Page 17 of Broken Things

“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?”

—FromThe Way into Lovelornby 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 thecops cleaned out the shed after the murder?”

The way she saysmurderso 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?”

“Nobody,” Mia says. She’s still standing in the doorway, hugging herself. Her hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, as if all these years she’s just been on one long detour on her way back to the ballet studio. “I mean, this land is public. It belongs to the town.”

“I’m surprised the town didn’t tear it down,” Abby says. She turns sideways, squeezing between two big metal grilles, the kind that might come off a Dodge Challenger. “Considering what happened.”

“The cops didn’t think it was important,” Mia says quietly. “They didn’t believe us when we told them how the shed had... changed. They didn’t understand about Lovelorn.”

“That’s because we made the whole thing up,” I say again, for at least the third time in two days.

It was a game we used to play.Not an hour in the police station, and Mia rolled. The cop taking notes in her interview read me back the pages. She told them all about the original Lovelorn book and how angry we were when Summer wanted to stop playing.

But Brynn was the maddest.

I left Brynn alone with her. I don’t know what happened next. Ask Brynn.

“Maybe not,” Abby says brightly. I stare at her as she leans hard against a massive piece of ancient machinery that looks kind of like an upside-down mushroom. “It’s not all farm equipment, you know. It’s someone’s stuff. Maybe more than one person’s stuff. There’s an old DVD player in the corner, and a violin case. No violin, though. But there’s this.” She bends down kind of awkwardly, resting one hand on the wall for balance, and holds up something that looks like a narrow funnel.

“What is that?” I say.

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