Unbreak My Heart (11 page)

“Tasty.” I held out the bowl so Amanda could administer creamy white goodness.

She paused. “It might make it soggy.”

“Drizzle,” I said.

Very carefully, she moved the bottle over the popcorn bowl.

Olive wandered into the kitchen. “Sick!”

“What did I tell you?” I asked Olive.

Her eyes went wide. “To be quiet if I wanted to hang out with you guys.”

“Right.”

She frowned and I ruffled her hair. I was actually glad to have her around that night.

“Want me to pop you a separate batch, Livy?” asked Amanda.

“Yes, please,” said my sister.

Amanda grabbed another microwavable sack out of the cabinet.

“Not everyone has our exotic tastes, Clem,” she said, smiling over her shoulder as she pressed the “Popcorn” setting.

I grinned and took a handful of ranch-covered popcorn.

“Verdict?” asked Amanda.

I held up my messy fingers. “We should probably invest in flavored salt,” I said. “It’s drier.”

Amanda laughed and handed me a paper towel.

The night after I went to the movies with Ethan, Amanda and I were preparing to watch an old favorite,
The Little Mermaid,
in the den. Olive pulled a beanbag chair out from her room and settled onto the floor.

Usually I’m not that into having my little sister around for sleepovers, but I was afraid of being alone with Amanda that night.

Besides, it was sort of a throwback evening for us. We hadn’t had a
sleepover
sleepover, like with popcorn and Disney movies and BFF secrets, since sixth grade. The thing was, I didn’t really want to do the BFF-secrets part. Because now I had my own secret, one that I had to admit to myself: I liked Ethan.

But that night was about me and Amanda. I thought it might stop the weird swirl of thoughts I was having about Ethan.

When Ariel’s best song came on, Amanda stood up and held the remote in front of her like a microphone.

“Look at this stuff … isn’t it neat?” she sang along. “Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete?”

I stood and chimed in. Olive looked at us like we were nuts, but Amanda and I finished out the whole song, belting into our awful high ranges (meaning just raising the volume) for the final lines.

Then we collapsed onto the couch giggling.

“I think we should audition for a singing show,” said Amanda, trying to straighten her grin.

I shook my head, stifling a laugh. “It really wouldn’t be fair to the other contestants.”

Olive rolled her eyes and we settled down again, sipping our sodas through bendy straws and eating our ever-more-soggy popcorn. Everything felt right.

By the time Ariel was on land with Prince Eric, Olive was asleep. I let her doze, and when the credits rolled, I woke her up and walked her sleepy self to bed.

“I’ll get this,” said Amanda, gathering a tray with the popcorn bowl and our glasses. She must have put them in the kitchen and then gone to my room, because when I got there after tucking in Olive, Amanda was staring at the bulletin board over my desk.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

She was fingering the list of songs I had planned for Ethan’s playlist. It was pinned up to the board because I’d been brainstorming in history class and I wanted to remember to download the music to my desktop.
How could I have just left it up there?

Did her voice sound suspicious? No. I was being paranoid. It was just a song list, not anything she could read into.

“‘Girl from the North Country,’ ‘Skinny Love,’ ‘Last Goodbye’!” She laughed loudly, her eyes wide. “These are your
favorites
. You’re totally in love with someone! Who is it?”

I started to sweat. I could actually feel wetness pooling in my armpits. Gross, but true.

“It’s just a playlist I was thinking about,” I said. “For, um, STEVE!”

I shouted the name of my camp boyfriend loudly, and it sounded weird, probably because I’d just thought of it as it came out of my mouth.

“Steve?” asked Amanda, tilting her head to the left. “Sailingcamp Steve?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You haven’t talked about him since two summers ago,” she said.

“He messaged me the other day, so we’ve been back in touch.” I walked over to the bulletin board and took down the song list. “He’s gotten hotter,” I said, adding a detail that I thought made my story sound more authentic.

Note to self: look up Steve again and make him a playlist.
It’s not a lie if you make it true after the fact, right?

Amanda sat down on my bed and stretched out her legs, leaning back against the wall. “Wasn’t he the one who was really into metal?” she asked. “Didn’t you say that was part of the reason you guys couldn’t last through fall?”

She was smiling and amused, but I felt myself being pulled deeper and deeper into deception-land.

“Yeah, I’m hoping to expand his musical tastes and give it another shot,” I said. My story didn’t sound remotely believable.

“Doesn’t he live in, like, Kentucky?”

How was her memory so good?

“It could work,” I said, joining her on the bed and looking into the mirror across the wall.

Her reflection eyed mine in the glass. “Clem, you’re so busted.”

“Huh?”

“Just tell me who you like!” she said. “Really.”

Her smile was open and wide, ready to listen to a good crush story, ready to go over tiny little details—like what this amazing guy said to me in the hallways or how he looked at me across a classroom.

“Noah Knight,” I said, naming the first hot-but-not-in-our-universe guy who came to mind. He was a skater, and I’d probably exchanged two words with him during our entire school career, but he seemed plausible because he’d suddenly gotten drop-dead over the summer.

Amanda put her hand to her heart. “He’s a total dream,” she said, her eyes shining. “Okay, I’m in. Let me know what I can do to help.”

I smiled at her in the mirror, and there in the reflection it looked like a real BFF smile. But I was glad she wasn’t looking at my actual face.

chapter sixteen

Dear Amanda,
I didn’t mean to lie to you. I tried to stop
it, you know. I talked to Ethan one day
after school, and …

“Are you working at Razzy’s today?” asked Ethan as we walked out of history together.

“Yeah, four to eight,” I said. “Are you going to the mall?”

“Now that I know you’re working I am,” he said.

I felt a tightness in my chest—like excitement and guilt combined. More and more, our interactions felt like flirting. Not the harmless variety, but the actual prelude-to-a-relationship kind.

“I’ll look for you,” I said.

“I’ll be there.” He gave me a small wave as he turned left down the math hallway to meet Amanda by her locker.

What exactly was my problem?

Sometimes I thought I had this weird crush on Ethan because I had only had that one boyfriend—Steve from sailing camp. Although it was a really sweet summer romance—and we even got to sneakily spend the night together in the craft cabin—it didn’t really count in terms of school. Because camp boyfriends? They sound made up.

Until this year, I couldn’t find anyone to date at Bishop Heights High. It was like no guys really
got
me. But Ethan did.

Why did it have to be Ethan?

At work that afternoon, I busied myself by restocking the candy—pouring peppermints and gumdrops into big glass jars and sticking long-stemmed lollipops into their display stands. But after twenty minutes, there was nothing to do but hang out in between customers. My weekday shifts were solo because it was never that busy, which was good for doing homework, and one reason why Mom and Dad let me keep this job during the school year.

I wasn’t doing homework that day, though. I had torn up my list of songs for Ethan’s playlist, and I brought my journal because I wrote down a promise to myself:

If Ethan stops by tonight with Amanda, it’s all good. We’re friends, he knows that. If he shows up by himself, just to see me, I will tell him that I think we should stop hanging out. That it’s not okay. That Amanda wouldn’t like it.

There it was, in black and white. Somehow it felt like an official order to myself, since I wrote it down. But I couldn’t figure out the wording I wanted to use if I did have to bring things up with Ethan, and I was still kind of unclear on what to say.

I was turning all of this over in my head, lost in my own world, when Ethan’s smile hit me like a fastball.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi!” I stood up, greeting him too brightly, like he was a customer I wanted to impress. “Can I get you something?”

Now I was really acting like he was a customer.

“Aha,” said Ethan. “So this can be an official candy-counter visit and not just a drop-by-to-see-Clem thing?”

He did come just to see me. Heart fluttered, heart sank.

“Is Amanda coming?” I asked, hoping,
really
hoping, she was.

“She tutors after school on Wednesdays,” he said.

And I knew that, of course I knew that. I’d only been her friend for, like, a hundred years.

I glanced back down at the black ink in my journal to give me strength.

“So I made you something,” said Ethan. “That’s why I wanted to stop by, I mean.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, thanks.”

“Wait to thank me—you haven’t seen it yet.” He reached into his coat pocket and brought out a CD. “I burned your playlist. I know it’s kind of old school, but this way you have a hard copy, and I got to work on the cover and stuff.”

I turned the plastic case over in my hand. In very messy, classic boy scrawl, I saw the names of some of the songs Ethan had chosen for me: “Beautiful Girl,” “Zebra,” “So Much Closer.” Around the edges he’d doodled vines—ivy?—and the title said, “For Clementine, From Ethan.” It wasn’t exactly a declaration of love, but I still felt a stone in the pit of my stomach.

“I can’t take this,” I said, pushing it back across the counter toward him.

He looked surprised, maybe even hurt.

“Why not?”

“You know,” I said. Not the most eloquent expression of what I wanted to say.

“What do I know?” asked Ethan.

I sighed in frustration.

“It’s too much,” I said. Again I was Queen Vague. I looked down at my journal, but it didn’t have a script for me.

“Clem,” said Ethan, leaning on the counter and spinning one of the rainbow lollipops with his fingers. “It really isn’t a big deal. Amanda doesn’t like the same music I do, and I love making mixes. I used to do it for all my friends back in Ohio.”

“You did?”

“Yup.” He let go of the lollipop and smiled at me. “Even the girls. My
friends
. My friends who were girls.”

“Oh,” I said again, still unsure.

“Guys and girls can be friends,” said Ethan. “Like you and Aaron, right? Or you and Henry.”

I looked down at the counter, my face reddening a little.
Was I just overreacting? Reading too much into this? Making myself look like a fool for thinking that Ethan was flirting with me when really he was just being my friend?

“Cool,” I said, finally, reaching out and taking the CD again. Part of me really wanted to hear the songs he chose. “Sorry for being … um …”

“It’s okay,” said Ethan.

And then he stayed. He stayed for another hour of my shift, stepping aside whenever a customer came and making me laugh in between.

“Serious question: Could a Sour Patch Kid take a Gummy Bear in a fight?”

I was getting zero homework done.

“Definitely,” I said. “I’ve actually contemplated this matchup before. Sour Patch kids have sharp, scratchy skin, and they’re kind of like the bad kids on the block—total bullies. Gummy Bears are just soft and sweet.”

“But they’re
bears
,” said Ethan.

“Kid-sized bears, not big scary ones.”

“I’m not convinced.” Ethan turned his back to me and leaned on the counter.