Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend Read Online Free Page B

out, the moment he’d realize
    I’d been faking— that I wasn’t as good a person as him, that I didn’t
    care about my carbon footprint as much, and that I thought the
    Marsh Warbler was ugly. After all, the whole way we’d met was
    based on a lie. And Teddy was brilliant— of course he would have
    fi gured it out eventually.
    When I wasn’t looking at pictures of us and crying, I was watch-
    ing movies that were making me cry even harder, even ones I
    thought were safe, like Ghostbusters . Sophie stopped by once a
    day, bearing an iced latte for me, to try and coax me out of the house.
    It never worked, though, and usually she just ended joining me on
    the bed and staying for the day’s second viewing of The Notebook .
    I just really didn’t see any point in returning to the outside
    world, because I couldn’t imagine the situation ever improving.
    Also, if I ventured out, I might encounter Teddy and his neck-
    tattoo girl. But things were safe in my bedroom. So for the fore-
    seeable future, I was staying put.
    -1—
    The only bright spot was that Sophie didn’t have any gossip to
    0—
    report. People had been shocked by our breakup, but nobody had
    +1—
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    heard anything about Teddy dating someone new. So I fi gured
    that it might be bearable, and that I could just learn to live in
    this brokenhearted state. I had tissues, and daily iced latte deliv-
    eries. It would be okay.
    And then, the morning of my third day of bed- living, my door
    opened and things got worse.
    “Hi, Gem,” my mom said, knocking as she opened the door,
    which, in my opinion, defeated the whole purpose of knocking.
    She gave me the kind of look people had been giving me lately, a
    mix of sympathy and fear, like I was a particularly pathetic- looking
    time bomb. “How are you?”
    “Hello there, Gemma,” Walter, my stepfather, said, coming
    into the room behind my mom and giving me his sympathetic
    frown.
    “Hi, Walter,” I muttered. Despite the fact that I’d known Wal-
    ter for fi ve years, we had never quite moved past the polite- awkward-
    small- talk phase. When things got really desperate, we talked
    about the weather.
    And it wasn’t like Walter’s job provided tons of conversation
    fodder. He was a salmon expert, and had once been a competitive
    fl y- fi sher, because apparently there is such a thing. Now he just
    advised people on salmon. My mom, a real estate agent, met him
    when he was looking for a house with a basement big enough for
    his fl y- fi shing trophies and a pond so he could practice casting.
    When I was eleven and my parents separated, I had refused to
    believe that it would last. But it had, and as a result I’d had to
    listen to talk about salmon for the last fi ve years.
    —-1
    “You know how sorry we are about you and Teddy,” my mom
    —0
    —+1
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    said as she perched on the edge of my bed. I could tell that some-
    thing encouraging was about to follow. That was one of the dan-
    gers of being a realtor, I’d learned— you were always looking to
    sell someone on the bright side. “But maybe it’s for the best!” she
    continued in the tone of voice that she used when explaining that
    one bathroom would bring a family closer, and that, in her opin-
    ion, closets were overrated.
    “Yeah,” I muttered as I closed my laptop and picked a loose
    thread from my quilt. I couldn’t see how having my heart shat-
    tered into a million pieces was for the best, but I didn’t want to
    argue the point. Especially in front of Walter.
    “But the thing is,” my mother said, settling herself more fully
    on my bed, like she was preparing for a longer chat, “we need to
    talk about the summer.”
    I frowned. “What about the summer?” My dad had told the
    HELPP people I wasn’t coming and had gotten most of his