Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “Like being a shadow,” I say, and she smiles a nice normal teacher smile, like I got the right answer on a quiz.

  “Summer was having trouble in school. The reading and writing especially. I offered to help.” She glances at me sideways, and I think of her telling us so casually at TLC that Owen was tutoring Summer. Still clinging to her lies. Still trying to protect herself. The hatred blooming inside me feels toxic, like one of those red tides that stifles everything alive.

  “What a sweet little setup,” Brynn says. “You knew she wouldn’t tell anyone. She’d be too embarrassed.”

  “No,” Ms. Gray says quickly, turning to Brynn. “I didn’t plan it. I swear. She told me about Lovelorn, and how she’d always wanted to write a sequel. But she was shy, you know, about her writing. I just offered to help.”

  “Bullshit,” Owen says. Still calm, still casual, not the wildfire boy who moved but a boy I don’t know, a boy I really, really want to know. Not memory and story but fact and now and real. “You thought it would be easy to put the blame on us.”

  “You’re not listening.” Ms. Gray looks upset for the first time. “I’m telling you—I didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t want it to happen.”

  “You took the gas can,” Owen says. “You left it behind my house.”

  Ms. Gray touches a hand to her forehead, and for a second I think she’s going to cross herself, but she lets the hand drop. “That was afterward,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. And I figured that’s where she’d gotten them. You were the only thing she could talk about, in the end. Owen, Owen, Owen. She knew you didn’t really care about her, you know. She knew there was someone else.” Her eyes slide to mine and I have to look away. “Besides, she had your sweater. She’d forgotten it at my house the day before. We’d had a fight. . . .”

  Why? I want to ask. Why was she in your house at all, removing her sweater, removing any of her clothing? But I can’t bear to hear the answer said aloud.

  “My sweater?” Owen repeats.

  Brynn shakes her head. “She wasn’t wearing a sweater.”

  “I put it over her,” Ms. Gray said. “It was ugly. Dark brown and stained. But it was better than nothing. I was worried, you know, that she’d be cold at night.” She says this matter-of-factly, as if there’s nothing weird at all about stabbing someone seven times and then worrying about how cold she’ll be.

  Owen closes his eyes. “The blood,” he says, and then opens his eyes again. “The blood on the sweater. You remember how bad my nosebleeds were. She must have taken a sweater without asking. No wonder the DNA was a match. She was wearing my sweater.”

  Ms. Gray leans forward, patient but also emphatic, making a point. She teaches kids. That’s what occurs to me. She still teaches kids every day. The sick thing is she’s really good at it. “Summer loved Lovelorn. You have no idea—none of you have any idea—what she’d already been through. You couldn’t know. She didn’t want you to feel sorry for her. I was the same way. Lovelorn was her escape.” Ms. Gray’s eyes are so bright that for a second it’s like seeing Summer’s ghost there. C’mon, guys. Lovelorn calls. “It was her safe place.”

  “It was a story.” Now Brynn speaks up, and Ms. Gray turns to her, frowning. “It was a story and she wanted it to end.”

  Ms. Gray shakes her head. “She started changing. Cutting school. Smoking pot. I heard rumors about what she was getting into. After what I’d done for her—”

  “You cleaned up the shed,” I say.

  “I did it for her,” she says. “For all of you. To make Lovelorn real.”

  “You killed those birds, too,” Brynn says, and she brings a finger to the dark tattoo on her wrist, maybe unconsciously. “You killed them and stuck them on a stake and left them where you knew we would find them.”

  Those birds: frozen stiff with blood, beaks to the sky, one of them still flapping out its last life. We’d had lasagna for lunch that day, and I remember how it tasted coming up, the vivid orange in the snow.

  And suddenly I have another memory—something I must have forgotten—of a time when Ryan Castro thought it would be funny to try to make me talk by spitting on me in the hall, to get me to fight back. This was before Summer and I were even friends—she was still the new girl with boobs who dressed weird—but she walked straight up to him and put an elbow to his neck and said, I’ll kill you. And afterward she told everyone I didn’t talk only because I didn’t talk to idiots.

  This is the problem with words and even stories: there is never one truth. Summer was awful. We hated her. And she was magical, too, and it was our job to protect her, and we failed.

  “It was just a warning,” Ms. Gray says. “She shouldn’t have been doing what she was doing—it wasn’t right. It wasn’t good for her. I was protecting her.”

  “You were hurting her,” I say. And this I know, too. I understand it instinctively, without wanting to understand it, without wanting to think about it. “She trusted you, and you hurt her.” Who knows how it started—little touches on the knee, long hugs, a kiss on the forehead. And Summer, beautiful, crazy, screwed-up Summer, who once sat in my room with an old pair of scissors over her wrist, saying swear, swear you love me—who didn’t know what love looked like unless it was hurt, too—she might have believed it. She would have believed it, like Brynn believed that she couldn’t come home and my mom believed she could rebuild her life shoebox by coupon by envelope and I believed in an Owen who didn’t exist.

  Did Summer know the difference anymore, at the end, between what was real and what wasn’t? I remember how she looked on that final day, when we came over the hill and saw her in the long field: like an angel who’d been pinned to the ground only temporarily, like someone not meant to stay. She believed by then, really and truly. In the book, in the Shadow, in the sacrifice.

  Or maybe even that story was better than what was really happening, what she didn’t know how to stop.

  “I loved her,” Ms. Gray says quietly. “I want you to know that. I loved her more than anything.”

  Brynn is shaking a little when she stands. “You didn’t love her,” she says. “You don’t even know what that word means.”

  “You’re wrong,” Ms. Gray says. She looks strangely small, collapsed inside her clothing. “That’s why I did it. She was trying to leave me. She was so confused. That’s what we were fighting about, the day before she died.” Not: the day before I killed her. The day before she died. As if it was all an accident. As if Summer ran against the knife herself, all seven times. “When she didn’t answer my call, I set out to find her. I knew she must have gone to Lovelorn. But when I saw what she was doing . . .” Her voice breaks, and for a moment she looks close to tears. “The knife and the gas can and that cat. The Sacrifice meant to keep away the Shadow. Meant to keep me away. She was—she was scared of me.” She shakes her head, as if still this idea makes no sense to her. “Scared of me. I just wanted her to stop running. I wanted her to listen. And then I thought . . .” She squints, like someone trying to puzzle out how to explain a math problem. “She was so troubled, you know. She wouldn’t have ended up well. I thought she could stay in Lovelorn.”

  When Owen stands, he puts a hand on my back to draw me up with him. I’m glad. I can’t even feel my legs anymore. I’m filled with the strangest sense of relief and loss, like finally giving up on something you were reaching for.

  “We’re going to have to go to the police, Ms. Gray,” Owen says, very politely and formally. And then: “Please wait for them to come. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Again she squints up at us. She has a face that you’d forget five minutes after looking at it. Is that why we didn’t see?

  “I won’t go anywhere.” She spreads her hands. “Like I said, I’ve been waiting . . . and I’ve accepted what’s right, anyway.”

  We shouldn’t leave, I know. We should call the police and sit and wait and make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. But we need out. Out, out, out: into air, out
of the heat, away from Ms. Gray and the story of love that looks like bleeding.

  But I turn around before we get to the door because suddenly I get it, I see all of it—all of Summer, all of who she was and who she was trying to be and who she could have become; but also, for the first time ever, I understand Lovelorn and why Georgia Wells ended the book the way that she did. That broken sentence we puzzled over, all of our theories about sudden shock or writers’ block or sequels to come, they were all wrong: she was leaving the story unfinished because that’s the point of stories and their power: that the endings are still unfolding.

  “She was a kid,” I say, and the words seem to come from someone and somewhere else. “She was troubled. But you don’t know what would have happened to her and what she would have been. How can you know? You took her story away. You ended it before she had a chance.”

  “I saved her,” Ms. Gray whispers.

  “That’s just your story,” I say, and push out into the sunshine where I can breathe again.

  Brynn

  Now

  Here is how it ends: halfway back to the car a whispery voice in the back of my head speaks up—a voice telling me there’s something I’ve forgotten, something Ms. Gray said.

  “Oh my God.” I stop. All at once I know what Ms. Gray meant when she said she had accepted what was right.

  Mia and Owen have been walking close together, heads bowed, like people on their way back from a funeral. They both turn around together.

  “What?” Mia says. Her eyes are scrubby from crying.

  “Lovelorn,” I say. Not just words—a message. A secret code. “It’s a quote from Lovelorn. It’s what the sacrifices say, just before the Shadow takes them.”

  Mia shakes her head. “What do you mean?”

  But I’m already sprinting back, the pavement walloping the soles of my shoes, knees ringing, because even though she deserves it and a part of me wishes for it, I am not a broken thing after all, and not a monster, and so my instinct is to run—and I’m almost there, I almost reach the door, and my heart is beating so hard that when the gun goes off I almost, almost don’t hear it.

  Audrey, Ava, and Ashleigh were much older by the time they found Lovelorn again, and by then they’d been dreaming of returning for a long time.

  They walked into the woods, hands interlinked, though it had been years and years since they’d seen each other, waiting for the magic feeling, the spine-tingly anticipation, waiting for the world to shimmer and change. But after a while they had to admit there was nothing left in the woods but the woods.

  “What happened?” Audrey asked. “Where did Lovelorn go?”

  Ava checked the time. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m having dinner with my family.”

  Ashleigh agreed. “We can come back and look again tomorrow.”

  But tomorrow came and they didn’t come back, and the tomorrow after that, too. They never did go back in those woods and look again, partly because they knew they’d be disappointed, but also because they were busy now, with lives and friends and families of their own, and it just didn’t seem so important anymore. Gregor the Dwarf had told them once before that there was magic in all different kinds of things, and maybe that’s what he meant.

  —From the final chapter of End of Lovelorn by Brynn McNally and Mia Ferguson

  Mia

  Now

  When people talk about New York City, they usually talk about the size of it: the height of the buildings and the endless rivers of people flowing in narrow channels between them, the way I used to have to squeeze through the Piles before the Piles were vanquished. But what really strikes me is the sound—a constant hum of traffic and footsteps and phones ringing and kids squealing and someone, always, cursing at someone else. Even here, standing in the middle of Washington Square Park, there’s the rattle of skateboards on pavement and a college boy playing guitar with his friends and protesters chanting about inequality.

  Since I arrived in New York yesterday, it’s like my voice is in a rush to join all the other voices, all the other sounds: I haven’t talked so freely or so much in my whole life. Somehow, it feels so much easier to speak when everyone else is fighting to be heard, too.

  I love it.

  “So?” Dad looks like he stepped out of an ad for Urban Tourism. He has a camera looped around his neck and a fanny pack—an actual fanny pack—around his waist. Every time we’ve gone on the subway he keeps a hand around his wallet. Never know in these big cities, he keeps saying, as if he’s hoping he can subtly persuade me to go to college in southern Vermont. “What do you think?”

  “I like it,” I say carefully. And then: “You know what, actually? I love it.”

  To his credit, Dad manages to avoid looking totally freaked out. He pats my shoulder awkwardly. “I’m glad, honey.” Then: “And I’m sure if I just sell my house, car, and business—”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

  “And you take a job at the Seaport slinging tuna—”

  “Dad. You’re thinking of Seattle.”

  “We might have enough money for the first semester of tuition.” But he’s smiling, and a second later he draws me into a hug. “I’m proud of you, honey,” he says, into the top of my head, which for him is a major, huge confession of love.

  “I know, Dad.” As I pull away, my heart stops: he’s here. Even though we’ve been texting or talking or messaging almost every day, seeing him is different: Owen, coming toward us, beaming, his hair longer and wilder than ever and his cowlick straight in the air like an exclamation point. The strangest and most beautiful boy in the city. Maybe in the world.

  “Mr. Ferguson,” he says, out of breath, as if he’s been running. He barely looks at my dad when they shake hands. He’s just staring at me, grinning. “Mia.”

  “Owen.” Since August, when I last saw him, he’s grown another inch. He’s wearing a navy-blue scarf and a jacket with leather patches at the elbows and he looks older, somehow, like he’s filling space differently, like he belongs.

  This is something I understand now. This is the miracle—of other people, of the whole world, of the mystery of it. That things change. That people grow. That stories can be rewritten over and over, demons recast as heroes, and tragedies as grace. That Owen can never be mine, not really, and that is a good thing, because it means I can truly love him. That love often looks a lot like letting go.

  The real crime is always in the endings. Georgia Wells knew that.

  If Summer had lived, she might have learned that too.

  “Nine o’clock,” Dad says, giving Owen a stern mind-your-manners look he must have been holding on to for the past seventeen years. Then he turns to me. “You can find your way back to the hotel?”

  “Yes, Dad,” I say.

  “I’ll get her back safely,” Owen says, still with that smile that could power half a city block. Funny that as a kid he wore so much black. He’s all color now, all sparkle, like a rainbow in boy form.

  “Nine o’clock,” my father repeats, adding in a finger waggle. “Love you, Mia.”

  “Love you too, Dad,” I say. Thanks to our sessions with Dr. Leblanc, it’s all love all the time. It was as if for five years we were locked in the same holding pattern, circling around the things we wanted to say. But when Ms. Gray committed suicide, we had permission to land.

  “So?” Owen doesn’t hold my hand, but we walk so close he might as well be touching me. And I think of a lift: held by him, weightless, soaring. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I promised I’d get Abby a souvenir,” I say. “Ugliest one I could find. I should get something for Brynn, too.”

  Owen and I walk together down to Canal Street, and he tells me about his courses and his professors and the boy who lives on Owen’s floor who runs an illegal gambling den from his room. He tells me about New York and how it opens like an origami figure, showing more dimensions every day, more hidden restaurants and art galleries, more tucked-away stores and more people, a
lways more people, all of them with stories.

  In Chinatown I find a horrible T-shirt for Abby with actual working lightbulbs sewn across the chest. For Brynn I pick out a black sweatshirt with a headbanging skunk on the front. I give Owen the updates because he asks: Brynn is enrolled in a special school and gets extra help from Ms. Pinner, who still homeschools Abby; she’s picked up volleyball and has proven unsurprisingly skilled at spiking the ball at other players’ heads. Wade and I went together to a game one time he was home from BU on break, and we both agreed: Brynn was born to hit things.

  I’ve gone back to St. Mary’s, just for the year, because I was told it would help my chances of getting into NYU. The first few weeks were bad. Not bad like the first time—now, since the news of Ms. Gray got out, and the police found proof on her computer, pictures, emails—we’ve gotten famous again. But this time as the victims—victims of small-town prejudice, cruel injustice, police incompetence, you name it. Before, everyone acted as if I had a contagious disease. Now people want to be my friend just to prove something.

  But after a few weeks, when it turned out I didn’t have much to say about what happened this summer or five years ago, when it turned out I was kind of quiet and nerdy and not very interesting, most people just started ignoring me.

  For dinner, Owen takes me to an amazing underground pizza restaurant with some of his friends. It’s so loud everyone has to yell to be heard, and I amaze myself by yelling, too. Occasionally, Owen leans in to tell me about the people at the table.

  “That’s Ragner—the one I was telling you about—he grew up on a legit commune in upstate New York because his parents were protesting the modern emphasis on consumerism—but they got tired of it and now his dad owns a hedge fund—