The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club by Jessica Morrison Read Free Book Online Page B

on a whole other continent. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. Worst of all, I don’t know who I am supposed to be. There is no plan, and without a plan, there is no Cassie. It’s all so overwhelmingly wrong that I have to concentrate on my breathing to keep from hyperventilating. There is no way I am going to make it six months.
    So I break it down like any good project manager. I focus on the next few minutes, on arriving at the address on the piece of paper I’ve been clutching so hard it’s already softening. I suspect that the apartment I rented in my drunken state, though nice enough in the online photos, might not be so spectacular in reality, but sleep on the flight was sporadic at best (Valium, shmalium), and the idea of putting my head down somewhere, anywhere, helps get me through the long cab ride. I rest my forehead against the cool window as the cabdriver prattles on, now completely in Spanish. The clogged streets give way to cobblestone roads lined with malnourished trees, and eventually, we thump to a stop.
    “You here,” the driver says happily.
    “Don’t remind me,” I mumble to myself.
    He peeks through his passenger window. “Good house.”
    The “house” he refers to is a massive yellow wall relieved only by a forbidding wood door, two windows all but obscured by thick iron bars, and several disturbing fissures that run from sidewalk to roof. The website said the suite was bright and had a nice garden view, but the chances of that being true look pretty slim. The only things growing on this sadly sloped, graffiti-stained street are persistent weeds that stretch up hopefully through cracks in the concrete, and stunted trees standing limply every twenty feet or so. Seattle’s docks, heavy with rusting ship skeletons and rustier merchant marines, have more greenery.
    It’s barely been a day, and I miss it so much already. If you get up early enough, you can buy fresh fish, fruit, flowers, pretty much anything, down at the docks. Not that I ever did, but I always knew I could, and now—now I can’t. Now those docks are a world away. People who aren’t from Seattle don’t understand the city. They think we are all Pike-Place-fish-throwing, Kurt-Cobain-mourning, plaid-shirt-wearing coffee addicts. You can’t know Seattle’s heart and soul unless you walk the streets first thing in the morning, eat hot dogs from a street vendor downtown at noon, hang out in a jazz bar on a Tuesday night, cure your hangover with a 5 Spot Café breakfast. Why did I want to leave, even for a second? I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else. Besides long weekends in Vegas and that trip after graduation to New York with Trish, I’ve never given traveling much thought. I don’t have wanderlust. Don’t even have any real curiosity about other cultures, to be honest. I’m glad they’re out there—I just don’t feel any need to be out there in them. Seattle in all its wet, sleepy, grungy glory has always suited me just fine. Yet here I am, thousands of miles from where I was and from who I want to be. Instead of salt-worn wood planks solid under my feet, I have a crumbling cobblestone sidewalk mined with dog crap.
    If I’ve set my watch correctly, it’s very late, but I have no choice but to knock. While the driver gets my bags, I negotiate sidewalk cracks and crap and locate the door buzzer on the massive yellow wall. If not for the building’s cheerful color, I’d swear I was about to check in to a convent. Maybe this is all part of some twisted Argentine plot to indoctrinate young foreign women into the sisterhood—a theory immediately dispelled when I notice a couple of transvestite hookers parked on the corner behind us. One of them smiles at me and says something in Spanish to her/his friend. I smile back and they laugh. Nothing I haven’t seen in Seattle, but this one similarity doesn’t exactly fill me with comfort. I sigh deeply and shake my head at the few moments when I let myself