Chelsea Fine - Best Kind of Broken

Jenna takes the ice cream carton from my hands and eats a spoonful. “You didn’t feel like you could be yourself around him?”

I think about it. “It’s not that I couldn’t be myself. I just… I just didn’t want to be myself. He and I… we just didn’t feel right. Do I sound crazy?”

“Yes.” She nods. “But the good kind of crazy.”

I rub my face. “This day has been super shitty.”

She wrinkles her brow. “I thought you and Matt broke up a few days ago.”

“What?” I sit up. “Oh. Yeah. We did.” I take the ice cream back. “But then Levi and I got in this fight this morning and it was so stupid, but it just infected me, you know?” I cram an oversized bite into my mouth.

“What did you and Levi get in a fight about?” Jenna narrows her gaze. “Do I need to voodoo his ass? ’Cause I will.”

“It was nothing really.” I wave my spoon flippantly. “This Daren guy was trying to talk me into going to our hometown’s Fourth of July lake party and Levi happened to be standing there when Daren kissed me—”

“Some guy kissed you?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like that. It’s—never mind. It’s complicated.” I sigh again. “But it pissed Levi off, which is understandable, but then Levi said some things he didn’t mean, which is also understandable, but God. It hurt, you know?” I shake my head and look down at the ice cream. “And it made me miss Charity.”

Jenna goes very still. “Levi’s sister?”

I nod and stab at a few chunks of frozen strawberry.

Charity and I met in kindergarten and became instant best friends the day she invited me over to play at her house. That was the first time I was introduced to the Andrews family. To happiness. Love.

“This is my friend, Sarah,” Charity introduced me to Levi. “Sarah, this is my brother, Leaves.”

She always called him Leaves, like he was made of Thanksgiving decorations or something. I used to call him that too. Before.

Growing up, Charity taught me how to be beautiful and free and brave, and she shared her family with me when I was desperate for one myself. She was my other half. We laughed and cried and talked about boys and had sleepovers and dreamed about the future. We were inseparable.

Jenna’s golden eyes study me. “Do you want to talk about her?” she asks quietly.

“No.” I stare at the ice cream.

“Do you want to talk about Levi?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk about—”

“No,” I say sharply. I swallow and try to compose my violent tone as I look up. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be bitchy. This is my fault. I know I brought it up. I know I should want to talk about it. But I just—I can’t.”

She nods with a half smile and shifts her weight on the couch. “That’s okay.” A beat passes. “Let’s just talk about something else.” She smiles again, but this time it’s real and warm.

God, I love Jenna and her unflinching ability to roll with my closed-off past.

“Like what?” I take another bite and try to swallow down my emotions along with the dessert.

“Like… what are you doing next semester? Jack mentioned that New York might be back on the table…?”

My heart starts to race. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.” The ice cream feels too cold in my hands. “What are you doing next semester?”

She shrugs. “Going back to ASU. Getting another tattoo. The usual.”

“Another tattoo?” I lift a brow. “With what skin?”

She looks down at all the ink covering her belly, arms, and legs. “I’ll find room somewhere. I want a sea horse.”

“A sea horse?”

“Yes. Did you know the males carry the babies, not the females?”

I lift a brow. “And that’s why you want to draw one on your body?”

“And sea horses don’t have teeth. Or stomachs.”

“I feel like these aren’t good enough reasons to permanently draw one on your skin.”

She tips her chin. “What is a good enough reason?”

I pause.

“Exactly,” she says, pulling up a few sketches on her phone. “Okay. Which sea horse do you like best?”

For the next hour, Jenna and I sit on her couch and discuss sea horse tattoo possibilities until I’ve almost forgotten all about Charity and Levi and the way things used to be.

And they used to be wonderful.

When Charity and I were high school freshmen, Levi had a truck so he was our ride to school every day. He was also our ride home, which was only a problem during football season.

By that time, he was already a hotshot football player and the game was his life, and consequently, ours. He had practice after school, which meant we had to wait until the sun set for our ride home.

Most of the time, we just watched videos on our phones or whined about teachers and mean girls. Sometimes we did homework. But occasionally, we would hang out by the bleachers and watch the football team pummel one another and get yelled at by Coach McHugh.

I had a crush on the safety, so watching him run around in tight pants for three hours was not a problem for me. And Charity, well. Charity had a crush on every guy ever, so she didn’t complain either. We’d sit there and happily sigh to the sound of play calls and colliding helmets.

On one of these occasions, Charity felt the need to make catcalls from our post in the upper bleachers. Don’t ask me why. Probably just to piss Levi off. It worked.

After five minutes of god-awful meowing and almost-obscenities from Charity’s mouth, Levi turned on the field and threw a football at us.

He threw a football. AT US.

Levi’s grown a bit in the last four years, but he was no scrawny tyke back then, and a pigskin coming at you at a hundred miles an hour is effing scary, which is why we ducked as the football sailed just beyond where we were seated.

Fun fact: Levi always hits his target. So the football missing us was no accident. But still, it was terrifying—and quite effective since Charity never catcalled again.

The football of fury rolled down a few bleachers and landed at our feet, giving Charity and me the bright idea to play catch; this is a good example of just how desperate we were to kill time.

We chose a spot at the far end of the field and started throwing the ball back and forth, with less than desirable results. Whose idea was it to develop a ball with two pointy ends? Total nonsense.

Needless to say, Charity and I threw like girls and laughed our butts off at the cartwheel effect we somehow couldn’t avoid as we chucked the stupidly shaped ball back and forth.

We didn’t notice practice was over until Charity missed a catch and the football went dancing over to Levi’s feet. He was standing there with his hands on his hips in that I-just-ran-fifty-miles-and-I’m-almost-out-of-breath kind of way.

He shook his head at Charity. “I’m ashamed to call you family.”

She smiled. “Because I was whistling at your friends’ cute butts?”

“That too.” He nodded. “But ducking every time a football comes at you? That’s unacceptable. It’s not going to bite you. And you.” He pointed at me. “Why are you using two hands? You’re throwing like a moron.”

I smiled because he was serious, and serious Levi cracked me up.

“Come here, both of you.” He picked up the ball as we neared him. “This”—he pointedly looked at Charity, then me—“is how you throw a football.”

He demonstrated flawlessly and proceeded to instruct us on doing the same. We failed miserably, but it was hilarious to try. We giggled and fumbled and flinched and annoyed the hell out of him. But he didn’t give up.

Levi made sure to continue our football-throwing lessons until we were no longer an embarrassment to the good Andrews name.

By that point in my life, I considered Levi just as close of a friend as Charity. The three of us did everything together, and we had since we were little. We were the Three Musketeers. And even though time and adolescence changed the way we interacted in public, when it came down to it, the three of us were our own kind of family. Real. Unshakable. Constant. It was a special feeling.

I didn’t know back then just how special it was, but I know now.

I keep my distance from Pixie for the whole next week, not sure I’m ready to see how much she hates me. I’ve kept myself busy gutting the unoccupied east wing bedrooms. It’s amazing how much work you can accomplish when you’re plagued with guilt.

I still can’t believe I called her a whore. Pixie, of all people. She’s had sex only one time, for Christ’s sake. A jealous tremor runs through my veins as I remember the night I found out she’d lost her virginity.

Two years ago, I picked up Charity and Pixie from a party where they had gotten irresponsibly wasted, and the moment we got back to our house, Pixie crawled onto the couch and moaned, “That party sucked.”

Charity laughed. “Only because you lost it to Benji Barker and it was a total fail.”

In that moment, I felt like someone punched me in the gut. I had no air, no sight.

“Total fail.” Pixie hid her face in one of the couch pillows.

Charity clucked her tongue. “That’s why you don’t lose your virginity to another virgin, Pix. Neither one of you knew what you were doing. Bad call.”

Still no air.

“Shut up, best friend.” Pixie threw a pillow at Charity. “Maybe I wouldn’t have made such a bad call if you’d stayed by my side instead of ditching me to go screw Daren Ackwood.”

I whipped my eyes to Charity. “WHAT?”

My head was going to explode.

Charity turned to me with feigned innocence. “What? Daren and I have been dating for a while now and we have sex. A lot of sex. Get over it.”

“Whore,” Pixie mumbled, once again facedown in a pillow.

“Shut up,” Charity said to the couch. “At least Daren makes me orgasm, which is more than I can say for you and novice Benji.”

I tugged at my hair. “Oh my God. My ears are bleeding. My ears are bleeding.”

Charity was sleeping with Daren Ackwood? And Pixie wasn’t a virgin anymore?

My chest hurt. My stomach hurt. Where the fuck was all the air?

“God, I know,” Pixie whined. “Benji Barker? Ugh.”

Something tight and hot inside me snapped, and I spun to face Charity. “What the hell were you thinking, leaving Pixie alone tonight?”

“What?” Charity looked confused.

I yelled, “What kind of friend are you, ditching Pixie for some asshole?”

A hurt expression crossed Charity’s face. “I didn’t know—”

“Don’t be mad, Leaves.” Pixie pulled her green eyes up from the pillow and looked like she was going to cry. “Please don’t be mad.”

For the first time ever, I looked at Pixie like something that belonged to me. I wanted to throw her over my shoulder and have those green eyes all to myself. Always. I didn’t want to share them with Benji, or any other prick.

“Mad?” I screamed. “I’m furious! You’re hammered, Pix. That guy had no right to touch you when you weren’t sober enough to make an intelligent decision! I’ll kill him. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to rip him to pieces and—”

Pixie started crying. “I’m so sorry,” she bumbled at no one. “I’m so sorry! It seemed like a good idea because neither one of us had ever been with anyone and he’s not scary and I was that happy kind of buzzed and so was he and then it was all messy and awkward and it didn’t feel good at all and then it was over and even more awkward and now my head hurts and Leaves is mad at me!” She started sobbing into the pillow and howled, “Leaves is so mad at me.”

“Hey.” Charity knelt beside her and rubbed her back, saying a slew of reassuring girl things while I paced the room. Pixie eventually calmed down, and when she passed out, Charity stood up from the couch and glared at me.