The Heartbreak Messenger Read online

  Carmen’s dark skin flushed red, and the hard lines faded away. Her friends weren’t laughing anymore. She spoke quietly. “You wanna say that to me one more time?”

  Not really. I cleared my throat again. “Jared asked me to come tell you that, um, he’s breaking up with you.” Steady, man. I looked down at the items in my hands. “He wanted me to give you these as a token of his…”

  And that’s when it hit me. I don’t know for sure what it was. Probably Carmen’s fist, although it felt more like a rock, or maybe a can of beef stew. I went from staring at the white flowers of death to staring at a bright flash of stars to finally staring at the blue sky peppered with clouds. I found myself flat on my back in the grass, and my head was throbbing.

  It was kind of a surreal moment, like the exact instant when an ordinary guy in the comic books turns into a superhero. It was as though my sense of hearing was enhanced beyond normal human abilities. I could hear the cars idling at the traffic light on the other side of the field. I could hear the feet of the cross-country team making their way around the circuit. I could hear the doors of the girls’ locker room open and slam and open and slam. And, though I couldn’t really be sure, I thought I heard, maybe, the sound of Carmen crying.

  And that’s when I passed out.

  Chapter 9

  I don’t think I was unconscious on the soccer field for very long. When I came to, I found myself staring up at a bunch of cheerleaders who wanted me to get off the field so they could practice. They were really polite about it, though. One of the guy cheerleaders even offered to pick me up and carry me off, if I needed help.

  The carnations still seemed to be in pretty good shape. They had been knocked around a little, but all the petals were still intact. And, unlike me, the box of chocolates had also made it through the incident unharmed. I took them home and actually considered myself lucky. Carmen had obviously refused the gifts—boy, had she refused the gifts—and so I had no problem with saving the merchandise for a future job. Assuming there would be another job. There were apparently some risks I’d have to think through first. Death, for example.

  I pulled out a glass vase from under the sink for the flowers and put them in my room. I placed them next to the window and then piled up a big mound of clothes and junk in front of them so they didn’t look so obvious. I didn’t really want Mom to suddenly see a vase of flowers in her son’s bedroom. She might wonder about me. I resisted the temptation to eat the chocolates by stuffing the box in my underwear drawer.

  Then I dug out a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and wrapped it in a dish towel. As I held it up to the left side of my face, I had to admit that Carmen’s reaction had completely taken me by surprise. I mean, I could understand her getting upset with the jerk-wad that broke up with her. But didn’t she know that you don’t shoot the messenger? I was sure I’d heard that in a movie. Somewhere.

  The icy towel began to sting my skin, soothing and hurting at the same time. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I gently lifted the towel to reveal four different colors spreading out along my swollen cheek.

  It was a shiner to be proud of.

  That thought made me stand up a little straighter. I had been clobbered by the star player of the (girls’) soccer team. Someone so fierce that she left a trail of broken bones and red cards in her wake. And yet I had stood up to her without flinching. Carmen Mendoza may have been tough, but the Heartbreak Messenger was a force to be reckoned with, too.

  I glanced at the clock, then back at my multicolored face. Maybe Mom wouldn’t notice.

  * * *

  At three minutes apiece, it didn’t take long for me to have our microwaveable TV dinners hot and ready to go on the table at Mick’s. Making dinner is so easy. I don’t know why people complain about having to cook. Mom washed at the sink and sat down. She glanced at me, then down at the dinner tray, and inhaled. “Mmmm. Chicken-fried steak and creamed corn.” She smiled. So far so good.

  I grabbed my plastic fork and dug in. “Your turn, Mom,” I said between the first and second bites.

  “Let’s see. How about … fighting at school?”

  I looked up at her, trying to keep my face as straight as possible, which took some serious effort under the scrutiny of mom-eyes. “Fighting at school? I’m against it. One hundred percent. It seems to me that only a dipstick couldn’t figure out a solution to a problem without resorting to throwing punches.” I hoped that Carmen wasn’t within earshot.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Mom said. “I suppose even intelligent guys realize that sometimes they have to fight to get what they want, or to do what’s right, or to defend themselves. The difference between an intelligent guy and a bonehead is that the bonehead fights first and thinks later. The other guy thinks it through, looks at the options, and then decides that fighting’s the best choice he’s got.”

  I stopped chewing, my mouth hanging half-open. Moms aren’t supposed to talk that way, even my mom, the grease monkey. Somehow, though, what she said made a lot of sense. I finally nodded my head and finished chewing. Despite her words of wisdom, I knew there was no hiding it. “Does my eye look that bad?”

  “It ain’t pretty.”

  I finished off my mini portion of cherry cobbler before saying anything else. “Well, it wasn’t a fight. More of a misunderstanding. There was this guy that broke up with his girlfriend, and I happened to be standing nearby when it happened. The girl just went totally ballistic and started hitting things, including my eye.”

  She tried hard, but there was no way for Mom to hide a smile when it was so plain on her face. “A girl did that?”

  “She was a … tough girl. A soccer player.”

  By then she was laughing. Hands-over-her-mouth laughing.

  It was just my mom, but I could feel my ears turning pink. “I’m serious, Mom. They give her red cards like they’re lunch tickets.”

  She kept going. Soon her eyes were watering.

  “Mom, you’re not doing much for my sense of manliness.”

  She forced herself to grab a breath. “I’m sorry, Quentin.” She closed her eyes and took another deep breath. “Did this happen at school? Do I need to talk to the principal about it?”

  My eyes got wide, including the purple one. “Are you kidding? As far as the rest of the world knows, I hit my head on the bathroom sink when I bent down to tie my shoe.”

  Mom reached across the table and ruffled my hair. “My poor baby.”

  I pulled back and grinned. “No, it’s too late for that. You keep your fake pity to yourself.”

  As I walked home after dinner, my thoughts wandered back to the fifth grade. That year Rob got into a fight on the playground with a fourth-grader who was picking on him. To Rob’s credit, it was Stubs Thompson, the biggest kid in the school who had been held back a grade—twice. But still, a fourth-grader. No one really got hurt, but they both got in plenty of trouble. I remember Rob telling me about the long talk he’d had with his dad the night after it happened. His dad had been totally cool about it. He’d shared a few stories about fights from his school days, talked about when it was okay to stand up for yourself and when to let it go, and how to hold up your left fist in front as a guard. I think he even took Rob out for ice cream or something.

  I’m pretty level-headed and hadn’t ever been in a fight. (Rob throwing sand in my face in the second grade didn’t count.) Carmen Mendoza’s fist was the first time I’d even come halfway close. Since Rob’s experience, though, I’d wondered on occasion what would happen if I got into a fight. I mean, I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction from my mom for that black eye. But still, talking about something so personal and manly as your first shiner—it really ought to come from a father, you know? I suppose I wasn’t the first single-parent kid to feel cheated out of stuff.

  Mom always says that you shouldn’t waste any time feeling sorry for yourself. But as I turned down our street in the blue evening light, I reached up an
d gently touched the swollen skin around my left eye, and winced.

  Chapter 10

  Carmen Mendoza had hammered into me the idea that this Heartbreak Messenger business might be a little risky. I figured Carmen was probably an extreme case—I really hoped she was an extreme case—but it was enough to make me argue with myself about whether I should keep the business going. The seventy dollars I’d pulled in was amazingly persuasive, however, and it didn’t take long for the money to win the argument. If I was going to risk my life, at least I stood to make some good money doing it.

  But that presented another problem: If this gig was going to work, there had to be a steady stream of clients. Advertising was out of the question—just in case Carmen wasn’t an extreme case. I needed a way to drum up business without announcing to the world that I was the Heartbreak Messenger and you could find me in apartment 326T.

  I needed a front man, someone out in the field of potential clients who could make the sale for me. So I turned to the only high-schooler I knew.

  “Marcus, I have a proposition for you,” I told him one afternoon over a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  “You know how you told Jared about the help I gave you with Melissa?”

  “Oh, sure. Man, he was hurting something bad. Problem was, he knew Carmen would beat the crud out of him if he broke up with her himself.” Marcus laughed. “In fact, I haven’t seen him at school since you delivered the message. He’s probably still lying low, just in case.”

  I rubbed the side of my face, which was still a little tender. “Do you think you could find other guys that might need my services? You know, send them my way like you did Jared?”

  “I’m sure I could.…” Marcus’s eyes grew a little wider. “I see. You want me to drum up business for you. Yeah. In fact, I know a couple guys off the top of my head that might want a little help. I’ll talk to them. For a cut, of course.”

  “How about ten percent of the profit?”

  Marcus stuck out his hand. “Deal.” I knew it would take him awhile to crunch the numbers and figure out it only came to two-fifty a job. In the meantime, I now had my front man.

  Marcus was as good as his word. The next Monday after school, as I headed out of the junior high, Marcus was standing there with another high-schooler. Marcus pointed toward me and flashed a thumbs-up. I changed direction and headed for an empty part of the school yard. My new potential client, a tall kid with a shaved head and glasses, sauntered over.

  “What’s up?” he said. “I’m Ty. My man Marcus says that you’re the Heartbreak Messenger.”

  “That’s right. What can I do for you?”

  The guy bit his lower lip and looked up at the sky for a good, long moment. “I gotta break up with my baby.” He smoothed down his eyebrows with his fingertips.

  I waited for him to go on. His eyes were getting a little moist.

  “I’m no good for her, see. That’s what her mama says, that’s what her girlfriend says, that’s what everybody says. And they’re right, man.” He sniffed, long and loud. “I love her, but I’m no good for her. I gotta end it.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I guess.” I felt like an undertaker talking about funeral arrangements. “What’s her name?”

  “Her name’s LaTisha. It means ‘great happiness.’ And that’s all she’s brought to me. I got a picture right here.” He whipped out his wallet and flipped it open. “See?”

  It was a picture of Ty and a girl with big hair making kissy faces at the camera as one of them held it out to snap the photo.

  “And where can I find her?” I asked.

  “She works the desk down at Chic Clinique on Fifth. She always smells like the shampoo of the week.”

  “Uh, right. Well, a lot of guys want me to take the girl chocolates and flowers.…”

  “Nah, none of that. She’s got allergies for, like, everything.”

  “Okay.” In my mind I could see the carnations wilting away in my room. “Well, then…”

  “But I do have a song.”

  “A what?”

  “A song, man. It’s our song. Hers and mine. It’s something special, and I wrote it myself. I want you to sing it to her. Kind of a going-away present from me.”

  “Well, I’m not much of a singer.…” Understatement of the year. Mom actually asked me not to sing in the shower.

  “No worries. Powerful lyrics like this sing for themselves. Poetry. It’s all about what’s here that counts.” He thumped his heart with his fist. “It goes like this.…”

  Every once in a while life hands you a surprise, something you never could have guessed was going to happen. A high-schooler serenading me on the junior high blacktop was one of those things.

  “You see the moon, You see the star,

  But me alone, I won’t go far.”

  Ty didn’t hold anything back. His voice warbled and rose up and down like he was serious stuff in a recording studio. I glanced around to see a few stragglers still leaving the school grounds. I tried to look natural, which was hard since Ty had some hand motions and arm waving to go with those powerful lyrics.

  “You have my love, you are my fire,

  Like the sun above, you’re my desire.

  Ba … by.”

  He savored the final note like it was a piece of creamy European chocolate. “You got that?”

  “Um, close enough.” My screechy rendition would mostly be unintelligible anyway. “Now about the money…”

  “Oh, and there’s one more thing, Heartbreaker. My ring.”

  “Your ring?”

  “Yeah, she’s got my class ring. The one with the red stone in the middle. She wears it everywhere. But since we’re going our separate ways and all, I’m gonna need it back.”

  What did he think I was running, a singing repo service? I’d heard that the customer is always right, but after the Carmen Mendoza business, I was a little wary about getting close enough to grab a ring. “You sure you need it?”

  “Yeah, man. I paid good money for that ring. Just give it to Marcus when you got it. He knows where to find me.”

  I charged him thirty, since love songs and ring retrieval were a little outside of my normal job description. He was cool with that, except that opening his wallet to get my cash brought LaTisha into view again, which meant an encore performance. I hummed along.

  * * *

  Chic Clinique was just a few blocks from Mick’s, so I went to the garage to drop off my things first. Rob and Abby were already at the picnic table, notebooks out.

  “Hey guys,” I said as I tossed my backpack onto the table. “I need to run an errand. I’ll be back in a few.”

  Abby looked a little disappointed. I figured it was because we had an English assignment due the next day and she wanted help with it. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be quick.”

  I made my way over to Chic Clinique, a small shop squeezed between an all-oak furniture store and an Army surplus outlet. I put my face up to the window to see several customers in swivel chairs, and several employees doing hair and nails and whatever else they do in places like that. None of them looked like the photo of LaTisha.

  I started to turn away when I saw the receptionist desk crammed into the front corner. Behind it, reading a magazine, sat the girl who was apparently too good for Ty.

  Now, how to get her alone? The thought of going inside a room full of gossipy women terrified me. Who knew what deep secrets they might be able to pry out of me with their arsenal of cosmetic chemicals. I also needed to be outside just in case any of them had grudges against guys and didn’t take kindly to Ty’s message.

  I moved to the nearest window and tapped quietly. LaTisha didn’t look up. I tapped again, a little harder. I felt a few of the hairdressers and nail filers turn in my direction, but LaTisha remained glued to her magazine. I banged on the window with my knuckles. LaTisha looked up at me, along with every other person in the salon.

&n
bsp; Not quite the subtle approach I had planned. I smiled weakly and motioned LaTisha to come outside. She gave me a funny look, but I heard one of the other employees say something. LaTisha sighed and put her magazine down and headed for the entrance.

  “Hey. What do you want?” she asked as she stuck her head out the door.

  “Are you LaTisha?”

  She looked a little confused. “Yeah. Who are you?”

  After Carmen, I’d taken some time to look up a few good one-liners on the Internet, and I had one ready for LaTisha. Kind of an icebreaker, you know. “‘The hottest love has the coldest end.’” Socrates. Being able to toss out a saying by someone both dead and Greek makes you seem all the more professional.

  “Yeah, that’s nice kid. You waiting for your mom? I’m sure she’ll be done soon.” LaTisha started to duck back inside.

  “Ty sent me.”

  That made her stop. “Ty?” She stepped out onto the sidewalk, the door swinging closed behind her.

  I cleared my throat. “Ty sent me to tell you that he’s no good for you, and he’s breaking up with you.”

  LaTisha stood there with her mouth open, her eyes moving back and forth, as though she were trying to read the joke on my face that wasn’t there.

  “Why are you messing with me?” she asked, her eyes flashing between anger and desperation.

  “Um, I’m not. Really. In fact, I have a song he asked me to sing.” I hummed a starting note just to see how it sounded before launching into it.

  “You see the moon, You see the star…”

  LaTisha stepped forward and shoved my shoulders. “Oh, no you don’t!”

  I jumped clear and backed a few steps into the street, my heart in my throat. My eye was just returning to its natural color, which was how I wanted to keep it.

  LaTisha stood on the curb, hands on her hips. Her head wove from side to side as she spoke. “How dare you tell me Ty’s breaking up with me and then go and sing our song. That ain’t right. You don’t treat a woman like that. You go back and tell Ty that if he wants to break up with me, he comes and tells me himself.”