The Pursuit of Miss Heartbreak Hotel Read online

  Maya opens her eyes wide, eating it up, as Zoë interrupts to spill on some detail of the particular shape and contour of some unfortunate shaver’s nether parts.

  Maya, she’s way into heart-Jacks. She’s henna-dyed redhead, sly, mysterious, awkward, and demure. She’s Wife-in-Training and she wears her bleeding heart oozing and dripping onto her perfect sleeve. Clash-Jacks pick on her, shavers especially, who feel her need and desire and use it to wound her. Maya’s a good listener and a hornet’s nest of honey. Maya’s Siamese Cat.

  I flip open my Zippo on my pants, over and over, watching the last dim lights of the city fade as we cruise home to the burbs, thinking on what it’d be like to pull a U-ey and speed away from the familiar treetops and ramshackle old farmhouses, plastic-sided McMansions cluttering wide-paved cul-de-sacs. Don’t look back, never look back.

  Me, I wish I were Tom Cat, but I’m not. I’m Feral. I’m private and elusive, wild and unpredictable. Lone. I’m quick and gritty and keep my scrappy nest of secrets in a den under an old, rusty junk banger. Houdini-junkyard-hobo, that’s me.

  Together, we’re Tabby, Siamese, and Feral. We’re a pack of strays and as we pull off and into a twenty-four-hour Quik Stop, Zoë points at the machines, a cuppa joe on her mind; Maya cranes her neck to scope a group of shaver Jacks lingering by the gas pumps; and I have my eye on an ad for a carton of tars inside the store. We get out, go our separate ways without saying a word.

  We are feline. Hear us meow.

  Ancient History

  I can hardly believe track season’s over in two weeks when Coach announces it in the quiet, tense moments before our meet begins. Last season ever, for me.

  We do team cheer, stretch, and then break, dispersing to our corners to jump and parade around like possessed mechanical monkeys. I’m having (another) one of those days where sex is literally the only thing I can think about.

  Javelin in hand, I try and focus my thoughts, step out the distance from start line to launch. I jog, sidestep, mime a throw. My foot goes over the line. I sigh, backtrack, take a look around, watch the 100-meter dashers lugging their blocks across the track, scoping out the competition. I get stuck on a massive ace cornrowed betty, long legs for miles bending into her starting squat. She powers her legs, up and down, up and down, and I try and keep my jaw from grazing the freshly mown lawn.

  I know I should be more focused, setting a proper example and everything. I am, after all, co-captain this year, along with my hit-Jack, Luke Castle, the team’s star mile-runner, and a betty we all call Rabbit, for her Energizer-like, marathon-style masochism. Together, the three of us are tri-captains. For the past two months I’ve been tri-ing to care.

  I look around for Dad and my wee-Jack brother, Miles—Dad said they might make it—but to no avail. Then Castle saunters by and shoots me a movie-star smirk as he helps some cute sophomore betties with the high-jump mats. He flexes his biceps at me and winks when they’re not looking and I flex the middle finger of my right hand.

  Every day, before practice, Castle and I drag tars at the edge of the student parking lot and we scat about how much everything sucks. Flip this, flip that. You know, the uje. Go-Go Captain Rabbit wheels by in her banger, equipment crowding her back seat, and she waggles her digit at us and laughs, though she really does disapprove. Don’t get me wrong, I love Rabbit. But she’s in-n-out. She isn’t one of us, one of the slack-stars.

  At practice, I’ve weaseled out of my races. I pass the baton and never look back. I tell Coach I hurt my hip flexor doing the triple jump, which is mostly true.

  He says, “Bloody ’ell, Butler. Doesn’t mean you can’t still throw that javelin. You’ve got a scholarship on the line!” And I hold up my digits in peace signs.

  “Rinse and repeat, Coach,” I say. “Rinse and repeat.”

  I watch Rabbit lap the track for the gajillionth time and I yank the cold metal rod from the grass and curl my wrist, laying the silver shaft across my heart cage. I jog, sidestep, extend, and then hurl the steel up and out over the field. It arches through the air and I stand and admire my skills, thinking again about Eve Brooks, Ms. Ancient History. The javelin lands, sticking with a soft, satisfying swish in the manicured green turf and I have this weird feeling—like maybe she’s nearby. Delusional thinking, I believe it’s called. Then I’m reminded of when all this nonsense began, this throwing pointy sticks and running in circles.

  The Crush That Broke the Camel’s Back.

  Two words. Raine. Hall.

  She was a junior enrolled in ninth-grade French. She was doubling up with Spanish, which she already spoke, fluently. Madame thought she walked on water. I’m still not sure she couldn’t. Cut class, forgot homework, she got away with murder.

  We sat in the back of the room and talked. Raine had long hair and sported tight flared jeans, penny loafers, and hippie shirts. We both drew. We did portraits of each other. She said, “Is my nose really that curved?” and ran her finger along its lioness bridge. I said, “Lemme try again,” and grew my shag and wore tight flared jeans, penny loafers, and hippie shirts.

  She was hit with my Satan-souled older sister, Marta, and they dragged canna and toasted together back in the day before Marta graduated and went on to achieve absolutely nothing. Raine and I, we talked about heart-Jacks. I despised hers. Raine ran track. She said I should try out.

  She threw the javelin. I threw the javelin. She did the long jump. I did the triple. She did the high jump. I was crank at the high jump. I asked her if there was a low jump and she took my head in both hands and laughed and leaped over skyscrapers.

  She ran the hurdles. I could only muster the 200-meter sprint. She ran long distances in her sleep. She was Dream Queen Gazelle. I was Princess I Heart You Raine Hall.

  Twelfth grade. Today. I still run track, am being paid via college degree to throw a sharp piece of steel, jump three times in a row, and run a relay for 200 meters at a time. Raine came to a meet last season and I could barely look at her. She’s the Crush That Broke the Camel’s Back and I am a caged bird, perched high on my secrets and shame.

  And that’s when I see her perched on the hill.

  Evelyn Brooks. Here. At my meet. I was actually, finally, maybe a little bit right. It’s a new sensation.

  She’s watching, looking slightly confused, standing there in this beat knee-length army coat, arms wrapped tight around her too-small frame. Pretty Penny entourage nowhere in sight. I gawk, shaking off the tight weave of Never-Ending Pending memories slowly suffocating my pulmonaries and I wave and she waves, gives me a crooked-smiled, I-know-it’s-random-I’m-here shrug. I’m floored.

  The javelin judges mosey past and I stumble over myself getting in line. And I throw like a prince. I even take names in my 200-meter relay. I run hard and sure, and after I sprint by the coaches with their stopwatches, I fold at the waist, mitts on my knees, my smoker’s lungs burning, and look to see Eve’s small frame as she thumbs-ups and waves once more, heeling it off to the student parking lot.

  Castle comes up, shoves a thick shoulder into mine.

  “Nice sprint, Jackie Joyner. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “I don’t.”

  He pokes me in the ribs and I wiggle, turn around, and pinch his left teat. Even though we made out last year and I pretended it never happened, Castle’s still my best shaver-Jack. One of a kind. He socks me lightly in the arm and strides away and it finally hits—like seventeen tons of bricks—that high school’s really going to end. And Castle and I won’t run track. And Zo and My and I won’t see each other every goddamn day. And that Eve Brooks just showed up to my track meet and I have no idea why, but I sort of maybe do, but can’t believe it’s true because that’s impossible and I’m brain-cell-challenged for even considering it.

  I look again for the small silhouette of her oversized coat, see it fading away. She really was here. Imagine that.

  In the Flesh

  It’s only 9:30 in the morning and I can already hear Future
Dad reading me the riot act over dinner. That is, if he were ever home for dinner.

  Zo and I are in it deep, up to our chins, sitting outside Principal Chandler’s office awaiting what can only be described as Judgment Day. We’re choking on semi-stifled fits of laughter and I close my eyes to take long, deep breaths, my impish accomplice cracking into rippling giggles again and again. We’ve been unhinged for a half hour straight, the results of said hysteria landing us here after Mr. Payne unceremoniously slapped us both with the heavy hand of the law.

  “Poor Mithter Payne,” I say, because I can’t help it and there’s something mentally wrong with me. “We really thhouldn’t give the guy thuch a hard time.”

  “Thath perpothterouth,” Zoë says. “Of courthe we thould.”

  And it’s all over for us, again. Here’s the thing, Mr. Payne is a bona fide lemon. And he’s got this lisp. And there we were, sitting in physics, brains oozing from our ears, when he draws the lines of a magnetic field and looks up, all feverish and giddy.

  Tho, a male magnet tellth a female magnet that from her backthide, he thinkth theeth repulthive. But from the front … he findth her very attractive!

  But then nobody’s laughing and the poor guy’s eyes are bugging from his head.

  Don’t you underthand? he begs. He thought thee wath hot thtuff! A real thekthy li’l mama!

  And it couldn’t be helped: Zoë and I lost our marbles. It wath the thtupiditht thing anybody’th ever thaid. So we go massive Ophelia with laughter for ten minutes straight, holding the class hostage with our hysteria. When Mr. Payne finally gave us the ax, we detoured our trip to the office by busting into the band room and pilfering these massive, two-foot-tall marching band uniform hats, blue and gold with plastic chin straps and ornate, glittering tassels. We got busted a second time, parading repeatedly past Maya’s calc class, by the crotchety old hall monitor Mr. Sproul, and now here we are, sitting in too-small plastic seats outside Principal Chandler’s office, trying to lace it up, enormous pillars of school pride perched on our gone-amok heads. I’m gonna miss this so much, it’s unhealthy.

  “Zoë-Jack,” I sigh. “What the flip am I gonna do without you next year?”

  She frowns. “Seriously. Who am I gonna hate everyone else with?” And I shake my head.

  “Really. You’re like, you’re like my—”

  “Can the after-school special, Jack,” she laughs, and I open my mouth but she slaps my jaw shut with her palm. She smiles. “I know.”

  I sigh, sit back, scope her from the corner of my eye. I knock twice on the side of her towering hat. “I dare you to wear this thing in when she calls you.”

  “Um.”

  “And you have to walk in and pretend like it’s not there.”

  She considers.

  “She might call you in first.” And I realize I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Fine,” I say, grinning, fidgeting in my seat. “I’m game.”

  “Me too.”

  We sit in silence, waiting, tick-tock, tick-tock, till the door creaks open and we lean forward in our seats. The anticipation is deadly. Chandler coughs. And then grunts Zoë’s name from inside. Zo looks at me, eyes wide.

  “You can do this, Jack,” I say, “I believe in you.” But she’s shaking her head. Chandler grunts again, louder, and I yank Zoë up by the arm, walk her slowly to the door. “Move it,” I say, pushing her in. “But watch yourself,” I whisper. “Theeth a real thekthy li’l mama.”

  And my bestest apple-Jack is all but pissing her skinnies as she crosses the threshold to her doom, blue-and-gold band hat perched crooked and proud upon her head.

  * * *

  For a premed prospect, it’s Chandler’s opinion my attitude’s gonna need a serious face-lift, major reconstructive surgery. I don’t remind her I’m an honors student, aced my AP exams, and recently received the largest Division 1 women’s track-and-field scholarship of any student-athlete, ever, in the history of the school. Not that athletics will automatically make me a viable future MD but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

  I’m mulling over how to get out of the after-school detention she’s issued, when I turn the corner, band hat tucked under my arm, and am suddenly nose-to-nose with none other than Ms. Ancient History, Eve Brooks, in the flesh, walking up to the adjacent door of the guidance counselor’s office. She’s flush-faced, standing on my toes, and I stumble back, laughing, grabbing hold of her too-bony shoulders.

  “Eve Brooks,” I yammer. “I understand stalking me, but this is ridiculous.” I feel my neck get hot, remembering her tiny frame huddled at my meet.

  She smiles, nods at Chandler’s door. “Whaddya in for?” and I hold an invisible pistol to my head, pull the trigger.

  “Murder?”

  I laugh. “Just too beat for this street.”

  “Beatstreet, eh? Pretty cool.”

  “What about you? They finally expelling smart kids for making the rest of us look bad?” And she laughs, but then the door opens and she’s called inside and I don’t want her to go. “You came to my meet,” I say quick, and she smiles again, points to the strangeness that is the marching band hat under my arm. And then she’s gone, her tiny body moving like a shadow. Outta sight, but not outta mind.

  I pick my heart up off the carpet and heel it back to class, taking my precious time. I can picture it now: Eve smiling and nodding as Guidance Counselor UselessMcNobody babbles and banters college bull and Eve sits, starving, wasting away while the Thickly Settled cogs in charge suck grant money off of her switch SAT stats and don’t give two flying cranks that one of their best students is an eating-disorder disappearing act.

  “This place is a heap of steaming manure,” I say to a glass case full of cobwebbed copper trophies frozen forever in mid-throw. I pick up my pace and make a beeline for the cafeteria, figure it’s second breakfast somewhere in the world and I can always count on my gal pal Doris in the kitchen to sneak me a plate of soggy huevos rancheros. I’ll shoot the breeze with some freshies and munch a snack for the both of us. For me and Eve.

  I like the sound of that. Me and Eve.

  Loser Express

  I’m heeling it up a steep wooded bank into the clearing of our small town cemetery, tar balanced between my lips. I’m feeling dejected, as Zoë’s ditched me to hang out with her city-Jacks this afternoon and, while I declined her invitation to go with, I’m still managing to feel left out.

  As I walk, I practice dragging without using my mitts. It’s beat when the paper sticks to my lips and hangs in this slick, film noir way. I come to my favorite spot, in the far corner of the cemetery, where a large oak stands and pushes its thick, gnarled arms to the sky. There’s a stone bench under the tree’s muscled old limbs and I sit, lean back my head, listen to nature’s clicking, singing, whispery murmur. The ground under my feet begins to dry as the sun’s rays arc through the sky’s cloudy canopy. I push my hood off and roll up my sleeves and bathe my white winter-bleached skin. I even pull off my navy knit sailor hat and stuff it in my pocket, flick my tar to the ground, stomping it out with my boot. I lean into the tree—my tree—eyes closed to soft spring air, and will the sun to pull the heavy, liquid sadness from my core.

  When our (my) beloved, elderly K9, Saxby Meredith-Jones Butler the Third (though she was really only the first), was suddenly hit and killed by a neighbor’s car, Marta and I heeled it up here after the traumatic, too-real trip to the vet. Dad was outta town with Miles, so us two betties had to deal with it on our own. The hard glare of surgical lights, the sting-smell of antiseptic, the needle sinking into Saxby’s dark blue doggy vein. It was last spring, a mirror day to this one. And Marta and I sat on this very same stone bench and I sobbed and sobbed, sad to my rotten core. Marta sat quietly and it was beat she was there, but part of me wished I could just cry alone.

  But then she got all massive philosophical, saying, “It’s so flip, Lu, ’cause the last time I came up here that’s exactly what I did.” And I actually believed she had, thoug
h I couldn’t imagine what she had been so worked up about. I wanted to ask, but never did.

  I haven’t felt close to my sister like that since, or really before. She’s kind of a deadbeat, when it comes down to acting like a human being.

  I’m thinking about her up in her dorm, blazing high I’m sure, wondering if it’d be massive weird if I dialed her up, see what’s the beat, when I’m zoomed back into the present, voices cutting through my calm quiet. I freeze where I am against the big tree, careful not to move an inch. I watch as a shaver and betty, hand in hand, heel it along the opposite side of the graveyard, light glinting in shards around the edges of their silhouettes. They go for the obvious spot in front of the view and set up a blanket by the bench overlooking the rooftops and hills of the town below. She’s giggling and his deep voice comes in short, amused bursts.

  I’m invisible. My back morphs into the grooves of the tree and bark crawls up my skin and I watch, unseen, as all trees do. Together, they make the perfect picture-that-comes-in-the-frame-when-you-buy-it couple and the whole thing’s just too Hallmark for me to handle. I’m about ready to stand and make my escape when they start getting all frisky, swapping spit. They slump back onto the grass and the guy’s hand goes sliding up the girl’s loose shirt. And then her dainty hand starts working its way over the crotch of his expensively faded and torn jeans and I’m paralyzed, mortified, an animal, caged.

  I look to my left, then to my right, plan my getaway in my mind—through the baby graves, under the canopy, over the bramble pile, down the hill. I stand, crouched low, ready myself to bolt, Flash-style, total-stealth. But just as I’m picking my first, tentative steps up and over the gnarled roots of the towering tree, the girl turns her head and she scopes me. I slow to a crawl, suddenly caught in an atmospheric patch as thick as blackstrap molasses, and I watch her eyes squint and then widen as she recognizes me. I recognize her, too, see she’s the brown-haired Pretty Penny, one of Eve Brooks’s doting minions and besties forevs. I freeze, realizing just how massive Ophelia I must look crouched there, hair all mussed up, rain boots up to my knees, a smiley-faced whale raincoat rolled up to my elbows, just staring.