Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “Who’s the creep?” she asks me directly, jerking her chin in Wade’s direction.

  I shoot Wade a look, like see? But he’s just circling the room, taking in all the details, like an archaeologist admitted for the first time into King Tut’s tomb.

  “He’s not a real creep,” I say. “He just plays one on TV.” That makes Abby snort a laugh. “Besides,” I say, directing the words to Mia, who’s reentered her room and is now watching Wade suspiciously. “He knows everything there is to know about the case. He’s been studying it for the past five years. If anyone can help us, he can.”

  Wade bends down to look at a framed photograph on Mia’s desk. Big surprise, Abby’s in this one too, mooning at the camera, wearing fake lashes coated with sparkly glitter. “Brynn told me you guys think the answers are in Lovelorn,” he says, without straightening up or turning around. “I’m with you. The murder was more than ritualistic. It was narrative. It told a story. And of course the sacrifice wasn’t out of line with what we learn in the original book, about the Shadow and how he picks his victims.”

  “It was almost word for word like what we wrote in our fan fic,” I say. That was my big mistake, all those years ago—admitting to the cops that we had planned the murder, in a way. We’d written about it. I never thought they’d use that as evidence that I was involved. What kind of idiot writes about a murder she plans on committing and then admits it afterward?

  Wade is still turning over items on Mia’s desk, rearranging a pile of paper clips, straightening her MacBook and aligning it with the edge of the desk. “Someone either wanted to frame you, or was lost in the same fantasy.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Mia asks, narrowing her eyes.

  “Oh, I know everything there is to know. Timelines, suspects, press and media coverage, autopsy results.” Wade puffs out his chest, rooster-style. “I even set up a website to help prove Brynn’s innocence when I was fourteen. Comprehensive, detailed, and impartial. That’s my motto.” He rattles this off like it’s printed on a business card. Knowing Wade, it probably is. “Since I started, I’ve gotten four hundred thousand discrete visitors, and my page impressions number in the—”

  “Hold on a second.” Mia looks like her eyeballs are about to explode. “Hold on one second.” She puts a hand to her head, squeezing. “Wade Turner. You’re Wade Turner, from FindtheTruth.com?”

  “That’s me.” Wade beams at her. “Brynn’s cousin.”

  “Second cousin,” I quickly add.

  For a second, Mia just stares at him speechlessly. Then she turns to me.

  “Brynn,” she says, in a voice that sounds like she’s piping it through her teeth. “May I see you for a second? Outside?”

  As soon as we’re out in the hall, she practically pounces. Gotta hand it to Mia—for a girl with the build of a ballerina, she’s got quite a grip. Suddenly I’m immobilized between a teetering card table and a metal clothes rack hung with winter coats.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” she whispers. “Why would you bring that—that—”

  “Creep?” I offer helpfully.

  “Yes. That creep into my house?”

  I step around her so she doesn’t have me pinned against the wall.

  “I told you. Wade’s cool.” This is about 15 percent accurate. “He’s my cousin—”

  “Second cousin,” she says through her teeth.

  “And he can help us.” This is more than 15 percent accurate, but of course I can’t tell her that he’ll really be helping me. Good old cousin Wade is the Travelocity to my one-way ticket out of here. “Look, Wade wasn’t kidding. He knows everything. He’s been on a mission to clear my name—to clear our names—for the past five years. Did you know the cops looked at another kid on the football team? Some freshman named Heath Moore. He was all over Summer, too.”

  “The football players had an alibi,” Mia says.

  I take a deep breath. “Not exactly.”

  When I tell her about tracking down Jake Ginsky, her eyes go wide, and for a second she looks just like twelve-year-old Mia, our tiny dancer. After I finish speaking, she chews on her lower lip for a bit.

  “Heath Moore . . .” She screws up her face around his name. “I don’t remember Summer talking about him.”

  “That’s my point. Neither do I.” For a second, I remember Summer standing next to me in the shower, water running down the space between her breasts and beading on her eyelashes. Do you love me? she’d asked, putting her head on my shoulder, and I wanted so badly to kiss her I couldn’t move. I was so terrified. Will you always love me?

  Of course I loved her. I was in love with her.

  Prove it.

  I shove aside the memory, stomp it down, break it into pieces. That’s the only way to keep her from haunting me every day. I have to destroy her.

  Mia exhales, a long sigh. “All right,” she says. “He stays.”

  Once again I notice how much sadder she looks even since yesterday. Or not sad, exactly. Hollow. Like someone’s taken a straw to her insides. Could it be because of Owen, because I told her he’d come home? But she can’t still have a thing for him. Not after five years. Not after what he did to her.

  What he and Summer did together.

  And here’s the worst thing, the deepest, truest, most awful thing about me, the thing that twists me up and makes me just a half person, hobbled and horrible: I was sad when Summer died. Of course I was. She was my best friend.

  But a teeny, tiny part of me was glad, too.

  Back in the bedroom, Abby and Wade have gotten cozy real fast. She’s still lying on the bed, but now she’s paging through The Way into Lovelorn, and he’s sitting on the floor with his long legs splayed out in front of him, occasionally leaning closer to point things out on the page.

  “I don’t get the whole Shadow thing,” Abby’s saying when we reenter the room. “What is the Shadow?”

  “Ah.” Wade waggles a finger. In his outfit, he really does look like a deranged professor from the 1970s. “The Shadow is the best—the most interesting—part of Lovelorn. The original book is nothing special.”

  “Hey,” Mia protests automatically.

  “It’s true.” Wade brushes the hair from his eyes and squints at her. “Look, I’ve read all the big fantasy authors. Tolkien, Martin, Lewis, Rowling—”

  “Why does none of this surprise me?” I say.

  Wade steamrolls over that one. “I mean, in my BU application I wrote about the role of fantasy in modern life—”

  “Wait, wait.” Mia stares at Wade, at his weird assortment of thrift-store clothing and his permanently surprised, I just got out of an underground vault look. “Your BU application?”

  He blinks at her. “I’m transferring this fall.”

  Even Weirdo Cousin Wade has a life. Mia and I exchange a look, and I feel a little rush of sympathy, of understanding. The Last Two Losers in the Northern Hemisphere. But at least Mia has Abby. Besides, she’s smart. She’ll be okay.

  “My point is, Lovelorn isn’t special.” Now he turns back to Abby, wide-eyed. “It’s an amalgamation of all these other fantasy tropes—”

  “Speak English,” I say.

  He takes a deep breath. “It’s a mash-up. It’s nothing new. And it’s kind of an unsuccessful mash-up. Dwarfs and trolls and fairies and ghosts and witches. It’s like Wells took all the popular fantasy books and shook them together and poured them onto the page. The only thing she got right was ending the book the way she did, in midsentence.” He pauses to let this sink in while Mia looks outraged. “But the Shadow . . . well, the Shadow was new, at least. It was hers.”

  “But what is it?” Abby says, struggling to sit up. She catches me staring at her stomach, where a bit of her skin, pale and soft-looking, is revealed, and yanks her shirt down.

  “We never really find out in Book One,” I say quickly, so she won’t think I was checking her out or something. “Georgia hints it’s a kind of force that gets concentrated
in one person.”

  “But we do know it’s hungry,” Mia says. “The Shadow’s the reason that Lovelorn stays pretty year-round, why the harvests are abundant, why no one fights wars anymore. He keeps the peace. He keeps people happy. But in exchange . . .” She trails off, glancing at me for help.

  It’s Wade who jumps in. “The people of Lovelorn have to make a yearly sacrifice to the Shadow. Always a kid. We never see it. We just see the selection process and the kid getting led off into the woods.”

  “He eats them,” Mia says quietly. “The Shadow does. At least, that’s what Georgia implies.”

  “But not in our version,” I say.

  “No,” Mia agrees. “Not in our version.”

  Abby is quiet, absorbing this. The air in the room feels heavy, charged, the way it does before a bad storm: it’s as if the Shadow is real and has extended between us.

  “What about Heath Moore?” Mia blurts. Abby raises an eyebrow.

  “A freshman,” I explain to her. “Wade says he was obsessed with Summer.”

  “He wrote her, like, a thousand messages on Facebook,” Wade says. “Snaps, too. And texts. That’s why the cops were interested in him.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” Abby asks.

  “Persistence,” Wade says.

  “He means being as annoying as possible to as many people as possible,” I say.

  Wade waves a hand. “Tomato, tomahto. My stepbrother was a cop in the district for years. So I get special privileges.”

  “They never charged Heath, though,” I point out.

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” Mia counters. “You’re the one who said his alibi is crap.” Of course she wants it to be anyone other than Owen, even after what he did to her. I remember that spring dance when everything fell apart—when we fell apart. The way Mia stood there, watching Owen and Summer together, unblinking, as if she’d simply forgotten how to move.

  She never danced again. She said she’d outgrown it, but I knew the truth. I saw it in that moment—like someone had leaned forward and blown out a flame in her chest. But who knows? Maybe we were always broken. Maybe I was always a liar, and Mia was always weak. Maybe what happened to Summer didn’t turn us but only revealed what was already there.

  Wade hauls himself to his feet. He’s so tall, his head nearly reaches the ceiling. “Did you keep your old yearbooks?” he asks Mia.

  Mia stares at him. “We keep our old everything,” she says. “But finding them . . .” She trails off, shrugging.

  “Come on,” Wade says. “I’ll help.”

  Half of me suspects he just wants an excuse to poke around in Mia’s house—and from the way Mia frowns, maybe she suspects it too. But she lets him follow her, leaving Abby and me alone. The way her skirt is bunched up, I can see her thighs, barely contained by a pair of striped tights, and for some reason I think of highways at night, the pattern of the median flashing by.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me—like every secret I have is leaking out of my pores—so I go over to the window and pretend to be studying the backyard. There’s shit piled even at the bottom of the pool, which has been drained. I remember lying next to Summer on a float the summer before seventh grade, thigh to thigh, the smell of suntan lotion and chlorine, the sun hazy in a hot summer sky, making plans for our first-day-of-school outfits.

  “Do you miss her?”

  I turn around, mentally drawing down the curtains on that memory.

  “Sometimes,” I say. “But it was a long time ago. And things got so screwed up. Summer was”—at the last second I stop myself from saying cruel—“hard, in her own way.”

  “I didn’t mean Summer,” Abby says. “I was talking about Mia.”

  I hardly know Abby, but already I can tell this is her own special skill: she can reach inside and find the major note and bang on it. I’ve never asked myself whether I miss Mia, but of course as soon as she says it, I realize I do, I have—since the cops first came to my door, since I first passed Mia sitting on the other side of that shitty airless station, her eyes raw from crying, since Officer Neuter sat me down and said, Mia said she left you two alone in the woods. Mia said she had nothing to do with it. Mia’s trying to get out of trouble. How about you tell me the truth? And in that moment—in that little room smelling of coffee and stale breath and my mom sitting next to me, crying silently into her fist—I knew I’d lost not one best friend but two.

  “People change,” I say.

  “Have you changed?” she asks. In the sunlight, her eyes are like amber hard candies, her skin glowing like there’s a flashlight behind her cheeks. Out of nowhere I get the urge to kiss her—maybe just to get her to shut up.

  I can’t make my voice work, and for a moment we stare at each other in silence. Then her expression changes. She looks suddenly afraid. She sits up, drawing a pillow protectively over her stomach, like she’s worried I’m going to lunge at her zombie-style and start chowing down on her flesh. “What? What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Nothing.” I turn away again, blushing so hard my cheeks burn, not sure where that momentary bit of insanity came from.

  Luckily, before things can get any weirder, there are footsteps on the stairs—Mia and Wade are back. Mia is hugging our sixth-grade yearbook to her chest, and the sight of it makes my stomach hurt. I don’t know what happened to my copy, the one covered all over in Summer’s and Mia’s handwriting, including a doodle of Mr. Springer, our bio teacher, with a hard-on (courtesy of Summer) and a hand-drawn heart border around a picture of the three of us, taken during Spirit Week (courtesy of Mia).

  “It’s a miracle,” Mia says. Her face is flushed and she’s smiling. “There’s actually a clear path to the bookshelves. I hardly even remembered we had bookshelves.”

  “Making progress, Mia,” Abby says.

  I deliberately avoid looking at Abby and sit down next to Mia when she kneels on the carpet. Wade sits next to us, cross-legged, and draws the yearbook into his lap. As he begins paging through it, my stomach does more gymnastics. I see quick flashes of familiar faces, classrooms, photographs—my past stamped down, pressed onto the pages like a butterfly pinned behind glass, preserving some piece of the time before.

  “Check it out.” Wade flips to a photograph of the football team and uncaps a pen with his teeth. He circles a guy with a scowl and long bangs kneeling in the front row.

  “Hey,” Mia protests.

  Wade barely glances up at her. “Don’t tell me you were saving this for your grandchildren.” He slides the yearbook over to me. “Heath Moore.”

  I lean forward, squinting. The resolution’s not great, but even so, I do recognize him. “Wait a second—he was on our bus route.”

  “Let me see.” Mia snatches the yearbook from me and frowns over his picture. A squirrely guy, always sat up front, hunched down in his seat with earphones plugged deep in his ears whenever Mr. Haggard, the bus driver, started in on his usual rotation of show tunes. Les Misérables, Into the Woods, Meet Me in St. Louis, even one of the songs from Cats. The only reason I remember him at all is because of the way he used to stare at Summer. Perv much? I said to him once. And he smiled and showed off nubby teeth and said, You would know.

  “Okay,” Mia says slowly. “If they met on the bus, he might have known that we hung out in the woods.”

  “Yeah, but how would he have known about Lovelorn?” Wade says.

  “She must have told him.” Abby scooches to the edge of the bed, accidentally knocking my back with one of her shins.

  I shift away from her. “She wouldn’t have,” I say automatically.

  But the truth is, Summer did a lot of things in that last year I would never have expected. She went out with Jake Ginsky, freshman and resident leech, and started cutting school and smoking pot in the mornings. She made out with Owen Waldmann in the middle of the dance floor at the Spring Flin
g when she knew Mia had been in love with him for years. She even got wasted a few times, even though she’d always trash-talked her bio mom for being a useless drunk, for never leaving Summer with anything except a dumb name and a single copy of the only book she’d ever read to Summer as a child: The Way into Lovelorn.

  It was like there were two Summers. Or like Summer was a coin with two different faces. You never knew which one was gonna land.

  Wade takes back the yearbook and flips forward a few pages, looping a big circle around Jake Ginsky.

  “It wasn’t Jake,” I say quickly.

  “I’m not saying it was. Just hang on.” He rifles through some more pages and circles another boy, pictured with a serious-looking camera and a slick of long hair in his eyes. Wade’s last target, sandwiched between students dressed identically in blazers, smiles stiffly at the camera. “Heath Moore, Jake Ginsky, James Lee, and Noah Shepherd. The cops looked at all of them. Why? Because all of them, at some point or another, were involved with Summer or wanted to be involved with her.”

  “What’s your point?” No matter how hard I try to push them down, memories keep resurfacing, exploding hot and bright behind my eyelids. Summer looping her arms around Mia and me just after the rumors about her and Jake first started, saying, You know you’re the only ones I really love.

  “My point is why? Why Summer? Where did they meet her? Where did they even see her? TLC has three thousand students from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It’s not exactly tiny. These boys were all in high school. They couldn’t have seen her in the halls—she was in an entirely different building. And other than Heath and Jake, none of the boys had activities in common. Heath was on her bus, fine, but the others weren’t. I’ve checked.”

  “They seriously let you into BU?” Mia says.

  Wade ignores that. “Different friends, hobbies, and habits, all of them in love with the same girl.”

  “You obviously have a theory,” I say. “So just spit it out.”

  “My stepbrother told me that all the boys used to stay after school Mondays and Wednesdays for extracurriculars,” he says. “I think Summer must have too. She might have been meeting someone, or was part of some club she never told you about, and if we can figure out what it was—”