After Jennie's girlfriend,Jisoo, dies in an accident during their junior year, she reaches out to the recipients of the donated organs in hopes of picking up the fragments of her now-unrecognizable life. But whoever received Jisoo's heart has chosen...
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heart (n): a hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation; the center of the total personality, especially with reference to intuition, feeling, or emotion; the central, innermost, or vital part of something
—definition of the word heart.
I don't know how I knew, when the sirens woke me just before dawn, that they were for her.
I don't remember jumping out of bed, or tying the laces of my shoes. I don't remember my legs carrying me down the driveway, onto the winding stretch of road between our houses. I don't remember the feel of my feet hitting the ground, or my lungs taking in air, or my body racing to catch up with what I already knew in my heart was true.
But I remember every detail after that.
I can see the blue and red lights, swirling garishly against the pale sunrise sky. Hear the clipped voices of the medics. The words 'head trauma' repeated over the loud jumble of their radios in the background.
I remember the deep, choking sobs of a woman I didn't know and still don't, even now. The odd angle of her white SUV, its hood hidden by the broken stalks and scattered blooms of the sunflowers that grew along the side of the road. The fence, splintered and broken.
I remember glass like gravel, all over the asphalt.
Blood. Too much.
And her sneaker, lying on its side in the middle of it all. The heart I'd drawn in black Sharpie on the bottom.
I can still feel the emptiness of her shoe when I picked it up, and the way the absence of weight brought me to my knees. I can feel the strong grip of the gloved hands that lifted me and then held me back when I tried to run to her.
They wouldn't let me. Didn't want me to see her. And so what I remembermost about that morning is standing on the side of the road, alone, darknessclosing in around me as the day was unfolding. Morning sunlight on the vibrantgold petals, scattered where she lay dying.
