Page 44 of Broken Things

She’s already dodging the sawhorses and disappearing down Carol. I curse and get out of the car. Already, the blob of people has re-formed, filled in all the spaces. The scratchy microphone voice is still blaring in the distance.Five years ago today... atragedy in our community...Other than that, it’s silent. Not a single sneeze, cough, or fart.

I tug my hood a little lower, mumble “Excuse me,” and work my way over to Carol, skirting the edge of the crowd.

A few doors up on Carol, Heath Moore has Owen shoved up against the window of Lily’s Organic Café and Bakeshop. His two friends remind me of blowfish: hovering just behind Heath, doing their best to puff themselves up and look bigger. One of them has a phone out and he’s filming the whole thing. And Mia’s just standing there with her fists clenched.

“Stop it,” she’s saying when I blow past her—but quietly, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Leave him alone.” Heath doesn’t even glance in her direction.

“You think this is funny?” Heath shoves Owen against the window. Owen doesn’t try to fight back, although I bet he could. “You think it’s a fucking joke?”

I’m out of breath from the short dash down the street and pull up, panting a little. I snatch the phone from the blowfish who’s filming and dance out of his reach before he has a chance to take it back.

Heath Moore whips around, keeping an arm across Owen’s chest. “What the hell?” he says. “That’smyphone.”

“My phone now.” I pocket it, keeping my voice steady, relaxed. The calm before the fuck-you-up. “So what happened, Heath?” I say. I don’t even know why I’m so desperate to defend Owen. “Your mom forget to lock your cage this morning?”

His eyes sludge past me and land on Mia. His face goes through about ten different expressions and settles on the ugliest one.

“Cute,” he says. In the five years since Summer died, Heath Moore has thickened out, and not in a good way. “Real cute. The whole band’s back together.” His dopey friends are just standing there, staring. They must be twins. They’ve got the same chewed-up look, like someone gnawed on their faces and then regurgitated them just a little wrong. “You’ve got some balls, showing up here.”

“At least one of us has them,” I fire back.

“Very funny.” Heath’s not sure who to go after first. He keeps swiveling around from Owen to me, me to Owen. “It’s all a game to you, isn’t it? Showing up here, laughing at everyone. Laughing at Summer.”

I squeeze my hands into fists and imagine black smoke rising through me, blotting out the memory. “She was our friend,” I say. “Our best friend. Just because you decided to perv out on her—”

Heath turns red. “Shewent afterme.”

I barrel right over that one. “—doesn’t mean you knew her. It doesn’t mean you knew anything about her.”

“I knew enough to know what she thought of you.” He’s lost it now. His voice is carrying, and people at the end of the street have started to look. But no one comes over to investigate. They’re like frigging cows, just herded up and watching all the action. “I know what you did to her. You turned her.”

“Turned her?” For a second, I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Into one of you,” he said. “You turned her gay.”

He takes another step toward me and leans in, so I can feel the heat of his breath, a gasoline smell, like maybe he’s been drinking. He reaches up with hard bloated fingers and takes my shoulder. “Or maybe you just haven’t had the right guy yet. What do you think of that?”

Whoosh.Anger crackles through me. Without thinking, I bring my knee up, hard, between his legs, catch him right in the soft parts. Heath lets out a howl and doubles over, cursing, tears streaming down his face.

One of the Regurgitated Twins comes at me. I’m hot now, ready for a fight. But he’s stronger than he looks and shoves me off balance.

“Bitch,” he says.

“Don’t touch her.”

Even as I’m swinging at the guy, Owen comes at him, knocking him in the shoulder to spin him around. Owen swings. His fist connects with a crack. The guy stumbles backward, blood gushing from his nose, a bright tide of it, and I think of that day years ago on the playground, when Owen turned on Elijah Tanner and shut him up with a single punch—but when Owen’s eyes meet mine, I see in them something that runs through me like a shock: we’re the same. He fights not because he wants to, but because he has no choice. He fights from the corner.

Then the other guy leaps on Owen from behind and brings him to the ground, and now Mia’s voice has finally broken free of herthroat and she’s standing there screaming, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

People come flowing down Carol Street, and my whole head feels huge and swollen as a blister, about to explode—they’re going to see us, they’re going to see us. Just then, I spot Mr. Ball, Summer’s foster dad, in the crowd. But the next second, a woman shoves him aside and hurtles past me.

“What on earth—?”

It takes a minute for my brain and eyes to connect: Ms. Gray. Owen and Twin #2 are still grappling on the ground. Ms. Gray just steps in and grabs Twin #2 by the shirt collar, like he’s a dog, and hauls him backward. “What is goingon?”

“They started it,” I blurt out.

She gives me a look—are you serious?—and I press my lips together, wishing I hadn’t said anything. Next to me, Mia’s practically hyperventilating, as if she were the one getting clobbered. Her voice has dried up again, just straight up and gone.

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