Unbreak My Heart (18 page)

I turn around and carefully look at the sidewalk as I go, noticing some initials, VG + RS, written in the concrete. I see a chalk-drawn hopscotch game in front of the hardware store.

I want to push Facebook from my mind, but it’s still there.

Everyone can tell something’s off with me when I walk into the ice cream parlor. I try to arrange my face the right way, I try to slow my breathing, I try to smile. I study the menu intensely. Olive sees it first.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Mom’s done with her e-mail and she’s eating maple-flavored ice cream. Olive is crunching the lower half of her waffle cone. Dad’s loudly draining the last drops of his vanilla milkshake.

I’m such a damn billboard for my emotions. How do deceptive people do it?

I glance over at the ice cream counter.

“They don’t have peppermint,” I say.

“They have mint chocolate chip,” says Dad.

“Not the same,” I say.

Olive looks at me sympathetically. I sit down and join the family ice cream table, ice-creamless.

When we get back to the boat, I need some in-my-own-cabin time. They didn’t push me to talk earlier, and no one’s asking me to do anything now. Mom starts making dinner, and Olive offers to help. I go into my room and close the door. When I get out my journal, I have trouble starting.

The Facebook stuff is still fresh in my mind, and I write about Ethan and Amanda being back together. When I write about Amanda unfriending me, and how she’s spending the summer with Ethan, I let a few tears fall, now that I’m finally in a semiprivate space. But I don’t bawl my eyes out like I wanted to when I first saw her album. Family ice cream time helped. The flowers in the parking lot helped. Seeing the boat with the sun setting behind it as I walked toward the dock helped. And thinking about James—and seeing him again soon—helped.

I take his drawing out of my drawer and tape it to the wall next to my bed, just so it’ll be there when I need to focus on being in the present. With him, with my family. It’s a reminder of what’s real.

chapter twenty-seven

Dear Amanda,
I know you don’t believe me, but Ethan and
I never hooked up. We never even—

Eventually, out in that field in the county, the sun started getting low in the sky, and Ethan and I both started murmuring about “getting back.” I wondered,
What happens now?

But even though I felt like we could talk about anything and everything, I couldn’t ask Ethan that. I didn’t even know what I
wanted
to happen.

We drove back to town slowly, right at the speed limit. From the moment we got in the car, though, I noticed that something had shifted—things felt off.

For twenty minutes, we were silent.

“Oh,” I said, noticing the gas needle close to
E
. “I should stop for gas.”

“I should really get home,” said Ethan. “Can you drop me off first?”

“Sure.” I faced straight ahead.

Ethan checked his phone. “Shit,” he said. “It’s dead.”

“Mine too.” I’d noticed that when we were in the field. “They were probably straining to find a signal way out there.”

I looked over at Ethan, but he just frowned and put his phone back in his pocket.

He didn’t put his hand over mine as I shifted gears, he didn’t tell me a story or make me laugh, he didn’t even glance in my direction.

By the time we got back into town, we weren’t even listening to music. Ethan hadn’t started up a new playlist after the last one ended. And as we got closer to home, the car got quieter and quieter.

When we pulled into his driveway, it was almost 8:30 p.m., nine hours after I’d picked him up this morning. I wasn’t worried about Mom or Dad—I was sure they’d think I was out with Amanda, enjoying my first day as an official driver. But I felt a sense of loss as I drove into Ethan’s neighborhood, even before I turned into the driveway and saw them.

Amanda’s car was pulled up to Ethan’s house, and she and Ethan’s mom were sitting on the front porch together. Mrs. Garrison must have made iced tea, because there was a pitcher and a plate of sliced lemons on the small table between them. It was such a nice scene. And it made me feel afraid.

I wondered if something bad had happened to Amanda, if she’d needed Ethan or me for an emergency, but she couldn’t find either of us because we were together. I felt guilt gnaw at my stomach, and my face got red and splotchy before I even got out of the car.

But when we stepped into the driveway, they both waved. No, they were just hanging out, waiting for us to get back because they couldn’t get through to us.

I’m sure Amanda was suspicious about where we were, but we still would have been in the clear, probably, if it hadn’t been for the looks Ethan and I both had on our faces. We were guilty of
something
. Our hair was rumpled, we had that sheen of lusty sweat clinging to us, and our eyes were darting, shameful. We hadn’t done anything wrong—not really. But we both knew that we had crossed a line, somehow. And it showed.

I could hardly stutter out a “We were driving on these country roads,” as Ethan said, “We got lost,” at the same time.

Amanda—who’d been half smiling and only slightly annoyed that we weren’t back earlier—looked at me, then at Ethan, then at Ethan’s mom, who was standing up to go inside. She knew.

“What’s going on, Ethan?” asked Amanda, almost shouting.

She didn’t pay any attention to me, even as I looked to her for something—I don’t know what. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.

I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t want to lie about anything. So I panicked. I turned to leave, getting back in the Honda. I didn’t look at Ethan, who was walking up on the porch to try to calm Amanda down. I didn’t look at Amanda again, but I heard her yelling and I could tell she had started to cry. I’d never seen her lose control like this.

The last thing I heard as I reversed out of the driveway was, “With my
fucking friend
, Ethan? My fucking
best friend
?” And I wished Ethan and I had rolled up the windows on the way back.

“Can you
believe
her?”

“Someone told me they had sex in a field.”

“She did that to her
best friend
.”

“Amanda’s way prettier.”

I zombie-walked through the last three days of sophomore year. We had exams, so everyone was just going from test to test, but still, I felt like a hollowed-out shell of Clem Williams.

My parents knew something was wrong. After I got home from dropping off Ethan and facing Amanda, I pretended to be sick. Mom brought me soup in bed and I tried not to burst into tears in front of her. She knew I’d been crying, though.

Olive asked to come in and watch our favorite ABC Family shows on the TV in my room, but I told her no, that I might be contagious, and she stayed away.

All weekend I slept and cried. I stayed off-line because I was too afraid to see if anything was going around about me, but I checked my phone incessantly. I was sure Ethan was going to call, tell me what happened, tell me what he’d said to Amanda.

But he didn’t.

I was even more sure that Amanda would call to at least listen to my side of the story.

But she didn’t.

And so on that Monday morning I went through the motions—showering, drying my hair, putting on lip gloss and a little swipe of mascara. Dad made sure I had a good breakfast. “Can’t have you taking tests on an empty stomach!” he said. Then he kissed my forehead and headed to work, and Olive and I stayed at the table to finish our eggs. She chattered on about end-of-the-year cupcakes and asked me if I wanted her to bring one home.

“No,” I said, moving my eggs around the plate with my fork.

“There’s always extra,” said Olive. “Cameron Brown’s mother makes, like, a gazillion because she’s a bored homemaker.”

I looked up at Olive.

“That’s what Mom says, anyway,” she said.

Of course Mom says that. She has lawyer-mom guilt because she leaves early and gets home late and doesn’t have time to make cupcakes for Olive’s class. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need the sugar.”

And maybe because it was the first time I’d met her eyes since the Ethan incident, but Olive suddenly looked at me like she knew—
really
knew—that I was not okay.

I saw what seemed like fear and concern flicker on her face, but then she smiled reassuringly.

“Want to borrow my lucky pen for your exams?” she asked.

“No,” I said, grabbing my plate and taking it into the kitchen.

“It might help,” said Olive, ignoring my rejection. She walked to the entryway where her backpack was sitting, and I heard her rifling through the pockets.

I leaned back on the kitchen island and tried to steady myself. I had no idea what I would face at school.

“Here,” she said, coming into the kitchen with a pink pen. It had a feather on the end of it and looked utterly ridiculous.

“Thanks,” I said.

When I got to school, I was gripping the pink feather-pen in my right hand as I walked through the hallways. That’s when I heard the whispers. That’s when I felt the stares.

I knew instantly that even though no one had called
me
this weekend, there had been a lot of talk. A few people came up to me and said things like “Ethan’s a jerk,” or “Amanda had it coming,” but it’s not like that made me feel better. Actually, those comments made me feel worse. Ethan wasn’t a jerk, I thought, and Amanda
didn’t
have it coming; that remark came from mean girls, mostly. Despite those wincing moments, though, I didn’t really feel anything at all. It was like I was watching someone else go through this, watching another girl’s life fall apart.

I think Amanda’s therapist mom would call it “distancing”—avoiding emotion so I wouldn’t have to feel the devastation full on.

I kept my head down, walking through the halls with a hunched back and a protective books-in-front-of-chest stance. But when I saw Amanda’s sparkling blue ballet flats coming toward me as pondered where to eat my lunch, I instinctively looked up. I caught her eye. She looked like she’d been crying too.