It feels strange to ride in Wade’s truck with Abby next to me, and Brynn fiddling with the radio in the front passenger seat, and Wade tapping a rhythm with his hands against the steering wheel—almost as if we’re really friends. Some people, I know, get to live like this all the time: they ride in cars with their friends. They listen to music. They complain about being bored.
If Summer had lived, maybe she’d be sitting next to me instead of Abby. Maybe Owen would be the one driving.
If, if, if. A strange, slender word.
Abby reaches over and takes my hand. “You okay?” she asks. Luckily, Wade’s truck is so loud—he seems to be carrying the contents of an entire Best Buy in the back—that I know he and Brynn can’t hear.
“I’m okay,” I say, and give her hand a squeeze. Thank God for Abby. I haven’t told her about seeing Owen yesterday. I haven’t told Brynn, either.
Always, the story leads back to Owen. I think again of what he said: I felt sorry for her. And: I was in love with you.
Could it possibly be true?
Does it matter?
Brynn’s right about one thing: he’s the only one who knew about Lovelorn. If my hunch is right, he’s the only one who could have known.
To get to Owen’s house we have to pass through town. Main Street is, once again, blocked off by squad cars and barricades. Beyond them, a crowd is clustered at the corner of Spruce, in front of the little gazebo and the bandstand where the parade must have ended yesterday. Several trees have come down and been roped off by the parks department.
Abby presses her nose to the window as we wait at the light to turn onto County Route 15A. “What’s going on?” she says. “Why’s everyone standing around?”
“I don’t know,” I say, but then I spot the bunches of white lilies arranged in front of the gazebo steps and the microphone set up for a speaker, and my stomach drops.
Brynn must see them at the same time. “Summer’s memorial,” she says. Her voice sounds thin and uncertain, like a ribbon beginning to fray.
“Should we stop?” Abby asks.
“No,” Brynn and I both say together. Abby looks surprised, but she doesn’t argue.
When we drive past Perkins Road, Wade raps a knuckle against the window.
“That’s your street, isn’t it?” he says to Brynn. She gives a nod. “I remember your old house. I came over once for a barbecue when you were, like, five. I think it might have been your birthday party. Do you remember?”
“No,” Brynn says flatly.
“I wore a Batman costume. That was during my superhero phase—luckily, before I got really into Green Lantern but after Superman—”
“Wade?” Brynn’s voice is fake-sweet. “Can you please keep your weirdness to a minimum?”
Wade just shrugs and smiles. I suck in a quick breath when he makes the turn onto Waldmann Lane, navigating around a honeysuckle bush that cascades halfway into the road. How many times did Owen and I make the walk up the hill together, while he used a stick to beat at the grasses at the side of the road and overturn the mushrooms growing between the pulpy leaves, while I let every single word I’d swallowed during the school day come pouring out of me, a sudden release that felt as beautiful and natural as dancing?
Abby whistles when we crest the hill and the house comes into view, an enormous patchwork of stone and wood extensions, additions and modifications tacked on over almost two centuries. There was always something sad about the Waldmanns’ house—I’d always thought it must be because Owen’s mom died at home, just dropped dead one day from a cancer everyone had thought was in remission—but now it looks worse than sad. It looks broken and wild. The breakfast room, which used to feel like being inside a snow globe, has been completely destroyed. A tree has come down straight through the roof.
“Well,” Abby says, “that’s one way of redecorating.” Brynn snorts.
“You guys stay here,” I say quickly when Wade parks. I know, suddenly, that I need to get Owen alone. If he did what I think he did, he’s been keeping the secret for years. There must be a reason, and I won’t—I can’t—believe that he did it. That after the years that had passed, he was guilty after all. “I’ll talk to him.”
Wade is already halfway out of the car but now slumps back in his seat, obviously disappointed. Brynn twists around to look at me, and for a second something flares deep in her eyes, an expression of care or sympathy or maybe just pity. Then she clicks her seat belt closed again.
The gate—a new gate—is open. A big truck is parked in the driveway: Krasdale Landscaping + Tree Removal. I don’t see any other cars. Someone is working a saw—the air is shrill with the sound of metal on wood, a sound that makes my teeth feel like they’re getting filed. The air smells like running sap. Like heat and rot and insects. Like summer.
I start down the flagstone path, now choked with grass and weeds, toward the front door. One of the landscapers, ropy and muscled, comes around the corner of the house, carrying a chain saw. He shouts to someone out of sight. Then he turns to me.
“Not home,” he says, gesturing toward the door with his chain saw.
“Do you know where he went?” I ask, wrapping my arms around my waist, even though it isn’t cold. Just creepy to stand in a place that used to be familiar when it now feels so foreign, like standing on the bones of a former self. He shakes his head. “You know when he’ll be back?” I ask. He shakes his head again. My phone buzzes in my bag. I turn around, squinting, to see whether Brynn or Abby is gesturing to me, but can’t make out anything beyond the glare of the windshield.
Another guy comes around the house, this one reed-thin, shirtless, and the color of raw leather, with a skinny blond mustache and a goatee and lots of bad tattoos. There’s an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Maybe backcountry, or one of the cottage kids.
“You need help with something?” His tone isn’t exactly welcoming.
“I was just looking for a friend,” I say. “I’ll come back.”
“He had a funeral,” he calls out when I’m halfway to the car.
“What?” I turn around.
“No, not a funeral.” He’s got his cigarette lit, and he exhales a long stream of smoke from his nose, dragon-style. Definitely backcountry. I wonder if he knew Summer. I wonder if he knows me. “A memorial or whatever you call it. There was a girl who died a few years ago. Got axed. Nearly took her head off.” When he smiles, he tilts his head back and narrows his eyes, like a cat looking at something it can eat. “Your friend is supposed to be the one who did it.”
As always when someone mentions the murder, I get a weird out-of-body feeling, like the moment right before you faint. “She didn’t get axed,” I say. My voice sounds loud. I’m practically shouting. “She was stabbed. And he didn’t do it.”
I turn around and practically sprint back to the car.
“No luck?” Brynn says, when I get into the car.
“He’s not home.” I feel strangely out of breath, as if I’ve been forced to run a long distance. “He went up to town for the memorial.”
“What?” Brynn squawks. “Is he insane? He’ll get lynched.”
“Come on,” Abby says. “It isn’t that bad, is it? Not after all this time. We were at the school yesterday and no one bothered us.”
“That’s because no one noticed us.” Brynn pivots completely around in her seat to glare. “You live here. You should know how people are.”
“I’m antisocial, remember?” Abby says serenely. “I’m a shut-in, like Mia.”
“I thought you were famous.”
“Online.”
Brynn rolls her eyes. “Sorry, Batman. You don’t exactly look like you’re trying to fly under the radar.”
Brynn has a point: today Abby’s wearing a polka-dot taffeta skirt with a ruffled hemline, a T-shirt that says Winning, chartreuse shoes, and her Harry Potter glasses.
“I think we should go,” Wade says.
Brynn rounds on him next. “Oh, yeah, right. That’d go over real well. Sorry, but I’m already full-up on shitty ideas.”
“I’m serious.” Wade turns around, appealing directly to Abby. “Killers often can’t stay away—from the scene of the crime, from the media, from anything having to do with the case. What do you want to bet the killer will be at Summer’s memorial?”
“He’s right,” Abby says. “I watched a whole documentary about it.”
I can feel Brynn’s eyes on me and I look away. Owen came home after five years, right in time for Summer’s memorial. Could it possibly be coincidence?
No. Of course not.
But then I think of his smile and the way he used to chuck my arm and say, Hey, Macaroni when we passed in the halls. The afternoons up in the tree house, eating cheddar cheese on graham crackers, which was weird but surprisingly delicious. How he would watch my dance routines, really watch, his chin cupped in his hands, totally interested, no matter how long they were. The kiss.
And I know that that Owen, the old Owen, the Owen I always believed in even after he broke my heart, is the only thing I have left. I can’t lose it, too.
“That’s what everyone will think if we show,” I say. My voice sounds faint and fuzzy. Like a bad recording of itself. “They’ll think we just couldn’t stay away.”
“We don’t even have to get out of the car,” Wade says. “We’ll just get as close as we can, and we’ll watch.”
Brynn shakes her head. “No. Mia’s right.”
“Come on, guys.” Wade looks from me to Brynn, then back to me again. “Don’t you want to finish this?”
Brynn makes another noise of disgust. When we were kids, Brynn always seemed so much braver than everyone. She was a thousand times braver than I was. I threw up in the bathroom in sixth grade when we had to dissect a worm. She barely blinked. When Hooper Watts called me Mute Mia and told everyone I was too stupid to know how to talk, I proved his point and said absolutely nothing. When he told everyone Brynn had been caught stealing girls’ underwear from the gym lockers, she told everyone he’d been paying her to do it so he could add to his collection.
And maybe she is braver. But she’s afraid now.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
Brynn gapes at me. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Maybe,” I say, feeling strangely relieved, and strangely free, too. She keeps staring at me, shocked, as if she’s never seen me before, and I can’t help it: in my head I do a little jump, arms up to the sky, victory.