The Heartbreakers (12 page)

Without thinking about it, Sydney reached up to kiss Drew on the lips. But just before she planted the kiss, he turned away.

“Sorry,” she muttered, anger and embarrassment burning her cheeks. She hurried around the front of the SUV and got inside. She drove away, avoiding looking at Drew, still standing there on the sidewalk.

The aftershock had finally reached her, like the boom of the fireworks in Eagle Park.

“Damn it,” she cursed. Maybe this was the first step to becoming a hermit cat-lady. God, she hoped not.

If Drew could be happy without her, then she could be happy without him. Like he said, he needed space. He wanted to have fun.

So where should she start? What would Raven do right now?

She'd burn the Drew tombstone. Sydney stepped on the gas and headed home.

Rule 7:
You are required to stay up late on a Thursday night eating popcorn as you and your girls laugh over a fifty-page list of The Ex's flaws.

I hate Valentine's Day, Kelly thought as she parked out front of Sydney's house. The motion light on the garage clicked on, illuminating the driveway. Alexia's silver Cavalier was there, as was Raven's Sentra. Looked like Kelly was the last one to arrive. Better late than never, right?

She grabbed her fifty-page Ex's flaws list from the passenger seat and got out of the car. She zipped her white down vest up around her chin. It wasn't that cold, considering how frigid it'd been in the middle of January, but still, cold was cold to her. And any kind of cold was
bad
.

They'd all decided Valentine's Day was the perfect day to spend inside, hanging out with each other while reading their ex's flaws out loud. It wasn't like Kelly had anywhere else to be.

A twinge of sadness wedged in her chest. She should have been de-virgined by now. She should have been Will's
girlfriend and they should have been together right now, eating dinner at Bershetti's.

But instead she'd barely talked to him in the last week, yet it seemed she spent every waking minute thinking about him. Wondering where he was and what he was doing. Who was he hanging out with? And whether or not he wanted Brittany as a girlfriend because she was so much skinnier and prettier than Kelly.

Will hadn't even called her once in the month since they'd broken up.

Sydney pulled the door open before Kelly rang the bell. Syd's hair was up and disheveled, as if she'd bent over, bunched her hair up, and wrapped a rubber band around it. Kelly took in a breath and her shoulders loosened. She hated to think of how much pain Sydney was going through, but Kelly couldn't help but be somewhat happy that she wasn't going through a broken heart alone. It was always better to share pain than bear it alone.

Although it'd been a month since Sydney and Drew officially broke up, Sydney was showing no signs of getting over it. It wasn't just the careless way she wore her hair now, or her neglected clothes. It was the attitude and her lack of focus, as if suddenly she didn't care. Maybe she didn't, but they knew Sydney so well. It was in her nature to care about
everything
.

Now she put a wide smile on her face. “Kelly!” She waved Kelly inside. “Finally, we've been waiting forever.”

“Sorry,” Kelly muttered, setting her purse on the table near the door. “Monica wouldn't leave me alone, and then my brother hid my car keys.” She groaned, the irritation still fresh. Her older brother, Todd, sometimes was more of a pain in the butt than her little sister.

Kelly unbuttoned her vest and hung it on a hook beside the door. She headed into the living room with Sydney and stopped just over the threshold to look around. Black crepe-paper streamers hung around the room. Black cardstock hearts, torn in half, were taped on the walls. Spider confetti was strewn all over the coffee table. Kelly bent down and picked a piece up.

“It was all I could find.” Raven shrugged as she fingered a big, silver hoop in her ear. “They should make broken-heart confetti for Valentine's Day. I bet they'd sell more of it than stupid chocolate.”

“Chocolate,” Kelly breathed. “You got chocolate, didn't you?”

Raven nodded. “It's for later though. After the popcorn.”

Alexia turned sideways on the couch and straightened her plain green J. Crew T-shirt. “Did you bring your list?”

Kelly held up her pathetic page and nodded remorsefully. “I tried super hard.” Which was totally true. She'd spent the last hour trying to think of something negative about Will, but he was just too darn perfect. Maybe that was one of his flaws.

“It's okay,” Sydney said, coming up behind her. “I didn't get fifty pages either.”

“I did!” Raven gloated, fanning her list in the air.

“She cheated though.” Alexia narrowed her eyes at Raven. Raven stuck out her tongue. “She only put one thing on each page.”

“No one ever said there were rules for the rules,” Raven countered, tossing a piece of popcorn in her mouth.

“Where are your mom and dad?” Kelly asked Sydney, ignoring the argument starting in the living room.

For the first time in a few days, Kelly saw raw emotion pass across Sydney's face, but she was quick to recover her stony expression. “Dad's upstairs reading. Mom's staying overnight in Hartford.”

Kelly didn't miss the air of disappointment in Sydney's voice when she talked about her mom being gone. From what she'd gathered over the last few months, Syd's mom was staying in Hartford more and more. She even had her own apartment there now and stayed a lot through the workweek.

Kelly felt sorry for her friend. She didn't know what she'd do if her mom started spending more time away from home. Mrs. Waters was like Kelly's best friend. Kelly could tell her mom practically everything.

“Should we get started?” Sydney said quickly.

Kelly sat next to Alexia. Sydney lay down on her stomach on the floor.

“Let me go first,” Raven said, bringing her list in front of her. “Caleb's Flaws. Number fifty: He doesn't go over his tongue while brushing his teeth.”

All the girls wrinkled their noses in disgust.

“And you used to kiss him?” Sydney asked. She bent her legs at the knees, her feet swinging back and forth. The TV behind her played a commercial for diamond jewelry. “Get your Valentine something special this holiday,” a delicate female voice said over the display of glitzy diamond earrings.

Kelly waved her list around. “I only managed to get thirty-eight flaws. So, this is thirty-eight. Will doesn't eat candy.”

Alexia groaned. “He is such a freak.”

“How can you
not
eat candy?” Sydney asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Now you, Syd,” Raven said.

Sydney picked at something on the floor. “Well…”

“Don't tell me you didn't do a list,” Alexia said.

“I have a mental one.” Sydney sat up, crossing her legs in front of her. “Drew always has to have a plan.” She visibly swallowed, then nodded, as if satisfied with that flaw.

Raven popped a few more pieces of popcorn in her mouth. Kelly took a handful out of the pink plastic bowl and started picking at the buttery pieces. When was Raven going to bust out that chocolate?!

“All right, good enough,” Raven said. “Number forty-nine for Caleb is he never puts things back where he found them.”

“Drew does the same thing!” Sydney laughed. “I was constantly searching for my stuff.”

“Well, that's Drew's next flaw then,” Alexia said.

“Yeah.” Sydney nodded thoughtfully. “I guess it is.”

They continued like that for the next hour. Raven undoubtedly had the most flaws to share since her list was the longest. Kelly ran out of steam about halfway through and Sydney had a hard time listing Drew's flaws fifteen minutes after they started.

After hearing about Caleb's nasty BO and his tendency to jerk like crazy when he was falling asleep, Kelly had to wonder how Raven ever put up with him. And when Kelly asked her, Raven thought for a minute and said, “You know what, I'm not really sure.”

Listing Will's flaws and laughing about them with her friends made Kelly ten times more aware of how perfect Will tried to be. Did he seriously not like candy? Or did he not eat it in front of anyone so people thought he was healthy? Did he seriously like spending ninety percent of his time doing things that would look good for colleges?

Kelly just couldn't imagine spending the rest of her life with someone who strived for such high extremes of perfection. Also, Will's habit of hoarding those little moist towelettes you get at restaurants drove her nuts.

When Kelly listed that flaw, her friends guffawed.

“He is the biggest dork,” Sydney said.

And Raven said, “Does he carry them in his pockets? And get all germaphobe about touching carts and door handles?”

When Kelly thought about it, she realized, yeah, he did carry them around and sometimes wiped the handles on shopping carts, complaining about grease or something sticky.

How did she ever fall for him? It was a mystery.

With the lists finished, they all headed into the kitchen, where Raven finally broke out the chocolate. It was the expensive kind, too. The ones where you had to follow a little illustrated map on the underside of the box lid just to figure out what chocolate was what. It was a game of treasure hunting, except the reward was chocolate!

Raven hoisted herself up on the laminated countertop, her long legs hanging over the edge. Sydney threw another bag of popcorn into the microwave and punched in a few numbers.

“Get off the counter,” she said, giving Raven a push. Raven rolled her eyes but slid down. Those two were always picking at each other. It drove Kelly nuts. But honestly, sometimes Sydney could be a brat.

“Thank you,” Sydney said, then, “Oh, there was something I needed to talk to you about. We talked about band uniforms at the last student council meeting.”

“Yeah?” Raven leaned against the counter and picked at a torn fingernail polished gothic purple.

Kelly leaned against the counter next to her and perused the chocolate box lid. Dark chocolate. Caramel-filled chocolate. Coconut chocolate. Oh, where to start?

Alexia picked a random piece out of the box and headed over to the fridge where she started alphabetizing the restaurant magnets.

“We were trying to decide on fundraisers and I came up with an open-mike night,” Sydney said. The microwave echoed with the sound of exploding corn. The smell of melted butter filled the air.

“That sounds like fun,” Kelly said before biting into a piece of chocolate filled with raspberry-flavored crème. Would Will go to an open-mike night or would he deem it too frivolous? Probably if they were still sorta-together, he would have talked her out of going when really she would have wanted to go.

“There's just one thing.” Sydney grinned sheepishly. “We need a place to host it, and we need it for free. You think your mom would let us do it at Scrappe?”

Raven stopped picking at her nail to look up. Her long, black lashes nearly grazed her eyebrows. “Maybe. Sounds like the kind of thing she'd say would look good on my college application.”

“Well, it would. Tell her that.” Sydney took out the bag of popcorn and shook it. “Let me know what she says? We're thinking about March thirty-first.”

“Got it.” Raven grabbed a second box of chocolates. Sydney wrapped her arm around the bowl of fresh popcorn and they all filed back into the living room.

Raven popped in her sister Jordan's
Gilmore Girls
DVD. It was the season when Jess (as in Milo Ventimiglia) was a major character in the plot.

There was just something so yummy about a slightly short bad boy. Maybe Kelly should get her own bad boy? He would be the exact opposite of Will, if she ever found one. Probably that's what she needed eventually but not now. The Code was starting to work, she thought, and dating another guy right now was definitely
not
in the rules.

Around midnight, Kelly's cell rang in her purse. It was her brother.

“What?” she said by way of greeting.

“Dude, where are you?” Todd asked.

“I'm at Sydney's. I told Mom that when I left. Why?”

“Oh,” he said. “You haven't gone over there in forever.”

“So? What do you want?”

“Will just called here looking for you.”

Kelly's heart suddenly hammered in her ears. Will had called for her? Did he miss her? Did he finally want her as a girlfriend?

“Did he
just
call?” Will was usually in bed by ten. He only stayed up late if he was working on a major project.

“Okay, okay.” Todd groaned. “He called about two hours ago, but I just remembered.”

“Thanks a lot, Todd!”

“Hey, I'm not your answering service.”

Anger blazed in her cheeks, but then she realized all of her friends were staring at her.

“Did Will call or something?” Sydney asked.

Kelly opened her mouth to make up an excuse, but she didn't want to lie to her friends. And she didn't want to start defending Will when they'd just had the liberating experience of reading The Ex's flaws.

“Yeah,” she said. She took in a breath for courage. “But I'm not going to call him back.”

“Good for you!” Alexia squeezed Kelly's shoulder. “See, The Code is working.”

“Hey! Hello!” Todd said.

Kelly turned her attention back to her brother. “Sorry. Anyway, I gotta go, Todd.”

“Wait. One more thing. Mom wants you home.”

“It's getting late, Kelly,” Mrs. Waters said in the background.

“Did you hear that?” Todd said.

Kelly rolled her eyes. “Yes. I heard her.”

“See you soon!”

The phone went dead. She flipped it closed. “I gotta go,” she said.

Sydney paused the DVD.

“Yeah. I'll see you guys tomorrow.”

“You won't call Will back, will you?” Raven asked, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows.

“No. He called hours ago anyway. He's probably in bed by now.”

“If you feel like you need to call him,” Alexia said, “call me instead, okay?”

Kelly smiled. “Sure.”

“Bye,” Sydney and Raven said in unison.

“See ya.” Kelly shut the door behind her.

“You know what?” Kelly said, as she put her coat away at home. “I really don't like you right now.”

Maybe it was meant to be that Todd had forgotten Will called. With it being so late, there was no way Kelly could call over there, even if she'd been tempted to.

Todd grinned. “That's fine, as long as you like me tomorrow.”