The Space Between Trees (16 page)

“We’re going,” she repeats. She turns around in her seat, pulling the nose of the car back from where it’d almost hit the guy, circling around the place where his body fell, even though she could have just as easily driven through it. She pulls out onto the road. I keep
expecting to hear sirens, and I even glance over my shoulder a few times to look for the lights.

A few minutes later she finally asks, “He okay?” in a tone of voice like she’s being forced to ask it.

“You didn’t see? He got up okay. He ran.”

“I couldn’t look.” She’s silent for a moment, then adds, “He shouldn’t have been watching us,” Hadley says, turning in her seat and looking right at me. “Strange guy. Two young girls. He shouldn’t be following us into the parking lot, staring at us. Someone might think . . .” She trails off, pinching her lower lip so that it folds in half against itself.

The guy’s words play through my head:
I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
“He was just some random guy. He probably wasn’t even trying to follow us.”

“I’m not apologizing,” Hadley says, and, Christ, it isn’t like I ever expected her to.

We’re almost all the way back to my house before I relax. I’d forgotten that I was sick, but as we pull into my neighborhood, the itch grabs around my throat again. Hadley pulls to the curb, but when I try to open the door, she clicks the lock shut. I unlock it, only to have her lock it again as soon as I lift my hand.

“Cute,” I say, but she’s not smiling. “Hey, let me out.”

She won’t look at me. She’s staring straight ahead, her hands tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel, the same rhythm she tapped on my door this afternoon, not whimsical but methodical, a clock ticking down. Then her hands stop.

“We have to find him,” she says.

“Who? The guy you just ran over?”

“No,” she says. “Him. You know: him.”

“Um, the cops are—”

She looks at me with eyes that I can’t really describe. Maybe I’d call them sad, or maybe angry. From the right angle, in the right light, I might even call them frightened. “We’re Zabet’s friends, aren’t we?”

I bite down on my lip.

“Aren’t we?”

I nod. I have to.

“We can find him, Evie, you and me.”

She unlocks the door.

H
ADLEY DICTATES THE LIST
, and I write the list. She can’t write, she says, because no one can read it when she does. This isn’t true. I’ve seen her handwriting—clean, thick block letters constructed like houses. I tell her that we should take turns.

“But I can’t move when I write,” she says. “I need to
move
. That’s what’s wrong with school, you know. Who can even think when you’re sitting still?”

This is my first time inside Hadley’s house, though I’ve set a rolled paper on her porch for years and have coveted it as I covet all of the houses in Hokepe Woods. The Smiths’ house is a dark brick box, two stories, its porch held up with wide beams and no welcome mat set in front of the door. Its outside is lush and posh and proud. It has the look of a nurse with dry, capable hands or an old-maid aunt with her hair pulled back tight in a bun, which is why I nearly gasp when Hadley yanks me through the doorway.

A mess. Wrinkled clothes are heaped over the banister and tucked in the crevice of each stair; child-sized, pilled socks dangle from the rail like ivy; I’m not sure if this laundry is unironed or unwashed altogether, though the rank, close smell of the room hints at the latter.
The dining room has no furniture, only a tower of moving boxes in one corner and a torn-up patch of shag carpeting at the other. The kitchen counters are covered with instant-dinner boxes, microwave trays crusted with old food, and glasses striped with sticky rings of soda or juice. In the sink, a stack of dirty dishes teeters within an inch of the faucet’s dripping mouth, and a jumbo pack of paper plates has been left in the drying rack, cellophane torn open, ready for use. The room smells of spoiled milk.

Hadley makes no apologies for the state of her house. She doesn’t seem embarrassed at all, and I think of how ashamed I’d been to bring anyone home; at least Mom and I keep our house clean. Hadley tromps ahead of me, through the kitchen and into the living room, where three towheaded boys sit on a wraparound couch, hypnotized by a video game that makes the room whistle with laser-gun fire.

“You have brothers,” I say.

One of the boys, hearing my voice, whips around, a video-game controller in the shape of gun gripped between his hands. He fixes me in his sights, and then turns back to the TV screen, as if I am only some figure from his game that must be identified, eliminated, and promptly forgotten. Hadley fishes a few pens out from a nest of newspapers and bills on an ottoman.

“Don’t you dare bug us,” she commands. Though her warning seems unnecessary because none of the boys turn, nor do their guns slow in firing.

Upstairs, Hadley’s bedroom is from another age, one of Hadley’s own earlier ages. It’s startlingly girlish with a pink petal design on
the bedspread and a vanity with a mirrored tray like the women in old movies have. “I mean to redecorate,” she says when I first step in, waving a hand to include all of it.

Hadley doesn’t have any paper handy, so we use the blank pages in the back of my science notebook, past the careful grids of my labs, which makes the list feel empirical—our own controlled experiment. Despite what Hadley said about needing to move in order to think, she doesn’t. She lazes on the bed, her feet planted on the wall above the headboard. I sit on the floor against her bed, and her voice floats down to me.

“Justin Paluski,” she says.

“Who’s he? A senior?”

“Junior. He totally beat up this kid for getting his sleeve wet with an umbrella.”

I look back at her. All I can see from where I’m sitting are her sneakers and the chewed bottoms of her jeans. “For getting his sleeve wet?”

“Rule one: People are fucked up, Vie.” She steps her feet against the wall in place, like she could walk up it. “Evidently.”

“
P-A
-luski or
P-O
-luski?”

“
A,
I think. Whatever. I’ll know who it is.”

I have the yearbook out next to me. I flip to last year’s sophomores, the
P
s. Justin Paluski smiles out at me. I recognize him as one of the boys who sits at the lunch table next to the Whisperers’ table. Once when I was struggling with the top of my milk carton, he reached over my shoulder, peeled it open, and handed it to me without a word.

“Thanks. I can never do it right,” I said to his back.

“No sweat.” His head was shaved for swim team, and there was a little spot on the back, about the size of a fingernail, where the hair didn’t grow. The skin of his scalp was a soft white-blue, like a tooth or a candle.

I’d thought about the moment for weeks after that, always with a liquid feel in my stomach and the taste of sweet milk on the back of my tongue. I’d wanted him to open my milk carton again, but I was also simultaneously afraid to order milk in case it would seem like I was trying to get him to do it again. So I bought pop after that instead, snapping the can open with a hiss that I was sure sounded over to the next table.

Back in Hadley’s bedroom, I count. Justin Paluski’s name is the eleventh on our list. The list of suspects was my idea for how to find Zabet’s killer. Hadley’s idea was for us to hang out alone in Hokepe Woods at night as bait. She even wanted us to dress like Zabet. I suggested the list as a saner alternative. I lied and said that I’d seen them make a list like this on a police show.

Hadley said that the police are no help. She should know. They came over to her house the week after Zabet’s death to question her.

“Mostly they talked to my parents,” she told me. “Like
they
know anything. Like
they
even exist in the, like, world.” Even though she was out of sight on the bed above me, I knew she was rolling her eyes. “They asked me about two questions: Did Zabet have any enemies? Did Zabet have a secret boyfriend? It was some lady officer who asked me, like they thought I’d open up to her guidance counselor bullshit. They kept apologizing for bothering me. They’re proba bly talking to the real killer right now without even knowing it, apologizing for bothering him.”

The springs squeal up above me as Hadley lets her feet fall down from the wall.

“Write
Wendy Messinger
,” she says. Wendy is one of Hadley’s old friends—the tough girls. “She and Zabet didn’t get along,” Hadley adds. “And, God, you could probably write down the whole entire soccer team. They’re always getting into fights and getting high on stuff and following girls around, flipping up the backs of their skirts.”

This is news to me, and I feel both relieved and deficient that my skirt has never been flipped up, not that I even wear skirts.

“Should I write down . . . ?” I pause. “I’m not going to write them all down.”

“You said anyone, no matter how unlikely.”

“Okay.” I write down
The Soccer Team
. “Should I specify varsity or JV?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Hadley says, swinging around so that she is leaning over my shoulder. She reads for a minute, her hair tickling my cheek. She’s so close that I can see a crumb of dried milk in the corner of her mouth. I have the strange impulse to lick it away. After a moment of thought, she says, “And this is just the high school. There’s still the entire town, the college.”

“Yeah, like that creep at the party, that Chad,” I say carefully. We haven’t talked about the party since it happened a week and a half ago. I don’t know what Hadley’s reaction might be. Turns out, it’s not much of one.

“Who?” she says blankly, and I can’t tell if she’s just pretending not to know who I mean.

“That guy at the party. The one who, you know, scared you.” Hadley makes a face. “Nobody scares me. I don’t even remember that night.”

“But he was really—”

“Add him. Definitely,” she says in a neutral voice. “And that one who you messed around with.”

“Tony? I didn’t mess arou—”

“I don’t care, Evie. Put him down anyway.”

I write down
Tony
, but then ask, “Do you think Zabet would’ve met them, though? I mean, we just met them that night.”

Hadley sighs exasperatedly right in my ear and swings back to her original position on the bed. “Why not? Zabet and I went to parties like that all the time. What? You think those guys only invited us because you were there? You think you’re so damn alluring?”

“
No
,” I say, stung.

We sit in a tense silence. I press my pen into the paper; I want it to leave a dark blot of ink, but it only leaves a tiny dot.

“When you think about it, we could put down almost anyone,” Hadley finally says.

“No. Not anyone,” I say. “That’s why we’re making a list.”

“But when you think of who maybe could have done it, it’s anyone.”

“It’s not anyone,” I say again.

“Who
isn’t
it then?”

“There are some people who we can reasonably assume aren’t capable of murder.” I’m pleased with the big words marching out of my mouth.

Hadley rises up on her knees, her hands on her hips. “Like who? Who’s not capable?”

“Kier Dylan.” I name one of the meekest Whisperers.

To my surprise, Hadley knows who she is. “Maybe she could. Maybe we just don’t know the real her.”

“Right. She has wheat allergies and sociopathic tendencies.”

Hadley snorts. “Who the hell is allergic to
wheat?
”

“I don’t know. People.”

“People.” Hadley snorts. “It could be anyone.”

“Even me?” I ask.

“Even me,” Hadley says, grabbing the list from my hand, her eyes running down it once more.