Page 2 of Broken Things

At least, I think it would be. I’ve never stayed at a hotel.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Paulie says. Her eyes are fish-big, wide and sincere behind her glasses. “I don’t want to see you back here in six months.”

“You won’t,” I say, which is kind of true. I’m not going to come back to Four Corners. I’m not leaving at all.

I like rehab. I like the whole routine of it, the clean rooms and the staff with their identical polo shirts and identically helpful expressions, like well-trained dogs. I like the mottos posted everywhere on construction paper:let go or be dragged;live and let live;have an attitude of gratitude. Life in bite-size portions. Miniature Snickers–sized wisdom.

It turns out that after a first trip to rehab, it’s easy to hopscotch. All you have to do is make sure to flunk a pee test right before you’re supposed to get out. Then counselors get called in; insurance companies, social workers, and relatives are contacted; and pretty soon you’ve got yourself an extended stay. Even now that I’m eighteen and can technically leave on my own recognizance, it won’t be hard: you’d be amazed at how quickly people rally together when they suspect their patient might have killed someone before she was even menstruating.

I don’t like lying, especially to people like Paulie. But I keep the story simple and pretty basic—pills and booze, Oxy I used to steal from my mom—and apart from the actualI’m an addictpart, I don’t have to fake it too much.

My momwason Oxy the last time I was home, since some idiot in an SUV rear-ended her when she was coming home from a late shift at the hospital and fractured her spine in two places.

I get nightmares, panic attacks. I wake up in the night and still, all these years later, think I see the bright burst of a flash outside my window. Sometimes I hear the hiss of an insult, a voicewhisperingpsycho, devil, killer. Sometimes it’s Summer I see, beautiful Summer with her long blond hair, lying on the ground in the middle of a circle of stones, her face a mass of terror—or maybe peaceful, smiling, because the story she had been writing for so long had at last come true.

That’s one thing I don’t talk about here, no matter how many times Trish or Paulie or any of the other counselors push. I don’t talk about Mia, or Summer, or Owen, or Lovelorn and what happened there, how we believed in it, how it became real.

In rehab, I can be whoever I want. And that means, finally, I don’t have to be a monster.

Lovelorn had its own weather, just as it had its own time. Sometimes the girls passed through into Lovelorn at high noon and found that within the quiet hush of the Taralin Woods it was all rose and purple, long shadows and crickets, and that the sun was already kissing the horizon. Just as often, when it was cold and rainy in their world, it was brilliantly sunny in Lovelorn, full of summertime bees and fat mosquitoes. One or another of the girls was always abandoning sweatshirts, scarves, or hats on the other side and being lectured for it later.

—FromThe Way into Lovelornby Georgia C. Wells

Mia

Now

“Holy mother of funk.” Abby, my best friend, holds up a moldering piece of fabric between two white-gloved fingers. “Whatisthis?”

Whatever it used to be—a jacket? a blanket? an area rug?—is now black, stiff with years of stains accumulating and drying, and full of holes where it’s been chewed up by a procession of insects. And it smells. Even though I’m halfway across the room and separated from Abby by mounds of books and newspapers, lamps and old AC units, and cardboard boxes containing a hundred different never-used, never-unpacked purchases, the kind you order off TV at midnight—blenders and multipurpose knives and Snuggies and even a rotisserie oven—the smell still makes my eyes water.

“Don’t ask,” I say. “Just bag it.”

She shakes her head. “Did your mom stash a dead body in hereor something?” she says, and then, realizing what she’s said, quickly stuffs the cloth into a lawn-and-leaf bag. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I say. That’s one of the things I love about Abby: she forgets. She legitimately fails to remember that when I was twelve, I was accused of murdering my best friend. That the first Google result that pops up when you type inMia Fergusonis an article on a popular parenting blog called “How Do Kids Become Monsters? Who’s to Blame?”

Partly, that’s because Abby moved here only two years ago. She’d heard about the murder, sure—everyone’sheard about it—but secondhand is different. To people outside our town, Summer’s death was a tragedy, and the fact that three kids were the primary (okay,only) suspects, a horror, unimaginable.

But in Twin Lakes it was personal. Five years later, I still can’t walk around town without everyone glaring at me or whispering awful things. Once, a few years ago, a woman approached me outside the Knit Kit—I’d been looking at the baskets piled with fleecy, multicolored wool, and the sign in the window,Make Socks, Not War—lips puckered as if she were about to kiss me, and spat in my face.

Even my mom is abused whenever she has to go shopping or drop off laundry or go to the post office. I guess everyone blames her for raising a monster. At a certain point, it just became easier to stay inside. Luckily—or maybe unluckily—she has her own online marketing business. Since she can order everything from toilet paper to socks to milk on the internet, she can go six monthswithout ever stepping out the door. When she announced a few days ago that she was going to visit her sister, I nearly had a heart attack. It’s the first time she’s left the house for more than an hour since the murder.

But then again, she didn’t exactly have a choice. After my mom’s “collections” started spreading, first onto our back porch, and then onto our front porch, and then into our yard, our neighbors started a campaign to get Mom and me thrown out. Apparently, our very presence was contaminating the neighborhood and single-handedly destroying the chance that our neighbors could ever sell their houses. While the town stopped short of taking legal action against us, they did give us two weeks to clean up or face fines for all sorts of environmental hazards. My mom went to stay with my aunt so she wouldn’t be in the way, sobbing every time I tried to throw out a used dinner napkin, and I got stuck sorting through five years’ worth of accumulated trash.

“Check this out, Mia.” Abby extracts a stack of ragged newspapers from beneath a broken standing lamp. “Now we know what was major news in”—she squints—“2014.”

I hoist a box from the floor, feeling a small rush of satisfaction when a bit of the carpet is revealed. I read off the side of the box: “‘With the amazing Slice and Dice, kitchen prep is a breeze!’”

“Maybe you should sell that. It’s still in the box, right?” Abby climbs to her feet with difficulty, using a TV stand for leverage. Abby is fat and very beautiful. She has light eyes and dark hair, the kind of lips that make people think of kissing, a perfectlystraight nose, just slightly upturned.

When she was ten, she started a YouTube channel all about fashion and beauty. By fifteen, she had two million subscribers, sponsorships from major brands, and a flow of bank that meant her family could get out of Garrison, Iowa, and move back to Vermont, where her grandparents lived.

Abby travels to so many Beautycons, vidcons, and fashion weeks, she has to homeschool, which is how she and I ended up together—when she’s not traveling—five times a week, four hours a day, listening to Ms. Pinner drone on about everything from narrative techniques inThe Sun Also Risesto the covalent bond. We meet at Abby’s house, three blocks away, for the obvious reason that there is nowhere to sit in my house. There’s hardly room to breathe.

The Piles have seen to that. They are ruthless. They breed. They multiply overnight.

“Sure,” I say. “If you like your veggies with a side of black mold.” I tuck the box beneath my arm and make my way to the front door, sticking to the path carved carefully between the Piles, an endless canyon of belongings—flattened cardboard boxes tied with twine, rolls and rolls of expired grocery store coupons, packing tape and rusted scissors, old sneakers and deflated inner tubes and no-longer-functional lamps—all stuff that my mom, for some reason, thinks it necessary to keep.

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