Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “It doesn’t seem stupid,” Abby says. “Lovelorn was all you had.”

  She’s nailed it, of course. Lovelorn was all we had. Of the three of us, Mia was the smartest and Summer the prettiest. I was the most outgoing. But we were loners, when it came down to it. The other girls hated Summer, called her a whore, wrote dirty shit on her locker and stole her gym clothes and threw them in the trash, or smeared them with ketchup so it would look like period blood. Mia became so afraid of speaking in public that for years she said not a single word, even when the teacher called on her, and she kept getting sent to the principal for disciplinary problems. She’d been at the same school her whole life and still hardly anyone knew who Mia Ferguson was. Owen Waldmann, resident developing psychopath, was the only person who was ever nice to her, the only person who could get her to talk—until Summer came along. She told me once that’s why she took up dance in the first place. She didn’t know how to speak out loud. It was the only way she could communicate.

  And I’d been getting into trouble since the first time I put my fist into Will Harmon’s face after he called me backcountry trailer trash, which didn’t even make sense because we lived in a house, not a trailer. But he knew we were hard up, and he’d seen my mom on night shifts at the gas station, a job she took before she found a job in admin at the same hospital where my sister is doing her residency now.

  In elementary school I was involved in fights almost every year. It’s like I couldn’t keep my anger from coming out of my fists. And once the boys got too big to scrap with, the anger just took up a permanent squat in my vocal cords, so half the time the shit coming out of my mouth wasn’t even stuff I meant to say out loud.

  I couldn’t help it. When I get angry, it’s like someone lights my whole body on fire. Snap, crackle, pop. And then the entire world is burning.

  But together, in Lovelorn, we made sense. Summer was the princess, beautiful and misunderstood. Mia was the good one, the sweet sister, the voice of reason and understanding. And I was the swordsman, the knight, proud defender of their honor.

  “The February before Summer died, I took some pages.” Mia looks away, biting her lip, as if worried I’m going to start lecturing her. “We were fighting about this one scene—”

  “What scene?” I can’t help but ask.

  “The tournament scene,” she says. “We were arguing about whether or not Gregor should win in his bout with the giantess. Summer thought the Shadow should be responsible for killing the giantess and saving Gregor’s life. But I . . . well, it sounds stupid, but I just wanted to give Gregor a little bit of respect, you know?”

  As she speaks, I tumble down a hole, landing all the way back in seventh grade, when we used to sit together in this very room and debate what “Georgia” did and failed to do in Book One, about why she’d screwed up the whole book by ending it the way she did or by not ending it, about how to make Book Two even better than the original.

  “I guess I was just getting annoyed that Summer always got to decide. Besides, Gregor’s one of the best characters,” Mia says, turning now to Abby. She looks at me for support.

  “True,” I say. “Although Firth was always my personal favorite. A centaur,” I say, when Abby shoots me a questioning look. “He rides around rallying the whole country to banish the Shadow at the end of Book One.”

  For the first time all day, Mia smiles at me. Mia has a great smile. It turns her whole face into an invitaion “Firth’s great too,” she agrees. “Anyway, like I said, I took a few pages. I just wanted to make some edits, and then I was going to return them.”

  “But you didn’t,” Abby says.

  Mia’s smile fades. “I never had a chance. Two days later, Summer told us she didn’t want to play anymore. She never went back to Lovelorn again, not with us. Not until that day—”

  “What did happen that day?” Abby says, adjusting her glasses again. “I mean, what really happened?”

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “Don’t tell me you haven’t looked it up.”

  “I haven’t,” she says, in a tone so sincere I immediately feel guilty. “Besides, I’m not talking about what shows up online. Haven’t you ever heard you can’t trust everything you read on the internet?”

  “Not today, okay, Abby?” Mia wraps her arms around her knees. She looks suddenly exhausted. “We’ll explain some other time.”

  Abby raises both hands, like, just trying to help.

  “All right, Mia.” I scoot off the bed and join her on the floor. “Let’s see what you got.”

  There are three pages, neatly covered with Summer’s handwriting. Instantly, I see exactly what Mia meant about someone else helping Summer. There isn’t a single error, not a word crossed out or even changed. It’s as if she copied the text from somewhere else. Why did I never see it before?

  Abby leans in next to me, and I’m surprised by her sudden closeness, and the fact that she smells like lavender.

  “All right, explain,” Abby says. “What am I reading? What’s all this about an amphitheater?”

  “The amphitheater was Summer’s idea,” I say. “In the first book, we never know where the Shadow comes from. She wanted to explain it. An origin story, kind of. So we made up the amphitheater, where bloody battles take place.”

  “Summer liked to weave in real people and places,” Mia adds. “They were like our inside jokes. So the giantess was really supposed to be Mrs. Marston, our math teacher. We named the giantess Marzipan and gave her a wart and tufts of wiry red hair. Things like that.”

  “So if the amphitheater is where the Shadow first shows up, and the Shadow is supposed to be Summer’s killer, then it’s important.” Abby reads in silence over my shoulder for a while. “What’s up with the sprites?”

  This makes me smile. “That’s another thing Summer made up,” I say. “They’re this really annoying, dumb race descended from the fairies, and their voices are high-pitched and squeaky.”

  “When they get excited, they can shatter glass,” Mia says. “And they go around cheering on the competitors during tournaments.”

  Abby looks from Mia to me and back. “Bloody competitions and a group of mindless, squeaky cheerleaders? Sounds like the TLC football stadium to me.”

  For a minute, I can do nothing but stare at her.

  “The football stadium . . . ,” Mia says slowly, and smiles again. “You’re a genius, Abby.”

  “Nothing to it, my dear Watson,” Abby says with a little flourish.

  “Jake Ginsky was on the football team,” I say. “He was, like, outfielder or something.”

  “Outfielder’s a baseball term,” Mia says.

  Leave it to Mia to be nerdy about even non-nerdy things. “Whatever. He was tight ass or rear end or whatever they call it.”

  “Who’s Jake Ginsky?” Abby asks. She’s still sitting uncomfortably close to me, so close I can see the sticky wet look of her lips, and I scoot backward, leaning against Mia’s bed.

  “Jake Ginsky,” Mia says. “He went out with Summer for a few months. Supposedly.”

  “Definitely,” I say firmly, remembering that time with Summer in the car, how her eyes swept over me as if I was a stranger.

  Mia sighs. “But they broke up in January. Besides, the cops looked at him. He had an alibi. He was hanging out with some other freshmen on the team.”

  Something tickles the back of my mind. Something wrong.

  Abby hauls herself to her feet. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” Mia blinks up at her.

  “The amphitheater,” she says, as if it’s obvious. “We can sneak around the locker rooms and look beneath the bleachers.”

  “What do you think we’re going to find—bloody handprints?” I say. “We’re talking about something that happened five years ago.”

  “Well, we have to start somewhere, don’t we?” Abby crosses her arms. “These are the only pages you have left, right? If Summer left clues about her killer in Return to Lovelo
rn, the amphitheater seems like a place to start. Maybe you’ll remember something important. Maybe you’ll see something. That’s how it works in mysteries, anyway.”

  “This isn’t a mystery,” I say. “This is real life.”

  But Abby’s already moving toward the door. “Whatever you say, Nancy Drew.”

  Ava gaped at him. “Do you mean to say the Shadow steals children?”

  “Oh no,” Gregor said, obviously horrified. “Never that. The Saviors go willingly. It’s a great honor. The Shadow, you see, protects us. The Shadow keeps our harvests plentiful and makes sure our rains are not too heavy or too light. The Shadow keeps us safe from war and starvation. The Shadow has chased away the Reapers so that no one has to grow old. The Shadow has great magic.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” Ava said, wrinkling her nose.

  Gregor blinked at her. “It’s an exchange,” he said, as though it were obvious. “One child per harvest.”

  —From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells

  Mia

  Now

  The high school at Twin Lakes Collective is separated from the middle school and elementary school cluster by a long stretch of well-tended soccer and lacrosse fields, a looping ruddy-colored track, and the football stadium, standing like an alien spaceship in the middle of all that rolling green.

  When we pull into the parking lot, I’m surprised to find it almost full: I’d forgotten all about the Fourth of July parade.

  “Christ,” Brynn mutters. “Glitter and glee clubs. Just what we need.”

  Every year, hundreds of kids aged five to eighteen march next to homemade floats and mascots from various local businesses, from the school all the way down to the gazebo in the park at the corner of Spruce and Main. I’m surprised they didn’t cancel it this year. They’ll be skirting downed tree branches and sloshing through gutters bloated with rainwater. Then again, what better way to celebrate America’s independence? Land of the free, the brave, the stubborn, the stupid.

  “Pull around the gym,” Abby says. “There are usually extra spaces behind the weight room.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe this was a bad idea. We could come back tomorrow.”

  “It’s a great idea,” Abby says. “No one will even notice us. We’ll blend in.”

  Doubtful. Brynn and I are two of the most hated girls in Twin Lakes.

  Up near the cafeteria, dozens of preteen girls wearing identical uniforms twirl batons and practice cartwheels. From somewhere in the distance comes the clamor of instruments tuning up. On a stretch of grass that divides the dumpy Life Skills class trailer from the admin office, a woman is trying to wrestle her screaming son into a costume. I’m not exactly sure what he’s supposed to be, but multiple arms give him the look of a patriotic bug.

  “So your mom’s a teacher here, huh?” Brynn leans forward, resting her elbows on the front seats. She smells like my shampoo. She insisted on showering and changing before we left the house, although she put on the same ratty skinny jeans. At least she changed her shirt. This one is black and says Godzilla Is Coming in ominous silver letters. As always, she looks not just effortless, but as if the idea of effort was invented for people far less cool. People like me.

  “Uh-huh. Music,” Abby says. She’s been typing on her phone and now she looks up. “No luck on Lillian Harding, by the way.”

  “Who?” Brynn says.

  “Lillian Harding. Remember the mouthpiece we found in the shed? I googled Lillian Harding in Twin Lakes, Vermont, and related to the murder. Nothing. It was a long shot, anyway. Stop here.”

  A forty-person marching band, ages eight to eighty, mills around on the grass in front of the football stadium, near the picnic benches, all of them tuning and tootling and drumming to individual rhythms. Brynn covers her ears when we get out of the car.

  We start across the grass toward the stadium entrance, avoiding the crowd. Instinctively, I put my head down, like I always do in public, and I notice Brynn tugs her hood up. Only Abby looks unselfconscious, swishing along in her skirt, humming a little, as if the noise the instruments are sending up is actually music. I can’t find any rhythm in it. I picture the dancers in my head twitching, having a seizure.

  We pass into the stadium, where the noise is, at least, muffled. The grass is brilliant green and neatly clipped. Purple-and-yellow banners, many of them sporting an image of an angry wasp, the TLC mascot, hang, listless, along the stands, or have been driven down by hard winds into the mud.

  “Okay.” Brynn takes off her sunglasses. “Remind me what we’re supposed to be looking for?”

  I ignore her. “Purple and yellow,” I say, pointing. “In the book, Gregor’s tournament colors are purple and yellow.”

  “So Summer was writing about the stadium,” Brynn says. “We already knew that. We wrote about a lot of real places.”

  We move past rows of empty bleachers. I try to imagine what Summer might have seen here, what might have stuck with her. High school boys, padded and painted, moving in formation. Cheerleaders chanting and stamping, backflipping on the grass. Fans roaring in the bleachers. Does any of it matter? Does any of it relate to what came afterward?

  After twenty minutes, Brynn loses patience. “This is stupid,” she says. “What are we supposed to be doing, communing with the spirits of cheerleaders past?”

  Even Abby has to admit she’s right. There is nothing here, no old voices whispering secrets to us. Nothing but the continued squeaks and honks of the woodwinds and a distant shouting as the parade-goers assemble, all those hundreds of people so beautifully fixed in the present, in this day, under the bright sunshine.

  “Drums over here. No, on the other side of the picnic bench. Danny, are you listening?”

  A woman is trying to herd the marching band into formation and not having very much luck. One of the younger boys is running around with a flute between his legs, laughing maniacally.

  “Danny, stop that.” As the woman turns around to yell, sweeping her frizzy blond hair away from her eyes, I stop. It’s our old Life Skills teacher, and—I nearly laugh out loud—she’s still wearing that awful purple cardigan.

  Brynn recognizes her at the same time I do. “Holy shit,” she says. “That’s Ms. Gray.”

  Miraculously, she hears her name over the clamor. Or maybe her eyes just land on us. For a fraction of a second she looks shocked. But almost immediately, she comes toward us, with both arms outstretched, although she stops several feet away from us and doesn’t move to close the distance.

  “I don’t believe it,” she says. She drops her hands against her thighs with a clapping sound. “I don’t believe it. You two.”

  “You remember us,” I say. Stupid, since she obviously does. For some reason I feel shy in front of her. Embarrassed. She actually looks happy to see us.

  “Of course I remember you,” she says in her gentle voice. Brynn and Summer always used to lose it when she said words like syphilis or diaphragm in that singsong. “Mia and Brynn . . .” She shakes her head. “What are you doing here?”

  I can’t think of an excuse. Luckily, Abby jumps in. “We just came to check out the start of the parade.” Then: “Um, I think that kid’s trying to stick his head inside the trombone.”

  Ms. Gray spins around. “Tyler, please,” she barks, and then turns around to face us again. “The town was looking for volunteers. I can’t think why I said yes.” Her eyes are enormous, bug-size behind her glasses. “But tell me—how are you? I’ve thought about you a lot. I’ve wondered . . .”

  She trails off, leaving the question unspoken.

  I’ve wondered what happened to you.

  I’ve wondered if you survived. And how.

  “We’re okay.” Lying is just another thing that takes practice. Your muscles get used to it over time. “Actually,” I say, before I can think about it, or wonder whether it’s a good idea, because thinking of Summer—beautiful Summer, a ballerina with her arms up, center stage, light spilli
ng around her in a pool, light pouring from her—makes my chest tight with pain, “we’re kind of doing a project. About Summer. Summer Marks.”

  She flinches when she hears the name, like so many people do here in town. Like it’s a curse word. But she recovers quickly enough. “I see,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “Is this for the anniversary memorial?”

  “Yeah,” Brynn jumps in when my voice, seemingly exhausted, simply curls up. It does that still, sometimes. Retreats, withdraws. Peters out. Like it’s a living thing with its own moods and appetites. I’d forgotten that yesterday, Twin Lakes had been planning a big five-year-anniversary commemoration of Summer’s death. It must have been delayed because of the storm. “Yeah, it’s for the anniversary. Kind of like . . . a memory book. We’re talking to everyone who knew her.” I’m sure Ms. Gray can’t tell she’s lying, but I can. It’s the way she’s speaking, kind of breathless, as if she’s been running for a while.

  Ms. Gray smiles. “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell you anything you don’t already know,” she says. “You know Summer wasn’t with me for very long. Life Skills,” she adds, with a little shrug, “is a misnomer. The school sticks the students with me once a week to satisfy a state requirement about sex education. The rest is just fluff.”

  Brynn and I exchange a look. There’s something thrilling about hearing Ms. Gray admit it after all these years—that’s exactly what we used to say. Just give us some condoms and a forty-five-minute free period, Summer had said during one lesson, so loudly I was sure Ms. Gray had heard.

  And again, I feel that knifepoint of sadness thinking of all the things Summer will never hear, see, or know.

  “Still,” Brynn says. “Is there anything? Anything at all about her you remember?”

  “I remember the three of you were together all the time. I had to separate you so you wouldn’t pass notes in class.” Ms. Gray’s smile fades. “Summer was a difficult student, in some ways. But very sweet, very alive, if you know what I mean.”