Broken Things

by Lauren Oliver

  “Yeah. And now you owe us.” Brynn reaches into the backseat, swiping a Kit Kat bar from Abby. She rips off the corner of the package with her teeth. “We came to collect.”

  Owen’s face changes. “What do you mean?”

  “Mia didn’t tell you?” Brynn says, turning to me now. Her voice is light, but I can tell she’s trying to telegraph a warning through her eyes. Don’t fall for him again. Don’t be stupid. Don’t. Don’t.

  “I didn’t get to it,” I say to her, which falls under #23: Lying by not saying what you truly mean. Secretly I know I haven’t asked for one reason and one reason only: because I’m afraid of the answer.

  “Mia and Brynn are on the hunt for a killer,” Abby says, in a movie-announcer voice. She’s struggling with a bag of potato chips. She doesn’t seem to notice that instantly, everything goes quiet, except for the crinkle-crinkle of the bag.

  “I thought Brynn thought I was the killer,” Owen says.

  “So convince me otherwise.” Brynn shrugs, like they could be talking about any stupid argument, about a movie or a new sandwich place.

  Owen turns to me after what seems like forever. “Mia?”

  I swallow back the urge to apologize. “You told me you did a favor for Summer.” The words come slowly, haltingly, but they come. “You told me you kept her secret because you felt bad.”

  “I did.” Even with one eye covered, Owen’s staring at me as if he’s mentally shrinking me down to the size of an insect. And I feel like an insect, or like I’ve swallowed one and now it’s trying to scrabble free of my stomach. “I swore not to tell anyone. Ever.” He emphasizes the last part deliberately.

  “Summer’s dead, Owen,” Brynn says. There’s a hard edge to her voice. “She doesn’t have secrets anymore.”

  Owen opens his mouth, then closes it again. His face has gone white. He turns to me. “I promised her,” he says.

  Just like that, the old jealousy comes back: a worming, sick feeling, like a stomach virus. Why did he promise Summer? Why did he protect her?

  Why did he kiss her, when he should have kissed me?

  I know it isn’t fair to blame him. We all protected Summer, for reasons I can’t totally explain. That’s why Brynn and I never told anyone what really happened that afternoon in the woods, and why we never revealed what Summer was really like. How when she was angry she would swipe me with her nails, or grab me by the shoulders and shake me until my teeth rattled in my head. How once she took scissors to her wrists after Brynn admitted to maybe having a crush on Amy Berkowitz, just sat there drawing long scrapes down her skin until Brynn begged her to stop and started to cry and promised Summer she’d never love anyone more than she loved us—and how Summer laughed afterward, telling Brynn she was a hopeless dyke, and left the scissors on my desk, still crusty with blood.

  How she became our everything, our tornado. We were caught up in her force. She turned us around. She made the world spin faster. She blotted out all the other light.

  We couldn’t escape.

  And maybe it’s the old influence, the winds still embedded inside, but now I’m the one who wants to destroy. I want to break the old connections. I want to flatten her back into the grave.

  I want her to let us go.

  Owen’s still watching me. Pleading, as if he expects me to contradict Brynn.

  Instead I say, “It’s time, Owen.”

  Owen lets out a big whoosh of air, as if instead of speaking, I’d punched him. He slumps down in the seat, lowering his hand from his eyes, staring down at his lap.

  “Okay,” he says finally. “Okay,” he repeats, and looks up. “I didn’t think it was a big deal. She asked me to take away your story—that book you were working on. She made me swear I wouldn’t read it, that I wouldn’t look at it at all.”

  Brynn’s eyes click to mine for a sharp, electric second. “But you did, didn’t you?”

  Owen shakes his head. “No way. She brought it to me all packaged up.”

  “She must have told you about the story before, though.” Brynn keeps her voice casual. “Since you were tutoring her and everything.”

  “Tutoring her?” Even with his cheek hopelessly swollen, Owen manages to go bug-eyed. “I never even saw Summer with a book.”

  You were too busy doing other things, whispers a terrible voice inside my head.

  Brynn exhales. “All right, so you never saw Return to Lovelorn until Summer gave it to you. Did she say why she wanted it gone?”

  Owen shakes his head. “All she told me was the game was over,” he said. “She told me that she was ending it for good.”

  “Why you?” Brynn asks bluntly. “Why didn’t she get rid of it herself?”

  Owen shrugs. “She knew I’d be able to get to Maine, I guess. That was back when my dad was drunk all the time. He never paid attention.”

  “Maine?” I echo. “What’s in Maine?”

  But Brynn’s the one who answers. “Georgia Wells,” she says. She brings a hand to her mouth, as if the words have left a taste there. “Georgia Wells is in Maine. That’s where she’s buried.”

  Owen only nods.

  As always, Abby is the one to speak first.

  “Good thing we bought snacks,” she says. “Who’s up for a road trip?”

  Mia

  Then

  “She doesn’t like him really,” Summer said, that night in April, the night of the dance. Spinning around my bedroom, wearing a tank top she’d stolen from my drawer without asking and a full tulle skirt that fanned around her knees. It was the first time in weeks—maybe months—that we’d seen her this way, happy and bright and ours. Her blond hair glimmering, eyes smoky with makeup I wouldn’t have even known how to buy. Falling backward onto my bed, snow-angel-style, next to Brynn. “You don’t really like him, do you, Mia? It’s just a game. You’ve never even kissed him.”

  I do like him, I wanted to say. I wanted to scream. I like him more than anything. More than dance. More than breathing.

  More—so much more—than I like you.

  But I waited too long. I hesitated. The words built up backstage, and I couldn’t find them in the darkness, and then I’d waited too long.

  Summer laughed.

  “See?” she said to Brynn. She took a pillow and hurled it at me. “What a tease. Someone should give that poor boy a break.”

  What do I remember about the dance? Zigzag red and blue lights, patterns of strobe on the floor, an awful sound system beating its patchy rhythm into the air. Standing with Brynn and Owen and Summer in a group, all of us with hands up, laughing, breathless. Whole. It was as if time had simply rewound. As if the past six weeks—the way Summer had avoided us, the way she’d sneered at Brynn in the cafeteria and said in front of everyone, “Stop drooling, McNally. I’m not into girls, okay?”—had never happened. As if they’d been one long nightmare and we had all woken up.

  What else? Letting the music flow through me like a river, forgetting form and structure and point your toes and turn out and spine straight, just letting myself swim in the sound.

  And Summer the thread, the connection, the spindle weaving all of us together, beautiful and sharp and deadly.

  “Mamma Mia!” She grabbed my hands and spun me around in a circle. My palms were sweating. Hers were dry. “You’re going to be famous someday, you know?”

  And afterward, when a slow song came on, and Brynn looped an arm around my shoulder and we went, sweaty and still laughing, to get punch from the cafeteria table and whisper about the couples walking stiff-armed, zombielike, through a cheesy rendition of a Taylor Swift song, turning around, suddenly realizing Owen and Summer hadn’t followed us.

  I spotted them right away, but it took me a moment to understand.

  Owen and Summer. Summer and Owen. Summer and Owen. So close they’d become one, a single figure in the middle of the gym: the end of the dance, the crescendo, the moment the music swells, just before the stage goes dark.

  Kissing.

&nbs
p; And the strangest thing was this: in that moment, all the music—the bubbly, fizzy vivace, the lazy andante and the yawning adagio, which for years had lived inside of my bones and blood and marrow, so that when I danced it wasn’t so much moving as becoming the music—drained straight out of my body. I could feel it happening. The dancers withdrew and retreated into the wings, and they’ve stayed there—trapped in the darkness of my mind—ever since. It was as if for years I’d carried this live, humming secret inside, a secret rhythm that tugged at me to leap and spin, bend and turn, and suddenly the secret was revealed and it wasn’t mine anymore and it didn’t matter.

  As if someone had cored me like an apple.

  I tried. Believe me, I did try. After weeks of avoiding Madame Laroche’s frantic phone calls, of making excuses to my mom and dad about why I wouldn’t go to class or rehearsal; after Brynn forced me back to Lovelorn, hoping it would make me feel better, only to find that Lovelorn, too, had vanished; I put on my tights and my leotard and my favorite pointe shoes and went back to Vermont Ballet.

  For a week I fumbled through classes, missing turns, hitting my arabesques just a second too late, losing track of where I was in the combinations, while Madame Laroche went from encouraging to furious to silent, tight-lipped, and the other girls began edging away from me, as if losing the ability to dance was a disease and might be contagious.

  “What happened?” Madame Laroche pulled me aside after the last class I ever took. “You used to dance from here.” She pointed to her heart. “You used to dance like singing. Now I don’t know who is on that stage.”

  How could I have told her? How could I have explained? There was no heart left to dance. I had no voice to sing.

  Instead, I said, “I know. I’m sorry.” #47. Truths you can never say, because they will strangle you on the way up.

  When I got home, I threw out my pointe shoes. My leotards, too, and my collection of leg warmers. My sewing kit with my lucky purple thread that I used to fix elastic onto my shoes.

  And when Summer came up to me, shyly, after a week of barely glancing in my direction, of piloting Owen away whenever he made a move to talk to me—when she giggled and slipped a hand in mine and leaned in, smelling like apple shampoo, to ask, “You’re not mad, are you? You know I can’t stand it when you’re mad at me. You know I’ll just die.”

  I said, “No, I’m not mad.”

  #46. Lies that feel like suffocation.

  Here’s the real truth. She didn’t just steal Owen. She took dancing too—just evaporated it, like cupping a mouth over a window to fog it and then leaning back to watch it disappear. She took both of the things I loved most in the world.

  It was my fault she died. I wanted it. I wished for it.

  And then it happened, and I never got the chance to say I was sorry.

  Only once did Audrey try to sneak to Lovelorn on her own. Ava was sick, and Ashleigh was grounded, after losing both Christmas mittens (since she couldn’t very well explain that they were safe and sound sitting next to Gregor’s teapot). Audrey thought she’d pop round and see how Gregor was doing, enjoy an escape from the brittle cold, and retrieve the mittens.

  She was therefore stunned when she wandered fruitlessly for hours but couldn’t find the entrance to Lovelorn. It had never occurred to her, you see, that all three friends had to be together—that in fact, the magic lived only in their friendship.

  —From The Way into Lovelorn by Georgia C. Wells

  Brynn

  Now

  Now that Owen has finally confessed, it’s like his mouth is in turbo gear. He won’t stop talking. He tells us that Summer came to him that final morning, looking like she’d been up all night. That she’d packed up Return to Lovelorn carefully, in plastic and an old metal lockbox he figured she’d stolen from her foster parents. That he’d taken cash from his dad’s wallet while his dad was PTFO (passed the fuck out, in rehab terminology) and hoofed it up to town to take a cab from Twin Lakes to Middlebury, and from there hopped a bus.

  And the crazy thing is, I believe him.

  From Middlebury it’s two hundred miles to Portland, Maine, and that’s if you’re doing a straight shot between them. But taking the bus means you go south all the way to Boston before transferring and backtracking north along the coast to Maine, a trip of six and a half hours one way—longer, for Owen, because at one of the rest stops an off-duty firefighter spotted him, thinking it was weird for a thirteen-year-old to be traveling on his own, and held Owen up so long with questions he missed the bus and had to wait for another.

  “Thank God for that guy, though,” Owen says. “My lawyer tracked him down just before the case went to trial. It was one of the things that saved me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Mia asks. “You let the police arrest you. You went to Woodside. Why didn’t you just tell the truth?”

  Outside the window, houses blur by. A big smear of whitegreenwhitegreen. Wade must be going sixty, seventy miles an hour, screeching around the turns, not even paying attention to his speed. But it was all supposed to be a joke—the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane on the hunt for the truth, putting our demons to rest. A few days of make-believe just so I could get back to Four Corners.

  Except that it doesn’t feel funny, or like make-believe.

  “I did, finally,” Owen says. “Most of the truth, anyway. I told the cops I’d had a fight with my dad and was out riding the buses. But they didn’t believe me. Not at first.”

  “Why not?” Abby says. She’s been leaning back, eyes closed, and I assumed she was sleeping. Abby, I’ve decided, reminds me of a cat. A kind of obnoxious, maybe a little full-of-herself cat. Cute, though, in a way. Summer would have hated her. I’m not sure why I think about this, but I do. Chubby chasing, Brynn? she would say. You like some jelly rolls with your doughnut hole?

  “Because we’d lied.” Owen’s voice sounds all cracked up and dusty, like he’s swallowed old asphalt. “The first time the cops came around asking where I’d been, we told him I hadn’t gone anywhere. That I’d been home. We didn’t know . . . I mean, I’d heard someone had been found in the woods, but I thought it was a hunter or something. Not Summer. Never Summer.” He sucks in a breath. “My mom’s sister was already making noise about taking me from my dad. We thought that’s why the cops showed up—to make sure my dad was okay. That I was okay. He’d had an accident in the winter, you know, just passed out at the wheel, went straight into a tree. . . .”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mia says.

  Owen shrugs.

  “Anyway, my aunt was threatening to sue for custody if my dad didn’t sober up. She said he wasn’t fit to be a parent. He wasn’t, back then. But I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t. I thought if I did . . .” He trails off. When I look back at him, he’s just sitting there, staring at his hands, half his face like an eggplant you forgot was in your fridge. I can’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “What?” I say.

  He looks up, startled, as if he’s forgotten we’re all there. “I thought he’d die,” he says simply.

  And I think of my mom and the way she sits in front of the TV eating green beans from the can, fishing them out with her fingers because she kicked potato chips twenty years ago, and how she always scours the dollar stores for every single Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and Thanksgiving decoration she can find and decks out the house for every holiday—I’m talking fake snow and twinkly lights or giant bunny wall decals or cobwebs on all the bushes outside—and I suddenly feel like the world’s biggest nobody. I wonder if she thinks of me at all, if she misses me, or if she and Erin have made a pact never to mention my name, if they’re happier with me gone.

  How can I go back? How can I ever go back?

  Owen clears his throat. “Dad thought if the cops knew he’d been passed-out drunk and his thirteen-year-old son had taken the bus all the way to Maine, they’d take me away for sure.”

  Outside, all the trees have their hands up, waving. Don’t s
hoot.

  “They came by looking for me around six o’clock,” Owen continues. “Must have been right after they found out—after they found her. My dad was a wreck. Already drinking again, cops at the door, son missing. He told them I was sick. Bronchitis. Couldn’t talk to anyone. They said they’d be back. So when I got home, we agreed on a cover story. He wasn’t even mad.” Owen laughs like he’s choking. “I didn’t get back until two, three in the morning. I’d stolen sixty bucks and spent it all. And he wasn’t angry. He was panicked.”

  I remember when the tires crunched up the driveway and my mom twitched open the curtain and saw the cops, I thought they must have found out I’d stolen some nail polish and a few packs of gum from a local CVS the week before. Even after what had happened in the woods, even after Summer and the cat and the carving knife, I was worried about that stupid black nail polish. “You still didn’t know about Summer?” I ask him.

  “Not then. My dad hadn’t left the house in two, three days. Wasn’t picking up his phone, either. And my phone had died before I even got to Maine. My dad thought his sister-in-law—my aunt, the one who kept threatening to take me to Madison—must have been the one to call the cops. That she was conspiring with me. I remember that’s the word he used. ‘She’s conspiring to take you away.’ He thought that’s why I’d been out of the house—because I wanted to get him in trouble. I thought he was going to go after me, hit me or something, but he was too drunk to do more than shout.”

  Mia lets out a little squeak, like a balloon getting squeezed.

  “We agreed on a cover story. I’d been sick, twenty-four-hour virus, hadn’t left my room at all. The cops came back the next morning. They were the ones who told me about Summer. Otherwise, I guess I would have found out online. I’m glad the cops told me, actually. Before I could read about it.”

  In the days after Summer’s body was discovered, everyone posted to her Facebook and Instagram profiles—prayers and videos and pictures and poems—even people who’d hated her when she was alive, who said she was a witch or a slut or made fun of her for being in foster care. Then someone found a way to log in as Summer. I was in the middle of the Walmart parking lot the first time I saw her name pop up in my feed.