal with real food yet, but Mom likes to call it “the Boat Cookbook.” Creating a dinner entirely out of canned goods makes her feel really accomplished. “Besides,” she told us when we had the “boat grocery list” family meeting last week, “canned goods keep for so long! We’ll eat well every night.”
I had nodded then—I’d just wanted to be released from the family meeting so I could go back to my room and mope—but now, as I watch the cans of peas, pinto beans, and SpaghettiOs come out of her box, I wonder if I should have stood up for some fresher foods.