Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “Brenn was my idea,” I admit. “Summer wouldn’t let my character enter the tournament, since we were supposed to be in the stands cheering Gregor on. So we wrote in Brenn instead.”

  “And the kiss she demands from Summer after she decapitates the troll?”

  I look away. “That was Summer’s idea. Kind of a joke.”

  “Were you guys . . . ?” Abby licks her lips. Her tongue is pink, small, catlike. “I mean, was she your . . . ?”

  “Girlfriend?” I say, and she nods, obviously relieved she doesn’t have to say it out loud. “No. She wasn’t even gay. She just liked to mess with me.”

  And then, before I can stop it, I remember the time she came in through the window after she and Jake Ginsky broke up in February, her clothes smelling like cold, her skin like a freezer burn. How she climbed into bed with me but wouldn’t stop shivering, even when I squeezed her so tight I wondered how she could keep breathing. How she lay there gasping and snotting all over my pillow while her back drummed a hard rhythm on my chest. How we took off our clothes down to our underwear. For body heat, she said. And how she turned to me just as I was starting to drift off. . . .

  Do you love me, Brynn?

  So much.

  Show me. Show me.

  That was more than just messing with me. Or so I thought.

  I kissed her.

  And for a single, time-stopping moment, her tongue slid into my mouth, warm and needy, like something alive and desperately searching. But almost as quickly, she jerked backward with a sharp quick gasp that to me sounded like glass breaking.

  Her smile then was just like a blade. I ran straight up against it; I felt everything it cut apart.

  She smiled like someone dying, to prove she didn’t care.

  She smiled like I was the one who’d killed her.

  And afterward I couldn’t walk down the halls without girls hissing at me and calling me dyke, and even Summer began to avoid me, pivoting in a new direction when she saw me coming toward her. I knew she must have told everyone, and all the time the memory of her smile was still embedded in my stomach like shrapnel. I felt its pain in every one of my breaths.

  “But you are.” Abby’s still giving me that look I can’t figure out.

  “I am what?” We’re close, I realize. So close I can see three freckles fading like old stars on the bridge of her nose. So close I can smell her, a fresh smell, like grass after it rains.

  The tongue again. Pink. Electric. “Gay.”

  “Guilty,” I say. I pull away, widening the distance between us, realizing I’m thinking about that tongue. Wondering whether she’d feel soft to kiss. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to attack you.”

  “That’s all right,” she says quickly. “I mean, I’m gay too. Or—bi. At least, I think I am.”

  “What do you mean, you think?” She looks like she feels soft. Cloudlike.

  “I’ve never kissed a girl before. Don’t tell Mia,” she adds quickly. Her cheeks flush. “I told her I’d hooked up with a girl at Boston Comic-Con last year because . . . because, well, I’ve always wanted to, and there was this one girl in a Wonder Woman costume, and when I saw her, it was just like . . .”

  “Magic,” I finish for her, and she nods.

  She looks so naked—scared, too, like a little kid. Like she’s waiting for me to punish her. And in that moment I wonder if maybe Lovelorn wasn’t so special after all. Maybe everyone has a make-believe place. Make-believe worlds where they play make-believe people.

  And without thinking any more about it or wondering whether it’s right or really fucking stupid, I lean in and kiss her.

  I was right. She does feel soft. Her lips taste like Coca-Cola. I can feel the heaviness of her breasts against mine, and I lean into her, suddenly all lit up, zing, Christmas lights and candy stores, suddenly want to roll her on top of me and feel the weight of her legs and stomach and skin, the heat of her. But just as quickly, she pulls away with a little “Oh,” bringing a hand to her lips, as though I’ve bit her.

  “Why—why did you do that?” she asks me.

  “Because I wanted to,” I say.

  She stares at me for a half second. Now she’s the one who leans in first. Her tongue is quick and light. She’s not used to doing it. But the way she smells, the way she brings her palm up to touch my face once, as if to make sure I’m real, unhooks something deep in my chest—something that’s been locked up for a long time.

  Then Summer hisses back into my head.

  What are you doing? she whispers, and then Abby jerks away and I realize Summer has spoken in my voice, through me. I’m the one who said it.

  “What are you doing?”

  And Abby’s looking at me like I just puked in her mouth, and that’s what I feel like, like I just threw up something dark and old, and it’s too late to take it back, too late to do anything but let it all come up.

  “What am I . . . ?” The way she looks at me, Christ, she looks just like an animal. Like that poor crow we came across in Lovelorn, all those years ago, like she’s just begging me to save her, to make it stop. “You kissed me. I thought we were . . .”

  I stand up, feeling like I’m going to be sick. Seeing that bird again, choking on the feel of feathers, Summer’s voice ringing out across an empty space of snow. It’s Lovelorn. It doesn’t want to let us go.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Because that’s what you do. You drown it, you strangle it, you make the pain stop any way you can. “It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have.” She’s still looking at me, those big blue eyes, fringed with lashes, that face all pinks and softness, all promise. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore, or why I’m saying it. Words that speak for you. Ghosts that speak through you. “I’m really sorry.”

  I’m out of the house and into the summer heat before she has the chance to respond, before I have to see her react.

  Mia

  Then

  The second time the police asked for us, they made sure that Brynn and I didn’t see each other. This time, they sat me in an airless office between my mom and dad, who were fighting. They’d been fighting for days.

  #45. Words too hurtful to repeat.

  I told you that girl was bad news.

  Maybe if you were ever home . . .

  Maybe if you didn’t make home so intolerable . . .

  Your daughter . . .

  Your fault . . . .

  And at the same time my voice had evaporated. Every word felt like a physical effort, like having to stick an arm down my throat and draw something up that had already been digested.

  Answer him, Mia.

  Answer the questions, Mia.

  Outside the police station, through the thin walls, I could hear the voices of the people who’d gathered. Dozens of people, crowding the entrance, some of them weeping, although I couldn’t understand why. They didn’t know Summer, hadn’t loved her. So what was their loss? Why the signs and the anger, a hiss that followed me the moment I got out of the car?

  Monster. Monster. Monster.

  #30. Words that burrow like insects in the ear, that nest and wait to eat you from the inside out.

  My dad put an arm around me in the parking lot, just like he kept an arm around me here, in the little room with a fan rustling stacks of paper and a table ringed with old stains. Squeezing my shoulders, hard, as if he could squeeze my voice out of me.

  For God’s sake, Mia, just answer the goddamn question. Tell him. Tell him that you had nothing to do with it.

  Outside: a heavy mist, alive with voices. Monster. Monster.

  Ask Brynn, was all I could say. My throat was a long deep hole and it was collapsing, and soon everything, all the words I had ever said, would be buried. How could I explain? My voice was drying up. Ask Brynn.

  The problem with fairy tales isn’t that they don’t exist. It’s that they do exist, but only for some people.

  —From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks

  Mia

 
Now

  If there’s a good time to say I love you, I have always loved you, let’s start over, it isn’t between aisles two and three of the local 7-Eleven, bleached by the high fluorescents, with legions of squat cans of instant Hormel chili serving as witnesses. Or in front of the night clerk with so much metal in her face she looks as if she got accidentally mauled by barbed wire. Or in the car with Wade Turner, who insists on rolling down all the windows “to keep us awake,” despite the fact that we’ve just bought jumbo coffees and chocolate-chip cookie dough for extra sugar highs, flooding the car with darkness and the roar of wind.

  Three minutes. That’s all I need. Maybe less. And yet Owen and I haven’t had a single minute alone. He hasn’t tried for a single minute alone with me.

  Was he lying when he said he always loved me? Or did he mean past tense, loved but now no longer love?

  #12. Words that mean multiple and different things. Always loved, meaning still do; always loved, meaning used to.

  Owen’s house looks strange with just the living room light burning, like a bit of dark matter anchored by a single star. Wade hops out of the car first, but Owen takes a second to fumble with his seat belt. Wade is halfway to the porch by the time Owen starts after him.

  Now, I think. Now that I know he didn’t do it. Now that even Brynn knows. This shouldn’t matter, but it does: on some level, deep down, I realize I’ve been waiting for Owen’s side of the story, for this final proof.

  Now. Quickly. In the time it takes to do four grands jetés, to take four giant leaps into the air across the studio floor.

  “Owen?” I reach out and put a hand on his elbow.

  “Hmm?” He turns around, looking almost surprised, as if he’s forgotten I’m there.

  The tree frogs and crickets are turning the air to liquid sound, and when I open my mouth, I suddenly feel like I’m drowning.

  “Listen.” My voice is a whisper. “About what you said the other day—”

  Just then the front door flies open and Abby stands there, transformed by the light behind her into a bell-skirted stranger.

  “Is Brynn with you?” she calls out.

  Owen turns away from me. Poof. The moment is gone. “What do you mean? I thought she was with you.”

  The grass is cool against my bare ankles as I follow Owen across the lawn. I deliberately avoid the flagstones, stepping hard on the soft earth, a miniature revenge. Then, feeling stupid and childish, I step onto the path again. Abby edges backward to let us in. I can tell something has upset her. She has a good poker face, but not good enough.

  “She ran out,” Abby says. “I thought she was just taking a walk. . . .”

  “She ran out?” I repeat. Abby nods mutely, avoiding my eyes. Now we’re all packed into the front hall: me, Wade, Abby, and Owen. On one side, the living room, papers blown around like brittle leaves. Our past, scattered and dissected. On the other side, rooms dark and mostly empty of furniture, the whistle of wind through the destroyed remnants of Owen’s sunroom. That’s our past too: rooms full of darkness, things we didn’t understand, wind blowing through shattered spaces. “I don’t get it.”

  “There’s nothing to get,” Abby says, crossing her arms. Then I know she’s hiding something. “She just went out for a bit. I thought she’d be back by now. That’s all.”

  “I’ll go look for her,” I say quickly.

  “Want company?” Wade asks, and I shake my head.

  Owen doesn’t even offer.

  If Brynn had started down Waldmann Lane, we would have seen her on our way back from town. It’s a one-lane road with nowhere to hide, unless she’d hurtled last-minute into the nest of trees. So I loop around the house to the backyard, thinking she might have needed a break. But she isn’t there, either. A heavy blue tarp, still scattered with old leaves, covers the long-empty pool.

  Where could she have gone?

  I circle around to the front of the house again, deciding that we must have missed her. The gate whines open and my shoes crunch on a scattering of pebbles. The moon is slivered short of full. Crazy to be wandering around after midnight, just because, making everybody worry.

  But maybe she needed a break from Lovelorn. From Summer. From the sizzle and hiss of old words. When Owen pulled up that box from where it had been entombed, when I saw it lashed all over with tape, I had the strangest feeling that it hadn’t been hidden to keep it safe—but to keep us safe from it.

  Witches, they called us. Demons. On a night like tonight all silvery and still, with nothing but a cratered moon and the trees knotted together as though for warmth and comfort, it’s easy to believe that monsters exist. That there are witches hunched over cauldrons and people possessed by vengeful spirits and vampires crying out for blood.

  Just outside Owen’s gates is a wooded area where the underbrush has been trampled and the low-hanging branches snapped or twisted back, forming a kind of hollow. Only then do I remember that Brynn’s family moved after the murder. Her house is on Perkins, which runs parallel to Waldmann. Could she have gone home?

  I push into the trees, ducking to avoid getting smacked in the face by the branches of an old fir tree. The chitter of insects in the trees grows louder here, as if they’re protesting my interference. Now I see that there’s a pretty clear path cutting down the hill through the underbrush. I can see the glimmer of lights on what must be Brynn’s street, from here no more than a few distant halos, hovering beyond the trees. She must have gone this way.

  Burn them. There was a whole tumblr dedicated to the murder and to the idea that Brynn, Summer, and I had been witches, and Owen the warlock who helped control us all. I remember coming across it during that awful month when people drove by my house just to take pictures, when Mom and I woke every day and found our stoop covered by the sheen of egg yolk or our trees toilet-papered or our mailbox pitched over in the grass. When Mom started ordering our groceries online and stopped going to the gym and started stacking up cardboard boxes in the kitchen “just in case.”

  Burn them, someone had posted. That’s what they used to do with witches. Build a bonfire and throw them in to roast.

  Then we heard that Brynn’s next-door neighbor had tossed a Molotov cocktail into her kitchen. The fire went through the house like it was paper. Brynn barely made it out. Even though she hadn’t spoken to me since the day Summer died, I tried calling her a dozen times, but her phone was always off. And then it was disconnected.

  I fish my phone from my bag for light before remembering it’s been dead for hours, and instead go carefully, arms outstretched, sliding a little on the muddy path and swatting at the spiderwebs that reach out to ensnare me. There’s something claustrophobic about these woods and the trees all hemmed close together in this narrow spit of undeveloped land, and I’m relieved when I break free of the last entanglement of growth and end up on a road lined up and down with cheap cottage housing stacked side by side.

  Immediately, I spot her: fifty feet from me, standing absolutely still in front of a house that looks like all the others next to it. There’s something unearthly about her stillness. As if she can’t move. Her face is touched with a shifting pattern of blue light.

  I start toward her and am about to call out, when the window becomes visible and in it I see Brynn’s mother stand up to turn off the television. She’s wearing a bathrobe. I see her face only briefly before the blue light dies in the window and on Brynn’s face. But Brynn’s mother is supposed to be in the hospital.

  “Brynn?”

  She turns quickly. For a second I see nothing on her face but pain. Then, almost immediately, she looks furious.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she says.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You told me your mom was in the hospital.”

  “Keep your voice down, okay?” Brynn glares at me as if I’m the one who’s done something wrong.

  “You lied,” I say. A word that doesn’t sound half as bad as it is. To lie, to deceive, to cheat, to trick
. To recline on a soft bed. #12 again. “All this time, your mom was fine. You could have gone home. You didn’t have to sleep in the shed—”

  “God. Just keep your voice down, all right?”

  “You didn’t have to stay with me—”

  The rest of the sentence turns hard and catches in my throat. Suddenly I can’t breathe.

  The answer is so obvious. Why did she agree to help, after she told me at first I was crazy? Why did she go to the shed and then make up a huge lie about her mom? Could she have known I’d invite her back to my house? She’s been looking for something—evidence, something she wrote for Summer or Summer wrote for her. She hasn’t been helping me find the truth.

  She’s been trying to cover it up.

  Run, Mia, she’d said. Run. And I did. I didn’t stop, not even when I heard screaming.

  Brynn—wild, ferocious Brynn, Brynn and her big mouth, all curled-up anger and leaps and explosion, Brynn with a fist hard like a boy’s—killed Summer. And I’ve been too stupid, too stubborn, to believe it.

  “You.” Now, when I’ve never been so scared in my life, my voice is strong. Steady. Pouring over the words. “You killed her. It was you all along.”

  “Oh my God, are you for real?” Brynn rolls her eyes. “Look, I can explain, okay? Just not here.” She grabs my wrist and I yank away. She stares at me. “Wait—you’re not serious, are you?”

  Before I can answer, a lamp clicks on in the living room, lighting up Brynn’s mom, face pressed to the window, eyes creviced at the corners, squinting to see outside.

  “Shit.” This time Brynn gets a hand around my arm and pulls me into a crouch, so we’re concealed behind a straggly line of bushes. An old plastic Easter egg is half-embedded in the dirt. “Shit,” she says again.

  “What are you—?”

  “Shhh. Come on.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you—”

  But she’s already hauling me back to my feet, and like it or not, I have no choice but to follow, have never had a choice. We shoot across the street, bent practically double, and push into the trees just as the porch light comes on and Brynn’s mom steps out onto the stoop, hugging her bathrobe closed, peering out over the now empty street. Brynn takes a step backward even though we’re sheltered by the trees and the shadows, wincing as a branch snaps beneath her weight. But soon her mom returns inside and the porch and living room lights go off in succession.