“It seems so obvious now,” Brynn says. We’re parked halfway down the street from Ms. Gray’s house: a small shingled cabin on Briar Lane, not even a half mile from the woods where Summer was killed. Parked in the driveway is a maroon, rust-eaten Honda. Something about the house seems sad and remote and sympathetic, like a girl standing at a party too afraid to venture away from the corner, even though the lawn is well cared for and there are even flower boxes in the window—carnations, I see, and feel another twist of nausea. Then I realize it’s the curtains, which are all drawn, as if she doesn’t want any interaction with the outside world. “Why didn’t we suspect Ms. Gray? Why didn’t the police suspect?”
“Because . . .” I fumble for words to explain it. I remember Ms. Gray plowing through a lecture on contraception while Todd Manger made a jerk-off motion behind her, Ms. Gray talking about organic versus engineered produce, Ms. Gray teaching us the signs of cardiac arrest and how to clear food from a blocked air passage. So helpful, so kind, so convincing. Of course I see now how easy it would have been for her to persuade Summer to accept extracurricular help, to earn her trust, to make Summer feel special. “She isn’t someone we thought much about, is she? She was just there. Like wallpaper. Besides, we were thinking the Shadow had to be a guy,” I say. “Even though Summer never said it was. And Georgia Wells doesn’t either.”
“Heteronormative,” Abby says, with one of her eyebrow quirks. “I told you.” But I can tell she’s nervous, and so can Brynn, I guess, because she reaches out to squeeze Abby’s knee.
Abby and Wade have insisted on driving with us, although they’ve agreed to stay in the car while Brynn, Owen, and I talk to Ms. Gray.
“I guess it’s now or never, right?” Brynn says, looking as though she wishes it would be never. But she climbs out of the car.
Abby grabs me before I can follow her. “Anything happens,” she says, “I’m calling the cops.” It’s rare to see Abby so worried, and it almost makes me smile.
Almost.
“Nothing will happen,” I say, half to convince myself, and then I step out onto the street and slam the door. The knot in my chest makes it hard to breathe.
This is It. The Grand Finale. Except I haven’t practiced, don’t know the moves, have to fumble through it.
The leaves are starting to crisp in the August heat. The sky is like the white of an eyeball: like something that should be paying attention but isn’t.
There is nothing at all remarkable about Ms. Gray’s house, nothing that says psychotic murderer or manipulative crazy person. There is nothing about the house that says anything, and this, I realize, is the secondary reason it seems so sad: it is a house that anyone in anyplace could live in, a house that has remained featureless and indistinct.
We go up the flagstone path in a line: Brynn first, then Owen, head down, as if moving against a strong wind. Then me. Even though nothing moves, no curtain so much as twitches, as we get closer I have the distinct sense that someone in the house is waiting for us, watching us approach.
Just before we get to the front porch, Owen wheels around to face me.
“Listen,” he says, in a low, urgent voice. And I do not love him anymore, because he does not love me, but my heart throws itself into the sky. “Listen,” he repeats. His upper lip is beaded with sweat and even this looks right on him, like his skin is just crystallizing. “I want you to understand something. I’m leaving, okay? I’m leaving Twin Lakes. I’m not coming back. I hate it here. This place—” He breaks off and looks away.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask. I do not love him because he does not love me, and people don’t have the right to break your heart over and over and over.
Brynn has reached the front porch now.
“Just listen, okay?” He grabs my shoulders before I can move past him, and I know, I know that something huge is happening, the kind of thing that takes worlds apart and remakes them. Hurricanes and tornadoes and boys with blue eyes. “I applied to NYU—I wanted to go there—partly because . . .”
“Because why?” I manage to say.
“I thought you might come too,” he says, in barely a whisper. “I thought if you did, it would be a sign. That we were meant to start over. That we were meant.”
“But—” It doesn’t make sense. And yet I know he’s telling the truth. I believe. “You told me you didn’t love me anymore.”
“I learned to stop,” he says, and his voice breaks, and my heart explodes against the sky in cinders and ashes. Fireworks. “I made myself. I had to.”
“Owen.” I take a breath. “I still—” But before I can finish, before I can say love you, the front door opens with a whine and Brynn freezes where she is, hand outstretched to knock.
“Oh.” Ms. Gray looks almost relieved. As if she’s been standing there, waiting for us, all this time. “I thought you would come.”
Inside the house it’s dim and sticky-hot, although several window units are regurgitating air. Maybe that’s why she keeps the lights off and the curtains closed: a single lamp pushes feeble yellow light through a graying lampshade.
The house looks just as featureless inside as out. It’s very clean, and the wood floors are bare. The furniture is all the do-it-yourself kind made out of painted plywood and cheap plastic. There are no pictures on the walls except for a framed painting of two yellow-haired cherubs cavorting in a sky of puffy pink clouds that looks as if it belongs in a bad diner or a dentist’s office.
In the living room, Ms. Gray invites us to sit on a couch upholstered in itchy beige. She sits across from us in a fake-leather armchair so stiffly resistant it squeaks under her weight. Possibly no one has ever sat there before.
“Would you like something to drink?” Her tone is pleasant. She interlaces her fingers on her lap. The woman who taught me the meaning of the word spermicide. God. “I don’t keep soda in the house. But I have lemonade. And water, of course.”
“We’re fine,” Brynn says quickly.
“All right,” she says. “Well, if you change your mind . . .”
“Ms. Gray.” Owen’s mouth sounds dry. He’s sitting very straight, palms to thighs, and I press my knee hard into his. For boundaries and safety and comfort. “You said you thought we would come. What did you mean?”
Ms. Gray tilts her head, birdlike. She says in a measured voice, “It’s about Summer, isn’t it? I thought you would come about Summer.”
I’m surprised that I’m the one who answers. Always in the strangest moments I find I have a voice. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s about Summer.”
Ms. Gray looks away, toward a window curtained off, reflecting nothing. “I knew,” she says. “When you said you were doing a project for her memorial, I knew. Why would you need to talk to me? You were her best friends. You were more than that.” She looks at Owen and for a brief second her whole face peels back—and beneath it is an expression of such jealousy, such need, that my stomach goes watery and loose and I almost run like I did all those years ago. But then her face closes again and she looks like the same old Ms. Gray. “I knew then,” she says, and she looks down at her hands. “But I guess in some ways I’ve been waiting.”
“Is that why you didn’t leave Twin Lakes?” Brynn asks.
“I liked to be close to her,” she says quietly.
“Tell us what happened,” Owen says. He still hasn’t moved—maybe he can’t move—but he’s gotten it together, doesn’t seem anxious or angry anymore. “When did it start?”
Ms. Gray looks away again. “You have to understand,” she says after a long pause. “I loved Summer. I saw myself in her. I was raised in the system, too, bounced between homes—” She breaks off. Then: “You don’t understand, can’t understand what it’s like. I was never loved by anyone, I don’t think. I was never even liked, really. If you’re lucky, you’re tolerated. And then you’re supposed to be grateful. Have you ever had a dream where you’ve tried to run and can’t? Tried to yell and can’t? That’s what it’s like. Like . . .” She trails off.
“Like being a shadow,” I say, and she smiles a nice normal teacher smile, like I got the right answer on a quiz.
“Summer was having trouble in school. The reading and writing especially. I offered to help.” She glances at me sideways, and I think of her telling us so casually at TLC that Owen was tutoring Summer. Still clinging to her lies. Still trying to protect herself. The hatred blooming inside me feels toxic, like one of those red tides that stifles everything alive.
“What a sweet little setup,” Brynn says. “You knew she wouldn’t tell anyone. She’d be too embarrassed.”
“No,” Ms. Gray says quickly, turning to Brynn. “I didn’t plan it. I swear. She told me about Lovelorn, and how she’d always wanted to write a sequel. But she was shy, you know, about her writing. I just offered to help.”
“Bullshit,” Owen says. Still calm, still casual, not the wildfire boy who moved but a boy I don’t know, a boy I really, really want to know. Not memory and story but fact and now and real. “You thought it would be easy to put the blame on us.”
“You’re not listening.” Ms. Gray looks upset for the first time. “I’m telling you—I didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t want it to happen.”
“You took the gas can,” Owen says. “You left it behind my house.”
Ms. Gray touches a hand to her forehead, and for a second I think she’s going to cross herself, but she lets the hand drop. “That was afterward,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. And I figured that’s where she’d gotten them. You were the only thing she could talk about, in the end. Owen, Owen, Owen. She knew you didn’t really care about her, you know. She knew there was someone else.” Her eyes slide to mine and I have to look away. “Besides, she had your sweater. She’d forgotten it at my house the day before. We’d had a fight. . . .”
Why? I want to ask. Why was she in your house at all, removing her sweater, removing any of her clothing? But I can’t bear to hear the answer said aloud.
“My sweater?” Owen repeats.
Brynn shakes her head. “She wasn’t wearing a sweater.”
“I put it over her,” Ms. Gray said. “It was ugly. Dark brown and stained. But it was better than nothing. I was worried, you know, that she’d be cold at night.” She says this matter-of-factly, as if there’s nothing weird at all about stabbing someone seven times and then worrying about how cold she’ll be.
Owen closes his eyes. “The blood,” he says, and then opens his eyes again. “The blood on the sweater. You remember how bad my nosebleeds were. She must have taken a sweater without asking. No wonder the DNA was a match. She was wearing my sweater.”
Ms. Gray leans forward, patient but also emphatic, making a point. She teaches kids. That’s what occurs to me. She still teaches kids every day. The sick thing is she’s really good at it. “Summer loved Lovelorn. You have no idea—none of you have any idea—what she’d already been through. You couldn’t know. She didn’t want you to feel sorry for her. I was the same way. Lovelorn was her escape.” Ms. Gray’s eyes are so bright that for a second it’s like seeing Summer’s ghost there. C’mon, guys. Lovelorn calls. “It was her safe place.”
“It was a story.” Now Brynn speaks up, and Ms. Gray turns to her, frowning. “It was a story and she wanted it to end.”
Ms. Gray shakes her head. “She started changing. Cutting school. Smoking pot. I heard rumors about what she was getting into. After what I’d done for her—”
“You cleaned up the shed,” I say.
“I did it for her,” she says. “For all of you. To make Lovelorn real.”
“You killed those birds, too,” Brynn says, and she brings a finger to the dark tattoo on her wrist, maybe unconsciously. “You killed them and stuck them on a stake and left them where you knew we would find them.”
Those birds: frozen stiff with blood, beaks to the sky, one of them still flapping out its last life. We’d had lasagna for lunch that day, and I remember how it tasted coming up, the vivid orange in the snow.
And suddenly I have another memory—something I must have forgotten—of a time when Ryan Castro thought it would be funny to try to make me talk by spitting on me in the hall, to get me to fight back. This was before Summer and I were even friends—she was still the new girl with boobs who dressed weird—but she walked straight up to him and put an elbow to his neck and said, I’ll kill you. And afterward she told everyone I didn’t talk only because I didn’t talk to idiots.
This is the problem with words and even stories: there is never one truth. Summer was awful. We hated her. And she was magical, too, and it was our job to protect her, and we failed.
“It was just a warning,” Ms. Gray says. “She shouldn’t have been doing what she was doing—it wasn’t right. It wasn’t good for her. I was protecting her.”
“You were hurting her,” I say. And this I know, too. I understand it instinctively, without wanting to understand it, without wanting to think about it. “She trusted you, and you hurt her.” Who knows how it started—little touches on the knee, long hugs, a kiss on the forehead. And Summer, beautiful, crazy, screwed-up Summer, who once sat in my room with an old pair of scissors over her wrist, saying swear, swear you love me—who didn’t know what love looked like unless it was hurt, too—she might have believed it. She would have believed it, like Brynn believed that she couldn’t come home and my mom believed she could rebuild her life shoebox by coupon by envelope and I believed in an Owen who didn’t exist.
Did Summer know the difference anymore, at the end, between what was real and what wasn’t? I remember how she looked on that final day, when we came over the hill and saw her in the long field: like an angel who’d been pinned to the ground only temporarily, like someone not meant to stay. She believed by then, really and truly. In the book, in the Shadow, in the sacrifice.
Or maybe even that story was better than what was really happening, what she didn’t know how to stop.
“I loved her,” Ms. Gray says quietly. “I want you to know that. I loved her more than anything.”
Brynn is shaking a little when she stands. “You didn’t love her,” she says. “You don’t even know what that word means.”
“You’re wrong,” Ms. Gray says. She looks strangely small, collapsed inside her clothing. “That’s why I did it. She was trying to leave me. She was so confused. That’s what we were fighting about, the day before she died.” Not: the day before I killed her. The day before she died. As if it was all an accident. As if Summer ran against the knife herself, all seven times. “When she didn’t answer my call, I set out to find her. I knew she must have gone to Lovelorn. But when I saw what she was doing . . .” Her voice breaks, and for a moment she looks close to tears. “The knife and the gas can and that cat. The Sacrifice meant to keep away the Shadow. Meant to keep me away. She was—she was scared of me.” She shakes her head, as if still this idea makes no sense to her. “Scared of me. I just wanted her to stop running. I wanted her to listen. And then I thought . . .” She squints, like someone trying to puzzle out how to explain a math problem. “She was so troubled, you know. She wouldn’t have ended up well. I thought she could stay in Lovelorn.”
When Owen stands, he puts a hand on my back to draw me up with him. I’m glad. I can’t even feel my legs anymore. I’m filled with the strangest sense of relief and loss, like finally giving up on something you were reaching for.
“We’re going to have to go to the police, Ms. Gray,” Owen says, very politely and formally. And then: “Please wait for them to come. It’s the right thing to do.”
Again she squints up at us. She has a face that you’d forget five minutes after looking at it. Is that why we didn’t see?
“I won’t go anywhere.” She spreads her hands. “Like I said, I’ve been waiting . . . and I’ve accepted what’s right, anyway.”
We shouldn’t leave, I know. We should call the police and sit and wait and make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. But we need out. Out, out, out: into air, out of the heat, away from Ms. Gray and the story of love that looks like bleeding.
But I turn around before we get to the door because suddenly I get it, I see all of it—all of Summer, all of who she was and who she was trying to be and who she could have become; but also, for the first time ever, I understand Lovelorn and why Georgia Wells ended the book the way that she did. That broken sentence we puzzled over, all of our theories about sudden shock or writers’ block or sequels to come, they were all wrong: she was leaving the story unfinished because that’s the point of stories and their power: that the endings are still unfolding.
“She was a kid,” I say, and the words seem to come from someone and somewhere else. “She was troubled. But you don’t know what would have happened to her and what she would have been. How can you know? You took her story away. You ended it before she had a chance.”
“I saved her,” Ms. Gray whispers.
“That’s just your story,” I say, and push out into the sunshine where I can breathe again.