Page 65 of Broken Things

“I’ve heard stories about you,” Summer said, tossing her hair so as to look unconcerned. But the Shadow was right. She was scared. “You steal children. You take them away underground to eat them.”

“That’s not true,” the Shadow said. “I only take them to keep them safe. So they won’t grow old and ugly. So they can stay children forever.”

—FromReturn to Lovelornby Summer Marks

Mia

Now

“Morning, sunshine.”

I wake from a dream that breaks up immediately and leaves me with only the sense of someone shouting. Brynn is standing in front of me, hazy in the sun beaming in through the windows.

I sit up, jittery from the dream I can’t remember. “What time is it?”

“Ten,” Owen answers from the hall. A second later he appears, showered and clean-looking, his hair curled wetly, in a faded red T-shirt that saysLondon. The black eye seems to have grown overnight, bleeding down into his cheek. I don’t know why people call it a black eye. This one is plum-colored. “Sorry. Brynn thought you’d want coffee.”

When I bring a hand to my cheek, I can feel the spiderweb impressions of faint lines from the couch.

“Where’s Abby?” I ask. I don’t remember falling asleep lastnight—only that Wade and Brynn were arguing about whether or not Haggard could have possibly known about Lovelorn, whether he could really have been the one helping Summer do the writing, and I decided to close my eyes just for a few minutes, and then I wasn’t on a couch at all, but on a boat. At some point, I thought Owen was beside me—I thought he touched my hair and whispered—but that must have been part of the dream.

“Wade must have dropped her at home on his way to work,” Brynn says. “They were gone when I got up. She probably didn’t want to wake you up,” Brynn adds quickly, because she must see that I’m hurt. Brynn looks good—alert, dark hair bundled up in a messy ponytail, fashionably rumpled, as if sleeping on the floor in other people’s houses with a sweatshirt for a pillow is part of her strategy for success. She passes me a Styrofoam cup of coffee, too sugared, pale with cream. “Gotta caffeinate,” she says. “Today we nail Haggard.”

“Today?” I nearly spit out my coffee. “You want to talk to himtoday?”

“What’s the point in waiting?” she says.

I look to Owen—old habit, from back when I could count on him to agree with me, when I could read what he was thinking by the way he squinted his eyes, by the smallest twitch in his lips; when we didn’thaveto speak, because we just understood—but he sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “She’s right,” he says, and only in his voice do I hear how tired he is. “I just want this to be over. Finally.”

And then what?I nearly say. Then Owen goes off to my dream school, and the Waldmann house is sold, and I lose him forever—beautiful, bright, matchstick Owen, full of crackle and life. Then Brynn does whatever Brynn is going to do, and Abby and I are still stuck here, in Twin Lakes, and no one will hail us or call us heroes. And that’s it, the end of the story: curtains down, dancers gone home, a theater sticky with spilled soda and old trash.

Then I will still be as lonely as ever. Lonelier, maybe. Because this time, there will be no chance that someday Owen will come home and we’ll get to start over.

In the bathroom mirror I barely recognize myself. I look spidery and thin and old. My eyes are sinking into two hollows. I wonder what Summer would look like now, had she lived—all that blond hair and skin like a new peach. I find a single half-used tube of toothpaste in an otherwise empty drawer and use my finger to clean my teeth, then finger-comb my hair back into a bun.

What will we say to Mr. Haggard?

Do you remember a girl named Summer Marks?Stupid. Of course he does. Everyone does. And he was at her memorial.

Mr. Haggard, we know what you did to Summer.

Mr. Haggard, tell us what you know about Lovelorn.

I whisper the words very quietly in the bathroom. There, they sound silly and harmless. Musical, even. #44. Words mean different things to different people, at different times, in different places.

Through the window I see a dark car—the limousine type that service airports—nose through the gates and disappear fromview. A second later Brynn pounds on the bathroom door.

“Mia,” she whispers.

“What?” I say, opening the door. She looks as panicked as I’ve ever seen her. “What is it?”

But then, from the front hall, a man calls, “Owen? You home?” The voice is instantly familiar, even after all these years.

Mr. Waldmann is back.

Brynn edges behind me into the front hall, as if she expects Owen’s dad to start shooting at her and wants to use me for cover. Mr. Waldmann is almost unrecognizable. I remember him mostly as a disembodied voice—a voice slurring from behind a locked door to be quiet, go outside. He wasn’t fat back then, exactly, but he was soft. Blurry. Chin folding into neck into chest into rolls of stomach. Even his eyes were blurry and seemed never to be able to focus on one thing without sliding over to something else.

But Mr. Waldmann now is all sharp corners and edges: close-cropped hair, thin, a jaw like Owen’s, perfectly defined. Even in his jeans, wearing a blazer over a T-shirt, he looks like the kind of person who’s used to being listened to. Something old and damaged has, in the past five years, seemingly been fixed.

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