Reckless Hearts

6

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 com-fort 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.”

7

“Sounding good, brother.”

Nathaniel was back, leaning against the sliding door that opened out from the cavernous living area onto the massive porch where Jake had been practicing his new song. He’d just taken a midafternoon shower and was wrapped in one of the impossibly plush, massively large towels with which the house was stocked.

Annoyed by the intrusion, Jake looked up from his guitar and stopped playing. “Thanks,” he said, propping his bare foot on the rail of the porch and slouching back in the chair he’d dragged over.

He had a gig tonight at Tiki Tiki Java, his standing Thursday-night show, but this one was different because he’d made up his mind to play the new song for Elena. It was finished now. His most honest song ever. There was no way she’d be able to hear it and not know it was about her.

“You got a title yet?” Nathaniel asked.

“I think I’m going to call it ‘Driftwood.’”

Jake strummed a couple chords, hoping Nathaniel would get the hint and go away. He didn’t want to be rude. He picked out a timid melody. The guy wouldn’t leave. He was just about to get up and go somewhere else himself when he heard the telltale buzz of a bee zipping around his head.

He froze, momentarily terrified.

Having lived with his allergy for so long, he didn’t even have to think about how to react. He just listened and tried not to move a muscle.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Nathaniel cocking his head and studying him with a look on his face that said he found what was happening cruelly amusing.

“You okay?” Nathaniel said.

The buzz tracked closer to Jake’s head and he dug his chin into his neck, trying to avoid but not incite it.

“I’m allergic to bees,” he explained.

Nathaniel chuckled. “It’s always something, right?” he said. “No worries. I’ve got you covered.” For a moment, he tracked the bee, following it with his nose. Then he clapped his hands together and the buzzing stopped and the bee fell to the porch railing, dead.

Jake exhaled. “Thanks,” he said. But he couldn’t help feeling like there was something aggressive, some sort of power play, in the way Nathaniel had nonchalantly taken care of the bee for him.

“Not a problem.” Nate flicked his finger and sent the bee out into the dunes. He leaned against the railing and folded one leg over the other. “Electra gonna be there tonight?” he asked. “What am I saying? Of course she is. Look at you.”

Jake had put on his best pair of jeans. He’d rummaged through his T-shirt drawer until he’d found the iron-on Speed Racer shirt she’d gotten him for Christmas last year. A special outfit, yes, but how would Nathaniel have known?

“What do you mean by that?” he asked Nathaniel. “Do I look anxious or something?”

Nathaniel made that face of his, the one that might mean he was judging you or might mean he was just being smugly friendly. “Do you look anxious?” he said. “You look like you’re halfway to a heart attack. You gonna make your move?”

“I’ll see how it goes,” Jake said vaguely, trying not to give anything away. He gazed out at the ocean and let the breeze smother his face.

“Dude. Confidence,” Nathaniel said. He was tapping his thumb against his pec in a weird way that seemed both casual and rehearsed. “You’ve got a few things to learn about girls, don’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The last thing Jake wanted right now was unsolicited advice from Nathaniel. Every interaction they’d had since that first night in Jake’s room had felt tinged with undercurrents of competitive malice. Jake didn’t take it personally. It seemed more of a function of Nathaniel’s personality than anything specifically directed at Jake, but he’d begun to suspect that the two of them would never be the friends that Nathaniel seemed to want them to be.

“I’m just saying, you’re a nice guy,” Nathaniel said, pulling a chair up next to Jake’s. “Nice guys don’t win.”

“I’m not trying to win.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Nathaniel pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights out of the waist of his towel and flipped it open. “You do want to win. You want to win Electra’s undying devotion.” He tapped out a lighter and a cigarette. “You want her to lie in bed aching for you. You want to see her and be able to tell that she’s drowning inside her desire for you. If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is. And I’m telling you, it’s never gonna happen as long as you keep trying to be a nice guy.”

Jake just stared at him. He felt trapped and suffocated by this conversation and he couldn’t figure out how he’d fallen into it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he finally said.

Nathaniel shrouded his cigarette from the wind and lit it.

“Listen,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Cameron’s an asshole. We’ve already established that. But a shrewd kind of asshole. He knows what he’s doing. And, brother, that dude gets more pussy than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Jake wasn’t sure how to take Nathaniel’s attitude toward Cameron. First that Nathaniel would talk this way about his own father. Then that he might be telling the truth. It couldn’t be true. Jake’s mother would never marry a guy like that.

Nathaniel leered at him. “The one helpful thing he’s ever taught me—girls want the bad boy. They want the guy who doesn’t care about them. They want to pine and fret over whether you love them. That’s just the facts, Jack. Make her think she’s got to beg and grovel for your devotion and she’ll give you whatever you want.”

Jake retreated into picking at his guitar. He was repelled by the thought that Nathaniel would want him to aspire to this sort of behavior. Jake had seen guys like this who, as Nathaniel had said, got whatever they wanted. There was a guy nicknamed Rollo, a thick-necked wrestler who’d graduated from Chris Columbus a couple years ago and who’d been a total bastard toward women who always seemed to be falling all over him. Elena used to rant about him all the time. His name—Rollo—had become a secret code between them, a word they used to refer to guys like that in general.

“Elena’s not like that,” he told Nathaniel. “She’s enlightened.”

“That’s what you think,” Nathaniel said. “They’re all enlightened. Until they’re not.”

Jake wanted to punch him. He felt his muscles clenching.

“Now I’ve hit a nerve. Sorry, brother. Just trying to help.”

But Nathaniel didn’t seem all that sorry. He leaned over the rail and flicked the end of his cigarette out into the dunes. Then he flashed that look of his again and patted Jake on the shoulder.

“Let me know how it goes.”

He adjusted his towel and wandered back into the house, and when Jake began practicing his song again he found that he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think about was Elena swooning and fawning over an asshole like Rollo. Something like that would never happen, he told himself, but now that Nathaniel had placed the idea in his head, he couldn’t get it out.

8

When she arrived at Tiki Tiki Java, Elena was so excited to see Jake that she threw herself off her bike, leaving it to spin its wheels on the patch of lawn out front as she raced through the bamboo-covered outside seating area that had been strung with white Christmas lights into the main room of the café. Jake’s mom had really done the place up for the season. Spray-on snow frosted the windows and intricate snowflakes had been stenciled onto the glass. A massive Christmas tree sat in one corner of the room, festooned with ornaments fitting for a café that took pride in its tropical location: plastic pineapples and bananas, a surfing Santa, reindeer in sunglasses.

Elena hardly saw the mothers with strollers and old fogeys reading their newspapers and the few hipper, looser, younger people who’d begun to show up for Jake’s gig—her eyes were focused on Jake, seated, as she knew he would be, at the small round table next to the platform where he would perform. It had been only three days since they’d seen each other, but it felt like a lifetime.

He gazed up at her with his shy smile and she was pleased to see that he looked just like himself, so tall that he seemed folded into his seat, his light brown hair mussed and a little too long, like an overgrown little boy. He’d worn the faded Speed Racer shirt she’d bought him last year for Christmas and on the table in front of him was a pink smoothie, which she knew must be for her, since he’d never let that kind of sugary, milky drink gum up his throat before he had to sing.

“Hey-o!” she said, sliding into the seat across from him. “Jake. Jaybird. Where’ve you been my whole life?”

He blinked at her with his wide, pale eyes. “Your smoothie, madam.”

Taking a sip, she thought through the various tastes as they hit her tongue and said, “Umm. Raspberry and … banana. A hint of, is that vanilla yogurt? Where’s the kale? I’m disappointed. To me it’s not a smoothie unless there’s kale.” This was a game they’d played a hundred times, imitating and mocking the pretentious foodies who’d taken over the strip of restaurants along Magnolia.

“Kale’s so last year,” Jake said, picking up on her riff. “I asked for brussels sprouts, but they were all out.”

They both laughed at this.

“You better get your mom to take care of that,” she said.

She tapped at the table with both hands, grinning at Jake, unable to contain the energy inside herself. She could see by the inquisitive angle of his gaze that he was trying to get a bead on why she was so excited.

“Everything okay, Elena?”

She held up a finger, like, wait a second. She felt like a hundred firecrackers were going off at the same time inside of her, each one a new thing she wanted to tell him, all of them erupting on top of each other, drowning each other out. To calm herself down, she guzzled her smoothie through the straw until she’d given herself a brain freeze. Then she threw herself dramatically, head and shoulders and one slapping open hand, onto the table.

“So,” she said. And she grinned at him.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said, matching her grin for grin.

Sitting up, leaning back, both hands splayed flat on the table, she just kept grinning.

“What, Elena? Tell me!” he said, carving a little doodle of expectation in the air with his head.

“It’s nothing. It’s stupid,” she said.

Jake’s eyebrows raised slightly, then returned to neutral.

“I’ve been talking to some guy on AnAmerica. Chatting. Like internet-wise. And … I don’t know. It’s silly. It’s just flirting. Forget it.”

“You’ve been chatting with a guy online? Don’t you do that every day with your AnAmerica friends?”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. It just is. He seems smarter than most of those people. And he really liked the animation I made for you. He said it reminded him of the art he saw in Paris. He just … surprised me, I guess.”

Jake hunched down in his chair, as much as was possible with his long legs. He had that look on his face that he got when was listening closely, taking everything in and absorbing it in that sensitive way of his. “Paris, huh?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve fallen in love with him because—”

“Love? Who said anything about love? I’ve fallen into witty banter with him. I’ve fallen into Wow, you know about art and you can talk to me about my animations in a really sophisticated way and you think I’m talented and you’re so much cooler than the boneheads and dweebs who usually like me with him. I’ve fallen into I’m bored and my sister’s being a pain and my best friend is busy with his new family across town with him.”

Jake flinched a little, and Elena sort of regretted making that comment about him being too busy for her. But what had he said on moving day? That he’d call her all the time or something? Well, her cell hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook or buzzing with texts from him since then. She didn’t want to admit it, but it kind of stung.

“Do you know anything else about him? Like what his name is, even?” he asked, his voice sharp.

“His name is Harlow.”

“Harlow what?”

Elena stared at Jake, unable to answer. What was up with him today? This was exactly not how she’d thought this conversation would go.

“You’ve talked to him, how many times?”

“Like … two.” Why did she feel so defensive? “Does it matter?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jake. He shook his head and winced, thinking it through. “I’d be careful, Elena … Guys on the internet. Anybody on the internet, really. You can never know who they really are. Who knows what he might be up to. Stealing your information. Infiltrating your computer. Toying with you just to, I don’t know, fulfill some dark little fantasy of his. He might not even be a guy. Or he might be eighty years old. Or seven. You see what I’m saying? Just … be careful.”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, hoping her tone would point out to him how weirdly overprotective he was being.

He looked so wounded somehow. It was bizarre. “I’d just hate to see you get hurt,” he said.

“Have you ever seen me let myself get hurt? Look! I’m wearing Doc Martens!”

She yanked her foot up above the tabletop to show off her pink combat boots, hoping that doing so would lighten the mood. But Jake had withdrawn into one of his quiet places. Elena could never tell what he was thinking when he did that. She could see the emotions rippling on his surface, but she had no way of knowing what those emotions were. Though she knew there was no reason to, she felt bad, like she’d somehow done something wrong.

Jake’s fans were beginning to show up. Kids from school, mostly—Becky Anderson, with her timid way of walking, like she didn’t want anyone to see her and her signature waist-length braid; Arnold Chan, the computer whiz who’d gotten in so much trouble a couple of years ago when he’d been running tech for the graduation ceremony where Jules Turnbull’s homemade sex tape had been inadvertently played; and a handful of others. Jake nodded and threw curt two-fingered waves at them.