Two days after Mia’s twelfth birthday, in December: a hard freeze on the ground and the snow piled up in drifts above the basement window, blocking out the light. Mia and I were messing around with the balloons, still half-inflated, chucking them at each other, while Summer was sitting at the desk, hunched over an ancient desktop computer that growled whenever you so much as pressed the shift key. She was always online at Mia’s house, since her foster parents had put up firewalls to keep her from accessing anything good on YouTube. She’d caught Mr. Ball pulling up her online history, too, and snooping around in her dresser drawers. Just want to make sure you’re staying out of trouble, he always said, but Summer thought he was a freak who got off on things like that.
“Maybe,” I said, tossing a balloon and punching it toward Mia, “she was dictating the pages, and she fell into a manhole and died.”
“Or maybe,” Mia said, punching it back, “she was sending the manuscript page by page while she was on safari, and she got eaten by a lion right in midsentence.”
“What do you think, Summer?” I asked, lobbing the balloon at her. She swatted at it without looking and it bounced off the keyboard. “You think Georgia Wells got swallowed up by a manhole or a lion?”
“What?” She turned around in her swivel chair, frowning, and blinked as if seeing us for the first time. “You guys are still talking about the ending?”
Mia and I exchanged a look. It was like asking whether we were still breathing. We were always talking about the ending. It was our favorite pastime, as mindless as checking our phones. Why, why, why? What happened to the sequel? What could she possibly have been thinking? Georgia Wells’s website, which hadn’t been updated in ten years, gave us no answers. The sequel to The Way into Lovelorn was, according to the home page, still forthcoming. The author page showed a picture of Georgia smiling into the camera and a two-line bio: Georgia Wells lives in Portland, Maine, with her three cats and her favorite trees.
But Georgia Wells was dead by the time we found Lovelorn, the promise of a sequel forgotten. Still, that didn’t stop us from scouring the internet, looking for clues, trying to piece together details of her life.
“Got eaten by a lion, dropped in a manhole, flattened by a bus, her brain bled out by leeches—it doesn’t matter. You know that, right?” Summer gave us a look like we were both period stains on her underwear. I felt the blood rushing to my face. Knock, knock, knock. Beating in my head like an angry fist.
Mia looked hurt, which just made me feel angrier. “Doesn’t matter?” she repeated. “It’s Lovelorn.”
Summer frowned. “We can’t play forever,” she mumbled, turning back to the computer.
Mia’s mouth fell open, as if it had been unhinged. “We—what?”
Summer whirled around again. But she was suddenly furious. “I said we can’t play forever,” she repeated, and I saw her hands tight and white in her lap, the angry spaces between her knuckles. “People grow up. That’s all right, isn’t it? For people to grow up? You don’t have a problem with that?”
“Don’t yell at her,” I said quickly, and Summer stared at me for a second.
Then, once again, she turned back to the computer. But I heard her say it one more time.
“Everyone grows up,” she whispered. “Everyone.”