Page 4 of Broken Things

My mom likes to say that she collects because she doesn’t want to forget anything. She once joked that the Piles were like a personal forest: you could read her age in the size of them. And it’s true that here, a history of our little two-person family is written: water-warped postcards, now indecipherable, dating from just after my parents’ divorce; five-year-old magazines; even one of my science textbooks from seventh grade, the last year I ever spent in public school.

But it’s more than that. It’s not the story of a family but of a family gone wrong. It’s a book told in silences, words suppressed underneath enormous cloth-and-cardboard mountains.

I squat down to keep sifting and discarding. Then I shift a stackof moldering printer paper and my heart stops.

Sitting on a patchy square of carpet is a single paperback book. The cover, speckled with mold, shows the image of three girls holding hands in front of a glowing door carved into a tree. And suddenly, for no reason, my eyes are burning, and I know that this thing, this small, bound set of pages, is the heart of it all: this is the root of the forest, the seed, the reason that for years my mother has been building walls, mountains, turrets of belongings. To hem it in. To keep it down.

As if it’s alive, and dangerous, and might someday come roaring back to life.

The book feels simultaneously heavy and hopelessly brittle, as if it might break apart under my touch. The inside cover is still neatly marked in blue pen:

Property of Summer Marks.

And beneath that, in red, because Brynn insisted:and Mia and Brynn. Even though Summer never even let us read it unless she was there to read it with us. It was hers: her gift to us, her curse. I have no idea how it ended up in my house. Summer must have left it here.

The last line of handwriting I recognize as my own.

Best friends forever.

For a long time I sit there, dizzy, as everything comes rushing back—the story, the three friends, the landscape of Lovelorn itself. Those days in the woods playing make-believe under a shifting star pattern of leaves and sun. How we’d come home atnight, breathless, covered in bug bites and scratches. How things changed that year, began to twist and take different shapes. The things we saw and didn’t see. How afterward, no one believed us.

How Lovelorn stopped being a story and became real.

Slowly, carefully, as if moving too fast might release the story from the pages, I begin leafing through the book, noting the dog-eared pages, the passages starred in pink and purple, the paper warped now from moisture and age. I catch quick glimpses of familiar words and passages—theRiver of Justice,Gregor the Dwarf,the Red War—and am torn between the desire to plunk myself down and start reading, cover to cover, like we must have done eighty times, and to run outside and hurl the book into the Dumpster, or just set it on fire and watch it burn. Amazing how even after all this time, I still have whole passages practically memorized—how I remember what comes after Ashleigh falls down the canyon and gets captured by jealous Nobodies, and what happens after Ava tempts the Shadow by singing to it. How we used to spend hours arguing about the last line and what it might possibly mean, trolling the internet for other Lovelornians, theorizing about why Georgia Wells hadn’t finished the book and why it was published anyway.

A sheet of paper is wedged deep into the binding. When I unfold it, a Trident wrapper—Peach + Mango Layers, Summer’s favorite gum—flutters to the ground. For a second I can even smell her, the gum and the apple shampoo her foster mother bought in jumbo containers at the ninety-nine-cent store, a shampoo thatsmelled awful in the bottle but somehow, on Summer, worked.

My heart is all the way in my throat. Maybe I’m expecting an old note, a scribbled message from Summer to one of us; maybe I’m expecting her to reach out from the grave and sayboo. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when I see it’s just an old three-question Life Skills pop quiz that must date from sixth grade. It’s covered all over with the teacher’s red pen markings and various deductions for wrong answers and misspellings. At the bottom, the teacher has even included a summons.Come see me after class, please.—Ms. Gray.

Ms. Gray. I haven’t thought about her in forever. She was one of the Earnest Ones and seemed to believe that her subject, Life Skills, wouldactuallyimprove the quality of our lives. Like knowing how to unroll a condom on a banana and identify a uvula on an anatomical chart were going to get us through middle school.

I’m about to replace the failed quiz and toss the book, once and for all, when I get the poky feeling that something isn’t right—a discomfort, like a rock in the shoe or a bug bite on the knee, something itchy and impossible to ignore. It doesn’tfit.

I grab the book and the quiz and make my way out into the hall, where the light is better. The temperature has dropped by at least fifteen degrees, and I shiver when my feet hit the linoleum. Outside, the rain is still pounding away at the windows like it’s trying to get in.

Summer was never a good student—she was more interested inReturn to Lovelornthan she was in doing homework—and herfoster father, Mr. Ball, was always threatening to lock her in her room if she didn’t bring her grades up. She just didn’tcareabout school. Her future was bigger than graduation, bigger than college, way bigger than Twin Lakes.

But she was the writer. She was the talent. She was the one who insisted we meet up at least twice a week to work onReturn to Lovelorn, the fan fic we were making up together, the sequel that would resolve the awful, baffling, unfinished ending of the original. She would sit cross-legged on Brynn’s bed, directing us to change this or that scene, to add in certain details. She would go away for a week and come back with sixty pages, with the three of us as the heroines instead of Ashleigh, Ava, and Audrey; and her chapters were brilliant, detailed, and strange and gorgeous, so good we always begged her to try to get them published.

Here, though, Summer’s answers are all screwed up. She switches around common words and misspells stupid things liketheirandthey’re, writes half her letters backward, mistakes words for words that sound similar but mean totally different things.

I get a sudden rush to my head, like a fever coming on all at once. Suddenly I realize: Summercouldn’thave written those perfect pages ofReturn to Lovelorn.

Which means that there was somebody else.

The day turned brighter and the shadows darker, the trees grew incrementally taller and their leaves turned a very slightly different green, and the girls knew without speaking a word that something tremendously exciting was happening, that they had come to a new place in the woods.

“I don’t remember a river,” said Audrey, wrinkling her nose as she often did when she was confused.

“Or a sign,” said Ava, and she read aloud from the neatly lettered signpost tacked to a tall oak tree. “‘Welcome to Lovelorn.’”

“Lovelorn,” Audrey said scornfully, because she was often scornful about things she didn’t understand. “What on earth is that?”

Ashleigh shook her head. “Should we go back?” she asked doubtfully.

“No way,” Ava said. And because Ava was the prettiest one, and also the most opinionated, and the others always did what she said, they went forward instead.

—FromThe Way into Lovelornby Georgia C. Wells

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