An Optimist's Guide to Heartbreak (Heartsong #1)(39)

Massaging my temple with two fingers, I nod, grateful for the subject shift. And for Uncle Dan. “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

“Love you most.”

When I hang up and slide the phone into the waistband of my too-tight leggings, Cal is behind me looming in the doorway. I turn, feeling his eyes on me, and discover him leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and a subtle smirk on his face. “What?” I probe, my throat tight. He has a look like he’s remembering the smiley face.

“She thinks we’re sleeping together.”

How?

How does he always do that?

He sees me start to fluster and cuts in. “Your mother always talks like she’s trying to speak over a pod of sperm whales partaking in a fire drill. I heard.”

Why?

Why did he have to say sperm?

I’m even more flustered when I reply, wiping my clammy palms along my backside and blowing my chaos ponytail out of my face. “Well, she’s just nosy. You know this.”

“Yeah, I do. Can’t forget the time she practically broke down your bedroom door, convinced I was trying to sully your preteen innocence.”

Even though that moment was humiliating, I can’t help but bark out a laugh. “You were only helping me with my spelling bee words.”

Cal bites his bottom lip, sliding it between his perfect teeth. “Right.”

The look he shoots me sends a flurry of flutters down south, then he pulls up from the doorjamb and steps out.

I heave in a breath, unable to prevent the smile from tipping my lips.



Cal holds the notebook just out of reach, listing off words as he leans against my cotton candy pink headboard with a ballcap shadowing his features. “Leisure,” he reads off.

“L-i-e-s-u-r-e.”

“Wrong. E before I,” he quips.

“What? It’s always I before E except after C.”

“That’s a web of lies. Erase that from your brain.”

“English is hard,” I whine.

Shrugging his shoulders before squaring them, his eyes roam over the spiral notebook. They glance up at me, glinting with something like mischief. “Have,” he says.

I blink, confused, but I spell it anyway.

“You.”

I spell it, still lost. These are not my spelling bee words, I’m sure of it. These were sight words when I was in second grade.

“Ever.”

“Cal, what are you doing?”

“Spell it, Lucy.”

“Ugh,” I say, but I do.

“Been.”

He’s being infuriating and wasting time.

Still, I spell it.

Then he glances up again with only his glittering light brown eyes, long lashes tickling his brow line. He bites his lip in a strange way and says, “Kissed.”

My heart slams against my ribs, my thirteen-year-old brain going haywire. I study him, seeing the question staring back at me.

Everything feels warm. My skin, my throat, my nerves.

Moistening my desert-dry lips, I squeak out the letters, one by one, watching as he lowers the notebook and scoots closer to me on the bed.

“K-i-s-s—”

My bedroom door barrels open, revealing my mother in her lavender bathrobe, pointing a disapproving finger in my direction as Cal and I jump to our feet like the mattress just caught on fire.

“Lucille Anne Hope!”





Chapter 12





10.04.12

“Fireflies”



The thing I miss most about summertime is the fireflies.

Fireflies, lightning bugs, glowworms.

Campfires are warm and bright, but they don’t replace the magic of little lanterns lighting up the backyard when the moon crests. I sometimes make wishes on them. I sometimes catch them in glass jars. I sometimes name them because things without names are just things.

And I always miss them.

Tonight I curled up on my window bench and stared out through the glass, missing the fireflies…

So I named the stars instead.



Toodles,

Emma





I’m nervous when I pull into Cal’s gravel driveway and the rocks smash beneath my tires like a fist around my lungs.

He parks his bike under the attached carport and removes his helmet, sliding his eyes to me through the windshield when I make no effort to exit my vehicle.

I need a minute.

I need a minute to drink in his landscaping and shutters and the front door that I never expected to be red. Red doors are welcoming, somehow, and Cal is…

Well, Cal is a gray door.

Cloudy and overcast, in dire need of sunshine.

Maybe the house just came with a red door, I decide, just like my house came with Emma. Maybe cheerful things simply have a way of finding people.

It’s a tiny ranch-style house, similar to mine, but even smaller. The bricks are ruddy and brown as opposed to my honey-yellow bricks, and the shrubbery is overgrown with dying weeds and a singular wooden ghost decoration that sticks out of the wood chips. I recognize it. It’s old and weathered, purchased from a pumpkin farm years ago when Emma spotted it and named it Mr. Boo-tiful.

God, he still has that?

My eyes water, knowing he probably snatched it from one of his mother’s overflowing tubs of Halloween décor, and that he takes the time to display it every October.