The first time we went to Lovelorn, it was raining.
This was late June, a few weeks after the end of sixth grade, and I shouldn’t have been home. I was supposed to be at ballet camp in Saratoga Springs, New York, bunking up with other dance nerds and spending my mornings perfecting my pas de bourrée and trying not to be hungry and generally getting as far as possible from my parents, who had been in a four-month competition to see who could be angrier.
But two weeks earlier, during our stupid end-of-school field day, Noah Lee shoved into me from behind and down I went, hard, on my left ankle. Summer told me afterward that even my fall was dramatic and graceful. Brynn said she wished she’d been filming for YouTube.
So: I had a sprained ankle and no summer plans.
We’d played at Lovelorn plenty of times since September of sixth grade, when Summer had first moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Ball, a couple with four grown children of their own who had for unknown reasons decided to foster a child late in life—largely, Summer thought, for the cash they got from the government.
Plus Mr. Balls—that’s what Summer called him—needed someone new to order around.
Brynn and I weren’t even friends before Summer came along. Summer had slid suddenly and effortlessly into our orbit, bringing Brynn and me into alignment, like the gravitational center of a very small universe.
We were on the same bus route. Our whole friendship, and everything that happened, can be traced back to that dumb yellow bus that always smelled like the inside of a Cheetos bag. Mr. Haggard, our bus driver, had a weird comb-over and was always singing show tunes and joking that he should have been on Broadway. Brynn liked to say that school was just a big sanity test to see who would crack first, and on that bus, it was easy to believe that.
For years, Brynn and I sat separately in the very back, sometimes leaving a few rows of seats between us, sometimes directly across the aisle from each other, without ever once speaking. And then one day Summer appeared, wearing cutoff shorts and men’s suspenders over a flimsy Coca-Cola T-shirt, and she slipped between us—sitting right next to me, legs up, little blond hairs growing over her knees—and started talking to us as if we’d chosen to sit there deliberately and not because it was far away from everybody else. As if we were already friends.
From then on, we were.
Summer was the one who introduced us to the book. She had the whole thing practically memorized. She’d been toting it around from foster home to foster home and always said it was the only thing she owned that truly belonged to her and wasn’t borrowed or stolen.
By June we’d played at being the three original girls plenty of times. Sometimes one of us would sub in as a different character—Gregor the Dwarf, or one of the Sad Princesses who lived in the Towers. Brynn loved to play Firth, a centaur thief who’d stolen one of the princesses’ hearts and bartered it for his own freedom, only later realizing he’d cursed himself to a loveless life. Summer often switched characters halfway through the game, declaring that she was both Audrey and the nymph conscripted by the Shadow to steal Audrey away, and we never questioned her, because she knew the book better than we did and because she played all the characters so well, really hamming it up and making us believe. That’s one of the things I loved about her: she wasn’t afraid to look like an idiot.
She wasn’t afraid, period.
That day, the day in early summer when Lovelorn turned real, we had to go slower because of my ankle. Summer and Brynn leapt over the creek and then helped me across, and we pretended we’d forded the Black Hart River. We fought through the long field filled with cattails and spider grass, pretending that we were on the road to the dwarfs’ village in the Taralin Woods.
Maybe it’s just because of what happened next, but I remember feeling then a kind of magic coming to me on the wind. The trees lifted and lowered their great green hands and then fell still. The birds went quiet. Summer and Brynn were already far ahead of me, laughing about something, and I stopped, suddenly struck by the strange wonder of the sky, a sweep of golden sun and dark clouds and the whole world gone quiet as though waiting for something.
Lovelorn, I remember thinking. And even though it made no sense, a thrill went through me, a certainty that made me feel breathless. This is it. We’re really here.
Then the rain came. It swept in out of nowhere, the way summer storms do, throwing the trees into a frenzy again. Summer’s house was the closest, but Mr. Ball didn’t like her to have friends over—and besides, the whole place was dark and smelled like old-man breath.
We were soaked within seconds. My jeans felt like they were trying to suck the skin off my thighs.
“The shed!” Summer yelled, reaching out and seizing Brynn’s hand. Everything felt so urgent then. “Make for the shed!”
In the spring we’d found an old equipment shed that had at one point belonged to a farmhouse that had been torn down to make room for a whole bunch of double-wides and rent-by-the-week cottages like the kind Summer lived in with the Balls. We’d been to the shed plenty of times, although I was too afraid of spiders to stand inside for more than a few minutes. The shed had a plank floor and smelled like it was rotting. The single window was so coated in dust, even in midday the room was practically pitch-black, and it was piled with rusted tools that looked like parts of human anatomy, arms and fingers and teeth.
Brynn and Summer went dashing off, and I remember seeing the outline of their bras through their T-shirts and being jealous because I had nothing but bug-bite nipples and an occasional achy feeling. I was annoyed, too, because I couldn’t keep up and even though I kept shouting for them to wait, they wouldn’t. They were always doing things like that—ducking into the bathroom to whisper about something and shutting the door in my face, or raising their eyebrows when I complained that Mr. Anderson was too hard and then bursting into laughter. “That’s okay, Mia,” Summer would say, patting my head as if she were a thousand years older than I was. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
They disappeared into the shed. By the time I caught up, the door had swung closed again. It was swollen and warped with age and I had trouble getting it open. For a second I thought they were going to leave me outside, in the rain, as a joke. I started pounding on the door and shouting, and finally it swung open.
They hadn’t even heard me. They were standing in the middle of the room, water pooling beneath their feet, dripping from their hair and clothing. I remember how quiet it was when I shut the door, and the rain was nothing but a dull drumming on the walls and roof.
The shed was clean swept and smelled like scented vanilla candles. All the old tools were gone. All the spiderwebs, too.
The walls were papered with old-fashioned floral wallpaper, cream with pretty bouquets of roses, and a green braided area rug muffled the sound of our footsteps. In one corner was a small cot covered with a patterned quilt. Next to it was a wooden bedside table and a battery-powered lantern designed to look like candlelight. The windowpanes had been scrubbed mostly clear, although a few webbed bits of mold remained in the corners. There was even a mason jar filled with tiny wild violets.
And a small wooden sign, looped with cursive writing, nailed above the bed: Welcome to Lovelorn.
“Did you do this?” I turned to Summer, even though I knew from her expression that she hadn’t.
In the books, the original three were never anything but delighted when Lovelorn appeared, when it began to change things, melting familiar landscapes like butter softening at the edges, kneading it into new shapes: a tree into a tower; the old stone wall into the gremlins’ grotto. And later, we would love the clubhouse, the way it had materialized for us in the rain; the warmth of the quilt, which we draped over our shoulders like a communal cape; the lantern with its flickering glow.
But I wasn’t delighted, not then. Then, I was scared.
“It’s magic,” Summer said. She went to the walls and ran her fingers over the wallpaper, as if worried it would dissolve under her fingers. When she turned around again, her eyes were bright. It was the only time I ever saw her close to crying. “It’s Lovelorn. We found Lovelorn.”
“Lovelorn doesn’t exist.” Brynn still hadn’t moved. She looked angry, which meant that she, too, was scared. “Admit it, Summer. You planned this. Admit it.”
But Summer wasn’t listening. “It’s Lovelorn,” she said. She went spinning through the room, touching everything—the blanket, the cot, the lantern—her voice rising in pitch until she was practically shouting. “It’s Lovelorn.”
In the bedside table, she found a box of chocolate chip cookies and tore it open with her teeth. They were stale, I remember, and crumbled like caulk between my teeth.