Instructions for a Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

furrowed, and Jessa immediately regretted her words, wished she could just stuff them right back into her mouth like a big chunk of bread.
    “Yes, you can.” Ms. Jackson’s usually muted eyes glittered. “You can. But you can’t half ass it.”
    “What?” Jessa took a step back, her eyes finding the hem of her jacket.
    “Jessa. You know how Mr. Campbell talks to you guys about auditioning?”
    “Yeah?”
    “How you start your audition the second you walk in the door, the second you take your seat. Not just when you get on stage?”
    Jessa nodded.
    “Think of this like that.”
    This was one of those things English teachers did when they wanted you to find the deeper meaning, when they wanted you to seek out the metaphor. Jessa was missing the metaphor.
    “I think I’m missing the metaphor.”
    Ms. Jackson laughed, a deep, surprised laugh she sometimes got when one of her students said something unexpectedly funny in class. “No, honey, you’re not. This is about impressions. How you’re seen. You don’t want him to see you moping around, leaving restaurants and sulking. You want him to see you having a blast, living it up, not needing him. Don’t come all this way and then blow your monologue. Now there’s a metaphor.”
    Jessa thought about Carissa’s audition for Hamlet , her meltdown when Sean switched their lineup tickets and then marched on stage with his “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” What a rogue? For sure. But Carissa had flipped and then sulked her way through the rest of auditions. She had blown her audition before she got on stage.
    The street darkened, tiny bits of lamplight pooling from the windows of restaurants and bars, the haze of evening settling over the city, this city she had come so far to see.
    “You know what, Ms. Jackson? They had some pretty good-looking pasta on that menu.”
    “Good girl.”
    ***
    The next morning, Jessa sat cross-legged on the smooth floor inside the belly of the Pantheon. She still couldn’t believe she’d walked through those massive gray columns and into the heart of this ancient temple, the huge dome above her head with its bright, light-spilling eye. She breathed in the cool air, tried to close up her ears as if they had eyelids. For a quick moment, she thought about her iPod—she craved Rent . How perfect would “Seasons of Love” sound right now? But she didn’t want to drown out the sounds of Rome around her completely. She was sitting in the temple of the gods, this great sweeping place where all the people in their tourist shorts and swinging cameras seemed out of place, seemed like they should be wearing togas or draping gowns laced with ivy. No, an iPod would just be tacky. Looking up, she followed the smooth marble walls peppered with Latin rising around her, her eyes sliding across the high ceiling, the dome lit with sky. She willed away the sounds of all the tourists around her. She began to sing under her breath about all those thousands of minutes that made up a year. The gods probably sang, right? Even if they didn’t sing Jonathan Larson.
    She rubbed her eyes—so tired. Stupid Tyler and his stupid rock-paper-scissors he made her play to see whether or not she’d write Carissa’s character description. He knew Jessa had made a personal commitment to never turn down a legitimate RPS request. No fair. And she had lost—paper to Tyler’s scissors. So she’d stayed up and written it, surprised it had taken so long. The first draft was just too mean; the next rewrite wasn’t mean enough, wasn’t close to accurate. But Jessa had spent a good deal of her relationship with Sean defending him. It was a hard habit to break. Finally, she’d landed on it. She sent it to Carissa at breakfast after a pretty lengthy argument with Tyler to include “dresses like an Aberzombie”:
    Audition for World’s Suckiest Boyfriend
    Name: Sean Myers, age 16. Tall, good at sports, good looking but not in an obvious sort of way
    Character