Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  Brynn exhales. “That was close.”

  At last, she releases me. I whip around to face her, rubbing my wrist even though it doesn’t really hurt. Still, she’s left half-moon marks in my skin. “Explain,” I say. “Now.”

  “Come on, Mia.” She doesn’t sound guilty. Not even a little bit. Just angry and tired. “Cut the shit. You can’t really think I killed Summer.”

  The words sound ridiculous when she says them. That brief sense of certainty—the truth like an electric pulse reaching out to zap me—is gone. Brynn’s a lot of things, at least half of them bad, but she’s not a killer. I remember how upset she was years ago when we stumbled on those poor crows, two of them skewered as if for a barbecue roast, the last one bleeding out slowly in the snow. While my lunch came up in my throat she kneeled down in her jeans and scooped the poor thing into her arms, went running with it toward the road as if there was anything she could do, any help she could give it there. It died in her arms and she wouldn’t believe it was beyond rescue. She insisted on finding a shoebox so we could bury it.

  Still, she lied.

  “I don’t know what I think,” I say.

  She stares at me for another long moment. Then she turns around and starts beating her way up the hill, back toward Owen’s house, thwacking through the trees and sending down a patter of moisture from their leaves.

  I hurry to keep up. “I want the truth, Brynn.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” She deliberately lets a branch rebound so I have to duck to avoid getting swatted in the face.

  “Try me.” The slope is steeper than it seemed on the way down. Brynn must have walked this path plenty of times. She’s moving quickly, confidently through the dark, leaping over stones that knock at my shins, pinballing from tree to tree for momentum. I hit a slick of rotting leaves and my ankle turns, and I grab hold of the back of Brynn’s shirt at the last second to keep from going down. She turns around with a little cry of surprise. “What are you hiding?”

  She looks away. Sharp nose, sharp cheeks, sharp chin. Brynn is the most knifelike person I’ve ever known. “I’m not an addict,” she says finally, after such a long pause I was sure she wouldn’t answer.

  “What?” This, of all things, was not what I expected her to say.

  She turns back to me, almost impatient. “I’m not addicted to anything. Not pills. Not alcohol. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. The last time I had a beer it made me sick. I don’t know how people drink that stuff.”

  I stare at her. “I don’t understand,” I say finally, and the crickets say it with me, sending up a fierce swell of protest.

  She makes a little noise of impatience. “When I was in eighth grade, I got drunk with some kids from Middlebury and took some of my mom’s sleeping pills when I got home. I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she says quickly, before I can ask. “I was just tired. School was hell. I begged my mom to move away, but she wouldn’t. We couldn’t. She didn’t have a car that winter, and she needed to be able to get to work on foot. I started taking the bus into Middlebury after school just to have a break. I met some older kids, potheads, and they were the ones who got me drunk. Lost my virginity that way too.” She smiles, but it’s the worst smile I’ve ever seen: hollow, as if it’s been excavated from her face.

  “Brynn.” I want to say more—I want to hug her—but I feel paralyzed.

  “It’s okay.” She takes a step backward, as if anticipating I might try to hug her. “You wanted the truth, so I’m telling you the truth. I took pills and puked and my sister found out and freaked and got me into rehab. I was so mad at first. But then . . . I started liking it.”

  I stay quiet now, hardly breathing.

  “I was in for forty-five days. I finished eighth grade in rehab. Took a few tests, sent in my answers, got a see you later, okay to pass Go. The program recommended me for a special high school, an alternative program, you know. Freaks and geeks and burnouts and losers. But that was good. It meant I didn’t have to go to TLC. A special car came to pick me up at my house and everything.” She shrugs. “But I still had to be me. I still had to go home. My mom and sister can hardly look at me, you know,” she says in a rush. “They can hardly stand to be in the same room as me. It’s like everything that’s happened, every single thing that’s gone wrong, is my fault. They like it when I’m away. I think sometimes they wish I’d just go away permanently. Don’t say it isn’t true,” she adds flatly, before I can. “I’m giving you facts. My mom and I used to have this weekend tradition, whenever she wasn’t working. We’d sit on the couch and watch all the soaps she’d missed during the week. We’d try to guess what would happen before it did. But suddenly she got too busy. She had stuff to do around the house. She was too fat and shouldn’t be sitting around. Excuses. I’d hear the soaps going at night, you know, when she thought I was asleep.” She looks away, biting her lip. As if one pain can be traded for another. “I had a girlfriend freshman year at Walkabout—that was the name of the alternative school—and her mom was a doctor. I stole some samples from the medicine cabinet when I was over one time and flashed them around at school. Walkabout had a zero-tolerance policy. Back to rehab I went. And then, sophomore year, when I was out again, I started hanging around with Wade. He’d been bugging me since the murders, you know. Thought he could help. Thought we could clear my name together. I guess he’s always had a bit of a superhero complex.”

  “Batman,” I say.

  “Batman,” she says, nodding. “Wade has a part-time job working in a clinic for fuckups. Real fuckups. Not pretenders like me. Sixteen-year-old heroin addicts, that kind of thing. He helps me . . . fake it. So I can stay in the system. Bounce around.” Brynn stares at me, tense, chin up, as if daring me to ask how.

  But I’m not sure I want to know. So I just say, “Why?”

  She hugs herself, bringing her shoulders to her ears. “He knows I like it,” she says shortly. “He knows I feel safe there. Plus—”

  “What?”

  “I think he just needed a friend,” she says. “We’re family, sure, kind of, but . . . friends are different, aren’t they?”

  Now the crickets and the tree frogs and all the tiny stirrings and windings of the invisible insects in the dark have gone still. Hushed and silent.

  “That’s why he’s here,” I say. I’m fumbling, struggling to piece together the facts, but as soon as I see Brynn’s face, I know I’m right. “That’s why he’s helping. You made a deal with him.”

  She shakes her head. “It started off that way. But now . . .” She trails off. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  Under the vaulted canopy of trees, I have the feeling of being in a church. And I have the craziest idea that Summer was the sacrifice, that she had to die so that the four of us, these broken people, could find each other. A Bible quote comes back to me, from years and years ago, before my dad left, when we still went to church. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

  “Why did you lie about your mom?” I ask Brynn, and the trees let out a shushing sound.

  Brynn looks down at the ground. “I didn’t tell my mom I was coming home. I wasn’t planning to come home, but . . . well, everything got messed up. But that first day, after you picked me up, I went by the house—” She abruptly stops, sucking in a breath, as if she’s been hit by an invisible force.

  “What?” I touch her once on the elbow. Feel the ridge of her bone beneath my fingers. Mercy. “What is it?”

  When she speaks again, her voice is very quiet. “It’s stupid,” she says. “My mom and sister were sitting on the couch. Feet up on the coffee table, matching slippers, bowl of popcorn. They were watching Days together. That was always my mom’s favorite soap. ‘The most bang for your buck and tears for your time,’ she always said. They looked so happy.” Her voice breaks and I realize she’s trying not to cry.

  I want to hug her and tell her it’s okay, she’s going to be okay, we all are, but I don’t know that. How can
I know? How can I promise? Terrible things happen every day.

  Then she clears her throat and I know she’s gotten control of herself again. “I couldn’t interrupt. I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going until I was in backcountry. Didn’t know what I would do. But then I remembered the shed and knew at least I’d have a place to crash until I figured it out. It was weird being there,” she says, in a different tone. “Spooky. Like . . . someone was watching. Like she was watching. In the middle of the night I woke up and . . . I swear I saw her face in the window. Just for a second. Those big eyes, her hair. Guilt, probably. Or I was dreaming.”

  “I’m sorry, Brynn” is all I say. Sorry is one of the worst words of all: it hardly ever means what you want it to.

  “That’s all right,” she says. Another thing people say and hardly ever mean.

  “No, it’s not.” Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the stupidity, the futility of it all. Brynn and I were Summer’s best friends. We fell in love with a story. We fell in love with an idea. And for that we’ve been punished again and again. Where’s our forgiveness? Where’s mercy for us? “You have to go home.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” she says. Sharp again.

  “You can’t be homeless forever.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” She stares at me for a long second, her face striped in shadow, her eyes unreadable. Then she looks away, shaking her head. “Forget it,” she says. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you wouldn’t get it.”

  “That’s not fair,” I say. “I do get it.” And then, as she starts to turn away, anger makes a leap in my chest. “You’re not the only one who’s been hurt.”

  She turns back around to face me. “Poor baby,” she says. “You want to start a club or something? Want to be treasurer and get a trophy?”

  “Stop it. You know that’s not what I meant.”

  Moonlight catches Brynn’s teeth and makes them flash, like a predator’s. “I’m sick of your poor-me act, okay? I’m not buying it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do.” Brynn has lost it plenty of times in front of me, but never like this. Never at me. The woods seem to be shrieking along with her. “You sold me out.”

  “What?” I nearly choke on the word.

  “To the cops. You sold me out.” In the dark, she looks like a stranger, or like a wild spirit, something not of this world. Flashing teeth and eyes striped with dark and wild hair. “‘Ask Brynn,’” she mimics. “‘Brynn will tell you. I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even there.’” She’s shaking, and in an instant I know that this, her anger, what she thinks I did, is the reason she stopped picking up my calls, never texted back, dropped stonelike straight out of my life. “They wouldn’t believe me about anything. You had them convinced it was my fault.”

  I remember sitting in the musty room, armpits tickly with sweat, my mouth desert-dry despite the Coke they’d given me. My dad glaring at me, losing control, not quite shouting but almost.

  “I never meant to get you in trouble.” Tell them, Mia. Just tell them the truth. And me: trying to haul the words up from some sandpit where they’d gotten stuck, through layers of stone and sediment, shaking with the effort. Ask Brynn, I said. Ask Brynn.

  “Oh yeah? What did you mean, then?”

  “I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.” She turns away from me again and now it’s my turn to grab her wrist, to force her to stay and listen. “You made me lie for you, Brynn. You made me swear I wouldn’t tell what happened—”

  “I didn’t do it for me.” We’re so close I can feel the words as she shouts them. Stab, stab, stab. Like she’s hitting me instead. “I did it for her, don’t you get it? So no one would know. I was protecting her, I—”

  “Brynn? Mia?” Owen’s voice comes to us from the street. I drop Brynn’s arm and she steps backward quickly. My heart is racing, as if I’ve been running.

  “Mia?” Owen’s voice is closer now.

  “Here.” Brynn brings a hand up to her eyes as she turns away, and I feel a hard jab of guilt. Was she crying? But when we make it onto the street and her face is revealed in the moonlight, she looks calm, almost blank. As if someone has taken an eraser and wiped away not just her anger but every feeling.

  Owen looks like a matchstick on fire. His hair shoots toward the sky. He’s practically crackling with excitement. “There you are,” he says. “Come on.”

  “What?” I say. “What is it?”

  He’s already started back toward the house. He barely turns around to answer. “It’s Abby,” he says. “She found something.”

  Brynn

  Then

  The snow was coming hard on a slant, and somehow we got turned around. We’d been in the woods a hundred times, walking through the same trees, making our landmarks of stumps and depressions, clumps of briar and places where ancient walls had tumbled into piles, but with the snow so fast and pure white and all the ground caked over, we’d gotten lost.

  You heard stories growing up in Vermont. Stories of people run aground in their cars in wintertime: people who wandered out of their cars and got lost in the whiteness. Stories of people frozen to death because of being in woods just like these, unprepared, cocky, no way back, the sweat built up on their bodies turning them into icicles. Stupid. We couldn’t be a quarter mile from Brickhouse Lane, but the more we walked, the less we recognized. Blank spaces, all whited out by snow. Like they were getting erased with it. Like we were getting erased, too.

  “You’re doing it deliberately,” I said to Summer. I was only a few notches on the belt down from panic. “Take us back.” She’d been leading us in circles—I was sure of it. To punish us for wanting to go home.

  “I’m not. I swear I’m not.” The tip of Summer’s nose was patchy, white and red. The first sign of frostbite. And I knew from the way she said it that she was telling the truth—but that just made me more scared. Mia was crying but without making any noise. Tears and snot ran down to her mouth. And not a sound in the world but the soundlessness of snow, swallowing up our footsteps, swallowing all of us.

  “We’re lost.” When Mia finally gave voice to it, I turned around quickly, as if she’d cursed.

  “We aren’t lost,” I said. Snow dribbled from my hair. Ice made crusts of my eyelashes. “We just have to keep going.”

  There was nothing to do but go on, into the white, hoping we’d see something we recognized. Snow stung like cigarette burns on our cheeks. The snow stretched time into stillness. Mia cried her throat raw, but Summer was surprisingly quiet, her face turned up to the sky, like she expected direction to come from there.

  And then the trees fell back like ranks of soldiers on retreat, and we saw we’d somehow looped around to the south side of the long field, missing the shed by at least a few hundred yards. We were less than five minutes from Summer’s house. Mia shouted with relief, and I remember I almost cried, too. But even my eyeballs were cold. The tears froze and wouldn’t fall. Only Summer was still quiet, still staring at the sky flaking into snow and the landscape all blurry with white, like there were secrets there we could never guess.

  And when halfway across the field we found the crows—two of them frozen, long dead, mounted together on the same stick, like the bloody flag of an ancient warrior warning others not to trespass, and one of them fluttering out its last breaths, drowning in snow, a pellet ribbed deep in its flesh—she stood there shaking her head, almost smiling.

  “It’s Lovelorn,” she said, even as I took up that poor bird, that poor dumb innocent crow, and Mia turned away to retch between her fingers. “Don’t you see? Lovelorn doesn’t want to let us go.”

  Summer, Brynn, and Mia made a pact that they would never tell anyone else about Lovelorn. It would be their secret. Secrets are like glue. They bind.

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

  Brynn

  Now

  After t
he smash-heat of outside, Owen’s house feels overbright and empty, like a museum. Abby has moved to an ottoman. Mia and Owen sit on opposite ends of the leather couch, leaving a whole cushion between them. She has her hands pressed to her thighs, like she’s trying to convince them not to run her straight out of there. I’ve chosen a chair across the room, stiff-backed and uncomfortable, and possibly only meant for show.

  Only Wade looks comfortable. His long legs are stretched out in front of him and he’s taken off his shoes, revealing mismatched socks, one of them red with Christmas penguins. Every so often he slurps loudly from his coffee.

  “When we first started talking about who killed Summer, Brynn suggested we call him the Shadow.” Abby’s voice rebounds off every empty wall. “From the beginning, it seemed like the right symbol of her killer. Why?” She starts ticking items off on her fingers. “One. Summer was obsessed with the Shadow. Two. She began to think she was actually in danger from him. That was the point of that day in the woods, right? She wanted to make a sacrifice to him?” She glances at Mia for confirmation.

  “Right,” I say instead, trying to force her to look at me. She does, but only for a second. Her face hitches—a look of embarrassment—like she’s accidentally looked at someone peeing.

  She turns to Wade. “In the original Lovelorn, the Shadow is mentioned how many times?”

  “Fifty-two,” Wade says. Then, as if it isn’t obvious: “I’ve counted.”

  “In Return to Lovelorn, the Shadow gets over one hundred mentions in a single chapter.” She pauses to let that sink in. “So let’s assume we were right all along. The Shadow is the murderer. The Shadow wrote himself into the story, just like you guys wrote yourselves into it.” She looks around, as if expecting us to contradict her. “There should be clues. Details about who he was in real life. The way the Giantess Marzipan—your math teacher—has a wart above her right eyebrow. That was real, right?”