The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  I issue a short, echoing laugh and Eve’s face softens to a small, lovely smile, the test in her hand falling heavy to her side. I whistle, slapping my mitt on the sink as she stoops to slide the test and box deep into her purse.

  “Holy. Crank,” I say.

  She looks up. “Holy. Massive. Crank.” And we’re laughing, until we’re not and then it’s sort of crickets.

  I feel the oxygen circulating again through my limbs, but see Eve isn’t recovering quite as quick. The corners of her mouth are turned down. And I’m desperate for that smile again.

  “When I heard you in the stall and I had blood and guts all over myself, it’s like I was Bathroom Troll reincarnate,” I say. “Remember? Come out, come out, whoever you are! You were there.”

  She nods. “I was so flip over that. You flap-Jacks were so clash to that poor girl.”

  “Truer words,” I laugh, and she smiles, a light blush of color coming to her cheeks. She opens her mouth to say something but then the door is swinging open. And speaking of lowlife, underage seed, here comes Nate Gray’s perfect floating head peering around the edge. He sees me and grins. I show my teeth.

  “Hey, babe,” he says to Eve, voice loud, sugar dripping from the curled-up corners of his slippery lips. “What’re you ace ladies up to, anyways? Talking about periods? Or me?” Eve looks at me and our eyes go wide.

  “You, Gray,” I say, stifling a laugh. “Always you. What else is there?” and he grins, looks convinced.

  “We weren’t talking about anything,” Eve says, pulling her lips tight as she yanks the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She looks in the mirror, dragging the tip of her finger under her eye, wiping away the small charcoal smudge I’d been admiring and I realize that if I admit to myself how much I want her, this ghost from my past, it’s likely I’ll go insane. So, instead, I robotically wash my hands and stare into the water as they lather like it’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Clash,” Nate hisses as he feverishly scans a new buzz. “You clash cog!”

  I eyeball Eve. “Crick-ets,” I whisper softly and she laughs a teeny tiny bit and I wonder what it would be like to make her laugh all the time. Like as a full-time gig.

  “Eve, babe, let’s go!” Nate blurts, then closes his eyes, bringing it down a notch. “You look ace, obviously. But we’re way tardy and I still gotta drop you off. My apple-Jacks are gonna ream me hard a new one.”

  “Better hustle,” I say. “Wouldn’t want him to miss out.”

  Nate smirks. “Ha, ha, Lucy Butler. I’m massive gay and like it up the butt. So riot.”

  I’m surprised he knows my name.

  “Okay,” Eve says. “Be easy. Both of you.” But she’s smiling at me sidelong as she slides on peach-scented lip gloss. She steals another glance at Nate, sees he’s gone mentally MIA again, and leans over. I breathe her in. “Lu,” she whispers, puckering and pursing her newly shining lips. “For real, that thing we were just talking about, y’know … the test?”

  “Don’t mention it,” I say. “I won’t.”

  She lets out a gust of fruit-fragrant air. “Switch.” She full-swing smiles, her sweet, sad eyes POW! WAM! ZAP!-ing me in the mirror. Holy infatuation, Catwoman. “Good luck,” she says. “With the, um, laundry. Stick it under the hand dryer for two shakes and it’ll be good as new.”

  I open my mouth but there’s nothing, hot air.

  “’Kay, babe,” she chirps to Nate, straightening up and crunching a handful of ginger curls in her hand. “Let’s jet,” and she drops her makeup into her bag. She glances up at me again and her mouth is a small crescent moon. “Thanks,” she whispers, grabbing my wrist, and then she’s gone.

  History

  I slow-dissolve the whole ordeal in my mind as I heel it back to Ms. Hayes. In her room, everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same. Of course it does. But something’s different. I hand her back her sweater and she puts it on and it’s three o’clock and then I leave. Just like that.

  I heel it across the nearly empty student parking lot to my banger and visions of an alternative reality dance through my mind. Eve: dog-tired and greasy-haired, a roly-poly pukester perched on her chest. Nate Gray: beer-bellied and goateed, distractedly pushing a stroller with one hand as the other buzzes his flap-Jacks homoerotic come-ons in dude-bro jargon. Man-o, that betty got lucky with that negative.

  I stand beside my banger and press redial on my speak. I’ve been trying to reach University Bloody Admissions all day. “Thank you for holding,” Robo-Cog singsongs. “An agent will be with you shortly.”

  “Flipit,” I say and slam it shut. College is chewing me an ulcer and I haven’t even started yet.

  I slide into my banger and stew in the wet, stale air. I think about Eve Brooks and I cook in the new, moist oven of an impending heartache. Not this time, I think. Not with Evelyn Goddamn Brooks. And I push her sad, wonderful mug from my mind, trying to protect the last feeble shreds of this quivering mass of muscle I call my heart. Eve Brooks—she’s too taken. She’s too straight. She’s long gone. She’s History.

  Ms. Hayes? Ms. Hayes who?

  Sailors & Cowboys

  It’s pouring, so I decide to take a walk. Think maybe a pack or two or twenty of tars will clear my fog-machine mind.

  I slip into my rubber knee-high boots, and pull on my raincoat with the smiley-faced whales on the inside liner. I snag my blue knit sailor’s cap from my bag, an old seaman’s beanie that’s slowly fusing to my hair from overwear. I’ve been sporting this damn thing all winter, cock-eyed and sly, and I pop the collar of my shirts and coats like some secret-agent mystery man. Man-o, I’m so cool, I make ice jealous.

  I pull my hood up, and with my head down and my mitts in my pockets, I stalk into the cold foggy face of spring streets, my witness the empty sky. As I walk, I count in my mind the one hundred and ninety-four steps up the hill and around the corner to where I can pop off the road and down into the soggy-bottomed woods, where I know Dad or my wee brother, Miles, won’t drive or bike by me and throw a conniption fit.

  My boots slurp through the melt and muck on the trail and I blaze like a smoldering smokestack. I think about everything, I think about Eve. I think about nothing, I think about Eve. I realize I still have her digits memorized from when we were tiny tykes and I wonder if I could ever just call. Just pick up my phone and dial. Talk for hours about nothing, like we used to.

  I drag and think about sailors. Beat sailors on big, old, rusty boats that catch slick fish with thick-roped nets that require endless mending. I imagine I look like a sailor. I hold my lit tar between my lips, and inhale like the Marlboro Man, squinting as the smoke singes my eyes and fills the corners of my hood. I rub together my cold red mitts and think of the sailors rubbing together their cold red mitts just before tying massive, twined knots of figure eights and loops and twists, the freezing, pelting rain ricocheting off their rubber hats. I think I would make a kill sailor. That, or a cowboy.

  I mull over the wee tykes in Ms. Hayes’s freshie English class and how in school, I’m role-model teacher’s assistant and I strut my stuff, presenting well the myth I know who I am. The cast of characters is the same as it was in my day; there’s the class badrat, pulling a ’tude and talking back to earn the only attention she’s ever gonna get; the jester, first to the punch so that his crank attendance and slipping grades aren’t; the shy betty crushing on me, just as hard as I do on Ms. Hayes; and the class flap-Jack, shouting come-ons to me in mezzo-soprano tones to prove he’s a big boy in front of his little buds.

  I know if any of these wee-Jacks could see me now, they’d start dragging tars—if they haven’t already. I remember. That was me. Though don’t get me wrong—99.9 percent of me is massive repulsed by the whole crank deal and I hope they never get the nic itch. I’ve seen the pictures of blackened lungs, the videos of skin-and-bone elders, wheezing through an artificial larynx. Dr. Mom made sure her three children were sufficiently tobacco-traumatized
as kids—that is, before she played out her vanishing act, in her wake instructing us in the mysterious merits of abandoning your brood.

  All I know is, I hate myself for smoking so much. And if I ever start kissing anyone again I’ll quit in an instant. This I know is truth.

  Over the river and through the woods, I drag my way through four sticks and at last schlep it across the old, potholed Murphy Farm field and back onto our street. As I’m loping numbly down the hill, Dad comes rumbling up in his truck and thank geezuschrist I’m not still dragging a tar. I pop a piece of gum in my mouth and go to the window.

  “Louie, I haven’t seen you in days,” he says, voice husky from a long day bossing Jacks around in the hospital. His stubble is a gritty shadow on his face and the lines around his eyes are deep, tinted purple. “You okay?” He’s a trauma surgeon in the ER and works crazy hours, and whenever he asks me if I’m okay, I have the feeling he’d rather be taking my blood pressure or white blood cell count than actually talking about how I feel.

  I nod. “Swell.”

  He sighs. “I’m off to the market. Emergency cookies and milk run for your brother’s Earth Scouts in Technology meeting tomorrow.” I roll my eyes and he smiles. “Wanna come, stranger? Be good to catch up.”

  I imagine us driving into the fog, him rambling about work or my elderly Oma’s innumerable health concerns, or Miles, my younger, genius brother-Jack, and his enormous goddamn brain. Or worse, the airwaves will fall dead and we’ll cut a wheel in silence, the awkward hush choking our throats, words, like gas, combusted and lost, evaporating and clogging the fragile crank ozone. The ice caps will melt and polar bears’ll slip tragically through sharp, gaping cracks into the arctic sea …

  “Louie?”

  I snap into it. “Oh. No. I’m beat.”

  Y’know, to save the polar bears and all.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he says, thick eyebrows stern across his forehead. “You’re not high, are you?” And I just laugh, walk away. He puts the truck in gear and waves, gunning the gas as I turn to watch his taillights glow smaller and smaller still.

  A shivering shambles, I climb the back stairs and stomp onto the porch. I stayed out in the cold rain way too long and I’m a soaking-wet frigid village idiot. Popsicle in Boots. I tromp upstairs and twist shower knobs and pull the sopping layers of fabric from my red-turning-blue skin and shake my arms and pump my fists to warm my ice-cube core.

  Warning: Frost Heave.

  The water hits my face, chest, arms, in a singeing blast, so hot it feels cold. Glacial streams run from freezing cords of hair plastered down my back and my toes are red-hot roots screaming mercy. My chattering subsides and I’m no longer thaw, I’m simmer. I boil and take mouthfuls of steaming water that warm my ice-cube teeth. My bangs stick in hot slices to my forehead. And my skin tingles back to life.

  I close my eyes and think of what a strange day it’s been, what a strange world it always is. And then, because it can’t be helped, I’m on the trail of Evelyn Brooks like hounds on a fox. So heartbreaking with that smudge of black eyeliner shadowing her golden, freckled face. And her hand on my wrist. And the heat it left, and how warm it was.

  My fingers travel over hip bone ridges, lower stomach, and down between my thighs. Pink streams of period wash down me, swirling about my feet, and Eve is checking her makeup in the mirror, peeking at me from the corner of her eye, a small smile curling the edges of her full strawberry lips. I wanna tell her how stunning she is. Show her. Like this. Like this.

  But she’s a moving target, going backward. She’s Ancient History.

  But she’s right here, and I want to tell her. Like this.

  And her mouth opens wide and she’s laughing, her pearly whites shining in a Cheshire cat grin. And then Nate Gray is loping eagerly in, a sneaky, slithering snake, pulling her by her waist, cackling head back, teeth bare. The door swings shut. And I’m a blank screen, dead air, white noise.

  I open my eyes and am crushed. My hands fall to my water-streaming sides and I have the impulse to put my fist through the fogged-up glass of the shower door. The hot calm the contact would bring, the mess, the glass, the pain. It’s just a thought, passing like a storm cloud through my mind.

  This kind of misery is the stuff suicide notes scrawled into shower-curtain mist are made of: “Too lonely. Drowned in inch of shampoo water. For best results, rinse, and repeat. I hereby leave my Zippo collection to Zoë Stone…”

  I slouch against the tile and let the water hit my head and run over my ears in a loud streaming rush until I’m numb.

  Pack of Strays

  After my shower, I climb into bed naked as the day I was born, a nap-that-spans-infinity on my woe-weary mind. Instantly, my speak buzzes to life.

  “Butler,” Zoë says. “What’s beat?”

  “In-n-out,” I mumble.

  “How did throwing pointy sticks and running in circles go?”

  “Track? Canceled due to rainage.”

  “Word. So, pick you up in an hour?”

  I grumble, “Dunno, Zo. I’m hacked, massive.”

  “Gay.”

  I sigh. “Jack—”

  “Unacceptable, human,” Robo-Zoë says. “Pre-evening activities will officially commence in T-minus thirty minutes.”

  “You get cooler every time you talk like that.”

  “Obviously,” she deadpans. “Now get your butt in gear, flippity-flap. Box chain dynasty dining waits for no man.”

  I groan and we hang up. I mentally assemble an outfit, which is much simpler than actually getting dressed. I’d forgotten that it’s Thursday, aka Betties’ Night Out, starring the usual suspects—Zoë, Maya, and me. I’m pondering who this me character might be, without much success, when a threatening buzz arrives.

  Get ur ass outta bed or we’re U-Hauling ur sad sack by the teats into Zoë’s whip if it’s the last mortal thing we ever do. Clothes, or no.

  It’s like that?

  Believe.

  So I lift my sad sack from the warm damp of my sheets, take a fistful of pain meds, pull on my visualized outfit, and even push my shag around under the blow dryer a bit. We go out for dinner at the cheapy chain restaurant with the cute waiter Maya always flirts up, and we sneak sips of peach schnapps from a stainless steel canteen called the Five-Fingered Flask that I pinched from a convenience store many moons ago.

  After a few rounds, I find my stride. Here, with these betties, I’m Queen Badrat and I’m up to no good and visions of Eve Brooks fade into the diner’s faux-wood facade and knickknack trinkets strung along the walls. I’m superfreeze fly in my patterned button-up and cock-eyed navy hat and I’m one shady character with a big, sideways grin.

  “Maya-Jack,” I say. “Give Waiter-Shaver a sneak peek of your new PG-13 tramp stamp and he’ll think you’re so switch he’ll finally ask what you’re into tonight.”

  Zoë scowls as she pulls last sip from Five-Fingered. “Or,” she says. “Slip him your fake and order Mama some more happy sauce.”

  I’m in rare form. Medium rare. “Or, flash him the Marilyns and you, my dear, can have it all.”

  Maya spits her water back into her glass, blushing like a 1950s hemorrhoid cream commercial spokeswoman. Zoë pounds her fist on the table—she loves when I call Maya’s breasts by their proper name.

  “Lu,” Zoë says. “I’ll show you my tits if you give me Five-Fingered.”

  “Whoa, Jack. Go Children Slow. You can offer to show me your crank water-bra bumps a million times, but you’ll never get this flask. I risked my life for this thing. I’m practically an outlaw.” I grin, hold up Five-Fingered with one mitt and a peace sign with the other. “Mine-not-yours.”

  As we heel it out, Zoë and I secretly scratch Maya’s name and number on the back of the check, tell him to buzz and we’ll whisk him away from his mortal hell in the Flaming Chariot of Fire, aka Zoë’s hot whip. But Waiter-Shaver doesn’t buzz and we don’t say a thing.

  We linger in the lot to drag tars
and then climb into the Chariot, pour more schnapps into Five-Fingered, and cut a wheel to the club to slice it up. Into the wee hours of night we go mega robo-teckto on the floor, our blood thumping in time with thick, pulsating electro-switch beats. I grind my pelvis into slick-rick shavers all night and even manage to sneak off and talk up the sexy-betty bartender a bit. And, per usual, I’m glad I let my Jacks drag my sad sack out. I’d never tell them as much, but I’m pretty sure they know.

  * * *

  On the late-night drive home, Zo and My sit in the front, scatting up a goddamn gossip storm and I’m sauced and loose in the back, fighting the urge to spill my Never-Ending Pending soul to my apple-Jacks. But instead, I zone out, watching them laugh and wondering where we’ll be in two months, ten years, a lifetime.

  Us three cats have been apple-Jacks forever, our small group the broken remnants of a larger clan eroded away over the years, school’s high tide wishing and washing Jacks in-n-out with the moon. Freshman year, after Eve Brooks ditched my sorry behind for shinier, more glamorous shores, the three of us crystallized into this gang of mismatched socks. These betties know almost everything about me. Almost.

  I catch Zoë’s eye in the rearview and she pulls a face, faking like Maya’s boring her with prom speak when I know Zo’s just as hyped as the next flap-Jack. I think on how much I’m gonna miss them both. Don’t know what I’ll do without them.

  Zoë and I are partners in crime. A terrible twosome. Boris and Natasha, Cheech and Chong, Thelma and Louise without the scarves and skirts. Zoë’s a tough nut, hard as rocks, stiff as a board, straight as a nail. Her mom’s a dropout and her dad’s a hillbilly hick. She makes it with flap-Jacks in the city—gutter-mouthed Jacks who bartend, and rough, slick shavers who sauce up and work on whips and enlist in the Service. We got mixed up on alters a year back, rolling too hard for too long, totally strung out. Bad news bears and near disaster. But we’re on the wagon with the hardgoods. She’s superfreeze on the dance floor and riot as hell. She’s my closest ally. My rock. Zoë’s Tabby Cat.