Reckless Hearts Read online

  The longer Jake stared at Harlow’s page, the more sure he became that this was a shell profile, made to trick Elena. Cowboy Bebop? Studio Ghibli? Was it any coincidence that these were the exact same things Elena liked? He must have cased her page before constructing his. No wonder he had his claws in her. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair and who knew what horrible things the guy might be up to. Poor Elena. Even if she was mad at him, Jake rationalized, he had to do something to stop her from getting hurt.

  Before he’d thought it through any further than that, he had his phone to his ear and he was listening to hers ringing on the other end of the line.

  “Ung. Wha . . . ,” she mumbled when she answered.

  “Hey. It’s me. Jake.”

  “Jake, it’s really late.”

  “I know. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hold on.”

  Jake waited for her to shake the sleep from her head. This wasn’t the first time he’d called her at three a.m. There’d been a time, during his dad’s worst days, before he got sober, when he’d leaned on her almost every night, talking about the newest development, how they couldn’t find his dad, or how they’d had to bail him out of jail, how his father seemed so helpless and sad and totally not like the dad Jake had always known.

  “What’s up?” she said. “You calling to apologize?”

  Jake had been so swept up in the conspiracy theory he’d begun to develop around Harlow that he’d forgotten that this was the actual root of the problem between him and Elena. Confronted with his guilt, he froze up and couldn’t think of what to say.

  And in that fiery way of hers, Elena filled the silence between them. “’Cause what was that about? That song! I mean, I don’t even know what you were trying to say to me. You think I’m some sort of flighty, stupid girl who lets whoever comes along take advantage of her? Is that how you see me?”

  “No, I don’t,” Jake mumbled.

  “Then tell me why. It’s totally not like you to do something like that.”

  “You’re right,” he said dumbly.

  “So?” She waited for him to explain himself.

  Jake could feel the pressure on this moment, like the whole world was pressing down on his shoulders. He knew that the right thing to do was to tell her the truth: that he loved her, that he’d been overcome with an irrational and overwhelming jealousy and that he’d lashed out stupidly. For some reason, though, he couldn’t do it. The possibility of being rejected by her terrified him.

  All he could bring himself to say was “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She still sounded guarded. “Do you forgive me?” Jake asked, his insecurity gnawing at the edges of his brain.

  “Yeah, Jake. I can be a dick sometimes, too. But . . .” Her voice softened and he felt the old concern and quiet care for him filter into it. “. . . what’s going on with you? Why won’t you tell me? It’s like you suddenly don’t trust me anymore.”

  The pressure returned. It was even heavier than before. He thought of Harlow and remembered his initial reason for calling her.

  “Have you talked to Harlow?” he asked.

  “A little bit. He liked my animation,” she said.

  His heart raced. “He’s definitely not real,” he said, blurting it out in one rushed breath. “Listen, I just Googled him—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You need to know, Elena. He’s not real.”

  “Not ‘real’? Like he’s my imaginary friend? Like a cartoon character? Jake. Come on. Are you still on this? I’m not an idiot.”

  “You know what I mean. Somebody made a fake profile. Like, they’re trolling you and trying to trick you. I don’t know why, but—”

  “Is this why you called me? Have you been up all night thinking about Harlow? Jake, why are you doing this?”

  “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “Have I ever needed protecting before?”

  “No.”

  “So then stop trying.” Her voice was firm, final.

  “But—”

  “You know what? I can’t deal with this tonight.”

  “Elena, wait—”

  She was gone before he could say any more. There was just a gaping, dark, empty silence on the other end of the line now.

  Jake closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I’m such a fool, he thought. He set the phone down on the desk and stared at it in the blue glow of his computer screen. Then he picked it up again.

  The urge to call her back made him dizzy. His finger hovered over the call screen until, finally, he broke and pushed the button.

  She didn’t answer. The call went to voice mail after the first ring, which Jake knew meant that she’d rejected the call.

  He pushed the button again, and again she rejected it.

  He felt like she was rejecting more than just his calls, like she was rejecting the entirety of their history together.

  He tried one more time and when she still refused to answer, he threw his phone across the room into one of the open boxes he still hadn’t unpacked. He wasn’t sure which one, which was a great relief. If he’d seen where it had landed, he’d be digging around for it, and he knew that could only make things with Elena worse than they already were.

  13

  It always happened at the last minute. Elena’s father would get a call from the manager of one of his Laundromats saying, “I think I’m sick. I just took my temperature.” There’d be coughing and a wan listlessness in the manager’s voice. “I can’t make it in today, sorry.”

  And Elena would have to take over the woman’s shift. It was a tedious job. She had to just sit there, making change for the old women in their thin, flower-print smocks, and sometimes fixing a jammed machine.

  Today, she was near the beach on the south side, in the Slats. Mixed in with the detergent scent rising off the washers, she could smell the salt water, so near, yet so far from the cage she was stuck in by the front door of the fluorescently bright room. To pass the time, she hung out on AnAmerica, trying not to think about the frantic call she’d received from Jake the night before and wishing Harlow would reach out to her.

  She couldn’t help breaking into a satisfied smirk at the sight of his flaming motorcycle icon when he finally direct messaged her. She wished Jake could see the freewheeling, expansive conversations she’d been having with Harlow. It would serve him right given how totally paranoid he was being.

  Propping her computer on the empty stool across from her, she clicked open the message.

  “Hey, raven hair,” it said. “Would you look at something for me?”

  “Like what?” she wrote back.

  A streaky-blond woman in flip-flops and a wraparound skirt with tropical fruit printed on it wandered up to the counter and slipped some folded bills out of her bikini top. She pushed them through the opening in the cashier’s cage.

  “You’ve inspired me. I made a video,” said the next message from Harlow.

  Elena quickly gave the woman five dollars’ worth of quarters. The job was so easy she didn’t even have to speak to the customers to fulfill their needs.

  She wrote back to Harlow as soon as the woman dragged her laundry bag away. “Hell-za yeah, I’ll look at a video from you! ☺”

  “Really? It probably sucks, but . . .”

  “Are you being shy?”

  “I’ve never shown my stuff to anyone before,” he wrote. Then a second message came tumbling in below this one. “It’s not fair, though, for me to like your stuff so much and not let you see mine, too.”

  Elena’s heart did a little spin as she realized the risk he was taking. Her fingers could hardly keep up with her typing. “It would be an honor.”

  “One sec.”

  A moment later, a link to a private Vimeo page came in along with another message. “I’m nervous now.”

  “Watching,” she wrote. Then she clicked through to the Vimeo page and play
ed his animation.

  It started with blackness. Then just sound, strings, and warbling synthesizers. She recognized the song. It was by Sigur Rós. Harlow let it play for ten or fifteen seconds in darkness. Then a pinpoint of white appeared in the middle of the screen, slowly growing larger. The blackness had somehow, imperceptibly, turned into a rich dark blue, flecked with other colors—greens, yellows. It looked like it had been painted with watercolors. The pinpoint of white was big enough now to see that it was an eye.

  The camera pulled back to reveal a solitary man crouching on the edge of a skyscraper. He wore a hooded cloak, and under that, a billowing white outfit wrapped in leather straps from which hung knives and assorted other Japanese weapons: throwing stars, nunchucks. Elena knew right away that this was a ronin, one of the solitary, roguish samurai whose personal code of ethics demanded that they walk alone through the world. You didn’t last long in the world of anime without learning about these mythic warriors.

  And then the music soared and a million robotic men rained down from the sky and the ronin leaped into action. The next two and a half minutes consisted of an intricately choreographed ballet in which the ronin swooped and spun and danced through the air, battling it out with the robots under a full moon. It was riveting. There was no dialogue, no sound at all except for the Sigur Rós song. The color palate shifted with the mood shifts in the music.

  The world around Elena disappeared while she watched. It was like she’d been hypnotized.

  And then, in a daze, she realized that the animation had ended.

  Blinking, she let herself take in the moment. Harlow was maybe the most talented artist she’d ever encountered on AnAmerica. It was hard to believe that he didn’t know this. And now having seen what he could do, his admiration of her work meant a thousand times more than it had before.

  She looked around at her surroundings. The day seemed brighter in every way than it had been before she’d watched the clip—great art always had this effect on her. The winter sun streaming in the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Laundromat had gone from turning everything a pale white to pulling out the vibrant sparkle in the steel machines. She was glad that the blond woman, way back by the jumbo washers, was the only person there to witness how overwhelmed with emotion she’d suddenly become.

  Elena cued the video up and watched it again, hoping to find something smart to say about it. Wells of emotion washed through her as the music soared and spun, changing and deepening with every new color washing through Harlow’s animation.

  She hadn’t been this touched by someone else’s talent since the first time she’d heard Jake play a song he’d written. But this was different. With Jake, she’d felt like she’d been able to see through to the heart of someone fragile whom she needed to look out for, like the music was telling her, in more beautiful form, things she already knew about her closest friend.

  Harlow was mysterious, more worldly than her. His art dared her to grow, to expand beyond herself. She felt proud for him—and honored that he wanted her opinion on what he’d made. She was amazed that someone who could make something this good cared so much what she thought.

  When she was done watching the video for the second time, she could think of only one thing to say.

  “LOVE!”

  “Really? You like it?” he wrote back.

  “More than I can say.”

  “Cool.”

  She waited for another communication from him. When it finally came, it said, “Would it be wrong of me to ask for your phone number?”

  She typed in her number. Then, to help herself feel less awkward about what was clearly a new step in their relationship, she added, “I’m a sucker for talent.”

  “You and me both,” he said.

  14

  Finally, six days after moving in, Jake had managed to get all his things out of the boxes and onto the bed, floor, and chair. He’d broken down the boxes and moved them to outside his door, though not to the garage, where Cameron had told him to put them.

  Feeling like he’d accomplished something monumental, he looked around the space and, for the first time, saw how big and sterile the room really was. The brushed concrete floor felt warm and slick under his bare feet. The blond wood of the designer bedroom set had a gleam to it that reinforced the feeling that this room was made for looking at, not living in. He wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to it.

  Now to organize the clothes, guitar paraphernalia, graphic novels, electronic devices, photos, and random other junk he’d collected over the years (why did he need those old Pokémon cards? He didn’t know, but somehow he still did) and find places for them all.

  He picked up a framed illustration that Elena had given him—her avatar, Electra, scowling out from a bright red bull’s-eye—and gazed at it for a moment. Just the thought of her made his heart feel like it was being poked with a thousand needles.

  This cleaning binge had been meant to take his mind off of her, and until now, it had succeeded. But staring at the doodle, he couldn’t help gravitating toward obsessing over her again. He sat on the pile of T-shirts on his bed and traced Electra’s outline with his finger, giving in to the moody self-pity he’d been avoiding.

  They hadn’t spoken, or even texted, since he’d woken her up in the middle of the night two days ago. He knew he’d been an ass at the gig and now he’d made things that much worse. He knew he should be the bigger person and apologize to her, but he wasn’t ready yet. What he really wanted was for her to reach out to him and say, I miss you, I’m lost here, I know how you need me, and I need you, too. But she wasn’t going to do that.

  Jake thought of her kissing Harlow. He had no idea what the guy might look like, so what he saw wasn’t the kiss itself but Elena’s expression, that openness, that touching quiver between her eyebrows as she gazed up at Harlow, that expression that Jake imagined in his fantasies of kissing her himself—his lips trailing down her neck and grazing her shoulders, his hands gripping her waist . . .

  He didn’t know why the thought of Elena and Harlow together seemed like so much more of a threat than the other guys she’d dated in the past. Maybe it was because those guys had been so obviously beneath her. When she’d been seeing Robby Clay, she used to call him “the shrimp” because he was so short, but also because he had a sort of rumpled, scrunched-up way about him. Whether she meant it or not, Jake had always felt like she was secretly telling her that he had nothing to worry about from Robby, that she’d chosen the kid because he was safe. And it had been the same with Toby Stossel. But this Harlow guy—if he was really who he said he was, which Jake still refused to admit might be true—seemed like he could actually erase the future Jake had secretly planned for himself and Elena. The guy was witty—Jake had seen this from the comments he’d posted on Elena’s videos. And he’d apparently traveled the world. And he—

  No. This had to stop.

  Leaping to his feet, Jake threw himself back into the details of room organization. He placed the illustration on one of the built-in shelves—the one closest to the ceiling, so high that even he, at six foot four, had to stand on tiptoes to reach it.

  As he positioned the frame, his hand brushed against what felt like crumpled paper up there. An origami swan. This was the fifth or sixth one he’d found hidden around the room. It was odd. Nathaniel didn’t seem like the kind of guy to do arts and crafts. He crushed this one and threw it into the trash bag with the others.

  To fend off the nostalgia and maudlin wishes that looking at more framed photos and artwork might bring, he focused on his clothes. T-shirts in one drawer. Shorts in another. In the process he collected three more swans.

  He could feel someone lurking in the doorway, watching him. An aura. A tight white heat. He knew without looking that it was Nathaniel. Jake wondered how long his stepbrother had been watching him. The guy seemed to always be there, wandering in and taking up Jake’s space, watching, making quasi-helpful but mostly annoying comments about the best and wor
st ways to do things. Pressuring him for updates on the Elena situation.

  Jake ignored him. He folded his jeans and lightweight pants and placed them in stacks in the bottom drawer.

  “Looking good, brother,” Nathaniel said.

  Jake arched an eyebrow and glanced at him. “Thanks.”

  “A clean room’s important,” Nathaniel went on. “You don’t want to be one of those mama’s boys who don’t know how to pick up after themselves.” Jake braced himself for the lecture on how to be suave and oily that he knew was coming. “When your chicky comes to visit—Elissa? Alana?”

  “Elena.”

  “Right. She’s going to be sizing up your room and looking for evidence. You want her to think you’re interested in more than just sports and comic books.”

  “I’m not interested in sports,” Jake said flatly, hoping his tone would convince Nathaniel to leave him in peace.

  “Sure. Cool. But you’ve got that.” Nathaniel pointed one overly manicured finger at the scale model of Serenity, the ship from Firefly, lying on its side next to the stack of framed photos on the desk.

  Jake took his time responding. He picked up a stack of socks and shoved them into the top drawer of the dresser.

  “She’s not going to judge me for that,” he said. “She gave it to me.”

  Instead of looking for Nathaniel’s reaction, Jake kept to his task. He carried the boxers folded on the bed to the dresser and made room for them next to the socks. Two more swans. This would be the opportune time to ask Nathaniel about them, but Jake didn’t want to give the guy the satisfaction of explaining their significance. He crumpled them in his fist and shoved them into the trash bag with the others.

  “What about that?” Nathaniel said. He was pointing at the photo at the top of the stack, a blow-up of Dave Matthews and Jake’s dad playing acoustic guitar together in a little club in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was signed and everything. One of Jake’s most prized possessions. “You think she’s going to be impressed by Dave Matthews?”