The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(48)

But when I looked closer, what stood out the most wasn’t genetic: Thick, shiny scars ran up both her inner forearms and across one side of her neck. The scars were shocking, and once I’d noticed them, I couldn’t see anything else. A dozen questions raced through my head. It took everything I had not to gawk.

“This is a tough one,” Jack said. “I’m not sure if I can use any of these.”

“I thought there were a couple. ‘Screw’ is always good.”

“I’m not using ‘screw,’ Jillian.”

“Okay, okay. What about this one.”

Jack twisted the page and smiled. “Yeah. That’ll work great. Here, let’s see if Beatrix can find it.”

“It’s a test,” Jillian said excitedly while handing the paper to Jack, who handed it to me; I guessed she really didn’t like touching.

When I took the wrinkled page, I caught a glimpse of the other “puzzles.” They were all basically the same: homemade word searches. A grid of letters, most of them legible, some not so much. I sat back down and studied the one in my hand.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to find. Nothing had been circled, but one word was bolded in the center of the grid: “Charlie.” It looked like she’d started with that and built words off it. And seeing how quite a few of those words were things like kissing and licker and the previously discussed screw, I didn’t really want to get into exactly who Charlie was, but she told me anyway.

“Charlie’s one of the orderlies. It was just a joke because he’s too mean.”

“He’s tough, not mean,” Jack said.

“No, I meant he’s straight, or, um … what’s the word?”

“Stoic.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She pointed at Jack and nodded. “Stoic.”

I studied the puzzle, searching for the word they’d found. The marker she’d used wasn’t the same metallic gold that Jack used for his pieces. But it could definitely be called golden. And at the bottom of the grid, I spotted four letters that shook something loose in my brain. I could already envision it written in glittering spray paint.

“Rise?” I guessed.

Brother and sister shot me dueling grins.

And that was the exact moment I fell in love with Jack Vincent.

20

I’ve never really minded the scent of hospitals. Maybe it’s because my mom’s a nurse. It’s familiar. Comfortable. Sure, I understand why some people might associate the scent with bad things, like tears and pain and death. But it should be associated with good things, too, like healing and hope and second chances.

And as I exited the psych building with Jack, I associated the scent with other positive things, like admiration. Understanding. And a strange sort of tenderness that melted the right ventricle of my heart.

“You’re painting all the words for her,” I said, looping the handles of my sketch bag over my shoulders and clamping it between my elbow and ribs. Chilly night air gusted through my open jacket.

“She feels trapped. She loves the city, but she’s been terrified of it ever since she got sick. Too much noise, too many people. And you saw her on a good night—a really good one. Some days, she shuts down completely and won’t talk. She’s lost all her friends, and she hasn’t been out in public doing normal things for so long. I just wanted to show her that the walls aren’t closing in and that there’s something out there. Something that’s hers.”

“Something to give her a reason to keep going.”

“Yeah.”

We strolled down the sidewalk, both quiet, until we ended up at a bench near the back parking garage entrance. Jack stopped and sat me down. “I need to tell you the rest before I lose my nerve.”

“Tell me.”

A long breath gusted from his lips. Legs spread, he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, cracking his knuckles. “It happened at Thanksgiving, when we were sophomores. Things had slowly been going downhill for her for months. She dropped out of all her extracurricular stuff at school and started staying at home more. Her grades fell. Her friends stopped coming over. One teacher called my parents in, all concerned about the way she stared in class, like a zombie. The teachers all thought it was drugs.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No. But I thought it might be, too, for a while. She went from being homecoming princess to someone who stopped wearing makeup and dressed like a slob. My parents got her on an antidepressant, which helped for a little while. But after a few months, she started saying strange things and complaining about hearing voices. She seemed agitated and tweaky. And that’s when she started secretly smoking. She said it calmed her nerves. We later found out that something like eighty percent of people with schizophrenia smoke. The researchers don’t know why, exactly—there’s a ton of theories they can’t agree on. But for Jillie to smoke? It was just so out of character.”

He shook his head and waited for a couple of students to walk past before continuing. “Anyway, early that October, she went into a rage at school. It was our old school, before I transferred to the one I go to now, and we were in the same class, so I saw it happen. She couldn’t answer a history question about the Colonies, and Mr. Davis snapped and mocked her. The next thing I knew, she’d dumped over her desk and was screaming crazy stuff, running erratically, knocking things over. She grabbed a stapler and lobbed it at Mr. Davis. It hit him in the face. Hard. He had a black eye for a couple of weeks. And Jillian got an overnight stay in a psych facility across town.”