Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb

least try to make things easier in some way. You’ve only spoken to Miss Petrollo once and already you seem relieved.”
    â€œOh, yeah,” I said, slicing my lettuce into bite-size pieces. I didn’t tell him that the relief was because of him.
    After we finished eating and placed our salad bowls on the conveyor belt, I returned to my father’s room. The heart monitor still broadcast every rhythm, and my sister hardly looked up from her Quantum Mechanics III, but the thought of Richard made it all affect me less, somehow. Part of me knew that it was unrealistic to hope for something, to transform our brief meeting into some whirlwind of eternal devotion. A tiny memory of Jay Kasper’s pity date also poked through—but I still couldn’t help hoping. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I didn’t have Richard to think about. Even if it was unrealistic for us to be together now, what was to stop us from connecting in the future, like the characters in a romance novel, meeting on page two and again on page two hundred? I could see Richard and myself at more appropriate ages . . . me, having graduated from college, in a job (anything but social worker), until some minor incident—a friend’s baby, a sprained wrist—took me to the hospital. Years would have passed—no matter. He’d have been through girlfriends, many of them, but never married. In hours, it would happen as we’d always known it would: we’d kiss outside the hospital, a deep, shocking kiss, and theother doctors, the passengers in traffic, the visitors, the social workers—the whole world—would stop and stare in surprise.
    Alex still wasn’t speaking to me the day of the surgery; she sat curled up in her square orange seat in the hospital lobby, with her calculator and protractor and textbook. I wandered in and out of the gift shop, carrying my books from school yet not opening one of them. I bought a new romance novel, Rosamunde’s Revelation, and skipped to the sex scenes. I was hyper-awake from exhaustion; all night I’d been unable to sleep. At three o’clock I’d gotten out of bed and started watching television, flipping between reruns of Twilight Zone and Love Boat, and periodically visiting the kitchen to rummage through the freezer. I opened a yellow Tupperware container and found the frozen three-month-old carcass of Jay Kasper’s Cocoa Krispies treats. Whenever I saw him in the halls at school now, he smiled at me faintly, as if he barely remembered who I was, and walked on. I threw his creation out and settled on a more recently purchased Sara Lee chocolate cake; I ate it frozen from the box while my imagination leaped and bounded off, alternating between scenes of my father on the operating table and visions of the wedding dress I’d marry Richard in, ivory sleeveless with long silk gloves.
    At six that morning I’d started getting dressed. I didn’t wear my mother’s clothes, to try to keep peace with Alex for at least one day, but I used every kind of makeup my motherowned: eyebrow pencil and cheekbone highlighter, even a set of false eyelashes she’d bought for a Cleopatra costume one Halloween. I wore my own small wool hat and matching dress; in a moment of inspiration I stuffed my bra with cotton.
    Late in the afternoon, I plopped down in the chair beside my sister, who was scribbling away in her notebook. For the first time that day she really looked at me.
    â€œWhat’s on your face?”
    â€œNothing.”
    She squinted. “Your eyes. They look weird.”
    â€œThey’re fake,” I said, and blinked at her. “The eyelashes. They make my eyes look big.”
    She shook her head and went back to her work, and I read until I fell asleep. At five o’clock she nudged me awake—Richard stood before us in the lobby.
    He looked tired but relieved. “It was a success,” he said. “Everything went