Page 10 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

I sighed and unlatched the door. Jo slumped a shoulder against the frame of the stall like she couldn’t hold herself up any longer. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ve been staring at your phone all night. Is it Declan? I know you said you were okay with it, but—”

“It’s not Declan,” I said curtly. “And I was on my phone because I’m worried about content. That’s all. You know how important it is to keep our engagement up during the off-season.”

“We’re not supposed to be worrying about that tonight.” Her breath smelled like wine and I realized that she was maybe a little drunk. Not that I could blame her. We were on vacation, celebrating her engagement. But for reasons that maybe weren’t entirely rational, bitterness rose in my throat. It was her nonchalance that bothered me; here I was stressing about the future and everything changing and what that meant for me and the podcast, all while she didn’t seem to have a care in the world—and what came out of my mouth next was about as involuntary as a sneeze. “The internet doesn’t come to a screeching halt just because Jo Hernandez decided to get married.”

I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth. It was one of those thoughts that was better left bottled up, but for some reason it just flew out, like popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. Jo squinted at me like she was having trouble seeing me straight, but I didn’t think it was because of the alcohol. “It’s always the podcast with you. Everything else comes second.”

I tore my eyes away from hers and bit the inside of my cheek, wondering if I should even bother arguing. But she’d backed me into a corner here. Literally. She was blocking the door to the stall and I couldn’t leave until this conversation was finished. “I’m just a little worried about the backlash we’re getting. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but your wedding isn’t going to pay the rent.” Which I was going to have to figure out a way to pay by myself when she moved in with Peter after the wedding. We’d always managed to scrape by between our Patreon and various sponsorships, but despite putting our most glamorous foot forward on social media, we weren’t rolling in absurd amounts of cash. Most sponsors paid us in services and tester products. I wasn’t sure I could afford the apartment on my own, and I hadn’t figured out where I would go if I couldn’t.

“I’ll help you find another place,” Jo suggested, as though she’d read my thoughts. “Or you could stay with me and Peter for a while, at least until …”

She trailed off. I tried to imagine what that might look like: Jo, Peter, and me, the squeaky third wheel they were probably better off without. Worse than being left in the dust was the thought of being dragged along out of pity. “I don’t need help.” And I had no interest in following in Jo’s footsteps. I wasn’t some lonely single girl pining for a life she didn’t have. I’d chosen my own path, and my choice was just as valid as hers. I only worried whether she saw it that way. “I’m just trying to make sure our careers don’t tank in the middle of all this.”

“Have you ever considered that maybe the podcast could use a little change? Half our comments are complaining about how we’re rehashing the same old thing.”

“Do we really have to talk about this right now?” I asked, exasperated. We were spinning in circles. “Your fiancé’s waiting back at the table.”

She lifted a shoulder. “It’s just something to keep in mind. Change isn’t always a bad thing.” She pushed herself off the frame of the stall.

“All right,” I agreed. “But I do actually have to pee.”

She left and I finished up in the restroom. After washing my hands, I stopped in front of the mirror and combed my fingers through my hair, disentangling a strand from where it had picked a fight with my tragus piercing. The girl in the mirror was one-half of Seven Rules, but at the same time she wasn’t, because mirrors didn’t have Facetune to fill in the gap in my left eyebrow or touch up my roots. Go was the face I showed the world, the one fretting over how I should caption my photos or which Tweet I should pin to my profile, and sometimes I wasn’t sure who Margo was beneath her anymore. Whoever she was, she didn’t pay the bills.

Maybe Jo was right. Maybe we were limiting ourselves by sticking to the same old material. Despite everything my college marketing internship had shoved down my throat, reducing ourselves to a single-faceted brand was undeniably limiting. I grabbed my phone out of my cross-body bag. “Siri,” I said aloud, my voice echoing off the tile, “create a reminder for tomorrow morning: brainstorm social media for the month.” I hesitated, my phone still listening, then added, “And try to think up some fresh content.”

Satisfied, I tucked the phone away and pushed through the door—only the door knocked right into something solid. Someone, headed for the men’s room. He caught it with a hand and a surprised “Whoa!” just as I stumbled and fell, scraping my knees on the weathered plank floor.

“Shit,” I mumbled, sucking air through my teeth as I repositioned myself to inspect the damage. Matching angry red scrapes stared back at me. The bridesmaid dresses fell just above the knee, and judging by how thoroughly I’d skinned my knees, I doubted the scabs would be healed in two weeks. I tossed up my hands. “Cool. Now it’s going to look like I was blowing some dude outside the bathroom.”

“Most people would just say ‘ow.’ ” Declan offered a hand, his gaze pointedly averted, and I realized my dress was hiked up my thigh. I tugged it down and he helped me to my feet. After a quick glance to ensure I was decent, he looked me up and down to assess the damage. “That looks like it hurts. I can see if they have any Neosporin—”

Warmth stung my cheeks at the thought of him helping me tend to my scraped-up knees like a kid who’d fallen off her bike. I straightened the straps of my dress, made a show of ensuring everything was in order. “Can we please drop the friendly act?”

“Friendly act,” he repeated, raising a brow.

I exhaled through my nose. I wasn’t in the mood for this. “Look, to be honest, I’m not really buying it after everything you put me through in high school. But for the sake of our friends, and this wedding—” I broke off, because he was frowning at me, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure in my assessment of the situation.

“No, please continue. What about high school?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

He just stared, shook his head faintly, like I was speaking a different language.

“ ‘Most Gullible,’ ” I prompted. He continued to look dumbfounded, so I kept going. Everyone wanted to reminisce, then we were going to reminisce, all right. “Sophomore year, in the middle of the homecoming pep rally. You stuffed my tuba with shaving cream. I almost popped a blood vessel trying to blow an F sharp. Never mind frosting Jordan Gardner like a fucking cake.”

Understanding dawned on Declan’s stupid, freckled face. For the briefest of moments, I thought he might apologize. But then he burst into gleeful, fifteen-year-old-boy laughter, and for the first time he actually resembled the Declan I’d known. Knew he was still in there, somewhere. “I haven’t thought about that in forever.”

“You might’ve forgotten, but everyone else remembered just fine,” I grumbled. The tuba incident was the first in a string of embarrassing incidents that probably contributed to the nickname. Like every single time someone told me there was a stain on my shirt. Or when my lab partner in chemistry briefly convinced me that makeup brands were lab-testing waterproof lipstick on fish. I was ready to sign a petition and everything. “They voted me the ‘Most Gullible’ in senior year.”

And you know what, maybe they had it right. Maybe I was gullible, because it was that same year that I learned my dad had cheated on my mom for eight whole years. They’d stuck together for the sake of making sure I finished school and I was never the wiser until the day they sat me down on the ugly sectional sofa in our three-bedroom house in Rialto, two days after my eighteenth birthday, and told me they were getting a divorce. I was blindsided, but everyone else just shrugged and went on with their lives, because that was the way the world worked. People lied and cheated and got divorced, and if you didn’t learn to recognize that, life would kick you while you were down.

From that day on, I swore that I would wise up. Always stay two steps ahead.

“But that’s high school,” Declan said. “Superlatives don’t matter in the real world.”