Page 11 of Broken Things

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 plankfloor 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 wastoo hardand 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 vanillacandles. 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.

And a small wooden sign, looped with cursive writing, nailed above the bed:Welcome to Lovelorn.

“Did you do this?” I turned to Summer, even though I knew from her expression that she hadn’t.

In the books, the original three were never anything but delighted when Lovelorn appeared, when it began to change things, melting familiar landscapes like butter softening at the edges, kneading it into new shapes: a tree into a tower; the old stone wall into the gremlins’ grotto. And later, we would love the clubhouse, the way it had materialized for us in the rain; the warmth of the quilt, which we draped over our shoulders like a communal cape; the lantern with its flickering glow.

But I wasn’t delighted, not then. Then, I was scared.

“It’s magic,” Summer said. She went to the walls and ran her fingers over the wallpaper, as if worried it would dissolve under her fingers. When she turned around again, her eyes were bright. It was the only time I ever saw her close to crying. “It’s Lovelorn.We found Lovelorn.”

“Lovelorn doesn’t exist.” Brynn still hadn’t moved. She looked angry, which meant that she, too, was scared. “Admit it, Summer. You planned this. Admit it.”

But Summer wasn’t listening. “It’s Lovelorn,” she said. She went spinning through the room, touching everything—the blanket, the cot, the lantern—her voice rising in pitch until she was practically shouting. “It’s Lovelorn.”

In the bedside table, she found a box of chocolate chip cookies and tore it open with her teeth. They were stale, I remember, and crumbled like caulk between my teeth.

There were probably lots of entrances to Lovelorn, maybe in old cupboards or under beds or in places no one thought to look, like the back of an old storage closet. But the easiest way to get there was through the woods, and so that’s where Summer, Brynn, and Mia went the day they decided to see it for themselves.

—FromReturn to Lovelornby Summer Marks, Brynn McNally, and Mia Ferguson

Brynn

Now

Mia’s words keep cycling through my head as I trudge up Harrison Street, like a song I can’t stop hearing.

You were in love with Summer.

In love with Summer.

Summer.

Summer.

Summer.

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