The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(67)

“Hey,” she said, pushing inside as I stripped out of my jacket.

“Hey.”

Something bounced on my bed. I glanced up to see my sketchbook of Minnie.

“You can finish up your work in the anatomy lab,” she said. “But that’s not a license to run around wherever you please afterward. Just to the lab and back home.”

I was a little shocked. I tried to answer, but it came out as a grunt.

“Dinner’s in the kitchen,” she added, and then walked out. I listened to her shuffling back to her room, and the door closed.

Whatever small hope this gave me was crushed when Jack called me again later that night in lieu of our usual good-night texts. My heart raced as I answered the phone.

“I can’t talk long,” he said in a rush. “Mom’s coming back any second.”

“Okay.”

“I told them.”

“What?”

“I told them about the graffiti.”

“Oh no. Jack? Why?”

“It was time.”

“What did they say?”

“Mom cried, which sucked. Dad is furious. At first I thought he was going to make me turn myself in to the police, but he wouldn’t want the bad publicity. Now he’s threatening to send me to a boarding school in Massachusetts for my senior year.”

“What?” Surely this was a joke or some kind of invented cover-up story, like Jillian being sent to boarding school in Europe. Only … it wasn’t.

“Some elitist prep school,” he said angrily. “It’s a gateway to Ivy League colleges, but I don’t want to go to Harvard or MIT, and I can’t leave San Francisco. God only knows how Jillian will react—she doesn’t do well with change, and Dad knows that. I can’t believe he would even consider it. But I guess it’s what he does with everything he doesn’t know how to handle. He shoves it out of sight. First Jillian, now me.”

“This can’t be happening,” I whispered. “This is all my fault.”

“Hey, stop that. It’s not. I’m glad I told them. It feels like a weight off my shoulders. And I’m not mad, so don’t even think that. You hear me? I’m sorry I got upset earlier. I was just shocked. But I did this for both of us, so your mom can’t hold it against you. I thought it would help, but I guess it only screwed things up even more.”

I suppressed tears and sagged against the headboard of my bed. “Oh, Jack.”

“You are the only thing good in my life. If he forces me to move across the country…? Jesus, Bex. I’m already dying over here. One day apart from you feels like an eternity. What will happen if I can’t see you for months?”

Months. I couldn’t even fathom it, but I already felt the potential loss impaling my chest, an echo of things to come.

It had been weeks since I’d posted on the Body-O-Rama blog. Not to sound tragic, but in a way, it was pretty much the only outlet I had for conversation right now, because no one else was talking to me. Well, Jack would if he could, but before he hung up the previous night, he’d warned me that his parents were watching his every move, and they knew about his trick with their home security cameras. They were also threatening to monitor his texts. In a way, I guess I was happy for once that I paid for my own phone. Mom couldn’t shut it down or anything.

With all this hanging over me, I drew a quick sketch of a human heart and added diagram labels for all the parts. It was no Max Brödel—I’ll tell you that much. And maybe because it was so sketchy, or maybe because my life had been upended, I dug through the bottom of my wardrobe and found my plastic tub of Prismacolors. The scent of wood and wax wafted when I opened the lid. I sharpened the Scarlet Lake pencil and, blowing out a long breath, set the lead against the paper.

I only meant to outline what I’d already done, but half an hour passed, and I’d softly shaded the contours of my entire sketch. I was worried all that color would look garish, but it wasn’t so bad.

“Imagine that, Lester,” I said to my one-armed skeleton.

A few snips in the shape of a square, and the heart, along with its diagram labels, was neatly unmoored from the paper. I carefully ripped it in two and pasted the pieces on a sheet of black paper. Done. Before I could chicken out or second-guess anything, I slapped it on my desktop scanner and uploaded the file under my BioArtGirl profile with only the date and time for a title. And, you know, it actually made me feel a little better.

That night Mom wasn’t working, so she dropped me off at the anatomy lab and told me she’d be back to pick me up at 8:00 p.m. She didn’t add “sharp” to the end of that, but I felt the implication clearly enough.

We were communicating only on a need-to-know basis, but at least that was better than screaming at each other, and it was certainly more communication than Heath and I had. Conveniently, he was spending the night at Noah’s. Mom told me this—not him. She also told me Heath had set a move-out date: the day after my art show.

I didn’t see Simon Gan in the anatomy lab lobby, but after I’d signed in and clipped on my visitor’s badge, I headed into the cadaver room and spotted him in his usual spot. He saw me putting my stuff down and waved. The stand I used to prop up my sketchpad wasn’t around, but several extra ones sat across the room. I headed over to retrieve one but stopped when I noticed that something was … off.