Page 32 of Broken Things
He spread his hands. “If she has nothing to hide, she doesn’t have to worry.”
If. But I skimmed over that word,if, ignored it.
Instead, I started to burn. I started to crackle and sizzle in my seat. My mom didn’t understand. She was making me seem guilty when I wasn’t—she was making it seem like I had something to be ashamed of. Only Lieutenant Marshall understood. “I wasn’t mad,” I said, a little louder. “It’s just...” I trailed off, and Lieutenant Marshall nodded encouragingly.
“That’s all right,” he said, smiling again. I decided he was exactly what I would want my dad to look like, if I had a dad. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Brynn. Your feelings are perfectly natural.”
I closed my eyes. How to explain it?
I wasn’t mad. I was exploded. I was full of tiny shrapnel shells. Torn apart with jealousy. It hurt to breathe. My lungs were rattling with cut glass. I wanted to take Owen’s eyes out with a toothpick—not just for me, but for Mia, too. I wanted to go back to the night Summer and I kissed and the miracle happened and then she started to cry and I kept my arms around her while she shook in my bed and her spine knocked against my breastbone and her feet slowly thawed from icicles to skin again. Except thistime, I’d make sure to fix whatever had gone wrong. This time, I wouldn’t screw it up.
I opened my eyes again.
“I didn’t understand” is what I said. Lieutenant Marshall was still nodding. “I didn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough.” I didn’t mean to say the last part, but the words just flopped out of my mouth on their own, like dying fish. And my sister, Erin, was staring at me, a look on her face like I was a wild animal, disgusted and frightened and confused all at once. I looked away, fighting the sudden urge to cry. The blinds were only lowered partway and I could see into the station’s main room and the clutter of desks and sun slanting through the windows and the dusty water cooler and ancient fax machines. But Mia was gone. She must have gone home.
Why were they keeping me here, then, if Mia got to go home?
For the first time, really, I got a bad feeling, a gnawing suspicion that Lieutenant Marshall was maybe not as nice as he was pretending. That these questions weren’t routine. That they weren’t just looking for my help so they could find the person who’d done it. Suddenly, it was as if insects were chewing my stomach from the inside.
Lieutenant Marshall was still smiling. He sat down on the edge of the table, crossing his hands in his lap.Relax. “You must have been pretty pissed off,” he said, “when she started spreading all those rumors about you at school.”
“It is a strange phrase, ‘falling in love,’” said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. “It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn’t someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love.”
—FromThe Way into Lovelornby Georgia C. Wells
Mia
Now
Abby almost—almost—lets me off easy. We’ve made it all the way to her house before she turns to me suddenly and says, “So thisOwenguy...”
I groan. She quirks an eyebrow, giving me her sharp, infuriatingI can solve calc problems faster than youlook. “How come you never told me about him?”
Even thinking his name makes me squeeze the steering wheel a little harder, trying to press the memory of him out through my palms. “I did,” I say.
“You told me heexisted,” Abby says. “You never told me you had a thing for him.”
Abby is omnisexual. I don’t know exactly who she’s hooked up with, or when, but from the confident way she’s talked about it, it seems there have been boys and girls. Once I asked her where she met all these people, and she just said,Cons. You should come with me sometime. Cosplay gets everyone going.
“I don’t. I mean, I did.” I can’t bring myself to say out loud: Owen was a five-year-old crush that never even happened. He was just one more thing I made up. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Don’t deflect.” Abby waggles a finger in my face. “It’s not going to work.”
“We were kids,” I say. “It was just a stupid crush. It didn’t mean anything. We never even...” I’m about to saykissed, but for some reason the word gets tangled in my throat. And that’s not true. Not exactly.
One November afternoon in sixth grade, we got stormed into the tree house. We were lying there in our sleeping bags and I could feel his knee bumping mine every time he moved, and his face was so close I could feel the warm exhalation of his breath, which smelled grassy and fresh, and we’d been laughing about something, and then when we finished laughing Owen leaned forward and before I knew what was happening, our lips were pressed together, so warm and soft and perfect, as if they’d been designed to line up that way.
The weird thing is that after it happened, we didn’t even talk about it—just went right on laughing, as if it hadn’t happened. But it wasn’t a bad thing—it was natural, so natural that we didn’t have to speak about it or talk about what it meant. We knew. I remember how I kept my toes curled up, trying to squeeze in all my happiness, trying to preserve it. It was, I knew, the first kiss of hundreds of kisses to follow.
Only it wasn’t.
“Never even what?” Abby narrows her eyes at me.
“Forget it,” I say, too embarrassed to confess to her, Miss Omnisexual, that that single kiss, chaste and tongueless and insixthgrade, was my only one—not counting the time in eighth grade, at St. Mary’s, when for a whole glorious month nobody knew who I was, no one had put it together yet. I even got invited to a party and wound up kissing a boy named Steven on a dumpy basement couch, and even though his breath smelled a little like Cheetos and he squeezed my boobs once each, like he was trying to ring a doorbell, I was so happy. He held my hand for the rest of the party and even leaned in to whisper, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” before I left.
But by Monday his texts had stopped, and when I saw him in the hall he raised two fingers and made the sign of the hex, shrieking, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Please!” while the rest of his friends laughed so hard they doubled over.
Abby must sense that she’s upset me, because she lets it go. For a while we drive in silence. As always, I feel better after we’ve left behind the new downtown, with its greedy clutching palm of B and Bs and stores and farm-to-table restaurants, and even better once we’ve successfully skirted the old downtown and its sprawl of fast-food restaurants and Laundromats and gun stores, once the trees run right up to the road again and all the houses are concealed behind heavy growth.
