“So what, you’re back now?” I don’t care if I sound rude. First Mia, and now Owen, all in the same day. The whole point of the past is it’s supposed to actually, you know, pass.
Owen just shrugs. “We’re selling the house,” he says. “To be honest, I’m not sure why we’ve hung on to it so long. My dad’s away on a business trip. I came back to help him get everything in order. But now . . .” He gestures to the tree, still poking its arms up through the wreckage, like a drowning person waving for help. “On the plus side, now you can walk straight from the kitchen into the garden. No need to use a door. I keep telling my dad we should put that in the real estate brochure.”
Something hard yanks at my stomach again. I forgot Owen was funny. I forgot so many things, like the way Mia chews the inside of her lip when she’s nervous, gnawing on it like a corncob. I didn’t want to remember.
“Sucks,” I say, and turn away from him, suddenly exhausted.
“Hey!” Owen calls me back. Now he looks hurt, and also surprised, like a middle schooler at a social who was just sure his crush was going to ask him to dance. “I haven’t seen you—I mean, it’s been years. How are you? How have you been?”
This seems like such a stupid question that for a second I just stare at him.
“Oh, I’ve been great.” Apparently he doesn’t pick up on my sarcasm, because he starts nodding really fast, like his chin is set to overdrive. “Flipping fantastic. I graduated.” I don’t know why I lie. It just slips out.
“That’s great, Brynn,” he says. “That’s really great.”
“Yup. With honors. And a varsity frigging cheerleading jacket. Now I’m going to Harvard on a full ride. I wrote an essay called ‘The Girl Behind the Monster.’ It won a prize.”
His smile fades.
Now that I’m on a roll, I can’t stop. “Every year the town throws me a parade. You should come down next time. There’s even popcorn.”
He looks so sorry that I almost—almost—feel bad. “Things are still shitty, huh?” he says quietly.
“Never stopped,” I say.
Once again, he calls out to me when I turn to leave. “Brynn!”
“What?” I spin around, no longer even pretending to be friendly.
Owen comes across the lawn slowly, like he’s worried I’ll startle and run if he gets too close. There’s something scary about Owen, even now that he’s dressed normally and has graduated and has a kind-of-cute accent—something intense and airless, like the pull of a black hole. And the thought comes back to me, as always: just because they couldn’t nail him doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.
“I wanted to ask about . . .” He trails off, looking away, squinting into the sun. “I mean, is Mia still around?”
Just like that, I feel a rush of hatred, strong and dark, like a mudslide. “You know what, Owen?” I say. “Leave Mia alone. Do us a favor, and leave both of us alone.”
Then I turn around again and stomp into the woods. This time, he doesn’t call me back.
All the dwarfs were crying, but none so hard as Gregor—he would never forget how the three girls had saved his sister from being taken by the Shadow.
“Please come back,” he said. “Please don’t forget us.”
“Of course we’ll come back,” said Ava stoutly.
“How could we ever forget you?” said Ashleigh loyally.
“We’ll always be with you,” said Audrey kindly, pointing to her heart. “In here.”
“But—what will happen to you?” he cried.
That was, indeed, the question. What would happen to them? What would happen to Lovelorn, to the doors in and out? And yet they had to go home. They had to move forward. Because if not, then
—The controversial last page of The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells
Mia
Now
“I don’t know about this,” Abby says, gripping a birch tree around the trunk and sliding backward down into the creek bed. “This feels suspiciously like exercise.”
“We’re almost there,” I tell her. “Besides, the water feels good.”
Abby stares skeptically at the creek, which, after the most recent rains, is now pummeling and frothing across a pathway of small rocks, forming little white eddies, and then wiggles awkwardly out of her flip-flops.
“Have you ever noticed,” she said, “that people don’t feel the need to endorse things that actually feel good? Sleep in, it feels good! Finish those nachos, it’ll feel good! Only things that cause physical discomfort need the extra advertising dollars.”
“Don’t be a baby,” I say. She wades into the water and squeals.
“See?” I say, when she makes it to the other side of the creek, gripping her flip-flops in one hand, and hauls herself up the bank. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“Compared to what, the Inquisition?” She swats at a mosquito with a flip-flop. “Most people celebrate the Fourth of July the American way—by sitting on their ass. Where’s your sense of patriotism?”
“Fresh out,” I say, reaching over to squeeze her shoulder. She grumbles something that sounds a lot like evil.
It’s Monday morning, ten a.m., and I’m doing something I’ve never done before, something I swore I would never do: I’m going back to Lovelorn, and I’m taking a stranger with me.
But of course, as Brynn was quick to point out, there is no Lovelorn, and so the rules don’t matter. There is no ancient magic, nothing but a big stretch of woods that gobbles up the hills and the houses, and an old supply shed. Still, as Abby and I fight our way up the mud-slicked bank and start across the meadow, I can’t help but feel excited. Butterflies zip through the trees and insects chitter.
“So this is where it happened?” Abby breaks the silence. Today she’s wearing a short black skirt, thick black-framed glasses, a white T-shirt that says Save a Horse, Ride a Unicorn, and a knotted necktie. Harry Potter–punk, she calls her style.
“Where what happened?” My voice sounds loud in the thin morning air.
“Where Summer’s body was found,” Abby says bluntly, the way she would if she were talking to anybody else.
“Not here,” I say. “In the long field. I’ll show you.” Weirdly, I’ve never actually spoken about the way her body was found—only what came afterward, and where I’d been.
Soon the trees run out at a long, rectangular meadow, a place mysteriously devoid of trees that we named the long field years ago. I point to a line of thick pine trees, through which I can just make out the roof of the old supply shed. “The police think she was killed over there. There was evidence she ran. Someone hit her on the back of the head with a rock. Then she was dragged.”
Standing here in the sun, it all seems so surreal, like I’m only narrating a story I once heard. Birds swoop over the field, bright blurs of color, sending their shadows skimming over the grass.
Abby squints at me. “You okay?”
“Yes.” I close my eyes for a second and say a quick prayer to Summer, if she’s out there, if she’s listening. Tell me, are the only words that come. Tell me what happened.
A bird cackles somewhere in the trees. I open my eyes again.
We keep going. Halfway across the field we come across a circle carved out of the underbrush, as if a giant cookie cutter has removed a portion of the meadow. A large wooden cross is staked in the ground. On it, someone has written in purple marker: 5 years later . . . we will never forget you. Amazing how many people claimed to love Summer after she died, even people who didn’t care at all when she was alive.
Next to the cross is a beautiful flower arrangement, red and white roses interlinked in the pattern of an enormous heart. It must have cost three, four hundred dollars. Curious, I bend down to look at the card. There’s no signature, only a quote from the Bible.
I read it out loud. “‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me.’” I look at Abby. “It’s a psalm.”
“Hmm.” Abby f
rowns. “I’ll stay on the hill of the brightly lit land of happy, thanks.”
“The Bible was written, like, two thousand years ago,” I say, standing up. “They didn’t do happy back then.”
“Probably because they didn’t have Wi-Fi.”
We keep going, passing once again into the shadow of the trees. The shed is even smaller than I remember it, but otherwise looks the same, except for a flimsy chain lock cinched like a belt across it. Funny that the shed never got much attention from the police or the press, despite all the time we spent lying on the braided rug, giggling, playing music on our phones, or just talking about nothing. We never knew how to talk about what had happened: how Lovelorn had materialized overnight.
And how it vanished.
A few months before Summer died, Brynn and I went to Lovelorn without her. It must have been right after the spring dance, because neither of us was talking to Summer, and I remember how badly my throat hurt whenever I tried to swallow, as if days of crying had left it bruised. I’d missed four ballet classes in a row—my teacher, Madame Laroche, had even called the house to see if I was sick.
I was. Just not in the way she thought. I’d always thought heartbreak was beautiful, like the adagio in Swan Lake: a kind of graceful withering. But this just felt as if I’d been gutted and bled, my insides lifted clean away.
We’d never been to Lovelorn just Brynn and me. I didn’t feel like going. But Brynn thought it would be a good idea.
“She can’t take everything,” she said, seizing my hand and practically hauling me off the bus. I knew she wasn’t just angry at me. Something else had happened, something between Brynn and Summer, but I didn’t know why or exactly what: only that people had begun to whisper about Brynn liking girls, and several girls had refused to change next to her before gym class. People were saying that Brynn was obsessed with Summer, and that Summer had caught Brynn staring into her window at night. The worst part was that Summer wasn’t denying it. “She can’t just take everything you want.”
It was a raw, cold day, more like March than April. We stomped across the fields in silence, both of us miserable and half-frozen, jackets flapping open, breath steaming in the air. Brynn was first through the door and I’ll never forget the way she cried out—half gasping, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The wallpaper was gone. The rug, the cot, the blanket, the lantern—gone. The shed had the same whitewashed walls as always, the same rough-hewn plank floors, the same random assortment of dusty farming equipment piled in the corners and tacked to the walls.
It was as if Lovelorn had never existed.
Of course, I know now that it never had.
Still, a small, buried part of me believes. It was there. We saw it.
“Check it out.” Abby reaches for the lock, showing me that it’s actually been snapped, then rehung and stuck together with a disgusting combination of a hair tie and chewing gum. From a distance of even a few feet, you’d never be able to tell it was broken. “Looks like someone beat us to it.” Her voice is still cheerful, but I can tell from the way she palms her hands on her skirt that she’s nervous.
“Probably some sicko taking pictures for his blog,” I say. I’ve made it this far. No way I’m turning around now.
Tell me. The prayer comes now even without my willing it to. Tell me what really happened, Summer.
The door shudders on its hinges when I shove it open. I take a deep breath, like I’m about to submerge, and practically throw myself over the threshold.
I scream when I trip over a body.
Almost immediately, the body, bundled underneath a pile of old clothing, starts to wriggle and move. Now Abby begins shouting “It’s alive,” like it’s some old-school horror film, and then a head emerges from beneath the hood of a sweatshirt.
“Brynn?” I can barely choke out her name.
“What the hell?” She’s on her feet in an instant, shaking off the old clothing like a snake molting its skin. But one sock still clings to her sweatshirt, just by her left shoulder. “Are you following me?”
“Following you?” I stare at her. She’s wearing the same outfit she was wearing yesterday, when she bolted out of my car. A faded hoodie over a T-shirt, jeans with a big hole, right in the crotch, patched with something that looks like a dinner napkin. “Of course not.”
“Then why are you here?” When Brynn’s really mad, her lips get totally white and very thin, as if they’ve been zipped together. She jerks her head in Abby’s direction. “And who’s she?”
Abby raises a hand. “Name’s Abby,” she says. “Resident sidekick.” When Brynn and I just keep glaring at each other, she says, “Old friends, I presume?”
“Can I talk to you outside?” Brynn says to me, practically growling. “Alone?”
She grabs my elbow and pilots me outside, kicking the door closed forcefully, sealing Abby inside. I start to protest, but she cuts me off.
“So what is this, your sick idea of a good time?” she says. “Relive the glory days?”
“Excuse me.” I pull away from her. “I’m not the one sleeping in the old clubhouse.”
“It’s a shed,” she spits back. “It isn’t a clubhouse. It isn’t anything.” She turns away. “Besides, I didn’t have a choice.” When she turns back to me, her eyes are practically black. “My mom was in an accident last night. My sister took her to the hospital. They forgot to leave a key for me.”
Immediately, my anger lifts. “Oh my God.” I reach out to touch her arm and then think better of it. “Is she okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” she says angrily, as if she’s annoyed at me for asking. “Now it’s your turn. What the hell are you doing here?”
I count to three this time. “Someone else knew about Lovelorn. Someone else was writing about it. And I want to know who.”
She stares at me, openmouthed. It occurs to me for the first time how pretty Brynn is, how pretty she’s always been. Even with her hair wild and dirty and tangled down her back, and the crisscross marks from where her cheek has been pressed into something made of corduroy, she’s beautiful. Maybe I didn’t notice it before because of Summer—when she was around, it was impossible to see anyone else. Like the sun, just drowning all the stars in light, evaporating them.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she says at last.
It’s not until then that the hugeness of it hits me—all this time, there was someone else. Someone who knew about Lovelorn, someone who was there in the woods that day, watching. Of course, it seems obvious now. Otherwise there’s no way to explain Summer’s murder at all. Otherwise the Shadow came to life, and reached out of our story, and took her.
Either that, or Owen did it.
But the police interviewed everyone they could think of, anyone who’d been seen with Summer, spoken to her, had contact with her day-to-day. They talked to her teachers. They had Jake Ginsky into the station three times, even though he had an alibi: he was playing video games with the other freshmen on the varsity football team. They even searched the Balls’ house, while Mr. Ball stood outside screaming curses about police incompetence, wearing knee-high black socks and boxer shorts that made him look just like the child molester everyone whispered he might be.
And they kept coming back to us. To Brynn, Owen, and me.
But what if the answer wasn’t in testimony and eyewitness accounts and alibis? What if the answer was in the book all along?
“Let me explain something to you, Mia,” Brynn says, in a low voice, like she’s talking to a child. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, okay? What you’re looking for doesn’t exist. There was never any clubhouse. There were never any signs from the otherworld or strangers who wanted a sacrifice or any of that. We made it all up, every last bit of it. We were bored, we were deviant, we were in love, we were out of our fucking minds—”
“Guys?” Abby pokes her head out the door, and Brynn whirls around, inhaling the remainder of her sentence. “Check this out. I
think I found something.”
“What if we never went back?” Ava asked one day, when she, Ashleigh, and Audrey were all lying together on the banks of the Black Hart River, watching bees drone around flowers as large as fists. Both Ashleigh and Audrey turned to her in surprise.
“What do you mean?” Ashleigh said.
“Just what I said.” Ava reached out to pluck a flower and began removing the petals, one by one. “Why not just stay in Lovelorn?”
—From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells
Brynn
Now
Inside, my duffel bag is open and all my clothing is scattered like guts across the floor. I catch Mia staring at a pair of my underwear—polka dots, a gift from my mom—and shoot her a dirty look.
“Is there a problem?” I say.
She opens her mouth, closes it again, and shakes her head.
I bend down and grab a fistful of clothing, shoving it back into my bag. Screw Mia and her little white sundress and big sunglasses that probably cost a hundred bucks and her kooky-looking tagalong best friend. My back aches from sleeping on the hard floor, and there’s a foul taste in my mouth. I need to brush my teeth.
Mia’s friend—Abby—is already wading into the junk that has accumulated over the years. She moves aside a large sheet of corrugated metal, barely clearing an old car battery. “You said the cops cleaned out the shed after the murder?”
The way she says murder so casually makes me wince. “Pretty much,” I say. “They were looking for proof that we’d been holed up doing devil worship and murdering cats.”
“Were you?” Abby asks. I scowl at her and she shrugs. “Well, someone’s obviously using it again,” she says, gesturing to the piles of old crap. “Who does the shed belong to?”
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