“I’m sorry, Mia,” Owen says. “I know you thought—I mean, I know it was important to you—”
“We were wrong about Mr. Haggard, okay?” I say before he can finish. “That doesn’t mean we were wrong about everything.” I seize onto this idea, haul myself forward word by word. “Someone was helping Summer write Lovelorn. Someone left clues behind. Maybe he was hoping to get caught. . . .”
Owen rubs his eyes. For a second he looks much older. “Mia . . .”
“Nothing else makes sense.” I keep going because I can’t stand to hear him contradict me. In my chest, a bubble swells and swells, threatening to burst. “Whoever killed her knew all about the sacrifice. He knew about the woods and the shed and all of it.”
“Mia . . .”
But I can’t let him finish. “We can talk to Mr. Ball again. Or we look at Heath Moore. We know his alibi’s bullshit now.” I’m babbling, desperate. “You heard Brynn. She took his phone. I bet there’s a ton of creepy stuff on it. There’s something wrong with him. And Summer was with him, right, before she—well, before you.” I still can’t say it. “She might have told him about Lovelorn, she probably did, she could never keep her mouth shut—”
“No. Mia, no.” Owen twists around in his seat to face me, and the swollen thing in my chest explodes, flooding me with cold. “The clues don’t lead anywhere. It’s all make-believe—don’t you get it? It’s still make-believe.” He looks like someone I barely know—new hard planes of his face, new mouth stretched thinly in a line, not my Owen, the brilliant wild boy, a boy meant to leap and spin alone in a spotlight, not a scrap of him left. “I’m sorry.”
Hot pinpricks behind my eyes mean I’m going to cry. I look down at my lap, at my hands squeezed into fists. “You’re sorry,” I repeat, and Owen flinches, as if he thought the conversation was over and he’s surprised to find me still sitting there. “You’re sorry.” I press down the tears under the weight of an anger that comes tingling through my whole body, waking me up. “You left. You got out. You’re going to NYU next year, for God’s sake. NYU. That was my school.”
“Seriously?” Owen frowns. “We always talked about going to NYU.”
“I always talked about it. I did.” My voice sounds foreign to me—cold and hard and ringing. “And you come back here with your cute little car and your fake British accent—”
“Hey.” Owen looks hurt, and when he looks hurt he looks, momentarily, like the old him.
But it’s too late, I can’t stop now. “We’ve been buried here, don’t you understand? We’re suffocating. And you think you can make it better by saying you’re sorry? You don’t care about helping, you don’t care—” I break off before I can say about me. The tears are back now, elbowing me hard in the throat, making a break for it. I take a deep breath. “How dare you show up after all this time and pretend? You’re the one playing make-believe. You—you told me you loved me. But you don’t. You couldn’t.” I didn’t mean to say it, but there it is. Words are like a virus—there’s no telling what kind of damage they’ll do once they’re out.
Owen stares at me, and I’m so busy trying not to cry it takes me a minute to realize he’s looking at me with pity. “I did, Mia,” he says quietly.
Did. Past tense. As in, no longer.
I make it out of the car without crying. Without saying goodbye, either, even though that’s what I mean.
Mia
Then
I was walking with Owen in the fall of sixth grade, arguing about whether or not AI would eventually spell the destruction of the human race (him: yes, thankfully; me: no, never) and dodging caterpillars plopping out of the trees onto the road like gigantic furry acorns—there were hundreds and hundreds of caterpillars that year, something about the reduction of the native population of bats—when all of a sudden Owen broke off midsentence.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
I didn’t even have time to say what? By the time I looked at him he was standing calmly, head tilted back, cupping a hand to his nose while blood flowed through his fingers, so bright red it looked like paint.
“It’s okay,” he said thickly, while I squealed. “It happens all the time.”
But I was already shaking off my sweatshirt—not caring that it was my favorite, not caring that my mother would kill me, not thinking of anything but Owen and all that blood, his insides, flowing out in front of me—and pressing it balled up to his face, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” even though I was the one who was afraid, standing there until my sweatshirt was damp with butterfly patterns of blood.
Audrey, Ava, and Ashleigh stood, shivering in the sudden wind, and watched Gregoria disappearing with the Shadow into the woods. At a certain point, it looked as if the Shadow bent to whisper something to her. Then they were simply gone.
—From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells
Mia
Now
“You okay?” Brynn asks. I’m going to have to dig up my old list of all the ways that words can turn to lies, make some amendments to it. I don’t bother answering.
Inside, the smell of mold and wet and rotting cardboard is worse than ever. Or maybe it’s just that everything’s worse. I grab an armful of stuff from the side table, including a framed picture of me dressed as Odette in my dance school production of Swan Lake, grinning at the camera, dressed in tulle and pointe shoes and a frosty tiara, and turn right back around, stalk across the driveway, and heave it all up into the Dumpster. Goodbye. Another armful—mail and a carved figurine of a rooster and a dozen loose keys in a basket and an orchid in its clay pot, miraculously blooming despite the chaos—and outside I throw it in a long arc, like a longshoreman tossing catches of fish. Not until I grab the side table itself does Brynn say something.
“Are you sure . . . ?” she starts, but trails off when I give her a look. Brynn and I should never have stopped being friends. We must be the two most screwed-up people in Twin Lakes. Maybe in all of Vermont.
When the side table goes into the Dumpster, it splinters. Two crooked legs stick up over the lip, like an iron cockroach trying to claw its way to safety. The Dumpster’s nearly full already. And suddenly it hits me how hopeless it all is: the house is still swollen with trash. Like a dead body bloated with gases. Even from outside I can see the Piles shouldering up against the downstairs windows, the curtains going black with slime. I haven’t made a dent. The tears come, all at once, like a stampede, and I stand there crying in front of the stupid Dumpster with my house coming down behind me.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there when I notice a cop car: swimming slowly, sharklike, down the street. It stops just next to the driveway. I turn away, swiping at my eyes and cheeks. But when the cop climbs out, long-legged and narrow-faced, like a praying mantis, he heads straight for me.
“Hello,” he says, all toothy smile, pretending not to notice I’ve just been sobbing alone on my front lawn. “You must be Mia Ferguson.”
“Can I help you?” I say, crossing my arms. He looks familiar, but I can’t figure out why.
“I’m looking for Brynn McNally,” he says. “Seen her recently?”
What’s she done now? I almost ask. Luckily, my throat chooses the right time to close up.
But a second later Brynn bursts out of the door—like she does, like even air is a major barrier—maybe just because she’s sick of being inside with the smell, and the cop says, “Ah,” like he’s just solved a math problem.
Brynn freezes. “What is this?” she says. “Who are you?”
“Afternoon,” he says. I imagine the swish-swish of curtains opening across the street, neighbors peering out, wondering what we’ve done now, whether we’re finally going to get it. “Was hoping we could have a little chat. Name’s Officer Moore.” He pauses, like the name should mean something.
And then it does: Moore. As in Heath Moore. Brynn must make the connection at the same time. She looks furious.
“You’re Heath’s older brother,” sh
e says.
“Cousin,” he corrects. His cheeks are round like a baby’s, and swallow his eyes when he smiles. “Sorry to bother you ladies,” he says, hitching his belt higher, like we’re in a cowboy movie. “I’m here about a missing phone?”
In sixth-grade history we studied the fall of Rome. We charted all the factors that led to the collapse of one of the most powerful empires of all time. Corruption. Religious tension. Gluttony. Bad leadership. Little arms pinwheeling out from the central fact: over a hundred years, from superpower to sad little collection of city-states.
But no one ever tells you that sometimes disasters can’t be predicted. They don’t throw shadows of warning over you. They don’t roll like snowballs. They come like avalanches all at once to bury you.
Look at Pompeii, a city singed to ash in a single day. Or the way a first frost slices the heads off everything but the sturdiest flowers.
Look at the human heart. Think about the difference between alive and not. One second that little fist is going and going, squeezing out more time. And then it just quits. One beat to the next. Second to second.
One. Sound and noise and motion. Two. Another thump. Three.
Nothing.
Fifteen minutes later, Brynn is sitting in the front seat of the cop car, looking like a prisoner. Heath Moore, apparently too afraid to confront one of the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane himself, sent his cousin to do the dirty work. Officer Moore went directly to Brynn’s house, where he informed Brynn’s very confused mother that her daughter had stolen a phone during an altercation at Summer Marks’s memorial.
Brynn’s mother insisted she was at Four Corners. Four Corners insisted that Brynn had been signed out several days ago by an Audrey Augello. Officer Moore, no doubt thrilled that his missing-phone case had turned into a missing-girl case and sensing the opportunity to do something other than throw teenage boys in the drunk tank for the night, tracked Brynn down to my house after learning we’d been seen together.
And now Brynn is going home.
I’m still standing on the front lawn. The sun is high above us, like a ball lobbed up in the blue, and I feel just like I used to during curtain call, with all the stage lights bright and blinding and the applause already waning—an urge to laugh, or scream, or keep dancing, anything to keep the silence from coming.
When Officer Moore starts his engine, Brynn finally looks at me. For a second her face is blank, closed up like a fist. Then she brings a hand up and I think she’s going to try and say something. Instead she presses her palm flat on the glass. I bring my hand up too, just hold it there, even as the squad car pulls away and Brynn drops her hand, leaving a ghost imprint on the glass, even after they’re gone and the noise of the engine has faded.
Across the street, the curtains twitch. Someone is definitely watching. Just because, I take a bow.
“Show’s over,” I say out loud, even though no one’s around to hear me.
Inside, I stand in the dimness of the front hall, squinting at the Piles, trying to imagine them as something beautiful and natural, stone formations or ancient gods. But it doesn’t work this time. I see only trash, rot, mold webbing through the whole house. Maybe I’ll never even go to college. Maybe I’ll stay here forever, slowly yellowing like one of the old newspapers my mom refuses to throw away, or turning gray as the walls are now.
Owen’s voice is still echoing in my head. I did. I did. I did.
Strangely, the urge to cry has vanished. The urge to clean, too. It’s too late anyway. There’s no point. There was never any point.
“Sorry, Summer,” I say into the empty hall. Something rustles in another room. A mouse, probably. I close my eyes and imagine I can hear the amplified chewing of termites in the wood.
I must have been crazy to think that Owen would ever want me now. Grown-up Owen with his cute little accent and his Boy Scout look, off to NYU and girls with pixie-cut hair and J.Crew smiles, girls with vacation homes in Cape Cod and the Hamptons, girls who aren’t all jumbled up and split apart. Maybe my mom hasn’t been collecting all this time but reflecting. Mirroring our chaos. The chaos inside.
There’s a sudden pounding on the front door. Brynn. Maybe she left something. Maybe she catapulted out of the cop car and came running back. For a second, I even hope she did.
Instead my dad is on the front porch, waxy-faced, sweating.
“Mia.” He says my name as if it’s an explosion. “Mia. Oh my God.”
“Dad.” Then I remember that the door is open—just a crack, not enough for him to enter, not enough for him to see—and I try to slip outside. But he has his hand on the door, and he stops me.
“Where have you been?” He looks like he hasn’t slept. His hair is sticking straight up, as if a giant has grabbed him by the roots and tried to lift him off his feet. “I was this close to calling the police—tried you at least twenty times—phone went straight to voice mail—”
“My phone was dead. That’s all,” I say.
But he just keeps talking, leapfrogging over half his words so I can hardly piece together what he’s saying.
“—came by last night—house was dark—been calling for two days—phone off—”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I—I wasn’t feeling good. But I’m fine now,” I quickly add. I’m worried he’s about to have a heart attack: a vein is standing out in his forehead, throbbing as if it, too, is very upset.
Finally my dad runs out of anger—or out of air—and stands there panting, the vein still beating a little rhythm in his forehead. “Well, Jesus, Mia. Open the door. I’ve been terrified—your mother and I both—”
“You called Mom?” All this time I’ve been talking to my dad through a narrow gap in the door and angling my body so he can’t see inside. Now I slip onto the porch, closing the door firmly behind me. No way am I letting Dad inside. Dad’s never been inside, not since he left.
“Of course I called your mother. She’s on her way home from Jess’s house now.” Dad frowns, and looks a little more like my dad, the stern podiatrist—I’m pretty sure that even as a kid he liked to dress up in suits and diagnose people with acute tendonitis. His eyes go from me to the door and back again. “Come on,” he says, in a normal tone. “Let’s go inside. I could use a glass of water.”
“No!” I cry as he reaches for the door handle. Instinctively, I flatten myself against the door, keeping it shut.
My dad’s fingers are wrapped around the door handle. “Mia,” he says, in a low voice—someone who didn’t know him might think he was being casual—“what are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding anything.” But suddenly the tears are back. Traitors. They always come at the worst moment. “Please,” I say. “Please.”
“I am going to open this door, Mia.” Now my father’s voice is barely more than a whisper. “I am going to open it in three seconds, do you understand me? One . . . two . . .”
I step away, hugging myself, choking on a sob that rolls up from my stomach.
“Three.”
For a long second, he doesn’t even go inside. He stands there, frozen, as if he’s fighting the urge to run. Then he lifts a hand to his mouth—slowly, slowly, afraid to move, afraid to touch anything. “Oh my God,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I bend over and put my hands on my knees, sobbing in gasps. I don’t know what I’m sorry for, exactly—my mom, because I didn’t protect her; my dad, because I couldn’t stop it. “I’m sorry,” I say again.
He barely seems to hear me. “Oh my God.” A few feet inside and his foot squelches on something sticky. He flinches. Another step. Crackle, crackle. Old magazines snap underfoot. Even from outside I can make out the Piles, pointing like fingers toward a heaven that doesn’t exist, and all I can think is how mad he’s going to be, and how mad Mom’s going to be, and how I’ve messed up everything, even things that were messed up from the beginning. And I can barely breathe, I’m crying so hard: a broken girl with a broken heart living in a broken house.
&
nbsp; “Mia.” Then my dad turns around to face me, and I’m shocked to see not anger but a look as if someone just tore his heart out through his chest. I’ve never seen my dad cry, not once, not even at his own mother’s funeral—but now he’s crying, fully, without even bothering to wipe his face. Then he’s rocketing out onto the porch again and has picked me up like I’m still a little kid, so my feet lift off the ground and his arms are crushing my ribs and I’m so startled that I completely forget to be sad.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I say, even as he cries in big, long gulps. We’ve switched roles. Now he’s the one apologizing.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he keeps saying, over and over. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
There was no denying it. No understanding it, either.
The fact was this: the Shadow was getting stronger again.
—From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks, Brynn McNally, and Mia Ferguson
Brynn
Now
Wednesday morning, July 20, two weeks after Heath Moore’s cousin dragged me home, attempt number 1,024 to reach Abby, fifth ring . . .
Sixth ring . . .
Voice mail.
“Hey, this is Abby. If you’re getting this message, it probably means I’m screening your calls. . . .”
I thumb out of the call just as my sister practically kicks in the door, still dressed in her scrubs, hair swept back into a ponytail and eyes raccooned with tiredness.
She fists the door closed. “Fucking thing’s swollen,” she says, which is my-sister-speak for Hi! How are you! Nice to see you! But she comes and thumps down next to me on the couch, kicking up her feet on the coffee table, nudging aside Mom’s laptop. A school brochure slithers to the carpet, wedged with Post-it notes. Ever since I got home, Mom’s been writing away to every single alternative high school program on the East Coast. Not even an addict, she just kept saying when I told her, shaking her head, as if she almost wished I was. Really, Brynn. Well, I guess it’s about time you finish up school, then.
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