Abby almost—almost—lets me off easy. We’ve made it all the way to her house before she turns to me suddenly and says, “So this Owen guy . . .”
I groan. She quirks an eyebrow, giving me her sharp, infuriating I can solve calc problems faster than you look. “How come you never told me about him?”
Even thinking his name makes me squeeze the steering wheel a little harder, trying to press the memory of him out through my palms. “I did,” I say.
“You told me he existed,” Abby says. “You never told me you had a thing for him.”
Abby is omnisexual. I don’t know exactly who she’s hooked up with, or when, but from the confident way she’s talked about it, it seems there have been boys and girls. Once I asked her where she met all these people, and she just said, Cons. You should come with me sometime. Cosplay gets everyone going.
“I don’t. I mean, I did.” I can’t bring myself to say out loud: Owen was a five-year-old crush that never even happened. He was just one more thing I made up. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Don’t deflect.” Abby waggles a finger in my face. “It’s not going to work.”
“We were kids,” I say. “It was just a stupid crush. It didn’t mean anything. We never even . . .” I’m about to say kissed, but for some reason the word gets tangled in my throat. And that’s not true. Not exactly.
One November afternoon in sixth grade, we got stormed into the tree house. We were lying there in our sleeping bags and I could feel his knee bumping mine every time he moved, and his face was so close I could feel the warm exhalation of his breath, which smelled grassy and fresh, and we’d been laughing about something, and then when we finished laughing Owen leaned forward and before I knew what was happening, our lips were pressed together, so warm and soft and perfect, as if they’d been designed to line up that way.
The weird thing is that after it happened, we didn’t even talk about it—just went right on laughing, as if it hadn’t happened. But it wasn’t a bad thing—it was natural, so natural that we didn’t have to speak about it or talk about what it meant. We knew. I remember how I kept my toes curled up, trying to squeeze in all my happiness, trying to preserve it. It was, I knew, the first kiss of hundreds of kisses to follow.
Only it wasn’t.
“Never even what?” Abby narrows her eyes at me.
“Forget it,” I say, too embarrassed to confess to her, Miss Omnisexual, that that single kiss, chaste and tongueless and in sixth grade, was my only one—not counting the time in eighth grade, at St. Mary’s, when for a whole glorious month nobody knew who I was, no one had put it together yet. I even got invited to a party and wound up kissing a boy named Steven on a dumpy basement couch, and even though his breath smelled a little like Cheetos and he squeezed my boobs once each, like he was trying to ring a doorbell, I was so happy. He held my hand for the rest of the party and even leaned in to whisper, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” before I left.
But by Monday his texts had stopped, and when I saw him in the hall he raised two fingers and made the sign of the hex, shrieking, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Please!” while the rest of his friends laughed so hard they doubled over.
Abby must sense that she’s upset me, because she lets it go. For a while we drive in silence. As always, I feel better after we’ve left behind the new downtown, with its greedy clutching palm of B and Bs and stores and farm-to-table restaurants, and even better once we’ve successfully skirted the old downtown and its sprawl of fast-food restaurants and Laundromats and gun stores, once the trees run right up to the road again and all the houses are concealed behind heavy growth.
Abby suddenly speaks up. “What if you don’t ever figure out what happened to Summer? What if you never know?”
“What do you mean?” We’re driving past Waldmann Lane, and I get the sudden urge to spin the wheel to the right, to gun it straight to Owen’s front door, to drive straight back into the past. “I’ll just go on like I’ve been going on. Things will be the same as they always were.”
Which is, of course, the whole problem.
After I drop Abby off, I wind up at the bottom of Conifer where it dead-ends at the state park before I realize I must have made a wrong turn on Dell. I’ve been circling aimlessly, while my thoughts wind me back into the past. I keep thinking of Owen, of him so close, less than a mile away, as if there’s a giant elastic stretched between us, threatening to pull me back. But what would I say to him?
What will I say to him, if I see him?
What if I do see him?
What if I don’t?
I don’t notice the unfamiliar car parked in front of my house until I’m nearly on top of it. I get out, already half-annoyed and ready to yell at whatever Chinese food delivery service is trying to tuck flyers under my door, when I see a tall, light-haired boy standing on my porch with his back to me, holding a package under one arm. With his right hand he’s shielding his eyes from the glare, trying to peep into my front hallway.
Flooded instantly with anger and shame, I start running across the lawn. “Hey!” I shout. “Hey! What are you—?”
He turns around, obviously startled. Time freezes.
It’s him.
Taller—so much taller—and still thin, but muscular now. Broad shoulders, like the kind you’d want to hang on. Shorts low on his hips and a faded navy-blue T-shirt that brings out the color of his eyes. His freckles have faded and his red hair has lightened. Now it’s flame shot through with sunshine.
“Oh,” he says, and sets down the box he’s been carrying. “Oh.” Then: “Oh.” Like he didn’t expect to see me, even though he’s standing in front of my house.
“What are you doing here?” I manage to say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the far end of a tunnel.
He’s smiling at me, all teeth, so big it looks like a wince.
“Brynn didn’t tell you?” he asks. I stay quiet and he goes on, “Tree came down straight through the sunroom. The house is supposed to be going on the market, but now—”
“No. I mean what are you doing here? Here, here.” My heart is beating so hard in my throat it feels like I’ve swallowed a moth that’s trying to get out. He’s different—he’s so different. And at the same time he’s the same. He still cocks his head all the way to one side when he thinks, as if he’s trying to peer under a fence. And though his hair is lighter, it’s still cowlicked in the back, and he still reaches up a hand to smooth it down when he’s nervous.
But he’s muscular and tall and hot. More than that: he looks so normal. You’d never in a million years think of calling this boy Casper, or Nosebleed. You’d never imagine him hiding in a tree house or wearing a long coat he’d found in a rummage sale or talking about the historical probability of alien invasion. It’s like someone pressed the old Owen through the same cookie cutter that fires out cheerleaders and football players and people who ride in prom limos.
“I didn’t have your cell phone number,” he says. Even his voice sounds different—his vowels seem to take forever to pour out of his mouth. “I figured you changed it.”
“I did,” I say. That was the first thing to go. After we were arrested, someone from school posted my number online. My cell went morning and night, texts and phone calls, some of them from halfway across the country. U kno u’ll burn in hell forever for what you did, right? The funny thing is we’d been Catholic before the murder—my mom’s family is Italian—but afterward, after so many people had told us I’d burn in hell and the devil had taken my soul and even that my mother should try an exorcism, she threw out the Bible she’d had since she was a kid. That was the last thing she threw out.
“How have you been?” Owen asks gently. A hot rush of shame floods my cheeks. I get it now. He’s here to check up on me. To do his friendly, neighborly duty to the screwed-up girl he left behind.
“Fine,” I say firmly, for what must be the tenth time in the past two days. I make for the door and deliberately jangle my keys so he’ll get the hint and take off. He doesn’t. “Everything’s fine.” Big mistake: now that I’m on the porch, he’s close enough that I can smell him—a clean boy smell that makes my stomach nose-dive to my toes. “Don’t you live in England or something?”
“Scotland, actually.” Scotland, actually. Like it’s no big deal. Like Scotland is the next town over. At least that explains the new accent. “I was in school there. Finished in May and now I’m back for the summer. I’m starting at NYU this fall.”
I can barely get my fingers to work. I fumble the keys and drop them. “NYU, wow. Congratulations. That’s . . . that’s . . .” NYU was my school. My plan. My dream. I was going to go to NYU and study dance with a minor in English literature, and on weekends take ballet classes at Steps, where generations of dancers have spent Saturday mornings softening their pointe shoes on the floors.
How is it that Owen—Owen, who hated every class except science, who spent half his time in school with his earbuds in, staring out the window, who sometimes put his head down on the desk and slept through tests—is going to NYU? It’s like what happened to Summer barely registered. Like the year he spent at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, waiting for his trial to start, penned up with crazies and criminals and sixteen-year-old drug dealers, didn’t affect him at all.
Or actually, it did affect him. It made him better. Shiny and new, like an expensive Christmas present. Brynn and I ended up broken, pieced together in fragments.
And Owen, who was so broken back then, became whole.
And now the boy I used to love is heading off to my dream school.
Thankfully, I manage to get the door open, but Owen puts a hand on my wrist before I can slip inside, and his touch startles me into silence.
“Mia . . .” He’s watching me intensely, the same way he used to: as if the rest of the world has disappeared.
I remember then a line from the original Lovelorn about the centaur Firth, a line that always reminded me of Owen: His eyes were as dark and wild as a storm, and big enough to drown in.
“What?” My heart is beating painfully again, thudding against my ribs.
A look of uncertainty crosses his face, and for a second I see the old Owen—weird, wild, mine—float up underneath the surface of Owen 2.0, Shiny Plastic Barbie Owen. It occurs to me that now that he’s crossed over into Normalville, he isn’t used to girls just staring at him like dairy cows. The girls he knows probably do things like giggle and toss their hair and squeeze up next to him to show off pictures of their Caribbean vacation on their phone.
“Look,” he says, “can I come in for a second?”
“No,” I say quickly, remembering how I first found him: cupping his hands to the window, peering inside. All my shame comes rushing back. How much could he have seen from outside? I’ve made pretty good progress on the front hall, but the table is still buried beneath mounds of takeout flyers and unopened mail, and there are several cardboard boxes blocking the closet door. Could he have seen into the dining room? I haven’t even started on the dining room. The Piles there are so staggering, so complex in their arrangement, that Abby says my mom should have an honorary architecture degree.
Ten days until Mom comes home. Ten days to tackle the Piles. Ten days to turn back time, to find the truth, to start over.
“Come on, Mia.” He’s standing way too close to me. It can’t be accidental. And now he’s smiling all easy and cool, one corner of his mouth hitched as if it’s hit an invisible snag. Practiced. That’s what his smile is: practiced. I wonder how many times he’s used it, how many girls he’s practiced on. “Don’t pretend you’re not a little happy to see me.”
“Not really.” My voice is high-pitched, shrill as a kettle. I feel a sharp stab of guilt when his smile drops away, but at the same time it’s a relief to see a crack, a fissure in Owen 2.0. The words are flying out of my mouth suddenly: “It’s a funny coincidence you came back on the fifth anniversary. Just couldn’t stay away, could you?”
Owen flinches as if I’ve hit him. But I’m the one who feels as if I’ve been hit—I’m breathless, shocked by what I’ve just said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Owen says.
Now that I’ve started, it’s like the words are vomit—they’re making me sick, but still I can’t stop. “It just seems weird. Like you came back to commemorate it. Like it’s something to be proud of.” I want to take it all back. But my mind has become a monster, and I can only make it better by finishing, by exploding everything—him and me and whatever there used to be between us. “You know, you never even told us where you went that day. All this time, and you never told us. So what are you hiding?”
There: I finish, practically gasping, hating myself and hating him even more for forcing me to act this way, for moving away and getting normal, for leaving me behind.
Owen says nothing. He just stares at me, white-faced, and for a second I see the old Owen, the Owen who used to camp for days in his tree house when his dad was blackout drunk, the Owen who used to remind me of an animal in a trap, scared and hurt but still fighting.
He bends down and scoops up the box he was carrying when he first spotted me. He yanks open one of the flaps.
“I came to show you that I still had it,” he says, jerking his chin toward the contents of the box—an old cell phone sporting a ridiculous pink cover, a water-warped graphic novel called Revenge of the Space Nerds, photo-booth photos of Owen and me making goofy faces at the camera, a pair of rainbow socks—all of them items we selected for our personal time capsule, which we were planning to bury somewhere in the woods just in case the apocalypse came and future civilizations wanted to know about us. Owen claimed he was going to do the burying part, but I guess he never got around to it. “I kept it all these years. But I don’t need it anymore.”
He practically shoves the package into my arms. His cowlick is sticking straight up, as if it, too, is outraged by my behavior. I’m suddenly crushed by guilt, by my own stupidity. I haven’t seen Owen in years, and I managed to ruin everything in the span of five minutes. If being an idiot were an Olympic sport, I would win a gold medal.
“Owen—” I start to call him back even as he’s stomping toward his car, but he whirls around and the words simply evaporate. He’s furious. And something else—another expression is working beneath the anger, a look of hurt so deep it makes me want to curl up and die. It’s crazy how someone else’s pain can do that, just take the legs out from under you.
“You want to know what I was doing that day, Mia?” He crosses back toward me, and for a second I find myself scared and take a step backward. But he stops when there are several feet of space between us. “You really want to know where I went?”
I do. Of course I do. But at any second I know I’m going to start to cry, and I don’t want him to see it. “You don’t—you don’t have to.”
He ignores that. “I was helping her.” He doesn’t have to say he’s talking about Summer. That’s obvious. “She asked me to do her a favor—she made me swear not to tell anyone, not then, not ever. And I did. It was nothing,” he says, in answer to the question he must anticipate. “Trust me. She only asked me because she knew I could hop on a bus and my dad wouldn’t even notice. He was almost always drunk back then. I spent half the time in the tree house.”
“Why didn’t you tell us where you went?” I say.
He shoves a hand through his hair, trying to make his cowlick lie down, which it doesn’t. “Like I said, it was nothing important. Nothing relevant. She was just trying to put the past behind her. Besides, I felt sorry for her. The least I could do was keep her secret.”
“You felt sorry for her?” I repeat, certain I must have misheard. No one felt sorry for Summer. Summer was the light. Summer was the sparkle and dazzle, the beautiful one, the one all the boys broke their necks trying to follow down the hall. Grown men—dad-age men—slowed their cars to look at her and then, when she stuck her tongue out at them, sped up, red-faced and guilty. And sure, the other girls made fun of her trailer-trash fashion and called her a slut and wrote mean stuff about her in the locker rooms, but they were obviously just jealous.
Summer had power. Over them. Over us. Over everyone.
“I always felt sorry for her.” All the anger seems to have gone out of Owen at once. Now he just looks tired, and much closer to the boy I used to know, the Owen who was once mine. Casper the Ghost. Nosebleed. The Trench Coat Terror. But mine. “You and Brynn—you guys were always yourselves, you know? You didn’t know how to be anybody but you. But Summer . . . It was like she only knew how to play a role. Like she wasn’t fully a person, and had to pretend. She would do anything to get people to like her.” The stubble on his jaw picks up the light, and I have to put my arms around my stomach and squeeze. He’s become so beautiful. “That’s how it was with me. She didn’t like me. Not really. But she didn’t know any other way. And I was young. I was in seventh grade. And stupid. Nobody had ever liked me before.” Now I’m the one who looks away, heat rising to my face, understanding that this is his way of explaining, or apologizing for, what happened between them.
I liked you, I almost say. I always liked you. But I don’t.
“She was always jealous of you, you know.” He’s making a funny face, as if the words are physically painful and he has to hold his mouth carefully to avoid getting bruised.
“Of me?” This, too, is shocking. Summer was everything I wasn’t: confident and gorgeous and mature and cool. Half the time I’d find Brynn and Summer giggling about something—shaving down there or period cramps or getting to third base—I was too clueless to understand. Nothing, Mia, they’d say, rolling their eyes in unison; or Summer would pat me on the head, like I was a kid, and say, Never change. “Why?”
He half laughs. But there’s no humor in it. “Because I was in love with you,” he says, just like that, so quickly I nearly miss it.
“What?” I say. I feel as if a fault line has opened up directly beneath my feet, and I’m in danger of dropping. “What did you say?”
But he’s already turned around, and this time he doesn’t come back.