Page 51 of Broken Things

“Another few weeks, at least. Forty-five-day program.” What’s one more lie? At a certain point, maybe they’ll start to cancel each other out. Crap on top of more crap. Like subtracting from zero. “How’s Mom?” I say before she can ask any more questions.

“She’s all right. The same. You want to talk to her?”

“No,” I say quickly. “That’s all right.” But already Erin’s pulling the phone away from her ear. TV noises again, the roar of all those people laughing. My mom’s voice in the background, muffled, so I can’t make out what she’s saying. “That’s all right,” I say, a little louder.

“Christ, no need to shout,” Erin says. “Mom says hi.” Which means she didn’t want to talk to me either. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’mnotsurprised.

But still.

“I gotta go. I have group,” I say. Wade’s jogging back to the car, blowing air out of his cheeks hard, like he’s crossing a six-mile track and not a stretch of empty asphalt.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Erin says.

“Sure.” I hang up as Wade heaves himself behind the wheel again.

“I got you a present,” he says, and tosses a rabbit’s foot in my lap, one of the awful ones, dyed neon pink and dangling from the end of a cheap key chain.

“You know I’m a vegetarian, right?” I pick up the key chain with two fingers, get the glove compartment open, and hook it inside.

“It’s good luck,” Wade says.

“It’s nasty.” I try not to think of the poor rabbit, twitching out his guts on the ground for someone else’s good luck.

I have a sudden memory of seeing Summer that day in the woods, holding something dark and stiff that at first looked like a blanket....

“What? What’s wrong?” Wade’s watching me.

“Nothing.” I punch down the window, inhale the smell of new sap and gasoline. “Everything. This whole mission. It’sallwrong.”She’ll never let us go, I almost say, but bite back the words at the last second. I’m not even sure where they came from. “Maybe it’s better if we don’t know what happened. Maybe it’s better if we just forget.”

“But you weren’t forgetting, were you?” Wade says softly. “That’s why all the rehab trips. Isn’t that what you told me? It’s the place you feel safe.”

He’s right, of course. I wasn’t forgetting. Not even close.

“Why do you care so much?” I turn on Wade.

“What do you mean?” Wade looks legitimately confused. “You’re my cousin.”

“Ourmomsare cousins,” I say. “I saw you maybe twice growing up. And one time you were dressed as Batman. So what’s your excuse?”

Wade looks away, bouncing one knee, hands on the wheel, quiet for a bit. “You ever read about the Salem witch trials?”

“Sure,” I say. “Back in the 1700s, right?”

“No. Earlier. Massachusetts, 1600s. But there were others like them, here and in Europe. Some places they still have witch hunts, you know, when things start to go wrong.”

“Wade.” I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, suddenly exhausted. In my head I see Summer still teasing us to follow her, running deeper into the woods, passing in and out ofview.Tag. You’re it.“What are you talking about?”

“Witches, demons, evil spirits. Look, it’s human nature to point fingers. To blame. Hundreds of years ago, whenever something went wrong, the crops failed or a baby died or a ship got lost at sea, people said the devil did it. They looked for reasons because just plain bad luck didn’t seem like a good reason at all. Plain bad luck meant no one was looking out for you, there was no one to blame and no one to thank, either. No God.” He takes a deep breath. “What happened in Twin Lakes five years ago was a witch hunt. Something terrible happened. No one could understand it. No onewantedto understand it. So what did they do? They made up a story. They made up a myth.”

An invisible touch of wind makes the hair on my arms stand up. I open my eyes. “The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.”

He nods. “They turned you into demons. Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored. The boy next door. An old book. They made a movie out of you. It was a witch hunt.”

Three average, everyday girls. A little lonely, a little ignored.I turn toward the window and swallow down something hard and tight.No one’s ever lonely in Lovelorn.The line comes back to me, from our fan fic.No one except the Shadow.The trees are creeping on the edge of the parking lot, like they’re planning to make a sneak attack. For a second, I imagine that maybe Lovelorn’s still out there. Maybe it just picked up and moved, found some other lonely girls to welcome.

“The funny thing is,” Wade says, “they got it all mixed up.”

I turn back to him. “What do you mean?”

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