The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Ashley Herring Blake

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Good Wives and Warriors

  Cover design by Angela Taldone

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: March 2019

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blake, Ashley Herring, author.

  Title: The mighty heart of Sunny St. James / Ashley Herring Blake.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2019. | Summary: “Twelve-year-old Sunny St. James must navigate heart surgery, reconnection with a lost mother, the betrayal of a former best friend, first kisses, and emerging feelings for another girl.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017613| ISBN 9780316515535 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316515504 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316515511 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Heart—Transplantation—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Sexual orientation—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B58 Mig 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017613

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-51553-5 (hardcover), 978-0-316-51550-4 (ebook)

  E3-20190103-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Rebecca Podos

  If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

  —LEO TOLSTOY

  CHAPTER

  1

  I’m going to die today.

  Definitely for a few minutes and maybe forever. Kate keeps telling me no way, nohow is it going to be forever, but she isn’t the one who’s about to have her most important internal organ switched out like a new swimsuit at the start of the summer.

  I’ve imagined this moment a lot. I mean, a lot. Day in and day out, while Kate biked back and forth from our house to the bookstore she owns downtown about a million times a day to check on me, I would weave together this very moment in full color. And my imagination is fierce. One of the best on Juniper Island, if I had to guess. When you’ve spent most of the past two years on your couch watching the sun tick across the sky like I have, you’ve got a bunch of time to work on your thoughts.

  There’s usually a lot of blood involved. Of course there is. It’s my heart, after all, puny as it may be, the lousy blood-bringer to all my other top-notch organs. The color is pretty, bright red against my pale skin and the white and steel operating room.

  Then there are the noises and smells. A lot of people leave out noises and smells when they let their imaginations ramble, but not me. The scalpel zips down my sternum, and my body squelches and squishes as gloved hands dip into my open chest.

  I know, I know. I’ve made my own stomach twist more than once, but this kind of stuff is not for the faint of heart.

  Or actually, I guess it is.

  “You’re doing it again,” Kate says. She sits on the edge of the pea-green pleather chair that doubles as a bed in my hospital room. There’s a book open on her lap, but I know she’s not reading it. She’s too busy watching me, watching the tubes hooked into my arms and nose, watching that machine beep-beep-beep, proving I’m still alive. Which I am.

  For now.

  My eyelids close heavily. They’ve been doing that a lot lately, dropping like an iron door every time I blink. I pry them open again. “Doing what?”

  “Picturing things,” she says.

  “We could play Frisbee instead. Did you bring a Frisbee?”

  She smiles and shakes her head at me. “Just picture good things, okay?”

  “Like running and going to the beach with—”

  I cut myself off, but we both know who I was about to say. My official FBF—aka Former Best Friend. Even after four months of not having her in my life, she’s still a habit. A bad one.

  “Like running and going to the beach this summer,” Kate finishes for me, conveniently leaving Margot Banks out of it.

  “I called Suzette, just so you know,” Kate says.

  “What? Why?” Suzette is Margot’s mom, who I’ve known since I was four, when Kate brought me from Nashville to Juniper Island, just off the coast of South Carolina.

  “Because she loves you,” Kate says.

  I roll my eyes, even though I know it’s true. But Suzette was never the problem.

  “I told her we got the call and the surgery was today,” Kate goes on. “She said she was sending you all her good thoughts and she’d let Margot know what was going on.”

  I wait for Kate to tell me more, that Margot had a message for me, even if it’s just a simple hello and, you know, good luck with that whole new-heart thing, and, while I’m at it, I confess I’m pretty much the worst friend ever, but Kate just sits there, her eyes going all misty on me again.

  “Kate.”

  “What?”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Well, yeah, I’m allowed to cry.”

  She stands up, her book sliding to the floor, but she doesn’t bend to pick it up. Usually, Kate’s a neat freak—everything in our house and the bookstore is just so. Before Margot’s debacle of a birthday party back in January, she and I used to play this game where we’d move something small, like a candle from the living room to the kitchen or a picture frame from one side of a shelf to the other, and see how long it took Kate to notice.

/>   The longest she ever went was forty-seven minutes, and for twenty-one of those minutes, she’d been at the bookstore.

  Now her book is facedown on the germ-filled floor, the pages all crinkled up, and she doesn’t even care. It’s a hardcover too. It’s because of me. I sucked the care right out of her. I’m ready to stop doing that.

  She lies down next to me and tucks my hair behind my ear, then rubs circles into my temple over and over again the way she does when I can’t sleep.

  I look at the machine next to my bed, my heart rate pulsing 62… 63… 64… 62.

  “Are you scared?” Kate asks.

  “What, about dying? Meh.”

  “Sunny St. James.”

  “What?

  “You’re not going to die,” she says.

  “But I am. For a few minutes after they snip the bad heart out—”

  “Hey, I love that heart.”

  “It’s still bad, right?”

  She doesn’t say anything to that. Two years ago, when I was ten, I fainted during recess at school. Just totally face-planted in the rubber mulch. A day later, I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, which pretty much means my heart is bad. A total failure.

  “And after they cut it out,” I say, continuing my morbid lesson, “I’ll be dead. Like, actually dead while they put the new heart in and attach all the blood vessels and arteries and stuff.”

  Kate sighs and rubs her forehead. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  I nudge Kate with my shoulder as hard as I can, which has about as much force behind it as a gnat smacking against a window.

  “I wonder if death is like being underwater,” I say. “You know, like when you go really deep and then look up and everything is all dark and hazy and flowy. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?”

  Kate groans.

  “Maybe death is like getting a big hug from the ocean.”

  “Sunny!”

  I smile and snuggle against her as much as the tiny bed and all the tubes will let me.

  The truth is, I’m pretty scared. But I’m excited too. I think you can be both at the same time. I’m tired of being sick. I’m tired of thinking about Margot and her swim team friends and how much cooler they are than me because they can, you know, do more than just lie on a couch. I’m tired of seeing the ocean but not being able to dive under the waves. I’m tired of thinking about death too, even though I talk about it so much, Kate probably believes it’s my favorite thing.

  But I don’t want to die. I want to turn thirteen. I’ve never even been inside Juniper Island Middle School and I’m technically supposed to start seventh grade this fall. I want to do amazing and awesome things I never thought I’d get to do, like bungee jumping and skydiving and water skiing. I want to go to an overnight camp and make myself sick on junk food with a best friend.

  I want to have a best friend again.

  And I really, really, really want to kiss a boy. Like, I want to kiss a boy so bad, my lips itch all the time. I don’t mean the kind of kiss that Kate pops onto my forehead every night or the way Dave kisses my hand sometimes when he’s being silly. I mean a real kiss. The kind that Margot has already had with Sam Blanchard and Henry Lee. The kind of kiss that could change my whole life.

  Okay, fine, yes, I know kissing doesn’t seem like such a huge deal when my heart is gasping its last breath, but if I die without ever being really and truly kissed, I’m going to be so mad.

  71… 72… 73…

  Kate holds me closer. She always knows when my mind gets going because I get really quiet, and quiet isn’t exactly my usual thing. She pats my head like she’s trying to calm it down, then circles her thumb on my temple while she stares at me. Kate’s an excellent starer. When Margot and I would stay up too late during sleepovers, making all sorts of noise way past midnight, she’d open my door and stare at us. She didn’t even have to say anything. We knew she meant business and we shut up really fast.

  This is a different kind of stare, though. I’m not in trouble, I know that, but she keeps looking at me, like her eyes are thirsty and I’m a cup of cold water.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. Which, yeah, might be a silly question considering where we are and what’s about to happen, but it’s more than that. I can tell. For the past few months, Kate’s been my number one best friend. We’re all each other has, aside from Dave, so I know her pretty well. I also know that wrinkle between her eyebrows means she wants to talk about my mom.

  “You’re in love with Dave, aren’t you?” I say to throw her off her game.

  Her eyes widen. I try to keep a straight face, but a grin tugs at my mouth. Dave’s her best friend from high school and everyone’s favorite person ever. He’s a musician with muscular arms, curly black hair, and dark brown skin and, true to his artistic nature, wears plaid shirts and black-framed glasses three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Even I think he’s cute and he’s about a million years old. It’s obvious to everyone but Kate that all the tortured love songs he writes are about her.

  “Sunny, for goodness’ sake,” she says, but her cheeks are red. “No.”

  “Uh-huh, sure.”

  She takes a deep breath and her smile flattens out again. “Sunshine.”

  My weak little heart kicks up a notch. I tell it to calm down, but, like always, it doesn’t listen to me.

  “I don’t want to talk about her, okay?” I say.

  Kate sighs and that wrinkle disappears. Whenever she tries to bring up my mom—which happens every year on my birthday, every major holiday, and the first day of school like clockwork—I can never figure out if she’s relieved or sad when I shut her down. Either way, she’s always telling me it’s okay to have questions and I’m always telling her I don’t have any.

  I was born in Nashville. My mother’s name is Lena and she was a musician, like Dave. My dad, whose name was Ethan, died in a motorcycle accident right after I was born. Then, when I was four, Lena couldn’t take care of me anymore, so she gave me to her best friend, Kate, because Kate was all she had. Kate had just bought Cherry Picked Books on Juniper Island, so she moved me down here with her. Kate, who’s been there every day of my life since. Kate, who cried a bunch when I got sick, but didn’t freak out and didn’t leave me, even when things were really bad. Kate, who’s here right now.

  That’s all I need to know, right?

  Right.

  “Sunny,” Kate says. “Your mom—”

  “Kate, come on. I’m about to kick the bucket. Let’s talk about puppies and rainbows.”

  “Or how death is like an ocean hug?” Kate says, rolling her eyes.

  “Yes, exactly.” I take the deepest breath I can and shove Lena right out of my head. “Now, do you think it’ll be cold or hot? Or maybe it’ll just be a whole bunch of nothingness, like before being born? That would be disappointing, wouldn’t it? I hope death is something.”

  Kate groans again but smiles and presses her nose against my cheek. “I love you, Sunshine.”

  Her voice sounds funny, even though she’s smiling. Before I can tell her I love her too, Dr. Ahmed comes into the room, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun. She doesn’t have her white coat on. Instead, she’s covered in green scrubs from head to toe. Behind her, two orderlies wheel in a gurney, maneuvering it right next to my bed.

  Dr. Ahmed smiles down at me. She’s been my doctor for two years. She was the one to tell Kate and me that a transplant was the only thing that would save me. That was a year and a half ago.

  Last night, the pager the United Network of Organ Sharing gave us went off in the middle of dinner. We were sitting on the porch so I could smell the sea, eating grilled cheese and talking about how maybe, if I wasn’t too tired, we’d go down to the beach later and dip our toes in the cool, early-May ocean. But we never got a chance because suddenly the pager that Kate always kept clipped to her front pocket started beeping at us. It had never gone off before and it could only mean one thing.

  “We’re ready for you, Sunny,” Dr
. Ahmed says now, placing a cool hand on my forehead after checking my vitals. “New life awaits.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  She cracks a smile, used to my realism by now.

  “I’ll do my best to make that a definitely, all right?”

  I give her a thumbs-up and then she nods to the orderlies hovering around me. Kate inhales a shaky breath and kisses my cheek. She kisses it so hard, it almost hurts, but I’m glad. I can really feel that kiss. Remember it.

  “I’ll be here when you get back,” Kate says as she gets up from the bed. “I’ll be right here, Sunshine.” Tears are already falling down her face, and her voice is thick, like she’s talking around a mouthful of peanut butter.

  “One, two, three,” one of the orderlies says, and then they lift me up, like I’m a plank of wood, and set me gently on the wheeled gurney.

  I can’t think of anything super-awesome or emotional to say as they start rolling me out of the room, so I just hold up my pinkie. Kate’s face is red and soaking wet and she’s making these soft whimpering noises that make my throat feel all thick. She wraps her little finger around mine and gives it a wiggle.

  Then the scene changes. Kate’s gone and I’m zooming down the white-walled hallway, fluorescent lights bright overhead. We turn this way and that until they wheel me into a cold room. It smells exactly like I thought it would—almost like nothing, like a slate wiped clean.

  Another doctor, with glasses, appears and puts a clear mask over my face. Dr. Ahmed is just behind him, her own mask in place. Nurses are everywhere, IV bags full of clear liquid and blood ready to go, all their faces covered up so they don’t sneeze or breathe on me.

  “Count down from ten for me, Sunny,” the glasses doctor says. I nod, the good little patient, but my stomach is going crazy, like there are a million ants in there.

  Ten… nine…

  I let my eyes close.

  Eight… seven…

  I feel floaty, like there really is water underneath me. I’ll have to remember to tell Kate, but I’m not sure if I will because six… five…

  I only make it to four before the ocean swallows me whole.

  CHAPTER