A Heart in a Body in the World - Softcover

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Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of over sixteen books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award; A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Girl, Unframed; and One Great Lie. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.

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A Heart in a Body in the World

1

Annabelle Agnelli is trying to hold it together in the parking lot of Dick’s Drive-In. After what just happened, she’s stunned. Frozen. And then—imagine it—Annabelle’s wrecked self suddenly takes off like a lightning bolt. She’s clutching the white bag, which has the unfortunate word, Dick’s, stamped across it in orange. Her burger is still warm. She’s holding the Coke, too, which sloshes like a stormy sea as she tries to outrun the bad visions of the recent past. French fries spring loose in the bag, and it shakes around like a maraca.

Of course she’s heard that saying—A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Coach Kwan has a poster of it in his office. It shows the silhouette of a girl at sunset, running up a steep mountain path, and it’s all clouds parting and God rays shining down and purple mountain majesties. There is no panic and dropped napkins and hair flying. That poster does not look like this.

Where is she going? No idea.

Why is she going? Well, sometimes you just snap. Snapping is easy when you’re already brittle from the worst possible thing happening. It is easy when you’re broken and guilty and scared. You snap just like that. Like the snap has been waiting around for the right moment.

So, now, Annabelle Agnelli is no longer trying to hold it together in the Dick’s Drive-In parking lot. She’s lost it. Utterly lost it. She’s ditched her car entirely, and she’s jogging down the sidewalk, fast, at a really good clip. Coach Kwan would be proud. She’s getting sweaty and her mind is swirling, and it’s all a little unhinged for the straight-A student that she is. She is a good and nice person who keeps things together, but that has been a big job, an enormous job, a job that’s way, way too big for her lately.

It gets worse. Of course, this is what often happens: Things get worse and worse still. A spiral follows gravity downward. She’s been running for who knows how long, and it starts to get dark. It’s metaphor-darkness, but it’s also just the truth. Night falls. Big clouds cross the sky, threatening rain. So many things are falling—night, rain, the last of the stuff holding Annabelle Agnelli together.

She’s halfway down Seattle’s busy thoroughfare of Broadway. Then she turns down Cherry, and before she knows it, Annabelle is on the path that hugs Lake Washington. It’s March, which means that the sun goes down around five, five thirty. She has no idea what time it is, though. People with hunched shoulders and their jacket hoods up are walking their dogs. Little dogs and big dogs are pulled and yanked—there’s no time for luxurious sniffing with the sky that black. There’s a bicyclist or two or twenty, speeding home after work, their wheels zizzing by her. Backpacks are slung over their shoulders. Their tight, shiny bike pants shoot past, meteor streaks of luminescent yellow. Streetlights plink on.

She keeps running. There’s a little pit-pat of rain, nothing major. The burger bag is gone (in a trash can, she hopes, though she can’t say for sure), but Annabelle still has the Coke, and her purse bangs against her side. She stopped by Dick’s after hanging out with Zach Oh and Olivia, and so she’s wearing her jeans and a sweater and she’s way, way too hot. Her jacket is in the car; her regular running clothes and shoes are back at home. None of this matters.

Now, she’s past Leschi and then Seward Park, and it’s a little creepy out that way, with the lake a deep indigo and the big evergreens shaking their boughs overhead. This is the thing she wants to outrun: the creepiness. Not only the creepiness of Seward Park and the creepiness that just happened at Dick’s, but all creepiness, all powerlessness, all moments where you feel your fate in someone else’s hands.

Seriously, she should not be running in this part of the city at night. People get hurt here. Robbed. Killed. She feels a weird fearlessness. Whatever. Come and get me, she thinks. Do you think I care?

Then, she thinks something else: I could keep going and going.

This is where big ideas come from—a flash across the brain screen in moments when all the circuits are throwing sparks. The where and the why and the I don’t know form the tiniest ball of cells you’d need a microscope to see.

Big ideas can lead to great things. Big ideas can lead to disaster. The cells begin to divide.

Her phone has been buzzing in her pocket. She is hours late getting home. People are worried. She brushes away the thought, but then the responsible-person guilt collides with the burn in her legs and the ache in her toes. This is a large part of Annabelle Agnelli—the weight of what she owes everyone. It makes the gears of her anxiety click and whirl. Finally, she stops. She’s panting hard.

There is a park off to her left. She’s lived in Seattle all her life, but she’s never been out here. GENE COULON MEMORIAL BEACH PARK, the sign reads. CITY OF RENTON. She slurps down the Coke, crushes the cup. Crushing things feels awesome. She walks in a circle until her breath regulates, because she knows what will happen to her muscles if she doesn’t. Her chest burns.

Help me, Kat, Annabelle thinks. What do I do?

Keep going, Kat answers.

See? Kat is her best friend, so she understands. Kat knows Annabelle better than anyone, except maybe a certain someone who is losing her mind right about now. A certain someone who is calling and calling. Annabelle reaches for her buzzing phone.

“I’m okay, Mom,” she answers.

“Oh, God, Annabelle. Dear Jesus, where the hell are you?” Yes—God, Jesus, and hell in a ten-word sentence is really packing it in there, but this is Gina Agnelli. For her, being Catholic isn’t just about religion—it’s about superstition and safekeeping and tradition. She rarely goes to mass, but she’s got the required crucifix over the kitchen doorway, the rosary in the dresser drawer, and the stack of dead relatives’ funeral cards, held together with a rubber band. It’s almost hard for Annabelle to believe that people are still Catholic. But the Catholic church is something that’s been around for a zillion years and will keep on being around for a zillion years, in spite of the bad press and rumors of vanishing, kind of like Hostess Twinkies.

How can Annabelle believe in anything anymore, though? It’d be nice to have belief, but it’s likely gone for good.

“I’m at Gene Coulon Park. In Renton?”

“What? Why? Who are you there with? Have you been drinking?”

Ha. Annabelle wishes. “No, I haven’t been drinking! I ran here.”

“You ran there? What do you mean, you ran there? Where’s the car? Christ in heaven, do you know how worried I was? I was worried sick.”

Worry! Annabelle’s mother is always worried! She was worried even before last year, even before there was reason. Worry is another way Gina tries to keep everyone safe. Worry is a different version of prayer. Here is what happens when your mother worries: You become secretly worried. Anxiety plays in your background like bad grocery store music. You pace and count stuff and...