Page 9 of The Heartbreakers
My brother glanced up from the book in his hands. “Please don’t jinx it,” he said before returning to reading.
“We should find somewhere with air-conditioning. Wanna grab dinner?”
This time, Drew didn’t bother to look up from the page. “Maybe in a little bit,” he said. “I want to finish this chapter.”
For the past month, Drew had been consumed with completing his summer reading list. When summer was over, he was leaving to attend school in Minneapolis. Freshman registration wasn’t for another two weeks, but Drew wanted to major in English and had already picked a literature course he hoped to take. He was so excited about starting college that he’d decided to read the course material before the semester even began.
I turned away from my brother when my throat grew thick. Freshman year, before Cara was diagnosed, I’d set my heart on NYU. I’d decided that New York would the perfect place for me to discover who I was, independent of my siblings. At the start of senior year when Cara went into remission and I received my acceptance letter, things finally started to feel real. I was going to college.
By the time summer rolled around, I wasn’t so excited anymore. New York was calling out to me and I wanted to answer, but at the same time, the thought of leaving was terrifying. My mom told me the flutters I felt were normal. Leaving home for the first time was a big step, and it was good to be nervous. But what I felt inside my stomach didn’t feel like butterflies. It was more like killer bees.
Before I could make sense of anything, the cancer came back.
And just like that, the bees were gone. I knew I couldn’t leave while Cara was undergoing treatment, so I decided to defer for a semester. It was different for Drew. Minneapolis was only an hour and a half drive from Rochester, so he could come home on the weekends to visit Cara whenever he wanted. I would be states away, completely and utterly alone. I wasn’t bitter about having to put off school, but part of me wished I’d followed Drew’s example and applied to a university close to home.
A drop of sweat started to trickle down my forehead. “That’s it,” I said and sat up.
I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself. Yes, it was disappointing that I wasn’t going off to school like my brother, and yeah, I hadn’t been able to get the perfect birthday present for my sister, but there was no way I could deal with this discomfort any longer. Pulling my hair onto the top of my head in a bird’s-nest fashion, I decided to do something about our room.
“I’m going down to the front desk to complain. Don’t have a heatstroke while I’m gone.”
“You’re going down like that?” Drew questioned me.
I glanced in the mirror. Okay, so I looked like hell with my sweaty bangs plastered to the side of my face, but I was way past caring. “Yes, I am, so shut up. It’s not like I’m going to run into anyone important.”
“Just saying,” Drew said. His gaze dove back down to his book, and I watched for a moment as his eyes tore across the page. Suddenly he gasped at something unexpected. “No way,” he whispered to himself.
Rolling my eyes, I left my brother to his reading and headed out of the room.
• • •
“What do you mean, there are no more rooms left?” I complained to the concierge. He’d already informed me that the hotel maintenance man had left for the night, so no one could fix the AC.
“Sorry, miss, but everything is booked up.” The man’s eyes shifted around the lobby as he answered my question, almost as if he was expecting something bad to happen. I followed his gaze and noticed quite a few girls waiting around.
I placed both my hands flat on the counter. “Well, is there a manager I can talk to? I didn’t pay to melt to death.”
But the man wasn’t listening. His face went pale and he stared past me. “Oh crap…”
“Oh my God!” someone squealed. “They’re really here!”
The muscles in my shoulders went rigid, and I grabbed the edge of the counter with a grip tight enough to turn the tips of my fingers white. I’d heard a sufficient number of screaming girls for one day, and I sucked in a deep breath before turning around. Just as I was about to tell off whatever idiot had screamed, all of the girls lingering around the lobby rushed to the front doors.
“It’s the Heartbreakers!”
Four boys stepped into the lobby, bodyguards swarming around them on both sides. Outside, police were manning the door so a stampede wouldn’t rush into the hotel. I caught a glimpse of familiar wavy hair and my stomach dropped.
“You have got to be shitting me.”
This wasn’t seriously happening, was it? I mean, how was it even possible to run into the same celebrity so many times in one day? These kinds of things happened in movies, not real life.
“Ladies, ladies,” the concerned concierge called out. “Please give our guests some room.” His request went unnoticed.
“Xander, I love you!”
“Alec, marry me!”
“JJ, over here!”
