Page 84 of Broken Things

Owen closes his eyes. “The blood,” he says, and then opens his eyes again. “The blood on the sweater. You remember how bad my nosebleeds were. She must have taken a sweater without asking. No wonder the DNA was a match. She was wearingmysweater.”

Ms. Gray leans forward, patient but also emphatic, making a point. She teaches kids. That’s what occurs to me. She still teaches kids every day. The sick thing is she’s really good at it. “Summer loved Lovelorn. You have no idea—none of you have any idea—what she’d already been through. Youcouldn’tknow. She didn’t want you to feel sorry for her. I was the same way. Lovelorn was her escape.” Ms. Gray’s eyes are so bright that for a second it’s like seeing Summer’s ghost there.C’mon, guys. Lovelorn calls.“It was her safe place.”

“It was a story.” Now Brynn speaks up, and Ms. Gray turns to her, frowning. “It was a story and she wanted it to end.”

Ms. Gray shakes her head. “She started changing. Cutting school. Smoking pot. I heard rumors about what she was getting into. After what I’d done for her—”

“You cleaned up the shed,” I say.

“I did it for her,” she says. “For all of you. To make Lovelorn real.”

“You killed those birds, too,” Brynn says, and she brings a finger to the dark tattoo on her wrist, maybe unconsciously. “You killed them and stuck them on a stake and left them where you knew we would find them.”

Those birds: frozen stiff with blood, beaks to the sky, one of them still flapping out its last life. We’d had lasagna for lunch that day, and I remember how it tasted coming up, the vivid orange in the snow.

And suddenly I have another memory—something I must have forgotten—of a time when Ryan Castro thought it would be funny to try to make me talk by spitting on me in the hall, to get me to fight back. This was before Summer and I were even friends—she was still the new girl with boobs who dressed weird—but she walked straight up to him and put an elbow to his neck and said,I’ll kill you. And afterward she told everyone I didn’t talk only because I didn’t talk to idiots.

This is the problem with words and even stories: there is never one truth. Summer was awful. We hated her. And she was magical,too, and it was our job to protect her, and we failed.

“It was just a warning,” Ms. Gray says. “She shouldn’t have been doing what she was doing—it wasn’t right. It wasn’t good for her. I was protecting her.”

“You were hurting her,” I say. And this I know, too. I understand it instinctively, withoutwantingto understand it, without wanting to think about it. “She trusted you, and you hurt her.” Who knows how it started—little touches on the knee, long hugs, a kiss on the forehead. And Summer, beautiful, crazy, screwed-up Summer, who once sat in my room with an old pair of scissors over her wrist, sayingswear, swear you love me—who didn’t know what love looked like unless it was hurt, too—she might have believed it. Shewouldhave believed it, like Brynn believed that she couldn’t come home and my mom believed she could rebuild her life shoebox by coupon by envelope and I believed in an Owen who didn’t exist.

Did Summer know the difference anymore, at the end, between what was real and what wasn’t? I remember how she looked on that final day, when we came over the hill and saw her in the long field: like an angel who’d been pinned to the ground only temporarily, like someone not meant to stay. She believed by then, really and truly. In the book, in the Shadow, in the sacrifice.

Or maybe even that story was better than what was really happening, what she didn’t know how to stop.

“I loved her,” Ms. Gray says quietly. “I want you to know that. I loved her more than anything.”

Brynn is shaking a little when she stands. “You didn’t love her,” she says. “You don’t even know what that word means.”

“You’re wrong,” Ms. Gray says. She looks strangely small, collapsed inside her clothing. “That’s why I did it. She was trying to leave me. She was so confused. That’s what we were fighting about, the day before she died.” Not: the day before I killed her. The day before she died. As if it was all an accident. As if Summer ran against the knife herself, all seven times. “When she didn’t answer my call, I set out to find her. I knew she must have gone to Lovelorn. But when I saw what she was doing...” Her voice breaks, and for a moment she looks close to tears. “The knife and the gas can and that cat. The Sacrifice meant to keep away the Shadow. Meant to keepmeaway. She was—she was scared of me.” She shakes her head, as if still this idea makes no sense to her. “Scaredof me. I just wanted her to stop running. I wanted her to listen. And then I thought...” She squints, like someone trying to puzzle out how to explain a math problem. “She was so troubled, you know. She wouldn’t have ended up well. I thought she could stay in Lovelorn.”

When Owen stands, he puts a hand on my back to draw me up with him. I’m glad. I can’t even feel my legs anymore. I’m filled with the strangest sense of relief and loss, like finally giving up on something you were reaching for.

“We’re going to have to go to the police, Ms. Gray,” Owen says, very politely and formally. And then: “Please wait for them to come. It’s the right thing to do.”

Again she squints up at us. She has a face that you’d forget five minutes after looking at it. Is that why we didn’t see?

“I won’t go anywhere.” She spreads her hands. “Like I said, I’ve been waiting... and I’ve accepted what’s right, anyway.”

We shouldn’t leave, I know. We should call the police and sit and wait and make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. But we need out. Out, out, out: into air, out of the heat, away from Ms. Gray and the story of love that looks like bleeding.

But I turn around before we get to the door because suddenly I get it, I see all of it—all of Summer, all of who she was and who she was trying to be and who she could have become; but also, for the first time ever, I understand Lovelorn and why Georgia Wells ended the book the way that she did. That broken sentence we puzzled over, all of our theories about sudden shock or writers’ block or sequels to come, they were all wrong: she was leaving the story unfinished because that’s the point of stories and their power: that the endings are still unfolding.

“She was a kid,” I say, and the words seem to come from someone and somewhere else. “She was troubled. But you don’t know what would have happened to her and what she would have been. How can you know? You took her story away. You ended it before she had a chance.”

“I saved her,” Ms. Gray whispers.

“That’s justyourstory,” I say, and push out into the sunshine where I can breathe again.

Brynn

Now

Here is how it ends: halfway back to the car a whispery voice in the back of my head speaks up—a voice telling me there’s something I’ve forgotten, something Ms. Gray said.

“Oh my God.” I stop. All at once I know what Ms. Gray meant when she said she had accepted what was right.

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