Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  Resting in peace right now. Thanks for all the love.

  I stood there, my hands sweating so much I nearly dropped my phone, like I could press her right out of those words.

  But over the days, the messages on her wall turned nastier.

  Guess this is a lesson . . . all devils go to hell . . .

  And: Maybe the good aren’t the only ones who die young . . .

  Until finally someone had the account shut down.

  “The cops were nice at first. Just asking questions about how I knew Summer. They’d heard some stuff, I guess, about how Summer and I . . .” He trails off. What happened between Owen and Summer is still a major Danger Zone, obviously, Restricted Access, Hard Hat Area Only. “By the time I knew how serious it was—by the time my dad knew—we’d already told our lie a dozen times. Stupid. Someone had seen me in town on my way to Middlebury. And a cabbie remembered taking me home at two in the morning. Not a lot of thirteen-year-old fares, I guess. Even after I told them the truth, they wouldn’t believe me about anything.”

  “Did you ever find out how your blood ended up on Summer’s clothes?” Wade blurts out. I can tell he’s been dying to ask this whole time.

  “No,” he says, looking down at his hands.

  “It wasn’t,” Mia says. “It didn’t.” When she’s really angry, her voice actually gets quieter. Mia’s the only person I know who scream-whispers. “The cops screwed up. The sample was contaminated.”

  “The sample was inadmissible,” Wade corrects her. “Legally. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t his blood.”

  “How many miles do we have left until we get to Maine?” Abby jumps in before Wade can say anything else. I turn around and see the look Mia gives her. Thank you, the look says.

  And that bad feeling in my stomach worms a half inch deeper.

  “One hundred sixty-seven,” Wade says cheerfully.

  “How about the radio, then?” Mia reaches into the front seat to punch the radio on, and for a long time no one speaks again, even after the music buzzes into static.

  Around mile 115 everyone starts to get cranky. It turns out Mia has a bladder the size of a thimble. After the third time she asks to stop, I tell her she should keep an empty Big Gulp between her legs, like truckers do, so we have some hope of making it to Maine.

  I forgot Mia has no sense of humor.

  We pull off I-89 and into the Old Country Store, which is nothing more than a 7-Eleven with a fancier sign and a gas pump around the back. Owen’s frozen-burrito ice pack has thawed—Wade proved he is an alien by actually eating it—and he goes in search of new frozen edibles to serve as an ice pack. Abby wants to re-up on iced tea. Wade claims he is starving. He is, in addition to being an alien, a gigantic garbage compactor that needs to be fed a constant diet of beef jerky and potato chips or it starts to wind down.

  Wade, Mia, Owen, and Abby disappear into the Old Country Store together, and I quickly yank my phone out of my bag, relieved I have two bars of service. Out here, on these county roads, you never know. The trees absorb the radio signals, or maybe the crickets battle them midair and drown them out.

  My sister’s cell phone rings two, three, four times. I’m about to hang up when she answers. There are a few fumbling moments before she speaks. The TV’s playing in the background. Something with a laugh track.

  “It’s you,” she says, in a tone I can’t read. “What’s up?”

  The Old Country Store is lit up against the long evening shadows. Window signs buzz the way toward cold Coors Light and night crawlers. “Nothing,” I say. “Just calling to check in.”

  “They let you have your phone back, huh?”

  Four Corners confiscates cell phones. Cell phones, computers, personal property other than clothing. And she doesn’t know I’ve left yet. This is one piece of good luck: the storm took out home phone service for two days. The usual aftercare follow-up call must not have gone through. “For good behavior,” I lie.

  “You think they’ll spring you one of these days? How long you been in now? More than thirty days.”

  “Another few weeks, at least. Forty-five-day program.” What’s one more lie? At a certain point, maybe they’ll start to cancel each other out. Crap on top of more crap. Like subtracting from zero. “How’s Mom?” I say before she can ask any more questions.

  “She’s all right. The same. You want to talk to her?”

  “No,” I say quickly. “That’s all right.” But already Erin’s pulling the phone away from her ear. TV noises again, the roar of all those people laughing. My mom’s voice in the background, muffled, so I can’t make out what she’s saying. “That’s all right,” I say, a little louder.

  “Christ, no need to shout,” Erin says. “Mom says hi.” Which means she didn’t want to talk to me either. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not surprised.

  But still.

  “I gotta go. I have group,” I say. Wade’s jogging back to the car, blowing air out of his cheeks hard, like he’s crossing a six-mile track and not a stretch of empty asphalt.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Erin says.

  “Sure.” I hang up as Wade heaves himself behind the wheel again.

  “I got you a present,” he says, and tosses a rabbit’s foot in my lap, one of the awful ones, dyed neon pink and dangling from the end of a cheap key chain.

  “You know I’m a vegetarian, right?” I pick up the key chain with two fingers, get the glove compartment open, and hook it inside.

  “It’s good luck,” Wade says.

  “It’s nasty.” I try not to think of the poor rabbit, twitching out his guts on the ground for someone else’s good luck.

  I have a sudden memory of seeing Summer that day in the woods, holding something dark and stiff that at first looked like a blanket. . . .

  “What? What’s wrong?” Wade’s watching me.

  “Nothing.” I punch down the window, inhale the smell of new sap and gasoline. “Everything. This whole mission. It’s all wrong.” She’ll never let us go, I almost say, but bite back the words at the last second. I’m not even sure where they came from. “Maybe it’s better if we don’t know what happened. Maybe it’s better if we just forget.”

  “But you weren’t forgetting, were you?” Wade says softly. “That’s why all the rehab trips. Isn’t that what you told me? It’s the place you feel safe.”

  He’s right, of course. I wasn’t forgetting. Not even close.

  “Why do you care so much?” I turn on Wade.

  “What do you mean?” Wade looks legitimately confused. “You’re my cousin.”

  “Our moms are cousins,” I say. “I saw you maybe twice growing up. And one time you were dressed as Batman. So what’s your excuse?”

  Wade looks away, bouncing one knee, hands on the wheel, quiet for a bit. “You ever read about the Salem witch trials?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Back in the 1700s, right?”

  “No. Earlier. Massachusetts, 1600s. But there were others like them, here and in Europe. Some places they still have witch hunts, you know, when things start to go wrong.”

  “Wade.” I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, suddenly exhausted. In my head I see Summer still teasing us to follow her, running deeper into the woods, passing in and out of view. Tag. You’re it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Witches, demons, evil spirits. Look, it’s human nature to point fingers. To blame. Hundreds of years ago, whenever something went wrong, the crops failed or a baby died or a ship got lost at sea, people said the devil did it. They looked for reasons because just plain bad luck didn’t seem like a good reason at all. Plain bad luck meant no one was looking out for you, there was no one to blame and no one to thank, either. No God.” He takes a deep breath. “What happened in Twin Lakes five years ago was a witch hunt. Something terrible happened. No one could understand it. No one wanted to understand it. So what did they do? They made up a story. They made up a myth.”

  An invisible touch of wind
makes the hair on my arms stand up. I open my eyes. “The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.”

  He nods. “They turned you into demons. Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a witch hunt.”

  Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. I turn toward the window and swallow down something hard and tight. No one’s ever lonely in Lovelorn. The line comes back to me, from our fan fic. No one except the Shadow. The trees are creeping on the edge of the parking lot, like they’re planning to make a sneak attack. For a second, I imagine that maybe Lovelorn’s still out there. Maybe it just picked up and moved, found some other lonely girls to welcome.

  “The funny thing is,” Wade says, “they got it all mixed up.”

  I turn back to him. “What do you mean?”

  His face is pale, like a photographic impression of itself. But here in the half dark, his features are softened and I realize he’s not bad-looking. His face has character. Strength. He looks like someone you can trust.

  “Someone really did kill Summer,” he says quietly. “Someone knocked her out and dragged her into the stones and knifed her seven times. There’s a monster out there, Brynn. All this time, there’s been a monster out there. And no one’s tracking it.”

  “Except for us,” I say.

  “Yeah.” He sighs. He seems almost sad. “Except for us.”

  Mia

  Then

  What I remember: a day in January, dazzling with new snow, the sky like a flat mirror, white with clouds. Brynn and I hadn’t wanted to go to Lovelorn that day—it was much too cold, and I had a late dance practice. I was training harder than ever, then, in preparation to audition for the School of American Ballet’s summer program, one of the most competitive in the country.

  Besides, for a week Summer had been ignoring us, the way she sometimes did, punishing us for God knows what reason (because we’d gone to the movies the day after Christmas without her; because we’d failed to be as miserable on break as she was; because we had families to share Christmas with; all of the above), but when Summer came running up to us after school, backpack jogging, cheeks blown red from the wind and blond hair sweeping out from beneath her knit cap, we couldn’t say no.

  I remember how Brynn lit up, as if Summer was the current, the electricity, and for the past week she’d just been waiting for someone to plug her in. I knew then that Brynn didn’t love me, not half as much as she loved Summer. I was just a shadow substitute, someone to keep her company while she waited for her real best friend to come back.

  The woods were deep and quiet with snow. Our footsteps plunging through the film of surface ice disturbed crows from their perches, sent them screaming toward the sky.

  Summer was in a good mood. She hardly seemed to notice the cold and kept urging us to hurry up, go on, just a little farther—past the shed, past another frozen creek, down into a kind of gully where birch trees stood like ghostly signposts, frightened by some past horror into the same stripped whiteness. This was the prima ballerina Summer, the dazzlingly beautiful one, the one we could never refuse. But there was another Summer, another thing inside her, something bent-backed and old, something that crouched in the shadows.

  It started snowing. Flurries at first. But soon fat flakes were coming down, as if the whole sky was chipping away slowly, and I was freezing, and I’d had enough.

  “I want to go back.” I never spoke up, not to Summer.

  She and Brynn were floundering ahead. This far in the woods, the sun barely penetrated, and the drifts of old snow were higher, swallowing them all the way to the knee. Summer didn’t even glance back. “Just a little farther.”

  “No,” I said. Feeling the word through my whole body, like an earthquake. “Now.”

  Summer turned around. Her whole face was pink. Her eyes were a blue that reminded me of the creek—sparkling and pretty, until you noticed all the darkness tumbling underneath.

  “Since when,” she said slowly, “do you get to decide?”

  I’d made a mistake. That was how things were with Summer: like crossing a frozen river, just praying the ice would hold you. Then bam, suddenly you fell through, you were drowning. “I’m cold,” I managed to say.

  “I’m cold,” she parroted, making her voice sound thin and high and afraid. Then, with a wave of her hand: “All right, go ahead. Go back, then. We don’t need you. Come on, Brynn.” And she started to walk again.

  But Brynn stayed where she was, blinking snow out of her lashes. Summer was several feet away by the time she realized that Brynn hadn’t moved. She turned around, exasperated.

  “I said come on, Brynn.”

  Brynn licked her lips. They were peeling. The winter had come especially hard that year. It had snowed on Thanksgiving and hadn’t stopped snowing. “Mia’s right.” Her voice echoed in the emptiness. Nothing alive around for miles. I remember thinking that. We might as well have been standing in a tomb. “It’s freezing. I want to go back.”

  For a second, Summer just stood there, staring, shocked. And cold gathered in the pit of my stomach and turned my throat to ice. #35. Things you aren’t allowed to say (see: curse words; God’s name in vain; the word “Macbeth” whispered in a theater, which brings bad luck to the whole production). A shadow moved behind her eyes again, something so dark it didn’t just obscure the light but swallowed it.

  But then she blinked and shrugged and only laughed. “Whatever,” she said. “We can go back.”

  The moment had passed. Brynn exhaled. Her breath hung for a second in the air before dispersing.

  As Summer stomped past me, she squeezed my cheek with ice-cold fingers. “How could anyone,” she said, “say no to this face?”

  But she gripped me so hard, it left my jaw aching. We were safe, but not for long.

  It was Summer’s idea to bring back the tournament.

  “I mean, you can’t just say you’re loyal to Lovelorn,” she argued. “Anyone can say anything. There has to be a way to prove it.”

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

  Mia

  Now

  It’s dark by the time we get to Portland. The downtown is a compact network of tight turns, old houses, and light stretching out of bars and doorways, like elongated golden legs. Owen has fallen asleep; I barely touch his knee and he comes awake. Almost immediately he grimaces, as if the pain has come awake too.

  He brings a hand to his face and then, thinking better of it, drops it. Instead he sits forward, elbows on knees, spine hunched gargoyle-style.

  “This is it,” he says. “Follow the coast a few miles north, you can’t miss it. There’s a sign. At least, there used to be.”

  For the past hour we’ve been silent, stilled by the slowly descending dark, like people being drowned by increments. We used to talk about going to Portland to visit Georgia Wells’s old house. One of Brynn’s favorite theories about the ending was that it wasn’t an ending—that Georgia had written extra pages but for whatever reason had been forced to conceal them.

  Now we’re here to fix a different kind of ending. I know I should be grateful that at last we know the truth about Owen and where he was that day, and that even Brynn seems to accept it.

  But I can’t. I just feel afraid. Suddenly, this seems like a very bad idea.

  I press my nose to the window as we pass out of the city, trying to make out silhouettes in the dark, but all I can see is the glitter-eyed image of my own reflection. A few miles out along the coast the headlights pick up a sign pointing the way to the Wells House.

  “Turn right here,” Owen says, and Wade does, the light skittering off a badly kept dirt path. Trees crowd either side of the lane, ghastly trees with distorted limbs and squat, knobby trunks, trees with leaves like spiked fronds, trees I’ve never seen in my life.

  The lane ends at a gravel parking lot, empty of cars. Wade’s headlights seize on a
sign that says Welcome to the Georgia C. Wells House and another that says Absolutely No Smoking! Wade cuts the engine and we all climb out. After being in the car for so long, I’m surprised by how warm it is. The air is sticky and heavy with the sounds of tree frogs and crickets.

  A flagstone path cuts from the lot to the main house, only partially visible in the dark, and half-concealed behind more of those Frankenstein trees with scissored leaves and squat trunks. It’s a small Cape Cod house, gray or brown—hard to tell in the dark—with a weather vane on the roof, pointed toward the ocean. We’re all so still. For once, even Abby has nothing to say.

  I feel suddenly overwhelmed. This is where Lovelorn was written. In a way, this is where it all started.

  Is that why Summer made Owen take our pages here? Because she wanted them to lie where they had been born? Like a person killed at war, shipped overseas to be buried in his hometown?

  “I don’t get it.” Brynn crosses her arms. In the moonlight, she looks very pale. “It’s like a museum or something?”

  “A nature center,” Owen says. “She donated the house after she died.”

  “I didn’t think that anyone remembered her,” I say. I’m surprised to feel my eyes burning, and I look down, blinking quickly. The gravel under my feet throws back the moon, sheer white, practically blinding. The book, I knew, was old long before Summer got her hands on it. It was written when Summer’s grandmother was a girl and had been passed down to Summer’s mom. It’s the only book that dumb-ass could read, Summer used to say, spitting on the ground to make a point about what she thought of the mom who’d shoved Summer into foster care when she got tired of pretending to be a parent.

  And sure, we found some other fan sites about Lovelorn—Lovelornians, the communities called themselves—most of them dedicated to that famous ending and why on earth she would have been allowed to publish a book that wasn’t finished. Some people said she’d gone crazy. Others said she’d had a heart attack. Still others speculated that it was a code, a secret message about a sequel they were sure she was still planning to write. But most of the sites had gone inactive after her death. I guess no one was going to wait around for a ghost to finish a sentence.