“Whoa.” That’s the first, and only, thing I can say when Mia opens her front door.
Two pink spots appear in her cheeks. “I told you it was messy,” she says, righting a brass candlestick that has coasted, surfer-style, over a wave of loose papers on the foyer table and landed on its side.
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me it was”—seeing Mia’s face, I stop myself at the last second from saying crazy—“this messy,” I finish.
When we were younger, I liked Mia’s house. Loved it, even. The bookshelves had actual books on them, as well as funny wooden statues of chickens wearing clothing and playing guitars. Napkins—real cloth napkins—poked out of drawers. There were little collections of rose quartz just sitting around glowing on windowsills. Half the stuff Mia’s family owned I didn’t even have a name for—it all sounded like stuff that could have come from an old sci-fi movie. Decanter! Abacus! Trivet! Molecular transporter! And Mia’s mom was always shopping for new things. But this is collecting on crack. This looks like every single item they used to have had seven babies.
“Think of the house as a work in progress,” Abby says as we head to the stairs, squeezing down a ribbon of empty space lined on either side by accumulated junk. “By next week, this place is going to look like a Zen temple.”
Somehow I doubt it. Even the stairs are piled with crap, although in some places I see evidence that Mia has, in fact, been cleaning, in the form of discolored portions of carpet.
“And it’s temporary.” Mia is still stiff-backed, obviously offended. She won’t look at me. “Just for the night, right?”
“Right,” I say quickly. That’s what I told her: that tomorrow, if my mom isn’t out of the hospital, my sister will come for me. That I’ll be out of her hair.
The biggest problem with lies? They breed. Mia’s room, in contrast to the rest of the house, could double as an airport waiting lounge. The carpet is beige and smells like stain remover. Her desk is spotless except for an iPad and a mason jar she’s using to hold pens. Her bedspread is pale pink. Her headboard is blocky. There isn’t a single shoe, coin, or stray sock on the floor.
But certain things—certain tiny things—haven’t changed, like the lace curtains that cut the sunshine into patterns and the parade of scented candles on the bookshelf above Mia’s bed. The mug on her bedside table, which says Reading Is Sexy, where she keeps her glasses. A lamp in the shape of a ballet dancer.
“What is it now?” When Mia speaks, I realize I’ve been standing there in the doorway, unmoving, for at least five seconds.
“Nothing.” Feeling choked up, I dump my duffel bag on the floor and bend over, pretending to examine the few photos neatly framed and mounted on her wall. Almost every picture is of Mia and Abby, most of them in the same room—which, from the explosive zebra wallpaper, hot-pink curtains, and steampunk posters, I assume is Abby’s. Abby and Mia dressed up in feather boas and top hats. Abby and Mia lying together on a bed. Abby and Mia dressed in identical T-shirts. I feel a stab of jealousy—I haven’t been that close to anyone in a long time. I haven’t even been that close to my girlfriends.
In the last picture, taken in front of Mount Independence, a woman with wispy brown hair is sandwiched between them.
“Who’s that?” I ask, pointing.
“Oh.” Mia looks embarrassed. “That’s Ms. Pinner, our tutor.” She sits down on the bed. Everything Mia does, every move Mia makes, looks graceful and deliberate. This is not a girl who flops, slouches, slinks, or sprawls. This is a girl who sits, minces, prances, and pivots. I swear, I’ve never even heard her burp. “Mom tried busing me to St. Mary’s, thinking it would help to get away. It didn’t. Everyone called me a witch and put old tuna sandwiches in my locker and stuff. I begged her to homeschool me and finally she said yes. Abby and I take classes together, when she’s not on the road.”
Mia never had to go back to Twin Lakes Collective. Just like Owen, she split. She never had to sit in the same classrooms we’d sat in with Summer, or eat alone in the cafeteria, at the table we’d once sat at together. There was only one good thing about being a supposed killer: people pretty much stayed out of my way. Of course, that meant I had no friends, either. I wonder what Mia would say if she knew I’m not even sure what grade I’m in.
“What’s your excuse?” I say, turning to Abby.
She wrestles out a packet of Twizzlers from her bag. “Too famous,” she says casually. She tears open the package with her teeth. “The cons really mess with a regular school schedule. Plus I’m always booking photo shoots and stuff.”
I stare at her. “I thought models were thin,” I say.
“Oh, no. We come in all different sizes, shapes, and colors.” She raises her eyebrows. Her hair is dyed in stripes of platinum blond and purple, but her eyebrows are dark brown and perfectly shaped, like little crescent moons. “Just like murderers, I guess.”
I tense up. “I’m not a murderer.”
“If you say so.” Abby shrugs.
I look to Mia for help, but she is on her hands and knees, rooting for something underneath the bed.
Luckily, at that moment, Mia emerges, holding a thick, dust-covered photo album. I recognize it immediately. It’s her Nerd Notebook. Mia has been saving every single aced quiz, glowing progress report, successful art project, or A-plus essay since she was in kindergarten. Everything goes in her Nerd Notebook.
Or everything used to. From the dusty look of the cover, it seems she stopped keeping track of all her accomplishments. For some reason, that makes me sad.
“I’m telling you, the answer’s in the book,” Mia says. “In the book, and in all the stuff we wrote in Return to Lovelorn.”
“You guys wrote a sequel?” Abby actually sounds impressed. I wonder how much she knows about the original story. Weirdly, I feel another quick twinge of jealousy—Mia’s been sharing things with Abby. Mia has someone to share things with.
“It was fan fic. Summer was mostly writing it,” Mia says, and then immediately corrects herself. “Or—we thought she was. But now I think she had help.”
“Right. From the same person who put up that wallpaper. The same person who wanted Lovelorn to be real.” Abby frowns, pulling at her bangs, which are straight, curtain-like, fifties-dominatrix style. “From the Shadow.”
“The Shadow . . . ,” Mia repeats, chewing on her lip, like she does. She twists around in her seat to face me. “You know, you might be onto something. Think about it. Summer was obsessed with the Shadow. That’s the whole reason she wanted to write the sequel. To tell the Shadow’s story.”
“And to fix the ending of Book One,” I point out.
“And to fix the ending of Book One,” Mia admits.
“Why?” Abby asks. “What’s wrong with the ending?”
“What’s wrong with the ending is that it doesn’t end,” I say. “The book cuts off in the middle of a sentence. It’s crazy. It’s like Wells was writing and someone came and decapitated her.”
Mia gives me a look, like, let’s not start that now. “My point is Summer was afraid of the Shadow. That’s why she wanted to do the sacrifice. To give him something that would keep him happy,” she explains, turning to Abby. “A kind of gift. She thought it would keep the Shadow away.”
When Mia looks at me, the memory of that day rises up suddenly between us: of coming up over the hill into the long field, of seeing Summer clutching what we thought was a rag to her chest, her dress nipping around her knees.
“If someone was frightening her in real life, and she didn’t know how else to express it . . . ,” Abby trails off.
I’m struggling to think through it all. My brain keeps punt-kicking back the obvious conclusion. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent around addicts: I’ve gotten supergood at denial. The first step is admitting you have a problem. “You think her killer was helping her write the story,” I finally force out, not a question but a statement. “You think they left . . . clues.”
“It’s possible.” Abby thumbs her glasses up her nose. “Authors unconsciously write themselves into their books. They transform familiar places into fictional landscapes. It’s the same way when we picture aliens, we imagine they’ll look like us. Psychologists call it ‘transference.’”
“Thanks, Wikipedia,” I say.
“It’s not just possible. It’s probable,” Mia says. “Think about it. We took inspiration from real people all the time. That’s how we came up with the Ogre, isn’t it? You wanted to write in Mr. Dudley after he busted you for cheating.”
“I wasn’t cheating,” I say. “I was telling Kyle Hanning to stop mouth-breathing down my neck.”
“Whatever.” Mia rolls her eyes. “Someone put that wallpaper up. Someone made the clubhouse. And someone tore it down overnight. We didn’t make it up. It was real.” She knots her fingers in her lap, and I realize then that she needs it to be true. She needs not just to be innocent, but to know who’s guilty, to prove it.
Maybe I need it, too. To move on. To be free.
Here’s another little thing they tell you in recovery: Let go or be dragged.
“Okay,” I say, and Mia exhales, as if she’s been holding her breath. “Okay,” I repeat. “But if there are clues in the fan fic, what good does that do? You heard what Mr. Ball said. He trashed everything the cops didn’t take. It’s all gone.”
Mia shakes her head. Her eyes flicker. For a second, I think she’s going to smile. “Not all of it,” she says. She sits cross-legged on the floor, heaves the binder into her lap, and begins to page through it. “Summer never let us keep Return to Lovelorn,” she explains to Abby. “She always had to be in charge. There was a single copy, a notebook stuffed with a million loose pages, some of them typed up, some of them written out by hand.”
“Wow.” Abby wrinkles her nose as Mia keeps flipping through warped pages plastered with old pop quizzes and papers marked with lots of stickers. “That’s so pre-technology of you.”
“The first Lovelorn was written by hand in the 1960s,” Mia says. “Summer thought it was more authentic. Besides, she had to share a computer with her foster family, and they were always spying on her.”
“She even thought they’d trained their cat to read,” I say, and then wish I hadn’t, because Mia flinches.
She says, more quietly, “She wanted to keep Lovelorn private. She wanted to keep it for us.”
“We thought she did, anyway,” I correct her. But Owen knew, I almost add. Mia told him everything. He knew we liked to play. But I don’t have to say the words out loud. His name hovers there between us, like a bad smell, like the aftermath of a rude remark. His name is always there, threaded into the mystery of what happened, of all the things we still don’t know.
Mia shifts away from me. “Anyway, the point is, Summer kept the notebook at all times. If either of us wrote something, we had to give it to Summer for her approval. If she liked it, she’d add it to the notebook.”
I take a seat on Mia’s bed, ignoring the way Mia frowns at me, like I might contaminate her bedspread. I probably will. I stink. “Summer was obsessive. She thought we might even be able to have it published. It seems stupid now.” Mia’s comforter is pale pink and patterned with loops and curlicues. Some of the stitching is coming undone, and I pluck at a thread with my fingers, wishing the past was like that—that you could just pull and pull until it unraveled and you could start over.
“It doesn’t seem stupid,” Abby says. “Lovelorn was all you had.”
She’s nailed it, of course. Lovelorn was all we had. Of the three of us, Mia was the smartest and Summer the prettiest. I was the most outgoing. But we were loners, when it came down to it. The other girls hated Summer, called her a whore, wrote dirty shit on her locker and stole her gym clothes and threw them in the trash, or smeared them with ketchup so it would look like period blood. Mia became so afraid of speaking in public that for years she said not a single word, even when the teacher called on her, and she kept getting sent to the principal for disciplinary problems. She’d been at the same school her whole life and still hardly anyone knew who Mia Ferguson was. Owen Waldmann, resident developing psychopath, was the only person who was ever nice to her, the only person who could get her to talk—until Summer came along. She told me once that’s why she took up dance in the first place. She didn’t know how to speak out loud. It was the only way she could communicate.
And I’d been getting into trouble since the first time I put my fist into Will Harmon’s face after he called me backcountry trailer trash, which didn’t even make sense because we lived in a house, not a trailer. But he knew we were hard up, and he’d seen my mom on night shifts at the gas station, a job she took before she found a job in admin at the same hospital where my sister is doing her residency now.
In elementary school I was involved in fights almost every year. It’s like I couldn’t keep my anger from coming out of my fists. And once the boys got too big to scrap with, the anger just took up a permanent squat in my vocal cords, so half the time the shit coming out of my mouth wasn’t even stuff I meant to say out loud.
I couldn’t help it. When I get angry, it’s like someone lights my whole body on fire. Snap, crackle, pop. And then the entire world is burning.
But together, in Lovelorn, we made sense. Summer was the princess, beautiful and misunderstood. Mia was the good one, the sweet sister, the voice of reason and understanding. And I was the swordsman, the knight, proud defender of their honor.
“The February before Summer died, I took some pages.” Mia looks away, biting her lip, as if worried I’m going to start lecturing her. “We were fighting about this one scene—”
“What scene?” I can’t help but ask.
“The tournament scene,” she says. “We were arguing about whether or not Gregor should win in his bout with the giantess. Summer thought the Shadow should be responsible for killing the giantess and saving Gregor’s life. But I . . . well, it sounds stupid, but I just wanted to give Gregor a little bit of respect, you know?”
As she speaks, I tumble down a hole, landing all the way back in seventh grade, when we used to sit together in this very room and debate what “Georgia” did and failed to do in Book One, about why she’d screwed up the whole book by ending it the way she did or by not ending it, about how to make Book Two even better than the original.
“I guess I was just getting annoyed that Summer always got to decide. Besides, Gregor’s one of the best characters,” Mia says, turning now to Abby. She looks at me for support.
“True,” I say. “Although Firth was always my personal favorite. A centaur,” I say, when Abby shoots me a questioning look. “He rides around rallying the whole country to banish the Shadow at the end of Book One.”
For the first time all day, Mia smiles at me. Mia has a great smile. It turns her whole face into an invitaion “Firth’s great too,” she agrees. “Anyway, like I said, I took a few pages. I just wanted to make some edits, and then I was going to return them.”
“But you didn’t,” Abby says.
Mia’s smile fades. “I never had a chance. Two days later, Summer told us she didn’t want to play anymore. She never went back to Lovelorn again, not with us. Not until that day—”
“What did happen that day?” Abby says, adjusting her glasses again. “I mean, what really happened?”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Don’t tell me you haven’t looked it up.”
“I haven’t,” she says, in a tone so sincere I immediately feel guilty. “Besides, I’m not talking about what shows up online. Haven’t you ever heard you can’t trust everything you read on the internet?”
“Not today, okay, Abby?” Mia wraps her arms around her knees. She looks suddenly exhausted. “We’ll explain some other time.”
Abby raises both hands, like, just trying to help.
“All right, Mia.” I scoot off the bed and join her on the floor. “Let’s see what you got.”
There are three pages, neatly covered with Summer’s handwriting. Instantly, I see exactly what Mia meant about someone else helping Summer. There isn’t a single error, not a word crossed out or even changed. It’s as if she copied the text from somewhere else. Why did I never see it before?
Abby leans in next to me, and I’m surprised by her sudden closeness, and the fact that she smells like lavender.
“All right, explain,” Abby says. “What am I reading? What’s all this about an amphitheater?”
“The amphitheater was Summer’s idea,” I say. “In the first book, we never know where the Shadow comes from. She wanted to explain it. An origin story, kind of. So we made up the amphitheater, where bloody battles take place.”
“Summer liked to weave in real people and places,” Mia adds. “They were like our inside jokes. So the giantess was really supposed to be Mrs. Marston, our math teacher. We named the giantess Marzipan and gave her a wart and tufts of wiry red hair. Things like that.”
“So if the amphitheater is where the Shadow first shows up, and the Shadow is supposed to be Summer’s killer, then it’s important.” Abby reads in silence over my shoulder for a while. “What’s up with the sprites?”
This makes me smile. “That’s another thing Summer made up,” I say. “They’re this really annoying, dumb race descended from the fairies, and their voices are high-pitched and squeaky.”
“When they get excited, they can shatter glass,” Mia says. “And they go around cheering on the competitors during tournaments.”
Abby looks from Mia to me and back. “Bloody competitions and a group of mindless, squeaky cheerleaders? Sounds like the TLC football stadium to me.”
For a minute, I can do nothing but stare at her.
“The football stadium . . . ,” Mia says slowly, and smiles again. “You’re a genius, Abby.”
“Nothing to it, my dear Watson,” Abby says with a little flourish.
“Jake Ginsky was on the football team,” I say. “He was, like, outfielder or something.”
“Outfielder’s a baseball term,” Mia says.
Leave it to Mia to be nerdy about even non-nerdy things. “Whatever. He was tight ass or rear end or whatever they call it.”
“Who’s Jake Ginsky?” Abby asks. She’s still sitting uncomfortably close to me, so close I can see the sticky wet look of her lips, and I scoot backward, leaning against Mia’s bed.
“Jake Ginsky,” Mia says. “He went out with Summer for a few months. Supposedly.”
“Definitely,” I say firmly, remembering that time with Summer in the car, how her eyes swept over me as if I was a stranger.
Mia sighs. “But they broke up in January. Besides, the cops looked at him. He had an alibi. He was hanging out with some other freshmen on the team.”
Something tickles the back of my mind. Something wrong.
Abby hauls herself to her feet. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Mia blinks up at her.
“The amphitheater,” she says, as if it’s obvious. “We can sneak around the locker rooms and look beneath the bleachers.”
“What do you think we’re going to find—bloody handprints?” I say. “We’re talking about something that happened five years ago.”
“Well, we have to start somewhere, don’t we?” Abby crosses her arms. “These are the only pages you have left, right? If Summer left clues about her killer in Return to Lovelorn, the amphitheater seems like a place to start. Maybe you’ll remember something important. Maybe you’ll see something. That’s how it works in mysteries, anyway.”
“This isn’t a mystery,” I say. “This is real life.”
But Abby’s already moving toward the door. “Whatever you say, Nancy Drew.”