Reckless Hearts (6 page)

Jake had watched
the animation at least a hundred times. Each time it came to an end and the Jaybird character that was supposed to be him sank under the sand, he started it again. It was one thirty in the morning now, and as he sat in his underwear at the too-small desk he'd inherited with his new room, he still couldn't bring himself to stop clicking back and watching the animation one more time.

What stung wasn't that Elena had transformed her anger at him into art like this. That was how she processed her feelings, and anyway, he knew he deserved it. He'd thrown the first punch when he'd let his emotions boil and burn at his show. When he'd taken Nathaniel's
stupid advice and recklessly played that cruel song for her. What stung was that she hadn't been able to read his mind and see that he'd lashed out to hide his overwhelming love for her. Instead of bringing Elena closer, he'd pushed her away.

Jake watched the animation again. His eyes were bleary from watching so many times. He had tunnel vision from staring at the screen in the darkness. He could feel the tiredness in his cells. But still, his brain was hot and sparking, wide-awake.

The worst part was the comments. All those fans of Electra who were so eager to turn on Jaybird despite the way they'd adored him before.

“I know guys like that, Electra. They can find a way to be depressed by anything. Even videos of kittens can't cheer them up.”

“Jaybird, dude. Lighten up.”

Like they were talking to him. Like they didn't realize that the character in the video was a cartoon.

A new one popped up. Jake scrolled down to read it. Because what if that annoying image of a flaming motorcycle showed up, along with Harlow's name? He just had to look. It would crush his heart, he knew, but somehow he couldn't stop himself. He didn't know why.

And there it was. An aerodynamic crotch rocket shooting flames out its back end. Harlow, or whoever the guy really was, didn't even have the class to choose
a cool vintage cycle like a Triumph or one of those '60s BMWs. Jake braced himself for the message he was about to read.

“Love it. What did I tell you about emo guys? You're better off without him, Electra.”

You're better off without him.
The words seared through Jake's mind. He couldn't get rid of them. It was like Harlow had branded them there with a hot iron. The possible repercussions of this note tapped through his head. She might believe he was right. And then what?

His thoughts veered toward worst-case scenarios. By pushing Elena away, Jake had shoved her right into the arms of this douche bag. And now Jake would never have a chance to tell her the truth about his feelings. He'd lose her completely. And it would be his own fault because if he had just suppressed his feelings like usual and screwed on a brave supportive mask, she'd never have begun to question their friendship.

Jake saw her face floating in his mind—her beautiful black eyes sparking with life, her smooth round tan cheeks, that guarded joy that flitted across her face when she was half-charmed by something he'd done. He couldn't bear the thought of never seeing that look again.

And who was this Harlow guy anyway? What did he have that Jake didn't?

Tapping at the keyboard with shaking fingers, he
Googled the name
Harlow
. He Googled the name
Harlow
with the word
Florida
. He Googled the name
Harlow
with the word
anime
. Nothing, nothing, nothing. The guy didn't exist.

He scrutinized Harlow's profile on AnAmerica. That idiotic image. A bunch of blank spaces where there should have been details about who Harlow was and then a pretty small list of things he liked:
Cowboy Bebop
, Studio Ghibli, getting lost in foreign cities, trouble, whatever that was supposed to mean. The sort of things a poseur would claim to like, for sure.

The longer Jake stared at Harlow's page, the more sure he became that this was a shell profile, made to trick Elena.
Cowboy Bebop
? Studio Ghibli? Was it any coincidence that these were the exact same things Elena liked? He must have cased her page before constructing his. No wonder he had his claws in her. It wasn't right and it wasn't fair and who knew what horrible things the guy might be up to. Poor Elena. Even if she was mad at him, Jake rationalized, he had to do something to stop her from getting hurt.

Before he'd thought it through any further than that, he had his phone to his ear and he was listening to hers ringing on the other end of the line.

“Ung. Wha . . . ,” she mumbled when she answered.

“Hey. It's me. Jake.”

“Jake, it's really late.”

“I know. I couldn't sleep.”

“Okay,” she said. “Hold on.”

Jake waited for her to shake the sleep from her head. This wasn't the first time he'd called her at three a.m. There'd been a time, during his dad's worst days, before he got sober, when he'd leaned on her almost every night, talking about the newest development, how they couldn't find his dad, or how they'd had to bail him out of jail, how his father seemed so helpless and sad and totally not like the dad Jake had always known.

“What's up?” she said. “You calling to apologize?”

Jake had been so swept up in the conspiracy theory he'd begun to develop around Harlow that he'd forgotten that this was the actual root of the problem between him and Elena. Confronted with his guilt, he froze up and couldn't think of what to say.

And in that fiery way of hers, Elena filled the silence between them. “'Cause what was that about? That song! I mean, I don't even know what you were trying to say to me. You think I'm some sort of flighty, stupid girl who lets whoever comes along take advantage of her? Is that how you see me?”

“No, I don't,” Jake mumbled.

“Then tell me why. It's totally not like you to do something like that.”

“You're right,” he said dumbly.

“So?” She waited for him to explain himself.

Jake could feel the pressure on this moment, like the whole world was pressing down on his shoulders. He knew that the right thing to do was to tell her the truth: that he loved her, that he'd been overcome with an irrational and overwhelming jealousy and that he'd lashed out stupidly. For some reason, though, he couldn't do it. The possibility of being rejected by her terrified him.

All he could bring himself to say was “I'm sorry.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

She still sounded guarded. “Do you forgive me?” Jake asked, his insecurity gnawing at the edges of his brain.

“Yeah, Jake. I can be a dick sometimes, too. But . . .” Her voice softened and he felt the old concern and quiet care for him filter into it. “. . . what's going on with you? Why won't you tell me? It's like you suddenly don't trust me anymore.”

The pressure returned. It was even heavier than before. He thought of Harlow and remembered his initial reason for calling her.

“Have you talked to Harlow?” he asked.

“A little bit. He liked my animation,” she said.

His heart raced. “He's definitely not real,” he said, blurting it out in one rushed breath. “Listen, I just Googled him—”

“What are you talking about?”

“You need to know, Elena. He's not real.”

“Not ‘real'? Like he's my imaginary friend? Like a cartoon character? Jake. Come on. Are you still on this? I'm not an idiot.”

“You know what I mean. Somebody made a fake profile. Like, they're trolling you and trying to trick you. I don't know why, but—”

“Is this why you called me? Have you been up all night thinking about Harlow? Jake, why are you doing this?”

“I'm trying to protect you.”

“Have I ever needed protecting before?”

“No.”

“So then stop trying.” Her voice was firm, final.

“But—”

“You know what? I can't deal with this tonight.”

“Elena, wait—”

She was gone before he could say any more. There was just a gaping, dark, empty silence on the other end of the line now.

Jake closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
I'm such a fool
, he thought. He set the phone down on the desk and stared at it in the blue glow of his computer screen. Then he picked it up again.

The urge to call her back made him dizzy. His finger hovered over the call screen until, finally, he broke and pushed the button.

She didn't answer. The call went to voice mail after
the first ring, which Jake knew meant that she'd rejected the call.

He pushed the button again, and again she rejected it.

He felt like she was rejecting more than just his calls, like she was rejecting the entirety of their history together.

He tried one more time and when she still refused to answer, he threw his phone across the room into one of the open boxes he still hadn't unpacked. He wasn't sure which one, which was a great relief. If he'd seen where it had landed, he'd be digging around for it, and he knew that could only make things with Elena worse than they already were.

It always happened
at the last minute. Elena's father would get a call from the manager of one of his Laundromats saying, “I think I'm sick. I just took my temperature.” There'd be coughing and a wan listlessness in the manager's voice. “I can't make it in today, sorry.”

And Elena would have to take over the woman's shift. It was a tedious job. She had to just sit there, making change for the old women in their thin, flower-print smocks, and sometimes fixing a jammed machine.

Today, she was near the beach on the south side, in the Slats. Mixed in with the detergent scent rising off the washers, she could smell the salt water, so near, yet so far
from the cage she was stuck in by the front door of the fluorescently bright room. To pass the time, she hung out on AnAmerica, trying not to think about the frantic call she'd received from Jake the night before and wishing Harlow would reach out to her.

She couldn't help breaking into a satisfied smirk at the sight of his flaming motorcycle icon when he finally direct messaged her. She wished Jake could see the freewheeling, expansive conversations she'd been having with Harlow. It would serve him right given how totally paranoid he was being.

Propping her computer on the empty stool across from her, she clicked open the message.

“Hey, raven hair,” it said. “Would you look at something for me?”

“Like what?” she wrote back.

A streaky-blond woman in flip-flops and a wraparound skirt with tropical fruit printed on it wandered up to the counter and slipped some folded bills out of her bikini top. She pushed them through the opening in the cashier's cage.

“You've inspired me. I made a video,” said the next message from Harlow.

Elena quickly gave the woman five dollars' worth of quarters. The job was so easy she didn't even have to speak to the customers to fulfill their needs.

She wrote back to Harlow as soon as the woman
dragged her laundry bag away. “Hell-za yeah, I'll look at a video from you! ☺”

“Really? It probably sucks, but . . .”

“Are you being shy?”

“I've never shown my stuff to anyone before,” he wrote. Then a second message came tumbling in below this one. “It's not fair, though, for me to like your stuff so much and not let you see mine, too.”

Elena's heart did a little spin as she realized the risk he was taking. Her fingers could hardly keep up with her typing. “It would be an honor.”

“One sec.”

A moment later, a link to a private Vimeo page came in along with another message. “I'm nervous now.”

“Watching,” she wrote. Then she clicked through to the Vimeo page and played his animation.

It started with blackness. Then just sound, strings, and warbling synthesizers. She recognized the song. It was by Sigur Rós. Harlow let it play for ten or fifteen seconds in darkness. Then a pinpoint of white appeared in the middle of the screen, slowly growing larger. The blackness had somehow, imperceptibly, turned into a rich dark blue, flecked with other colors—greens, yellows. It looked like it had been painted with watercolors. The pinpoint of white was big enough now to see that it was an eye.

The camera pulled back to reveal a solitary man
crouching on the edge of a skyscraper. He wore a hooded cloak, and under that, a billowing white outfit wrapped in leather straps from which hung knives and assorted other Japanese weapons: throwing stars, nunchucks. Elena knew right away that this was a ronin, one of the solitary, roguish samurai whose personal code of ethics demanded that they walk alone through the world. You didn't last long in the world of anime without learning about these mythic warriors.

And then the music soared and a million robotic men rained down from the sky and the ronin leaped into action. The next two and a half minutes consisted of an intricately choreographed ballet in which the ronin swooped and spun and danced through the air, battling it out with the robots under a full moon. It was riveting. There was no dialogue, no sound at all except for the Sigur Rós song. The color palate shifted with the mood shifts in the music.

The world around Elena disappeared while she watched. It was like she'd been hypnotized.

And then, in a daze, she realized that the animation had ended.

Blinking, she let herself take in the moment. Harlow was maybe the most talented artist she'd ever encountered on AnAmerica. It was hard to believe that he didn't know this. And now having seen what he could do, his
admiration of her work meant a thousand times more than it had before.

She looked around at her surroundings. The day seemed brighter in every way than it had been before she'd watched the clip—great art always had this effect on her. The winter sun streaming in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Laundromat had gone from turning everything a pale white to pulling out the vibrant sparkle in the steel machines. She was glad that the blond woman, way back by the jumbo washers, was the only person there to witness how overwhelmed with emotion she'd suddenly become.

Elena cued the video up and watched it again, hoping to find something smart to say about it. Wells of emotion washed through her as the music soared and spun, changing and deepening with every new color washing through Harlow's animation.

She hadn't been this touched by someone else's talent since the first time she'd heard Jake play a song he'd written. But this was different. With Jake, she'd felt like she'd been able to see through to the heart of someone fragile whom she needed to look out for, like the music was telling her, in more beautiful form, things she already knew about her closest friend.

Harlow was mysterious, more worldly than her. His art dared her to grow, to expand beyond herself. She felt
proud for him—and honored that he wanted her opinion on what he'd made. She was amazed that someone who could make something this good cared so much what she thought.

When she was done watching the video for the second time, she could think of only one thing to say.

“LOVE!”

“Really? You like it?” he wrote back.

“More than I can say.”

“Cool.”

She waited for another communication from him. When it finally came, it said, “Would it be wrong of me to ask for your phone number?”

She typed in her number. Then, to help herself feel less awkward about what was clearly a new step in their relationship, she added, “I'm a sucker for talent.”

“You and me both,” he said.