Unbreak My Heart (9 page)

Listening to him is like being at the dentist in the chair with your mouth open and full of tools while the dentist asks you how school’s going. I try to indicate with my eyes that I know what he means about the ChapStick, because I do, but I’m not sure I’m good at ocular communication—especially in the almost dark.

James keeps talking. “But then when you don’t need ChapStick and everything is fine with your lips’ moisture level, you’ll find like twenty half-used tubes at the bottom of your backpack from the times when you were completely desperate for the stuff.”

He shakes his head.

“So weird. This is what I think about while I draw.”

His hands keep moving the whole time, faster than his mouth even, and I wonder how anything that moves so fast could be creating a drawing that’s even remotely good. But after about twenty minutes, James gets up suddenly and holds the sketch pad right in front of our faces, and what I see surprises me.

Olive gasps.

“That’s so us!” she says, delighted.

It’s a cartoon us—not like one of those real-life portrait drawings, but still, she’s right. James got her face perfectly: the way her nose turns up a little at the end, her slightly mussy left eyebrow, the glint of light that bounces off her green-framed glasses, which are a tiny bit askew in real life and in the drawing.

I notice that the background isn’t this setting, aboard this huge yacht. It’s earlier, at sunset. You can tell even in his gray pencil that the “lighting” is from a few hours ago. Olive and I are sipping from our root beer bottles. James put himself in the scene, too, just a little. His glass bottle is reaching in to touch ours for a “cheers.”

And then I look at me. I mean, illustrated me. She’s prettier than I am. She has freckles on her nose and a smile playing on her lips, though she’s not letting it spread across her face. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, like mine, and the arch of her cheekbones is striking—like she has a face that’s meant to be drawn. Her eyes look bright and alive, but there’s no doubt they look sad too.

I glance up at James and see him studying me. I wonder how much he can read in my face.

“We should go,” I say.

“Don’t you like it, Clem?” asks Olive.

I bite my lip and look down at her. “It’s great,” I say, though I feel like I might start to cry.

I walk to the spiral stairs and carefully but quickly ease myself down to the main deck. Then I step off the side of the boat and onto the dock. As the wake of a passing motorboat makes its way into the marina and rocks the dock with a few waves, I suddenly remember that I have to pee.
Badly
.

“You guys, I’m going to
The Possibility
,” I shout. “James, can you take Olive back to your boat?”

“Clem, wait!” says James. He’s down the steps in a flash. “Is there something wrong?”

“No!” I say. “I just really have to pee.”

And it’s only a half lie, because I
do
have to pee, and I have to pee
right now
. I’m almost glad for this slightly comical distraction, because I don’t want James to know that what’s actually wrong is that he saw it. He saw my sadness.

I hustle toward
The Possibility
and look back once to be sure Olive is with James and they’re walking to his boat. Then I runwalk back to our boat, jump on board, and tear down the stairs into the head.

Ahhhh.
Does anything feel better than making it to a bathroom after you’ve been holding it for hours? Well, probably something, but I can’t think of what in this instance. Sweet relief.

I sit in the main cabin of the boat for a minute. I could do the right thing and walk back over to
Dreaming of Sylvia
, say good night to James and his dad properly, thank them for a nice night.

But I just stay on the couch and listen to the gentle waves lap against the side of
The Possibility
. Those eyes.
My
eyes. They were cartoons, but they were so real. I saw my own sadness in that drawing, like I was looking into a reflecting pool from a fantasy novel that showed me my soul or something. How could James see that?

chapter thirteen

Dear Amanda,
It’s so hard to hide things from you. I know
you sensed something was wrong …

“I saw your feelings get hurt,” said Amanda. We’d just gotten home from the movies with Ethan and Renee and Henry, and she was sitting on my bed, staring into the mirror across the room.

“What?” I asked.

“Just that I could see it in your face when me and Ethan were holding hands,” she said.

“Oh.” My heart pounded in my chest.

Amanda’s mom is a therapist, and everyone in her family is way tuned in to their own emotions, and others’ feelings too—it’s actually kind of annoying how hard it is to hide anything from my best friend.

Amanda took a deep breath.

“What?” I asked.

I watched her squeeze her eyes shut in the mirror.

“I know it’s kind of awkward,” she said. Then she opened them. “But I think it’s normal that you’re jealous that I have a boyfriend who’s actually hanging out with us now.”

“Oh, I’m not,” I said, surprised. “I like Ethan …” I was about to add “a lot,” but I decided to leave it at that.

“Okay, okay.” She smiled at me, relieved. “I just had to say something, because it seems like you guys are friends, and then he and I are going out, so it’s like you have these two friends dating and it can be weird because we spend time alone, too, and … I don’t know, am I rambling?”

“No.” I kept my participation in this conversation very measured.

“It’s cool that you guys get along,” she said, and I saw her eyes widen a little in the mirror. “You seem to always be talking or having, like, private jokes.”

I wondered if she was fishing for something, if she could read me that well.

“We have a class together,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and then she threw her arms around me. “I’m sorry, Clem, I didn’t mean to say that you were jealous! It just seemed like something was bothering you tonight, is all.”

I nodded and hugged her back. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Maybe I am a little jealous because he takes away my time with you.”

That was an acceptable thing to be jealous about, so I went with it.

“Let’s have a sleepover next weekend,” said Amanda. “Just you and me.”

“Sounds good.” I pulled away from our hug and smiled brightly at her.

“Ack, sorry I made things awkward!” she said. Then she waved her hands in front of my face, which I guess looked kind of grim. “Okay, forget all that. Want me to make you a smile?”

And that was that. Amanda had noticed something wrong, and I had my warning—and I didn’t heed it. I had proof then that the weirdness wasn’t just in my head. I knew for sure that I needed to stop talking to Ethan so much.

But I didn’t. It was like I couldn’t help it.

Later that week, one snowy afternoon when I was stuck in the house, Ethan and I spent over three hours online, messaging different song lyrics to each other and trying to guess the song.

Clem:
I am so homesick for someplace I will never be

Ethan:
The Bravery, Time Won’t Let Me Go

Ethan:
When the wind is in your hair you laugh like a little girl

Clem:
Easy. Magnetic Fields, Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side

Ethan:
How very indie-aware of you

I laughed.

Clem:
I was dreaming of the past … and my heart was beating fast

He replied in, like, 0.4 seconds.

Ethan:
Jealous Guy, John Lennon

Clem:
You are so freaking good at this

Clem:
That’s an obscure song!

Ethan:
Nothing John Lennon ever did is obscure

And this is something I liked about him too. We had this shared musical sensibility. Whenever he mentioned a song that I didn’t know, I instantly had to download it and listen, and I always ended up loving it. That’s just how we aligned. It felt special. Plus, he never once made an “Oh my darlin’ …” joke about my name, which was pretty much a first. You don’t have a name like Clementine without having that song sung at you at least three times a week.

Clem:
I’m still impressed

Ethan:
She’s so scared, so very frightened

Clem:
Vague … more?

Ethan:
Anything could happen … right here tonight

Ethan:
That’s all you get (not a lyric)

Clem:
Old song?

Ethan:
Yup

Clem:
Like oldie old or 90s old?

Ethan:
More like 80s

Clem:
Band?

Ethan:
Cheating, but ok—INXS

Clem:
No clue, don’t really know them.

Ethan:
It’s called Beautiful Girl

My hands froze.

Ethan:
I’ll put it on your mix

That’s when he told me he was making me a playlist of songs that reminded him of me. And the one I knew about was called—good Lord—“Beautiful Girl.” I downloaded it and fell in love within the first six notes.

All I could think about was how much I wanted that playlist. I had never felt so excited and tingly and buzzy about a guy.

I copied and pasted our back-and-forth messaging session into a doc, then put it in a folder that, for stealth’s sake, I called “Every Once in a While.” That’s the name of a country song that my mom always turned up the volume for in the car, and it makes me feel warm inside to hear it.

That’s when I started planning a mix for him too. The first song on it? “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift. I was in deep.

chapter fourteen

We’re heading into the Mississippi River now, and Olive keeps mentioning
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

“Did you read that last summer in your advanced library program for kids with glasses?” I ask.

She sticks out her tongue at me.

I’m trying to read an outdated issue of
Us Weekly
that I picked up at the last dock deli, but once Olive starts in with the Huck Finn talk, she won’t leave me alone until I respond. “Do you think Huck and Jim were on this part of the river? Is this what they saw from the raft? Don’t you think it seems a lot bigger than it did in the book?” She gets on my nerves so much that finally, as we’re sitting above deck eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches together and trying to direct Dad around the floating orange buoys that mark the dangerous parts of the river, I snap, “I get it! You’re smart. You’ve read Mark Twain and you’re only ten. Everyone on this boat
knows
!”