Page 52 of Broken Things

His face is pale, like a photographic impression of itself. But here in the half dark, his features are softened and I realize he’s not bad-looking. His face has character. Strength. He looks like someone you can trust.

“Someone really did kill Summer,” he says quietly. “Someone knocked her out and dragged her into the stones and knifed her seven times. There’s a monster out there, Brynn. All this time, there’s been a monster out there. And no one’s tracking it.”

“Except for us,” I say.

“Yeah.” He sighs. He seems almost sad. “Except for us.”

Mia

Then

What I remember: a day in January, dazzling with new snow, the sky like a flat mirror, white with clouds. Brynn and I hadn’t wanted to go to Lovelorn that day—it was much too cold, and I had a late dance practice. I was training harder than ever, then, in preparation to audition for the School of American Ballet’s summer program, one of the most competitive in the country.

Besides, for a week Summer had been ignoring us, the way she sometimes did, punishing us for God knows what reason (because we’d gone to the movies the day after Christmas without her; because we’d failed to be as miserable on break as she was; because we had families toshareChristmas with; all of the above), but when Summer came running up to us after school, backpack jogging, cheeks blown red from the wind and blond hair sweeping out from beneath her knit cap, we couldn’t say no.

I remember how Brynn lit up, as if Summer was the current,the electricity, and for the past week she’d just been waiting for someone to plug her in. I knew then that Brynn didn’t love me, not half as much as she loved Summer. I was just a shadow substitute, someone to keep her company while she waited for herrealbest friend to come back.

The woods were deep and quiet with snow. Our footsteps plunging through the film of surface ice disturbed crows from their perches, sent them screaming toward the sky.

Summer was in a good mood. She hardly seemed to notice the cold and kept urging us to hurry up, go on, just a little farther—past the shed, past another frozen creek, down into a kind of gully where birch trees stood like ghostly signposts, frightened by some past horror into the same stripped whiteness. This was the prima ballerina Summer, the dazzlingly beautiful one, the one we could never refuse. But there was another Summer, anotherthinginside her, something bent-backed and old, something that crouched in the shadows.

It started snowing. Flurries at first. But soon fat flakes were coming down, as if the whole sky was chipping away slowly, and I was freezing, and I’d had enough.

“I want to go back.” I never spoke up, not to Summer.

She and Brynn were floundering ahead. This far in the woods, the sun barely penetrated, and the drifts of old snow were higher, swallowing them all the way to the knee. Summer didn’t even glance back. “Just a little farther.”

“No,” I said. Feeling the word through my whole body, like an earthquake. “Now.”

Summer turned around. Her whole face was pink. Her eyes were a blue that reminded me of the creek—sparkling and pretty, until you noticed all the darkness tumbling underneath.

“Since when,” she said slowly, “do you get to decide?”

I’d made a mistake. That was how things were with Summer: like crossing a frozen river, just praying the ice would hold you. Thenbam, suddenly you fell through, you were drowning. “I’m cold,” I managed to say.

“I’m cold,” she parroted, making her voice sound thin and high and afraid. Then, with a wave of her hand: “All right, go ahead. Go back, then. We don’t need you. Come on, Brynn.” And she started to walk again.

But Brynn stayed where she was, blinking snow out of her lashes. Summer was several feet away by the time she realized that Brynn hadn’t moved. She turned around, exasperated.

“I saidcome on, Brynn.”

Brynn licked her lips. They were peeling. The winter had come especially hard that year. It had snowed on Thanksgiving and hadn’t stopped snowing. “Mia’s right.” Her voice echoed in the emptiness.Nothing alive around for miles.I remember thinking that. We might as well have been standing in a tomb. “It’s freezing. I want to go back.”

For a second, Summer just stood there, staring, shocked. And cold gathered in the pit of my stomach and turned my throat to ice.#35. Things you aren’t allowed to say (see: curse words; God’s name in vain; the word “Macbeth” whispered in a theater,which brings bad luck to the whole production).A shadow moved behind her eyesagain, something so dark it didn’t just obscure the light but swallowed it.

But then she blinked and shrugged and only laughed. “Whatever,” she said. “We can go back.”

The moment had passed. Brynn exhaled. Her breath hung for a second in the air before dispersing.

As Summer stomped past me, she squeezed my cheek with ice-cold fingers. “How could anyone,” she said, “saynoto this face?”

But she gripped me so hard, it left my jaw aching. We were safe, but not for long.

It was Summer’s idea to bring back the tournament.

“I mean, you can’t just say you’re loyal to Lovelorn,” she argued. “Anyone can say anything. There has to be a way to prove it.”

—FromReturn to Lovelornby Summer Marks, Mia Ferguson, and Brynn McNally

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