Chapter 22 Heartbroken
Heartbroken
It’s weird to be coming back to somewhere—the beds rumpled how we left them, empty plastic takeout container on the dresser, wrapper from the dulce de leche cookie I bought Yumi on her nightstand.
“So,” Yumi starts, crossing her arms. “What’s going on?”
“Hmm?” I ask, turning away from her to focus on reorganizing my pack. Today’s clothes are hanging in the bathroom, having been washed unceremoniously in the sink, so I move my clothing cube to the top of the bag, ready to throw the (hopefully) dry clothes in tomorrow morning.
“You’re really going to do this to me?” She doesn’t sound mad. She sounds resigned. Like she expected it—whatever it is.
I zip my pack closed and stand. “Do what?”
Yumi sighs, pursing her lips. “Be Noelle about this whole thing. You just lock down when you’re uncomfortable,” she says. Not accusatory, but factual.
I don’t like the way my silence proves her right.
“You begged me to come here, so I did. You begged me to act like your girlfriend, so I did. You’re not allowed to just shut off and make me figure you out.” Like you used to hangs in the air between us.
She’s right, of course. But I want a break from being an adult about things for once. I want to cry. I want someone to pin my graduation cap for me. I want my mom to watch me on our favorite show and my best friend to braid my hair and my dad to be okay. But the puzzle pieces keep changing.
I wrap a hand around my necklace, spinning the globe between my fingers. “I can’t believe you told everyone,” I say with my head bowed. It feels unbearably childish.
“Told everyone what?”
I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not. “The truth! About me!” I run a hand over my hair. “About us! Without even talking to me about it first. What the hell was that?” My breath comes faster as I teeter on the edge of control.
Yumi just furrows her brow. “So, you wanted me to lie?”
What sort of question is that? This whole thing is a lie. We. Aren’t. Dating. We aren’t even friends. “Yes.”
“Just, make something up?”
“Yes,” I repeat, emphasizing the word.
“And I was supposed to know that…how?”
“Because it’s obvious!” I snap.
“Oh, was it obvious, Noelle?” she asks mockingly. “Should I have read your fucking mind?”
There’s a sudden pounding in my ears as every muscle in my body flexes. “Yeah, I think it’s pretty obvious that you wouldn’t make your ‘girlfriend’ look like an asshole on national television.”
“Well, I wouldn’t make my ‘girlfriend’ look like an asshole on TV if she didn’t act like an asshole in real life.”
“Oh, I’m the asshole?” My voice rises as I tap my chest. It reverberates through my body. “I’m the asshole?”
Her mouth twists, but she doesn’t back down. “Yes, Noelle. You’re the asshole.”
Angry tears gather at the inner corners of my eyes. “Tell me exactly how I’m the asshole here, Yumi. You stopped talking to me. You ignored me. You left me. You made me feel like shit, you weren’t there for my dad. Your life got to just go on, and mine fell apart. But I’m the asshole, right?”
Yumi’s face turns red, her jaw working. “Right. Because you broke my heart. Did you expect me to apologize? Was I supposed to be your fucking bestie after that?”
I can’t breathe. “What?”
She turns away from me so that I’m just looking at the white letters on the back of her varsity jacket—Panganiban. “Nothing, Noelle,” she says, exasperated.
She takes a step toward the bathroom, but I grab her sleeve. “No. What?”
Her jacket is coarse and scratchy beneath my fingers. She doesn’t jerk it away, though, just stands there, turned away from me. “I’m not saying it again.”
“I broke your heart?” The words feel wrong in my mouth. That’s not how it happened, right? The only heart I broke was my own, wasn’t it?
Watching her profile, I see her eyes close.
“Tell me if this sounds familiar.” Her voice is strained.
“You spend seven years acting like you’re in love with me.
I spend seven years being in love with you.
You fall asleep with your head in my lap.
You come to all of my swim meets, and you stay the whole time, even after my events are over.
You ask me to prom. And then the day I finally work up the nerve to k—” She pauses.
A sharp inhale. “I kiss you, and you leave.” She rolls her lips inward, eyes staying closed.
I’ve never felt like this before. It’s almost…calm? My thoughts have stopped racing, falling silent so they can hear what Yumi has to say. “I…I didn’t want to lose you.”
“You lost me the second you walked out,” she spits. I don’t think I could feel any worse, but then she says, “You h—” And her voice cracks. “Hurt me, Noe.”
“Oh my God, Yumi,” I breathe. Then she’s wrapped in my arms. It just happens. I don’t even think I move. Reality just glitches, and suddenly I’m holding her, and she’s crying into my shoulder. “No, no. No, please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’m so…”
I don’t know if I should explain or apologize or keep whispering soothingly. I just don’t know. I hurt Yumi? I hurt Yumi? That’s what happened? That’s not what happened. Is that what happened?
You know how people talk about an unstoppable force and an immovable object? Yumi Panganiban is both. I’m taller than her, but she’s bigger than me. She always has been. But she’s so small right now, tucked against me, sobs racking her body.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair. I don’t inhale her pineapple-and-melon scent—it’s not mine right now.
She shrugs.
I squeeze her tighter. “I was…”
“Stupid?” she supplies.
“Scared. And stupid,” I concede.
She takes a step backward. Every cell, every molecule, every atom of my body wants to pull her into me again, but I just stand there, uselessly. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s right.
“If you were scared, you should have stayed. You should have told me,” she says, wiping at her eyes and smearing mascara on the cuff of her jacket.
She stares at the black smudge for a moment before shrugging off her jacket and tossing it carelessly in the direction of her bed.
It falls short, landing in a heap on the floor.
“I—” I can’t change who I am, I almost say. But I can. I have. I’m not the person I was a year ago, and I won’t be this person a year from now. I want her to know that, I just don’t know how to tell her. “I tried. To apologize and…explain. I texted you,” I say limply.
“If you think I didn’t block you the moment you left, you’re out of your mind.”
I’d suspected as much, I’d even accepted it, but I didn’t know that this was on the other side of that stone wall. I didn’t know that Yumi was…sad. “I’m sorry.” In the history of the world, has there ever been a sentence more inadequate? “I needed time.”
Yumi scoffs a mirthless laugh, sinking onto the edge of her bed. “Yeah, well, I needed you.”
“If…” What I really want to say is If we’d tried it and broken up, and I lost you forever, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. But it feels too close to an excuse. Does it really matter why I left? Or does it just matter that I left. “If I could change it, I would.”
“Would you?” When Yumi looks up at me, I see so many different versions of her.
The full-faced, round-eyed girl who introduced herself to my fourth-grade class and taught me how to fold a paper airplane.
My best friend, wearing pajamas and laughing with my mom.
Yumi, gasping and wiping the water from her face as she glances up to see her time on the scoreboard.
Finding me in the crowd. Sitting on Taylor Norris’s backyard bench.
Pillow forts on her floor, meteor showers over my car, her books in my locker, my dessert on her fork.
“Yes,” I breathe, both confession and contrition at once. “I would stay.”
“I wish you had.” Her eyes are still red-rimmed, but her voice is steadier.
I settle carefully on my own bed, mirroring her. The mattress gives beneath my weight, and I suddenly realize how tired I am—exhausted with every facet of my being. We stare at the carpet, silence bleeding out in the space between us.
“I don’t know where we go from here,” I say honestly.
In my peripheral vision, I watch Yumi shake her head. Then she laughs softly. “The airport, I think.”
I huff a laugh, smiling. “Boo,” I heckle quietly, cupping my hands around my mouth.
“I don’t know,” she muses, tipping over so her upper body is lying on the bed facing me. She looks so young like this. “Can we start again? Is that possible?”
I follow suit, dropping my head to the mattress. “I mean, we can try.”
“And what if it doesn’t work?”
I take a deep breath, my gaze floating to the ceiling. “Then I think we just…keep trying until it does.”