Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “It used to turn red when she was mad.” I’m thinking that’ll at least get a laugh, but instead she frowns and looks down at her notepad.

  “There’s the dwarf Hinckel, who smells like sour cheese. There’s a pixie named Laureli with a voice so shrill she can’t be near glassware.”

  Mia hugs her knees to her chest. “I don’t remember writing any of that.”

  “Summer, or whoever was helping her write, must have added it in without telling us,” I say quietly. Then something occurs to me. “Laura Donovan. Had to be. Remember her laugh?”

  “Like a fire alarm.” Mia cracks a small smile.

  “There’s a psychotic dwarf named Joshua,” Abby goes on, “who gets flattened by a wagon wheel and dies horribly—”

  Finally, something I remember. “That was my character,” I say. “Josh Duhelm. Four foot seven of straight crazy. He used to put chewed-up gum on my seat.”

  “But the Shadow is never described,” Mia puts in. “We took it from the first book. It’s just . . . a shadow.”

  “Wrong.” This is it: Abby’s big reveal. This is what she’s been waiting to tell us. For a second I hold my breath, and Mia holds her breath, and even the lampshades look tense. “In Return to Lovelorn, Summer visits the Shadow seven times, mostly on her own. Wade helped me look for statements that don’t show up anywhere in the first book. Backstory. Made-up information about where the Shadow came from and where it lives now and how it spends its days. But what if it wasn’t made up?” She pauses again and then nudges Wade with a toe. “Maestro?”

  He flips open a laptop and reads. “Okay, here’s the list we made.”

  “Will you sing again?” the Shadow asked. “I’ve always loved music. I used to teach music, before.”

  “Who made you this way?” Summer asked.

  “Everyone and no one,” the Shadow said. “In my city, there’s a giant door in the shape of an arch, and I went through one side a regular person and came out this way.”

  “Sometimes I spend whole days going in circles,” the Shadow said. “Street to street. Following the same old route. Just hoping something new happens. But nothing ever does. That’s the trouble with being a shadow. No one notices. No one cares.”

  “I once lived in the desert,” the Shadow told her. “There was a kind of cactus there that can survive without any water. If only people could survive like that—totally alone. But they can’t. Not even shadows can.”

  Summer knew the Shadow’s biggest secret: the Shadow was lonely, horribly lonely, and just liked having someone to talk to and be with. But she also knew she couldn’t tell anyone, because no one would understand. The Shadow was completely different than people thought—no one would ever know the truth.

  Wade finishes reading, and there’s a beat of silence. My brain keeps stalling and turning over, like an engine in the cold. Abby sits there watching us expectantly. Correction: watching Owen and Mia expectantly. I’m a no-fly zone.

  Stupid. Why did I kiss her? And why did I have to screw it up afterward?

  “Okay, so what are we saying?” Sometimes I think the whole point of talking out loud is to shut the inside voices down. “The Shadow—the killer—likes music and maybe even taught it. That’s point number one. He comes from a city. Point number two.”

  “He walks around town when he’s bored,” Owen jumps in. “Point number three.”

  I frown. “That could be anyone.”

  “He used to live in a desert,” Wade adds. “Don’t forget that.”

  “It’s still not a lot to go on,” I say.

  “It’s more than we knew before,” Abby says.

  “Sure, but it doesn’t actually get us anywhere.” Owen slumps backward on the couch. His hair loses steam too, and falls over one eye.

  “Read number two again,” Mia puts in, before we can keep fighting. The way she’s sitting, ramrod straight, like she’s a split second away from leaping into a ballet routine, makes me think she’s heard something specific. Even her voice sounds like it wants to leap—like she’s keeping down some excitement. “About the city.”

  Wade repeats the bit about the city and the arch, and this time I hear it too.

  “A city with an arch,” I say slowly. “St. Louis?”

  “St. Louis,” Mia repeats. And then, unexpectedly, she begins to sing: “Meet me in St. Louis, meet me at the fair . . .”

  All of a sudden I feel like I’ve been punted in the stomach. “Holy shit.” My throat burns with the taste of acid. Too much coffee. Too much. “Mr. Haggard.”

  “Mr. Who?” Abby and Wade say together.

  Mia turns to them. “Haggard.” Now the excitement has broken through. She practically squeaks the words instead of saying them. “Our bus driver. He used to sing to us every day. Show tunes, you know. Les Misérables and stuff. But one of his favorites was Meet Me in St. Louis.”

  “He sang,” I say. “Maybe he plays piano, too.”

  “Did he seem lonely?” Wade asks.

  “Of course he’s lonely,” I say. “He’s a bus driver.”

  “That’s mean,” Owen says, but I ignore him.

  Mr. Haggard. I close my eyes, remembering the sheen of his scalp through thinning hair, the way he used to grin when he saw us. “All aboard,” he would say, and give a toot of an invisible horn. Like we were still first graders. His sad pit-stained shirts and the way he gargled out the same songs as he rumbled off to school. . . . I open my eyes again. “He was at Summer’s memorial,” I say, remembering now how I spotted him in the crowd, standing there in a badly fitting suit. Did he look guilty? “He came to watch.”

  “Half the town came,” Owen points out.

  “Read number three again,” Mia says to Wade, and he does, obediently. “Street to street? That could be a bus route.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Owen says, and Mia turns to look at him—mouth screwed up, like she’s preparing to spit.

  “Why are you protecting him?” Mia says.

  “I’m not protecting him,” Owen says. “We’re talking about murder. We have to be sure.”

  I try to imagine Mr. Haggard stomping through the woods, taking a rock to the back of Summer’s head, dragging her across the long field, and can’t. And Summer was horrible to Mr. Haggard. Was that all for show? Did she secretly meet with him to work on Return to Lovelorn? I can’t picture it. Why would she open up to him, of all people?

  Still: it’s the only lead we’ve got.

  Abby’s consulting the list again. “What about the desert? Did he ever live in the desert?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I say, and everyone turns to me now, even Abby, light winking from her glasses. I take a deep breath. “We ask.”

  Summer was nervous as she waited in the arena for the Shadow to appear again. Why had she agreed to come? Why hadn’t she at least told Brynn and Mia? But she knew why: because they would have told her it was a bad idea.

  Maybe, she thought, the Shadow wouldn’t show. But even as she thought it, she heard a light step behind her and turned around quickly.

  “You’re scared,” the Shadow said. “Don’t be scared.”

  “I’ve heard stories about you,” Summer said, tossing her hair so as to look unconcerned. But the Shadow was right. She was scared. “You steal children. You take them away underground to eat them.”

  “That’s not true,” the Shadow said. “I only take them to keep them safe. So they won’t grow old and ugly. So they can stay children forever.”

  —From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks

  Mia

  Now

  “Morning, sunshine.”

  I wake from a dream that breaks up immediately and leaves me with only the sense of someone shouting. Brynn is standing in front of me, hazy in the sun beaming in through the windows.

  I sit up, jittery from the dream I can’t remember. “What time is it?”

  “Ten,” Owen answers from the hall. A second later he appears, showered and clean-
looking, his hair curled wetly, in a faded red T-shirt that says London. The black eye seems to have grown overnight, bleeding down into his cheek. I don’t know why people call it a black eye. This one is plum-colored. “Sorry. Brynn thought you’d want coffee.”

  When I bring a hand to my cheek, I can feel the spiderweb impressions of faint lines from the couch.

  “Where’s Abby?” I ask. I don’t remember falling asleep last night—only that Wade and Brynn were arguing about whether or not Haggard could have possibly known about Lovelorn, whether he could really have been the one helping Summer do the writing, and I decided to close my eyes just for a few minutes, and then I wasn’t on a couch at all, but on a boat. At some point, I thought Owen was beside me—I thought he touched my hair and whispered—but that must have been part of the dream.

  “Wade must have dropped her at home on his way to work,” Brynn says. “They were gone when I got up. She probably didn’t want to wake you up,” Brynn adds quickly, because she must see that I’m hurt. Brynn looks good—alert, dark hair bundled up in a messy ponytail, fashionably rumpled, as if sleeping on the floor in other people’s houses with a sweatshirt for a pillow is part of her strategy for success. She passes me a Styrofoam cup of coffee, too sugared, pale with cream. “Gotta caffeinate,” she says. “Today we nail Haggard.”

  “Today?” I nearly spit out my coffee. “You want to talk to him today?”

  “What’s the point in waiting?” she says.

  I look to Owen—old habit, from back when I could count on him to agree with me, when I could read what he was thinking by the way he squinted his eyes, by the smallest twitch in his lips; when we didn’t have to speak, because we just understood—but he sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “She’s right,” he says, and only in his voice do I hear how tired he is. “I just want this to be over. Finally.”

  And then what? I nearly say. Then Owen goes off to my dream school, and the Waldmann house is sold, and I lose him forever—beautiful, bright, matchstick Owen, full of crackle and life. Then Brynn does whatever Brynn is going to do, and Abby and I are still stuck here, in Twin Lakes, and no one will hail us or call us heroes. And that’s it, the end of the story: curtains down, dancers gone home, a theater sticky with spilled soda and old trash.

  Then I will still be as lonely as ever. Lonelier, maybe. Because this time, there will be no chance that someday Owen will come home and we’ll get to start over.

  In the bathroom mirror I barely recognize myself. I look spidery and thin and old. My eyes are sinking into two hollows. I wonder what Summer would look like now, had she lived—all that blond hair and skin like a new peach. I find a single half-used tube of toothpaste in an otherwise empty drawer and use my finger to clean my teeth, then finger-comb my hair back into a bun.

  What will we say to Mr. Haggard?

  Do you remember a girl named Summer Marks? Stupid. Of course he does. Everyone does. And he was at her memorial.

  Mr. Haggard, we know what you did to Summer.

  Mr. Haggard, tell us what you know about Lovelorn.

  I whisper the words very quietly in the bathroom. There, they sound silly and harmless. Musical, even. #44. Words mean different things to different people, at different times, in different places.

  Through the window I see a dark car—the limousine type that service airports—nose through the gates and disappear from view. A second later Brynn pounds on the bathroom door.

  “Mia,” she whispers.

  “What?” I say, opening the door. She looks as panicked as I’ve ever seen her. “What is it?”

  But then, from the front hall, a man calls, “Owen? You home?” The voice is instantly familiar, even after all these years.

  Mr. Waldmann is back.

  Brynn edges behind me into the front hall, as if she expects Owen’s dad to start shooting at her and wants to use me for cover. Mr. Waldmann is almost unrecognizable. I remember him mostly as a disembodied voice—a voice slurring from behind a locked door to be quiet, go outside. He wasn’t fat back then, exactly, but he was soft. Blurry. Chin folding into neck into chest into rolls of stomach. Even his eyes were blurry and seemed never to be able to focus on one thing without sliding over to something else.

  But Mr. Waldmann now is all sharp corners and edges: close-cropped hair, thin, a jaw like Owen’s, perfectly defined. Even in his jeans, wearing a blazer over a T-shirt, he looks like the kind of person who’s used to being listened to. Something old and damaged has, in the past five years, seemingly been fixed.

  “Dad.” Owen is frozen in the living room doorway, trying to block the mess from view.

  “Jesus.” Mr. Waldmann takes in Owen’s black eye. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing,” Owen says quickly. “Just a stupid fight.”

  “You look terrible,” Mr. Waldmann says, and then looks at Brynn and me, squinting a confused smile in our direction. “Hello.”

  Brynn looks like someone trying to swallow a live eel. I try to say hello, but all that comes out is the final syllable. “Oh.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be home until Friday,” Owen says.

  “Business closed early. I wanted to surprise you. Hopped a red-eye from LA.” Mr. Waldmann looks increasingly confused as he turns back to us. “And you are . . . ?”

  Owen shoves his hands in his pockets and kicks at nothing, making a scuffing noise on the floor. “Dad, Mia and Brynn. You remember Mia.” He won’t look at me, and it occurs to me that he’s embarrassed. Blood beats a hard rhythm in my head. One two three four one two three four.

  “Mia. Of course. Mia. And Brynn.” But this time when Mr. Waldmann tries to smile, he only winces. “Wow. How wonderful. I had no idea you were all still in touch.” He turns to Owen, leaving the question unspoken: Why?

  “It’s been kind of like our reunion tour,” Brynn blurts out. “But we’re just wrapping up.”

  Mr. Waldmann’s attention moves to the living room—the mess of papers, coffee-ringed Styrofoam cups, empty chip bowls. “What happened here?” he says. “There another storm I didn’t hear about?”

  I shove past Owen and start snatching up pages, one by one—some of them brittle, like old leaves, some of them damp as though imprinted by sweaty palms. I shuffle them carelessly into a pile, ignoring the echoes of an old fear: they’ll be out of order now, we’ll never be able to sort them, Summer will be so angry.

  “Homework,” is the first thing I can think of to say, which is why I’m always so careful, why I weigh words in my mouth before I speak them. The first thing that comes out is often so wrong.

  “Homework?” Mr. Waldmann sounds almost amused. Almost. But the strain is obvious in his expression. “In July?”

  “Summer school.” More lies, more words I haven’t chosen, as though they’re just staging a riot. For a second I catch Owen watching me with the strangest look on his face—as if I’m someone he’s never seen before. “Owen agreed to help out, because of NYU and everything.”

  That doesn’t even make sense, but Mr. Waldmann nods. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” Then: “Owen, can I see you for a second? Alone?”

  This is it: the end of the line. Get them out, Mr. Waldmann will say, and Owen will be nice about it, give us an excuse, and shut the door in our faces. We dragged him into this. He didn’t want any of it.

  All he did was kiss her in front of half the school and break my heart.

  “I was just about to drive Brynn and Mia home,” Owen says, already going for the door. Goodbye, thanks for coming, please don’t crowd the exits.

  “Nice to see you, girls,” Mr. Waldmann says, but it’s not hard to figure out what he really means: Nice to see you leaving.

  Owen’s car is stifling hot. The AC does nothing but flood hot air at us. I roll down the window, worried I’m going to be sick. I’ll lose my chance to talk to Owen unless I do it now. But I won’t do it. Of course I won’t. Not here at ten forty-five a.m. in a sweat-sticky car, not anywhere, never.

&
nbsp; “I’m not going home,” Brynn says as Owen reverses onto the lawn to turn around. “I’m going with Mia.” She hasn’t asked me, of course, but I’m too tired to argue.

  “Neither of you is going home,” Owen says. For a second he looks just like the old Owen: stubborn, explosive, unpredictable. The boy who lived half the time out of his tree house and wore a bulky flea-market trench coat everyone said he would someday conceal a gun inside and spent half of class gazing out the window, doodling shapes in his notebook. Brilliant and strange and mine. “Not yet, anyway. We owe Mr. Haggard a visit, remember?”

  Brynn

  Then

  “Nice skirt, Mia,” Summer said, bumping Mia on the shoulder with a hip before she slumped into the seat next to me, even though for more than a month she’d been avoiding us entirely, turning down different hallways when she spotted me from a distance, refusing to answer any of my texts. In the cafeteria she’d practically shoved me when I put an arm on her shoulder. Stop drooling, McNally. I’m not into girls, okay? Furious, practically spitting, as if I were the one who ruined everything, who’d told about what had happened between us the night she climbed into my bed. It was April—a raw day, when the rain couldn’t decide whether to come down or not and so just hovered in the air, making trouble. “Trying to give Mr. Haggard a view of your prime real estate?”

  “Shut up,” Mia hissed. “He’ll hear you.”

  “So what if he does? Hey, Haggard. My friend Mia wants to know if you think she’s pretty—?”

  “I said shut up,” Mia said.

  We were stopped at a light. Haggard twisted around in his seat, bracing himself with one arm on the steering wheel.