The Space Between Trees (13 page)

It’s not Hadley who approaches, though, but one of the other boys in the group. He’s holding three plastic cups by the rims in a way that causes his fingers to dip into their contents. He hands one to Tony and one to me before sitting on the coffee table facing us. Tony sets his cup on the table.

“None for me,” he says to his friend. “Remember, I’m your ride home tonight.” He glances at me as if to make sure that I’m witnessing his sacrifice.

I stare down into the beer in my cup, not wanting to drink something that has had a strange boy’s fingers in it. The boys are both watching me, though, so I take a sip. I’m careful not to make a face at the taste of the beer, which I know will be bitter. Turns out that it’s not that bitter, or maybe it is and I don’t care. I decide to down it all just to see what the boys will do. Tony says, “Whoa!” like
Hold on!
But the boy who brought me a drink makes an impressed noise and hands me his cup. I take a healthy gulp of that, too.

“You okay?” Tony asks, releasing my coat and patting the fabric back into place.

I nod. I don’t feel drunk. Am I supposed to? My cheeks feel a little warm is all, and the taste of beer sits in my mouth, dark and woodsy, like plants might start growing up out of my tongue.

“You always drink like that?” one of them asks.

But I don’t answer and we sit for a while in silence. I finish Tony’s beer and the boy who brought them disappears and reappears with more full cups. Tony tries to talk to me, but I pretend that the music is too loud for me to hear him. He uses this as an excuse to lean closer, but I just pull away and teeter like I might fall off the arm of the couch if he unbalances me anymore. I wonder where Hadley is, how long I’m supposed to wait for her, what I’m meant to be doing here with this boy. Finally, she passes by in the sweep of the crowd between two boys, her arms linked with theirs. They must have been drinking more from the silver flask, all three of them, because they lurch and stumble; one regains his balance only to be tripped up by the other two.

“Hadley!” I shout, but the room is loud with music and chatter and she doesn’t hear me. “Hadley!” I lean forward on the edge of my couch perch, stretching to reach her arm. Tony’s friend is watching me warily, like if I get any louder or weirder he might have to pretend he doesn’t know me. Tony is amused, though, and calls out, “Hey! Hadley!” an echo of my shout. She hears this and makes her way over to us, towing the boys after her.

“Oh.
Hi
,” she says, like we’ve happened to meet by accident. Her eyelids are heavy, but her eyes gazing out from beneath them gleam. She sways slightly and leans back against one of the boys who gazes down at us impassively from under the brim of his baseball cap. His hand is on her waist, and I’m startled to see his thumb rubbing up and down her side. It looks so intimate, so adult. I tell myself that I’m being silly. After all, it’s just a thumb.

“What’s going on?” Tony asks. And I nod in agreement with his question.
What
is
going
on? I want to ask Hadley. No, I don’t want to ask that. I just want to say,
Stay. Stay here with me, please.

“We’re gonna check out this . . .” The boy Hadley’s leaning on stops mid-sentence, takes a look around, and then finishes with “place.” His voice is slurred, and he sways under Hadley’s weight, as if he’s barely able to hold her upright. Is he drunk? Are they both drunk? I’ve overheard kids at school say to each other,
I was so wasted last night
. Is this what it’s like to be wasted? I’ve had two beers already. Is it only a matter of time before I’m wasted, too?

“Upstairs,” the boy says out of nowhere. Tony laughs, and the boy looks bewildered. “What?” he says in an empty voice. “Did I say it already? We’re going to go upstairs.” The other boy who was with them has sat on the sticky, rickety coffee table and is staring at the palms of his hands, opening and closing one hand, then the other.

I try to catch Hadley’s eye to make sure she’s okay with this upstairs plan. When she sees me watching her, she pulls a face, stretching her lips in different directions and crossing her eyes. I laugh and she laughs even louder, and the boys look at us slightly startled and maybe even put out, like we’re laughing at them.

Hadley tips forward, her arms outstretched as if to give me a hug. I catch her, and she clings to me, reaching up to push my hair away from my ear and whisper, “You could, too. With yours.” I wonder if she can smell the beer on my breath. I can smell it on hers.
Yours?
Does she mean Tony?

“Tell him you want to see the rest of the house.”

“What?” I say, though I can hear her just fine.

“Or outside. He’ll know you mean . . . what you mean.”

I look over at the boys. They’re having their own whispered conversation. I wonder if they’re saying the same thing.
Ask her if she wants to see upstairs. She’ll know what you mean
. Could I make out with Tony? I imagine caressing his pink cheeks. I imagine his lips puckering and kissing just as rapidly as they talked about communications. I fight the impulse to giggle.

“Catch you later,” the boy in the cap mumbles and clumsily pats at Hadley’s shoulder. The boy who was with them makes no move to rise from the coffee table and join them. The other boys answer with a rote, “Catch ya.”

Hadley withdraws from me with a sleepy smile. The boy’s hand fumbles back down to her waist, but it is she who leads him back into the crowd. Soon there are too many people for me to see them anymore, but I keep looking after them because I’m honestly not so sure they’ll be capable of climbing the stairs. Then I hear Tony say something about pills. I whip around and the boys all fall silent.

“Your friend gave Hadley pills?” I look at them sharply one after the next. I know what to do here. We had a school assembly about this. There are phone calls and speeches to be made, peer pressure to be withstood.

The boys look away from me and at each other, not-so-secret glances that translate into
Should we tell her?

The one sitting on the coffee table finally says, “They were her pills. They were
strong
.” He shakes his head, puts it in his hands, and groans.

The other boys laugh at him.

“Strength, son,” the boy who brought us the beer says to his drugged friend. “Fortitude! Gumption!”

“What were they?” I ask. The boy doesn’t answer, so I reach out and shake his arm, which makes his whole upper body sway.

He groans again and the boys laugh again. I don’t understand why they’re laughing. “Something in a prescription bottle,” he mumbles.

“She wouldn’t,” I say with conviction, even though inside I’m certain that Hadley
would
.

I look over at the stairs, hoping to see her descending. And wouldn’t you know it? Standing by the foot of the stairs is Jonah Luks. I blink but he’s still there, leaning against the wall, peering down into his cup of beer. Jonah Luks, actual and verifiable. Jonah Luks, college dropout. Jonah Luks, employee of Jefferson Wildlife Control. I’m so surprised that I nearly fall off the arm of the couch and into Tony’s lap, and wouldn’t he like that? I keep my balance, though. And I have to admit that it’s probably not the best part of me that abandons all concerns about her pill-popping friend, takes another gulp of beer, screws up her courage, and heads for Jonah Luks.

I can hear Tony calling out behind me, but I pretend I can’t. I wriggle through the crowd, disrupting conversations and splashing people’s beer onto the floor. I don’t care, though, because when I arrive in front of Jonah, he looks at me like I’m a wonder.

“What,” he says, “are you doing here?”

“Hey, Jonah!” I clink our plastic cups together. “Cheers.”

“Yeah, cheers.” He eyes my cup. “How much have you had?”

“I’m fine.” I scowl and pretend like I’m going to turn away mad, but to my delight, Jonah catches my sleeve to keep me from going.

“Sorry. Just looking out for my Sunday-morning buddy.”

Of course his apology is accepted. All is forgiven. We are 100 percent A-okay. And I’m just about to tell Jonah so when Tony appears at my side, stringy and beaming. I take another mouthful of beer and contemplate squirting it at him.

“Hey, Evie,” Tony says and puts a hand on my shoulder. I resist shrugging it off. “One second you were there, and the next—”

“I saw a friend.” I glance at Jonah, silently pleading that he not think that Tony and I are together. Unless that would make him jealous. I might endure the misunderstanding if I got a bit of Jonah-jealousy in return. I make introductions. “Jonah, Tony. Tony, Jonah.”

Tony’s smile wilts. “Actually, it’s Anthony.” He offers his hand. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t supposed to call him
Tony
.

“Hey, man,” Jonah says, and he’s very generous, Jonah is, to refer to Tony as a man.

I wait for Jonah to ask if we’re here together so that I can deny it. He doesn’t say anything more, though, so I offer, “We’re here in a group of people . . . friends . . . acquaintances, actually. Where is everyone, anyway?” I ask Tony, hoping he’ll take the hint and go find them.

He doesn’t move, though, just swivels his head on his skinny neck, looking around. “Your friend went upstairs with Chad. I don’t know where the rest of the guys are.”

His hand is still heavy on my shoulder. I can’t resist anymore. I shrug my shoulder, and Tony’s hand jumps. Jonah stares at it, but Tony keeps it there on my shoulder. I shrug again.

“How do you guys know each other?” Tony asks Jonah.

At this, Jonah smiles, and the fact that a question about me makes him smile stuns me for a second. Or maybe it’s just that the beer is finally having its effect on me. Either way, I grin a dopey grin and don’t realize that Jonah is about to reveal my age until he’s already a few words into his answer.

“Oh, well, Evie and I run into each other every—”

But before Jonah has a chance to expose me, before I have a chance to interrupt and try to save my skin, a voice sails over the music. My name.

Tony turns to me. “Was that your—”

I’m already yanking my way through the crowd to the stairs and up to the second floor of the house. People look up for a second at the sound of the scream, but when there isn’t a second one, they return to their flirting and bragging and guzzling. Not me. I make it to the stairs, which are clogged with people. I squeeze under a boy’s arm and through a clutch of girls. It feels like I’m moving slow, too slow, and there seems to be an impossibly long stretch of time between the beats of the music. I emerge upstairs in a hallway. I spot a circle of people at its end. I barrel down the hall and break through the people to find Hadley holding on to a doorknob, leaning her full weight backward to keep the door closed.

“Hadley,” I say. “Hadley?”

Slowly, as if she’s afraid of what she’s going to see, she opens her eyes and looks around. When she sees that it’s me, she lets go of the door and collapses onto my shoulder, burrowing her face into my neck. I wonder again what she took and how long it’ll take to wear off. “You heard me,” she says. “You came.”

One of the onlookers murmurs, “Maybe we should—”

The door behind Hadley opens and a guy emerges, the one who wanted to show her upstairs. He has a hand pressed to his left cheek and eye. The hallway is dark and his cap still pulled low, so I can’t see the expression on his face, but I’m guessing that he might just possibly be angry. I hold Hadley closer and shuffle a step back toward the edge of the circle of onlookers, dragging her with me.

“Hey,” The boy tries to stagger forward but thinks better of it and grabs onto the doorjamb to steady himself. “What the hell?”

Hadley’s sobs quicken and she leans heavier on my shoulder. I tighten my arms around her in case the boy tries to run forward and tear Hadley from me, throwing her to the ground, kicking her—once, twice—in the stomach. When he’s done with that, he might decide to punch me in the face. I’ve never been punched in the face before. I try to imagine what it would feel like, the dull thump of knuckle against delicate eyes, nose, teeth, cheek. I feel my bones splinter, my teeth uproot from my gums; I can see the blood pool dark in my eyes. I can’t breathe, can’t think; the music won’t stop, either. But then Hadley sobs again, a seal of spit and breath against my neck, and I think of her words:
You heard me. You came.
And I know, suddenly and certainly, that it’s my job to protect her. I take back my step backward. Instead I take a step forward, toward the guy.

“Leave her alone,” I say, and my voice wobbles in a way I wish it wouldn’t. “You just leave,” and then I remember his name, “
Chad
.”

“She’s . . . she’s fucking . . . crazy,” Chad splutters and points at Hadley. His arm isn’t steady, so his accusing finger swings from Hadley to me.

“Maybe you’re the crazy one. You obviously did
something
to her.” “I didn’t.” He presses his forehead, for a second, against the doorjamb as if to collect his thoughts or temper. “I didn’t do anything to—”

“Then why’s she crying? And holding the door so you can’t get out?” My voice is stronger, and I’m proud of it. In fact, it’s nearly a miracle of nature that I can get any sound out at all, because still I can barely breathe. I hold Hadley even tighter to me, and she is like a shield; her sobs, my courage. “So she didn’t want to have sex with you? So you wouldn’t let her go?”

“Me? You want to see what she—?” He takes a step toward us, and I lose my nerve, gasping and dragging Hadley back until I thump up against someone at the edge of the circle. It’s Tony, and he’s not smiling at me anymore. In fact, he doesn’t even look at me. He sidesteps Hadley and me and goes over to Chad. He speaks in a low tone, but the noise of the party has withered away, and I can hear what he says.

“They’re in high school. Some guy downstairs knows her from her—get this—paper route.”

“What?” Chad says, shaking his head.

“Seriously. Fifteen or sixteen or some shit.”

“Sixteen?” Chad says, and his voice isn’t angry but slurrily incredulous. “Shit.”

I look from Chad to Tony and see an opening. I may not be able to fight my way out of here, but I can talk my way out. “Yeah. Sixteen,” I say. “Which means statutory rape, and probably more. My dad’s a lawyer. Don’t think he won’t come after you. He’ll call your school and your parents and . . . the police!” I glance at the crowd around us, everyone staring, all these college kids. “Everyone saw her crying, holding the door to keep you in. You’ll get kicked out of school. Jail! You’ll go to jail!”