A Hopeless Romantic by Harriet Evans Page A

and she was starting to freak herself out. But the thing about self-loathing is it stops you from taking the smallest of steps to make yourself feel better—even tying your hair back in a ponytail, or opening the window for some fresh air. She desperately wanted to get up, get out of bed, have a shower, but she couldn’t. It was easier to lie here and not do anything. She couldn’t go in and talk to Yorky. He’d told her all along she was stupid for carrying on with Dan! She couldn’t tell her parents; the shock of the whole sorry mess would kill them. She couldn’t call Jo, though she desperately wanted her wise, sanguine best friend’s advice. Of course she couldn’t call her—imagine what she’d say!
    She thought about what she had to do now, and the enormity of it overwhelmed her. Fix things, fix things left, right, and center. And then, in the middle of it all, get over this man.
    When she looked down the months to come, long Dan-less months of not sharing things with him, not telling him things, not being with him, her stomach clenched in sharp pain and her heart beat so loudly in her chest she felt it might burst. It was over. And so was that part of herself. When she thought about how she’d misjudged the situation, how she’d run ahead and fallen in love with him without stopping to look at whether he was the person she thought he was—well, she wanted to kick herself. Except this wasn’t the first time, and she knew enough to recognize that she’d done it before. One thing was for sure, though: It was the last time.
    Yes, the last time she’d fall like that. Absolutely the last time. A clean slate. A smooth, glowy feeling washed through Laura, stopping the cramps in her stomach. A clean slate, a project, someone to be, a new her. She looked past the gray-blue curtains at the crack that let the sunlight in. Yes, the good feeling persisted. She would be someone new. That was the only way to be. She was going to change.
    The sun was growing brighter. Laura swallowed, tasting a bitter, moldy fur on her tongue. She sat up, her hands on her knees, and was considering what to do with this newfound zeal—whether to convert it into something by taking the first of a thousand small steps and jumping in the shower, or whether to lie back and think about it some more. What should she do? The energy of the question fazed her, and she probably would have lain back down and closed her eyes again when, thank God, fate intervened.
    Laura didn’t know which happened first, the sight of it or the sound, but as she was sliding back down under the duvet, there was a sickening thump and the window flew into a million pieces, hitting the curtains, and a pigeon hurtled in and landed on the bed at Laura’s feet. Dead. Or dying.
    It took a few seconds before Laura realized the person screaming loudly was her, her first spontaneous action of the last two days. She couldn’t move. She sat staring and screaming at this twitching, bloodied pigeon, its feathers scraggly and ugly, its red-pink wormlike claws convulsing on her duvet, as Yorky burst into the room.
    “Stop!” shouted Laura. “Don’t come any farther! There’s glass on the floor—STOP!!!”
    Yorky slid to a halt, inches from a huge, dagger-shaped shard of glass. “Fuck! Fuck me!” he yelled. “What the fuck! Laura! What have you done!”
    The pigeon twitched again. Laura suddenly heard her mother’s voice saying, every time she wanted to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus, “They’re flying rats, dear. Vermin. Crawling with fleas and God knows what else.”
    “Get away from me!” she said incoherently to the pigeon. “Fuck! Off!”
    Yorky calmed down before she did. He looked from the broken window, where the curtains were fluttering plaintively in the summer breeze, across the path of devastation wrought by the flying glass in a shower across the floor, to the bed where the pigeon lay a couple of feet from Laura, who was