Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend (4 page)

would have in his future biography:
Gemma Tucker— not good

enough for the future Nobel Prize winner. She has never since done

anything of note.

So I spent my days in my room, crying, mostly curled into a

little ball. And whenever I took a break to catch my breath, or

drink some Gatorade (my mom had been leaving it outside my

door, because she was worried I was going to get dehydrated), I

realized that there was a piece of me that had been expecting

this to happen from the beginning. I had been waiting for the

moment that Teddy would fi nd me out, the moment he’d realize

I’d been faking— that I wasn’t as good a person as him, that I didn’t

care about my carbon footprint as much, and that I thought the

Marsh Warbler was ugly. After all, the whole way we’d met was

based on a lie. And Teddy was brilliant— of course he would have

fi gured it out eventually.

When I wasn’t looking at pictures of us and crying, I was watch-

ing movies that were making me cry even harder, even ones I

thought were safe, like
Ghostbusters
. Sophie stopped by once a

day, bearing an iced latte for me, to try and coax me out of the house.

It never worked, though, and usually she just ended joining me on

the bed and staying for the day’s second viewing of
The Notebook
.

I just really didn’t see any point in returning to the outside

world, because I couldn’t imagine the situation ever improving.

Also, if I ventured out, I might encounter Teddy and his neck-

tattoo girl. But things were safe in my bedroom. So for the fore-

seeable future, I was staying put.

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The only bright spot was that Sophie didn’t have any gossip to

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report. People had been shocked by our breakup, but nobody had

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heard anything about Teddy dating someone new. So I fi gured

that it might be bearable, and that I could just learn to live in

this brokenhearted state. I had tissues, and daily iced latte deliv-

eries. It would be okay.

And then, the morning of my third day of bed- living, my door

opened and things got worse.

“Hi, Gem,” my mom said, knocking as she opened the door,

which, in my opinion, defeated the whole purpose of knocking.

She gave me the kind of look people had been giving me lately, a

mix of sympathy and fear, like I was a particularly pathetic- looking

time bomb. “How are you?”

“Hello there, Gemma,” Walter, my stepfather, said, coming

into the room behind my mom and giving me his sympathetic

frown.

“Hi, Walter,” I muttered. Despite the fact that I’d known Wal-

ter for fi ve years, we had never quite moved past the polite- awkward-

small- talk phase. When things got really desperate, we talked

about the weather.

And it wasn’t like Walter’s job provided tons of conversation

fodder. He was a salmon expert, and had once been a competitive

fl y- fi sher, because apparently there is such a thing. Now he just

advised people on salmon. My mom, a real estate agent, met him

when he was looking for a house with a basement big enough for

his fl y- fi shing trophies and a pond so he could practice casting.

When I was eleven and my parents separated, I had refused to

believe that it would last. But it had, and as a result I’d had to

listen to talk about salmon for the last fi ve years.

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“You know how sorry we are about you and Teddy,” my mom

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said as she perched on the edge of my bed. I could tell that some-

thing encouraging was about to follow. That was one of the dan-

gers of being a realtor, I’d learned— you were always looking to

sell someone on the bright side. “But maybe it’s for the best!” she

continued in the tone of voice that she used when explaining that

one bathroom would bring a family closer, and that, in her opin-

ion, closets were overrated.

“Yeah,” I muttered as I closed my laptop and picked a loose

thread from my quilt. I couldn’t see how having my heart shat-

tered into a million pieces was for the best, but I didn’t want to

argue the point. Especially in front of Walter.

“But the thing is,” my mother said, settling herself more fully

on my bed, like she was preparing for a longer chat, “we need to

talk about the summer.”

I frowned. “What about the summer?” My dad had told the

HELPP people I wasn’t coming and had gotten most of his de-

posit back. And now that I no longer had any commitments, I

was pretty much planning on continuing to spend the summer

exactly where I was.

“Well,” my mother said, “we thought you were going to be in

Ec ua dor, darling. So we made plans.”

“Colombia,” I corrected, looking from my mom to Walter. “What

plans?”

“We’re going to Loch Faskally,” Walter piped up from the door-

way. “It’s prime spawning season in the Highlands.” I fl inched

slightly, as I always did whenever I had to hear my stepfather use

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the word “spawning,” which was far more frequently than I would

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have ever believed possible.

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“You’re going to
Scotland
?” I asked, taking a guess, since that

was the only place I’d ever heard of that had lochs.

“Yes,” Walter said, taking a tiny step into the room, looking

animated, the way he only ever did when talking about fi sh. “The

laird asked me personally. We’re staying in the castle as his guests.”

“So, you see, you really can’t stay here alone, Gem. And while

we’d love for you to come . . .” My mother let this sentence trail

off, with a small shrug. It appeared I was not invited, even though

I really wouldn’t have minded hanging out in a castle all sum-

mer. But I guess you really can’t just call up lairds and ask if your

stepdaughter can come along, especially if she has no interest in

fi sh.

“Fine,” I said, fl opping back against my propped- up pillows.

This whole conversation was exhausting me. “I’ll go stay with Dad.”

My father was a screenwriter who lived in Los Angeles. When

he’d been married to my mom, he was a struggling novelist who

wrote freelance articles to get by. After they separated, though,

he moved to L.A. His former college roommate, Bruce Davidson,

had become a big- time Hollywood producer, and he offered my

dad a rewrite job on a terrible movie about time- traveling turtles.

And while I thought even the rewritten version of
Time Crawls

was still pretty bad, Bruce was thrilled, and my dad had a new

career. I saw my father on holidays, and usually for a few weeks

in the summer anyway. It might be a nice change, staying with

him in California. Hanging out with my dad always meant that

we saw a lot of movies and ate lots of pizza, two things that sounded

very appealing to me at the moment.

—-1

“Good,” my mom said, smiling like she was happy things had

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been settled so easily. “Why don’t you call your dad and fi gure out

when in the next few days you want to head out there? And then

Walter can drive you.”

This made me sit all the way up. There was absolutely no way

I was going to drive across the country with Walter. We’d run out

of things to talk about before we left Connecticut. “Drive me to

the airport,” I clarifi ed. And also, I was the tiniest bit stung that

she seemed to want to get me out of the house so quickly. She

could have at least
pretended
that she wasn’t quite so eager to see

me gone. I mean, really.

“Oh, no,” my mom said, standing up and smoothing down the

quilt where she’d been sitting. “Your dad’s in the Hamptons this

summer, working on a movie for Bruce. So it’s just a few hours away!”

I froze, even as my mom talked on, about logistics and plans

and what I should pack. I hadn’t been back to the Hamptons in

fi ve years. It was where everything had gone down that summer,

and I had avoided it ever since. It had always felt, to me, like the

scene of the crime.

“Gem?” I looked up and realized my mom was looking at me

expectantly.

“What was that?” I asked, trying to focus on her.

“I just asked,” my mom said, her smile getting a little forced.

I could tell she wanted to wrap this conversation up and consider

the issue handled. Walter wasn’t even pretending to pay atten-

tion anymore; he was looking down at his phone, no doubt play-

ing Bait and Switch, the fi shing game he was addicted to. “If you

-1—

would call your dad and let him know the plan? And then we can

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confi rm your dates.”

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I was on the verge of telling her I didn’t think I could go to the

Hamptons after all, and she’d just have to call up the laird and

tell him I was coming, when my mom’s phone rang. “I have to get

that,” she said, looking down at the screen. “Work. Gem, just let

me know when you’ve talked to your dad, okay?” She hustled out,

saying hello in her realtor voice as she left, Walter trailing be-

hind, all before I’d even decided if I was going to be able to go

back there.

I reached up and pulled open my curtains for the fi rst time in

days. What I’d done the summer I was eleven was the worst of

me, a time I never liked to think back on if I could avoid it, and I

wasn’t sure that being in a place that would remind me most

strongly of my biggest mistakes was the best idea.

But it
had
been a long time ago, I reasoned as I squinted out

at the sun. And I had no reason to think that any of the Bridges—

especially Hallie— had ever returned to the Hamptons, particu-

larly after what had happened. And I really, really didn’t want to

spend the summer hearing about fi sh.

I looked around at the mounds of tissues that surrounded me

and realized I was getting sick of wearing nothing but my paja-

mas. It actually had gotten a little tedious, spending all this time

in bed. Plus, according to Sophie and WebMD, I might be in dan-

ger of developing rickets. It would probably be good to get out,

and if I was away in the Hamptons, there would be no danger of

running into Teddy and neck- tattoo girl. And at least if I had to

live with this broken heart, I could do it at the beach.

I weighed my options one last time, trying to see if I was re-

—-1

ally going to be able to do this. I decided that I was, lay there for

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one minute longer, then rolled out of bed and headed off to call

my dad.

O O O

“Shorter,” Sophie commanded as I glared at her from under-

neath my curtain of sopping- wet hair as my stylist, whose

name was Sigrid and who I wasn’t entirely sure understood En-

glish, opened her scissors with a terrifying
snap
.

“Not shorter,” I said quickly, grabbing my hair, just to make

things clear. Sigrid rolled her eyes and stalked to the other side

of the salon, where she fl opped down into a chair, somehow man-

aging to look tragic and Swedish as she did this. However, a mo-

ment later, I saw her look around furtively and pick up her copy

of
Once Bitten,
the very controversial and highly erotic vampire-

love novel that had been burning up the bestseller charts for months

now. My mom had forbidden me to read it, but there was no need—

there was no
way
I was reading it after I saw that she had a copy

hidden in her closet. I mean, gross.

“Gemma,” Sophie said to me in her warning voice, and I turned

back to her.

“Sophie,” I returned in mine.

Things had moved very quickly after I’d learned of the Scottish

plan and called my father. I had managed to get out of driving to

the Hamptons with Walter when I realized it would take us three

hours to get there. I’d convinced my mom to let me take the train

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instead and arranged for my dad to pick me up at the station. I’d

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told all my regular babysitting clients (sitting had been pretty much

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the way I’d gotten all my disposable income since I was about

twelve) that I wouldn’t be available for the rest of the summer. I’d