Page 37 of Broken Things

I take a deep breath. “Not exactly.”

When I tell her about tracking down Jake Ginsky, her eyes go wide, and for a second she looks just like twelve-year-old Mia, ourtiny dancer. After I finish speaking, she chews on her lower lip for a bit.

“Heath Moore...” She screws up her face around his name. “I don’t remember Summer talking about him.”

“That’s my point. Neither do I.” For a second, I remember Summer standing next to me in the shower, water running down the space between her breasts and beading on her eyelashes.Do you love me?she’d asked, putting her head on my shoulder, and I wanted so badly to kiss her I couldn’t move. I was so terrified.Will you always love me?

Of course I loved her. I wasinlove with her.

Prove it.

I shove aside the memory, stomp it down, break it into pieces. That’s the only way to keep her from haunting me every day. I have to destroy her.

Mia exhales, a long sigh. “All right,” she says. “He stays.”

Once again I notice how much sadder she looks even since yesterday. Or not sad, exactly. Hollow. Like someone’s taken a straw to her insides. Could it be because of Owen, because I told her he’d come home? But she can’t still have a thing for him. Not after five years. Not after what he did to her.

What he and Summer did together.

And here’s the worst thing, the deepest, truest, most awful thing about me, the thing that twists me up and makes me just a half person, hobbled and horrible: I was sad when Summer died. Of course I was. She was my best friend.

But a teeny, tiny part of me was glad, too.

Back in the bedroom, Abby and Wade have gotten cozy real fast. She’s still lying on the bed, but now she’s paging throughThe Way into Lovelorn, and he’s sitting on the floor with his long legs splayed out in front of him, occasionally leaning closer to point things out on the page.

“I don’t get the whole Shadow thing,” Abby’s saying when we reenter the room. “Whatisthe Shadow?”

“Ah.” Wade waggles a finger. In his outfit, he really does look like a deranged professor from the 1970s. “The Shadow is thebest—the most interesting—part of Lovelorn. The original book is nothing special.”

“Hey,” Mia protests automatically.

“It’s true.” Wade brushes the hair from his eyes and squints at her. “Look, I’ve read all the big fantasy authors. Tolkien, Martin, Lewis, Rowling—”

“Why does none of this surprise me?” I say.

Wade steamrolls over that one. “I mean, in my BU application I wrote about the role of fantasy in modern life—”

“Wait, wait.” Mia stares at Wade, at his weird assortment of thrift-store clothing and his permanently surprised,I just got out of an underground vaultlook. “YourBUapplication?”

He blinks at her. “I’m transferring this fall.”

Even Weirdo Cousin Wade has a life. Mia and I exchange a look, and I feel a little rush of sympathy, of understanding. The Last Two Losers in the Northern Hemisphere. But at least Mia has Abby. Besides, she’s smart. She’ll be okay.

“My point is, Lovelorn isn’t special.” Now he turns back to Abby, wide-eyed. “It’s an amalgamation of all these other fantasy tropes—”

“Speak English,” I say.

He takes a deep breath. “It’s a mash-up. It’s nothing new. And it’s kind of an unsuccessful mash-up. Dwarfs and trolls and fairies and ghosts and witches. It’s like Wells took all the popular fantasy books and shook them together and poured them onto the page. The only thing she got right was ending the book the way shedid, in midsentence.” He pauses to let this sink in while Mia looks outraged. “But the Shadow... well, the Shadow was new, at least. It washers.”

“But whatisit?” Abby says, struggling to sit up. She catches me staring at her stomach, where a bit of her skin, pale and soft-looking, is revealed, and yanks her shirt down.

“We never really find out in Book One,” I say quickly, so she won’t think I was checking her out or something. “Georgia hints it’s a kind of force that gets concentrated in one person.”

“But we do know it’s hungry,” Mia says. “The Shadow’s the reason that Lovelorn stays pretty year-round, why the harvests are abundant, why no one fights wars anymore. He keeps the peace. He keeps people happy. But in exchange...” She trails off, glancing at me for help.

It’s Wade who jumps in. “The people of Lovelorn have to make a yearly sacrifice to the Shadow. Always a kid. We never see it. We just see the selection process and the kid getting led off into the woods.”

“He eats them,” Mia says quietly. “The Shadow does. At least, that’s what Georgia implies.”

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