Page 62 of Broken Things

She turns back around to face me. “Poor baby,” she says. “You want to start a club or something? Want to be treasurer and get a trophy?”

“Stop it. You know that’s not what I meant.”

Moonlight catches Brynn’s teeth and makes them flash, like a predator’s. “I’m sick of your poor-me act, okay? I’m not buying it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.” Brynn has lost it plenty of times in front of me, but never like this. Neveratme. The woods seem to be shrieking along with her. “You sold me out.”

“What?” I nearly choke on the word.

“To the cops. You sold me out.” In the dark, she looks like a stranger, or like a wild spirit, something not of this world. Flashing teeth and eyes striped with dark and wild hair. “‘Ask Brynn,’” she mimics. “‘Brynn will tell you. I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even there.’” She’s shaking, and in an instant I know that this, her anger, what she thinks I did, is the reason she stopped picking up my calls, never texted back, dropped stonelike straight out of my life. “They wouldn’t believe me about anything. You had themconvincedit was my fault.”

I remember sitting in the musty room, armpits tickly with sweat, my mouth desert-dry despite the Coke they’d given me. My dad glaring at me, losing control, not quite shouting but almost.

“I never meant to get you in trouble.”Tell them, Mia. Just tell them the truth.And me: trying to haul the words up from some sandpit where they’d gotten stuck, through layers of stone and sediment, shaking with the effort.Ask Brynn, I said.Ask Brynn.

“Oh yeah? What did you mean, then?”

“I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.” She turns away from me again and now it’s my turn to grab her wrist, to force her to stay and listen. “You made meliefor you, Brynn. You made me swear I wouldn’t tell what happened—”

“I didn’t do it for me.” We’re so close I canfeelthe words as she shouts them. Stab, stab, stab. Like she’s hitting me instead. “I did it for her, don’t you get it? So no one would know. I wasprotectingher, I—”

“Brynn? Mia?” Owen’s voice comes to us from the street. I drop Brynn’s arm and she steps backward quickly. My heart is racing, as if I’ve been running.

“Mia?” Owen’s voice is closer now.

“Here.” Brynn brings a hand up to her eyes as she turns away, and I feel a hard jab of guilt. Was she crying? But when we make it onto the street and her face is revealed in the moonlight, she looks calm, almost blank. As if someone has taken an eraser and wiped away not just her anger but every feeling.

Owen looks like a matchstick on fire. His hair shoots towardthe sky. He’s practically crackling with excitement. “There you are,” he says. “Come on.”

“What?” I say. “What is it?”

He’s already started back toward the house. He barely turns around to answer. “It’s Abby,” he says. “She found something.”

Brynn

Then

The snow was coming hard on a slant, and somehow we got turned around. We’d been in the woods a hundred times, walking through the same trees, making our landmarks of stumps and depressions, clumps of briar and places where ancient walls had tumbled into piles, but with the snow so fast and pure white and all the ground caked over, we’d gotten lost.

You heard stories growing up in Vermont. Stories of people run aground in their cars in wintertime: people who wandered out of their cars and got lost in the whiteness. Stories of people frozen to death because of being in woods just like these, unprepared, cocky, no way back, the sweat built up on their bodies turning them into icicles. Stupid. We couldn’t be a quarter mile from Brickhouse Lane, but the more we walked, the less we recognized. Blank spaces, all whited out by snow. Like they were getting erased with it. Like we were getting erased, too.

“You’re doing it deliberately,” I said to Summer. I was only a few notches on the belt down from panic. “Take us back.” She’d been leading us in circles—I was sure of it. To punish us for wanting to go home.

“I’m not. I swear I’m not.” The tip of Summer’s nose was patchy, white and red. The first sign of frostbite. And I knew from the way she said it that she was telling the truth—but that just made me more scared. Mia was crying but without making any noise. Tears and snot ran down to her mouth. And not a sound in the world but the soundlessness of snow, swallowing up our footsteps, swallowing all of us.

“We’re lost.” When Mia finally gave voice to it, I turned around quickly, as if she’d cursed.

“We aren’t lost,” I said. Snow dribbled from my hair. Ice made crusts of my eyelashes. “We just have to keep going.”

There was nothing to do but go on, into the white, hoping we’d see something we recognized. Snow stung like cigarette burns on our cheeks. The snow stretched time into stillness. Mia cried her throat raw, but Summer was surprisingly quiet, her face turned up to the sky, like she expected direction to come from there.

And then the trees fell back like ranks of soldiers on retreat, and we saw we’d somehow looped around to the south side of the long field, missing the shed by at least a few hundred yards. We were less than five minutes from Summer’s house. Mia shouted with relief, and I remember I almost cried, too. But even my eyeballs were cold. The tears froze and wouldn’t fall. Only Summer wasstill quiet, still staring at the sky flaking into snow and the landscape all blurry with white, like there were secrets there we could never guess.

And when halfway across the field we found the crows—two of them frozen, long dead, mounted together on the same stick, like the bloody flag of an ancient warrior warning others not to trespass, and one of them fluttering out its last breaths, drowning in snow, a pellet ribbed deep in its flesh—she stood there shaking her head, almost smiling.

“It’s Lovelorn,” she said, even as I took up that poor bird, that poor dumb innocent crow, and Mia turned away to retch between her fingers. “Don’t you see? Lovelorn doesn’t want to let us go.”

---