Page 13 of Broken Things

I remember one time toward the end of the school year in sixth grade, when it was too hot to go to Lovelorn, too hot to do anything but lie across my bed reading magazines and taking quizzes online with the AC on full blast, Summer said her biggest fear was of being forgotten. That’s why she was going to be a model and then write and star in her own TV show. If you weren’t famous, Summer argued, if no one remembered you, you might as well not have lived at all. I understood her point, even though I’d never wanted to be famous.

But Summer hadn’t thought it all out. She didn’t realize how much depends on what you’re rememberedfor. Sometimes, it’s so much better to be forgotten.

All the roads in this part of Twin Lakes were once driveways leading up to farm and manor houses. And Waldmann Lane hasn’t grown much since then: it’s still a one-lane dirt road rutted with tire tracks and sticky with mud. While the Perkinses of Perkins Road and the Halls of Hall Street and all the other families who used to own the land around here took their money and left decades ago, Waldmann Lane still dead-ends at the ancestral home of Dieter Waldmann, great-grandfather of Owen. As far as I know, the house still belongs to Owen’s dad, even though amonth after Owen was acquitted, they picked up and went off, supposedly to Europe.

From Owen’s house I can cut through the woods and circle back to Perkins Road, a fact the press loved to mention. There was even a theory that Owen was a warlock controlling us all with his mind, and he’d forced my family to move after the crime so he could keep an eye on me. No mention of why Mia got to stay put, and why he’d need me close if he was telegraphing commands directly to my brain.

The mosquitoes are thick and the sun lies in long, heavy slabs, like butter. But as I get to the top of the hill, the day seems to get darker. The trees crowd closer overhead. The Waldmanns haven’t been around to make sure the road gets cleared by the county.

And then the house appears, partially obscured by the trees, and I stop.

It’s been years since I was up here, and in a flash I know I’ve been avoiding it. Just like I never go up to Skunk Hill Road, just like I haven’t gone into the woods once, just like I stopped reading, too, even though it meant nearly flunking eighth grade.

The house is the same, which is what shocks me—nothing should be allowed to stay the same when so many things are different. I think again of Summer’s face on the news report, how young she looked.

Forever thirteen. Forever gone.

I walk a little closer and finally register small differences: weeds have swallowed up the lawn, and at some point the Waldmannsdropped a fence around the entire property, probably to keep people from sneaking up and writing stupid shit on the walls with spray paint, like they used to do at our house. I can’t remember whether the fence was put up before Owen got shipped to Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, or afterward.

I press my face right to the cool metal fence and peer down the length of the driveway, and once again my breath gets punched out of me: an enormous oak tree has collapsed onto what used to be the solarium, where Summer and I smoked our first cigarette behind a potted plant in the fall of seventh grade and then felt like we might puke. Then there’s a flash of color through the trees, and suddenly Owen Waldmann rounds the corner of the house, threshing the tall grasses with a stick.

I jerk backward, but it’s too late. He sees me.

For a long second, we just stare at each other through the fence.

“Brynn,” he says, letting out a long breath. “Hi.” He’s gotten tall—he must be six-three—and he’s filled out a little, although he’s still skinny, and with his red hair all wild it looks as if a giant reached down, grabbed him by the scalp, and stretched him out like taffy. His eyes are still the kind of blue-gray that darkens from sunny sky to storm in a second. And the second he sees me, they knot up with clouds.

Owen Waldmann. Owen the warlock. Owen, with the crooked smile and the bad temper and moods that broke like waves on the beach.

Owen Waldmann, the maybe-killer.

Owen Waldmann, who wasmaybelucky enough to get away with it.

Luck is a funny thing like that. Like a coin whose two sides you can read at once.

At the scene of the crime, the police found Summer draped with Owen’s sweater, soaked with blood that might have been Summer’s.

Not just her blood: Owen’s.

Allegedly. The cops thought the case was so open-and-shut, they failed to properly store the sample, and during the trial the evidence was ruled inadmissible.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

He flinches. “Nice to see you too.”

“Answer the question.”

The last time I saw Owen was just after the trial, a few months after we moved to Perkins Road, two years after Summer was killed. In that time, there’d been other bad murders in the country, even in the state: in Burlington, a PTA mom kissed her husband goodbye in the morning and straightened up the kitchen and then drowned her newborn child in the sink. In New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old opened fire in a school, killing three people, including the guidance counselor who’d been trying to help him, and on and on and on. When you can’t count on anything else, you can count on the news to make you sick.

I remember hearing that Owen had been released from Woodside and that he and his dad were leaving. I hoofed it up the hillfrom Perkins Road just in time to see the last moving van rumbling down Waldmann Lane, followed by Owen in the passenger seat of his dad’s old Mercedes. An old man spat on the hood of the car. A woman kicked the tires and screeched “murderer.” I hung back in the trees, overwhelmed by a kind of jealousy that felt like having my guts pulled out through my mouth: he was getting out.

He was maybe, maybe, getting away with it.

Owen shoves a hand through his hair, making it look even wilder. His T-shirt is faded green and imprinted with the image of a cow. He never used to wear color. He had a whole wardrobe of black jeans, black T-shirts, black hoodies. Everyone used to say he would grow up to be a serial killer: he wore a black trench coat and combat boots every day and spent most of his classes doodling violent comic books or sleeping with his head on the desk. Plus, his dad was a drunk. Even worse, he was a rich drunk—he could buy his way out of hitting bottom.

I remember once on the playground in third grade, Elijah Tanner was making fun of Owen for being small and skinny and generally weird, the way kids did back then, and Owen barely even seemed to be listening. Thenboom. All of a sudden he whipped around and drove a fist straight into Elijah’s nose. I’ll never forget how much blood came from that little nose—like a spigot had been turned on.

I never understood what Mia saw in him. I never understood whatSummerdid.

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