The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Page 10

  Supercollider

  I’ve dialed and buzzed her many, many times. It’s two days since the Kiss Heard Round the World, though the movie trailer version of it plays surround-sound high-def, nonstop, through my flap-happy skull. I’ve dialed her four too many times.

  She’s not Call Missed. She’s not Call Waiting. She’s No New Messages. She’s Zero New Buzzes.

  She’s Not Calling Me Back.

  * * *

  I’m freaking out.

  I walk. I jog. I swim. I think about not thinking about dragging tars. I’m in motion. I hear scientists on the news say supercollider and I know what they mean.

  What I don’t do is buzz my apple-Jacks. They buzz and I pounce at my speak, Eve on my mind, but it’s never her and I die a little inside. From her messages, I can tell even Maya’s beginning to take it personally. Zoë’s beyond jammed. In her last buzz she was all, I’m sending to China for a new, more interactive model of mail-order apple-Jack. But I can’t talk to them. They could crack my little egghead shell and my beans would spill out every which way and then the whole flip world would know that I kissed Eve. They would never understand.

  I’m errands-girl extraordinaire around Oma’s house, always up for jetting out and snagging this or that, never resting long by her wicker sofa bed—the jitters are back, the sweats, too. Mostly I pick up more double chocolate crunch ice cream for Om, who’s either asleep or a massive munchy hippo. I wonder for a minute if Marta isn’t sneaking her canna treats of some sort. When I see him around, Dad’s all leaning on me about college and figuring out my rooming and preseason situation, and I realize I forgot I was going. How can there be a thing called college when there’s a betty called Eve. I pause in my sit-ups and say, “I’m beat, Dad. Can’t wait.”

  I pedal and pump on my spin and remember Eve still hasn’t dialed me back. I get home. I run. I do sprints between telephone poles. My nose drips and I spit thick mucus and threads stick to my lips and I wipe them on my sleeve. My lungs burn and my legs are heavy lactic acid logs and I’m hacked and wired and my guts are chock-full of jumping beans hopping their way back to Mexico.

  I run and I run and I run.

  * * *

  My counting obsession is ruining my life. The longer Eve doesn’t buzz, the more anxious and amped I get, the more I count. I’ve graduated from the innocent simplicity of counting steps, to spelling out full sentences, ticking off their letters, over and over, in my crank, cracked brain. Phrases loop in my mind, round and round, like a rogue Ferris wheel spun way out of whack. I count and I count. So mop, so OCD. Hello, my name is Lucy Butler and I’m a compulsive letter counter.

  Back when Zo and I would roll E for weeks on end, those were my peak Ophelia counting days. The more I rolled, the less I slept. The less I slept, the more I tweaked. The more I tweaked, the more I spelled. Then cut. Sliding blade edges up the inside of my arm or over my hip, across my ribs. Scratching out words or letters with my fingernails into the back of my hand or inner thigh. It was the only thing I knew could calm me down, mellow me out, hit reset. Totally Ophelia, totally over.

  But the letter thing is back. It starts out as a thought, and that repeats, and then I’m spelling out the words, adding spaces and punctuation, until it all fits just so. Right now on rotation is, she isn’t dialing me back. I tick my fingers, one, two, three, four, five, to check my mental work.

  S-H-E-(space)-I-S-N-(apostrophe)-T-(space)-D-I-A-L-I-N-G-(space)-M-E-(space)-B-A-C-K

  With no period, it’s perfection. Twenty-five ticks. Switch and even. Balanced and orderly. Ahhh. Feel the obsessive-compulsive bliss.

  Another phrase comes, after a sharp-tongued call from my sister-Jack wondering where I’m at.

  F-L-I-P-(space)-O-F-F-(comma)-(space)-M-A-R-T-A

  Fifteen ticks with the comma.

  And another pops up at will.

  Y-U-P-(space)-I-(space)-K-I-S-S-E-D-(space)-A-(space)-B-E-T-T-Y

  Twenty with no comma after yup.

  I’m tempted to buzz Eve’s speak and write:

  Y-O-U-(apostrophe)-R-E-(space)-D-R-I-V-I-N-G-(space)-M-E-(space)-O-P-H-E-L-I-A

  Twenty-five.

  But I don’t.

  * * *

  I’m on my spin, pedaling away, zooming up and down hills, thinking about Eve, and high school, and college, and Eve. It’s been five days. Five.

  Zoë and Maya have each rung about twenty hundred times, and Castle’s buzzed twice, and I keep my head down, eyes on the tar. I roll up at Oma’s and brake to a stop. I hop off and lean my spin against the old pool area fence, looking out over the once-brimming, chlorine-laden waters now filled in and grassed over, a fertile patch of overgrown green marking its once-rectangular depression. I remember a few years back when Oma had it filled in, after Opa passed, and all us wee-Jacks had gotten too big for summertime days dippin’ and divin’ in the sunshine. She was crying and I didn’t understand why. Now, suddenly, I do.

  Swimming lessons, I remember. Being fresh outta kindergarten, popping animal floaty toys with Marta and wearing their skins like hides. Operation Crime Scene—grinding colored chalk along the ridges of our cousins’ small, glistening bodies and taking testimonials from Mom and Dad and the aunties asking, Where were you on the night of August the second?

  The smell of wet tar, strawberries grown by Oma working summer-long, bent at her waist, knee-deep in garlic scapes, lettuce greens, parsley, seed-headed weeds. Eve Brooks and I, in sixth, holding freeze pops to bee stings on the balls of our feet, the tiny, buzzing bodies meeting their makers in the far patch of clover doubling as croquet pitch. Marta sending my ball flying with one crack of her mallet, Eve always taking the extra turn. Badminton tournaments till dusk with the aunts and Mom and Dad drinking down the sun. The good ole days.

  I take off my helmet and walk inside, peek my head into Oma’s quiet room, push my hand into my hard-pounding heart. Auntie Kay is helping her eat a bowl of chicken noodle. Oma stops, looks up at me.

  “Heya, Oms,” I say. “Long time no see.”

  She smiles hazily, nods her head. I take a breath and tread lightly across the carpet, on tiptoes—for no reason whatsoever—and lean over, wrap my arms around her tiny, angular body. She sighs and pulls me into a warm, bony-armed hug, and when I straighten up, Oma’s eyes are cloudy, far away. She searches my face.

  “How’s that sweet girl?” she says. “Your friend, little Evie?” and I laugh at her bizarre mental powers, run my digits along the impossible softness of her hand as I did as a wee-Jack during sleepovers, when she’d read Mart and I stories before bed.

  “She’s beat,” I say. “I’ll tell her you say hey.”

  “Do that,” she says, her breathing getting heavy, and Kay gives me a nod. I step aside, watch her help Oma put away a few more mouthfuls of chicken noodle, and then slip away into the clutter and motion of Oma’s dimly lit living room.

  I fall back onto the couch beside my sister, secretly wipe at the small pool of tears brimming in my eyes. I breathe, slow, again and again, matching the Beeps I hear from Oma’s adjacent room.

  Marta groans and I look down at the floor where she sits, slumped. She’s sulking as another turn of Mille Bornes (our German family’s favorite French card game) passes her by, Uncle Edgar gloating, telling me how he’s creaming her and his sons with an evil stream of doled out Flat Tires and Stops, a massive, scat-eating grin spread wide across his red, ruddy face. I lean in, scat some trash on Marta’s behalf, and finally, after much heated faux-Français banter, Marta gets a Spare Tire. And then a GO. With only fifty miles left to win, Edgar’s one-dimensional rig runs outta petro via an Out of Gas from his oldest son and Marta coasts to an easy win.

  “Karma’s a killer, eh, Ed?” I laugh, and Marta, shuffling the cards, chuckles beside me, leans her shoulder into mine. I can’t remember the last time we touched. We look up, see the aunts talking heatedly in the kitchen, and my heart flutters, my chest tightens. The living room goes hush as we listen for the Beep Beep of Oma
’s pulse.

  And it’s still there. It sounds and we all remember to breathe.

  “She’s hanging in,” Uncle Ed sighs reverentially, slapping his cards on the floor.

  “Another round?” asks Mart.

  “Deal me in,” I say, and scoot down onto the floor.

  Galaxies

  Everyone’s crashpadded out in the spare rooms, all the lights are low, and I’m downstairs in Oma’s musty basement, shifting letter magnets on the icebox’s mottled white hide, spelling out the names of as many of her myriad of mysteriously deceased cats as I can manage to remember. Starting with Twinkle Eyes on the line down to Hot Wheels. So far I have ten. I pull open the sticky door, look inside, scope three mason jars filled with green-colored goo, a Ninja Turtle action figure frozen in each. I laugh ’cause I remember this day, when Marta and the cousin Jacks and I played Turtles Get Cryogenically Frozen and we made Oma whip us up some of her world-famous soap-and-glue slime. We were all having a jolly ole time slopping our Turtles around in their jars of muck when Marta’s fell and smashed on the floor and nobody would help her towel up the goo that spread like sticky green lava under the fridge, oozing and conjoining with twenty decades of cat hair and dust and dead bugs. Needless to say, the fun stopped there and we ditched our Turtles in the icebox for later. Or never, as it turns out.

  It’s massive weird because I’m so horny right now I’m making me uncomfortable. It’s literally the last way I want to feel in my Oma’s old basement, rifling through her old fridge. And just then, Eve, she finally dials.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “What’s eggs?”

  Crickets.

  “You called back,” I finally say, squinting into the glare of the refrigerator light.

  “I’m massive sorry. I’ve been gigging doubles the past few days.”

  I’m silent.

  “You’re jammed.”

  I’m not jammed enough. “I’m … it’s fine.”

  More crickets.

  “So, the other night.”

  “Word. I’m sorry about that.”

  “No,” she says quick. “No. Don’t be that.”

  “Oh. Okay. ’Cause I’m not.”

  And she laughs, miles away. Galaxies rush between us, old airwaves of the first radio shows, stars and planets. Then space. And silence.

  “Me neither.”

  I smile, realizing I’m violently shaking a Ninja Turtle jar in my left hand. I put it down on the counter, watch the condensation pool around the base, smooth down my bangs.

  She sighs. “I mean, my apple-Jacks would so flip if they found out.” And I know she’s right. “And, like, I dunno.”

  My heart is sinking fast, ballast balls careening down to a dark, ominous ocean floor. “What about that heart-Jack of yours? You gonna spill to him?”

  “What heart-Jack?”

  “Huh?”

  “Turns out that clash-Jack was scheming on me after all.”

  “I guess maybe I heard that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  I laugh, and close the icebox door, spell her name with the magnets in all yellow letters. (Space)-E-V-E-(space).

  “So,” she says.

  “So.”

  We fall hush again.

  “Listen. It’s not like this has to be some massive big deal,” I say.

  “Totally. I know.”

  “I just wanna, like, be near you all the time. Stalk you and sleep in the bushes beside your house and breathe all over the back of your neck when you’re getting in your car.”

  She laughs. “Oh, Beatbug, you really are something special.” She sighs into the phone. “What are you doing right now?”

  Stupid question.

  Linkin’ Logs

  Eve and I are standing again in her dark kitchen. I’m near coma with nerves and she’s giddy and wide-eyed, bouncing Ping-Pong-style off the walls. I know how she feels. I’m superfly in my trusty navy hat, and I play it cool. Cryogenic.

  After I help her put away a heap of swanky lawn furniture and take down streamers and a HAPPY GRADUATION sign—the aftermath of a toaster I clearly wasn’t invited to—we’re raiding her folks’ sauce stash and finding too little. Shots on an empty gut and I think we’re pretending we’re more bombed than we are. We heel it upstairs and I know she’s waiting for me to do something. Anything. But I’m arctic stone. Paralyzed.

  A lava lamp glows against terra-cotta-painted walls and I read and reread song lyrics pinned to her wall, each one scrawled out in multicolored marker designs on paper tacked between magazine photos of giraffes and rivers and trees. I stand and spin some tunes on her old turntable. She plugs in white Christmas-tree lights that wind in looping shapes along her walls and ceiling. I scan a shelf of beat glass orbs—glorified paperweights—bubbles and streaks of color blown and frozen into their clear bellies. I pick one up, put it down.

  “Word, Thumbs. These are eggs.”

  Eve smiles and blazes up some incense. I sneeze, wish I had some canna.

  We’re standing in the middle of the room and I yank on a string of beads hitched to a fan above my skull and the blades whir slowly to life. I watch them going round and round and then Eve’s humming crank bad to some Etta, taking a swig of tepid Southern Comfort. I close my lids. I’m thinking about a tar.

  Just then a warmth—her breath on my face comes quick and hot, syrupy with sauce. Then her mouth’s on mine. Her lips are wet.

  She envelops my lower lip, pulling slightly, with a soft pressure, and her teeth, biting lightly. I open my mouth a crack and her breath head-on collides with mine, and I’m flooded full by her nectarous, boozy air.

  Time stops. All clocks are still, wouldn’t dare tick. Or tock.

  Down, deep into my lungs, I inhale our kiss and she travels light speed through my body and pushes, fiery hot and scorching, into my fingers and toes.

  The very tips of our tongues touch, and then push. And pull. We’re Slip ’n Slide, we’re dancing. Then she’s gone, as quickly as she came. I pull open my lids and all I see is her face. Her fingers press tiny scallops into her shining strawberry lips, and her eyes are massive wide, but then the corners of her mouth curl and she smiles.

  She’s giggling, blinking, and a massive grin hits me fast and furious. She’s cracking up as she sits back down on her bed and I sit, too, rubber, like Gumby, and the edges of our hands touch. I curl my pinkie around hers. Linkin’ Logs.

  I remember: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I yank off my navy hat and stuff it into my skinnies’ back pocket. She sighs and drags her hand over her curly golden hair and I’m waxing full again and shining bright. I look smack into her eyes and she laughs, opening her mouth to speak, and I kiss her.

  I kiss her. And I kiss her. And I kiss her.

  Tag, You’re It

  I wake up in Eve’s bed, feeling strange, somehow split right up the middle. Like half of me is here, and the other half—quiet and alone—is lost, but somewhere near. Across town, the steady Beep Beep of time ever echoing in my ears.

  I pull Eve’s arm off my chest and shimmy out of her sheets. I’m remembering how we went quiet after talking for hours, side by side, my mitt propped under my skull as she nestled in, her head on my heart cage. I was shocked she wasn’t thrown across the room by my fast-pumping heart. Ba-boom, ba-boom.

  And now here I am, up and heeling it out. Silent, as she sleeps.

  I motor over to Oma’s, the cold wheel strange under my clammy digits, the heater pumping dank wind into my tired eyes. I slink into the drive, tail between my legs. In her bed, Eve’s waking up, thinking I’m there. But I’m not. I’m here, and as the familiar, deathly silence descends, I couldn’t regret it more.

  * * *

  Oma has a rough go the next day and night and things are feeling massive bleak in the a.m., so Mart and Miles and I heel it to the grocery to give the aunts and Dad some space. I haven’t dialed Eve, and she hasn’t dialed me,
and at the deli counter I start to cry and my sibling-Jacks think it’s ’cause of Oma and I’m not so sure it isn’t.

  “‘Emotional infant’ is the phrase I think you’re looking for,” I say, Miles taking my hand, but Marta just smiles. A rare bird.

  “It’s so flip, Lu, ’cause the last time I came here that’s exactly what I did,” and I laugh at the cold glare of fluorescent lights and slabs of dead animal, sad and happy to my core, and start blubbering all over again. They escort me to the truck, where we binge on Oma’s double chocolate crunch and get massive coma on sugar.

  Back home, I dial Zoë, the words, the story of Eve and me, at the tip of my tongue. But Zoë’s all steamed, saying, “What thinkhole you fall down, thithta-Jack? We thought you’d detherted the troopth!”

  “Thtop that,” I say, working to play along. “You know I couldn’t thurvive without you,” and I tell her I’ve been buried deep dealing with the situation with Oma.

  “Um, what situation?” she says, and I spill the whole, ugly scoop. Zoë can’t really stay mad at me after this and tells me the Cats Plus Gid are meeting at the Falls for an early morning swim and I tell her I’m in.

  At the shore, our Fools Band of Four ditch our shoes, shorts, and hoodies and wade in, the cold water streaming up to our bathing suit bottoms. Gideon jives about shrinkage and Zoë and I jive about him jiving about shrinkage. The rocks are slick-rick sludge coated until we get closer to the base of the falls, where freshwater fish with translucent green and pink scales dart between pockmarked gray boulders and smooth, iron-colored stones. The waterfall leaves its bed ten feet above where we stand and the liquid pounds thick over the rift. A lion of a falls, it foams and smacks and roars. We shout to each other but our voices are lost. We’re all a whoop and hollering and playing tag-you’re-it with the spray.