Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  Erin fishes a Coke from her bag, pops open the tab, and takes a long swig.

  “How was work?” I ask. She’s been working doubles all summer, sometimes as many as forty-eight hours on shift, and then two days off when she crawls into bed.

  “Same as usual. Lots of old people.” Erin always talks this way, like she doesn’t give a shit, but I know that’s a lie. She’s busted ass to get through medical school, taken out tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she still takes money out of her paycheck to buy gifts for her favorite patients. “Saw your friend Mia again,” she says through another slurp of soda.

  “She’s not my friend,” I say quickly, and I’m surprised that it hurts. Stupid. We spend four days playing Scooby-Doo and now I feel lonely because the game’s over.

  I’ve spoken to Mia only once since Moore brought me home. Went up to town for coffee and I ran into her at Toast. She was dressed like she always dresses, in neat little shorts that looked like they’d been pressed and her hair in a bun and a polo shirt, but she looked more relaxed somehow—less like she was moving with a yardstick up her you-know-what. She told me she was spending more time at her dad’s while her mom got help from counselors at North Presbyterian Hospital, where my sister is doing her residency. Apparently a whole team of people are treating her house for black mold spores and other nasty shit her father was afraid would ruin her lungs.

  “Have you spoken to Owen?” I asked her, and her face got closed again and she shook her head. And then, because I couldn’t help it, I asked, “How’s Abby?”

  Mia made a face. “Hanging out with Wade a lot. Can you believe it?”

  “Star Wars fandom,” I said. “What can you do?” That made her laugh, but it was a forced laugh, like wincing.

  I never thought there’d be a day when I’d actually miss Wade. Half the time I text Wade now, he’s with Abby. I nearly spilled everything to Mia then, standing in front of Toast with my iced coffee sweating through my fingers—about Abby, and how mean I was. How stupid I was. How I actually kinda like her.

  How over and over I’ve replayed the kiss in my head.

  But then a woman walked by, tugging her child across the street and shooting us a dirty look, like we were contagious, and I remembered who we were, that it didn’t matter, that the only thing that bonds us now is Summer’s ghost. And Mia’s dad pulled up in his sparkly Land Rover and tooted the horn, and she lifted a hand and was gone.

  I check my phone out of habit, thinking maybe, by some miracle, I’ll find a missed call from Abby. In the past two weeks I’ve tried locking my phone in a drawer for hours, shoving my mom’s ancient TV, as big as a mini-fridge, in front of it to keep me from checking. I’ve thought about driving to her house. I even wrote her a letter—an actual letter, on paper—before tearing it into pieces and flushing it down the toilet.

  “You know, I’ve been talking with Mom about moving.” Erin says this like she says everything else, like the words just rolled out of her mouth without her paying attention. I stare at her.

  “Out of Twin Lakes?” I say.

  “We’re thinking Middlebury.” She shrugs. “I could help Mom out with the moving costs. We’re looking to get her a car, too, so she’d be able to commute to work. Things might be better . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence, but I know what she’s about to say: Things might be better for you.

  All I’ve ever wanted was to get out of Twin Lakes. But now the idea makes me feel like someone’s placed my insides on blend. “When?” I ask, and she shrugs again.

  “Soon as we figure out your school,” she says. “Soon as we figure out the money stuff.” She reaches over and musses my hair, like I’m still a kid. “You could start over, Brynn. We could all start over.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

  Her smiles are always so quick they look like they’re being chased away. She yawns big, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m going to bed.” She stands up, handing me her Coke. “Want the rest of this?”

  “Sure,” I say, and take it, even though it’s warm. A second later and I’m alone, listening to the chugging of the window AC, the sun through the windows still making my neck sweat.

  We could all start over.

  A nice idea. Except that it’s never that easy. Is it?

  I remember how Summer looked the day we found those sad little crows, one of them still struggling in the snow, its feathers stiff and clotted with blood. It’s Lovelorn, she said. It doesn’t want to let us go.

  And how we found her that day in the woods, holding on to that poor cat . . . the way she turned to us as if she hardly recognized us.

  Here’s the problem with starting over: Summer won’t let us. She doesn’t want to let us go, either.

  Summer, Mia, and Brynn no longer had a choice: if they didn’t give the Shadow something to feast on, its hunger would only grow. That day they set out for Lovelorn in silence, and each of them carried a special item. Mia had a pocketful of pebbles she’d scooped out from her driveway, to use for marking the circle. Brynn had a matchbook. And Summer carried the knife.

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

  Brynn

  Then

  June 29 was a perfect day. It wasn’t raining. There were no storm clouds. The trees weren’t whispering to one another but stood high and quiet with their arms to a blue sky. The bees clustered fat and drowsy in the fields, and birds pecked at their reflections in the creek. It wasn’t a day for nightmares or scary stories or shadows.

  It wasn’t a day for Summer to die.

  Meet me in Lovelorn, she texted that morning. It’s time.

  At first we thought the whole thing was a joke. That’s what I told myself over and over, what I tried to tell the cops. A joke, or just part of Summer’s storytelling, her way of making things real. We didn’t really think there would be a sacrifice. We didn’t really think she was in danger.

  Then why did you go at all? the cops asked.

  Because she needed us. Because we missed her. Because it was Lovelorn.

  You just said you didn’t think Lovelorn was real.

  We knew it was a story. But the story was also coming true.

  So did you believe, or didn’t you believe?

  That was the question I could never truly answer. The truth was both, and the truth was neither. Like that old idea of a cat in a box with the lid on it, alive and dead at the same time until you look. We believed in Lovelorn and we knew it was just a story. We knew there was no Shadow and we knew that Summer needed us. We loved her and we hated her and she understood us and she scared us.

  Alive and dead. I’ve thought about that a lot: when we saw Summer standing in the long field, shading her eyes with a hand to look at us, clutching something—a rug, or a stuffed animal—with her other, that she was both, that somehow what was about to happen to her was already built into that moment, buried in it, like a clock counting down to an explosion.

  That’s what I thought the cat was, at first. A rug. A stuffed animal. Not real. None of it could be real.

  “You came,” was all Summer said. In the week since school had ended, we hadn’t seen her. I hadn’t spoken to her at all since the last day of school, when, passing me in the hall, she’d suddenly doubled back and seized my hand. I’m going to need you soon, she’d whispered, pressing herself so close to me that a group of eighth-grade boys had pointed and started to laugh. By then the rumors had been everywhere for months: that I hid in the toilet stalls and spied on the other girls changing; that I’d invited Summer to sleep over and then slipped into her bed when she was sleeping.

  Summer looked small that day in the field, in a white dress and cowboy boots, both too big for her. Scared, too. There was a stain at the hem of her dress. Cat puke, I later realized. “I didn’t know if you would,” she said, and as we got closer I saw that her face looked bruised and purplish, like she’d been crying.

  Then Mia stopped and let
out a sound like a kicked dog. “What—what is that?”

  That was the thing Summer was holding, the sad, ragged bundle of fur. Except that when she kneeled I saw it wasn’t a that at all, but an animal, a live animal or half-live animal: the helpless staring eyes, the twitchy tail now stilled, the mouth coated in vomit and foam. Bandit: the Balls’ cat. Barely breathing, letting out faint wheezes, hissing noises like an old radiator.

  My whole body went dead with shock. I couldn’t move. My tongue felt like a slug, swollen and useless. Mia’s whimpers were coming faster now. She sounded like a squeaky toy getting stepped on again and again.

  “What’d you do?” I managed to say.

  Summer was busy placing rocks. Bandit was stretched out on his side, stomach heaving, obviously in pain, and Summer was putting rocks in a circle, and she may have been crying before, but now she was totally calm.

  “Are you going to help?” she said. “Or are you just going to stand there and watch?”

  “What’d you do?” I was surprised to hear that I was shouting.

  “We have to save him,” Mia whispered. Her color was all wrong—her skin had a sick algae glow to it, and I remember thinking this must be a dream, it must be. “He’s in pain.”

  Summer looked up and frowned. “It’s just a cat,” she said. She actually sounded annoyed. Like we were the ones being unreasonable.

  Mia moved like someone was tugging on all her limbs at different times. Jerk-jerk-jerk. Like a puppet. She was inside the circle on her knees in the dirt with the cat. “Shhh.” She was lifting her hand, trying to touch him, trying to help. “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” Crying so hard she was sucking in her own snot.

  “It’s not going to be okay, Mia.” Summer was still frowning. She was done with the rocks and started in with the gasoline. She must have stolen a can from her foster dad’s garage. “The cat’s going to die. That’s the whole point.” A little gasoline ended up on Mia’s jean shorts, and Summer giggled. “Oops.”

  “What’d you do?” I took two steps forward and I was standing in the circle and I shoved her hard. She fell backward, landing in the dirt, releasing the can of gas. Glug-glug-glug. It disappeared into the dirt.

  “Jesus Christ.” Now she was the one shouting at me. “What do you think a sacrifice is? I mixed some rat poison into its food. The stupid thing was too dumb not to eat it.”

  I hit her. All of a sudden, I was burning hot and explosive, and I wound up and balled up my fist and clocked her. I’d been in fights plenty of times before, but I’d never punched anyone, and I’ll never forget the sick, spongy way her skin felt and the crack of her cheekbone under my knuckles. Mia screamed. But Summer drew in a quick breath, sharp, like she’d been startled. She wasn’t even mad. She just looked at me, tired, patient, like she was waiting for my anger to run out.

  And I knew then that she’d been hit before, plenty of times, and acid burned up from my stomach and into my mouth.

  “Are you going to help me?” she said again, in a quieter voice, and stood up. Then I saw she was holding a knife, a long knife with a sharp blade like the kind used for carving turkeys on Thanksgiving, separating flesh from bone.

  “It’s just a game,” I whispered. Even my mouth tasted like ash. I could hardly speak, could hardly breathe, felt like I was choking.

  She shook her head. “It was never a game,” she said quietly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This is the only way.” She looked sorry. In a lower voice, she added, “There has to be blood.”

  She looked down to the cat, still shuddering out his life, and to Mia, bent over, trying to whisper him back to health, her long thin neck exposed, stalk-like; her shoulders bare in her tank top, heaving.

  I saw: pale skin, life thrumming through her veins.

  I saw: Summer with a knife. Summer saying, I’m sorry.

  I couldn’t think straight.

  “Mia,” I said. And thank God she listened to me. Mia always listened to me. “Run.”

  “When it comes to the heart, there is no right and wrong,” the Shadow told Summer. “Only what it needs to keep beating.”

  —From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks

  Mia

  Now

  “You sure you don’t want company?” Abby slides her sunglasses—purple, heart-shaped—down her nose to look at me. “I’ve always thought I’d make an excellent grave robber.”

  “I’m not robbing a grave,” I say. “I’m making one.”

  “Offer rescinded. Sounds dirty.”

  When I climb out of the car, a chorus of birds starts competing to be heard. A rabbit darts out from beneath the carriage of the old rusted Dodge and scampers off behind the tumbledown brick cottage for which the street was named. I stand for a second inhaling the smell of pine and earth, the way the shadows shift as the wind turns the leaves in the sun.

  August is the saddest month: nothing so perfect can possibly last forever.

  For the past few weeks, Abby’s been spending most of her time with Wade. Whenever I see her, she either brings him along or just spends the whole time quoting him. For a while, I thought she must have a crush on him, but when I teased her about it, she looked almost pained.

  “No,” she said. “Not him.” But she wouldn’t say anything more.

  So fine. Abby has a secret crush and a new best friend, and every time she forgets to invite me to hang out it feels like I’m trying to digest a pointe shoe. But that’s okay. People grow up and grow apart and get new friends.

  Normal people do, anyway. I can’t even hold on to my old ones.

  From the trunk I get a shovel—one of the few useful things we’ve managed to salvage so far from the endless flow of garbage bleeding out of our house—Georgia C. Wells’s The Way into Lovelorn, and all the pages of Return to Lovelorn, crammed into a single shoebox, and start for the woods.

  “What do they call this?” Abby shouts after me. “Behavioral therapy?”

  I turn around and manage a smile. “Closure,” I say.

  I take the creek easily in one bound, zigzagging up the dry bank with the shovel jogging on my shoulder. Only a few feet into the woods, my phone dings a text—Abby, last chance for company—and then, a second later, a picture message from my mom. At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at and have to stop, squinting over my screen, to make out the splotch of curdled green color in the screen.

  Can you believe I found my carpet? she has written, and then I realize that they must be tackling her bedroom, by far the worst room in the house.

  Proud of you, I write back, and return my phone to my back pocket.

  Ever since Dad found out about Mom and her condition, we’ve had an army of therapists and professional organizers storm the house, helping my mom deal with more than five years of accumulated disaster. I always thought her hoarding started after Summer died, after Dad left, but it turns out I was wrong. For months before they separated, Dad said, he would come home to find she’d stolen rolls of toilet paper from public bathrooms or stuffed his bedside table drawers with used matchsticks and restaurant flyers. It was part of the reason they began fighting so much: she told him that she held on to stuff because she was unhappy and their marriage left her feeling empty.

  So. It’s not my fault. It was never my fault.

  Now Mom goes to see a psychiatrist at North Presbyterian Hospital on Thursdays and we have family sessions every other week, too, with a Dr. Leblanc, who looks exactly like the lion from The Wizard of Oz. Mom has been calling me and texting me more than ever since I started staying at my dad’s, as if in the absence of all her stuff it’s me she has to hold on to most tightly.

  But she’s making progress. We all are. That’s why the shovel: I figure if she can put the past to rest, so can I.

  I head straight for the long field, through buzzy clouds of gnats that disperse like smoke in front of me. Something tugs at me, a residual fear, a sense of being watched—Lovelorn—but I ignore it. Dr. Lebla
nc says that hoarding happens when the brain mixes up signals, confuses trash for treasure, makes things meaningful that don’t have any meaning at all. Maybe it’s the same for the bad memories we carry, for associations overlaid onto a place or a book or an old story.

  In the field the grasses are nearly waist high and riotous, fighting back as I start pushing toward the place where Summer was killed, scything with my shovel. I’m surprised to see that her memorial is still tended. Around the cross, someone has trimmed the grass and must be refreshing the flowers: a bouquet of purple carnations, Summer’s favorite, lies next to it. I feel uneasy without knowing why—then I realize it’s the circle of trimmed grass, which is almost perfectly proportioned to the circle of stones Summer had set up for the sacrifice that day.

  That day. Sometimes I think I can still smell that poor cat, like sick and sweat and gasoline, can still feel its heartbeat slow and sluggish under my fingers. I don’t know why we never told the cops the truth about the cat. It would have been so easy to say: Summer did it. Maybe because the truth was too terrible. Maybe because I still blamed myself for running, for not doing anything more to help.

  That’s the whole point of stories: they stand in for the things too horrible to name.

  I start digging. Since the storm there hasn’t been an inch of rain, and the dirt is dry-packed, dusty. After only a few minutes I’m sweating. But I manage a hole just large enough to fit the shoebox, and bury it, tamping down the dirt with my foot, releasing a thin mist of red dust. I feel as if I should say a word or a prayer, but I can’t think of one. The makeshift grave looks bare and sorry, like an exposed eyeball in the middle of the grass, and I reach for the bouquet, thinking it might serve as a headstone. Goodbye, Lovelorn. Goodbye, Summer.

  When I move the bouquet, a small handwritten note slips from it: a psalm. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. The wind passes over my arm like a phantom finger, lifts the hairs on my neck.