If there’s a good time to say I love you, I have always loved you, let’s start over, it isn’t between aisles two and three of the local 7-Eleven, bleached by the high fluorescents, with legions of squat cans of instant Hormel chili serving as witnesses. Or in front of the night clerk with so much metal in her face she looks as if she got accidentally mauled by barbed wire. Or in the car with Wade Turner, who insists on rolling down all the windows “to keep us awake,” despite the fact that we’ve just bought jumbo coffees and chocolate-chip cookie dough for extra sugar highs, flooding the car with darkness and the roar of wind.
Three minutes. That’s all I need. Maybe less. And yet Owen and I haven’t had a single minute alone. He hasn’t tried for a single minute alone with me.
Was he lying when he said he always loved me? Or did he mean past tense, loved but now no longer love?
#12. Words that mean multiple and different things. Always loved, meaning still do; always loved, meaning used to.
Owen’s house looks strange with just the living room light burning, like a bit of dark matter anchored by a single star. Wade hops out of the car first, but Owen takes a second to fumble with his seat belt. Wade is halfway to the porch by the time Owen starts after him.
Now, I think. Now that I know he didn’t do it. Now that even Brynn knows. This shouldn’t matter, but it does: on some level, deep down, I realize I’ve been waiting for Owen’s side of the story, for this final proof.
Now. Quickly. In the time it takes to do four grands jetés, to take four giant leaps into the air across the studio floor.
“Owen?” I reach out and put a hand on his elbow.
“Hmm?” He turns around, looking almost surprised, as if he’s forgotten I’m there.
The tree frogs and crickets are turning the air to liquid sound, and when I open my mouth, I suddenly feel like I’m drowning.
“Listen.” My voice is a whisper. “About what you said the other day—”
Just then the front door flies open and Abby stands there, transformed by the light behind her into a bell-skirted stranger.
“Is Brynn with you?” she calls out.
Owen turns away from me. Poof. The moment is gone. “What do you mean? I thought she was with you.”
The grass is cool against my bare ankles as I follow Owen across the lawn. I deliberately avoid the flagstones, stepping hard on the soft earth, a miniature revenge. Then, feeling stupid and childish, I step onto the path again. Abby edges backward to let us in. I can tell something has upset her. She has a good poker face, but not good enough.
“She ran out,” Abby says. “I thought she was just taking a walk. . . .”
“She ran out?” I repeat. Abby nods mutely, avoiding my eyes. Now we’re all packed into the front hall: me, Wade, Abby, and Owen. On one side, the living room, papers blown around like brittle leaves. Our past, scattered and dissected. On the other side, rooms dark and mostly empty of furniture, the whistle of wind through the destroyed remnants of Owen’s sunroom. That’s our past too: rooms full of darkness, things we didn’t understand, wind blowing through shattered spaces. “I don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing to get,” Abby says, crossing her arms. Then I know she’s hiding something. “She just went out for a bit. I thought she’d be back by now. That’s all.”
“I’ll go look for her,” I say quickly.
“Want company?” Wade asks, and I shake my head.
Owen doesn’t even offer.
If Brynn had started down Waldmann Lane, we would have seen her on our way back from town. It’s a one-lane road with nowhere to hide, unless she’d hurtled last-minute into the nest of trees. So I loop around the house to the backyard, thinking she might have needed a break. But she isn’t there, either. A heavy blue tarp, still scattered with old leaves, covers the long-empty pool.
Where could she have gone?
I circle around to the front of the house again, deciding that we must have missed her. The gate whines open and my shoes crunch on a scattering of pebbles. The moon is slivered short of full. Crazy to be wandering around after midnight, just because, making everybody worry.
But maybe she needed a break from Lovelorn. From Summer. From the sizzle and hiss of old words. When Owen pulled up that box from where it had been entombed, when I saw it lashed all over with tape, I had the strangest feeling that it hadn’t been hidden to keep it safe—but to keep us safe from it.
Witches, they called us. Demons. On a night like tonight all silvery and still, with nothing but a cratered moon and the trees knotted together as though for warmth and comfort, it’s easy to believe that monsters exist. That there are witches hunched over cauldrons and people possessed by vengeful spirits and vampires crying out for blood.
Just outside Owen’s gates is a wooded area where the underbrush has been trampled and the low-hanging branches snapped or twisted back, forming a kind of hollow. Only then do I remember that Brynn’s family moved after the murder. Her house is on Perkins, which runs parallel to Waldmann. Could she have gone home?
I push into the trees, ducking to avoid getting smacked in the face by the branches of an old fir tree. The chitter of insects in the trees grows louder here, as if they’re protesting my interference. Now I see that there’s a pretty clear path cutting down the hill through the underbrush. I can see the glimmer of lights on what must be Brynn’s street, from here no more than a few distant halos, hovering beyond the trees. She must have gone this way.
Burn them. There was a whole tumblr dedicated to the murder and to the idea that Brynn, Summer, and I had been witches, and Owen the warlock who helped control us all. I remember coming across it during that awful month when people drove by my house just to take pictures, when Mom and I woke every day and found our stoop covered by the sheen of egg yolk or our trees toilet-papered or our mailbox pitched over in the grass. When Mom started ordering our groceries online and stopped going to the gym and started stacking up cardboard boxes in the kitchen “just in case.”
Burn them, someone had posted. That’s what they used to do with witches. Build a bonfire and throw them in to roast.
Then we heard that Brynn’s next-door neighbor had tossed a Molotov cocktail into her kitchen. The fire went through the house like it was paper. Brynn barely made it out. Even though she hadn’t spoken to me since the day Summer died, I tried calling her a dozen times, but her phone was always off. And then it was disconnected.
I fish my phone from my bag for light before remembering it’s been dead for hours, and instead go carefully, arms outstretched, sliding a little on the muddy path and swatting at the spiderwebs that reach out to ensnare me. There’s something claustrophobic about these woods and the trees all hemmed close together in this narrow spit of undeveloped land, and I’m relieved when I break free of the last entanglement of growth and end up on a road lined up and down with cheap cottage housing stacked side by side.
Immediately, I spot her: fifty feet from me, standing absolutely still in front of a house that looks like all the others next to it. There’s something unearthly about her stillness. As if she can’t move. Her face is touched with a shifting pattern of blue light.
I start toward her and am about to call out, when the window becomes visible and in it I see Brynn’s mother stand up to turn off the television. She’s wearing a bathrobe. I see her face only briefly before the blue light dies in the window and on Brynn’s face. But Brynn’s mother is supposed to be in the hospital.
“Brynn?”
She turns quickly. For a second I see nothing on her face but pain. Then, almost immediately, she looks furious.
“What the hell are you doing?” she says.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You told me your mom was in the hospital.”
“Keep your voice down, okay?” Brynn glares at me as if I’m the one who’s done something wrong.
“You lied,” I say. A word that doesn’t sound half as bad as it is. To lie, to deceive, to cheat, to trick. To recline on a soft bed. #12 again. “All this time, your mom was fine. You could have gone home. You didn’t have to sleep in the shed—”
“God. Just keep your voice down, all right?”
“You didn’t have to stay with me—”
The rest of the sentence turns hard and catches in my throat. Suddenly I can’t breathe.
The answer is so obvious. Why did she agree to help, after she told me at first I was crazy? Why did she go to the shed and then make up a huge lie about her mom? Could she have known I’d invite her back to my house? She’s been looking for something—evidence, something she wrote for Summer or Summer wrote for her. She hasn’t been helping me find the truth.
She’s been trying to cover it up.
Run, Mia, she’d said. Run. And I did. I didn’t stop, not even when I heard screaming.
Brynn—wild, ferocious Brynn, Brynn and her big mouth, all curled-up anger and leaps and explosion, Brynn with a fist hard like a boy’s—killed Summer. And I’ve been too stupid, too stubborn, to believe it.
“You.” Now, when I’ve never been so scared in my life, my voice is strong. Steady. Pouring over the words. “You killed her. It was you all along.”
“Oh my God, are you for real?” Brynn rolls her eyes. “Look, I can explain, okay? Just not here.” She grabs my wrist and I yank away. She stares at me. “Wait—you’re not serious, are you?”
Before I can answer, a lamp clicks on in the living room, lighting up Brynn’s mom, face pressed to the window, eyes creviced at the corners, squinting to see outside.
“Shit.” This time Brynn gets a hand around my arm and pulls me into a crouch, so we’re concealed behind a straggly line of bushes. An old plastic Easter egg is half-embedded in the dirt. “Shit,” she says again.
“What are you—?”
“Shhh. Come on.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you—”
But she’s already hauling me back to my feet, and like it or not, I have no choice but to follow, have never had a choice. We shoot across the street, bent practically double, and push into the trees just as the porch light comes on and Brynn’s mom steps out onto the stoop, hugging her bathrobe closed, peering out over the now empty street. Brynn takes a step backward even though we’re sheltered by the trees and the shadows, wincing as a branch snaps beneath her weight. But soon her mom returns inside and the porch and living room lights go off in succession.
Brynn exhales. “That was close.”
At last, she releases me. I whip around to face her, rubbing my wrist even though it doesn’t really hurt. Still, she’s left half-moon marks in my skin. “Explain,” I say. “Now.”
“Come on, Mia.” She doesn’t sound guilty. Not even a little bit. Just angry and tired. “Cut the shit. You can’t really think I killed Summer.”
The words sound ridiculous when she says them. That brief sense of certainty—the truth like an electric pulse reaching out to zap me—is gone. Brynn’s a lot of things, at least half of them bad, but she’s not a killer. I remember how upset she was years ago when we stumbled on those poor crows, two of them skewered as if for a barbecue roast, the last one bleeding out slowly in the snow. While my lunch came up in my throat she kneeled down in her jeans and scooped the poor thing into her arms, went running with it toward the road as if there was anything she could do, any help she could give it there. It died in her arms and she wouldn’t believe it was beyond rescue. She insisted on finding a shoebox so we could bury it.
Still, she lied.
“I don’t know what I think,” I say.
She stares at me for another long moment. Then she turns around and starts beating her way up the hill, back toward Owen’s house, thwacking through the trees and sending down a patter of moisture from their leaves.
I hurry to keep up. “I want the truth, Brynn.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” She deliberately lets a branch rebound so I have to duck to avoid getting swatted in the face.
“Try me.” The slope is steeper than it seemed on the way down. Brynn must have walked this path plenty of times. She’s moving quickly, confidently through the dark, leaping over stones that knock at my shins, pinballing from tree to tree for momentum. I hit a slick of rotting leaves and my ankle turns, and I grab hold of the back of Brynn’s shirt at the last second to keep from going down. She turns around with a little cry of surprise. “What are you hiding?”
She looks away. Sharp nose, sharp cheeks, sharp chin. Brynn is the most knifelike person I’ve ever known. “I’m not an addict,” she says finally, after such a long pause I was sure she wouldn’t answer.
“What?” This, of all things, was not what I expected her to say.
She turns back to me, almost impatient. “I’m not addicted to anything. Not pills. Not alcohol. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. The last time I had a beer it made me sick. I don’t know how people drink that stuff.”
I stare at her. “I don’t understand,” I say finally, and the crickets say it with me, sending up a fierce swell of protest.
She makes a little noise of impatience. “When I was in eighth grade, I got drunk with some kids from Middlebury and took some of my mom’s sleeping pills when I got home. I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” she says quickly, before I can ask. “I was just tired. School was hell. I begged my mom to move away, but she wouldn’t. We couldn’t. She didn’t have a car that winter, and she needed to be able to get to work on foot. I started taking the bus into Middlebury after school just to have a break. I met some older kids, potheads, and they were the ones who got me drunk. Lost my virginity that way too.” She smiles, but it’s the worst smile I’ve ever seen: hollow, as if it’s been excavated from her face.
“Brynn.” I want to say more—I want to hug her—but I feel paralyzed.
“It’s okay.” She takes a step backward, as if anticipating I might try to hug her. “You wanted the truth, so I’m telling you the truth. I took pills and puked and my sister found out and freaked and got me into rehab. I was so mad at first. But then . . . I started liking it.”
I stay quiet now, hardly breathing.
“I was in for forty-five days. I finished eighth grade in rehab. Took a few tests, sent in my answers, got a see you later, okay to pass Go. The program recommended me for a special high school, an alternative program, you know. Freaks and geeks and burnouts and losers. But that was good. It meant I didn’t have to go to TLC. A special car came to pick me up at my house and everything.” She shrugs. “But I still had to be me. I still had to go home. My mom and sister can hardly look at me, you know,” she says in a rush. “They can hardly stand to be in the same room as me. It’s like everything that’s happened, every single thing that’s gone wrong, is my fault. They like it when I’m away. I think sometimes they wish I’d just go away permanently. Don’t say it isn’t true,” she adds flatly, before I can. “I’m giving you facts. My mom and I used to have this weekend tradition, whenever she wasn’t working. We’d sit on the couch and watch all the soaps she’d missed during the week. We’d try to guess what would happen before it did. But suddenly she got too busy. She had stuff to do around the house. She was too fat and shouldn’t be sitting around. Excuses. I’d hear the soaps going at night, you know, when she thought I was asleep.” She looks away, biting her lip. As if one pain can be traded for another. “I had a girlfriend freshman year at Walkabout—that was the name of the alternative school—and her mom was a doctor. I stole some samples from the medicine cabinet when I was over one time and flashed them around at school. Walkabout had a zero-tolerance policy. Back to rehab I went. And then, sophomore year, when I was out again, I started hanging around with Wade. He’d been bugging me since the murders, you know. Thought he could help. Thought we could clear my name together. I guess he’s always had a bit of a superhero complex.”
“Batman,” I say.
“Batman,” she says, nodding. “Wade has a part-time job working in a clinic for fuckups. Real fuckups. Not pretenders like me. Sixteen-year-old heroin addicts, that kind of thing. He helps me . . . fake it. So I can stay in the system. Bounce around.” Brynn stares at me, tense, chin up, as if daring me to ask how.
But I’m not sure I want to know. So I just say, “Why?”
She hugs herself, bringing her shoulders to her ears. “He knows I like it,” she says shortly. “He knows I feel safe there. Plus—”
“What?”
“I think he just needed a friend,” she says. “We’re family, sure, kind of, but . . . friends are different, aren’t they?”
Now the crickets and the tree frogs and all the tiny stirrings and windings of the invisible insects in the dark have gone still. Hushed and silent.
“That’s why he’s here,” I say. I’m fumbling, struggling to piece together the facts, but as soon as I see Brynn’s face, I know I’m right. “That’s why he’s helping. You made a deal with him.”
She shakes her head. “It started off that way. But now . . .” She trails off. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Under the vaulted canopy of trees, I have the feeling of being in a church. And I have the craziest idea that Summer was the sacrifice, that she had to die so that the four of us, these broken people, could find each other. A Bible quote comes back to me, from years and years ago, before my dad left, when we still went to church. I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
“Why did you lie about your mom?” I ask Brynn, and the trees let out a shushing sound.
Brynn looks down at the ground. “I didn’t tell my mom I was coming home. I wasn’t planning to come home, but . . . well, everything got messed up. But that first day, after you picked me up, I went by the house—” She abruptly stops, sucking in a breath, as if she’s been hit by an invisible force.
“What?” I touch her once on the elbow. Feel the ridge of her bone beneath my fingers. Mercy. “What is it?”
When she speaks again, her voice is very quiet. “It’s stupid,” she says. “My mom and sister were sitting on the couch. Feet up on the coffee table, matching slippers, bowl of popcorn. They were watching Days together. That was always my mom’s favorite soap. ‘The most bang for your buck and tears for your time,’ she always said. They looked so happy.” Her voice breaks and I realize she’s trying not to cry.
I want to hug her and tell her it’s okay, she’s going to be okay, we all are, but I don’t know that. How can I know? How can I promise? Terrible things happen every day.
Then she clears her throat and I know she’s gotten control of herself again. “I couldn’t interrupt. I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going until I was in backcountry. Didn’t know what I would do. But then I remembered the shed and knew at least I’d have a place to crash until I figured it out. It was weird being there,” she says, in a different tone. “Spooky. Like . . . someone was watching. Like she was watching. In the middle of the night I woke up and . . . I swear I saw her face in the window. Just for a second. Those big eyes, her hair. Guilt, probably. Or I was dreaming.”
“I’m sorry, Brynn” is all I say. Sorry is one of the worst words of all: it hardly ever means what you want it to.
“That’s all right,” she says. Another thing people say and hardly ever mean.
“No, it’s not.” Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the stupidity, the futility of it all. Brynn and I were Summer’s best friends. We fell in love with a story. We fell in love with an idea. And for that we’ve been punished again and again. Where’s our forgiveness? Where’s mercy for us? “You have to go home.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she says. Sharp again.
“You can’t be homeless forever.”
“Thanks for the advice.” She stares at me for a long second, her face striped in shadow, her eyes unreadable. Then she looks away, shaking her head. “Forget it,” she says. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you wouldn’t get it.”
“That’s not fair,” I say. “I do get it.” And then, as she starts to turn away, anger makes a leap in my chest. “You’re not the only one who’s been hurt.”
She turns back around to face me. “Poor baby,” she says. “You want to start a club or something? Want to be treasurer and get a trophy?”
“Stop it. You know that’s not what I meant.”
Moonlight catches Brynn’s teeth and makes them flash, like a predator’s. “I’m sick of your poor-me act, okay? I’m not buying it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do.” Brynn has lost it plenty of times in front of me, but never like this. Never at me. The woods seem to be shrieking along with her. “You sold me out.”
“What?” I nearly choke on the word.
“To the cops. You sold me out.” In the dark, she looks like a stranger, or like a wild spirit, something not of this world. Flashing teeth and eyes striped with dark and wild hair. “‘Ask Brynn,’” she mimics. “‘Brynn will tell you. I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even there.’” She’s shaking, and in an instant I know that this, her anger, what she thinks I did, is the reason she stopped picking up my calls, never texted back, dropped stonelike straight out of my life. “They wouldn’t believe me about anything. You had them convinced it was my fault.”
I remember sitting in the musty room, armpits tickly with sweat, my mouth desert-dry despite the Coke they’d given me. My dad glaring at me, losing control, not quite shouting but almost.
“I never meant to get you in trouble.” Tell them, Mia. Just tell them the truth. And me: trying to haul the words up from some sandpit where they’d gotten stuck, through layers of stone and sediment, shaking with the effort. Ask Brynn, I said. Ask Brynn.
“Oh yeah? What did you mean, then?”
“I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.” She turns away from me again and now it’s my turn to grab her wrist, to force her to stay and listen. “You made me lie for you, Brynn. You made me swear I wouldn’t tell what happened—”
“I didn’t do it for me.” We’re so close I can feel the words as she shouts them. Stab, stab, stab. Like she’s hitting me instead. “I did it for her, don’t you get it? So no one would know. I was protecting her, I—”
“Brynn? Mia?” Owen’s voice comes to us from the street. I drop Brynn’s arm and she steps backward quickly. My heart is racing, as if I’ve been running.
“Mia?” Owen’s voice is closer now.
“Here.” Brynn brings a hand up to her eyes as she turns away, and I feel a hard jab of guilt. Was she crying? But when we make it onto the street and her face is revealed in the moonlight, she looks calm, almost blank. As if someone has taken an eraser and wiped away not just her anger but every feeling.
Owen looks like a matchstick on fire. His hair shoots toward the sky. He’s practically crackling with excitement. “There you are,” he says. “Come on.”
“What?” I say. “What is it?”
He’s already started back toward the house. He barely turns around to answer. “It’s Abby,” he says. “She found something.”