Your Hearts, Your Scars by Adina Talve-Goodman

Author:Adina Talve-Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Your Heart, Your Scars, Zombies

A WEEK OR SO AFTER MY twenty-first birthday, a little over a year after the heart transplant I received at age nineteen, K picked me up outside my dorm and we drove to Blueberry Hill for my first legal beer. I’d had the stomach flu and finals on my actual birthday, so I hadn’t done much celebrating yet. He ordered for me, a Blue Moon with an orange slice. I didn’t tell him I preferred darker beers. We sat across from each other in a booth. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember the talking was easy and I liked his smile.

We’d been out on other dates, but we were not dating. We’d gone and listened to live music at local bars, we’d slow-danced late at night at house parties, but I was still in love with a boyfriend from high school who went off to college while I stayed home in St. Louis to wait for a heart. The boyfriend and I had been together a long time by college standards. We were each other’s dates for senior prom, and he flew home from college when the heart came. While I was in surgery, he made me a list of all the things he knew about me—what I loved and hated, how I picked out onions and scallions from soup, where I liked to be kissed—so that I would have it to refer to when I woke up with a dead person’s heart in place of my own. The items on the list were things to remember, what made me Adina to him, just in case that foreign heart should cause me to forget. We lived together over the summer after the surgery and decided that seeing other people in our junior year was best because we both wanted to study abroad but at different times. K understood all this—he and his high school girlfriend had been through the same standard study-abroad breakup. I hadn’t mentioned the heart transplant part of the story, though. Maybe because it was so nice when K would say, “Yes, I went through exactly the same thing.” When he would ask if we could kiss, I’d say I wasn’t ready to break the boyfriend’s heart in exactly that way just yet. This was true, but I had also never been naked with someone who didn’t know the history of my body, the origin of my scars, and maybe I wasn’t quite ready for that, either. So when he drove me back to my dorm, on the cusp of winter break, and we sat there watching our still-visible breath in the cold of his car, I hoped he wouldn’t ask again.

“I made you something,” he said. He pulled a case out of his pocket and popped a CD he had burned from his laptop into his portable car stereo, the nicest part of his old SUV. The songs were all by K, written and performed. Mostly they

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