Instructions for a Broken Heart by Kim Culbertson Read Free Book Online Page B

face three seats away, and Jessa couldn’t even get off the bus. She had not bought a ticket for this show. Wanting to scream, throw something at them, or better, jump out the window to be swallowed up by the blur, she squeezed her eyes shut. Seriously, if he didn’t stop it soon, the girl would have permanent face damage. A smile twitched the corners of Jessa’s mouth, her eyes fluttering open. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. She forced her eyes back to them, her smile slipping, her chest clenching like it had its own gag reflex. No, it was worse than bad.
    Blinking tears, she pressed a warm hand to her chest. What was all this muck in her? This shortage of air, this pressure? She had no body memory for it, no tools, no study guide. Like the view outside the window, it was foreign, unknown. Jessa’s relatively normal family hadn’t prepared her for this brand of heartbreak, if that was in fact what this was—her heart a ceramic dish pitched onto a tile floor. She had nice parents—as far as parents go—who asked her how she felt about things, a basically sweet sister who smelled like strawberry gum and left Jessa little watercolor paper hearts on her pillow. She had friends—Tyler and Carissa, especially. School was a constant, controlled challenge, like running stairs during volleyball practice. There was always an understandable goal—study, get good grades, move forward—checking off the boxes inside her school-supplied day planner with the picture of the Williams Peak jaguar on the front. It wasn’t like she was perfect or anything—she wasn’t perfect. Things weren’t always good, and she had bad days like everyone else, but they didn’t feel like this, like being smashed between two huge plates of cold steel.
    Of course, she knew what loss was. She’d lost things—spelling bees, parts in plays, volleyball games, Becky from next door, who’d moved to Holland when they were ten. Two of Jessa’s grandparents had died. But they had been old—sick. Her parents had spoken to her in soft whispers, their hands warm across hers at both funerals like giant Band-Aids. Everything in the natural order of things, the right kinds of loss, not this inky, evil thing asleep in her.
    Before high school, perhaps she’d checked the box next to “Drama I” on the counselor’s pink sheet, sought out the theater world simply because she’d lacked so much of her own drama. Maybe that’s what had drawn her toward Carissa, who had to put her daily drama into categories the way some people separated their recycling. Carissa never seemed to feel more alive than when she was caught up in a crisis. Or two. Or three. Jessa had been swimming in Carissa’s disposable angst since Carissa had plopped down beside her in Ms. Jenkin’s third-grade class—her pigtails bouncing, one red ribbon slipping—and told her they had to be friends, because both of their names ended in ssa , so it was destiny . And Carissa leaned on steady, box-checking Jessa for the right words said in the right order. It’s what they did for each other. It was like that biology word—what was it? Symbiosis.
    Until now.
    Because this break, this ache, this pressure in her chest, it hurt —a sticky, ugly stomach-flu type of ache, like a tiny miserable elf had burrowed under her skin and had started pulling apart her nerve endings. No steady Jessa now. No, Jessa couldn’t shake it, couldn’t seem to stop from wobbling. It wasn’t the kind of pain you just popped a couple of Advil for; it wasn’t isolated to her ankle or her back—it existed everywhere, even in the balls of her feet, in her cuticles.
    Being here wasn’t helping. She had thought maybe Italy would make it better, but it seemed like it was having the opposite effect. The dawn light spread across the Italian countryside like syrup; she could almost drown in it. There was too, too much of it, all that yellow light, all the newness adding to the death grip on her heart. She needed to