Page 38 of Broken Things

“But not in our version,” I say.

“No,” Mia agrees. “Not in our version.”

Abby is quiet, absorbing this. The air in the room feels heavy, charged, the way it does before a bad storm: it’s as if the Shadow is real and has extended between us.

“What about Heath Moore?” Mia blurts. Abby raises an eyebrow.

“A freshman,” I explain to her. “Wade says he was obsessed with Summer.”

“He wrote her, like, a thousand messages on Facebook,” Wade says. “Snaps, too. And texts. That’s why the cops were interested in him.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” Abby asks.

“Persistence,” Wade says.

“He means being as annoying as possible to as many people as possible,” I say.

Wade waves a hand. “Tomato, tomahto. My stepbrother was a cop in the district for years. So I get special privileges.”

“They never charged Heath, though,” I point out.

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” Mia counters. “You’re the one who said his alibi is crap.” Of course she wants it to be anyone other than Owen, even after what he did to her. I remember that spring dance when everything fell apart—whenwefell apart. The way Mia stood there, watching Owen and Summer together, unblinking, as if she’d simply forgotten how to move.

She never danced again. She said she’d outgrown it, but I knew the truth. I saw it in that moment—like someone had leaned forward and blown out a flame in her chest. But who knows? Maybe we were always broken. Maybe I was always a liar, and Mia was always weak. Maybe what happened to Summer didn’t turn us but only revealed what was already there.

Wade hauls himself to his feet. He’s so tall, his head nearly reaches the ceiling. “Did you keep your old yearbooks?” he asks Mia.

Mia stares at him. “We keep our oldeverything,” she says. “But finding them...” She trails off, shrugging.

“Come on,” Wade says. “I’ll help.”

Half of me suspects he just wants an excuse to poke around in Mia’s house—and from the way Mia frowns, maybe she suspects it too. But she lets him follow her, leaving Abby and me alone. The way her skirt is bunched up, I can see her thighs, barely contained by a pair of striped tights, and for some reason I think of highways at night, the pattern of the median flashing by.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” I say. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me—like every secret I have is leaking out of my pores—so I go over to the window and pretend to be studying the backyard. There’s shit piled even at the bottom of the pool, which has been drained. I remember lying next to Summer on a float the summer before seventh grade, thigh to thigh, the smell of suntan lotion and chlorine, the sun hazy in a hot summer sky, making plans for our first-day-of-school outfits.

“Do you miss her?”

I turn around, mentally drawing down the curtains on that memory.

“Sometimes,” I say. “But it was a long time ago. And things got so screwed up. Summer was”—at the last second I stop myself from sayingcruel—“hard, in her own way.”

“I didn’t mean Summer,” Abby says. “I was talking about Mia.”

I hardly know Abby, but already I can tell this is her own specialskill: she can reach inside and find the major note and bang on it. I’ve never asked myself whether I miss Mia, but of course as soon as she says it, I realize I do, I have—since the cops first came to my door, since I first passed Mia sitting on the other side of that shitty airless station, her eyes raw from crying, since Officer Neuter sat me down and said,Mia said she left you two alone in the woods. Mia said she had nothing to do with it. Mia’s trying to get out of trouble. How about you tell me the truth?And in that moment—in that little room smelling of coffee and stale breath and my mom sitting next to me, crying silently into her fist—I knew I’d lost not one best friend but two.

“People change,” I say.

“Haveyouchanged?” she asks. In the sunlight, her eyes are like amber hard candies, her skin glowing like there’s a flashlight behind her cheeks. Out of nowhere I get the urge to kiss her—maybe just to get her to shut up.

I can’t make my voice work, and for a moment we stare at each other in silence. Then her expression changes. She looks suddenly afraid. She sits up, drawing a pillow protectively over her stomach, like she’s worried I’m going to lunge at her zombie-style and start chowing down on her flesh. “What? What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Nothing.” I turn away again, blushing so hard my cheeks burn, not sure where that momentary bit of insanity came from.

Luckily, before things can get any weirder, there are footsteps on the stairs—Mia and Wade are back. Mia is hugging oursixth-grade yearbook to her chest, and the sight of it makes my stomach hurt. I don’t know what happened to my copy, the one covered all over in Summer’s and Mia’s handwriting, including a doodle of Mr. Springer, our bio teacher, with a hard-on (courtesy of Summer) and a hand-drawn heart border around a picture of the three of us, taken during Spirit Week (courtesy of Mia).

“It’s a miracle,” Mia says. Her face is flushed and she’s smiling. “There’s actually a clear path to the bookshelves. I hardly even remembered wehadbookshelves.”

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