Unbreak My Heart (10 page)

Olive frowns. “I was just trying to have a discussion about a book we’ve both read,” she says. “
Excuuuuuuse
me!”

It’s silent for a minute, and I take a bite of my sandwich.

“Olive,” I say when I finish swallowing. “I’m sorry I shouted.”

“That’s okay.” She’s already recovered and smiling again. “I know you’re just mad that I’m smarter than you are.”

I give her a patronizing grin.

“Clem?” she asks.

“Livy?”

“Do you think James looks like Huck Finn?”

I laugh. “You never give up!”

“Well, do you?” she asks. “Do you think he’s like Huck at all?”

“Um, I guess I don’t really know. Did Huck have red hair?”

“Not really,” says Olive. “But I think he has Huck’s pluck.”

“Huck’s pluck?” I ask. “Where did you get that?”

“My teacher, Mrs. Perry, told me I had Huck’s pluck,” she says. “I like the way it sounds. Besides, I do think he has pluck. Look!”

I glance over to where Olive’s pointing behind me, and I see that
Dreaming of Sylvia
is just a few hundred feet in the distance.

“Wow,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.
They really
are
following our same route.

“I’ll get the binoculars,” says Olive. Before I can stop her, she’s going down through the hatch and into Dad’s nav station. She’s back in a minute and hands me a big black case.

“You spy on him,” I say. “You’re the one who cares so much about what he’s doing.”

“You don’t like him, Clem?” asks Olive. “I think he’s really fun.”

She smiles, and I swear I almost see a hint of a blush. I’m about to tease her, but then I remember how awful that can be when you’re first starting to like boys. So I refrain.

The binoculars cover almost all of Olive’s face, and she leans on her elbows to help her balance as we hit some waves. I snap a phone pic of her because she looks so silly. A bit of spray comes up onto the boat and she has to pause to wipe off the glass lenses, but finally she gets a good long look.

Then she giggles.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “I thought you weren’t interested.”

“I’m not. But if you’re going to have, like,
reactions
to what’s going on, of course I’m curious.”

Olive smiles at me like she knows something. I turn halfheartedly back to my magazine.

“He’s whistling,” she says after a minute.

“You can’t hear that from here,” I say.

“I can tell. His lips are pursed and he’s snapping his fingers every once in a while.”

“Let me see that,” I say. And then I add, “It sounds ridiculous,” so Olive doesn’t think I’m interested in watching James.

She’s right. He
is
whistling. And he gets this huge grin on his face in between whistling sessions. Has this guy ever known a dark day?

I hand the binoculars back to Olive.

“It appears that you’re right,” I say. “He is whistling.”

“He could make you happy,” says Olive.

“What?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

“I just mean that you’re sad and he’s not, and when he’s around—even through binoculars—you smile more,” says my sister.

“I do not.”

“You do too,” she says. “It’s almost like the old you.”

“Well, who wouldn’t laugh at a guy who’s whistling to himself like a freak?” I sound meaner than I want to. I pick up my magazine. “Put the binoculars back in the nav station before Dad sees they’re gone,” I say to Olive.

She pauses and stares at me for a minute before disappearing dutifully down the hatch.

I look back at
Dreaming of Sylvia
and see James, a tiny little stick figure dancing around on the deck. I used to be happy like that. Didn’t I?

chapter fifteen

Dear Amanda,
I didn’t realize that, sometimes, even if a situation is getting out of control, it happens slowly, in these really small moments. And even if what’s happening is wrong, it can feel like it’s right
.

I got so wrapped up in the fact that something was happening. Someone was
into
me. I didn’t have to be boring old Clem all the time. I had a secret.

I crumple up the paper and add it to the wad of trashed Letters to Amanda in my bottom drawer.

“Don’t you guys think that show about those people in the sixties who drink all the time and treat women like crap is weird?” said Amanda at lunch one day. “I mean, it’s kind of glorifying that behavior, in a way.”

And I guess she had a point or whatever, but it was more like a class topic than something fun to discuss at lunch when your brain is allowed to be off for a minute.

Ethan nodded halfheartedly and kissed her cheek.

I said, “Yeah, true.”

I was eating a leftover slice of pizza with mushrooms on it. “Mushrooms are so emotionally satisfying,” I said.

Ethan’s face lit up. “YES! I’ve always thought that. It’s something about their consistency and how they’re both soft and a little rubbery but also meaty in a way, right?”

I smiled. That was
exactly
what I meant. “Like how a portobello can sub in for a burger. I mean, seriously, that is a major move by a vegetable.”

“I know!” Ethan said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, today I’ll just top your salad, but maybe tomorrow I’ll stick myself between a bun and be your main meal.’”

“Very versatile.” I nod. “And international! I mean, give me some Japanese shiitakes in broth, please.”

“Medicinal, too,” said Ethan, leaning forward over the table. “Did you know that mushrooms are anti-inflammatory and have antiviral properties?”

“I did not know that, but I’m not surprised,” I said. “They’re kind of food superheroes.”

Then I glanced at the rest of the table and saw that they were staring at us in silence. For a moment it had been just me and Ethan and mushroom talk.

“Fungi nerds,” said Henry, turning back to his sandwich.

Amanda smiled at us happily. The guys she’d dated before didn’t really fit in with our friends. They were nice and everything, but just not guys I’d talk to for long periods of time. Ethan seemed different already.

When the bell rang, Ethan asked Amanda if she was free on Friday to go to
Red Water,
this indie film festival–winning movie that I’d been dying to see.

I laughed a little bit, anticipating her response.

“Or maybe the new Kate Hudson?” she said. “It’s playing right downtown.”

“Sure,” said Ethan, and I gave him a sympathetic glance.

Amanda saw. “You know, I’m not into the emo-indie stuff—you should go with Clem.”

I froze mid–Dr Pepper can toss.

“I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your shared supergeekdom,” said Amanda. “Maybe there’ll even be a scene with mushrooms in it!”

I studied her face for a moment, but all I could see was a sunny smile and total ease.

“You up for it, Clem?” asked Ethan. “I hate going to movies alone.”

He picked me up in his mom’s Pontiac—I needed a ride, I’d told Ethan, and he didn’t hesitate to offer.

I got in and we smiled, and it was like,
should we hug or something?
, but we didn’t, we just sat there, and then he said, “Awkward,” and I laughed, and he started to drive and it felt okay again.

“Have you ever played the song game?” I asked him. We were heading out of my neighborhood, winding down the back road to the highway.

“The song game?”

“I’ll take that as a no,” I said. “The song game is when you pick a radio station or shuffle your music, and then you tell the universe that the next song that comes on is how someone else feels about you.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“I’m bad at explaining.” We were listening to this classic rock station and “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones was playing.

I tried to clarify. “Okay, so for example, the next song that comes on the radio will express how you feel about me.”

“Whoa,” he said. “This game is intense.”

He smiled and rubbed his hands on the steering wheel. “Make it a good one, DJ!”

I laughed as the DJ came on to announce the next track.

When “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick came on, I got goose bumps and stared straight ahead at the road.

Even Ethan seemed lost for a way to lighten the moment as the lyrics went on and on … “I’d love you to love me.”

“Wow, that game really works,” he said after a minute. He said it quietly, and I could tell he wasn’t entirely joking.

I looked over at him and smiled, knowing then that we were getting close to crossing a line. I’d played the song game with all of my friends before. But if I got that song for, like, Aaron or Henry, they probably would have made some crude joke about wanting to get in my pants, and we would have laughed about it. It wouldn’t have meant anything. This felt different.

Because the movie we were seeing was an artsy one, we had to drive half an hour out of town to this classic old theater that only shows those kinds of movies. You know, the ones that get nominated for awards but that don’t really play at the stadium-seating, crazy-big screen places.

“I love this theater,” I said as I got out of the car.

“It’s amazing,” said Ethan. “Look at the marquee!”

“I know.” The title of the movie was up in these huge three-foot-high letters, and the stars’ names were listed underneath, like you’d see in some old Hollywood scene. “That’s my favorite thing about this place. Well, aside from the real butter they serve on the popcorn.”

“No way,” said Ethan, his eyes lighting up.

“Totally,” I said. “We can share a large.”

“Awesome.” And then, just like that, he took my hand in his. He held it for a beat before he dropped it and looked at me. His expression seemed wistful.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.” I went straight up to the ticket box so he couldn’t see my face getting red.

We did share popcorn, but we got separate sodas. He wanted Sprite, but I’m strictly a Dr Pepper girl. We didn’t talk about the fact that he had essentially held my hand, but I could tell it was hanging there in the air, filling the spaces between our shared laughter at the movie—which was excellent—and the times when our fingers would brush against each other in the popcorn bag.

On the ride home, we changed the radio to one of those “eighties, nineties, and today” stations, and we played the song game two more times. Once for how Amanda felt about Ethan (we got “Romeo and Juliet” by Taylor Swift, which made me squirm, it was so sickly lovey) and once for how my camp boyfriend Steve felt about me (we got “Beat It” by Michael Jackson, which made us both laugh).

“I guess he’s over you,” said Ethan. “Hard as that is to imagine.”

I know I should have been mad at him for saying things like that, for making the air between us full of that delicious kind of awkward all the time.

But I loved the way Ethan made me feel.

“Do we think ranch dressing drizzled over popcorn is tasty or gross?”