Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  He stares at me. “Do you seriously expect me to answer that question?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then no.” He looks me up and down. “Did you?”

  “Hell no,” I say.

  “Well, now that we got that out of the way,” Jake says dryly, “are we done here?”

  “No, we’re not done.” I almost add: we’ll never be done. “Your alibi was bullshit.”

  His face closes up, like a pill bug when you poke it. “What are you talking about?”

  “You told the cops you were hanging out with the other freshmen on the team. But you weren’t, were you?” It was in Mia’s car, when we were talking about Owen and where he was that day, that I got to thinking about alibis and what Mr. Ball had said: that Summer was playing a few freshman football players against one another. Maybe she did it deliberately, or maybe not. Either way, she was tearing that team apart. Those boys were at each other’s throats, he said. Fighting over her like she was a trophy.

  “We were hanging out, Brynn,” he says. But the lie sounds tired by now.

  “You weren’t,” I say. “You weren’t even speaking.” I watch Jake closely, watch the way his face contracts ever so slightly, like I’ve reached out and hit him. “When did you decide to lie?”

  For a long minute, Jake just stares at me. His eyes are the kind of puppy-dog brown that makes straight girls go puddly. And now I can kind of see why Summer went so crazy for him—even though back then Jake looked a little bit like a wet towel, all stringy and wrung-out-looking, he had the same eyes, the same adopt-me vibe.

  Finally he lets out a big huff of air, like he’s been holding his breath this whole time. “After we found out she was dead,” he says, “I heard the cops wanted to talk to me, and I panicked. It’d been months since we last hooked up—it was Moore right after me, but that didn’t last. Still, I figured they’d think I was crazy jealous or something.”

  “Were you?” I ask.

  He glares at me. “We hung out, like, eight times. Maybe less. Most of the time we were in a group. Besides, I was home that day. But my mom had clients all afternoon. And my dad didn’t get home until late. So I couldn’t prove I was home.”

  “Right. So you guys covered for each other.” I have to force‎ myself not to feel sorry for him. He probably thought he’d put Summer behind him. He’d left her behind about a hundred pounds of muscle ago. And here I am, like the ghost of Crap-mas Past.

  Still, if Jake’s alibi was bullshit, it means the other boys’ alibis were bullshit, too.

  Which means: maybe, maybe, we’re actually getting somewhere.

  “It wasn’t like it mattered. Everyone knew who did it,” he says. At least he has the grace to look embarrassed. “At least, we thought we knew.”

  “Right. I forgot.” Now it’s my turn to be sarcastic. “The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.”

  “I’m not talking about you.” He frowns like I’m being difficult for no reason. “I meant that guy Waldmann. He’s guilty, right?”

  “Maybe,” I say. I think of surprising Owen yesterday, the way he tugged on his lip with his teeth, the look on his face when he asked about Mia. Like even saying her name was some kind of mortal wound. “I don’t know.”

  Jake frowns again. “Who else could it have been?”

  “You sound just like the cops,” I say. “Just because they couldn’t figure out who did it doesn’t mean that he did.” I don’t know why I’m defending Owen—only that guilt isn’t supposed to be determined like one of those school superlatives, Most Likely to Succeed, Most Likely to Bash Girl’s Head In with a Rock.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake says in a quieter voice. “Really. I am.” He manages a smile. “See? You got your apology after all.”

  “Lucky me,” I say. Suddenly, I’m exhausted. I shouldn’t have come. Even if we are making progress, so what? It doesn’t change what happened. It won’t bring Summer back.

  And it won’t change what she did to us.

  “It was stupid of me to lie,” Jake says. “It was stupid of all of us. But I guess we were all just in shock. I never in a million years expected things to turn out the way they did. I always figured she’d be the one who got in trouble.”

  “She did get in trouble,” I say.

  “You know what I mean.” Now the smile drops, leaving just his eyes screwed up around a wince. Suddenly, he blurts out, “I was a little scared of her, to be honest.”

  I must be giving him a look, because he coughs a laugh. “I know. She was, like, half my size. But you know how she was. Intense. I hardly knew her. But I saw it. Glimpses of it, anyway. That’s all she’d let me see.” He takes a deep breath, like he’s run out of air. “Am I making any sense?”

  “Yes” is all I can say.

  “Like sometimes she’d open a door, just for a second, just a crack, and what you saw inside was . . .” He trails off, clears his throat, obviously embarrassed. Now I know he really was afraid of her: he’s telling the truth.

  “She hurt someone, you know,” he calls out when I’m already halfway across the lawn. I turn and see him handling his long limbs like they’re part of some old Halloween costume he’s embarrassed to be wearing, trying to tuck them into hiding. “At her last foster home. It’s why she got moved. She—she burned one of the other kids with a fire poker. Did you know that?”

  I shake my head. My throat is too full of feeling to speak. I remember another thing Mr. Ball said about Summer: She’d been bounced around some bad places. Some real bad places, with some real bad people.

  “One time we were messing around with a box turtle we found on the road. Heath Moore said he was going to keep it as a pet. Then Dunner said we should make turtle stew. It was a joke, obviously. But then Summer went inside and came out with a kitchen knife.”

  He looks up at me. Face raw. Open. As if years and years have been cut away. As if he’s looking not at me but at that moment, the shock of it, the turtle on the ground.

  “I swear to God, I really thought she might kill it.” Suddenly, he blinks. Tries a smile again, settles for a quick flash of his teeth. “It sounds crazy now.”

  “No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”

  Brynn

  Then

  “You must have loved her.” The new cop, Lieutenant Marshall, was a lot nicer than the last one. The last one, Detective Neughter—pronounced New-ter, he told us, like being named after the act of cutting a dog’s balls off was a good thing—was pale and mean and smelled like tuna fish.

  Lieutenant Marshall smelled clean and minty. His eyes crinkled when he smiled. He had dark hair, just graying at the temples, and kept his hands in his pockets. Relax, he seemed to be saying. Just relax. I’m on your side.

  “She was my best friend,” I said. “So, yeah. Pretty much.”

  He moved around the table, removed a hand from his pocket, and rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t look at me. Not because he was angry—because he knew I didn’t do it. I trusted Lieutenant Marshall. “It must have made you mad when she started going out with Owen Waldmann.”

  “Not mad,” I said, but my mother cut me off.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything, Brynn.” Then, to Lieutenant Marshall: “We don’t have to be here. Don’t try to trick her.”

  He spread his hands. “If she has nothing to hide, she doesn’t have to worry.”

  If. But I skimmed over that word, if, ignored it.

  Instead, I started to burn. I started to crackle and sizzle in my seat. My mom didn’t understand. She was making me seem guilty when I wasn’t—she was making it seem like I had something to be ashamed of. Only Lieutenant Marshall understood. “I wasn’t mad,” I said, a little louder. “It’s just . . .” I trailed off, and Lieutenant Marshall nodded encouragingly.

  “That’s all right,” he said, smiling again. I decided he was exactly what I would want my dad to look like, if I had a dad. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Brynn. Your feelings are perfectl
y natural.”

  I closed my eyes. How to explain it?

  I wasn’t mad. I was exploded. I was full of tiny shrapnel shells. Torn apart with jealousy. It hurt to breathe. My lungs were rattling with cut glass. I wanted to take Owen’s eyes out with a toothpick—not just for me, but for Mia, too. I wanted to go back to the night Summer and I kissed and the miracle happened and then she started to cry and I kept my arms around her while she shook in my bed and her spine knocked against my breastbone and her feet slowly thawed from icicles to skin again. Except this time, I’d make sure to fix whatever had gone wrong. This time, I wouldn’t screw it up.

  I opened my eyes again.

  “I didn’t understand” is what I said. Lieutenant Marshall was still nodding. “I didn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough.” I didn’t mean to say the last part, but the words just flopped out of my mouth on their own, like dying fish. And my sister, Erin, was staring at me, a look on her face like I was a wild animal, disgusted and frightened and confused all at once. I looked away, fighting the sudden urge to cry. The blinds were only lowered partway and I could see into the station’s main room and the clutter of desks and sun slanting through the windows and the dusty water cooler and ancient fax machines. But Mia was gone. She must have gone home.

  Why were they keeping me here, then, if Mia got to go home?

  For the first time, really, I got a bad feeling, a gnawing suspicion that Lieutenant Marshall was maybe not as nice as he was pretending. That these questions weren’t routine. That they weren’t just looking for my help so they could find the person who’d done it. Suddenly, it was as if insects were chewing my stomach from the inside.

  Lieutenant Marshall was still smiling. He sat down on the edge of the table, crossing his hands in his lap. Relax. “You must have been pretty pissed off,” he said, “when she started spreading all those rumors about you at school.”

  “It is a strange phrase, ‘falling in love,’” said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. “It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn’t someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love.”

  —From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells

  Mia

  Now

  Abby almost—almost—lets me off easy. We’ve made it all the way to her house before she turns to me suddenly and says, “So this Owen guy . . .”

  I groan. She quirks an eyebrow, giving me her sharp, infuriating I can solve calc problems faster than you look. “How come you never told me about him?”

  Even thinking his name makes me squeeze the steering wheel a little harder, trying to press the memory of him out through my palms. “I did,” I say.

  “You told me he existed,” Abby says. “You never told me you had a thing for him.”

  Abby is omnisexual. I don’t know exactly who she’s hooked up with, or when, but from the confident way she’s talked about it, it seems there have been boys and girls. Once I asked her where she met all these people, and she just said, Cons. You should come with me sometime. Cosplay gets everyone going.

  “I don’t. I mean, I did.” I can’t bring myself to say out loud: Owen was a five-year-old crush that never even happened. He was just one more thing I made up. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Don’t deflect.” Abby waggles a finger in my face. “It’s not going to work.”

  “We were kids,” I say. “It was just a stupid crush. It didn’t mean anything. We never even . . .” I’m about to say kissed, but for some reason the word gets tangled in my throat. And that’s not true. Not exactly.

  One November afternoon in sixth grade, we got stormed into the tree house. We were lying there in our sleeping bags and I could feel his knee bumping mine every time he moved, and his face was so close I could feel the warm exhalation of his breath, which smelled grassy and fresh, and we’d been laughing about something, and then when we finished laughing Owen leaned forward and before I knew what was happening, our lips were pressed together, so warm and soft and perfect, as if they’d been designed to line up that way.

  The weird thing is that after it happened, we didn’t even talk about it—just went right on laughing, as if it hadn’t happened. But it wasn’t a bad thing—it was natural, so natural that we didn’t have to speak about it or talk about what it meant. We knew. I remember how I kept my toes curled up, trying to squeeze in all my happiness, trying to preserve it. It was, I knew, the first kiss of hundreds of kisses to follow.

  Only it wasn’t.

  “Never even what?” Abby narrows her eyes at me.

  “Forget it,” I say, too embarrassed to confess to her, Miss Omnisexual, that that single kiss, chaste and tongueless and in sixth grade, was my only one—not counting the time in eighth grade, at St. Mary’s, when for a whole glorious month nobody knew who I was, no one had put it together yet. I even got invited to a party and wound up kissing a boy named Steven on a dumpy basement couch, and even though his breath smelled a little like Cheetos and he squeezed my boobs once each, like he was trying to ring a doorbell, I was so happy. He held my hand for the rest of the party and even leaned in to whisper, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” before I left.

  But by Monday his texts had stopped, and when I saw him in the hall he raised two fingers and made the sign of the hex, shrieking, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Please!” while the rest of his friends laughed so hard they doubled over.

  Abby must sense that she’s upset me, because she lets it go. For a while we drive in silence. As always, I feel better after we’ve left behind the new downtown, with its greedy clutching palm of B and Bs and stores and farm-to-table restaurants, and even better once we’ve successfully skirted the old downtown and its sprawl of fast-food restaurants and Laundromats and gun stores, once the trees run right up to the road again and all the houses are concealed behind heavy growth.

  Abby suddenly speaks up. “What if you don’t ever figure out what happened to Summer? What if you never know?”

  “What do you mean?” We’re driving past Waldmann Lane, and I get the sudden urge to spin the wheel to the right, to gun it straight to Owen’s front door, to drive straight back into the past. “I’ll just go on like I’ve been going on. Things will be the same as they always were.”

  Which is, of course, the whole problem.

  After I drop Abby off, I wind up at the bottom of Conifer where it dead-ends at the state park before I realize I must have made a wrong turn on Dell. I’ve been circling aimlessly, while my thoughts wind me back into the past. I keep thinking of Owen, of him so close, less than a mile away, as if there’s a giant elastic stretched between us, threatening to pull me back. But what would I say to him?

  What will I say to him, if I see him?

  What if I do see him?

  What if I don’t?

  I don’t notice the unfamiliar car parked in front of my house until I’m nearly on top of it. I get out, already half-annoyed and ready to yell at whatever Chinese food delivery service is trying to tuck flyers under my door, when I see a tall, light-haired boy standing on my porch with his back to me, holding a package under one arm. With his right hand he’s shielding his eyes from the glare, trying to peep into my front hallway.

  Flooded instantly with anger and shame, I start running across the lawn. “Hey!” I shout. “Hey! What are you—?”

  He turns around, obviously startled. Time freezes.

  It’s him.

  Taller—so much taller—and still thin, but muscular now. Broad shoulders, like the kind you’d want to hang on. Shorts low on his hips and a faded navy-blue T-shirt that brings out the color of his eyes. His freckles have faded and his red hair has lightened. Now it’s flame shot through with sunshine.

  “Oh,” he says, and sets down the box he’s been carrying. “Oh.” Then: “Oh.” Like he didn’t expect to see me
, even though he’s standing in front of my house.

  “What are you doing here?” I manage to say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the far end of a tunnel.

  He’s smiling at me, all teeth, so big it looks like a wince.

  “Brynn didn’t tell you?” he asks. I stay quiet and he goes on, “Tree came down straight through the sunroom. The house is supposed to be going on the market, but now—”

  “No. I mean what are you doing here? Here, here.” My heart is beating so hard in my throat it feels like I’ve swallowed a moth that’s trying to get out. He’s different—he’s so different. And at the same time he’s the same. He still cocks his head all the way to one side when he thinks, as if he’s trying to peer under a fence. And though his hair is lighter, it’s still cowlicked in the back, and he still reaches up a hand to smooth it down when he’s nervous.

  But he’s muscular and tall and hot. More than that: he looks so normal. You’d never in a million years think of calling this boy Casper, or Nosebleed. You’d never imagine him hiding in a tree house or wearing a long coat he’d found in a rummage sale or talking about the historical probability of alien invasion. It’s like someone pressed the old Owen through the same cookie cutter that fires out cheerleaders and football players and people who ride in prom limos.

  “I didn’t have your cell phone number,” he says. Even his voice sounds different—his vowels seem to take forever to pour out of his mouth. “I figured you changed it.”

  “I did,” I say. That was the first thing to go. After we were arrested, someone from school posted my number online. My cell went morning and night, texts and phone calls, some of them from halfway across the country. U kno u’ll burn in hell forever for what you did, right? The funny thing is we’d been Catholic before the murder—my mom’s family is Italian—but afterward, after so many people had told us I’d burn in hell and the devil had taken my soul and even that my mother should try an exorcism, she threw out the Bible she’d had since she was a kid. That was the last thing she threw out.