The Space Between Trees

The Space between Trees

By Katie Williams

Copyright © 2010 by Katie Williams.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
eISBN 978-0-8118-7862-3

Book design by Natalie Davis.

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclekids.com

To my parents

I’
M IN
H
OKEPE
W
OODS
this morning, like I am every Sunday, delivering papers and keeping an eye out for Jonah Luks. It’s early when I drive into the neighborhood, so everyone’s still sleeping. Me, I’m wide awake to see all those Hokepe houses cast in blue like the light in a movie theater after the credits have gone up and out. The streets are real quiet, too, not even one lone dog-walker yanking his pup away from something it wants to sniff. I pull Mom’s car to the curb where Jonah always parks his truck. No truck, though—too early for Jonah Luks. When I step out of the car, my breath puffs in front of me like some strange language I’m speaking. It’s early March and the snow is finally off the ground, but not the frost yet, and this early, it’s chilly out. I try to sink into it—my couple hours in the cold—and drag my satchel from the backseat, lifting the strap over my head.

The paper route is something I’ve had since I was eleven. Eleven-year-olds aren’t expected to stick with things, but I’ve stuck with this, and now I’m sixteen and the oldest paper carrier on the list by about three years. The only girl, too. This doesn’t embarrass me. I like the job. Anyway, it’s better than dripping medicine into some neighbor kid’s ear or getting my arms sticky scooping ice cream out
of a tub. The beauty of a paper route is this: You put a paper on a doormat. Done.

Also, I like the Hokepe houses. They have these details to them—windowpanes tinted green like they’ve been made from pop-bottle glass, brass sundials that cast spiky shadows, bunches of clematis so thick it looks like you could stick your hands in them and climb straight up a wall, stained-wood porches, peaked windows, speckled bricks—all the good stuff. They’re worlds different from the houses Mom and I rent, like the one we have now, with its screen doors sagging like a body’s pressed against them, the shag carpets hopping with fleas, and someone’s greasy head stain on the wall above my bed. Now, it’s not like you’d call the Hokepe houses mansions—they aren’t big or showy enough for that—it’s more that everything has been thought about and put in its right place, and so when you step up to one of their doors, you kind of feel like you’ve been considered and put in your right place, too.

Hokepe isn’t that large a neighborhood, but almost every house orders a Sunday paper. It usually takes me two hours to finish my paper route. I like to do the blocks in the middle of the neighborhood first and save the ones on the edges—the ones surrounded by the woods—for later. But today I must be walking slower than usual because I’m only halfway done with the middle houses when I notice that the sun has gotten its hairline up over the ground, which means that it’s time to catch Jonah Luks. Jonah must be slow this morning, too, because when I get back to the place where he parks, his truck still isn’t there. So I drag out the next few deliveries, rearranging the contents of my satchel, straightening any askew doormats, and setting both feet on each porch step. A few minutes later, I hear
Jonah’s old engine rattle, so I run back to the house next to where he’ll park and pretend I’m just coming down its front walk, even though I already delivered a paper there half an hour ago. Jonah pulls into his usual spot along the curb, and I can see that salt and rust have turned the bottom of his doors into lace. When he gets out, he pats the side of the truck, like it’s done a good job getting him there, which I guess it has.

I call out, and Jonah raises a hand. No one looks as good raising a hand as Jonah does. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s something to do with the angle of his palm or the torque of his wrist. When Jonah waves, he looks like he could be hailing his golden retriever or his old, doting grandmother or his college roommate (though probably not the last one, since Jonah dropped out of college two years ago).

I am, of course, none of these. But I pretend to be as important as each of them as I wave back—in fact, more important than all of them added up together. Jonah lets his hand drop and gets so busy rummaging in the bed of his truck that I’m able to walk all the way over to him without him even noticing me. When I tap him on the shoulder, he jumps.

“Boo,” I say.

“Boo, you,” he says.

“You’re late. Did you have a late night? Did you stay out and party? Did you drink until the sun came up?”

He frowns and returns his attention to his truck. The words
Jefferson Wildlife Control,
stenciled on its side, are peeling a little at their feet. I push the bottom of one of the
l
s down, but it rolls back up again. Jonah is trying to get out his sled, but it’s stuck, the prow of it jutting
up out of the truck bed, the stern trapped under some junk. He has so much trash in his truck it’s like he was raised by raccoons.

“It’s like you were raised by raccoons,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

I watch him work at it, and while he does, I look him over—the shadow on his jaw, the curl of his nostril, and the underbrush of his eyebrow. I think,
He is assembled so correctly.

“I know something you don’t.” I dance a little on the spot; he doesn’t look. “I know what you’ll get today.”

“Get?” He squints.

“Out in the woods. What animals you’ll get.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“Rabbits.”

“Yeah?” He finally yanks the sled out with an ugly metallic sound. “Rabbits, plural?”

“Barely plural. Just two.” I lean against his truck and take the sled’s pull-cord with my finger. The cord is stained gray from all the grime on Jonah’s hands. Sometimes I try to hold the same thing he’s holding but in a different place—like, just now, Jonah has the end of the sled and I have its cord. This makes it almost like we’re touching each other. Jonah drops the sled.

“Is rabbit the minimum?” I ask.

“Minimum?”

“Size-wise, I mean. If you see something smaller, do you still have to pick it up? What about a frog? Would you have to pick up a dead frog?”

“I guess,” he says.

“What about a snail? A beetle? A potato bug?”

I keep on talking while he moves things around in his truck bed. Every once in a while, he grunts or says “yep.” He doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to me. Jonah is unflappable—so unflappable that sometimes I want to shake him just to hear if anything inside rattles. I set my satchel of papers onto his sled and pull the thing a few yards down the street. The sled’s bottom scrapes against the asphalt, leaving a line of red paint behind me.

“Oops,” I say.

Jonah stops with his business in the truck and looks at me out of the corner of his eye.

“I need that.”

I smile and keep pulling it. “No, you don’t. I told you. You’re only going to find two rabbits today. They’re little. You can put one under each arm.”

He walks over, lifts my satchel from the sled, and threads the rope out from between my fingers. His hands are the swollen and chapped type, the kind that remind you more of tools than of body parts. I wonder what my hand feels like to him. Sweaty and twitchy, I suspect, like some dying animal he’d pick up out in the woods. I’ve tried to test it out before, what my hands would feel like to someone else, but it’s no good holding the damn things myself. The sled skips back to the truck after Jonah. I follow and lean against the side of the truck just next to where he is.

“What’ll you give me?” I ask.

“Give you?” His back is to me. He pulls out a pair of work gloves and tosses them on the ground by his feet.

“Knowledge is power. I told you about the rabbits. What’ll you give me?”

He thinks a second. “Rabbit soup.”

This is the thing about Jonah. You assume he’s barely paying attention, and then he zings you.
Rabbit soup.
I like this, and I call it after him as he takes his sled and walks off between the houses and then into the woods. “Ha! Rabbit soup!” He raises a hand without turning around and then disappears in the trees.

Already I’m examining our conversation in my head, pulling out a sentence or two to keep for myself, fixing up the rest. In my mind, I picture the line of Jonah’s shoulders, replay the fall of his voice, and memorize the lift of his eyebrows. I’ll be reporting the encounter on Monday, after all, and I have to figure out exactly how it should be told.

I sit with these girls in the cafeteria—pastel sweaters, home-packed lunches, unpierced earlobes, and unbreached hymens. Be assured: These girls and I aren’t friends. I don’t have any friends. This doesn’t bother me much. Most of the time I can be on my own—during classes, in the halls, on weekends—but in the cafeteria, I’ve got to sit somewhere. These pastel girls always have open seats at their table, so, a few months ago, I sat down in one, and no one told me to leave. I sat down in one again the next day and watched them unwrap their PB&Js, lay out their carrot sticks, poke straws into their juice boxes, and never look at me, not even once. I trucked through my food, chewing and swallowing to the rhythm of their conversations, which they had in sort of a whisper. That’s when I started calling them the Whisperers, just to myself, though, because who else was there to talk to?

One day, after a week of sitting there, when I’d balled up the ends of my lunch and gotten up to go, one of the Whisperers said, “Bye, Evie.” I turned around, but I didn’t know which one of them had said
it; I only knew a few of their names—some Jennys and a Kier. “Bye,” I said to all of them. And even though we wouldn’t be friends, it was nice to exchange hellos and good-byes. It wasn’t like we had anything more than that to say to each other. But then, the next day when I sat down at their table, wouldn’t you know it, they were talking about Jonah Luks.

It turned out that a number of the Whisperers lived in Hokepe Woods, and they’d seen Jonah tromping out to the trees, his sled bobbing after him like some loyal beagle. Jonah is “older,” has broad shoulders, and has a bit of red in his hair; this is more than enough to build a crush on. The Whisperers, I soon discovered, talk about Jonah all the time. They murmur, squirm, and, if one of them says something even a little bit sexual, squeal.

“That guy?” I said that lunch a few months ago. Back then, I’d never talked to Jonah, but I’d seen him on my route. “I know him.” Suddenly they were blinking at me, and I felt like I’d turned on the lights in a roomful of mice. “Evie,” one of them breathed, and then they were all squeaking my name.

At first, talking to Jonah was a game and winning it meant that I came to lunch with a new Jonah story for the Whisperers. I don’t think it was their friendship I wanted so much as their attention. No, more than that, I wanted something to happen; I wanted something to happen
to me
. And to make something happen with some college-dropout laborer guy, rusty truck and muddy work boots included, was . . . well . . . better than nothing happening at all.