Atomic Hearts

Atomic Hearts

December

The Past

I was sixteen. I said I would walk. If my fingers froze off, maybe it would be like I’d never touched him.

I slipped on a patch of ice when I was halfway home and landed on my wrist, breaking it in three places. Lying on the sidewalk with my head in the snow, looking up at the stars, I’d thought over and over: You deserve this.

A few weeks later, when we were all back at school, and Cindy and Gabe were back together, and I was wearing a sling and a splint, Gabe whispered to me, not kindly, “You should’ve let me drive you.”

It had seemed so out of the question Gabe would like me back that I never told anyone—­not even Cindy—­about my desperate crush on him.

I’d been raised on secrets, I knew they weren’t a good idea, but I was used to them and had found safety in them before. Everything was changing so fast. I didn’t know what was real. My and Cindy’s dads were using again, and I had to become a different, stronger person before I’d even figured out who I was in the first place.

When Cindy started dating Gabe, I didn’t think about what could’ve happened if I’d just talked to him. He played drums and had swoopy black hair and bony hands that mesmerized and every girl, even the cool ones, had been in love with him for at least a minute. Gabe was messy, complicated. He thrived on making people feel uncomfortable, uncertain—­he liked making people crave him, making people desperate to know when his attention would fall on them again. And once he was with Cindy his attention did fall on me—­sometimes, anyway. “Gabe loves you,” Cindy told me once. “He thinks you’re weird.”

She laughed like it was something hilarious, but she watched me, her expression sharp-­edged. She needed me to know that she was aware that Gabe saw something in me, even fixated on me. That was her way—­she needed control to feel safe.

“He does not love me,” I said, making sure she couldn’t see my face in case it showed the truth. For the first time in our two parallel lives, I wanted to keep her at a distance.

My shyness around Gabe might have, in some way, been self-­protective. The small, private, painful longing was better as a secret. Better when it was held back by the elbow. I couldn’t jump when I didn’t know if the water was deep enough to catch me.

But then, the night of the party, I plunged, and I fell for a long time.

“We need to tell Cindy,” I whispered to Gabe once the guilt had sunk in.

“Why hurt your best friend?” he asked. “It honestly meant so little. I barely remember it.”

Despite his declaration, for some reason—cruelty, maybe—he kept talking to me, and texting sometimes. And I kept listening, because you always want the person who told you you’re nothing to think you’re something.

And when you start to keep a secret like that, a secret that big, it gets possessive of you—it won’t let you go, even when you’ve realized it’s long past time to tell the truth.

I’d decided to go to the party after chugging a cocktail of self-pity and a sad-girl playlist Cindy had made me.

“Go,” Cindy told me on the phone.

She was away with her mom on a ski trip, their usual winter break vacation that Mrs. Fellows had insisted on even though their lives had turned upside down. My life, too. Her dad had left, she hadn’t heard from him in weeks and didn’t know where he was staying, and my dad was living in a motel with court-mandated rehab approaching after a second DUI.

“I’m not really in a partying mood,” I said.

“You can’t just be a sad girl the whole time I’m gone.”

“Why did you make me a sad-girl playlist, then?” I asked.

“To remind you it could always be worse! You could have to be a sad girl for a living.”

“That sounds awesome.”

“Go,” Cindy said again. “It will take your mind off things. I hate that I had to leave you for the holidays.”

It would take a lot more than a keg of beer and a picked lock on a parent’s liquor cabinet to forget our lives—but it was worth going to make Cindy happy.

For a while after that night, I found myself sinking into the seductive torture of wondering what could have been. All the other ways the night could’ve gone—they felt so possible, almost like I could make them real if I only believed they were. I started to understand the stories you hear about people becoming convinced of pasts that don’t belong to them. If I’d listened to different songs that led to different feelings. If, when I took my headphones out, I hadn’t searched the house to find it was empty. If Cindy hadn’t been on vacation with her mom. In the end, though, I believe that life has a longer runway than that. Most of the things coming are a long time coming.

I’d stopped the playlist and put on red lipstick and a black dress and trudged through the cold night to the party. A girl from school was hosting: Alice, who lived in one of the sprawling developments of white brick McMansions on the edge of our small town near Ann Arbor.

Alice’s trusting parents had gone out of town and left her alone. Cindy and I knew her from marching band; she was the cheerleader who played the trombone. During football games she marched in her cheer uniform, reveling in her contradictions. She was nice to everyone. She probably really meant it, but thinking about her cynically was more satisfying.

I stood outside when I arrived. Alice was laughing on the front porch, her parents’ absence an opportunity to make the house her own. I was home alone a lot, too, but I drifted through the rooms, searching for nothing. Being alone looked good on Alice, like her parents were busy and cosmopolitan and she was independent, while I could tell that people—Cindy’s mom, especially—thought of me as abandoned.

The uplighting on the trees in the yard made them look like ghosts, and the whole house was iced with sharp white Christmas lights—not like the chunky flashing ones we put on our bushes. So much light poured from the windows that even the front yard felt warm. I walked toward the door looking up at everything, and I ran right into Gabe. A winter hat covered his ears, but a loop of dark hair spilled out over his forehead. He puffed on a cigarette even though Cindy had made him quit.

I was dizzy from staring up at the lights. His image split into two and then floated back together.

He’d been with Cindy more than six months at that point, and for most of that time I’d been relieved that he was with someone so close to me that rules dictated he’d never be mine. He and I could never figure out a friendship after he started dating Cindy. But that had never mattered. We all hung out sometimes, it wasn’t like Gabe and I hated each other, and it wasn’t like she and Gabe were going to get married. We all seemed to understand that. Cindy and I were forever. Cindy and Gabe were for now.

“Cindy and I broke up,” Gabe said, flicking ash. “But you probably already knew that.”

Cindy had told me the news triumphantly before leaving, though I knew the crash would come soon—she’d get pulled down by his hold on her like she always did.

My attempt at a sympathetic smile twisted into a grimace. “She told me. I’m sorry.”

I started walking around to the back of the house, hoping Gabe wouldn’t follow, but he did. There was a fire going in a firepit. I brushed snow off the steps of the deck, and he did, too, and we sat on the frozen wood.

“She only broke up with me because her dad went off the rails. It’s such bullshit. I wanted to be there for her, I was there for her, but she didn’t give me a chance.”

I hesitated. I could see what he meant, but when it came to her dad, Cindy had me.

“It’s not always easy to talk about,” I said, “with other people.”

“She talks about it with you,” Gabe spat.

“Well, you know why,” I said. “She and I are the same.”

“My parents have problems, too. They barely talk, and when they do it’s just to bicker about stupid stuff. I wish one of them would do something insane. At least it would bring them out of their f***ing comas.”