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  From every ending comes a new beginning.…

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

  Copyright © 2010 by Lurlene McDaniel

  All rights reserved. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McDaniel, Lurlene.

  Heart to heart / Lurlene McDaniel. — 1st ed. p. cm.

  Summary: Relates the complicated friendship of a teenaged girl, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and a young heart transplant recipient.

  ISBN 978-0-385-73460-8 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-385-90459-9 (glb)

  ISBN 978-0-375-89652-1 (e-book)

  [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Heart—Transplantation—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M4784172He 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009017343

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to Lois and to Kaitlyn, whose heart lives on.

  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

  1 CORINTHIANS 15:26 (NIV)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note from the Author

  Part One

  1. Kassey

  2. Kassey

  3. Kassey

  4. Kassey

  5. Kassey

  6. Kassey

  7. Kassey

  Part Two

  8. Arabeth

  9. Arabeth

  10. Kassey

  11. Arabeth

  12. Kassey

  13. Arabeth

  14. Kassey

  15. Arabeth

  16. Kassey

  17. Kassey

  18. Arabeth

  19. Kassey

  20. Arabeth

  21. Kassey

  22. Arabeth

  23. Arabeth

  24. Kassey

  25. Kassey

  Part Three

  26. Arabeth

  27. Kassey

  28. Arabeth

  29. Kassey

  30. Arabeth

  31. Kassey

  About the Author

  A Note from the Author

  The name Elowyn is unusual, but I’ve loved it from the first time I heard it. The name belongs to the daughter of a friend of mine, and I was told that my friend and her husband “made it up” after reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. No matter. In fact, it is a real name in the Cornish tradition and means “strong elm”—as in elm tree. Origins of names are quite varied. It’s fascinating to learn why you were given your name and then to investigate its roots. You might want to do a Web search for your name and see what you find out.

  This story is fictional, but the phenomenon of “cellular memory” has been recorded by organ transplant recipients on numerous occasions, especially in cases of heart transplants. It is the idea that all human cells can store memories of the body and these memories can be passed along through an organ transplant. Medical science has proven that only the brain can store a memory, and most scientists believe that cellular memory is only speculative. And yet reports persist from many transplant recipients about how they assumed certain personality traits, likes, and dislikes after their transplants. I found this intriguing and used the idea in this novel.

  part one

  · 1 ·

  Kassey

  Elowyn Eden and I became best friends.

  We met the summer before were were going into seventh grade, when we were hospital roommates in the orthopedic wing, waiting for the same surgeon to fix broken bones. I’d busted up my arm playing volleyball (my favorite sport), and Elowyn had done a number on her left leg skating. She asked me, “Are you scared?”

  “About the operation? Not a bit,” I said, then dropped my water pitcher because my hands were shaking so much I couldn’t pour water into a cup. The pitcher splatted on the floor, and after we watched the water spread everywhere, Elowyn raised an imaginary microphone and said, “Cleanup on aisle four.”

  We started laughing and couldn’t stop. Hours later, we’d talked ourselves hoarse, only stopping long enough to eat dinner. Elowyn and her parents had just moved from South Carolina to Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta and my hometown since Mom and Dad split when I was three. Turned out Elowyn lived in a gated garden-home community five blocks over from our house. “So tell me what I’m facing at my new school,” she demanded.

  We were going to be in the same middle school, so I gave her an earful about who was who and what was what of the kids I knew would be our classmates. She took notes on a hospital napkin. That was so Elowyn—she made lists and took notes like nobody I’d ever met. By the time we left the hospital, we were each wearing a cast signed with the other’s name and phone number. She called first, and because I was more mobile than she was, Mom took me to her house a few days later.

  Her room was awesome! Her mother—“Call me Terri, not Mrs. Eden,” she insisted with a smile—was an artsy-craftsy type, and the whole house looked like something out of a decorating magazine, with lots of bright walls and piles of pretty pillows. Elowyn’s room had hand-painted vines and fields of flowers growing up the walls. The room was blue and yellow, the flowers pale purple. My house was beige; my room seemed dreary. I’d hung posters, but the space wa
s quite bland.

  “It’s supposed to be the French countryside,” Elowyn said. “France is my favorite place in the world. So romantic. I’m going to Paris on my honeymoon.”

  “Are you getting married anytime soon?” I joked.

  “Someday … and he’ll be so handsome. Maybe I’ll meet a French exchange student and marry him.”

  I hadn’t thought about getting married to anybody, much less someone from a particular country. I walked to the wall and touched the painted flowers. They looked so real. “What kind of flowers?”

  “Lavender. Can’t you just see whole fields of it? And I love the way it smells. It’s my favorite perfume.” She spritzed the air with a bottle from her dresser, and the scent was wonderful.

  Elowyn seemed so grown-up to me. I didn’t have a special fragrance except for the strawberry-scented shampoo I used. I kept looking around her perfect bedroom. “Your mom’s talented.”

  “That’s true. She’s one of a kind, but it’s my daddy who understands me best.”

  Elowyn’s dad was a lawyer, a Southern man who said goofy things like “Don’t get off the porch if you can’t run with the big dogs” and “Wake up and smell the coffee.” I didn’t get the point of most of his sayings, but one thing I did get: Elowyn had him wrapped around her little finger. He called her Sugar Plum. I admit, the one thing I ever envied about Elowyn was her relationship with her dad, because I’d grown up with mine long gone.

  My mom was a claims adjuster for a huge insurance company and worked long hours, so we were both happy when I fell in with Elowyn and had someplace to hang. I’d grown up with Mom working and me going to day care. No biggie. When I turned twelve, I got to come straight home from school and stay by myself doing homework and watching TV. I liked being around Elowyn and her family—so much like the families I saw on old television shows. Terri always met us at the door, and was always working on some project—gourmet cooking, painting water-color landscapes. Elowyn and I traded books we loved, and after our casts came off, we parked ourselves at the community pool, turning our bodies buttery tan and swimming to rebuild our shriveled limbs.

  In seventh grade, I lured her into volleyball, and between us we played a wicked game. Elowyn was left-handed, so few people on opposing teams could return her hook ball. I was a power server. The coaches loved us.

  We took up another habit the summer between seventh and eighth grades.

  “How’d you like to come on our family vacation?” she asked me.

  “Vacation?”

  “A trip.”

  “I know what a vacation is.” Mom and I rarely took vacations. If we traveled it was to see Grandma and Grandpa in Michigan. Talk about a long drive! Otherwise, we just stayed home, because Mom was tired and because vacations cost money we didn’t have.

  Elowyn sat with a bounce on her bed. “Do you know what it’s like to be trapped for a week with my family doing tourist stuff somewhere I don’t want to go to in the first place?”

  “No idea,” I said, but thinking, Lucky you!

  “B-o-r-i-n-g. Anyway, I got this idea that if I took a friend with me, I’d have a lot more fun than just hanging with Mom and Dad.”

  “You have fun parents.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh sure. We run around, but we never go anyplace cool.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “So,” she went on, “I asked Mom if I could bring you along.”

  “You want me to come?”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  “And you’re mine.”

  “Then it makes sense, don’t you think? We’ll have a ball doing things together, and Mom and Dad will have each other and they won’t feel like they have to keep me entertained. It’ll be a blast!”

  “I—I don’t know if Mom will let me.…”

  She held up her hand. “My mom will handle it.”

  And Terri did handle it. In August, I went with Elowyn and her parents to Destin, Florida, to a beach house they rented overlooking the ocean on sugary white sand. Elowyn’s parents played golf and we lounged on the beach flirting with cute guys. Between eighth and ninth grades, I went with them to a resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where Elowyn and I caught the interest of two guys who said they were in college. We sneaked out of our room adjoining her parents’ and met the guys by the pool in the moonlight. My guy, Todd, kissed me until my head spun and my blood ran hot. It was all new to me. Then he decided to put his hand inside my top. I jerked away. “Don’t!”

  “Why not?” His voice was not nice.

  Shivers of excitement shot through me, but I pulled away. “I—I said no, so it’s no.”

  “What are you? Some lousy tease?” His face, so handsome and romantic in the light of the moon, turned snarly.

  I shoved hard and he went backward into the pool. “Let’s go!” I cried to Elowyn, and she broke free of an embrace from her guy and ran with me for the pool gate and the patio door to our room, which we’d left unlocked. The guys called us some names but they didn’t follow.

  We locked the door and fell back on the bed, breathing hard. I was scared. Elowyn was laughing. “Wow!”

  “Shhh!” I said. “Don’t wake your folks.”

  “Never happen.” She raised herself up on her elbows. “Why’d you run?”

  I told her.

  “You know guys want to do more if you start kissing them.”

  “Not without permission. Don’t you agree?”

  “Older guys especially expect stuff. You know that.”

  My face got hot.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll never see them again anyway.”

  “You think?”

  “Positive. What guy wants to be with a girl who almost drowns him?”

  We dissolved into a fit of giggles.

  In ninth grade, we entered Alpha High School, a place so large we needed maps to find our way around the buildings. Fortunately we made the junior varsity volleyball team, which gave us a leg up in the dog-eat-dog world of incoming freshmen. Once the team started winning, people began to know who we were. Not a bad place to be. And then, with little warning, my cozy little world shifted.

  Elowyn got a boyfriend.

  · 2 ·

  Kassey

  The boy was Wyatt Nolan, a ninth grader with curly brown hair and dark brown eyes. Elowyn pointed him out to me on the basketball court in February during a game where we were sitting in the bleachers cheering for our team. “What do you think of him?” she asked over the noise of the crowd.

  He was a purple and gold blur running down-court. “I can’t see his face.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Don’t you think he looks French?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “He’s in my French class.”

  “Okay. Does that make him more adorable?”

  She tilted her chin at me and smiled. “It does.”

  She hooked him. By the end of basketball season, she was wearing his JV jacket and they were texting each other ten times a day. Not that cells are allowed at Alpha, but she managed to communicate with him. She and Wyatt were inseparable. Which meant I got shoved aside. Okay, maybe not shoved, but I definitely took a backseat in her life priorities. Elowyn was immersed in this guy. At first, I moped around feeling sorry for myself. When your best friend gets all preoccupied with “love” and there’s no room for anyone else, your feelings get hurt.

  Our friendship caught a break the summer between our freshman and sophomore years because Wyatt went to basketball camp, then to Indiana to visit his grandparents. I didn’t miss him. Elowyn did. Her family’s “vacation” was to Clearwater, Florida, and I was invited—just like old times. I was ready to have fun, but Elowyn dragged around halfheartedly. I couldn’t even lure her into the ice cream parlor for her favorite comfort food, Chunky Monkey. The girl had a bodacious sweet tooth. “I’m buying,” I said. “Waffle cones and toppings!” All she talked about was how much she misse
d Wyatt.

  When I mentioned it, she went off on me. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in love.”

  I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “You should get a boyfriend.”

  “No one I like,” I said. It was true. Guys our age at Alpha seemed immature to me. Deep down, I felt shy about guys. I never had a dad around to talk to. Men were not really part of my life.

  Elowyn and Wyatt talked on their cells for an hour every night while I watched TV or lay on the bed tossing a volleyball into the air endlessly. If they were still attached to each other next summer, I told myself I was staying home instead of going on her vacation.

  Once we got home, Elowyn and I went back-to-school shopping and that was fun. She had a calendar on her bedroom wall with the days marked off until Wyatt returned. “What’s this?” I asked the first time I saw it. “I used to mark the days before Christmas off when I was a kid, but I outgrew it.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “Don’t be mean.”

  When school started, Elowyn and Wyatt were again joined at the hip and I was left to figure out my life on my own. They never really included me and I didn’t want to be a tagalong anyway. But a few months into the new school year, cracks started to form in their “love.”

  “I hate him!” Elowyn said, coming into the gym to dress for volleyball practice. Our season started after football season and Coach had us practicing every day after school.

  “Who?”

  “Wyatt.” She slammed open her locker next to mine.

  “I thought you loved him.”

  “I’m mad at him.”

  “For what?”

  “He wants to hang with his friends Friday night instead of going out with me.”

  That didn’t seem like a “hate-able” offense to me. “You can’t go out Saturday night instead?”

  “He has to work.”

  I sat down to tie my sneakers. “You two go out all the time. Maybe he needs some guy time.”

  “So you’re on his side?”

  “Stop it. You’re my friend.”

  She pouted. “I don’t like being blown off.”

  “Tell me about it.” My comment, meant to express how she often made me feel, went over her head.