Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

For a second she looks faintly irritated, like the Mia who used to lecture us when Summer and I were supposed to be doing homework and instead were sprawled out on the couch, legs crisscrossed over each other, sharing a computer, competing over who could find the weirdest YouTube clips.

  “How do you think?” she said. “Google.” When she sees I don’t get it, her mouth twists up like she’s just taken a shot of something really gross. “Some blogger did a whole ‘where are they now’ piece for the fifth anniversary.”

  “No way,” I say, and she nods. “That’s fucked.” For a fraction of a second, we’re on the same team again. The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane. Bring out your pitchforks and light up the bonfire.

  Then she ruins it.

  “Look,” she says. She lowers her voice again. “I think I might have found something. . . . I know it sounds crazy, after all this time. . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  She avoids looking at me. “Going back.” Now she’s practically whispering. “We have to go back.”

  “Go where?” I say, even though I know. Maybe, deep down, I have been waiting for this. For her.

  I notice she’s holding something double-wrapped in a thin grocery bag, like raw chicken she’s afraid will contaminate anything it touches. Even before she fully removes the book, I recognize it: the faded green-and-blue cover, the girls huddled together in front of a tree glowing with a secret, as if a burning ember has been placed somewhere between its roots.

  She looks at me then, and says only one word.

  “Lovelorn.”

  Mia’s favorite thing about Lovelorn was the princesses who lived in high towers and sang sad songs about the princes who were supposed to come rescue them. Brynn’s favorite thing was the tournament and the chance to see everyone she hated beheaded.

  And Summer’s favorite thing was the fact that there were no cats, especially no crabby old tabby cats named Bandit, to pee in her shoes and claw her favorite jeans.

  Okay, maybe that wasn’t her favorite thing, but it was awesome.

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

  Mia

  Now

  Brynn loads her duffel bag and slams the trunk—harder than necessary—then climbs into the passenger seat, immediately slumping backward and putting her feet on the dashboard without asking for permission, so her knees are practically at her chest. If Brynn were a dance she’d be something modern, coiled and tight and explosive. A dancer on her knees, but ready to leap, punch, tear down the theater.

  #18. Words that want to be screams.

  “Are you going to drive?” she says.

  Earlier, when Brynn came through the lobby doors, I couldn’t believe it was really her—not because of how much she’d changed, but because she looked the same. It was like my idea of her, my memories, had simply doubled and spat her out a few years older, in a different setting, but unmistakably her: the wild tangle of dark hair, the heavy jaw, the way she walks almost angrily, with her hands curled into fists.

  But now, it’s the changes I notice: the fact that she has stopped biting her nails, which used to be chewed nearly raw; the three studs in her left ear, which used to be unpierced; the small tattoo of an infinity symbol on the inside of her right wrist. She catches me staring at it and tugs down her sleeve.

  She’s a stranger.

  Evidence of the storm is everywhere: roads blocked off because of downed trees or power lines, men and women in waders and hard hats redirecting traffic, detours looping us around and back again so I begin to worry we’ll just end up back at Four Corners. There are a thousand things I’m dying to ask Brynn, a thousand things I want to tell her, too, but the longer the silence drags on, the harder it is to know how to begin. She keeps her nose practically glued to the window, knees up. When I put on the radio, she immediately punches it off.

  Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “You could at least say something. I’m not your chauffeur.” Too late, I realize I sound like a mom.

  “You want me to say something?” She turns to me at last, narrowing her eyes. “Fine. I’ll say something. You’re out of your mind.”

  This is so unexpected, I can’t immediately find my voice. “What?”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she repeats. “Showing up out of nowhere—talking about Lovelorn.” She makes a face, as if the word smells bad. “What were you thinking?”

  I almost say: Excuse me. Didn’t I just pick you up from rehab? I almost say: Which one of us is really crazy? But I don’t.

  #19. Words that stick spiny in your throat, like artichokes.

  I say, “I was thinking you might actually care about what happened that day. I was thinking you might want to help.”

  “Help what?” She puts her legs down, finally. She’s left footprints on the dashboard and doesn’t bother to wipe them off. “It doesn’t matter what happened that day. Don’t you get it? She’s dead. Everyone thinks we did it and they’ll never stop thinking it and that’s the end of that. Move on. Change your name. Get a life.”

  “Oh, because that’s what you did?” In my head, a dancer breaks formation. Rapid frappés, striking the floor. One two three four five. “Were you moving on when you landed in rehab? When you landed in six rehabs?” The words are out of my mouth before I can regret them.

  She mutters something too quietly for me to make out.

  “What?” I say.

  She exhales, rolling her eyes. “I said yeah, actually. I was.” Then she turns back to the window. “It’s called survival of the fittest.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I say sarcastically. “And here I thought you slept through seventh-grade science.”

  She doesn’t bother responding.

  I’m half-tempted to pull the car over and order her out, see how she likes trekking the last however-many miles home to Twin Lakes through a sludge of mud and garbage. It was craziness to think she would help me, to think she would even care. She hasn’t asked me a single thing about Lovelorn, hasn’t even asked me what I found, why I drove two hours through a once-in-a-century storm just to talk to her. All she did at Four Corners was stand there, staring at me like I was a smelly stuffed animal she’d ditched in the local Dumpster—like she couldn’t imagine how I’d crawled back into her life. “Put that thing away,” she’d said, when I’d shown her the book—wincing slightly, as if it pained her. And then: “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m about five minutes away from splitting. And that makes you my ride, so.”

  Then nothing. Just ordered me into the car and told me to wait, like I was a limo service she’d hired to be her getaway.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Somehow I believed that if I could only talk to Brynn, she would make it better—or at least know what to do. I thought the old magic would come back, that special force that bound us together as a unit, that spun the rest of the world off into the distance. Back then, I thought Brynn could handle anything. I truly believed Summer would grow up to be famous.

  I truly believed we were special.

  But maybe the magic, like Lovelorn, never really existed: just another memory to let go.

  As we near Twin Lakes, we have to slow down behind a line of cars waiting to be fed into a single lane. Half the road is blocked off by a police cruiser, and flares fizzle on the road, marking a wide circle around an uprooted tree, roots raised to the sky like the spokes of a gigantic wheel.

  We inch into the left lane, following the instructions of a cop, who gestures us forward. I suck in a quick breath when I see the line of low-rent row houses just past Meers Lane, or what’s left of them, anyway. Whole porches have collapsed; garbage is scattered across the grass. One of the houses—where Pia, my old babysitter, used to live—has a chunk missing from one of its walls, like a giant has taken a bite out of it. I can see straight through into the living room.

  “Holy shit.” Brynn sits up a little in her seat. “Isn’t that where your babysitter used to live? P
ita?”

  “Pia,” I correct her. But the fact that she remembered—that she remembers—makes me suddenly and stupidly happy. She hasn’t totally forgotten.

  “Right. Pia.” Brynn seems more alert now. She leans forward. Farther toward the historic district—a name I’ve never understood, since it’s where all the newest shops are—9A turns into Main Street, and the sprawl of Laundromats and shingle-sided houses becomes instead a tidy collection of cafés, organic restaurants, jewelry stores, and art galleries. At the intersection of Main and Maple, the exact center of downtown Twin Lakes, Brynn whistles. “Damn. Check out Luigi’s. It looks like something exploded.”

  My heart gives another squeeze. Luigi’s is actually now Flatbreads & Co., and has been since we were in fifth grade. Now the big glass windows that belly out onto the street are gone, shattered by winds. One of the tables has made its way out onto the sidewalk, where it’s lying, legs up, like a drowned insect.

  “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” I say. Abby told me Twin Lakes got hit hard—hammered like a frat boy on a Friday were her exact words—but hearing about the damage is different from seeing it.

  “You weren’t here?”

  “I missed the worst of it,” I say. The streetlights at the corner of Main and Maple are down. There’s another cop directing traffic, and yet another long line of cars waiting to turn right. This portion of Main Street is completely blocked off, and we have to reroute down Maple and onto King. The parking lot behind Nooks & Books is still flooded. A Prius is just sitting there in a sludge of dirty water. “I left on Saturday afternoon, before the wind really picked up.” I don’t tell her I spent the night a few miles away from Four Corners, at the Sunshine Motel and Motor Lodge, on sheets that smelled like old cigarettes. I don’t tell her it took me hours this morning just to work up the courage to drive those final 3.6 miles.

  “I can’t believe you drove a car in this.” She turns to stare at me. “I can’t believe your mom let you. Weren’t you scared?”

  “Yeah, well.” I don’t answer directly. And of course, she doesn’t know that my mom is currently 110 miles away, probably sneaking dinner napkins into her purse and collecting junk mail from Aunt Jess’s house, and that she thinks I spent the whole storm safely tucked away in my bedroom. “It was kind of important.”

  Brynn’s still looking at me sideways, like she’s never really seen me before. “We made it all up, you know,” she says in a low voice. “There was never a Lovelorn. Not really. We went crazy.”

  “I know that,” I snap.

  “Crazy,” she repeats, with a funny expression on her face. “And half in love with each other.”

  “You weren’t in love with me,” I say. “You were in love with Summer.”

  I regret the words as soon as they’re out of my mouth. #31. Words like shrapnel: they get inside before they explode. For a split second, she recoils, as if I’ve slapped her. I see her spotlighted on a stage, on her knees, a small, coiled ball of fury.

  Then she leaps. She’s out of the car even before I’ve stopped moving. I jerk to a stop. The trunk is already open. The bag is in her hand. By the time I get the window down and call her name, she’s gone.

  Mia

  Then

  The first time we went to Lovelorn, it was raining.

  This was late June, a few weeks after the end of sixth grade, and I shouldn’t have been home. I was supposed to be at ballet camp in Saratoga Springs, New York, bunking up with other dance nerds and spending my mornings perfecting my pas de bourrée and trying not to be hungry and generally getting as far as possible from my parents, who had been in a four-month competition to see who could be angrier.

  But two weeks earlier, during our stupid end-of-school field day, Noah Lee shoved into me from behind and down I went, hard, on my left ankle. Summer told me afterward that even my fall was dramatic and graceful. Brynn said she wished she’d been filming for YouTube.

  So: I had a sprained ankle and no summer plans.

  We’d played at Lovelorn plenty of times since September of sixth grade, when Summer had first moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Ball, a couple with four grown children of their own who had for unknown reasons decided to foster a child late in life—largely, Summer thought, for the cash they got from the government.

  Plus Mr. Balls—that’s what Summer called him—needed someone new to order around.

  Brynn and I weren’t even friends before Summer came along. Summer had slid suddenly and effortlessly into our orbit, bringing Brynn and me into alignment, like the gravitational center of a very small universe.

  We were on the same bus route. Our whole friendship, and everything that happened, can be traced back to that dumb yellow bus that always smelled like the inside of a Cheetos bag. Mr. Haggard, our bus driver, had a weird comb-over and was always singing show tunes and joking that he should have been on Broadway. Brynn liked to say that school was just a big sanity test to see who would crack first, and on that bus, it was easy to believe that.

  For years, Brynn and I sat separately in the very back, sometimes leaving a few rows of seats between us, sometimes directly across the aisle from each other, without ever once speaking. And then one day Summer appeared, wearing cutoff shorts and men’s suspenders over a flimsy Coca-Cola T-shirt, and she slipped between us—sitting right next to me, legs up, little blond hairs growing over her knees—and started talking to us as if we’d chosen to sit there deliberately and not because it was far away from everybody else. As if we were already friends.

  From then on, we were.

  Summer was the one who introduced us to the book. She had the whole thing practically memorized. She’d been toting it around from foster home to foster home and always said it was the only thing she owned that truly belonged to her and wasn’t borrowed or stolen.

  By June we’d played at being the three original girls plenty of times. Sometimes one of us would sub in as a different character—Gregor the Dwarf, or one of the Sad Princesses who lived in the Towers. Brynn loved to play Firth, a centaur thief who’d stolen one of the princesses’ hearts and bartered it for his own freedom, only later realizing he’d cursed himself to a loveless life. Summer often switched characters halfway through the game, declaring that she was both Audrey and the nymph conscripted by the Shadow to steal Audrey away, and we never questioned her, because she knew the book better than we did and because she played all the characters so well, really hamming it up and making us believe. That’s one of the things I loved about her: she wasn’t afraid to look like an idiot.

  She wasn’t afraid, period.

  That day, the day in early summer when Lovelorn turned real, we had to go slower because of my ankle. Summer and Brynn leapt over the creek and then helped me across, and we pretended we’d forded the Black Hart River. We fought through the long field filled with cattails and spider grass, pretending that we were on the road to the dwarfs’ village in the Taralin Woods.

  Maybe it’s just because of what happened next, but I remember feeling then a kind of magic coming to me on the wind. The trees lifted and lowered their great green hands and then fell still. The birds went quiet. Summer and Brynn were already far ahead of me, laughing about something, and I stopped, suddenly struck by the strange wonder of the sky, a sweep of golden sun and dark clouds and the whole world gone quiet as though waiting for something.

  Lovelorn, I remember thinking. And even though it made no sense, a thrill went through me, a certainty that made me feel breathless. This is it. We’re really here.

  Then the rain came. It swept in out of nowhere, the way summer storms do, throwing the trees into a frenzy again. Summer’s house was the closest, but Mr. Ball didn’t like her to have friends over—and besides, the whole place was dark and smelled like old-man breath.

  We were soaked within seconds. My jeans felt like they were trying to suck the skin off my thighs.

  “The shed!” Summer yelled, reaching out and seizing Brynn’s hand. Everything felt
so urgent then. “Make for the shed!”

  In the spring we’d found an old equipment shed that had at one point belonged to a farmhouse that had been torn down to make room for a whole bunch of double-wides and rent-by-the-week cottages like the kind Summer lived in with the Balls. We’d been to the shed plenty of times, although I was too afraid of spiders to stand inside for more than a few minutes. The shed had a plank floor and smelled like it was rotting. The single window was so coated in dust, even in midday the room was practically pitch-black, and it was piled with rusted tools that looked like parts of human anatomy, arms and fingers and teeth.

  Brynn and Summer went dashing off, and I remember seeing the outline of their bras through their T-shirts and being jealous because I had nothing but bug-bite nipples and an occasional achy feeling. I was annoyed, too, because I couldn’t keep up and even though I kept shouting for them to wait, they wouldn’t. They were always doing things like that—ducking into the bathroom to whisper about something and shutting the door in my face, or raising their eyebrows when I complained that Mr. Anderson was too hard and then bursting into laughter. “That’s okay, Mia,” Summer would say, patting my head as if she were a thousand years older than I was. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  They disappeared into the shed. By the time I caught up, the door had swung closed again. It was swollen and warped with age and I had trouble getting it open. For a second I thought they were going to leave me outside, in the rain, as a joke. I started pounding on the door and shouting, and finally it swung open.

  They hadn’t even heard me. They were standing in the middle of the room, water pooling beneath their feet, dripping from their hair and clothing. I remember how quiet it was when I shut the door, and the rain was nothing but a dull drumming on the walls and roof.

  The shed was clean swept and smelled like scented vanilla candles. All the old tools were gone. All the spiderwebs, too.

  The walls were papered with old-fashioned floral wallpaper, cream with pretty bouquets of roses, and a green braided area rug muffled the sound of our footsteps. In one corner was a small cot covered with a patterned quilt. Next to it was a wooden bedside table and a battery-powered lantern designed to look like candlelight. The windowpanes had been scrubbed mostly clear, although a few webbed bits of mold remained in the corners. There was even a mason jar filled with tiny wild violets.