Free The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers by Lynn Weingarten

Whatever.”
    Lucy put her hand against her throat. What had just happened? “What did you do there?” she said. “What did you do to me?” But Liza didn’t answer.
    Olivia flipped on the radio. A song Lucy knew came on and Olivia turned it up loud. Lucy felt her whole body sizzling. Lucy sang along quietly to calm herself. She closed her eyes, the wind blew her hair. These girls are magic. If she’d had even the slightest hint of a doubt left, she didn’t anymore. They had power. They could destroy her. Or they could give her everything she wanted.
    Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of a bunch of row houses a couple of towns away from their clean, little suburb. The lawns were all bare and the paint on most of the houses was peeling. A woman was pushing a pink baby stroller toward them. As she passed, Lucy realized the woman was no older than Lucy. They got out of the car and walked up to a blue house. There was a guy with a shaved head and a goatee sitting on the stoop. He looked like he was in his forties. He had a can of something in a paper bag.
    Lucy could feel the guy on the stairs watching them with sleepy eyes. He gave Olivia a nod, like he knew her. Olivia walked inside. And when Gil passed he smiled and said, “Babybabybaby,” but it was sweet somehow, not skeevy.
    And Gil said, “Herbiiiiiee,” and he caught one of her small hands in his big ones and brought it to his lips and kissed it. Gil squeezed his shoulder and then walked inside too.
    When Liza was standing next to him he didn’t say anything, just stuck out his brown-paper-bagged can. She grabbed it, raised it up to her lips, and took a long, slow swallow.
    Liza handed him back the can. The guy held it upside down and a few drops sprinkled out onto the steps.
    “I owe you a beer,” Liza called out behind her.
    And the guy, he just opened his mouth and laughed. His teeth were perfect, movie-star teeth, the kind that people have when they have unlimited money to devote to the inside of their mouths.
    Lucy stared at the man on the stoop with his dirty hands and his beer can and the sun streaming down on him and his head tipped back and his lovely teeth all lined up in a row and Lucy thought about how Alex would probably have liked to take a picture of him.
    Lucy’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Her heart leapt.
    She wondered if it was Alex reading her mind!
    But it was Tristan.
    He’d sent her a photo of a balloon with GOOD RIDDANCE, FUCKO written on it in Sharpie. He was smiling next to it, giving a big, cheesy thumbs-up.
    When Lucy looked up, the other girls were already inside.
    “And oh,” Olivia called out, not turning back, “by the way, this is a test.”
    “A test of what ?” Lucy said. “What am I supposed to do?” But no one answered.
    Lucy hovered in the doorway.
    Three guys were in the room in front of her looking like they belonged in an ad for surf gear or skateboards. There was one sitting on the couch leaning forward, tan arms wrapped in leather bands, one lying down on the couch with his shoes off, and one cross-legged on the floor, sun-bleached hair flopping in his face. They were beautiful, all of them, and had that ease about them that implied not that they didn’t know what they looked like, but that they knew and didn’t care.
    Lucy just stood there blushing.
    There was, Lucy had long ago realized, an art to entering into rooms where groups of people were already having fun. One joke, one question, one clever observation was all one needed to cross the invisible line between person-by-the-door and person-in-the-room. This would have been hard for Lucy even on a good day, but then, with the wounds of a broken heart festering inside her chest, it felt completely impossible.
    “Oh no, no you don’t!” Gil said sweetly. Gil sat cross-legged on a giant blue cushion on the floor, holding a video game controller. Projected on the wall in front of her, a guy in a silver space suit was fighting a many-headed