Reckless Hearts (3 page)

Even with her
headphones on and the volume turned up as high as it would go, Elena could hear her father and sister going at it on the other side of her locked bedroom door.

Sitting at the drafting table she used as a desk, she tried to ignore them, to fill her headspace up with the new clips her friends on AnAmerica had uploaded. There was a spoof of
Hello Kitty
by EvilTwin82 in which the cute pillowy cat was mutilated into a cartoonish sea of blood. There was an amusing journey through the daily life of an ant by NaNo_NoLa. An abstract dance of colored lights choreographed to a Yo-Yo Ma song by CelloMello. Another installment in the ongoing saga of
“The 98-Pound Weakling” by ImNotNervous. But none of them held her attention the way she needed. None of them could compete with the never-ending soap opera of her family.

They were arguing over the remote now. Her dad was saying something about the Heat, how there was a crucial game against the Pacers tonight and no way was he going to let Nina stop him from watching it, even if she
was
pregnant. Elena didn't even want to know.

She watched a clip of a crime-fighting dog and cat who solved their cases, usually involving evil squirrels, by accident as they chased each other around the neighborhood. She liked this one. FranSolo was the name of the girl who'd created it. Elena wrote a comment on her page. “I always knew those squirrels were up to no good!”

Having run out of clips to watch, she got down to work uploading her new animation—the one she'd made for Jake—to the site.

Electra, her online tag, was a kind of celebrity on AnAmerica, and she knew a lot of love would be coming her way soon. With nothing better to do with herself, she sat back and stared at the screen, waiting for the outpouring of likes and comments to rack up under her new clip.

And here they came. One, two, three, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five likes. It felt good to see them every time, though she didn't know why—it's not like they really meant anything. The comments started rolling in.

“
Toy Story
is the best movie ever!”

“So sorry to hear Jaybird is moving away!”

“Very cool, Electra!”

As usual, everyone was so nice to her here. So why did she still feel so empty inside? Stupid question. She knew why.

The sound of the basketball game blasted from the TV in the other room. And her father's voice: “So go somewhere else, Nina. It's not like you forgot how to walk when you got pregnant.”

She whipped out her phone and shot a text to Jake.
“YOUR VIDEO IS LIVE.”
Then she immediately sent him another one.
“I MISS YOU!”

His response came within seconds.
“I MISS YOU TOO! RICH PEOPLE ARE WEIRD!”

For the first time all evening she felt in some small way connected to the world.

Jake had trained
himself to know when a new song was coming on. He could feel the rhythm in the fingers on his strumming hand. He'd unconsciously start miming out the chords and catching strings of lyrics in his mind. He'd learned to take note of these phenomena, to mark them and memorize them and hold them tight until he could begin doodling around them and teasing them into a musical form. Or better, to drop what he was doing immediately and follow the music wherever it was leading.

And tonight, after that uncomfortable dinner, he'd caught sight of the night view of the ocean from his new bedroom window for the first time—all that endless
black water beyond the gray moonlit dunes—and known a sweet and slightly sad new melody was beginning to form in him.

Sitting on an unpacked box, surrounded by stacks of other unpacked boxes, he strummed at his favorite guitar, a worn old Gibson his father had given him way back when he was twelve, and tested various chord progressions. He had two phrases in his head—
everything a boy could want, everything but you
and
don't let the sea wash me away
. He knew they went together but he hadn't figured out exactly how.

He gazed out the window again and studied the way the blackness of the sky met the even darker blackness of the water. A new line came to him.
I carved your name in the sand with a stick.
Maybe it could be the first line. He tested the line out, fingerpicking in a slow minor key beneath it.

To inspire himself, he'd propped his computer on one of the stacks of boxes and pulled up Elena's AnAmerica page. Her talent, and the energy she put into developing it, always inspired him. He had a notion that this song could be a response to the beautiful video she'd made for him, though he still wasn't sure if he'd admit this to her. For now, it might be better to continue pretending he was pining for “Sarah,” the free-spirited Key West beach bunny he'd invented to explain to her where all his love songs were coming from.

A new fragment came to him as he stared at her page:
don't hate me for loving you
. He knew this one would find its way into the song. It was the most honest line so far. It described what was going on inside him exactly.

Don't hate me for loving you

Oh-o'delay

Don't let the sea wash me away

Maybe that could be the chorus. It was a start.

He sang the lines again and again, changing his intonation and phrasing in little ways, running through the possible variations in search of the perfect version.

When he looked up from his guitar again, he was startled to see Nathaniel sitting on the sleek Scandanavian dresser across the room, slouching against the wall, smirking at him. His feet dangled off the edge and he tapped the drawers rhythmically with the heel of his polished black shoe. He seemed nervous, like there was a bundle of energy trapped inside him, bucking against his skin, trying to get out.

“Not bad,” he said. “Where'd you learn to pick like that?”

Jake clutched his guitar as though he could hide the music he'd been making. He didn't like being distracted when he was composing. But like everything else about this foreign house, the bedroom didn't feel like
it belonged to him enough for him to tell Nathaniel to leave.

“I . . . My dad's a musician,” he said. “He taught me.”

“Oh yeah?” said Nathaniel. “Have I heard of him?”

In his right hand, Nathaniel held an ornately decorated silver flask that had been inlaid with an image of a stalking tiger, delicately carved in ivory. He raised it to his lips and poured a nip of whatever it contained into his mouth as he waited for Jake to respond.

“He used to be in a band. Hope Springs. Kind of folky-bluesy stuff. They had a song called ‘Dandelions.' You might have heard that one.”

“That song was huge. That guy's your dad?”

“It wasn't that huge. Nobody got rich off it. It went to number eighty-six.”

Jake glanced at his guitar, wishing he could get back to work.

“Still . . .” Nathaniel warbled a few lines of the chorus to Jake's dad's minor claim to fame. Then, tipping the flask toward Jake, he said, “Want some forty-year-old, oak-cask rum?”

Jake shook his head no, but then realizing that since Nathaniel showed no signs of leaving, he wouldn't be getting any more work done on the song, he changed his mind. He felt like he should probably get to know his new stepbrother, anyway. “Know what, sure,” he said.

Popping down from the dresser, Nathaniel handed Jake the flask. The ivory inlay was impossibly intricate. It depicted some sort of Chinese landscape complete with mountaintop and weeping trees and a wise old man with a cane climbing a lonely path.

“How do you like the room?” Nathaniel asked, wandering around and poking his nose in the various boxes Jake had opened but not unpacked.

“It's okay, I gu—”

Cutting him off, Nathaniel went on. “It used to be mine. That dresser? Mine. That bed? Mine. That bookshelf? Mine. I guess what's mine is yours now, though, brother. Enjoy it.”

This was news to Jake. “They gave me
your
room?” he said, wincing at the burn as the rum hit his throat.

He felt a tug of guilt over having taken Nathaniel's room, though Nathaniel didn't seem all that upset about it. He just kept on poking around in the boxes, lifting things out to study them and then putting them back.

“Fuck it. That's what happens when you don't come home for two years.”

Every new detail Jake learned about this guy led to a hundred more questions. “Two years. Wow. That's a long time. You didn't come home once?”

Nathaniel threw him a look as if to say,
Isn't it obvious?
“You'll see,” he said. “Once you know Cameron like I do, you won't be asking questions like that.” He
peered at the screen of Jake's computer. “Who's this?”

Jake blushed. He felt exposed, like just having Elena's profile open like this was a betrayal of the secrets of his heart. Instead of answering, he said, “Did something happen between the two of you?”

“You're hilarious,” Nathaniel said. He took the flask back and downed a large shot of rum. “He's my father. Is that not enough?” He went back to studying Elena's profile. “Electra. And that makes you Jaybird.”

Jake could tell that he shouldn't push the topic too hard, but he had to ask. “Why aren't there any photos of you anywhere? I mean, I didn't even know you existed. That's sort of weird.”

“Ask Cameron, not me.” Nathaniel pulled up a box and sat in front of Jake. “Let's talk about Electra. She's obviously much more interesting to you than the ongoing saga of Nathaniel and Cameron. That song you're writing for her is pretty sweet. But eventually you're going to have to come clean with her.”

Just the thought of telling Elena how he felt made Jake's heart swell until it almost cracked in half. Immediately defensive, he said, “She's my friend, that's all.”

“She's your friend whose pants you want to get into. Unless you're lying to yourself, too.” Taking another nip from his flask, Nathaniel stared at Jake like he was trying to break him. “I don't think that's true, though. ‘Don't
hate me for loving you'? You know exactly how you feel.”

Jake didn't know what to say. Nathaniel was right, of course, but he didn't seem to understand how sensitive and complicated the situation was.

“I know how it goes, man. I've been there,” Nathaniel said.

“Have you?” Jake said shyly.

Nathaniel smirked knowingly. “Here's the thing.” He handed Jake the flask again. “Drink up.” As Jake forced himself to swallow down a little bit more of the rum, Nathaniel laid it out for him. “You can go on following her around forever, making puppy-dog eyes, knotting yourself up inside, dying a little bit every time she mentions some other guy, but you'll never get what you want that way. You've gotta make your move. That's the only play.”

Maybe it was the rum or maybe it was the fact that they were in this intimate space that had once been Nathaniel's and was now Jake's, or maybe it was just that Nathaniel seemed so much more self-confident and successful at life than Jake, but Jake felt like he could trust him, like he had something to learn from his new stepbrother. “If I never make a move, she can never reject me,” he said, admitting his deepest fear.

“So let her reject you. Then get on with your life,” Nathaniel said. “There's a lot of fish in the sea.”

Jake knew he was right, but that didn't make the truth hurt any less. He nervously picked out the few bars he'd written of his new song.

“There you go,” Nathaniel said. “Sing your heart song. And stick with me. I won't steer you wrong, brother.”

By the next
day, Elena's new Jake-less reality had begun to sink in. She sat on the tile floor in the living room, cradled in a misshapen pink-and-yellow polka-dot chair pillow that just barely fit in the space next to the tree, tooling around on her computer to distract herself from her sister's television program and, hopefully, escape the funk she'd fallen into since Jake had moved away.

The show today was
Hoarders
—even worse than
Storage Wars
.

As Elena bounced back and forth among BuzzFeed and Twitter and her own AnAmerica page, which was still racking up likes and comments now, three days
after she'd posted her latest animation, she couldn't help but track the gist of what was happening on the show. A woman in her forties who rescued cats to comfort herself from all the ways she couldn't rescue herself is confronted by her worried parents after they discover that the house she lives in is so overrun that she's now sleeping in her garage.

The thought that Elena was supposed to find this entertaining disgusted her, but she wasn't about to say anything to her sister. Nina loved it. She sucked on a giant candy cane and periodically popped it out of her mouth to click her tongue at the outrages the show paraded across the screen, shaking her head, bugging her eyes at Elena.

“Ay-yi-yi-yi!” she said.

Elena smiled in recognition and checked her AnAmerica page. A new comment popped up. Some guy going by the handle Harlow. “You're the best artist on this site,” he said.

A grin broke across her face. She didn't get compliments like this all the time, and it felt good to be singled out. She wondered who this Harlow guy was.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

“Love the way you reference those seventies posters of big-eyed children.”

She was surprised to see that he had caught the reference. She hadn't realized that anyone but her even knew
those posters existed. Commenting back, she said, “Big-eyed kids. Good catch. So sad and yet so sweet. Thanks for the shout-out.”

“These people!” said Nina, gawking at the TV. “How do they live with themselves?”

Elena didn't know where to begin answering this question. She looked at the nest of cast-off clothing Nina had strewn around herself, the glass-topped coffee table Nina had crammed with food like a buffet table from hell: takeout tacos, three more candy canes, Diet Pepsi, Cheez-Its, and the pineapple she'd been craving nonstop lately. Elena could see the seeds of a
Hoarders
episode taking root right here in her own house.

She wanted to say,
Nina, look at yourself before you start judging other people. Think about what you're doing to your unborn child
. But this was just too mean. She knew that her sister was in real discomfort today. She'd thrown up all morning. Her ankles were so swollen that she couldn't even fit socks over them. Feeling bad for her, Elena had made a promise to herself to be cheerful and kind and to baby Nina today in the way she knew nobody else would. Trying to play along with her sister's mood, she said, “It's good that she's getting help. The producers are going to give her a whole new house. I just worry about what will happen to all those cats.”

“The cats!” Nina said. “It's just too much!”

“Mmm,” Elena said as she scanned an article about
Scarlett Johansson on Flavorwire. She tabbed back to AnAmerica to see if Harlow had responded to her comment yet. He had.

“They remind me of the graffiti I saw last time I was in Paris. Big-eyed kids are making a comeback there.”

“I'll take your word for it. I've never been to Paris,” she wrote.

“We can change that,” he responded.

This made her smirk. “Oh yeah? How are we going to do that?”

“We'll take my private jet.”

She smirked again. This Harlow guy was fun. But he couldn't possibly have a private jet, right?

Before she could respond he shot her another message. “JK.” Then another one. “Who's the emo boy?”

“Jaybird?”

“Yeah.”

“A friend.”

“Boyfriend?” he asked.

Elena knew he was fishing. Before answering, she pulled up his user profile in a separate screen and scanned it for signs that he might be a creep. There wasn't a lot there. His profile picture was an aerodynamic cartoon motorcycle with giant jet boosters flaring out the back. Under likes, he'd listed “
Cowboy Bebop
, Studio Ghibli, getting lost in foreign cities where I don't know the language,” and, mysteriously, “trouble.” She decided to risk
it. She hadn't flirted with anyone in a long time.

“No. Just a friend,” she wrote.

His response came immediately. “So let's go to Paris.”

“We've already covered this,” she said.

“Right. How 'bout this. I'll bring Paris to you.”

She couldn't help but smile at this.

Her sister poked her with a toe. “Elena, you're missing the best part,” she said. “What's so funny, anyway?”

“Nothing, just . . . internet stuff.”

Elena glanced at the television. The shrink and the camera crew were wandering through the cat lady's house, poking at the six-foot-high stacks of empty litter containers, saying how nauseating the place smelled. “This is the good part?” she asked her sister.

Grinning, Nina shoveled a handful of Cheez-Its into her mouth. “Uh-huh,” she said, dribbling crumbs onto her sweatshirt.

Elena shrank a little bit inside. This family. These people. How had she ever come to be related to them?

When she jumped back to the chat screen, she saw that Harlow had left a new message. “Still there?”

She typed quickly. “Yeah. Sorry. My sister's annoying me.”

“Why?”

Where to start? She wasn't sure she wanted to subject this stranger to the craziness of her family struggles just yet, but she knew better than to let the conversation go
much further on the public comments board. She suggested they take the conversation into private mode.

“So? Your sister?” he asked, when they'd switched over.

Elena could feel herself chickening out. She didn't know this guy well enough to go into the gory details of Nina's troubles. Instead, she said, “Do you ever want to just run as far away as you can get from everything?”

“Every minute of every day,” he said.

“How do you deal with it?”

“I get on my motorcycle and just go, go, go. One day I'll go and never come back.”

“I want to do that,” Elena said.

“What's stopping you?”

“I don't have a motorcycle.”

“I can solve that,” he said, adding a winking emoticon.

“Just like you can fly me to Paris on your private jet.”

“LOL. I really do have a motorcycle.”

She took a closer look at his profile. His location was listed as South Florida, which gave Elena a little thrill. There was no harm in idly dreaming that this witty guy who admired her art and knew how to flirt online might be perfect for her. No harm in imagining that he'd been hiding right under her nose all this time.

Then in a new message, she said, “So your profile says you like trouble.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“As Marlon Brando said, ‘Whadda ya got?'”

This actually made her laugh out loud. She was brought back to earth when she glanced at Nina and saw her struggling to sit up on the couch and hobble on her swollen feet toward the bathroom.

See, this, this was why she couldn't run away. Her sister, her father, everyone needed her to be the sane and capable one around here. She didn't want to turn the TV on one day and see them on an episode of
Hoarders
or
Intervention
, or what was the other one?
Cops
.

“Gotta go. Nice chatting,” she typed, quickly shutting the computer.

Then, hopping up, she scrambled after her sister. “Nina, wait,” she called. “Let me help you.”