Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  And a small wooden sign, looped with cursive writing, nailed above the bed: Welcome to Lovelorn.

  “Did you do this?” I turned to Summer, even though I knew from her expression that she hadn’t.

  In the books, the original three were never anything but delighted when Lovelorn appeared, when it began to change things, melting familiar landscapes like butter softening at the edges, kneading it into new shapes: a tree into a tower; the old stone wall into the gremlins’ grotto. And later, we would love the clubhouse, the way it had materialized for us in the rain; the warmth of the quilt, which we draped over our shoulders like a communal cape; the lantern with its flickering glow.

  But I wasn’t delighted, not then. Then, I was scared.

  “It’s magic,” Summer said. She went to the walls and ran her fingers over the wallpaper, as if worried it would dissolve under her fingers. When she turned around again, her eyes were bright. It was the only time I ever saw her close to crying. “It’s Lovelorn. We found Lovelorn.”

  “Lovelorn doesn’t exist.” Brynn still hadn’t moved. She looked angry, which meant that she, too, was scared. “Admit it, Summer. You planned this. Admit it.”

  But Summer wasn’t listening. “It’s Lovelorn,” she said. She went spinning through the room, touching everything—the blanket, the cot, the lantern—her voice rising in pitch until she was practically shouting. “It’s Lovelorn.”

  In the bedside table, she found a box of chocolate chip cookies and tore it open with her teeth. They were stale, I remember, and crumbled like caulk between my teeth.

  There were probably lots of entrances to Lovelorn, maybe in old cupboards or under beds or in places no one thought to look, like the back of an old storage closet. But the easiest way to get there was through the woods, and so that’s where Summer, Brynn, and Mia went the day they decided to see it for themselves.

  —From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks, Brynn McNally, and Mia Ferguson

  Brynn

  Now

  Mia’s words keep cycling through my head as I trudge up Harrison Street, like a song I can’t stop hearing.

  You were in love with Summer.

  In love with Summer.

  Summer.

  Summer.

  Summer.

  Part of me wishes I hadn’t climbed out of the car. I should have laid into her instead, for getting it all wrong, for always getting it wrong. For being the tagalong, the scared one, the one who told the cops all about Lovelorn.

  But another part of me—the small, vicious, dark piece, the little monster squatting somewhere in my brain—knows that she isn’t wrong, at least not about this.

  Was I in love with Summer?

  Was she the first one?

  The only real one?

  There have been others since. I’m a lesbian. Or a lez, dyke, rug-muncher, and box-bumper, according to the graffiti that covered my locker in the years after Summer died. Vermont is mostly a liberal state—the principal of Twin Lakes Collective, Mr. Steiger, brings his husband to graduation every year—but that’s only so long as the queers stay invisible. Harmless. Nothing to worry about here, all hands accounted for, vaginas and children safe.

  I don’t know when I knew I was gay, exactly, except that I didn’t ever not know, either. And in case you’re into the idea that sex is like cauliflower and I’ll never know for sure unless I’ve tried it, I have tried it. I’ve been with exactly three girls—like, really been with them—and hooked up with a half-dozen others. There’s not a whole lot else to do in rehab.

  There was Margot, a skinny French-Nigerian girl with a dozen piercings in her face, who’d grown up in Ohio. Her nose ring fell out whenever we kissed. Sasha: Russian, from Brighton Beach, New York, with an accent that always made it sound like she was purring. Ellie, who I stayed with for a few months: she covered her mouth when she laughed and had hair that reminded me of a porcupine’s spikes.

  But Summer was different. Special. Pure, in a way. Maybe because I couldn’t have her—maybe because, back then, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

  Maybe just because I loved her so bad.

  Maybe because she broke my heart.

  I remember getting caught in a sudden downpour with her on our way back from Lovelorn, alone, in the fall of seventh grade. Summer hadn’t wanted to tell Mia, and I was guilty and thrilled all at once. And then back at her house we crowded into her little shower in our underwear and T-shirts, so close together we had no choice but to touch, and her blond hair was all in a tangle and mascara smudged her cheeks and her breath smelled like strawberries and we couldn’t stop laughing, taking turns shouldering each other out of the way to get under the water, and every time she touched me it was like someone had turned lights on beneath my skin. And then there was the time she said she was running away from home, and she spent three nights in the clubhouse, and one night she begged me to stay with her, so I did, wrapped in the same sleeping bag, our knees touching, the smell of her sweat filling the whole room and making me feel dizzy. She was a princess. I was going to be her knight.

  I was going to protect her.

  There was the Kiss. There was what came afterward, the rumors at school, the way people hissed at me when I passed, how none of the girls would change in front of me for gym. How Summer refused to look at me, how seeing her from down the hall made me feel like the witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz, like I was dissolving, melting into a sizzling puddle.

  But as always, my mind redirects when I get too close to that memory, veering sharply past it, my own little mental detour. Danger ahead.

  I backtrack to Main Street, keeping my head down, praying no one notices me, wishing I had a hat. Luckily, the people who are out are too busy checking for damage or picking up debris. It seems like all this mess should come with a lot of noise—flashing lights, sirens wailing, the growl of equipment—but the emergency has passed and it’s weirdly quiet.

  Turn left on County Route 15A and a few miles out of town you’ll hit Twin Lakes Collective: the elementary and middle schools and, across the street, the high school I never attended because the harassment was too bad. Instead, I turn right. This way leads to cheap subdivisions like the one my mom lives in now—home, I guess, although I’ve done my best to stay away—all of them carved out of old farm property that got cut up and mixed around like a chicken getting butchered for the fryer. Keep going, and the space between the houses grows, until it’s all browns and greens, forests and farms, and little blobs of civilization like the mistakes someone made while painting. Eventually County Route 15A peters out into a one-lane dirt road and winds past roads with names like Apple Orchard Hill and Dandelion Circle, and my old street, Boar Lane. Summer’s house was one lane over on Skunk Hill Road. Beyond that: Brickhouse Lane, named for the tumbledown house at the end of the lane scrawled over with graffiti tags and Sharpie initials, a rusted Dodge still raised on cinder blocks out front.

  Perkins Road is blocked off by a fire truck. A big pine tree has taken out a power line, and now various workers are milling around, looking bored, like people waiting at the post office. Across the street, I notice Marcy Davies’s front door open. Even though it’s too dark to see inside, I’d bet anything she’s sitting in a lawn chair in front of the AC, watching the road show. Marcy, the not-so-mysterious “source” quoted in four dozen newspapers who claimed to have known about my psychopathic tendencies since I was a little kid. For years, she told people, I’d tortured frogs for fun and stolen other kids’ bicycles; I’d always had a thing for knives and had played war instead of Barbies—despite the fact that we only moved to Perkins a few months after Summer died, after Billy Watson, our old neighbor on Boar Lane, said he was acting on a command from God and tried to burn our house down—when I was inside of it. I don’t even think Marcy was getting paid for her interviews. She just liked making shit up.

  I swing my duffel bag onto my shoulder, like it’s a body I’m rescuing from a collapsing building, hoping it will complete
ly conceal my face, and step up onto her lawn to get around the truck.

  Right away, a firefighter stops me.

  “Hang on.” He has acne around his jaw that makes him look twelve. He isn’t even wearing his whole uniform—only the overall pants over a thin white T-shirt. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home,” I say. Sweat is running freely down my back.

  “Road’s closed,” he says. “You’re going to have to come back later.”

  I can feel something hard—my cell phone—digging into my neck through the thin cotton duffel. “I can’t come back later. I live here.” Another firefighter briefly turns to stare. “Look,” I say. “I can see my house. See that little gray house over there?” I point because all the houses on Perkins are gray, since they were all built in two years out of the same sad collection of cheap shingles and plywood. “I’ll hurry. I won’t even go close to the lines.”

  “Road’s closed,” the guy repeats. He doesn’t even look over his shoulder to see where I’m pointing. “Fire department’s orders.”

  Finally, I lose it. “Are you even old enough to be giving orders?” I say. I know it’s stupid to argue, but my mouth and my mind have never exactly been in perfect sync. “Don’t you have to ask your daddy or something?”

  “Very funny,” he says. “If I were you—” He breaks off. Something changes in his face—it’s a subtle shift, but instantly, my stomach drops. He knows. “Hey,” he says. “I know who you are.”

  I turn away quickly, forgetting momentarily about Marcy, and in that second I see her, exactly where I thought she would be, revealed by a bit of sunlight slanting into the hallway: her legs, feet encased in grubby sandals; her hands gripping the arms of her chair, and a cigarette smoking between two fingers. She shrieks.

  “David!” Her voice carries all the way across the lawn. “David, you’ll never guess who’s home!”

  I start to run, not even caring how ridiculous I look, not caring about the weight of my duffel or the fact that my heart’s going club-beat-style in my chest. I don’t stop until I’ve rounded the corner and turned onto Waldmann Lane, where I’m concealed by the thick growth on either side of the road. I drop my duffel, cursing, rolling the pain out of my shoulder. There’s a chalky taste in my mouth. Goddamn Marcy. Goddamn prepubescent fireman. Goddamn Twin Lakes.

  I remember one time toward the end of the school year in sixth grade, when it was too hot to go to Lovelorn, too hot to do anything but lie across my bed reading magazines and taking quizzes online with the AC on full blast, Summer said her biggest fear was of being forgotten. That’s why she was going to be a model and then write and star in her own TV show. If you weren’t famous, Summer argued, if no one remembered you, you might as well not have lived at all. I understood her point, even though I’d never wanted to be famous.

  But Summer hadn’t thought it all out. She didn’t realize how much depends on what you’re remembered for. Sometimes, it’s so much better to be forgotten.

  All the roads in this part of Twin Lakes were once driveways leading up to farm and manor houses. And Waldmann Lane hasn’t grown much since then: it’s still a one-lane dirt road rutted with tire tracks and sticky with mud. While the Perkinses of Perkins Road and the Halls of Hall Street and all the other families who used to own the land around here took their money and left decades ago, Waldmann Lane still dead-ends at the ancestral home of Dieter Waldmann, great-grandfather of Owen. As far as I know, the house still belongs to Owen’s dad, even though a month after Owen was acquitted, they picked up and went off, supposedly to Europe.

  From Owen’s house I can cut through the woods and circle back to Perkins Road, a fact the press loved to mention. There was even a theory that Owen was a warlock controlling us all with his mind, and he’d forced my family to move after the crime so he could keep an eye on me. No mention of why Mia got to stay put, and why he’d need me close if he was telegraphing commands directly to my brain.

  The mosquitoes are thick and the sun lies in long, heavy slabs, like butter. But as I get to the top of the hill, the day seems to get darker. The trees crowd closer overhead. The Waldmanns haven’t been around to make sure the road gets cleared by the county.

  And then the house appears, partially obscured by the trees, and I stop.

  It’s been years since I was up here, and in a flash I know I’ve been avoiding it. Just like I never go up to Skunk Hill Road, just like I haven’t gone into the woods once, just like I stopped reading, too, even though it meant nearly flunking eighth grade.

  The house is the same, which is what shocks me—nothing should be allowed to stay the same when so many things are different. I think again of Summer’s face on the news report, how young she looked.

  Forever thirteen. Forever gone.

  I walk a little closer and finally register small differences: weeds have swallowed up the lawn, and at some point the Waldmanns dropped a fence around the entire property, probably to keep people from sneaking up and writing stupid shit on the walls with spray paint, like they used to do at our house. I can’t remember whether the fence was put up before Owen got shipped to Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, or afterward.

  I press my face right to the cool metal fence and peer down the length of the driveway, and once again my breath gets punched out of me: an enormous oak tree has collapsed onto what used to be the solarium, where Summer and I smoked our first cigarette behind a potted plant in the fall of seventh grade and then felt like we might puke. Then there’s a flash of color through the trees, and suddenly Owen Waldmann rounds the corner of the house, threshing the tall grasses with a stick.

  I jerk backward, but it’s too late. He sees me.

  For a long second, we just stare at each other through the fence.

  “Brynn,” he says, letting out a long breath. “Hi.” He’s gotten tall—he must be six-three—and he’s filled out a little, although he’s still skinny, and with his red hair all wild it looks as if a giant reached down, grabbed him by the scalp, and stretched him out like taffy. His eyes are still the kind of blue-gray that darkens from sunny sky to storm in a second. And the second he sees me, they knot up with clouds.

  Owen Waldmann. Owen the warlock. Owen, with the crooked smile and the bad temper and moods that broke like waves on the beach.

  Owen Waldmann, the maybe-killer.

  Owen Waldmann, who was maybe lucky enough to get away with it.

  Luck is a funny thing like that. Like a coin whose two sides you can read at once.

  At the scene of the crime, the police found Summer draped with Owen’s sweater, soaked with blood that might have been Summer’s.

  Not just her blood: Owen’s.

  Allegedly. The cops thought the case was so open-and-shut, they failed to properly store the sample, and during the trial the evidence was ruled inadmissible.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  He flinches. “Nice to see you too.”

  “Answer the question.”

  The last time I saw Owen was just after the trial, a few months after we moved to Perkins Road, two years after Summer was killed. In that time, there’d been other bad murders in the country, even in the state: in Burlington, a PTA mom kissed her husband goodbye in the morning and straightened up the kitchen and then drowned her newborn child in the sink. In New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old opened fire in a school, killing three people, including the guidance counselor who’d been trying to help him, and on and on and on. When you can’t count on anything else, you can count on the news to make you sick.

  I remember hearing that Owen had been released from Woodside and that he and his dad were leaving. I hoofed it up the hill from Perkins Road just in time to see the last moving van rumbling down Waldmann Lane, followed by Owen in the passenger seat of his dad’s old Mercedes. An old man spat on the hood of the car. A woman kicked the tires and screeched “murderer.” I hung back in the trees, overwhelmed by a kind of jealousy that felt like having my guts pu
lled out through my mouth: he was getting out.

  He was maybe, maybe, getting away with it.

  Owen shoves a hand through his hair, making it look even wilder. His T-shirt is faded green and imprinted with the image of a cow. He never used to wear color. He had a whole wardrobe of black jeans, black T-shirts, black hoodies. Everyone used to say he would grow up to be a serial killer: he wore a black trench coat and combat boots every day and spent most of his classes doodling violent comic books or sleeping with his head on the desk. Plus, his dad was a drunk. Even worse, he was a rich drunk—he could buy his way out of hitting bottom.

  I remember once on the playground in third grade, Elijah Tanner was making fun of Owen for being small and skinny and generally weird, the way kids did back then, and Owen barely even seemed to be listening. Then boom. All of a sudden he whipped around and drove a fist straight into Elijah’s nose. I’ll never forget how much blood came from that little nose—like a spigot had been turned on.

  I never understood what Mia saw in him. I never understood what Summer did.

  Except: she always had to be a part of everything. She always had to be the center. Maybe she had to be the center of that, too.

  “I live here, remember?” he says. His voice is faintly accented.

  “No, you don’t,” I say. “You moved.”

  “I went to school,” he corrects me. “I graduated.”

  Graduated. Jesus. Graduated is keg parties and sports trophies and a gift certificate to Bed Bath & Beyond. Graduated is proud grandparents and tearful selfies and country songs. I wonder whether Mia graduated this year too. I think I’m still a sophomore, but I’m not totally sure. Mom always said she was reenrolling me as soon as I could prove I could stay sober for more than eight weeks. But so far, thanks to good old cousin Wade and our little arrangement, I haven’t had to.