Page 30 of Broken Things

“What are you doing?” I wanted to look away. I knew she was just messing with me. But I couldn’t. Her T-shirt was old, washed practically transparent, and I could see the dark edge of her bra beneath it.

“Come on,” she said, and laughed when I tried to pull away from her. “It’s not hard. All you have to do is touch me....”

Katharine Ginsky Massage still operates out of Jake Ginsky’s house, and the address is listed right on the website. But it doesn’t occur to me until I spot the Volvo with the University of Vermont sticker that Jake Ginsky must have graduated by now. Somehow, in my head, everyone’s simply stuck, turning like a car wheelthrough a slurp of mud.

But I ring the doorbell anyway. It’s summertime. And I’m here. Might as well keep pedaling the gas.

Someone’s home—I can hear a baseball game going inside. Soon enough I hear footsteps cross to the door, and at the last second I get the urge to bolt.

But it’s too late. The door is opening already.

I remember Jake Ginsky as a skinny kid with teeth just a little too long for his mouth and the skulking look of a raccoon you surprise going through your garbage. Five years later, he’s practically unrecognizable. It looks like someone’s taken an air hose to his mouth and inflated him: six foot four, biceps the size of my thighs, a jaw that looks like a shovel. Even hisbeardis overgrown.

He freezes. For a second he looks like he’s thinking about slamming the door shut. “I heard you were in rehab,” he says. Then: “What are you doing here?”

His voice is flat. Not hostile, exactly, but definitely not friendly.

“Part of my twelve-step program. I’m on number nine.Make amends to all those you’ve wronged.Heard of it?”

Jake squints like my resolution is all fuzzy. “You’re here to apologize to me?”

I shake my head. “Hell no. I’m here soyoucan apologize tome.”

He lets out a sharp bark of laughter. Maybe he thinks I’m kidding. But after a second, the smile swirls right off his face, bottoming out in a look of disbelief. “Wait—you’re serious?”

I let a beat of silence pass so that he knows I am. Then I say,“Did you kill Summer?” No point in dancing around the dead elephant in the room.

He stares at me. “Do you seriously expect me to answer that question?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Thenno.” He looks me up and down. “Did you?”

“Hell no,” I say.

“Well, now that we gotthatout of the way,” Jake says dryly, “are we done here?”

“No, we’re not done.” I almost add:we’ll never be done. “Your alibi was bullshit.”

His face closes up, like a pill bug when you poke it. “What are you talking about?”

“You told the cops you were hanging out with the other freshmen on the team. But you weren’t, were you?” It was in Mia’s car, when we were talking about Owen and where he was that day, that I got to thinking about alibis and what Mr. Ball had said: that Summer was playing a few freshman football players against one another. Maybe she did it deliberately, or maybe not. Either way, she was tearing that team apart.Those boys were at each other’s throats, he said.Fighting over her like she was a trophy.

“We were hanging out, Brynn,” he says. But the lie sounds tired by now.

“You weren’t,” I say. “You weren’t even speaking.” I watch Jake closely, watch the way his face contracts ever so slightly, like I’ve reached out and hit him. “When did you decide to lie?”

For a long minute, Jake just stares at me. His eyes are the kind of puppy-dog brown that makes straight girls go puddly. And now I can kind of see why Summer went so crazy for him—even though back then Jake looked a little bit like a wet towel, all stringy and wrung-out-looking, he had the same eyes, the same adopt-me vibe.

Finally he lets out a big huff of air, like he’s been holding his breath this whole time. “After we found out she was dead,” he says, “I heard the cops wanted to talk to me, and I panicked. It’d been months since we last hooked up—it was Moore right after me, butthatdidn’t last. Still, I figured they’d think I was crazy jealous or something.”

“Were you?” I ask.

He glares at me. “We hung out, like, eight times. Maybe less. Most of the time we were in a group. Besides, I was home that day. But my mom had clients all afternoon. And my dad didn’t get home until late. So I couldn’tproveI was home.”

“Right. So you guys covered for each other.” I have to force‎ myself not to feel sorry for him. He probably thought he’d put Summer behind him. He’d left her behind about a hundred pounds of muscle ago. And here I am, like the ghost of Crap-mas Past.

Still, if Jake’s alibi was bullshit, it means the other boys’ alibis were bullshit, too.

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