Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “Nobody,” Mia says. She’s still standing in the doorway, hugging herself. Her hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, as if all these years she’s just been on one long detour on her way back to the ballet studio. “I mean, this land is public. It belongs to the town.”

  “I’m surprised the town didn’t tear it down,” Abby says. She turns sideways, squeezing between two big metal grilles, the kind that might come off a Dodge Challenger. “Considering what happened.”

  “The cops didn’t think it was important,” Mia says quietly. “They didn’t believe us when we told them how the shed had . . . changed. They didn’t understand about Lovelorn.”

  “That’s because we made the whole thing up,” I say again, for at least the third time in two days.

  It was a game we used to play. Not an hour in the police station, and Mia rolled. The cop taking notes in her interview read me back the pages. She told them all about the original Lovelorn book and how angry we were when Summer wanted to stop playing.

  But Brynn was the maddest.

  I left Brynn alone with her. I don’t know what happened next. Ask Brynn.

  “Maybe not,” Abby says brightly. I stare at her as she leans hard against a massive piece of ancient machinery that looks kind of like an upside-down mushroom. “It’s not all farm equipment, you know. It’s someone’s stuff. Maybe more than one person’s stuff. There’s an old DVD player in the corner, and a violin case. No violin, though. But there’s this.” She bends down kind of awkwardly, resting one hand on the wall for balance, and holds up something that looks like a narrow funnel.

  “What is that?” I say.

  “Mouthpiece,” she says. “For some kind of horn. Looks like a double French, but I’m not sure.” When I just look at her blankly, she smirks. She’s an excellent smirker—she must have practice. “My mom’s the band teacher at TLC. And check it out.” Abby passes me the mouthpiece, which is surprisingly heavy. A small laminated label, warped with age, has been plastered to its underside.

  “‘Property of Lillian Harding,’” I read out loud. Then I hand it back. I’m losing patience for this little mystery theater. “So someone’s got a hoarding problem. What does it matter?”

  “It probably doesn’t.” Abby has gone back to clearing crap away from the corner. “But this might.”

  She pulls her cell phone out of her bag, swipes to her flashlight app, and angles it toward the floor. Blocked by several pieces of heavy equipment, that corner of the room is heavily shadowed, but Abby squats so we can see the ragged line of paint near the floor.

  And see, too, that in one or two places the wallpaper underneath it—a pattern of rose bouquets—has started to show.

  “The corners are always the hardest part,” Abby says, grinning.

  Brynn

  Then

  Two days after Mia’s twelfth birthday, in December: a hard freeze on the ground and the snow piled up in drifts above the basement window, blocking out the light. Mia and I were messing around with the balloons, still half-inflated, chucking them at each other, while Summer was sitting at the desk, hunched over an ancient desktop computer that growled whenever you so much as pressed the shift key. She was always online at Mia’s house, since her foster parents had put up firewalls to keep her from accessing anything good on YouTube. She’d caught Mr. Ball pulling up her online history, too, and snooping around in her dresser drawers. Just want to make sure you’re staying out of trouble, he always said, but Summer thought he was a freak who got off on things like that.

  “Maybe,” I said, tossing a balloon and punching it toward Mia, “she was dictating the pages, and she fell into a manhole and died.”

  “Or maybe,” Mia said, punching it back, “she was sending the manuscript page by page while she was on safari, and she got eaten by a lion right in midsentence.”

  “What do you think, Summer?” I asked, lobbing the balloon at her. She swatted at it without looking and it bounced off the keyboard. “You think Georgia Wells got swallowed up by a manhole or a lion?”

  “What?” She turned around in her swivel chair, frowning, and blinked as if seeing us for the first time. “You guys are still talking about the ending?”

  Mia and I exchanged a look. It was like asking whether we were still breathing. We were always talking about the ending. It was our favorite pastime, as mindless as checking our phones. Why, why, why? What happened to the sequel? What could she possibly have been thinking? Georgia Wells’s website, which hadn’t been updated in ten years, gave us no answers. The sequel to The Way into Lovelorn was, according to the home page, still forthcoming. The author page showed a picture of Georgia smiling into the camera and a two-line bio: Georgia Wells lives in Portland, Maine, with her three cats and her favorite trees.

  But Georgia Wells was dead by the time we found Lovelorn, the promise of a sequel forgotten. Still, that didn’t stop us from scouring the internet, looking for clues, trying to piece together details of her life.

  “Got eaten by a lion, dropped in a manhole, flattened by a bus, her brain bled out by leeches—it doesn’t matter. You know that, right?” Summer gave us a look like we were both period stains on her underwear. I felt the blood rushing to my face. Knock, knock, knock. Beating in my head like an angry fist.

  Mia looked hurt, which just made me feel angrier. “Doesn’t matter?” she repeated. “It’s Lovelorn.”

  Summer frowned. “We can’t play forever,” she mumbled, turning back to the computer.

  Mia’s mouth fell open, as if it had been unhinged. “We—what?”

  Summer whirled around again. But she was suddenly furious. “I said we can’t play forever,” she repeated, and I saw her hands tight and white in her lap, the angry spaces between her knuckles. “People grow up. That’s all right, isn’t it? For people to grow up? You don’t have a problem with that?”

  “Don’t yell at her,” I said quickly, and Summer stared at me for a second.

  Then, once again, she turned back to the computer. But I heard her say it one more time.

  “Everyone grows up,” she whispered. “Everyone.”

  Ashleigh was the one who first noticed that no one in Lovelorn seemed to be much older than Gregor. When she questioned him about it, he laughingly explained that since the Shadow had arrived, no one had to grow any older than they already were.

  Ava, who always wanted to do things older kids could do, wasn’t sure she liked the idea of that, but Gregor reassured her.

  “It’s much better this way,” he said. “Change is just another word for disappointment, you know.”

  —From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells

  Brynn

  Now

  Twenty minutes later we’re sitting in Mia’s car, AC on. Mia is gripping the wheel tightly, as if trying to guide the car down an icy road, even though we’re still parked. Abby has reclined her seat. From the back I can make out the little ski-slope jump of her nose.

  “Okay, let me get this straight,” I say. “Someone else knew about Lovelorn and decides—what? To mess with us? To make us think we’re going crazy?”

  “Maybe,” Mia says. “Maybe whoever it was—”

  “The Shadow,” I interrupt her.

  This time, she does turn around, releasing the wheel with a small sigh. “What?”

  “I’m not going to keep saying ‘someone’ or ‘whoever it is,’” I say. “We might as well name him. He might as well be the Shadow.”

  “That’s so heteronormative,” Abby says. Her eyes are closed. “How do you know that a guy killed Summer? Why not a girl?”

  “Would have to be a guy,” I say. “You never met Summer. She was fierce. Could take your eyes out with a penknife. And someone knocked her down and dragged her halfway across the field.”

  Abby opens her eyes, tilting her head back a little farther to look up at me through her lashes. “A guy, or a strong girl.” Then she settles into her original position.

  “So, the Shadow,” Mia re
sumes, emphasizing the word and giving me a does that make you happy look in the rearview mirror. “Maybe he wanted us to look crazy, not just feel crazy. If the cops wouldn’t believe us about Lovelorn—which they obviously wouldn’t—no way would they believe us when we said we didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”

  “Hmmm.” Abby has her eyes closed again, fingers interlaced on her stomach. “Maybe. That’s a lot of planning, though. There’s another possibility.”

  “What’s that?” I say.

  She sits up finally, twisting around in her seat so she can see us both at once. “Maybe he just wanted to play. Like for real real.”

  There’s a long moment of silence.

  I clear my throat. “Owen knew about Lovelorn,” I point out. “He’s the only one who—”

  Mia cuts me off before I can finish. “Owen never read any of our stuff,” she says.

  “As far as we know,” I correct her. I still haven’t told her that I saw Owen yesterday, and that he asked after her. And I’m still not planning to tell her. Mia’s not exactly up for any Lifetime Friendship Achievement awards. Besides, it’s for her own good. She was always so sure he couldn’t have done it, that he wouldn’t have. But she wasn’t there that day he clocked Elijah Tanner in the face and just stood there staring while Elijah howled and blood came out from between his fingers.

  I never understood how she could protect him even after he broke her heart. Then again, I protected Summer even after she shattered mine.

  “Please.” Gone is innocent-wounded-Mia, with her big eyes and trembling lip and constant kitten-up-a-tree act: I’m a victim too, I just played along, it was never my idea, none of it was my fault. Now she’s all fire and brimstone. “The cops were desperate to stick the murder on Owen. So was the prosecutor. If he did it, he’d still be rotting in Woodside. He was acquitted, remember?”

  “Maybe because the cops screwed up,” I say, even though she has a point.

  Hank and Barbara Ball live in one of the cottages: a prefab double-wide souped up with fake siding and a screened-in porch, like all the other backcountry cottages plopped-and-dropped on two-acre parcels back in the 1970s. Even the hummingbird feeder comes standard, I bet. That’s the type of rustic crap the summer people go for. I’ve never even seen a hummingbird around here.

  I can’t remember visiting Summer at the Balls’ house more than a few times, but I recognize the turnoff right away, still marked by a dented mailbox sporting a faded American flag motif. A hand-painted wooden sign tacked to a birch states simply Balls.

  Abby thinks this is hilarious. “That sign is ambiguous,” she says. “What does it mean? Balls for sale? Balls go here? All balls welcome? Free balls?”

  “All right, all right, let it go.” The whole Balls things would be funny if Hank Ball weren’t so damn mean. Mean—and creepy as hell. I remember one time we stopped by just to get Return to Lovelorn, and in the middle of a pee I could have sworn I saw an eye staring in at me through the keyhole. Summer swore up and down it hadn’t been her, either.

  The driveway spits us out through the chokehold of summer blackberry bushes and overgrown pine trees into a narrow clearing where the cottage, looking even sorrier than I remember it, sits among a surf of trash, old furniture, and abandoned car parts.

  I remember that Mr. Ball was always fixing something in the front yard—rehabbing a crappy desk no one would buy even new, or fiddling with an ancient grandfather clock he’d bought at a yard sale—but it looks like things have been breaking a little faster than he can keep up with.

  An orange cat watches our approach from the porch railing, and I get a bad feeling in my stomach. We shouldn’t have come.

  But it’s too late. Even before Mia cuts the engine, the cat startles off around the house. A second later, Barbara Ball comes out onto the front porch, holding a dish towel, hobbling the way old women do when they’ve been on their feet all day.

  And she is—old, I mean. Older than I remember her. Sadder-looking, too.

  “Can I help you girls with . . . ?” She swallows the rest of her sentence just as soon as she recognizes us, and for a long moment no one says a word.

  Finally, Abby breaks the silence. “Get any hummingbirds?” she asks, gesturing to the feeder. I glare at her. She gives me a who, me? face.

  “Mostly squirrels,” Mrs. Ball responds, without taking her eyes off Mia and me. She lashes her dish towel around the railing and humps a little closer to us, squinting, like she wants to be sure she hasn’t mixed us up for someone else. Or like she’s hoping she has. “What are you doing here?”

  Mia swallows so hard I can hear it. I bet when she decided to start playing detective, she forgot all about the awkward middle chapters. I let her sweat it out. “My name is Mia Ferguson. And this is Brynn—”

  “I know who you are.” For someone so old, Barbara Ball sure has some volume in her. “What are you doing here?”

  “We were hoping to talk with you and Mr. Ball. . . .”

  “You were hoping to talk to us?” She says talk to as if it really means bludgeon. “What in God’s green you want to talk about?”

  Mia looks to me for help. But I just shrug. This was her idea. Make a bed, lie in it, blah blah.

  “About—about Summer,” Mia says.

  Mrs. Ball squints again, like she’s trying to make us out through a hard fog even though she’s no more than a few feet away from us.

  “Anything we had to say about that child, we said it a long time ago,” Mrs. Ball says. It’s strange to hear her describe Summer that way, as a child—she was the leader to all of us, in all things. But of course she was a child. We all were. “I think you should go now.”

  Mia shoots me a helpless look. And now an old, dark anger starts poking my chest. Unfair. “She was our friend,” I blurt out. “She was our best friend, and all we ever wanted was to make things right for her—”

  “Let it go, Brynn,” Mia says, in a quiet voice.

  But it’s too late. “—and everyone treats us like we’re some kind of disease—”

  “Look.” Abby cuts me off before I can say something that’ll get us booted off the Balls’ property for sure, possibly on the wrong side of a rifle. “Mia and Brynn have been doing some spring cleaning. The memorial coming up, and everything. You understand. Good time to let bygones be bygones, turn over a new leaf, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Mrs. Ball looks at Abby as if registering her for the first time. Her eyes linger on Abby’s skirt, on her fake eyelashes and carefully drawn lips. She looks suddenly uncertain. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Who are you?”

  Abby doesn’t even blink. “Abby Bluntich. Abby B, to my fans.”

  She actually says this. Out loud.

  “Fans?” Mrs. Ball repeats faintly.

  “You might recognize me from Beautycon, or from my YouTube tutorials and my Insta partnership with Howl Cosmetics. . . .”

  Mrs. Ball nods dazedly, looking like she’s just been hit by the blunt side of a shovel—I doubt she’s ever even heard of YouTube.

  “Anyway, what Mia and Brynn meant to say is that they turned up some old stuff that might have belonged to Summer. Spring cleaning, remember? Most of it’s trash. But if there’s anything you want . . .”

  It’s a brilliant tactic. The Balls are obviously pretty damn late on their spring cleaning.

  “What kind of stuff?” Mrs. Ball addresses Abby directly. It’s like Mia and I have disappeared entirely.

  Abby shrugs, all casual. “There were some old notes, a tube of lip gloss—we trashed that, because yuck—and a mouthpiece for some kind of instrument. Summer was in band, wasn’t she?”

  I can’t imagine why it matters: the mouthpiece we found made its way into the shed only recently. But when I shoot her a look, she ignores me.

  “When we could convince her to go,” Mrs. Ball says. “But she played the drums.” And then, a second later: “My husband fixes old instruments, though. He has quite a collection of old horns. She m
ight have . . . borrowed it by accident.”

  A wind lifts through the trees and touches the back of my neck. Could Mr. Ball have been responsible all along? I can’t remember now why the cops never treated him seriously as a suspect. It makes a horrible kind of sense: how he monitored her emails and social media, how he forbade her to date, even rifled through her stuff while she was out of the house—at least, according to Summer.

  The eye I saw, peering at me through the keyhole.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Ball,” Mia says. Surprisingly, her voice is steady. “We knew all about her borrowing. We knew her, remember?”

  It’s the funniest thing: Mrs. Ball looks at her for a second, her mouth working soundlessly, her body all coiled up with tension. And then, in a split second, she collapses. She lets out a whoosh of air, like she’s been holding her breath this whole time. Her face loses all its suspicion, all its confusion, all its anger, and cracks open along little fault lines of sadness. She ages another ten years right in front of us.

  “Yeah,” she says. Even her voice sounds tired. “Yeah. I guess you did.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of a footpath through the antique debris that winds around the house. “Hank should be around back in the workshop. You can go on and ask him yourself.”

  Hank Ball’s workshop is nearly the size of the house—and, in contrast to the rest of the property, pristine. Both doors are rolled open to reveal a clean and bright interior, neatly fitted out with circular saws and benches, drafting tables and shelves. One wall is tacked entirely with paper and labeled for tools I’ve never even heard of.

  And one wall is shiny with dozens and dozens of instruments.

  Tubas, saxophones, clarinets reflecting sun off their polish: it’s like some vertical band dropped their gear before running.

  Mr. Ball must be into old clocks, too, because there are plenty of those, including a cuckoo clock frozen with its wooden figurines on parade, like a face stuck with its tongue out. He’s straddling a workbench, doing some fiddly operation on a grandfather clock with all its parts exploding everywhere, like a body mid-surgery.