“Morning, sunshine.”
I wake from a dream that breaks up immediately and leaves me with only the sense of someone shouting. Brynn is standing in front of me, hazy in the sun beaming in through the windows.
I sit up, jittery from the dream I can’t remember. “What time is it?”
“Ten,” Owen answers from the hall. A second later he appears, showered and clean-looking, his hair curled wetly, in a faded red T-shirt that says London. The black eye seems to have grown overnight, bleeding down into his cheek. I don’t know why people call it a black eye. This one is plum-colored. “Sorry. Brynn thought you’d want coffee.”
When I bring a hand to my cheek, I can feel the spiderweb impressions of faint lines from the couch.
“Where’s Abby?” I ask. I don’t remember falling asleep last night—only that Wade and Brynn were arguing about whether or not Haggard could have possibly known about Lovelorn, whether he could really have been the one helping Summer do the writing, and I decided to close my eyes just for a few minutes, and then I wasn’t on a couch at all, but on a boat. At some point, I thought Owen was beside me—I thought he touched my hair and whispered—but that must have been part of the dream.
“Wade must have dropped her at home on his way to work,” Brynn says. “They were gone when I got up. She probably didn’t want to wake you up,” Brynn adds quickly, because she must see that I’m hurt. Brynn looks good—alert, dark hair bundled up in a messy ponytail, fashionably rumpled, as if sleeping on the floor in other people’s houses with a sweatshirt for a pillow is part of her strategy for success. She passes me a Styrofoam cup of coffee, too sugared, pale with cream. “Gotta caffeinate,” she says. “Today we nail Haggard.”
“Today?” I nearly spit out my coffee. “You want to talk to him today?”
“What’s the point in waiting?” she says.
I look to Owen—old habit, from back when I could count on him to agree with me, when I could read what he was thinking by the way he squinted his eyes, by the smallest twitch in his lips; when we didn’t have to speak, because we just understood—but he sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “She’s right,” he says, and only in his voice do I hear how tired he is. “I just want this to be over. Finally.”
And then what? I nearly say. Then Owen goes off to my dream school, and the Waldmann house is sold, and I lose him forever—beautiful, bright, matchstick Owen, full of crackle and life. Then Brynn does whatever Brynn is going to do, and Abby and I are still stuck here, in Twin Lakes, and no one will hail us or call us heroes. And that’s it, the end of the story: curtains down, dancers gone home, a theater sticky with spilled soda and old trash.
Then I will still be as lonely as ever. Lonelier, maybe. Because this time, there will be no chance that someday Owen will come home and we’ll get to start over.
In the bathroom mirror I barely recognize myself. I look spidery and thin and old. My eyes are sinking into two hollows. I wonder what Summer would look like now, had she lived—all that blond hair and skin like a new peach. I find a single half-used tube of toothpaste in an otherwise empty drawer and use my finger to clean my teeth, then finger-comb my hair back into a bun.
What will we say to Mr. Haggard?
Do you remember a girl named Summer Marks? Stupid. Of course he does. Everyone does. And he was at her memorial.
Mr. Haggard, we know what you did to Summer.
Mr. Haggard, tell us what you know about Lovelorn.
I whisper the words very quietly in the bathroom. There, they sound silly and harmless. Musical, even. #44. Words mean different things to different people, at different times, in different places.
Through the window I see a dark car—the limousine type that service airports—nose through the gates and disappear from view. A second later Brynn pounds on the bathroom door.
“Mia,” she whispers.
“What?” I say, opening the door. She looks as panicked as I’ve ever seen her. “What is it?”
But then, from the front hall, a man calls, “Owen? You home?” The voice is instantly familiar, even after all these years.
Mr. Waldmann is back.
Brynn edges behind me into the front hall, as if she expects Owen’s dad to start shooting at her and wants to use me for cover. Mr. Waldmann is almost unrecognizable. I remember him mostly as a disembodied voice—a voice slurring from behind a locked door to be quiet, go outside. He wasn’t fat back then, exactly, but he was soft. Blurry. Chin folding into neck into chest into rolls of stomach. Even his eyes were blurry and seemed never to be able to focus on one thing without sliding over to something else.
But Mr. Waldmann now is all sharp corners and edges: close-cropped hair, thin, a jaw like Owen’s, perfectly defined. Even in his jeans, wearing a blazer over a T-shirt, he looks like the kind of person who’s used to being listened to. Something old and damaged has, in the past five years, seemingly been fixed.
“Dad.” Owen is frozen in the living room doorway, trying to block the mess from view.
“Jesus.” Mr. Waldmann takes in Owen’s black eye. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing,” Owen says quickly. “Just a stupid fight.”
“You look terrible,” Mr. Waldmann says, and then looks at Brynn and me, squinting a confused smile in our direction. “Hello.”
Brynn looks like someone trying to swallow a live eel. I try to say hello, but all that comes out is the final syllable. “Oh.”
“You weren’t supposed to be home until Friday,” Owen says.
“Business closed early. I wanted to surprise you. Hopped a red-eye from LA.” Mr. Waldmann looks increasingly confused as he turns back to us. “And you are . . . ?”
Owen shoves his hands in his pockets and kicks at nothing, making a scuffing noise on the floor. “Dad, Mia and Brynn. You remember Mia.” He won’t look at me, and it occurs to me that he’s embarrassed. Blood beats a hard rhythm in my head. One two three four one two three four.
“Mia. Of course. Mia. And Brynn.” But this time when Mr. Waldmann tries to smile, he only winces. “Wow. How wonderful. I had no idea you were all still in touch.” He turns to Owen, leaving the question unspoken: Why?
“It’s been kind of like our reunion tour,” Brynn blurts out. “But we’re just wrapping up.”
Mr. Waldmann’s attention moves to the living room—the mess of papers, coffee-ringed Styrofoam cups, empty chip bowls. “What happened here?” he says. “There another storm I didn’t hear about?”
I shove past Owen and start snatching up pages, one by one—some of them brittle, like old leaves, some of them damp as though imprinted by sweaty palms. I shuffle them carelessly into a pile, ignoring the echoes of an old fear: they’ll be out of order now, we’ll never be able to sort them, Summer will be so angry.
“Homework,” is the first thing I can think of to say, which is why I’m always so careful, why I weigh words in my mouth before I speak them. The first thing that comes out is often so wrong.
“Homework?” Mr. Waldmann sounds almost amused. Almost. But the strain is obvious in his expression. “In July?”
“Summer school.” More lies, more words I haven’t chosen, as though they’re just staging a riot. For a second I catch Owen watching me with the strangest look on his face—as if I’m someone he’s never seen before. “Owen agreed to help out, because of NYU and everything.”
That doesn’t even make sense, but Mr. Waldmann nods. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” Then: “Owen, can I see you for a second? Alone?”
This is it: the end of the line. Get them out, Mr. Waldmann will say, and Owen will be nice about it, give us an excuse, and shut the door in our faces. We dragged him into this. He didn’t want any of it.
All he did was kiss her in front of half the school and break my heart.
“I was just about to drive Brynn and Mia home,” Owen says, already going for the door. Goodbye, thanks for coming, please don’t crowd the exits.
“Nice to see you, girls,” Mr. Waldmann says, but it’s not hard to figure out what he really means: Nice to see you leaving.
Owen’s car is stifling hot. The AC does nothing but flood hot air at us. I roll down the window, worried I’m going to be sick. I’ll lose my chance to talk to Owen unless I do it now. But I won’t do it. Of course I won’t. Not here at ten forty-five a.m. in a sweat-sticky car, not anywhere, never.
“I’m not going home,” Brynn says as Owen reverses onto the lawn to turn around. “I’m going with Mia.” She hasn’t asked me, of course, but I’m too tired to argue.
“Neither of you is going home,” Owen says. For a second he looks just like the old Owen: stubborn, explosive, unpredictable. The boy who lived half the time out of his tree house and wore a bulky flea-market trench coat everyone said he would someday conceal a gun inside and spent half of class gazing out the window, doodling shapes in his notebook. Brilliant and strange and mine. “Not yet, anyway. We owe Mr. Haggard a visit, remember?”