Page 18 of Broken Things

“Mouthpiece,” she says. “For some kind of horn. Looks like a double French, but I’m not sure.” When I just look at her blankly, she smirks. She’s an excellent smirker—she must have practice. “My mom’s the band teacher at TLC. And check it out.” Abby passes me the mouthpiece, which is surprisingly heavy. A small laminated label, warped with age, has been plastered to its underside.

“‘Property of Lillian Harding,’” I read out loud. Then I hand it back. I’m losing patience for this little mystery theater. “So someone’s got a hoarding problem. What does it matter?”

“It probably doesn’t.” Abby has gone back to clearing crap away from the corner. “But this might.”

She pulls her cell phone out of her bag, swipes to her flashlight app, and angles it toward the floor. Blocked by several pieces of heavy equipment, that corner of the room is heavily shadowed,but Abby squats so we can see the ragged line of paint near the floor.

And see, too, that in one or two places the wallpaper underneath it—a pattern of rose bouquets—has started to show.

“The corners are always the hardest part,” Abby says, grinning.

Brynn

Then

Two days after Mia’s twelfth birthday, in December: a hard freeze on the ground and the snow piled up in drifts above the basement window, blocking out the light. Mia and I were messing around with the balloons, still half-inflated, chucking them at each other, while Summer was sitting at the desk, hunched over an ancient desktop computer that growled whenever you so much as pressed the shift key. She was always online at Mia’s house, since her foster parents had put up firewalls to keep her from accessing anything good on YouTube. She’d caught Mr. Ball pulling up her online history, too, and snooping around in her dresser drawers.Just want to make sure you’re staying out of trouble, he always said, but Summer thought he was a freak who got off on things like that.

“Maybe,” I said, tossing a balloon and punching it toward Mia, “she was dictating the pages, and she fell into a manhole and died.”

“Or maybe,” Mia said, punching it back, “she was sending themanuscript page by page while she was on safari, and she got eaten by a lion right in midsentence.”

“What do you think, Summer?” I asked, lobbing the balloon at her. She swatted at it without looking and it bounced off the keyboard. “You think Georgia Wells got swallowed up by a manhole or a lion?”

“What?” She turned around in her swivel chair, frowning, and blinked as if seeing us for the first time. “You guys arestilltalking about the ending?”

Mia and I exchanged a look. It was like asking whether we were still breathing. We were always talking about the ending. It was our favorite pastime, as mindless as checking our phones.Why, why, why? What happened to the sequel? What could she possibly have been thinking?Georgia Wells’s website, which hadn’t been updated in ten years, gave us no answers. The sequel toThe Way into Lovelornwas, according to the home page, still forthcoming. The author page showed a picture of Georgia smiling into the camera and a two-line bio:Georgia Wells lives in Portland, Maine, with her three cats and her favorite trees.

But Georgia Wells was dead by the time we found Lovelorn, the promise of a sequel forgotten. Still, that didn’t stop us from scouring the internet, looking for clues, trying to piece together details of her life.

“Got eaten by a lion, dropped in a manhole, flattened by a bus, her brain bled out by leeches—it doesn’t matter. You know that, right?” Summer gave us a look like we were both period stains onher underwear. I felt the blood rushing to my face.Knock, knock, knock. Beating in my head like an angry fist.

Mia looked hurt, which just made me feel angrier. “Doesn’t matter?” she repeated. “It’s Lovelorn.”

Summer frowned. “We can’t play forever,” she mumbled, turning back to the computer.

Mia’s mouth fell open, as if it had been unhinged. “We—what?”

Summer whirled around again. But she was suddenly furious. “I said we can’t play forever,” she repeated, and I saw her hands tight and white in her lap, the angry spaces between her knuckles. “People grow up. That’s all right, isn’t it? For people to grow up? You don’t have a problem with that?”

“Don’t yell at her,” I said quickly, and Summer stared at me for a second.

Then, once again, she turned back to the computer. But I heard her say it one more time.

“Everyone grows up,” she whispered. “Everyone.”

Ashleigh was the one who first noticed that no one in Lovelorn seemed to be much older than Gregor. When she questioned him about it, he laughingly explained that since the Shadow had arrived, no one had to grow any older than they already were.

Ava, who always wanted to do things older kids could do, wasn’t sure she liked the idea of that, but Gregor reassured her.

“It’s much better this way,” he said. “Change is just another word for disappointment, you know.”

—FromThe Way into Lovelornby Georgia C. Wells

Brynn

Now

Twenty minutes later we’re sitting in Mia’s car, AC on. Mia is gripping the wheel tightly, as if trying to guide the car down an icy road, even though we’re still parked. Abby has reclined her seat. From the back I can make out the little ski-slope jump of her nose.

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