The Museum of Heartbreak Read Online Free PDF Page A

Way who didn’t recognize a hickey when she saw one.
    â€œDuh.” I gave an exaggerated smile and smacked my forehead, felt the sting of slap on skin.
    Audrey smiled gently, squeezed my knee. “It freaked me out when I saw it this morning too.”
    I tried to push past the inner mortification of being hopelessly, abnormally inexperienced, but every molecule in me felt whiny and monumentally terrible. Ever since I met her in third grade, Audrey and I had gone through pretty much everything together: learning there was no Santa (she told me and I told Eph), the horrors ofpuberty and zits and cramps, swooning over Titanic marathons on cable, scoping out all the boys in our class yearbooks. Yet somehow in the past year her life had merged onto the sleek highway of making out and hickeys, and I was still on the slow back road of never-been-kissed.
    â€œDon’t you want to know more?” Audrey asked, gently bumping her shoulder against mine.
    â€œUm, yes.” I straightened and tried to put on my best friend smile. “Okay, who was it, when did it happen, when are you going out next, what’s his name, how old is he—”
    â€œWhoa, slow down there, Delphine.”
    I felt a smile creep onto my face, and I tried to appear stern. “Not fair. Vivien tells Delphine everything. Besides, you know Vivien is always making foolhardy decisions.”
    â€œFoolhardy. Nice one.”
    â€œIt’s a good Delphine word, yeah?”
    â€œMost definitely,” Audrey said.
    I eyed my bookshelf and the old copy of Anne of Green Gables that my mom had given to me in seventh grade. The pages were yellowed, and there was a picture of the actress who played Anne in the miniseries on the cover. The spine was so cracked from multiple reads that pages 48 through 103 came out in a separate chunk. After I read it, I made Audrey read it. We fell in love so hard, so fast with that book, we decided to write our own series—not the story of an orphan girl on Prince Edward Island but rather the story of two orphan girls in New York City in the late 1800s. Totally different, right?
    I was Delphine, a bookish and shy, dreamy girl who wanted to be an English teacher; Audrey was Vivien, an outspoken, scrappytomboy who wanted to be an actress. Of course we were kindred spirits and bosom friends. Of course we had myriad adventures—many, I’m sure, plagiarized straight from the adventures of Anne Shirley. And of course, more than anything, we each wanted to find our own Gilbert Blythe.
    â€œSo, what does the real-life Thomas Flannery look like?” I asked Audrey, referring to Vivien’s one true love, a rakish troublemaker who later became a World War I pilot. (Of course Vivien nursed him back to health when he lost his leg.)
    Audrey made a dismissive hand flap. “Nah, no Thomas Flannery. This was just some random guy from Saint Ignatius. Cherisse and I met him and his friend when we were at the smoothie bar near Union Square, after French Club .” She glanced at me significantly.
    I gently rolled my eyes.
    â€œBy the way, Cherisse had me try this kale smoothie, and it was divine. I want to take you there. Plus, the guys from Saint Ignatius all hang out there after school. Maybe if not French Club, we could meet someone there. . . .”
    â€œKale?” I asked, unconvinced that anything associated with kale, let alone Cherisse, could ever be enjoyable.
    â€œHot guys, Pen.”
    â€œBut what about the guy who gave you that? What’s his name?”
    â€œMark? Or Matt? Maybe Mike?”
    â€œYou don’t even remember his name?” I asked, dismayed.
    She blushed. “Gregory! It was Gregory!”
    I resisted the impulse to point out that Gregory sounded nothing like Mark, Matt, or Mike. “Okay, okay. Here’s how it’s going to go: Gregory’s totally going to grow on you. What started out as acasual hookup is going to turn into true love,