Playlist for a Broken Heart by Cathy Hopkins

play.
Great
, I thought as Aunt Karen’s house, and the noise within it, receded to be replaced by a ballad accompanied by piano. It was one of my favourite tracks so far.
    All alone yet so many voices in my head,
    removed from my life, may as well be half dead.
    I’m in a dream, in a haze,
    looking for love, a way out of this daze.
    Where is the life I knew? Those sun-filled rooms?
    Once so full of hope, now I see cobwebs, reminders of how things used to be.
    There was a break for the piano. The whole piece was poignant, full of sadness and longing. Like so many of the other tracks, it really spoke to me. The words articulated my
experience exactly. Every track on the CD expressed different feelings but mainly seemed to be about someone searching for love, searching for who they were. I could relate to them all.
    The more I’d listened to the CD over the weeks since I’d got it, I began to think that whoever had made it was telling a story through the tracks that they’d chosen. The
progression of a love affair from loneliness to first attraction, a girl who stood out from the crowd, someone special, hope, dreams of how things might be. The later tracks were full of hope,
reaching out to a soulmate. What happened? Did he find her?
And can I find him?
I asked myself as I took out my earphones, picked up the CD case from by the bed and examined the cover.
    It was definitely homemade and, as I studied it, I could make out how it had been created. It was a paper collage of two, maybe three, pages from a magazine. I looked more closely. Two pages.
The top page had been ripped up in strips then stuck down vertically on top of the page beneath, leaving gaps a couple of centimetres apart so you could see through to the image below as if looking
through bars. On the top page, I could make out an abstract image of a girl in four colours: red, black, brown and a flesh tone. In the top right, there was an upturned face in profile, the eye
heavily made up. The face was large in proportion to the rest of the body, which was shown in the bottom right. I could make out a red skirt, a leg with a green high heel.
    As I stared at the image, it became clearer. The body was falling away to the bottom right. In the centre was a black mark, which could represent hair but as I looked closer, I realised it was a
crotchet from a music score. I focused on the image that had been placed underneath and that could be seen through the gaps between the torn strips on top. It was a photograph in browns and blues
and was harder to make out than the top ripped page. To the right, I could see a boy’s head, taken from high above. Brown hair, an eyebrow, a nose, to the left a jean-clad hip and leg. In the
centre, his hand over a . . . what was it? Maybe a guitar? As I refocused on both images, I saw that they had been placed so that the boy’s head appeared to be in the girl’s mind.
Clever
, I thought as I turned the CD case over.
    On the back was a black-and-white photograph. I had glanced at it when I’d seen it in the charity shop but hadn’t looked at it properly since. It was a figure, a boy by a window
looking out on a building opposite – red brick not Bath stone, I could tell that much. Above was clear sky. I screwed my eyes up to see if I could make out the boy’s face. I
couldn’t. His features were dark because he was in silhouette against the window, buildings and sky behind him. I couldn’t tell if he was facing the camera or turned away. I was more
intrigued than ever. Who was this boy? I’d really like to find him. Talk to him. Find out what the story was. Why he’d made the CD and why it ended up in a box of jumble in a charity
shop. I got up to look for my pencil case. When I found it, I pulled out my magnifying glass. I’d just gone back to studying the photograph when Tasmin and Clover walked in.
    Clover sat next to me and I could smell that she’d been drinking alcohol. ‘What you doing?’
    Tasmin sat on her