Page 10 of Broken Things

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

“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 nowFlatbreads & 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 Fridaywere 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 momletyou. 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 fromAunt 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 ofsixth 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.

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