One
Picture the ticker-tape parade when I left the hospital. Nurses and doctors and strangers crying and waving hankies. You did it, Marlowe! You survived! Picture me driving off in the back of a flashy convertible doing my best queenly wave at the streets lined with people cheering for the girl who survived.
And then Marlowe Jensen lived happily ever after.
Except …
That’s not really how it went. And I’m only seventeen so there’s a lot of “after” to get through.
I think about what the counselor said to me, when I was placed on the transplant waiting list. That losing my heart was like a death. And that I would mourn for it. That I would grieve. That I would move on but never forget.
But she didn’t tell me I wouldn’t be able to rid myself of this feeling. The feeling that even though I’m living the happily ever after, there’s still something missing. There’s still the feeling that every beat and thump and thud of my heart is unknown and unknowable because now there’s this whole part of me that’s not me—a little locked room deep within my chest.
I thought I could know who gave me their heart. I thought I could meet their family and it would be all sunshine and rainbows and happy tears. But that doesn’t happen. You can’t know who they are. Who they were. And if my heart isn’t my own—and I don’t know whose it is—then how can I ever know who I am?
So I can’t escape that feeling.
And when people look at me, what do they see?
It can’t be me. There is no “me” anymore. They’re seeing a girl with a borrowed heart.
Two
You know that moment when you’re standing in front of Bert’s Quality Butchers holding a speaker blasting “Meat Is Murder” and your mum is doing interpretative dance to express the heartbreak of a slaughtered cow and your ten-year-old brother, Pip, is handing out pamphlets for your family’s new vegan-organic-wellness store called Blissfully Aware and he’s dressed in a gingham pinafore, red wig, combat boots and tiger face paint?
That moment sucks.
I mean The Smiths are all right. And I’m pro my mum’s no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no sugar, no anything-that-tastes-good diet, even though I sometimes stare longingly at cheese. And if my brother wants to dress like he fell headfirst into a costume box, then all power to him.
But does it have to be such a production? Does it have to be 8 A.M. on Queens Parade with a crowd gawking at us? Does Mum have to be “giving birth” to an imaginary dead calf with my brother pirouetting around her and Bert the Butcher holding a meat cleaver, glaring through his shop window?
Can’t we be weird in secret?
“Can I go now?” I ask.
Mum closes her eyes and takes three deep, cleansing breaths. “Hold the boom box higher, Marlowe,” she says.
“No one says boom box, Mum.”
Mum’s got fake blood on her hands, all the way up to her elbows like she just delivered a cow, which, you know, she sort of did. It’s actually a stuffed unicorn called Princess Sparkles painted black and white with the words LOVE ME, DON’T EAT ME scrawled on its side.
A guy with a knitted tie shuffles up to stare at us. I hide behind my long hair, trying to be inconspicuous, but that’s one thing my family’s never been good at. I mean, I do my best—no one rocks timid tan, washed-out white and boring beige like me. No one has worked harder to become a human-chameleon hybrid. But it’s difficult to blend into the background when you’re flanked by a blood-clad vegan warrior and a kid who thinks every day is Halloween.
Pip thrusts a pamphlet into the guy’s hands. “That’s Blissfully Aware,” he says, and points at our shop. “Grand opening today.” The guy looks at the pamphlet, then at Pip, then at our shop, smack bang next to Bert’s Quality Butchers. He shakes his head like he can’t even begin to explain just how Blissfully un-Aware we are.
He walks off and my cheeks are burning red.
I check over my shoulder. Bert the Butcher is still scowling at us with a white-knuckle grip on his meat cleaver. Even though we only just moved into the shop a couple of days ago, I think he might already have plans to put us on the specials board.
The speaker weighs heavily in my arms.
“Mum? When is this going to be over?” My shoulders grow tight. “Can’t we just go? It’s my first day back at school in ages. Why can’t—”
Bert the Butcher barrels out of the shop, and the ye olde bell that jingles politely when someone enters thrashes and clangs. “What are you lot playing at?” he shouts. His voice sounds like it’s been squeezed through the meat mincer. “You’re driving away my customers.”
I stumble back and hug the speaker to my chest. It’s not much of a shield, but I guess I could throw it.
Mum doesn’t miss a beat. She’s an expert at confrontation. She thrives on it. Which was perfect when she was a high-powered lawyer and even better now that she’s a vegan warrior.
“At least we’re not murdering innocents.” She waggles a fake-blood-red finger under his nose. “Ten million cows are slaughtered for human consumption annually. That’s mass murder.”
Bert laughs unkindly. “One of those animal-rights nuts, are you?” He’s got streaks of red all over his blue-and-white apron—the real kind of blood red.
“You’re damn right I am.”
They start shouting over the top of each other, Mum citing stats and Bert spouting hippie clichés. Pip, ever industrious, hands out pamphlets to the assembled rubberneckers.
“What’s going on?” asks a woman.
“That’s my mum, owner of Blissfully Aware.” Pip shoves a pamphlet in the woman’s hand. “Half-price soy-based products for our grand opening today.”
The woman narrows her eyes at him. “And you’re supposed to be…?”
“Jungle Anne of Green Gables. Like if Anne of Green Gables got lost in a jungle and she had to fight her way out Survivor style.”
The woman laughs, but it’s a nervous trill. She looks at me. Questioning. Like I can make sense of it for her. And even though I don’t offer any answers she keeps looking at me.
They’re all looking at me.
My new heart is thumping. The doctors said it was a good one, but I don’t know: should it race like this? I’m not unfit—I have a strict post-op exercise program and it usually doesn’t take long for my heart rate to settle after a run. But I’m not even moving, so why do I feel like doubling over and passing out? Why does it feel like my heart is failing, after all?
I turn away from the gawking crowd only to find I’m being watched from inside the butcher shop too.
He’s got that bones-bursting-through-the-skin kind of look, like the man inside is just dying to rip through the outer shell of boy. He’s a head taller than me, broad shoulders, square jaw, tousled dark-blond hair. He’s behind the counter, wearing a blue-and-white apron, holding a that’s-not-a-knife-this-is-a-knife. And he looks like he just stepped in dog shit. Like I’m the dog shit.
My heart is beating fast and hard—it’s making me feel breathless. Maybe it’s a dud, maybe it’s a ticking time bomb and it’s seconds away from exploding and I’ll die here on the pavement and the paramedics won’t be able to tell what’s my blood and what’s the blood of a fake unicorn/cow. What even happens when you die with a transplanted heart—do you get buried with it or do they give it back to the donor’s family?
I turn to my mum. She’s really yelling now and Bert’s face is turning purple and Pip is dancing, singing the shop’s theme song he wrote last night.
I feel like I could drop the speaker on the concrete and scream. But I don’t want people looking at me. Not because I’m shy and hate being the center of attention. I am—I really am—but it’s not because of that.
It’s because of that feeling. That borrowed-heart feeling.
Copyright © 2018 by Shivaun Plozza
