Unbreak My Heart (2 page)

“What do you need me to help with?” I ask. I try to keep any sort of “tone” out of my voice. It’s not my family’s fault I’ve become a pariah.

“You could make sure everything’s out of the car and then drive it over to long-term parking,” says Mom. “It’ll be your last chance to break in that license for a while.”

“Okay,” I say. And then, to Olive, “Come on.”

My sister smiles widely and I stare back at her and try to look remotely friendly. I owe it to her to let her tag along, especially since I’ve been nasty all week.

Mom hands me the car keys, and Olive and I climb up the short ladder into the cockpit before carefully stepping off the boat and onto the dock.

I walk briskly toward the parking lot, and she jogs to keep up.

“Do you think Dad will let me unfurl the jib when we get underway?” she asks.

“Probably.” My voice has a who-cares tone that I don’t try to hide.

When we get to the car, Olive makes a big show of putting on her seat belt, even though we’re only driving about a hundred feet to the long-term parking lot.

I give her a look and she says, “What? You’ve only been driving for, like, two weeks.”

Two weeks exactly, actually. I got my license two Saturdays ago. That afternoon, I wanted to see who was around to go for a drive. I ended up texting Amanda and a few other people, but only one person responded right away. Unfortunately.

I pull into a spot in the shade and wrench up the parking brake.

“Nice,” says Olive. “I didn’t feel unsafe for a moment.”

“I’m so glad.” I step out of the car. When the sun hits my face, I close my eyes for a second to shake off the memory that’s encroaching.

“Clem?”

I open my eyes and look down at my little sister, who’s suddenly solemn.

“What?”

“I’m glad you’ve stopped crying.”

I half smile at her. “Me too.” I don’t tell her that just because the tears have mostly dried up, it doesn’t mean I’m better.

As we walk back to
The Possibility
, I see Mom unsnapping the blue canvas mainsail cover. Dad must want to get underway.

Before we go, though, I know we have to do one more thing.

I step back onto the boat and Dad pokes his head out from down below. “Ready?” he asks.

“Do we have a choice?” I ask.

“No!” Dad laughs really loudly. He is
so
happy right now. It’s almost contagious. Almost.

Mom folds up the sail cover and sits down on the cockpit seat. Dad settles into his captain’s chair, and Olive takes her perch next to him, the ultimate navigator. I sit back on the seat opposite Mom and tuck my legs underneath me.

“Now,” starts Dad. “What do you see?”

He smiles and looks around at us. “Livy?”

My sister is still at an age where she’s into this family game. Whenever we “embark on a new voyage”—which is my dad’s fancy way of saying “go sailing” (you’d think we were heading into outer space)—we have to go around the cockpit and state what we want from the trip, what we see in our future days of sailing.

“I am ready for a really fun summer,” says Olive. “I see swimming and fishing and cooking and eating and exploring islands.”

Olive likes to jump off the boat when we anchor and swim to the closest land, which is usually some random mud-beach where there’s nothing to do and no sand to lie out on. But I get it—I used to like that “explorer” game too.

“Excellent! All of that is very doable,” says Dad. “Clem?”

“Mom can go.”

“Okay,” says Dad. “Julia?”

“I see a warm, wonderful summer filled with family days,” says Mom. She’s taken off her straw hat and is leaning her head back so her face catches the sun. Her brown hair is styled into that short Mom cut, but she also has these freckles that sometimes make her look really young when she smiles. Like now.

“Family time!” says Dad, clapping his hands together. “I love it! Clem?”

I look at my dad, who’s smiling naively in my direction. He’s treating us like we’re his first-grade class. Suddenly I’m just annoyed. I’m sixteen years old. I don’t need to sit here, being forced to do some roundtable “What I See” exercise with my way-younger sister and my dopey parents. This is their dream summer—not mine.

“Clem?” he asks again. “What do you see?”

“I see a summer in exile.”

chapter two

We met on the first day of kindergarten, at the Play-Doh station. I was rolling a big blue ball in my hands, and Amanda asked to see it. Then she added a turned-up mouth and two eyes with her pieces of yellow clay.

After that, whenever anything made me sad, Amanda would say, “Do you need me to make you a smile?” She was like my friend–soul mate.

We talked about
everything
—from our first crushes in third grade to our late-arriving periods (Amanda got hers in eighth grade, I got mine in ninth)—while we sat on my bed and faced this big mirror on the opposite wall. We called it mirror-talking. My parents thought we were crazy, but there was something comforting about looking into the mirror at each other, and ourselves, while we talked. It made saying things easier somehow, just looking at reflections instead of the real person.

Maybe that’s why, for the past week, I’ve been trying to write her a letter about what happened. I can’t call her, and now that I’m stuck on this boat I certainly can’t go see her. So I brought a whole pad of light green paper with my initials, CSW, in dark blue script at the top.

Dear Amanda,
How can you just forget the entire history of
our friendship? Doesn’t being best friends for
over half our lives mean anything?

I crumple up the paper before I can write any more.

“Kidnap Picnic!” Amanda had yelled as I opened the door after she’d rung the bell three boisterous times in a row.

Last summer she had a tendency to show up unexpectedly with a plan for the day. Usually, I went with it.

She stood on our front porch in cutoffs, a striped T-shirt, and oversized sunglasses, and she carried a beach bag that was almost twice the size of her entire body.

“My mom dropped me off. I’ve got sandwiches, chips, two sodas, and four magazines,” she said, walking past me through the door into the house. “But I forgot sunblock, so grab some when you go upstairs to get changed—forty-five or higher, please.” She patted a rosy cheek. “I’m fair.”

Amanda smiled and raised her sunglasses to the top of her head as she plopped down on the couch in the living room.

“I have to ask my—”

“Mr. and Mrs. Williams, Clem and I are going to the park!” she shouted, cupping her hands together like a megaphone. Then she grinned at me. “Done.”

Ten minutes later, with a nod from my mom and just one round of “Why can’t I go too?” whining from Olive—which was shut down by Dad telling her he’d take her to the pool instead—Amanda and I were heading for the park at the center of my neighborhood. We each took a handle of her giant bag of picnic supplies and walked straight to our usual spot—a central patch of grass in the sun where lots of people pass by as they cross from the soccer field to the ice cream truck.

“This way we can watch everyone, but people can also see
us
,” she told me the first time we’d staked out this area two years earlier. Because this park was in walking distance of my house, our parents had been letting us “picnic” there since the summer we were thirteen.

I had traded my pajamas for a pair of bright red shorts and a white tank top, but as soon as we spread out the orange-and-blue-patterned blanket Amanda had brought for us to sit on, she peeled off her striped shirt to reveal a white triangle bikini top with multicolored butterflies on it.

My eyes must have gotten big, because she said, “This is why I really needed that sunblock.”

It wasn’t that people in the park didn’t sometimes wear bikini tops, it was just that
we
never had. And my stiff beige bra under a boring plain white tank suddenly seemed really homely in comparison to what my best friend was wearing.

Amanda read all of these thoughts on my face. We were connected that way.

“Ooh, I should have told you I had on a bikini top!”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I mean, not that we have to wear the same thing, but …” I stopped, not sure how to phrase
I want to look cute too!
without sounding whiny.

“I have an idea,” said Amanda, reaching over to pull up the bottom of my tank top.

I stiffened.

“Clemmy,
trust me
,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

So I lifted my hands and she looped the bottom of my tank through the neckline, creating a makeshift bikini in one fell swoop. She adjusted it over my bra straps expertly.

I looked down at my chest.
Not bad.

“Thanks!” I said.

“One more thing.” Amanda reached into her bag and brought out a bottle of bright red nail polish called
That Girl
. “I’ll do yours first.”

With our glossy ruby nails, we sat up on the blanket, peering from behind dark sunglasses and lazing around like we owned the park, giggling at our horoscopes and reading guy advice from
Seventeen
out loud.

And by the end of the afternoon, I felt as cherry-red hot as Amanda did, because she rubbed off on me like that.

chapter three

Day three on the Illinois River. We started out near our house, which is close to Joliet, and now we’re heading toward Peoria. I know the route in great detail because Dad has navigation maps all over the place. He’s constantly updating us on knot speeds and wind patterns. Thrilling.

My parents are big boat people. Dad was in the navy for a few years after college, and Mom grew up with parents who sailed. They’ve always had this dream that we’d go live on a sailboat, but they also have jobs and stuff—and Olive and I have school—so it’s not like the dream was very realistic. Until my dad, who’s a teacher, convinced my mom, who’s a lawyer, that she had enough seniority to request a sabbatical this year. Thus, the Great Summer of Boating.

Hoo
-ray.

Despite the fact that my mom is officially the first mate of the ship, meaning my dad’s right-hand woman, Olive is trying to usurp that role by wearing a silly navy hat and shouting “Aye-aye, Captain!” whenever my dad breathes. I have no interest in participating in the sailing, and I’ve mostly been down below in my cabin listening to music and itching for an Internet signal. But I know I’d just make myself more unhappy if I could stalk people online and read their “OMG we’re having so much fun this summer!!!” updates. It’s better to pretend Bishop Heights doesn’t exist.

Tonight we’re anchored in a tiny inlet off the main river, which is pretty narrow. Olive helps Mom lower the chain, tugging on the anchor to be sure it caught. I sit in the cockpit waiting for dinner—“SpaghettiO Surprise al-fresco,” Mom calls it. She brings out bowls of what appears to be a mix of SpaghettiOs and hamburger meat, plus canned peas and sour cream baked together. I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it is definitely from
A Man, A Can, and a Plan.
After we eat, I go to my cabin and continue being a moody loner. It’s hard to be antisocial on a forty-two-foot boat, but I’m managing pretty well so far. As long as I eat family dinner with them, my parents mostly leave me alone.

Still, as I hear Mom and Dad and Olive play a game of Triple Solitaire on the fold-up table—laughing and shouting and slapping their hands down on each other’s cards—I feel a pang.

I shut off my iPod and listen for a while. At first they’re talking about the game. Olive is small, but she has really fast hands.

“No fair!” says Dad. “I couldn’t tell if that ace was spades or clubs.” He wears thick glasses, so he’s always complaining like this and using his eyes as an excuse.

“I’m the only one with just two eyes in this game,” says Mom. “And I’m wiping the floor with your combined eight.”

Olive stays quiet, but I can almost picture her concentration as she shuffles through the cards in her hands, three at a time, three at a time. She’s always got a plan.

Suddenly I hear a wild round of slap-downs, and then a victorious “I win!” from Olive. “Never count your chickens before the cart, Mom.”

I hear my parents crack up—Olive is always mixing two expressions, like “Never count your chickens before they hatch” and “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” I smile in spite of my perpetual bad mood. But then I hear my sister’s feet coming down the hallway toward my door, and I frown again.

She knocks.

“What?” I ask.

“Want to play cards?” She’s hanging on the door handle as she peers into my room. I watch her eyes roam around, taking in my scene. iPod at the ready, balled-up tissues on the nightstand, pink feathered pen, and journal open at my side with manic marks in it.

I swat the journal closed in case her glasses are strong enough to let her read from that far away. I’ve been writing about Ethan again.