The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers (15 page)

“I’m supposed to be up there.” Lucy pointed to the stage.

“Performing tonight? Hey, awesome.”

“Olivia just sort of told me I was, so . . .”

“Well,
that
doesn’t sound like the Olivia I know.” Paisley grinned.

Lucy half laughed. “But I can’t get there.”

“You, my dear, are lucky I came along. You don’t spend half your life in clubs without learning a thing or two about getting through a crowd. My ex used to say watching me get through a crowd was like watching salt get through soup. The sweet boy was never very good at analogies.” He shook his head. “Anyway, allow me.” Paisley took Lucy’s arm and put it around his shoulder. Then leaned in and said: “In all the clubs I’ve been to I’ve met a thousand different types of people, but you know the one thing they all have in common? No one wants to get puked on.” Paisley leaned over then, put his hand over his mouth, and jerked his shoulders. “OH NO, I THINK I’M GOING TO . . . ,” he shouted. Then he winked at her and started lurching forward. Everyone around them started backing up. The backup spread like a ripple through the crowd. People were elbowing each other left and right to get out of his way. Every couple seconds Paisley would shout something like, “I DON’T THINK I CAN MAKE IT TO THE BATHROOM!”

“HOLD ON, PAISLEY!” Lucy shouted. “JUST HOLD ON!”

A minute later they were standing at the side stage door. It opened and she found herself pushed through before she even had a chance to thank him.

L
ucy stood in the wings, heart thumping along with the music, camera pressed against one wide-open eye. Instead of focusing on the pounding of her heart, she tried to direct all of her attention on what she saw through the lens: Two cabaret girls were out onstage, one playing an old-fashioned harp and the other playing this weird electronic instrument, which sounded like a creepy woman singing and was played simply by touching the air around it. Jack and B were out there too with their laptops, their cymbals, and a giant sousaphone. She took pictures of the coils of wire, of the dusty air, of the bright lights on their faces. When the song ended, she raised her camera and snapped a picture of the cabaret girls as they dragged their instruments into the wings.

Up close they looked like life-sized dolls—bright red Cupid’s bow mouths, huge fake spider-leg-looking lashes, faces powdered pale, and a red circle of rouge on the apple of each cheek. They were twins, Lucy realized, identical except for the dark freckle at the corner of one’s mouth. Which may have been painted on anyway.

They stopped in front of Lucy. They smelled baby-powder sweet.

Lucy put the camera down and took a deep breath. She stared out at the dark wood on the stage, a glow-in-the-dark X was taped out in the middle. So that’s where she’d be standing. That’s where she’d be standing when she puked all over herself.

Freckle reached out one tiny hand and squeezed Lucy’s arm. “You know what we always think about when we’re nervous?” She had a little girl voice, high and breathy.

“The Amazing Arturo!” said the other one, in the exact same voice.

“He was this famous magician back in the twenties, who was killed on that very stage. His assistant accidentally used steel knives instead of rubber in a knife trick.”

“She wasn’t so smart,” Freckle whispered. “But she had perfect aim.”

“The moral of the story? No matter what happens to you up there, it won’t go as bad as that. . . .”

They giggled. “Probably!”

Freckle grabbed Lucy’s camera off the shelf and started poking at it. “Oh, a picture-taker machine. Fun!”

The cheers were dying down and the lights were dimmed except for three blue spotlights on the stage.

“Ready?” Jack was about to walk back onstage.

“Wait!” Lucy’s stomach lurched as she realized something. “I don’t even know what the lyrics are!”

“Oh right, silly me.” Jack pulled a little piece of paper out of the back pocket of his tuxedo pants.

He handed it to Lucy. It was blank.

“But there’s nothing on here!” Lucy shouted.

“Well then, you’ll just have to make it up,” Jack said. He shrugged. And B shrugged. And they both strolled out onstage. B stopped under the spotlight on the row of laptops. Jack stopped behind the keyboards.

There was one blue light left, waiting for Lucy.

Lucy stared. For a moment she could not move at all.
This isn’t real,
she tried to tell herself.
Just go, this is only a dream.
But she could not convince her body; she could not convince her pounding heart. She was more awake than she’d ever been. She could not believe what she was about to do.

But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to do it.

Lucy’s legs were shaking as she stepped out. The stage was hot and dusty. She coughed. She could barely breathe. The lights were directly in her eyes, which was maybe a good thing because it meant that she could not see the crowd out in front of her.

The music started.

The whistle, the beat, the heart.

She squinted out into the crowd. She could not see anyone, but she knew Olivia and Gil and Liza were out there, watching her, judging her. So was everyone.

The music rose, up, up, up.
Sing, Lucy! SING!

Lucy opened her mouth. Nothing came out but a thin raspy squeak.

The spotlight moved, swirled around. She stared out into the crowd and she could—
oh, please no
—she could suddenly see them. All those people there, waiting for her to go, all of them, staring at her as they danced. Hundreds and hundreds of faces. Hundreds of people with brains and bodies, and hands and hearts. But none of them was the one she wanted.

None of them was Alex.

Her heart squeezed then. A pain shot through her so sharp and hard, she stumbled backwards. If she could do this, just this one last thing, access to the magic would be the reward. And Alex’s return would then follow. She closed her eyes and she pictured his lips against hers, breathing his love deep down into her. That was worth all this of course.
That was worth anything.

So she took one last breath. Filling her lungs down to the pit of her stomach, and then, standing up there in front of a thousand people, Lucy, still absolutely terrified, opened her mouth
.

A voice came out.

“OOOOOOOOOOH,”
the voice sang.

It wasn’t even Lucy’s voice. Lucy’s voice was high and sweet. This was deep and ragged and raw. This was not a note pushed out her open mouth, but something escaping from the split in her heart
.
She could feel the cry leaving it, vibrating up out of it.

“OOOOOOOOOOH.”

When she heard that voice, that rich, strong voice, hers but not hers, something happened and her fear broke like a fever. She opened her mouth up wide and felt the vibration as the sounds left her mouth, more and more and more of them. There was an endless supply.

Was that really her up there? Singing? Howling? Screaming?

She was no longer aware she was up on that stage. She was no longer aware of anything but the feeling of prying apart that crack in her heart, of letting what was inside of it out.

She could not see anything, just the blue light pulsing through her eyelids. And for a moment she did not even know where she was, or who she was, or what she was.

But she didn’t care.

And what was she singing up there on the stage that night?

The song she’d written for Alex, of course. The only song that had been in her head for two months. The song she’d sang quietly to herself a thousand times over.

It was the first time she’d sang it in front of anyone at all. Only instead of singing it sweetly the way she’d always practiced, she was screaming it:

I feel you here when you’re not

Her voice grew louder and louder.

I see your face in the sky when you’re not here

I hear your voice in my head when you’re not here

She was really screaming then. And she did not stop.

You’re always here, you’re always here

You are you are you are

She sang until the singing vibrated down deep within her chest. She sang with all she had.
She just sang everything out.

And then, when she was empty, when all the blackness had been expelled, she stood there as the beat faded. There was a whirring pulsing, and her voice above it all a final sweet high, clear note. The music stopped. The song was over.

For a brief second there was complete silence.

Lucy opened her eyes as the spotlight circled and went down into the crowd. All those bodies were suddenly frozen. No one was dancing anymore. No one was moving. All she could see was the light reflected off of the two thousand eyeballs that were staring right at her. And in one horrible moment it all came rushing back, where she was, who she was, and what she had just done.

They hated it. They hated her. She’d been so terrible that she’d paralyzed everyone with her terribleness.
She felt as though she were standing onstage completely naked. Worse than naked: without her skin.

She gasped.

Then the silence broke. Her gasp was drowned out by a rushing wall of deafening sound, a thousand voices screaming just for her.

B
reathless, Lucy just stood there, staring out at that crowd, completely frozen until her legs decided to walk her offstage. Behind the curtain people hugged her, squeezed her. “AMAZING!” they shouted. “INCREDIBLE!”

She kept going, all the way back, into the hallway, head buzzing. All alone, she leaned against a wall to catch her breath. She brought her hands up to her face. There were tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. Not of sadness, but of something else:

She’d done it.

She’d gotten up onstage, stood in front of a thousand people, and sung her heart out, sung her
guts
out. She’d lived through her greatest dream and her very worst nightmare. And survived.

But what exactly had
happened
back there? Why were people reacting this way?

BLAM!
The answer exploded in her skull.

Most people spend their entire lives afraid—of looking stupid, of being lonely, of wasting their life, of losing someone they love, of never finding anyone to love at all, of spiders, of drowning, of being burned alive, of bees, of crossing the street, of flying, of fighting, of being hated, of heights, of sharks, of failing, of winning, of elevators, of escalators, of falling, of fire, of getting up in front of a thousand people and singing out loud.

We like to say that love is what unites us; however it’s
fear
that we all share.

But standing up there onstage, nakedly, honestly, showing them the real, ragged insides of her ravaged heart, Lucy had appeared entirely fearless. Because in that moment she was. And
in this way she had seduced them all . . .

Offstage, Lucy still couldn’t make her way through the crowd, but this time it wasn’t because people didn’t see her,
but because they did.

People called things out to her, stopped their dancing or pulled her in to dance with them. She was passed forward in a daze. Everyone wanted a piece of her. They would not let her go.

Someone may have put a glass of water in her hand. She may have even drunk it. A very tall girl asked for her
autograph
and it was only after she walked away that she realized the girl had not in fact been kidding.

Jack and B were still up onstage; a cello player was out with them now. On the wall behind them was a time-lapse video of flowers blooming, blooming, blooming.

Some people said things to Lucy, about the beauty of her voice, about her dress, her hair, her presence. Some just stared at her in awe, too intimidated to say anything at all.

But through all of this, she kept thinking if only, if only Alex had been there to see her.

She took out her phone and wrote him a text.

Just performed a song in front of a thousand people. Wish you could have been there. X

She hesitated for one second, then hit
SEND
. She stuck her phone in the little side pocket of her dress.

A moment later Gil flew through the air and attacked her in a hug. She dragged Lucy off to the side. Olivia and Liza were right behind her.

“YOU WERE COMPLETELY INCREDIBLE!” Gil shouted.

Liza was shaking her head. “Damn, girl,” was all she said.

Olivia just nodded, looked at Lucy, and let out a laugh. “I’m not surprised by much,” Olivia said. “But
that
surprised
me.
”

Lucy blushed with pleasure.

“And
speaking
of people who think Lucy’s fabulous . . .” Gil was looking at someone behind Lucy. “
There
you are,” she said. She reached behind Lucy and pulled him toward her. Tall, square glasses, sweet face, dimples, blue eyes. Colin. “Where have you
been
?” Gil said. “Did you just get here?”

He shook his head. “I got here a while ago. But it’s so crowded and it’s so hard to get through a crowd like this. I was over there by the wall. I could still see though.”

“Did you get to hear Lucy sing?”

He nodded, then turned toward Lucy. “Hey, you were really . . .” His voice was quiet and Lucy had to lean in to hear him. “. . . watching you up there on that stage. I mean, I’ve never heard anything . . . you were just—” He took a deep breath. “Luminous.”

“Thank you,” Lucy said. “That is really nice of you to say.”

“How did you do that? How did you just stand up there in front of all these people and sing like that? And radiate that? And look so comfortable?” He blushed then, as though he’d already said more than he meant to. But then he did not stop. “If that had been me up there I would have been so scared . . . mostly of getting shot, because the only way I’d have ended up on that stage in the first place would be if someone was standing behind me with a gun.”

Lucy laughed.

But Colin’s face got even redder then, as though he had just heard what he’d said and decided it was exactly wrong. He stood there bouncing from foot to foot to foot, vibrating with jangly nerves, just staring down at her with his big, actually rather beautiful eyes open all wide. She could feel the discomfort radiating off of him.

“Colin,” she started to say. She wanted to tell him something then. Standing there, in that place with all those people who had just heard her sing, in that hot room filled with music and noise, what she wanted to tell him was something about how he did not have to feel so trapped by his own nerves, trapped in that little box he was in. She wanted to tell him that things are not as set as he might think they are. And that no matter what he believes about himself, one day he just may surprise the hell out of himself by what he is able to do.

But she did not know how to begin that kind of conversation with someone who was practically a stranger, even one who was looking at her the way he was, like he was not any kind of stranger at all. And even if she did know what to say and how to say it, it’s not like she could have with Olivia and Liza and Gil standing right there. With Gil, in fact, watching her at that very moment. Gil was nodding and grinning as though she was signaling for Lucy to do something, although Lucy had no idea what this was. Before she could figure it out, someone came up behind her.

“Mmmf, I could just chop you up into little pieces and
sauté
you,” a voice said. Lucy turned. There was a man standing in front of her. He was short and broad shouldered, with tattoos covering both his arms and a face like chewed-up meat. He was old, not quite parent-age but close. He licked his lips, then
mmmf
-ed one more time before he started walking away.

When Lucy turned back, Colin had moved a few feet away, was standing with Gil. It was as though he’d felt like he was intruding, as though he thought Lucy and Chewed-up-Meat-face might want to be alone.

“Colin is going home now, Lu,” Gil said. She looked disappointed. Her little arm was linked through his. “I tried to convince him to stay, but he won’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Colin said. “I just . . . need to.”

“Colin, why don’t you give Lucy your number so she can call you?”

Colin blushed even more.

“Uh,” he said.

“Lucy wants it, right, Lucy?” Gil looked up at her. “She already has her phone out.”

Lucy nodded quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

She handed her phone to Colin.

Gil winked and walked off.

Colin was looking down at her phone, punching numbers slowly, like he was trying to avoid having to look at her as he said whatever he was about to say. “I would love to hang out more. It’s just that big crowds like this are not so much my thing . . .” He chewed his lower lip. “I guess maybe you noticed yesterday. I’m sorry about running out so fast. But I’m glad I got to hear you.” He handed her the phone. “You were amazing.”

He turned to leave, started trying to work his way through the crowd. Then stopped, turned back. “Um, bye!” He reached his arms out and pulled her toward him into a hug.

His body did not feel like she would have guessed it would. There were strong muscles in his arms, in his chest, in his back. She could feel them through his thin gray shirt. This was not the tentative hug she would have expected from him. This was something else. . . . She leaned against him. She felt his arms around her waist, his strong hands pressing against her lower back, pulling her now more firmly toward him. She felt his stomach against hers as their entire bodies lined up. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She could smell him—he smelled like clean, sweet sweat.

Lucy sighed. She closed her eyes. She felt some part of herself melting, the harsh edges being softened. She hadn’t been hugged like this in so long, held like this in so long. The last time was the day before Alex left.

Alex.

Lucy’s eyes popped open. She pulled back. She shook her head.

Colin was staring at her. His face was flushed.

“I really hope you call me.” He had a glassy look in his eyes, as though the hug was a drug and he’d been suddenly made braver by it. “I mean, I don’t mean to make that sound weird and pressure-y or anything. I just . . . hope that you do.” He smiled one last time, a big full smile. A dimple dimpled deeply in each cheek.

Then he turned and slipped off into the crowd.

But when he was gone, and no one was looking at her, Lucy felt the empty space in her heart all the more deeply. Lucy looked down at her phone.

No text.

Well, really that didn’t mean anything. Alex just wasn’t a quick text-backer. The night before had just been a fluke.

So no, she could not expect one back yet. No, she would just be calm. She would wait.

Except
her stomach started to churn.
Where was he?
It was just before midnight. What was he doing? Where would he be when he received the message? Would he be excited when he saw her name flashing there? Well, assuming she was still in his phone . . . And
was she
still in his phone?

But then, suddenly, her phone
did
vibrate with a text, as though she had brought it forth by the force of her wanting it.

She held her breath and looked down.

Hope ice-cream night is going well, bud. If you run out of mint chip, let me know!

Lucy’s heart popped. The pieces flew everywhere.

She stood squeezing her phone until she felt a hand on her shoulder. There was Olivia, standing alone.

“All right, my little bean cake,” Olivia said. “You come with me now. I have something to show you. Something you’ve earned the right to see”—she took Lucy by the arm—“finally. We never show this to people who aren’t one of us. But I suspect you will be soon enough.” She gave Lucy a sly smile and pulled her into the crowd.

Lucy could barely breathe.

This was it.

Olivia pulled Lucy through a door, down a narrow hallway, into a back room. They walked until the booming music faded into a faint pounding. They went through one last door and there, straight ahead, was a tall metal ladder stretching twenty feet into the air and leading to a hatch in the ceiling.

Without speaking, Olivia started to climb, her smooth calf muscles barely flexing with each step. A few moments later, she vanished up into the hatch.

Lucy gripped the ladder’s thin metal sides, and waited for the familiar tight fist of fear to clench her stomach. This was a ladder after all, leaning against nothing, leading straight up into the sky. But the clench did not come.

Lucy climbed. As the floor got farther and farther away, all she could do was smile a tiny and bewildered smile at what she knew was waiting for her up at the top. At what she was leaving down below her.

Four days ago, Lucy was a scared little girl sobbing brokenheartedly in the bathroom, and now here she was, having just sung in front of a thousand people, on her way up a ladder about to be taught how to do
magic
that she would then use to get back her lost love.

Life is nothing if not surprising.

Lucy entered a warm dark room. Olivia flipped on the light.

In the center of the room there was a big metal desk facing a wall with nine flat-screen monitors stacked in a square.

“Where are we?”

“Pete’s surveillance room.” Olivia sat down in a fancy leather desk chair and motioned for Lucy to sit in one beside her. “He had this stuff installed last year when he thought someone was stealing from him. Turns out he’d just forgotten he’d put a big stack of cash under his bed to keep anyone from stealing it. He ended up keeping the cameras.” Olivia grinned. “Because in addition to being kind of forgetful, he’s also kind of a perv.” She pointed to the monitor on the bottom right corner, which showed a couple in a hallway heavily making out. “But I didn’t bring you up here for
that
,” Olivia said. “I brought you here . . .”

Lucy held her breath.

“
. . .
for this.”

Olivia twisted a few knobs on the control panel, then raised her finger to her lips. “It looks like she’s already started.” Olivia tapped the monitor in the middle and flipped a switch. Liza’s voice came crackling through the speakers.

“. . . we are done now,” Liza said.

On the screen, Liza was sitting at a picnic table in an outdoor courtyard. Across from her was a guy with short brown hair in a black T-shirt, his back to the camera. His shoulders were hunched and he was leaning his head against his hands.

“But there must be a reason,” the boy said. “Please”—his voice cracked—“whatever it is you can tell me . . .”