Page 67 of Broken Things

“What’s the trouble back there, girls?” Mr. Haggard’s voice sounded like it was rumbling out of a foghorn.

“Nothing,” Summer called back sweetly. “We were just saying how cute you look in your new jacket....”

I elbowed her. She rolled her eyes.

“Just giving him some excitement,” she said. “Look at him. He probably can’t even see past his stomach to his dick.”

“Can you not?” Mia made a face. Mia hated every word associated with sex, butdick,pussy, andlubewere among her least favorites. I knew because in the fall of seventh grade—back before Summer had turned on us, back when we were all best friends—we made a list during a sleepover and took turns reading them out loud to make Mia squeal.

“Speaking of special occasions.” I was trying to keep things light, like I hadn’t been dying to talk to her, like every time she’d glared at me and looked away hadn’t gouged me full of holes. “Any reason you’re gracing us with your presence?”

“Couldn’t get another ride,” Summer said, shrugging. Gouge. Gouge. “Besides,” she said after a minute, in a different voice. “I wanted to talk about the spring dance. We’re still going together, aren’t we? The three of us and Owen?” She reached for my hand and squeezed, and my heart squeezed too.

Once again, I forgave her. Forgave her for telling everyone Iwas in love with her. Forgave her for taking my deepest secret, my truest thing, my love for her, and turning it into a joke.

“You still want to go with us?” Mia’s face was suspicious, but also hopeful, happy.

We just didn’t work without Summer.

“Uh-huh.” She unwrapped a piece of gum carefully. Her nails were painted yellow and chipping. “I might need your help with something soon, too. It’s about Lovelorn,” she added casually, almost as an afterthought.

“I thought we weren’t playing anymore,” I said.

She looked up at me, eyes wide and sky-blue, eyes to fall into. “Who said it was a game?”

The problem with the Chasm of Wish wasn’t so much what it contained. Wishes weren’t in themselves dangerous, and many Lovelornians had lost years, decades even, swimming in the river at its bottom, buoyed up by wishes, enfolded in the happy visions of everything they’d ever wanted.

Which, of course, was the problem: not getting in, but getting out.

—FromThe Way into Lovelornby Georgia C. Wells

Brynn

Now

We pull Mr. Haggard’s address easily from whitepages.com: he lives on Bones Road in Eastwich, a speck of a town twenty minutes away. While Owen drives, Mia tries googling Mr. Haggard to find out more about him. There are only a handful of results: Mr. Haggard at a church picnic; Mr. Haggard manning a booth at the local Christmas bazaar; Mr. Haggard smiling with his arm around a skinny kid in front of a YMCA, where he apparently coaches basketball.

“That proves it,” I say. “Church and Christmas and coaching. That’s like the trifecta for pedophilia.”

“Or he’s a really nice guy who just likes kids,” Mia says.

“Or he’s pretending to be a nice guy who likes kids sweaty and worked up.”

“That’s gross, Brynn.”

“I’m not the pedophile. Besides, this was your big idea.”

“I know.” Mia turns to face the window. “It’s just...”

“Just what?” Owen asks, so quietly I barely hear him over the rush of the AC.

“It feels different, during the day. Harder to believe.”

She’s right. In the middle of the night and amped up on coffee, Haggard seemed inevitable. The nice dumpy bus driver, silently sporting a hard-on for Summer, maybe earning her trust, offering to help her out with homework, turning on her one day when she wouldn’t give him what he wanted.

Now, with houses flashing by behind neat-trimmed hedges and packs of kids riding bikes in the road, wind turbines up on the hill waving slowly, it’s hard to believe that anything bad could ever happen or has ever happened. It strikes me that maybe that’s the reason for it all—the nicely mowed lawns and hedges and houses painted fresh every few years. We build and build to keep the knowledge down that someday it will fall apart.

Bones Road is not what I expected. No old graveyards and headstones like splintered fingernails, no stormy-looking manor houses, no run-down farms with goats glaring at us from behind barbed wire. It looks kind of like my street, actually, with a bunch of pretty ranch houses set on identical tracts of land, lots of American flags and mailboxes in the shapes of animals and lawns littered with plastic kids’ toys. Mr. Haggard’s house is painted a cheerful yellow. There’s a big SUV in the driveway.

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