Page 34 of Broken Things

I remember then a line from the originalLovelornabout the centaur Firth, a line that always reminded me of Owen:His eyes were as dark and wild as a storm, and big enough to drown in.

“What?” My heart is beating painfully again, thudding against my ribs.

A look of uncertainty crosses his face, and for a second I see the old Owen—weird, wild,mine—float up underneath the surface of Owen 2.0, Shiny Plastic Barbie Owen. It occurs to me that now that he’s crossed over into Normalville, he isn’t used to girls just staring at him like dairy cows. The girls he knows probably do things like giggle and toss their hair and squeeze up next to him to show off pictures of their Caribbean vacation on their phone.

“Look,” he says, “can I come in for a second?”

“No,” I say quickly, remembering how I first found him: cupping his hands to the window, peering inside. All my shame comes rushing back. How much could he have seen from outside? I’ve made pretty good progress on the front hall, but the table is still buried beneath mounds of takeout flyers and unopened mail, and there are several cardboard boxes blocking the closet door. Could he have seen into the dining room? I haven’t even started on the dining room. The Piles there are so staggering, so complex intheir arrangement, that Abby says my mom should have an honorary architecture degree.

Ten days until Mom comes home. Ten days to tackle the Piles. Ten days to turn back time, to find the truth, to start over.

“Come on, Mia.” He’s standing way too close to me. It can’t be accidental. And now he’s smiling all easy and cool, one corner of his mouth hitched as if it’s hit an invisible snag. Practiced. That’s what his smile is: practiced. I wonder how many times he’s used it, how many girls he’s practiced on. “Don’t pretend you’re not a little happy to see me.”

“Not really.” My voice is high-pitched, shrill as a kettle. I feel a sharp stab of guilt when his smile drops away, but at the same time it’s a relief to see a crack, a fissure in Owen 2.0. The words are flying out of my mouth suddenly: “It’s a funny coincidence you came back on the fifth anniversary. Just couldn’t stay away, could you?”

Owen flinches as if I’ve hit him. ButI’mthe one who feels as if I’ve been hit—I’m breathless, shocked by what I’ve just said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Owen says.

Now that I’ve started, it’s like the words are vomit—they’re making me sick, but still I can’t stop. “It just seems weird. Like you came back tocommemorateit. Like it’s something to be proud of.” I want to take it all back. But my mind has become a monster, and I can only make it better by finishing, by exploding everything—him and me and whatever there used to be between us. “You know, you never even told us where you went that day.All this time, and you never told us. So what are you hiding?”

There: I finish, practically gasping, hating myself and hating him even more for forcing me to act this way, for moving away and getting normal, for leaving me behind.

Owen says nothing. He just stares at me, white-faced, and for a second I see the old Owen, the Owen who used to camp for days in his tree house when his dad was blackout drunk, the Owen who used to remind me of an animal in a trap, scared and hurt but still fighting.

He bends down and scoops up the box he was carrying when he first spotted me. He yanks open one of the flaps.

“I came to show you that I still had it,” he says, jerking his chin toward the contents of the box—an old cell phone sporting a ridiculous pink cover, a water-warped graphic novel calledRevenge of the Space Nerds, photo-booth photos of Owen and me making goofy faces at the camera, a pair of rainbow socks—all of them items we selected for our personal time capsule, which we were planning to bury somewhere in the woods just in case the apocalypse came and future civilizations wanted to know about us. Owen claimed he was going to do the burying part, but I guess he never got around to it. “I kept it all these years. But I don’t need it anymore.”

He practically shoves the package into my arms. His cowlick is sticking straight up, as if it, too, is outraged by my behavior. I’m suddenly crushed by guilt, by my own stupidity. I haven’t seen Owen in years, and I managed to ruin everything in the span offive minutes. If being an idiot were an Olympic sport, I would win a gold medal.

“Owen—” I start to call him back even as he’s stomping toward his car, but he whirls around and the words simply evaporate. He’sfurious. And something else—another expression is working beneath the anger, a look of hurt so deep it makes me want to curl up and die. It’s crazy how someone else’s pain can do that, just take the legs out from under you.

“You want to know what I was doing that day, Mia?” He crosses back toward me, and for a second I find myself scared and take a step backward. But he stops when there are several feet of space between us. “You really want to know where I went?”

I do. Of course I do. But at any second I know I’m going to start to cry, and I don’t want him to see it. “You don’t—you don’t have to.”

He ignores that. “I washelpingher.” He doesn’t have to say he’s talking about Summer. That’s obvious. “She asked me to do her a favor—she made me swear not to tell anyone, not then, not ever. And I did. It was nothing,” he says, in answer to the question he must anticipate. “Trust me. She only asked me because she knew I could hop on a bus and my dad wouldn’t even notice. He was almost always drunk back then. I spent half the time in the tree house.”

“Why didn’t you tell us where you went?” I say.

He shoves a hand through his hair, trying to make his cowlick lie down, which it doesn’t. “Like I said, it was nothing important.Nothingrelevant. She was just trying to put the past behind her. Besides, I felt sorry for her. The least I could do was keep her secret.”

“You felt sorry for her?” I repeat, certain I must have misheard. No one felt sorry for Summer. Summer was the light. Summer was the sparkle and dazzle, the beautiful one, the one all the boys broke their necks trying to follow down the hall. Grown men—dad-age men—slowed their cars to look at her and then, when she stuck her tongue out at them, sped up, red-faced and guilty. And sure, the other girls made fun of her trailer-trash fashion and called her a slut and wrote mean stuff about her in the locker rooms, but they were obviously just jealous.

Summer had power. Over them. Over us. Over everyone.

“I always felt sorry for her.” All the anger seems to have gone out of Owen at once. Now he just looks tired, and much closer to the boy I used to know, the Owen who was once mine. Casper the Ghost. Nosebleed. The Trench Coat Terror. But mine. “You and Brynn—you guys were always yourselves, you know? You didn’t know how to be anybodybutyou. But Summer... It was like she only knew how to play a role. Like she wasn’t fully a person, and had to pretend. She would do anything to get people to like her.” The stubble on his jaw picks up the light, and I have to put my arms around my stomach and squeeze. He’s become so beautiful. “That’s how it was with me. She didn’tlikeme. Not really. But she didn’t know any other way. And I was young. I wasin seventh grade. And stupid. Nobody had ever liked me before.” Now I’mthe one who looks away, heat rising to my face, understanding that this is his way of explaining, or apologizing for, what happened between them.

I liked you, I almost say.I always liked you.But I don’t.

“She was always jealous of you, you know.” He’s making a funny face, as if the words are physically painful and he has to hold his mouth carefully to avoid getting bruised.

“Of me?” This, too, is shocking. Summer was everything I wasn’t: confident and gorgeous and mature and cool. Half the time I’d find Brynn and Summer giggling about something—shavingdown thereor period cramps or getting to third base—I was too clueless to understand.Nothing, Mia, they’d say, rolling their eyes in unison; or Summer would pat me on the head, like I was a kid, and say,Never change.“Why?”

He half laughs. But there’s no humor in it. “Because I was in love with you,” he says, just like that, so quickly I nearly miss it.

“What?” I say. I feel as if a fault line has opened up directly beneath my feet, and I’m in danger of dropping. “What did you say?”

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