Page 39 of Broken Things

“Making progress, Mia,” Abby says.

I deliberately avoid looking at Abby and sit down next to Mia when she kneels on the carpet. Wade sits next to us, cross-legged, and draws the yearbook into his lap. As he begins paging through it, my stomach does more gymnastics. I see quick flashes of familiar faces, classrooms, photographs—my past stamped down, pressed onto the pages like a butterfly pinned behind glass, preserving some piece of the timebefore.

“Check it out.” Wade flips to a photograph of the football team and uncaps a pen with his teeth. He circles a guy with a scowl and long bangs kneeling in the front row.

“Hey,” Mia protests.

Wade barely glances up at her. “Don’t tell me you were saving this for your grandchildren.” He slides the yearbook over to me. “Heath Moore.”

I lean forward, squinting. The resolution’s not great, but even so, I do recognize him. “Wait a second—he was on our bus route.”

“Let me see.” Mia snatches the yearbook from me and frowns over his picture. A squirrely guy, always sat up front, hunched down in his seat with earphones plugged deep in his ears whenever Mr. Haggard, the bus driver, started in on his usual rotation of show tunes.Les Misérables,Into the Woods,Meet Me in St. Louis, even one of the songs fromCats. The only reason I remember him at all is because of the way he used to stare at Summer.Perv much?I said to him once. And he smiled and showed off nubby teeth and said,You would know.

“Okay,” Mia says slowly. “If they met on the bus, he might have known that we hung out in the woods.”

“Yeah, but how would he have known about Lovelorn?” Wade says.

“She must have told him.” Abby scooches to the edge of the bed, accidentally knocking my back with one of her shins.

I shift away from her. “She wouldn’t have,” I say automatically.

But the truth is, Summer did a lot of things in that last year I would never have expected. She went out with Jake Ginsky, freshman and resident leech, and started cutting school and smoking pot in the mornings. She made out with Owen Waldmann in the middle of the dance floor at the Spring Fling when she knew Mia had been in love with him for years. She even got wasted a few times, even though she’d always trash-talked her bio mom for being a useless drunk, for never leaving Summer with anything except a dumb name and a single copy of the only book she’d ever read to Summer as a child:The Way into Lovelorn.

It was like there were two Summers. Or like Summer was a coin with two different faces. You never knew which one was gonna land.

Wade takes back the yearbook and flips forward a few pages, looping a big circle around Jake Ginsky.

“It wasn’t Jake,” I say quickly.

“I’m not saying it was. Just hang on.” He rifles through some more pages and circles another boy, pictured with a serious-looking camera and a slick of long hair in his eyes. Wade’s last target, sandwiched between students dressed identically in blazers, smiles stiffly at the camera. “Heath Moore, Jake Ginsky, James Lee, and Noah Shepherd. The cops looked at all of them. Why? Because all of them, at some point or another, were involved with Summer or wanted to be involved with her.”

“What’s your point?” No matter how hard I try to push them down, memories keep resurfacing, exploding hot and bright behind my eyelids. Summer looping her arms around Mia and me just after the rumors about her and Jake first started, saying,You know you’re the only ones Ireallylove.

“Mypointis why? Why Summer? Where did they meet her? Where did they even see her? TLC has three thousand students from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It’s not exactly tiny. These boys were all in high school. They couldn’t have seen her in the halls—she was in an entirely different building. And other than Heath and Jake, none of the boys had activities in common. Heath was on her bus, fine, but the others weren’t. I’ve checked.”

“They seriously let you into BU?” Mia says.

Wade ignores that. “Different friends, hobbies, and habits, all of them in love with the same girl.”

“You obviously have a theory,” I say. “So just spit it out.”

“My stepbrother told me that all the boys used to stay after school Mondays and Wednesdays for extracurriculars,” he says. “I think Summer must have too. She might have been meeting someone, or was part of some club she never told you about, and if we can figure out what it was—”

“Owen was tutoring her,” I say. Mia glares at me, but I don’t care. “Our old Life Skills teacher told us. Maybe Owen and Summer stayed after school together.”

Wade is staring at us, openmouthed, obviously devastated that his big important theory has proved to be a complete wash. “But... but...” He looks back and forth from Mia to me, as if expecting one of us to yelljust kidding. “That wasn’t in any of the reports.”

“She must have been embarrassed about it,” I say. “That must be why she never told us.”

“Why would they stay afterschool?” Mia crosses her arms. When she’s angry, she looks sharper, as if someone has chiseled her face into a point. “They could have gone anywhere. His house, her house—”

“Oh yeah, right. Like she would have gone to her house with Mr. Ball skulking around her.”

She seizes on his name. “You know, I’ve been thinking weshould look harder at Mr. Ball. Do we have any proof that he was in Burlington that day, like he told us?”

“You think the cops didn’t check?” I ask.

“They didn’t check the football players’ alibis, did they?” Mia lifts her chin. “He used toread her emails. And she was sure he was stealing things from her drawers. Remember how weirdly afraid he was that she’d get pregnant? Like he just loved to picture her having—” She stops herself from saying the wordsex. Her cheeks go splotchy with color.

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