Page 74 of Broken Things

But then a woman walked by, tugging her child across the street and shooting us a dirty look, like we were contagious, and I remembered who we were, that it didn’t matter, that the only thing that bonds us now is Summer’s ghost. And Mia’s dad pulled up in his sparkly Land Rover and tooted the horn, and she lifted a hand and was gone.

I check my phone out of habit, thinking maybe, by some miracle, I’ll find a missed call from Abby. In the past two weeks I’ve tried locking my phone in a drawer for hours, shoving my mom’sancient TV, as big as a mini-fridge, in front of it to keep me from checking. I’ve thought about driving to her house. I even wrote her a letter—an actual letter, on paper—before tearing it into pieces and flushing it down the toilet.

“You know, I’ve been talking with Mom about moving.” Erin says this like she says everything else, like the words just rolled out of her mouth without her paying attention. I stare at her.

“Out of Twin Lakes?” I say.

“We’re thinking Middlebury.” She shrugs. “I could help Mom out with the moving costs. We’re looking to get her a car, too, so she’d be able to commute to work. Things might be better...” She doesn’t finish her sentence, but I know what she’s about to say:Things might be better for you.

All I’ve ever wanted was to get out of Twin Lakes. But now the idea makes me feel like someone’s placed my insides on blend. “When?” I ask, and she shrugs again.

“Soon as we figure out your school,” she says. “Soon as we figure out the money stuff.” She reaches over and musses my hair, like I’m still a kid. “You could start over, Brynn. We could all start over.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

Her smiles are always so quick they look like they’re being chased away. She yawns big, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m going to bed.” She stands up, handing me her Coke. “Want the rest of this?”

“Sure,” I say, and take it, even though it’s warm. A second laterand I’m alone, listening to the chugging of the window AC, the sun through the windows still making my neck sweat.

We could all start over.

A nice idea. Except that it’s never that easy. Is it?

I remember how Summer looked the day we found those sad little crows, one of them still struggling in the snow, its feathers stiff and clotted with blood.It’s Lovelorn, she said.It doesn’t want to let us go.

And how we found her that day in the woods, holding on to that poor cat... the way she turned to us as if she hardly recognized us.

Here’s the problem with starting over: Summer won’t let us. She doesn’t want to let us go, either.

Summer, Mia, and Brynn no longer had a choice: if they didn’t give the Shadow something to feast on, its hunger would only grow. That day they set out for Lovelorn in silence, and each of them carried a special item. Mia had a pocketful of pebbles she’d scooped out from her driveway, to use for marking the circle. Brynn had a matchbook. And Summer carried the knife.

—FromReturn to Lovelornby Summer Marks, Brynn McNally, and Mia Ferguson

Brynn

Then

June 29 was a perfect day. It wasn’t raining. There were no storm clouds. The trees weren’t whispering to one another but stood high and quiet with their arms to a blue sky. The bees clustered fat and drowsy in the fields, and birds pecked at their reflections in the creek. It wasn’t a day for nightmares or scary stories or shadows.

It wasn’t a day for Summer to die.

Meet me in Lovelorn, she texted that morning.It’s time.

At first we thought the whole thing was a joke. That’s what I told myself over and over, what I tried to tell the cops. A joke, or just part of Summer’s storytelling, her way of making things real. We didn’t really think there would be a sacrifice. We didn’t really think she was in danger.

Then why did you go at all?the cops asked.

Because she needed us. Because we missed her. Because it was Lovelorn.

You just said you didn’t think Lovelorn was real.

We knew it was a story. But the story was also coming true.

So did you believe, or didn’t you believe?

That was the question I could never truly answer. The truth was both, and the truth was neither. Like that old idea of a cat in a box with the lid on it, alive and dead at the same time until you look. We believed in Lovelorn and we knew it was just a story. We knew there was no Shadow and we knew that Summer needed us. We loved her and we hated her and she understood us and she scared us.

Alive and dead. I’ve thought about that a lot: when we saw Summer standing in the long field, shading her eyes with a hand to look at us, clutching something—a rug, or a stuffed animal—with her other, that she was both, that somehow what was about to happen to her was already built into that moment, buried in it, like a clock counting down to an explosion.

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