The Space Between Trees (12 page)

The boys have already piled into their car, exhaust putting out its back. The car rolls forward a few feet and then stops. We hear a shout and see the wave of a hand out one of the windows. At us? Hadley takes a step toward it, pulling me after her. Just as she does, the car shoots forward, out of the parking lot, and down the road.

“Wait!” Hadley shouts after them. “My friend was going to give it to you!”

“Hadley!” I try to cover her mouth, but my hand is still tangled in hers. She yanks my arm, breaks free of me, and runs around the parking lot in circles.

“Come back,” she cries to the boys. “My friend wants you!”

I chase after, trying to catch and shush her. It’s a ghost that’s taken us up; I can feel it in my chest, a high happiness that wavers, arms pinwheeling wide, on the edge of some other scarier feeling. We hop and poke at each other’s sides. Hadley yodels and, when I try to cover her mouth again, blows a wet raspberry into my palm.

“Gee, thanks.” I wipe my hand on my jeans.

“Aw, Evie.” She takes ahold of my head and pulls it close to hers, knocking our temples together. She holds my head too hard, and when I squirm, she won’t let it free. “Let’s run away together.”

Then she’s pulling me across the parking lot and down the muddy slope of the drainage ditch, then back up the other side of it to the edge of the highway. She’s singing something high and tuneless, her hair flying out behind her and into my face. I feel a syrupy strand of hair flick up beneath my eye. She’s got me by the arm still, and when we get to the shoulder of the road, she forms my hand into a fist, thumb up.

“Hadley,” I say, but she’s jumping around me, wild, with her hair over her face so that I can’t read her expression. Then she’s stretching my arm out toward the road. “Hadley!” I say again, and make a swipe at her with my free arm. “Come on.” I’m half laughing now, mostly because I don’t know what else to do. She’s pulling my arm so hard that I have to put all my weight on my heels if I don’t want to tumble out into the road. “Come on. Let’s get your car.”

“No, Vie. We’re out of here. Someone will pick us up. We’ll hitchhike to Chicago. New York!”

“Hadley. We can’t. It’s not . . . it’s dangerous.”

“
We’re
dangerous!”

She lets go of my hand, and I drop the hitchhiking thumb. I present my palms to her, flat. “We’re not,” I say.

She reaches for my face, and I flinch, but it’s only my necklace that she wants. She closes her hand around the globe. I can feel her fist, warm and hard at my throat. I swallow against it, frightened.

“I’ll protect you,” she says in a voice so fierce that I have the impulse to laugh at her, except then suddenly I don’t feel like laughing at all. She tightens her grip on the necklace and the chain digs into the back of my neck. “You can count on it. I’d fight him. I’d—”

“Hey,” I say to her, coaxing. “Hey.”

She lets go of the necklace. “Let’s just go, okay, Vie? We’re gonna go.”

“Where?”

She spins around. The intersection is dead, no cars coming or going, only the traffic light hanging from its wire, blinking red.

She sags against me. “Aw, hell,” she mutters.

But then from around the corner, a car appears, as if she’s called for it. And even though Hadley’s no longer signaling for a ride, the car slows as it passes us, pulling to the shoulder of the road a few yards from where we’re standing. Hadley’s head jerks up like she’s scented something on the wind. She stares at the car. It’s dark blue and compact and nondescript. It looks more like a mom’s car than a killer’s car. Still, I’m not getting in it. Hadley, though. She’s already taken a step for it.

“We can’t just—” I say.

A head pops out of the passenger window, followed by shoulders and arms: one of the boys from the diner. He perches on the frame of
the open window, holding the top of the car to steady himself. He’s what my mother would call lanky and what I would call stringy, and his jacket is a size or two too big, making him look even stringier. His cheeks are ruddy, like he’s just drunk something warm.

“Hey, ladies,” he calls, and there’s some noise from inside the car in response, the word
ladies
sung in a falsetto. The boy ducks back into the car for a second and then pops out again. “I apologize. My friends are losers.”

At this, the car jerks forward a foot, and the boy curses and nearly falls out onto the ground. He keeps his grip on the roof, though, and swings back into the car as soon as it stops. I look over at Hadley, who’s watching the car with a little grin on her face as if this is all for our amusement. In a moment, the boy is back out, though just his head this time.

“We’re going to a party. Near campus.”

“They’re in
college
,” I whisper.

Hadley ignores me. She tosses a shoulder and tilts her head at the boy as if to say,
So? What does your party have to do with me?

“You ladies”—the car jerks forward again at
ladies
—“you wanna come?”

There’s no question that Hadley will want to go, so I wait for her to answer him. But she doesn’t answer him; instead she turns and watches me steadily as if waiting for something. I nod at her to mean that I agree, we can go, but she just keeps looking at me.

“What?” I whisper.

“
You
tell him,” she says, tipping her head toward the guy in the car.

“Me? Tell him what?”

“That we’ll go.”

“Oh. Well. It really doesn’t matter who tells him, does it?”

“Scared, little Vie?”

“No. It’s just . . . he’s mostly talking to you.”

“Go on. Don’t be a baby.” Her voice isn’t mean as she says this last bit; rather, it’s indulgent, almost as if I
am
a baby.

“I don’t—”

“It’s not a big deal. Just say
yeah
or
okay
. Just one word.”

There are other passengers in the car, their silhouettes moving behind the windows. The boy turns and says something to one of them, then sticks his head back out the window and a stringy arm along with it. He looks at us expectantly. I feel as I haven’t used my voice in years, and if I open my mouth, only a sighing wheeze of ancient dust will swirl out.

“You coming?” he asks.

Hadley sneaks a hand under my coat and pinches my side.

“Yes,” I whisper too soft for him, or even Hadley, to hear. But before Hadley can pinch me again, I gather my breath and say it louder—too loud really—a shout that travels past the boy and the car and all the way down the road.

W
E FOLLOW THE BOYS IN
H
ADLEY’S CAR
. They drive too fast and stop at stoplights too short. I ask Hadley why, after inviting us, they’re trying their best to lose us, and she explains that they’re not; they’re just showing off. At each light, Hadley reaches over and grabs my chin, coating a section of my face, and then her own, with a different sort of makeup—blush, mascara, lipstick, even eyeliner. When she’s done, I flip down the sun-visor mirror and peer at the strip of my reflection it allows. My lips look sticky, my cheeks hollow, my eyes bright mirrors set in frames of sooty black makeup.

“No one will think I really look like this,” I say. “They’ll think I’m wearing makeup.”

“You
are
wearing makeup.”

I adjust the mirror, appraising my face from different angles. We’re out of Chippewa now, and the streetlights are less frequent, some burnt out. My face glides in and out of shadow. “You don’t think it makes me look funny?”

“Nope.” Hadley considers for a moment. “It makes you look ready.” Ahead of us, the boys pull to the curb, adding their car to a long chain of parked cars that winds down the street. Hadley pulls in behind them.

“Ready for what?”

I can see the party house up ahead, all lit up, dark shapes moving together on the front lawn. I can’t hear the music yet, but when I rest my fingertips on the dashboard, it hums with a shallow vibration.

“Ready for something to happen,” Hadley says, getting out of the car and walking toward the boys. I hurry after her, conscious of the fact that it must look like I’m hurrying after her.

A whole group of boys have climbed out of the car, too many to safely fit in it. Some of them must have been squeezed onto the floor or piled in each other’s laps. I imagine them all in there, knees pressed to their chests, one boy’s breath on the back of another’s neck while they waited, car idling on the shoulder of the highway, for our answer.

We fall in with them—no introductions more elaborate than a few heys—and all trudge toward the house. Hadley slips into the center of the group of boys, and it is as if she has dived into an icycold lake, leaving me on the shore, watching the echo of her ripples. I fall back a step. I can see only glimpses of Hadley now, past upturned jacket collars, baseball-cap brims, and overlapping shoulders. A hand shoots up from within the group, offering a flask that shines silver as a surfacing fish. I’ve never seen a flask before—only in movies. Then there’s Hadley’s familiar hand, stretching up, reaching over, and taking the flask. The shoulders part for a moment, and I see her tip her head back and drink deep. I want nothing more than to call Hadley back to me; of course, I can’t, not without looking totally stupid, anyway.

“Hey,” says a voice next to me, and it’s the stringy boy who’d invited us along. He matches his pace with my reluctant one. “I’m Anthony don’t call me Tony,” he says in one breath, and then smiles like he expects me to smile back.

“Evie,” I say. “And that’s already a nickname.”

“For what?”

“Eve,” I say, bracing myself for some stupid college-boy joke about an apple and a snake.

“Aren’t nicknames supposed to be shorter?”

I scuff my shoe on the ground. “Go figure.”

He smiles more, and I wish he’d stop because I haven’t said anything funny. It’s lonely when someone thinks you’ve made a joke and you really haven’t. Besides, I’m not sure I want this stringy college boy smiling at me. I’m not sure what it means when a college boy smiles at you—when any boy smiles at you. Sure, there’s Jonah, but he’s different. He’s Jonah. The only thing he’ll probably ever do to me is smile. And anyway, Jonah’s smiles don’t come as easy as this. I glance at the group of boys ahead of us and wonder if they put Tony up to talking to me so that they could vie for Hadley’s attention or if it was something he actually wanted to do.

“Do you go to State?” he asks.

“No,” I say, but that’s all. I’m not about to tell him I go to Chippewa High School. Let him figure it out.

“Do you, like, work, then?”

“What else?”

“Well, um, where?”

“For a newspaper. In sales,” I add before he can ask anything else more specific. I look down at my feet because now I
am
making a joke, but I don’t want him to know it.

“That’s cool. I’m thinking about majoring in communications, so that’s sort of related.”

He babbles on about communications classes as we come up to the house. I decide that despite the fact he’s in college, Tony’s not
intimidating—not at all. He’s too eager to be intimidating. In fact, he’s a little annoying.

The party must be well attended because people have spilled out of the house and onto the lawn, many of them without coats despite the cold.
These are college kids
, I think with a little thrill.
I’m at a college party.
They’re standing in clumps on the dead grass, drinking beer out of plastic cups, leaning on each other for warmth. And, yes, I know high school kids do this, too—hang out, drink beer, stand in the cold—but I’ve never been invited to those parties. Or any parties.

I follow Tony, which is how I can’t help but think of him now, across the lawn and onto the concrete slab of porch. Hadley is up ahead of us with the boys, the silver flask changing from hand to hand. They don’t knock on the front door but walk right in, and we follow them into a living room that is nearly bare of furniture and nearly full of bodies. Strange arms, legs, breasts, shoulders, and elbow push against me. There’s the damp, bready smell of beer and a richer smell that I can’t identify but reminds me of when the neighbors burn their raked-up leaves in the fall. A thumping, electronic music fills up the entire room, so loud that it becomes a crackling white noise blanketing every other sound.

“Cool that you came,” Tony leans over and shouts, pressing his arm against mine. I’d move away if I weren’t scared of losing him in the crowd.

“Yeah, well, we weren’t . . .” I look around to include Hadley in my “we,” but she’s somehow squeezed through the entire room full of people and is disappearing into the back of the house with the rest of the boys. “Oh!” I say, despite myself. “Your friends!” I gesture after them.

“Looking for the keg,” Tony says, then adds, “I’m designated,” as if he’s very proud of the fact.

“Designated for what?” I ask for no other reason than to be difficult. “Team mascot? Human sacrifice?”

Confusion crosses his face. “Designated
driver
,” he says.

“Yeah, I know. I was just—”

“Hey!” He cranes over the crowd. “Spot!”

He pulls us through a mob of partygoers and over to a sagging couch upholstered in a mystifying print of flowers and old stains. He sinks down and seems to expect that I’ll do the same. I perch on the arm instead, and he looks up at me, still smiling. He’s sort of goofy—too goofy to be in college. But then that’s wrong isn’t it? Goofiness, awkwardness, loneliness . . . I’d been assuming that these things ended with high school. I guess they don’t. I guess they can stretch on for years.

“I should find my friend,” I say, edging off of the couch.

Tony grabs the hem of my coat. “She’ll be back in a second.” I look down at his handful of fabric and am faced with three equally ludicrous decisions: yank harder to pull my coat loose, try to pry open his hand with my own, or sit back down like he wants me to. It’s silly, Tony holding on to my coat to keep me from going. I come up with a fourth option: slip out of my coat, leaving him holding an empty garment. But before I have to decide which of my options to take, Tony says, “See?” and points at someone behind me.