Page 6 of Broken Things

Maybe I’ll get to stay for ninety days this time.

“Thank you, Ellen,” the fat guy in the badly fitting suit says, and then puts on his bad-news voice. “In other news, the town of Twin Lakes is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at Brickhouse Lane—”

All the air goes out of the room. Half the girls turn to stare at me. The rest of them go still, as if they’re worried the slightest motion will cause an avalanche.

“—in which, on a seemingly normal Tuesday afternoon, thirteen-year-old Summer Marks was viciously murdered.” A picture of Summer flashes and my heart closes up, fist-like. She looks so young. Shewasso young: our thirteenth birthdays, only three days apart, had passed two weeks before she was murdered. And yet when I imagine her, and when she comes to me—which she still does, in quick impressions, popping in and out of dreams or running through my memories the way she used to run through the woods, suddenly full of light and suddenly plunged into shadow—she’s always my age. Or maybe I’mherage, back when she was my everything.

“Suspicion quickly fell on Summer’s then-boyfriend and two best friends, who had been obsessed with a little-known and especially violent children’s book—”

Please don’t show the picture.My lungs feel as if they’re being flattened to paper.Please don’t show the picture.

“Turn it off,” one of the counselors says sharply. Jocelyn is looking for the remote on the carpet, where it has become lost in the tangle of legs and blankets and soda cups. And it’s too late, anyway. A second later, the picture is on the screen, the infamous picture.

In it, Mia and I are dressed up for Halloween like the Reapers of Lovelorn, wearing black hoodies and lots of eyeliner that Summerpocketed from a local CVS and carrying homemade scythes fashioned from tinfoil and broom handles. And Summer, standing between us, is the Savior: in all white, her blond hair pinned and curled, her lips bloodred and pulled into a smile and a matching circle of red around her neck, too. The news has fuzzed out my face and Mia’s as if with a giant eraser, but Summer’s face is perfectly clear, grinning and triumphant.

I didn’t even want to be a Reaper. I thought we should dress up as the original three—Ava, Ashleigh, and Audrey—but Summer said that would be boring. It was all Summer’s idea.

“So wait. Which one is you?” Zoe asks, turning to me. Zoe is new. She got out of the detox unit only a few days ago and since then has done nothing but sit sullenly in group, chewing on the sleeve of her hoodie or staring at the ceiling fan as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the universe.

“The remote.” The buzz is building among the counselors. Jocelyn is shoving people aside, rolling other girls onto their hips, trying to find the lost remote.

“The case against the two girls was soon dropped, and Summer’s boyfriend was ultimately acquitted, due largely to objections by the defense that the investigation had been mishandled.” He pauses and lets this sink in for a minute, staring at the camera sadly, as if to say that this, the failure to put us in jail for the rest of our natural lives, is an absolute travesty.

He doesn’t say that the cops never even cautioned us before dragging us down to the police station, so nothing we told themwould have held up in court. He doesn’t say that Owen’s defense turned up evidence of insane police incompetence: the DNA sample that supposedly showed his blood intermingled with Summer’s at the crime scene had actually been left in the back of a police van for forty-eight hours and was so broken down by heat that it was ruled inadmissible.

“Thatisyou, right?” Zoe repeats, now looking hurt by my refusal to acknowledge her.

“Five years later, this small, tight-knit community is still shattered by the incomprehensible horror of this crime, and on Sunday plans to host a memorial to—”

The TV goes blank. Jocelyn has at last found the remote, and she sits there panting, like a dog that’s worked too hard to find a bone. There’s an electric silence, somehow louder than any sound. Everyone is watching me, or deliberately not watching me, as if they’re afraid I’ll scream or throw something or maybe just start crying.

Or maybe they’re just afraid.

“Well.” Trish springs to her feet, false cheerful, clapping her hands. “What’s it going to be tonight? Last week there was a vote forTangled—should we watch that?”

No one answers. The room is still laced with tension. I stand up, slightly dizzy, not caring that this will make it worse. No one says anything as I force my way out into the hall, stomping over popcorn kernels and plastic cups, stepping on a girl’s hand. She yelps and then goes quickly quiet.

The hall is empty and cool—an AC thrums somewhere in the walls. As soon as I’m alone, my eyes start to burn and blink fast; I’m not even sure why I’m crying. Maybe it was seeing Summer’s face on TV—that crazy-beautiful heart-shaped face, all big eyes and thick lashes, smiling like she always had a secret.

The pay phone at the end of the hall is etched with initials of previous patients. The receiver smells like bubble gum, and it’s always coated with a thin moisture-film of sweat and lotion. I try to keep it far away from my cheek as I pull out my phone card—sold in the Four Corners store next to racks of stuffed animals and motivational T-shirts—and punch in Wade’s number.

He picks up on the first ring.

“It’s Brynn,” I say, instinctively lowering my voice, even though there’s no one in the hall to eavesdrop. “You’re still coming tomorrow, right? You’re not listening to all this bullshit about a hurricane?”

“Brynn! Hi!” Wade always speaks in exclamation points. “I’m still...” His voice fades out and I have to wrench the phone away from my ear as a brief series of cracks and pops explodes through the line.

“What?” I knuckle the phone a little harder. “I can’t hear you.”

“Sorry!” Another series of cracks, like the sound of someone balling up tinfoil, disturb the line. “The wind’s bad already. They say we’re going to get maybe three feet of rain. River’s supposed to...” His voice fades out again.

“Wade,” I say. I can still hear him talking, but his words arehopelessly distorted. “Wade, I can’t understand you. Just tell me that we’re on for tomorrow. Promise me, okay?”

“I can’t control the weather, Brynn,” he says. Another annoying thing about Wade is that he comes out with deeply obvious statements as if they’re major pieces of wisdom.

“Listen.” At this point I’m pretty much desperate. I need Wade. I’m not leaving Four Corners. I’m not going back into a world of people who stare at me or, even worse, choose to ignore me altogether—push past me on the sidewalk, refuse to serve me at the diner, look straight through me, as if I don’t exist. “Just say you’ll be here, okay? I have something I want to tell you. It’s important.” All bullshit, obviously, and like I said, I’m not a liar by nature. But I’ve learned to look out for myself. I’ve had to.

“What kind of something?” His voice turns suspicious—but also hopeful.

---