Instructions for a Broken Heart (11 page)

Somewhere around two, she and Hillary had finally untangled the sheets, scooted the beds back into their rightful positions, and Hillary had gone to sleep wrapped in Bruno’s jacket.

An hour ago, she’d heard Ms. Jackson’s door across the hall click shut after rounding up the last of their group—L. E., who’d been taking a moonlit run on the beach with a tall midfielder from one of southern Italy’s premier teams. At least that’s what she told Ms. Jackson (and her mom via cell phone) in heated whispers in the hall. Hillary and Jessa had pressed down on the floor to listen through the crack under the door. Jessa believed L. E. She’d seen them come in through the courtyard, walking hand in hand, two sets of running shoes side by side. She probably was taking a run, knowing L. E., and it seemed like Ms. Jackson believed her too. But she’d been chasing them into their rooms all night, sorting through lies and truth like mismatched socks.

Technically, most of the group had broken the behavior contracts they’d signed before leaving. Still, Jessa didn’t believe her teachers would send the whole bunch of them home. Besides, the other group was in more trouble than Williams Peak. Two of them had even come back to the hotel in Italian police cars. Those two were
definitely
going home. Quiet Guy had stood in the courtyard nodding along to whatever the officer told him, his jacket over a pair of red plaid pajamas. When Jessa passed Bob-the-world’s-most-boring-world-history-teacher in the hall, she thought he looked so worried he might throw up, called to the lobby in his robe, face green as an alien, Francesca hurrying behind him, spouting Italian into her phone. For once, there was no sign of the frog.

Jessa watched most of it unfold from her window. Madison, Cheyla, and a few other girls laughed their high hyena laughs with a pack of soccer players, passing a glinting bottle back and forth. Kevin and Rachel wandered through the courtyard, his arm around her shoulders. When had that happened? Even Cruella wobbled in alone around 3 a.m. on spaghetti legs, her sunglasses still perched atop her head, looking thin, worn.

Now it was quiet. A hush had settled over the hotel, a cloak of sleep around its stone shoulders. Jessa could see the ocean from her window, a dark, moving thing. The sky was choked with stars, the storm clouds having passed through. She thought of Carissa’s instructions. She had told Tyler to make Jessa sing where Sean could hear her. A ribbon of anger fluttered through her stomach, then settled like a feather. As much as she hated to admit it, Carissa did know what made her feel better. And singing always made her feel better, replenished something in her, her own little electrolyte tonic. Even if she didn’t need him to hear, she needed to sing.

Quietly, like mist, she started to sing “Stars.”

There was movement behind her. Hillary pulled the curtain aside and leaned next to her against the window. “Pretty,” she murmured, rubbing her eyes.

“Did I wake you up?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t really sleep.”

Jessa started from the beginning, Javert’s song about chasing his fugitive, the despair of his failure, because really, it was less about judgment and more about being a slave to his own dogma that sent Javert leaping to his death. Her voice picked up, sent the song up and out, and she heard a movement at the window of the next room. Suddenly, Jade’s voice joined hers, floating out, then falling into the courtyard below. Jade shifted the words around, catching onto the underbelly of Jessa’s voice, adding dimension to her song.

They sang through to the end, their voices widening, entwining, and Jessa watched a few lights click on around the hotel, people leaning out, blinking from their windows below, looking up. Somewhere, Jessa was sure Sean was listening.

Several rooms over, Devon shouted out. “What do you think this is—
West Side Story
? Go to sleep, you idiots!”

No one from Williams Peak was being sent home, but Mr. Campbell and Ms. Jackson let them know at breakfast that they were on very short leashes—collars, really. And they were leaving Venice early, losing the opportunity to take the cool boat ride that had been planned for the morning.

They left Venice with the dawn just a peeking glowing band on the horizon, the night above still spattered with stars. Francesca sat in the first seat, rubbing her temples, the man-boy whose name Jessa still didn’t know asleep next to her, the side of his face pressed against the window.

Rachel slid into the seat next to her. “His name’s Giacomo,” she whispered, offering Jessa a wafer cookie from a bag.

“Who?” Jessa took a cookie, popped it in her mouth where it melted almost instantly. Yum. She grabbed another.

Rachel motioned to the front of the bus. “Adonis up there.”

“Who is he?” Jessa helped herself to yet another cookie.

Rachel shook her head. “We’re working on that. But he’s definitely with Francesca. Lizzie heard them fighting last night.”

“What about?” Jessa studied the back of Giacomo’s head.

“Who knows? It was all Italian. But she said it was
heated
. Can I sit here?” Rachel tucked her knees up against the back of the bus seat in front of her and flipped open a
Tennis
magazine.

Jessa’s eyes searched the bus. Tyler sat up close to the front with his sweatshirt pulled over his eyes. She nodded at Rachel. “Sure. You playing first singles this year?”

“Hope so. Kelly Stahl is hitting really well. She’ll give me a run for my money.”

“Not a chance. You’re more consistent than Kelly.”

Rachel seemed surprised. “Thanks. Do you still play?”

Jessa sighed. “Not really. Volleyball kind of took over. Can’t do it all.” She cleared her throat, averted her eyes out the window. She and Rachel had gone to the same summer camp for tennis all through middle school, and she’d played a bunch when they lived in the city. But volleyball and tennis were the same seasons at Williams Peak. Jessa couldn’t remember the last time she picked up her racquet. Maybe she’d dig it out of her closet when she got home.

She could feel Rachel studying her. “Well, if anyone can do it all, it’s you. We should hit sometime. For fun,” Rachel added.

Jessa fiddled with her iPod. “I’d like that. You’ll obliterate me, but I’d like that.”

Popping her mint gum, Rachel went back to her magazine, winding a piece of honey-colored hair around her finger.

Jessa clicked to
Evita
on her iPod and let the music wash over her. She pressed her palm against the cool glass of the bus window and bid farewell to Venice, its green canals still snaking through her veins. Maybe once you drifted through the water world of Venice, it never really left—your body was somehow forever tied to the floating island city.

Jessa shut off her music, fidgeting in the seat. She couldn’t get comfortable. Something was wrong. She knew it, felt it in the pit of her belly. In some sort of mid-trip fractured way, she knew that something had broken for her. Not just her fight with Tyler or Carissa’s stupid manual or the chaos of last night. Not even Sean, who sat three seats away, reading his
National Geographic
—was he fifty? He loved that magazine. No, it was something bigger than that.

But Sean and Natalie, who now snuggled up front with Jamal, were definitely over. Somewhere between Florence and Venice, she had switched boys the way Jessa might change her shirt at the last minute before running out the door. Red shirt, blue shirt. Sean shirt, Jamal shirt. Sean must have felt her watching him. He turned, the magazine slipping slightly against where he had it propped on his knee. He gave a quick, practice wave, like he was auditioning to wave to her. Jessa pretended to be searching her iPod. No, this feeling wasn’t about Sean. What had shifted? Something had split off, was left bobbing there in the Venice canals.

“Jessa?”

Mr. Campbell stood in the bus aisle. He slid into the now-empty seat beside her. At some point, Rachel had moved up a few seats and was snuggling with Kevin, their voices low purrs. Jessa pulled her earbuds out and tucked them into her sweatshirt pocket.

Mr. Campbell seemed like he’d aged four years, his eyes all dark circles and his skin red splotched.

“Rough night?” she asked.

“You could say that.” He held a book out to her. An old paperback with a black-and-white cover.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, well read and dog eared.

She took the book, smoothed her hand over the cover, looked at him expectantly.

“You gave me a book for the trip. I figured I could return the favor.” He folded his hands in his lap, leaned into the seat.

“James Joyce?” She had seen Hillary reading it for AP English during rehearsals last month. She said it was confusing—beautiful, but confusing.

“Kind of changed my life.” Mr. Campbell smiled a sad, half smile at her. “In the way that some books can change what you know about yourself. For better or worse, when you look at the world through an artist’s eyes, it’s nice to know you aren’t alone.”

She thanked him, flipped it open. He had marked some of the pages with a black ink pen, little flecks in the margins.

“Ignore the marks. I wrote a paper on it in college. You’ll find your own marks.”

“What’s it about?” She read the small description on the back. A boy “choosing between a religious vocation and an artistic one.” Her stomach fluttered. A boy finding his way.

“Just read it. We’ll talk.” He moved back to his place near the back of the bus with Ms. Jackson who quickly, but long enough for Jessa to see, squeezed Mr. Campbell’s hand as he slid into the seat beside her.

***

Time travel. That was really the only explanation for it. Umbria. Castles and fortresses standing out against the sky, the hills all layered like waves, dotted with terra-cotta towns and row upon row of olive trees.

They waited for the frog to point them in the right direction.

Here, though, sitting on a smooth stone bench in the center of the Piazza del Comune, Jessa wasn’t sure there was a right direction at all.

Assisi—even the word took time to say. Time didn’t seem at all in a hurry here, not the busy buzz of Florence and Rome, or even the drifting, dreamy haze of time in Venice. Here, time took a long lunch, planting itself firmly on a blanket in a fat beam of sun. Was it the twenty-first century or the nineteenth? Did it matter? Not really.

Well, that’s not totally true. It seemed to matter to her friends. And to the other group. Everyone, it seemed, was in full-force fidget mode. Squirmy, like ants on a banana peel—ants with iPods, and phones, and PlayStations, and Nintendos.

The frog wanted their attention. Francesca waved it in three, quick flaps over her head. “Who has heard of St. Francis?” She waited. A man buzzed by on a Vespa. St. Francis—Jessa had
heard
of him, but she wasn’t sure where or why.

“The nature monk?” Dylan Thomas called from a bench where he and Tyler had been lounging in the sun. He blinked and looked around the group. “Oh, come on, people. He was like Dr. Doolittle or something.” He shook his head, apparently disgusted either with their lack of knowledge on St. Francis or perhaps with Dr. Doolittle, Jessa wasn’t sure. He collapsed back on the bench and closed his eyes.

“Um, the Eddie Murphy movie?” Cheyla volunteered without missing a moment on her phone, texting someone furiously, her fingers flurried bees. Could someone get carpal tunnel in their thumbs?

Francesca looked skyward. Perhaps the frog would have a reason for their tragically incomplete educations?

Mr. Campbell cleared his throat. “You guys will like this one. Rich kid who denounces his dad to live in poverty, to seek out the quiet life, the virtuous life tied to nature.”

Devon frowned. “No offense, Mr. C, but what about that story did you think we would like?”

Tim nodded. “Yeah, no offense, but he sounds like kind of a tool.”

Francesca leveled her gaze at them. “He was buried on Hell Hill with convicts and outcasts.”

Erika and Blake stopped whispering, their heads swiveling to attention. A hush blanketed the group. Cruella clucked her tongue disapprovingly.

Francesca had them at “Hell Hill.”

***

“Are you talking to me yet?” Tyler offered her a gummy bear, staring down at where she sat on the steps outside the Basilica di San Francesco.

Jessa shook her head, returned her gaze to the book in her lap.

“What if I do a dance?”

She squinted up at him, the sun against his back making him glow with the warmth of Umbrian sun. “No dancing.”

“What if I promise
not
to dance?” He put on his sweet, please-forgive-me-puppy-dog-who-ate-your-shoe face.

She took the bag of gummy bears, folded them up, and put them in her bag. “I’m officially cutting you off.”

He sat down next to her, pulled out another bag of gummy bears from his bag, and ate a handful. “OK, I have an idea.”

“What idea?”

“I know Carissa can be a real pain. She can be a spoiled, selfish drama queen.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

“Let me finish.” Tyler held up his hand. “You know what she loves more than anything?” Jessa held his gaze. “You,” he finished. “She put a lot of time into these envelopes, and believe it or not, they’re helping. I mean, you don’t have that beat-puppy face twenty-four seven like you did when we first started.” He twisted his face into a replica of the aforementioned puppy.

“I don’t make that face.” Jessa returned her eyes to her book, but she wasn’t really reading.

“You know what I think?”

“Enlighten me.”

“I think we finish. We’ve come this far. You finish the instructions. I finish the manual. If for no other reason than I’m getting really tired of looking at churches.”

Jessa pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and rubbed her eyes. Something in the air here seemed to slow the world around her, disperse time like dandelion fluff left suspended in the cool, sun-spilt air. Her eyelids drooped. She thought of her sister, Maisy, when she was barely two—how her eyes would give up before she would for a nap. Her mom would drive around and around to get Maisy to sleep, her eyelids thick as her head bobbed and fought in her car seat. Jessa would ride next to her, watching, waiting for that exact moment they’d close for good and they were safe to go to the drive-through coffee place, latte for Mom, mango smoothie for Jessa.

Finally, she said, “OK.”

They watched everyone regroup, wander back to the steps from the little shops they had been perusing. Mr. Campbell stood a few feet away, checking his watch every few minutes.

Tyler motioned toward the note tucked into her book:

Reason #11: Café Dumbass.

“But in the spirit of full disclosure as you now
know
that I know what’s coming next, I always thought this one was Carissa at her bitchiest.”

“Me too.” And it was. Usually after a show, they all went to Tony’s, an old diner out on Highway 174, mostly because it was open late and also because Tony Stevens, the owner, gave them free French fries and acted like they were some kind of celebrities because they were in the high school show. But during the
Hamlet
run, they had wanted to find a café for after the Sunday matinees. So L. E. had suggested Café Dumas, a new one that had opened downtown that was supposed to have really yummy muffins and play good music on Sundays. Another kid who worked there had been passing out little glossy cards after the show that day.

Sean got lost finding it, so they were already fighting, but when they walked in, he said, “What kind of place calls itself Café Dumbass?” and he wasn’t trying to be funny. Jessa tried to make it seem like he was joking, like he didn’t just totally mispronounce it and look like an idiot announcing it to the room. But Carissa knew better, eyed Sean with icy eyes from her perch next to Aaron Wright, who played Laertes and was too cute for his own sweet nature. Carissa had taken to flirting with him like she might qualify for an Olympic trial in toying with nice guys’ feelings.

“It’s
Doom-ah
, moron,” she had drawled. “But we could call you Café Dumbass if you’d like.”

And even though most of them meant it in fun, Jessa still watched Sean prickle anytime he walked into a room and someone yelled out, “Café Dumbass!”

Jessa pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?” Tyler peered over her shoulder, watched her text.

“Telling Carissa that I’m not doing it. She should’ve come up with some other ideas than having me shout things at him, throw things at him. Her need to have things hurled in his general direction is getting a little generic.”

“But don’t tell her you know about the manual!”

“I won’t! Shut up for a second.”

She was halfway through the text when she realized the group had fallen silent. Jessa paused, her thumbs hovering over the tiny keys.

Mr. Campbell was boring a hole into her head with his eyes. Not a happy hole. A dark, smoldering hole.

“What?” Her question was barely a breath.

“See,” Mr. Campbell addressed the group. “This is what I mean. This is what I’m talking about. Here we are. In Italy. Halfway around the world, walking through ancient ruins and buildings with ancient stories. And all you guys can do is bury your heads in your machines.” He threw up his hands. Ms. Jackson stood next to him, her face unreadable.

The group was silent, their phones, iPods, cameras, PSPs, Nintendos drooping like overripe fruit at the end of their arms. What had she missed? Had he been talking? Her face went hot. She jammed the phone into her bag. The other group hurried away as if avoiding a sudden rainstorm and reconvened on the other side of the courtyard.

Francesca leaned into Mr. Campbell, whispered something. He waved her off. “No, really. It’s ridiculous. You’re trying to talk to them and they’re so plugged in they can’t even hear you. It’s embarrassing. You’ve got all this reality around you, all this history and you’re too busy…” At this point, Mr. Campbell did something that could be described only as performance art—sort of a mime mixed with bleeps and clicks that was surely meant to be them texting, talking on phones, listening to iPods, but it made him look like Pinocchio on speed.