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PART ONE

The End

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I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS, characters die of heartbreak. Literally. A girl gets dumped, and she’s so grief-stricken she suffers a “brain fever,” or goes wandering out on the moors, and the next thing you know, the whole town is hovering by her bedside while a servant gallops on a desperate midnight ride to fetch the doctor. Only, before you can say Bring on the leeches! the guilt-ridden rake who abandoned our heroine is strewing rose petals on her grave and begging God to Please, take me, too because his ex is dead, dead, dead.
According to Mrs. Hamilton, my English teacher, this is known as a “convention.” After writing CONVENTION on the blackboard, she gave us a lecture explaining that conventions are things we accept when they happen in books and movies even though they never happen in real life. Then she asked us to think of some modern conventions, like how characters on soap operas get amnesia constantly, and in teen movies the only thing an ugly girl needs to be pretty is contact lenses and a new haircut, when in real life if an ugly girl gets contact lenses and a new haircut, she’s just an ugly girl with contact lenses and a new haircut.
But when Max told me that he’d “been thinking about it a lot lately” and had “decided it would be better if we were just friends,” it occurred to me that dying of a broken heart might not be a convention. I unbuckled my seat belt, slid out of his car, and shut the door. As the freezing February air slapped my cheeks, I thought, That’s the last time I’m going to get out of Max’s car. And right after that I thought, I’m never going to kiss Max again. And then I thought, Max isn’t my boyfriend anymore. And that’s when I knew I was going to be sick. I got inside my house with barely enough time to drop my bag and make it to the upstairs bathroom before I hurled. And then I spent about an hour lying on the cold tile floor trying to get up the strength to walk from the bathroom to my room, which is a distance of roughly ten feet.And when I finally did manage to make it to my room, I just got into bed without taking off my clothes or anything. Right before I fell asleep, I decided that whoever made the brilliant so-called medical decision that death by heartbreak was only a “convention” of nineteenth-century literature clearly never had her heart broken.
Because if anything can make death feel like a truly desirable alternative, it’s getting dumped.

I’d had an insane crush on Max Brown since I first joined the Hillsdale High Spectator as a lowly freshman reporter. By this fall, when I was a junior and the newly appointed managing editor of the paper, and Max was a senior and editor in chief, I liked him so much I could hardly read in his presence (which, as you can imagine, made editing the paper something of a challenge). But even though we were constantly engaging in flirty banter,and he was forever saying stuff to me like, “Jennifer, you know I’d be lost without you,” nothing ever happened.
Until.
Until the third Saturday in September, when Jeremy Peterson chose to honor the trust his parents had placed in him by throwing an enormous kegger at his house while they went out of town for the weekend.
Jeremy Peterson and Max are really good friends, so there was zero doubt Max would be in attendance (and, by extension, zero doubt I’d be there). Arriving fashion¬ably late, my friends Clara and Martha and I passed Max’s Mini Cooper parked in the driveway. Both of them gave me significant looks as we walked by the car, but none of us said a word; good secret agents know better than to discuss a mission in progress.
The three of us hung out in the kitchen for a while drinking beers, and then I said I was going to go to the bathroom, which we all knew was a lie; clearly I was going to look for Max.We had a positive car ID. He was in the house. The only question that remained was: where?
I got my answer walking down the hallway that ran past the den. There he was, sitting on the Petersons’ modular sofa talking to Jeremy and two other seniors, Michael Roach and Greg Cobb. Just as I walked by, Max turned his head toward the open door and brushed the hair out of his eyes. And then he saw me. And I saw him see me, and he saw me see him see me, and it was like all those months and years of flirting suddenly exploded or something. I swear to God you could have powered all of Westchester County on the look that passed between us.
Max raised an eyebrow at me and gestured to the empty spot on the sofa next to him, and I went over and sat down without either of us saying a word.Then I sat there listening to him and the three other coolest guys in the senior class argue about whether Franz Ferdinand or Wilco is the band that’s more likely to
leave an enduring musical legacy. (At first I didn’t actually realize they were bands—I thought they were people, and that Wilco was a guy who went by a single name, like Madonna or Beyoncé.)
During a particularly heated exchange between Jeremy and Michael, Max turned to me.
“Do you know these bands?” Max is a lot taller than I am, but the couch was the kind you sink way down into and we were both leaning back, almost reclining, so his mouth was only an inch or two away from my ear.
Normally I would have tried to come up with some witty way to avoid admitting I hadn’t even realized they were bands, but there was nothing normal about this night. So I just said, “No.”
Max stood up. “Hey, Jeremy, you got any Wilco in your room?”
Jeremy was leaning forward, telling Michael he was starting to sound like a guy who listens to smooth jazz. He looked over at Max, gave him a quizzical scowl and said, “Is the Pope Catholic?” before turning back to Michael.
Max reached his hand down to me. “Come on,” he said. His hand was warm, and when I stood up, he intertwined his fingers with mine.
He took me up a narrow flight of dark stairs. Without saying a word, he crossed the hall and entered
a room, pulling me in behind him before closing the door. Then he turned on a small desk lamp and ran his fingers down a stack of precariously balanced CDs.
“God, what a loser,” he muttered, pausing at one of them and laughing a little to himself. I’d barely had time to look around Jeremy’s room and take in the unmade bed, the open closet with clothes on the floor, the poster over the desk from an antiwar protest, when Max popped a disc into the CD player and turned off the lamp. Before my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could feel him standing next to me.
“Like it?” he asked.
My heart was pounding. It took me a minute to focus on the music, an almost atonal series of notes played by different instruments.
“Too early to tell,” I answered. “Give me a second.”
“Sure,” he said. He’d taken my hand again, and now he took the other one. We stood there for a long moment, neither of us moving. “Well?” he asked finally.
A man with a husky voice was singing. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but I liked his voice, the way the instruments seemed to find and hold a melody around it.
I could see Max now in the dim light of the digital display. “Yeah,” I said. “I like it.”
He leaned down so slowly I could barely tell he was moving. “I’m glad,” he whispered. And then we were kissing, and I was thinking about how amazing it felt to be kissing him and how soft his lips were and how perfect it was to wrap my arms around his waist and then to run my fingers through his dark, silky hair.
But you know what I should have been thinking about? I should have been thinking about the girls in those novels. Because if I’d thought a little more about them and a little less about Max’s hair and lips and how it felt when he put his hands on my face and said about our kiss, “I’ve been wanting to do that since I met you,” then maybe I wouldn’t be thinking about them now, five months later, having just been informed by the love of my life that we’ll be better off as friends.
Maybe then I wouldn’t be thinking that I, like them, could actually die of heartache.