Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  She’s right, of course—even if I have absolutely no desire to see him ever again, not after what he said. Maybe it’s unfair to resent a person for not loving you back. Then again, it’s unfair that feeling doesn’t always flow two ways.

  But this is bigger than me. And it’s bigger than losing Owen.

  “We’ll pick you up,” I say. I turn to Abby but she starts shaking her head frantically, mouthing no, no, no. She looks completely panicked—eyes rolling like a spooked horse’s, sweat standing out on her forehead—even more panicked than when I first hurtled into the car and told her to move. But I ignore her. “Stay where you are.”

  No one knew what happened to the children taken as sacrifices by the Shadow. There were many stories: rumors that the Shadow took them to an underground palace and lavished expensive presents on them; suspicions that the Shadow used them as slaves; hints that the Shadow was the only one of its kind, and that the children went afterward to a subterranean city vaster even than its counterpart on earth.

  Only one thing was certain: none of the children was ever again seen alive.

  —From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells

  Brynn

  Now

  There’s a For Sale sign staked to the grass in front of Owen’s house. The workers have made quick business of the sunroom. The tree has been removed and the glass repaired, although there’s still a roofing truck parked in the driveway.

  Maybe our luck has finally changed: Owen, not his father, comes to the door. For a second he just stands there, looking like someone who got a mouthful of salt water instead of soda. Then he splutters, “Mia. Hi. Hey.” As if Abby and I aren’t even there.

  “It’s Ms. Gray,” Mia says breathlessly. “She killed Summer.”

  “What?”

  Abby pushes her way inside first. She hasn’t looked at me once since I got in the car, hasn’t mentioned all the calls and texts she’s been ignoring, is still acting like I’m a giant wart and the best course of action is to pretend I don’t exist. But what am I supposed to say? Hey, Abby, I know we’re about to nail a teacher for the murder that got pinned on me, but in the meantime can I just say I really did mean to kiss you?

  The living room where we spent our sleepless night poring over Return to Lovelorn is all boxed up, furniture wrapped in plastic like it’s been swaddled in giant condoms. Instead we go to the kitchen, which is brighter and warmer and still shows signs of life—keys and mail scattered across the kitchen counter, crumpled receipts, a phone charging next to the toaster, still unpacked.

  Mia tells Owen about the note and the bouquet of flowers, and I tell him what I found out from Heath Moore. Five minutes into the story the front door opens and closes with a bang and then Wade careens around the corner, panting, his shirt half-tucked into his pants as if he hauled them up while using the bathroom.

  “What’d I miss?” he says between gulps of air. Then, grinning at me: “Hey, cuz.”

  There’s a long beat of shocked silence. Abby shrugs. “I called him,” she says, by way of explanation.

  So we have to start over again. All this time, Owen is frowning, hunched over his phone, like he’s only partly paying attention. And then I get this awful bunched-up feeling: he doesn’t buy it. And if he doesn’t buy it, the cops never will.

  Owen shakes his head. “Check it out.” He shoves his phone across the counter, as if it’s something poisonous that’s been clinging to his hand. “She lived in St. Louis. The city with the arch.”

  There are dozens of results for Evelyn Gray in St. Louis, including pictures that clearly show Ms. Gray but younger: smiling awkwardly into the camera with her arm around a little girl carrying a big trombone, or arms raised, conducting a band of kids dressed identically in red jackets.

  Evelyn Gray, volunteer conductor of the Youth Music Society of Armstrong Grammar School in St. Louis . . .

  Evelyn Gray, who graduated valedictorian from her high school in Tucson, Arizona, before attending Washington University St. Louis . . .

  Evelyn Gray, pictured here helping the women’s extramural volleyball team spike their way to victory . . .

  “She was an athlete,” Mia says, pointing to an image of Evelyn Gray midair, body contorted like a giant comma. “So we know she’s strong.”

  Evelyn Gray, pictured here with first-chair student Lillian Harding . . .

  “Music,” Wade finishes triumphantly. “That was clue number three in Return to Lovelorn. She taught music.”

  “And she lived in Arizona. The desert. That was clue number one,” Owen says.

  “Oh my God.” Abby has gone green. “Lillian Harding. I know that name.” For the first time since we kissed, she looks at me directly, and my heart does a sickening flop, like a wet rag slapping in my chest. “Remember that day we found you in the shed? There was a mouthpiece buried there with all that junk. It belonged to Lillian Harding. I googled her to see if there was a connection.”

  “You googled Lillian Harding in Vermont,” Mia points out.

  There’s an awful moment of silence. Owen reaches for his phone. A second later he stiffens.

  “‘Lillian Harding of St. Louis,’” he reads quietly, “‘ten, disappeared on her way home from school on December 2 . . .’”

  “Oh my God.” Abby turns away, and I have the urge to put my arms around her, to bury my mouth into the soft skin of her neck and tell her it will all be okay, even though of course it won’t. It’s already too late for that.

  “There’s more,” Owen says. It’s so quiet in the moment before he begins reading again I can hear the tick-tick-tick of the old-school hanging clock. Wade no longer looks happy. Even he looks like he might puke on his boots. “‘The body of Lillian Harding, who disappeared on her way home from school on December 2, was found just after New Year’s Day by an ice fisherman in the Mississippi River, where she’d apparently drowned—’” Owen breaks off. He looks like he’s about to be sick. “Jesus. She’s quoted.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. I feel like I did the first—and only—time I took pills. Like my brain has been wrapped in a thick blanket.

  “I mean they interviewed her. Listen. ‘“Lillian was a wonderful girl, and everyone loved her’” said Evelyn Gray, who gave Lillian lessons in French horn and has for two years been the conductor of the neighborhood youth orchestra. . . . “I’ll miss her very much.”’” He abruptly stops reading and wipes his mouth with a hand, as if the words have left a bad taste behind. “Christ.”

  “She killed Summer,” I say. My voice sounds overloud in the silence. “What do you want to bet she killed Lillian too?”

  “And kept the mouthpiece like a—what? Like a trophy?” Abby’s face is white.

  “It’s pretty common for murderers to keep something that belonged to their victims,” Wade says. But even he looks sick. “It’s a way of reliving the connection.” I look at him and he shrugs, all bony shoulders and elbows. “I’ve read about it.”

  “Holy shit. I saw her.” This occurs to me only as I’m saying it out loud. “The night I spent in the shed—she was there. I woke up and thought Summer was looking at me. All that blond hair . . . I was half-asleep,” I say quickly, because now Abby is staring at me as if she’s never seen me before. “But it was her.”

  Owen stands up and then immediately sits down again. “We need to tell the police,” he says. “We need to tell someone.”

  “No.” Mia practically shouts the word, and everyone jumps. She’s gripping the countertop like she’s holding herself in place. “No,” she says, a little quieter. “Not yet. I want to talk to her first. I want to know why.”

  “It won’t change anything,” Owen says. “Besides, she’ll probably deny it.”

  “I don’t think so.” It’s rare for Mia to sound so certain about anything, and for a second I wish that Summer were here to see how little mousy mute Mia grew up: gorgeous and tall and determined. “I think she wants to tell. I think it’s killing her. That’s why she goe
s back to the long field all the time. That’s why she dropped all those clues into the sequel. And that’s why she kept Lillian’s mouthpiece, I bet. It’s not a trophy. It’s a way of keeping Lillian alive. Of keeping their connection alive.”

  Owen’s house suddenly feels very cold. “That’s sick,” I say.

  Mia looks at me pityingly, and for the first time in our friendship I feel like the naive one, the girl who just doesn’t get it. “Ms. Gray made Lovelorn for us,” she says. “She made it come true. She must have thought she was doing us a favor. She must have loved Summer, in a way.”

  “That’s fucking sick,” I say again, but I’m surprised that the words come out all tangled and my eyes are itchy as hell and suddenly I’m crying.

  For a long second, no one moves. I can’t remember the last time I cried. Mia looks as if I’ve just morphed into a nuclear bomb, like any motion might detonate me and exterminate life on the entire planet.

  And then, miraculously, Abby comes to me.

  “Hey.” She barely touches me, but already I feel a thousand times better. And I don’t care about the fact that everyone’s staring at us, watching as I lean into her and put my head on her shoulder and inhale. “Hey. It’s going to be okay.”

  I swipe my nose with my forearm. “I know,” I say. Because I know she’s forgiven me, and so it will be.

  “We’ll all go,” Wade announces, nearly toppling one of the kitchen stools as he moves for the door. “We’ll all talk to her.”

  “No,” Mia says again, and for the second time we all stare.

  She looks at me and then Owen, then back to me again. Her eyes are very dark.

  “She was ours to start with,” she says. I know she means Summer. “This is ours to finish.”

  “Think about it,” the Shadow told Summer. “The world you know is evil. People kill one another. They grow old and die. Love turns to hate and friendships to poison.

  “But here, with me, you’ll be safe forever.”

  —From Return to Lovelorn by Summer Marks

  Mia

  Now

  “It seems so obvious now,” Brynn says. We’re parked halfway down the street from Ms. Gray’s house: a small shingled cabin on Briar Lane, not even a half mile from the woods where Summer was killed. Parked in the driveway is a maroon, rust-eaten Honda. Something about the house seems sad and remote and sympathetic, like a girl standing at a party too afraid to venture away from the corner, even though the lawn is well cared for and there are even flower boxes in the window—carnations, I see, and feel another twist of nausea. Then I realize it’s the curtains, which are all drawn, as if she doesn’t want any interaction with the outside world. “Why didn’t we suspect Ms. Gray? Why didn’t the police suspect?”

  “Because . . .” I fumble for words to explain it. I remember Ms. Gray plowing through a lecture on contraception while Todd Manger made a jerk-off motion behind her, Ms. Gray talking about organic versus engineered produce, Ms. Gray teaching us the signs of cardiac arrest and how to clear food from a blocked air passage. So helpful, so kind, so convincing. Of course I see now how easy it would have been for her to persuade Summer to accept extracurricular help, to earn her trust, to make Summer feel special. “She isn’t someone we thought much about, is she? She was just there. Like wallpaper. Besides, we were thinking the Shadow had to be a guy,” I say. “Even though Summer never said it was. And Georgia Wells doesn’t either.”

  “Heteronormative,” Abby says, with one of her eyebrow quirks. “I told you.” But I can tell she’s nervous, and so can Brynn, I guess, because she reaches out to squeeze Abby’s knee.

  Abby and Wade have insisted on driving with us, although they’ve agreed to stay in the car while Brynn, Owen, and I talk to Ms. Gray.

  “I guess it’s now or never, right?” Brynn says, looking as though she wishes it would be never. But she climbs out of the car.

  Abby grabs me before I can follow her. “Anything happens,” she says, “I’m calling the cops.” It’s rare to see Abby so worried, and it almost makes me smile.

  Almost.

  “Nothing will happen,” I say, half to convince myself, and then I step out onto the street and slam the door. The knot in my chest makes it hard to breathe.

  This is It. The Grand Finale. Except I haven’t practiced, don’t know the moves, have to fumble through it.

  The leaves are starting to crisp in the August heat. The sky is like the white of an eyeball: like something that should be paying attention but isn’t.

  There is nothing at all remarkable about Ms. Gray’s house, nothing that says psychotic murderer or manipulative crazy person. There is nothing about the house that says anything, and this, I realize, is the secondary reason it seems so sad: it is a house that anyone in anyplace could live in, a house that has remained featureless and indistinct.

  We go up the flagstone path in a line: Brynn first, then Owen, head down, as if moving against a strong wind. Then me. Even though nothing moves, no curtain so much as twitches, as we get closer I have the distinct sense that someone in the house is waiting for us, watching us approach.

  Just before we get to the front porch, Owen wheels around to face me.

  “Listen,” he says, in a low, urgent voice. And I do not love him anymore, because he does not love me, but my heart throws itself into the sky. “Listen,” he repeats. His upper lip is beaded with sweat and even this looks right on him, like his skin is just crystallizing. “I want you to understand something. I’m leaving, okay? I’m leaving Twin Lakes. I’m not coming back. I hate it here. This place—” He breaks off and looks away.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask. I do not love him because he does not love me, and people don’t have the right to break your heart over and over and over.

  Brynn has reached the front porch now.

  “Just listen, okay?” He grabs my shoulders before I can move past him, and I know, I know that something huge is happening, the kind of thing that takes worlds apart and remakes them. Hurricanes and tornadoes and boys with blue eyes. “I applied to NYU—I wanted to go there—partly because . . .”

  “Because why?” I manage to say.

  “I thought you might come too,” he says, in barely a whisper. “I thought if you did, it would be a sign. That we were meant to start over. That we were meant.”

  “But—” It doesn’t make sense. And yet I know he’s telling the truth. I believe. “You told me you didn’t love me anymore.”

  “I learned to stop,” he says, and his voice breaks, and my heart explodes against the sky in cinders and ashes. Fireworks. “I made myself. I had to.”

  “Owen.” I take a breath. “I still—” But before I can finish, before I can say love you, the front door opens with a whine and Brynn freezes where she is, hand outstretched to knock.

  “Oh.” Ms. Gray looks almost relieved. As if she’s been standing there, waiting for us, all this time. “I thought you would come.”

  Inside the house it’s dim and sticky-hot, although several window units are regurgitating air. Maybe that’s why she keeps the lights off and the curtains closed: a single lamp pushes feeble yellow light through a graying lampshade.

  The house looks just as featureless inside as out. It’s very clean, and the wood floors are bare. The furniture is all the do-it-yourself kind made out of painted plywood and cheap plastic. There are no pictures on the walls except for a framed painting of two yellow-haired cherubs cavorting in a sky of puffy pink clouds that looks as if it belongs in a bad diner or a dentist’s office.

  In the living room, Ms. Gray invites us to sit on a couch upholstered in itchy beige. She sits across from us in a fake-leather armchair so stiffly resistant it squeaks under her weight. Possibly no one has ever sat there before.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Her tone is pleasant. She interlaces her fingers on her lap. The woman who taught me the meaning of the word spermicide. God. “I don’t keep soda in the house. But I have lemonade. And water
, of course.”

  “We’re fine,” Brynn says quickly.

  “All right,” she says. “Well, if you change your mind . . .”

  “Ms. Gray.” Owen’s mouth sounds dry. He’s sitting very straight, palms to thighs, and I press my knee hard into his. For boundaries and safety and comfort. “You said you thought we would come. What did you mean?”

  Ms. Gray tilts her head, birdlike. She says in a measured voice, “It’s about Summer, isn’t it? I thought you would come about Summer.”

  I’m surprised that I’m the one who answers. Always in the strangest moments I find I have a voice. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s about Summer.”

  Ms. Gray looks away, toward a window curtained off, reflecting nothing. “I knew,” she says. “When you said you were doing a project for her memorial, I knew. Why would you need to talk to me? You were her best friends. You were more than that.” She looks at Owen and for a brief second her whole face peels back—and beneath it is an expression of such jealousy, such need, that my stomach goes watery and loose and I almost run like I did all those years ago. But then her face closes again and she looks like the same old Ms. Gray. “I knew then,” she says, and she looks down at her hands. “But I guess in some ways I’ve been waiting.”

  “Is that why you didn’t leave Twin Lakes?” Brynn asks.

  “I liked to be close to her,” she says quietly.

  “Tell us what happened,” Owen says. He still hasn’t moved—maybe he can’t move—but he’s gotten it together, doesn’t seem anxious or angry anymore. “When did it start?”

  Ms. Gray looks away again. “You have to understand,” she says after a long pause. “I loved Summer. I saw myself in her. I was raised in the system, too, bounced between homes—” She breaks off. Then: “You don’t understand, can’t understand what it’s like. I was never loved by anyone, I don’t think. I was never even liked, really. If you’re lucky, you’re tolerated. And then you’re supposed to be grateful. Have you ever had a dream where you’ve tried to run and can’t? Tried to yell and can’t? That’s what it’s like. Like . . .” She trails off.