Page 59 of Broken Things

“Owen?” I reach out and put a hand on his elbow.

“Hmm?” He turns around, looking almost surprised, as if he’s forgotten I’m there.

The tree frogs and crickets are turning the air to liquid sound, and when I open my mouth, I suddenly feel like I’m drowning.

“Listen.” My voice is a whisper. “About what you said the other day—”

Just then the front door flies open and Abby stands there, transformed by the light behind her into a bell-skirted stranger.

“Is Brynn with you?” she calls out.

Owen turns away from me. Poof. The moment is gone. “What do you mean? I thought she was with you.”

The grass is cool against my bare ankles as I follow Owenacross the lawn. I deliberately avoid the flagstones, stepping hard on the soft earth, a miniature revenge. Then, feeling stupid and childish, I step onto the path again. Abby edges backward to let us in. I can tell something has upset her. She has a good poker face, but not good enough.

“She ran out,” Abby says. “I thought she was just taking a walk....”

“She ran out?” I repeat. Abby nods mutely, avoiding my eyes. Now we’re all packed into the front hall: me, Wade, Abby, and Owen. On one side, the living room, papers blown around like brittle leaves. Our past, scattered and dissected. On the other side, rooms dark and mostly empty of furniture, the whistle of wind through the destroyed remnants of Owen’s sunroom. That’s our past too: rooms full of darkness, things we didn’t understand, wind blowing through shattered spaces. “I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing toget,” Abby says, crossing her arms. Then I know she’s hiding something. “She just went out for a bit. I thought she’d be back by now. That’s all.”

“I’ll go look for her,” I say quickly.

“Want company?” Wade asks, and I shake my head.

Owen doesn’t even offer.

If Brynn had started down Waldmann Lane, we would have seen her on our way back from town. It’s a one-lane road with nowhere to hide, unless she’d hurtled last-minute into the nest of trees. So I loop around the house to the backyard, thinking she might haveneeded a break. But she isn’t there, either. A heavy blue tarp, still scattered with old leaves, covers the long-empty pool.

Where could she have gone?

I circle around to the front of the house again, deciding that we must have missed her. The gate whines open and my shoes crunch on a scattering of pebbles. The moon is slivered short of full. Crazy to be wandering around after midnight, just because, making everybody worry.

But maybe she needed a break from Lovelorn. From Summer. From the sizzle and hiss of old words. When Owen pulled up that box from where it had been entombed, when I saw it lashed all over with tape, I had the strangest feeling that it hadn’t been hidden to keep it safe—but to keep us safe from it.

Witches, they called us.Demons.On a night like tonight all silvery and still, with nothing but a cratered moon and the trees knotted together as though for warmth and comfort, it’s easy to believe that monsters exist. That there are witches hunched over cauldrons and people possessed by vengeful spirits and vampires crying out for blood.

Just outside Owen’s gates is a wooded area where the underbrush has been trampled and the low-hanging branches snapped or twisted back, forming a kind of hollow. Only then do I remember that Brynn’s family moved after the murder. Her house is on Perkins, which runs parallel to Waldmann. Could she have gone home?

I push into the trees, ducking to avoid getting smacked in theface by the branches of an old fir tree. The chitter of insects in the trees grows louder here, as if they’re protesting my interference. Now I see that there’s a pretty clear path cutting down the hill through the underbrush. I can see the glimmer of lights on what must be Brynn’s street, from here no more than a few distant halos, hovering beyond the trees. Shemusthave gone this way.

Burn them.There was a whole tumblr dedicated to the murder and to the idea that Brynn, Summer, and I had been witches, and Owen the warlock who helped control us all. I remember coming across it during that awful month when people drove by my house just to take pictures, when Mom and I woke every day and found our stoop covered by the sheen of egg yolk or our trees toilet-papered or our mailbox pitched over in the grass. When Mom started ordering our groceries online and stopped going to the gym and started stacking up cardboard boxes in the kitchen “just in case.”

Burn them, someone had posted.That’s what they used to do with witches. Build a bonfire and throw them in to roast.

Then we heard that Brynn’s next-door neighbor had tossed a Molotov cocktail into her kitchen. The fire went through the house like it was paper. Brynn barely made it out. Even though she hadn’t spoken to me since the day Summer died, I tried calling her a dozen times, but her phone was always off. And then it was disconnected.

I fish my phone from my bag for light before remembering it’s been dead for hours, and instead go carefully, arms outstretched,sliding a little on the muddy path and swatting at the spiderwebs that reach out to ensnare me. There’s something claustrophobic about these woods and the trees all hemmed close together in this narrow spit of undeveloped land, and I’m relieved when I break free of the last entanglement of growth and end up on a road lined up and down with cheap cottage housing stacked side by side.

Immediately, I spot her: fifty feet from me, standing absolutely still in front of a house that looks like all the others next to it. There’s something unearthly about her stillness. As if shecan’tmove. Her face is touched with a shifting pattern of blue light.

I start toward her and am about to call out, when the window becomes visible and in it I see Brynn’s mother stand up to turn off the television. She’s wearing a bathrobe. I see her face only briefly before the blue light dies in the window and on Brynn’s face. But Brynn’s mother is supposed to be in the hospital.

“Brynn?”

She turns quickly. For a second I see nothing on her face but pain. Then, almost immediately, she looks furious.

“What the hell are you doing?” she says.

---