Amelia Kahaney - The Brokenhearted

For my parents, who gave me wings, and for Gabriel, who gave me someplace warm to land.

Let us dream of blood and pulse and ebb and flow. Let us consider tide and beat and throb and hum. Let us unweave the web of artery and vein, the fluttering jetties of the valves, the coursing of ions from cell to cell, the sodium that is your soul, the potassium that is your personality, the calcium that is your character.

Brian Doyle

CONTENTS

A girl, alone.

Legs tucked up inside a baggy black hoodie, she perches on a metal grate atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in Bedlam City. She is watchful, still and silent as a gargoyle. The city heaves beneath her, but all she can hear this high up is the whistling of an icy wind.

This building, Fleet Tower, shares her name. When her parents die, she will inherit all eighty-seven stories of it. Lucky girl , the papers say. But Anthem Fleets luck ran out a long time ago.

Beneath her, in the penthouse, is her bedroom. Inside it, objects she once loved. The varnished mahogany ballet barre bolted to the wall, where she practiced till her feet bled. The king-size bed she looked forward to crawling into each night, back when sleep came easily. Underneath the bed, a metal lockbox. The place she kept everything he gave her, until what he gave her turned into something no box could contain, something no girl would want to keep.

Above her, an indifferent sky shot through with searchlights, long fingers of light groping at the purply dusk. Gray thunderheads forming over a bruise-colored lake. Scattered fires raging, always raging, downtown.

And inside her, a cold steel ball. A ticking bomb that beats just like a heart. Pain and rage in equal measure. Tick tock .

While she sits and watches, waiting for nightfall, she makes a list of lies.

Time heals all wounds. Not all of them, it turns out. Some wounds cut too deep, and some kinds of heartbreak arent temporary.

Theres something good inside everyone. Some people are born into this world to do harm. She knows this now but wishes she didnt. Nothing matters to her more than keeping those people away from the ones who cant fight back. Away from the kind of person she used to be, before.

You only live once. What shes been through these past months should have killed her, but it didnt. She has a second life now, one she would never have chosen, but its all shes got. Her life, her little square of rooftop, and a heart that beats too furiously.

She narrows her green eyes to slits and stands up, swinging her arms a little, bracing herself for the jump. She turns her gaze to the darkening streets downtown, to the sprawling, seething mass of inhumanity beyond the Midland River, better known these days as the Crime Line. The jagged scar of the river is what separates the gleaming north side from the lawless south.

Past the Crime Line, somewhere in the maze of the South Side, is where Anthem went from whole to brokenhearted. Where she stopped being the girl with all the promise in the world and turned into a shattered, damaged thing.

And every day since then, Bedlam City and the people in it have managed to break her heart all over again. Shes learned this world is a beast, a bully that keeps on kicking you long after youre down.

In Bedlam, you either learn to take a beating, or you find a way to fight back.

Heres the choreography: school, ballet, homework, sleep. Repeat the steps until you turn eighteen, keep perfect time, twirl like the ballerina in a jewelry box, and someday it will all pay off. Keep the routine, and the routine will keep you safe. This is what Ive been brought up to believe.

But today, just this once, I cant.

As I walk through the front door of 87P, I compose my face. I shrug my ballet bag off my sore shoulders and drop it next to the statue looming next to the coat closeta black marble griffin with its sharp teeth bared, oversize hundred-dollar bills clutched in its claws.

Stop staring, I whisper to the marble beast, reaching up a hand to cover its beady eyes.

I pass our sunken sitting room, the plush white of it blazing orange as the sun falls below the horizon, and spot my father through the sliding glass doors. He speaks in low tones to Serge, his right hand, driver, and bodyguard, while pacing on the balcony. Serges back is to the window, but I see his head nodding yes, his huge shoulders straining against his usual black suit. When my father turns around and sees me through the glass doors, he flashes me one of his showstopper smiles, his handsome, unlined face radiating an easy confidence that sells buildings all over Bedlam. Tonight he wears his black tailcoat and a white bow tie. The full penguin , he calls it.

I pad down the long hallway toward the master bedroom, rolling my neck from side to side and listening to each vertebra pop and crack.

Mom? I call as I take a few tentative steps inside my parents empty bedroom suite. I brace myself for whatever version of my mother awaits me. Will it be Vivirax-mellowed Helene? Liftivia-energized Helene? Giggly, flushed Helene, deep into a bottle of Amnesia Vineyards chardonnay? Heading toward my mothers massive dressing room, I slide my eyes along the enormous oil portrait of twelve-year-old Regina sitting cross-legged in a field of wildflowers, a perfect miniature version of my mother. Regina with her big blue eyes, imperious lips above a pointed chin, white-blond hair hanging halfway down her back. The sister I never had. The daughter my mother wishes she still had.

But when I enter the dressing room, Helene isnt there. Instead, Im met with my dress, light as air and fluttering a little on its hanger. I stare at the princess-cut gown, the iridescent material glowing white, blue, pink, and purple all at once, like the sky at dawn reflected off an ocean. This is more than a dress, I realize. Its a promise. Of a certain kind of night. Of the right kind of future.

And I cant put it on.

The evening was supposed to go like this: I would wash up after ballet practice, put on this dress my mother picked out, and head to the mayors house for the South Side Orphans Association Ball. I would nod, smile, make polite, demure conversation, and dance with my boyfriend of six months, Will Hansen, under a twinkling chandelier. Then Will and I would slip off to a suite at the Bedlam Grande. He would lay me down on the bed, my long red hair fanning out in all directions, and deflower me. It would hurt a little, according to my best friend, Zahra, or maybe it wouldnt. We would lie there together until the wee hours, my parents assuming we were out at the heavily secured Young Philanthropists after-party in the hotel lobby. As the sun rose over the Bedlam skyline, Will would drive me home in his silver Huntley. I would kiss him good-bye and watch his car crawl quietly away, rejoicing in my bright future with the district attorneys son.

The vision pops like a soap bubble when my mother joins me in the closet, luminous in her seaglass-colored ball gown. Her golden hair is wound into a low, loose bun, and her angular face glows in the pinkish light.

Hello, darling, she murmurs when she sees me. Our eyes meet in the gilded, pink-lit mirror of her ivory vanity, where she keeps her gold-handled makeup brushes, her lipsticks and shadows, lined up with military precision. In one corner are five crystal jars that hold all her prescriptions. Her heavy-lidded gray eyes are full of Viviraxed calm as she gestures toward the dress. I had it steamed.

Its beautiful, I start, a hot blush crawling up my chest. But... I cant go tonight. Im sick. I threw up in the middle of ballet.

I wrap my arms around my midsection and hunch over, willing my face to drain of all color. Staring back at me in the mirror is a damp-looking redhead, mascara dripping beneath her eyes, her pale skin covered in a constellation of ginger freckles. Next to the perfect human specimen that is Helene Fleet, I really do look ill.