Page 110 of Goodbye Days

“Inside. Drunk-texting exes. We smuggled a bottle of vodka home from school.”

“Good, because I really, really can’t deal with them right now.”

“Hang on,” Georgia says. She goes inside and comes out a few moments later with a blanket. She sits and wraps it around both of us, snuggling up next to me, shivering. “Okay. Spill.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Jesmyn?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re way into her.”

“Yeah.”

“Obviously.”

“Great.”

“But she’s not into you at the moment because too weird.”

“Yeah.”

“That all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Yes. But is that all?”

I sigh and squeeze my eyes shut. “I totally screwed myself. Told her how I felt. Said a bunch of stupid stuff. She’s really pissed.”

Georgia hugs my arm and rests her head on my shoulder. “Aw, Carver.”

I rub the side of my head like I’m trying to get out a stain. “She was all I had. She was my only friend here.”

“I know.”

“I’m really lonely.”

“I bet.”

“I want to be happy again before I die. That’s all I want.”

We sit for a long time without speaking in the lovelorn and desperate circle of porch light, shivering and listening to the crickets’ dying song in the brisk darkness. The air is heavy with dew when we finally end our empty vigil.

I once thought heartbreak was akin to contracting a cold or becoming pregnant. It only comes one at a time. Once you get it, you can’t get it again until you’re done with the first round.

It turns out it’s actually more like how you eat dinner until you’re full. But the minute someone says, “There’s pie!” you suddenly have room again in your dessert stomach, separate from your dinner stomach. You have a love heart, separate from your grieving heart, or your guilt heart, or your fear heart. All can be individually broken in their own way.

So I have all kinds of room for a new type of heartbreak.

That’s what I discover the Sunday after the Dearly show, when I have all day to sit and stew and be lonely and lock myself in my room for safety until Maddie and Lana are gone. Which sucks, because I really need a day to hang out with Georgia.

I relearn it on Monday morning, when I show up to school alone. Jesmyn and I didn’t always ride to school together. But we always met up to hang out for a few minutes before class. Not now.

It really sinks in at lunch. We always ate lunch together. I sit in the buzzing, pulsing cafeteria, hoping she sees me; hoping my forlornness can win her over. But she’s nowhere to be found. I guess she’s eating lunch in the music rooms. She said her friend Kerry and the other music nerds did that.

So I sit alone and indulge in wishful thinking, imagining her sitting there as lost as I am. At best, I can envision her giving off the faintest whiff of melancholy; so that someone asks what’s wrong, and she says, “Nothing.”