Page 60 of Broken Things

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You told me your mom was in the hospital.”

“Keep your voice down, okay?” Brynn glares at me as if I’m the one who’s done something wrong.

“Youlied,” I say. A word that doesn’t sound half as bad as it is. To lie, to deceive, to cheat, to trick. To recline on a soft bed. #12again.“All this time, your mom was fine. You could have gone home. You didn’t have to sleep in the shed—”

“God. Just keep your voice down, all right?”

“You didn’t have to stay with me—”

The rest of the sentence turns hard and catches in my throat. Suddenly I can’t breathe.

The answer is so obvious. Why did she agree to help, after she told me at first I was crazy? Why did she go to the shed and then make up a huge lie about her mom? Could she have known I’d invite her back to my house? She’s been looking for something—evidence, something she wrote for Summer or Summer wrote for her. She hasn’t been helping me find the truth.

She’s been trying to cover it up.

Run, Mia, she’d said.Run. And I did. I didn’t stop, not even when I heard screaming.

Brynn—wild, ferocious Brynn, Brynn and her big mouth, all curled-up anger and leaps and explosion, Brynn with a fist hard like a boy’s—killed Summer. And I’ve been too stupid, too stubborn, to believe it.

“You.” Now, when I’ve never been so scared in my life, my voice is strong. Steady. Pouring over the words. “You killed her. It was you all along.”

“Oh my God, are you for real?” Brynn rolls her eyes. “Look, I can explain, okay? Just not here.” She grabs my wrist and I yank away. She stares at me. “Wait—you’re not serious, are you?”

Before I can answer, a lamp clicks on in the living room, lightingup Brynn’s mom, face pressed to the window, eyes creviced at the corners, squinting to see outside.

“Shit.” This time Brynn gets a hand around my arm and pulls me into a crouch, so we’re concealed behind a straggly line of bushes. An old plastic Easter egg is half-embedded in the dirt. “Shit,” she says again.

“What are you—?”

“Shhh.Come on.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you—”

But she’s already hauling me back to my feet, and like it or not, I have no choice but to follow, have never had a choice. We shoot across the street, bent practically double, and push into the trees just as the porch light comes on and Brynn’s mom steps out onto the stoop, hugging her bathrobe closed, peering out over the now empty street. Brynn takes a step backward even though we’re sheltered by the trees and the shadows, wincing as a branch snaps beneath her weight. But soon her mom returns inside and the porch and living room lights go off in succession.

Brynn exhales. “That was close.”

At last, she releases me. I whip around to face her, rubbing my wrist even though it doesn’t really hurt. Still, she’s left half-moon marks in my skin. “Explain,” I say.“Now.”

“Come on, Mia.” She doesn’t sound guilty. Not even a little bit. Just angry and tired. “Cut the shit. You can’treallythink I killed Summer.”

The words sound ridiculous when she says them. That briefsense of certainty—the truth like an electric pulse reaching out to zap me—is gone. Brynn’s a lot of things, at least half of them bad, but she’s not a killer. I remember how upset she was years ago when we stumbled on those poor crows, two of them skewered as if for a barbecue roast, the last one bleeding out slowly in the snow. While my lunch came up in my throat she kneeled down in her jeans and scooped the poor thing into her arms, went running with it toward the road as if there was anything she could do, any help she could give it there. It died in her arms and she wouldn’t believe it was beyond rescue. She insisted on finding a shoebox so we could bury it.

Still, she lied.

“I don’t knowwhatI think,” I say.

She stares at me for another long moment. Then she turns around and starts beating her way up the hill, back toward Owen’s house, thwacking through the trees and sending down a patter of moisture from their leaves.

I hurry to keep up. “I want the truth, Brynn.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” She deliberately lets a branch rebound so I have to duck to avoid getting swatted in the face.

“Try me.” The slope is steeper than it seemed on the way down. Brynn must have walked this path plenty of times. She’s moving quickly, confidently through the dark, leaping over stones that knock at my shins, pinballing from tree to tree for momentum. I hit a slick of rotting leaves and my ankle turns, and I grab hold of the back of Brynn’s shirt at the last second to keep from goingdown. She turns around with a little cry of surprise. “What are you hiding?”

She looks away. Sharp nose, sharp cheeks, sharp chin. Brynn is the most knifelike person I’ve ever known. “I’m not an addict,” she says finally, after such a long pause I was sure she wouldn’t answer.

“What?” This, of all things, was not what I expected her to say.

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