Five years ago, when I had just turned thirteen, I killed my best friend. I chased her down and cracked her over the head with a rock. Then I dragged her body out of the woods and into a field and arranged it in the center of a circle of stones I’d placed there with my other friend, Mia. Then we knifed her twice in the throat and five times in the chest. Mia was planning to douse her body with gasoline and light her on fire, but something went wrong and we bolted instead.

Here’s how everyone knew we were guilty: we had described the crime, more or less, in a fan-fic sequel to the book we were all obsessed with, The Way into Lovelorn.

Afterward, Mia and I split up. She went home and spent the evening conked out in front of the TV, without even bothering to clean up the gasoline that had soaked her jean shorts. I was more careful. I did a load of laundry—hauling ass to the local Bubble ’N’ Spin, since we didn’t have a machine at my house. The police were still able to extract samples of blood from my T-shirt, not Summer’s but a bit of animal blood, since we’d previously practiced the knifing ritual on a cat, also found in the field.

Owen Waldmann, Summer’s kind-of-maybe boyfriend, disappeared after the murder and didn’t return for twenty-four hours, at which point he claimed he didn’t know anything about it. He never said where he had gone.

He was lying, obviously. He was the one who orchestrated the whole thing. He was jealous because Summer had been hanging out with older boys, like Jake Ginsky, who was on the high school football team. That was the year Summer started growing up, leaving the rest of us behind, changing the rules.

Maybe we were all a little jealous of her.

I tackled Summer when she tried to run, hit her over the head with a rock, and dragged her back to Mia so that Mia and I could take turns stabbing her. Owen was the one who brought the can of gasoline and the one too stupid to dump the can after we mostly emptied it. It was found, later, just outside his garage, behind his dad’s lawn mower.

Owen, Mia, and me, Brynn.

The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.

The child killers.

That’s the story the way everyone tells it, at least, a story repeated so many times, accepted by so many people, it has become fact. Never mind that the case against Mia and me never even made it out of family court. Try as hard as they could, the cops couldn’t make the facts fit. And half the information we told them was illegally obtained, since we’d never even been cautioned.

Never mind that Owen was acquitted in criminal court, not guilty, free to pass go.

Never mind, either, that we didn’t do it.