The Space Between Trees (19 page)

“I don’t know.” I shrug my shoulders, hoping to shake off her hands, but she just squeezes harder like it’s some game we’re playing. “She’s sort of like that.”

“Like what?”

“She’s been through a lot,” I say, this last sentence an exact repeat of what I’ve heard teachers, guidance counselors, and various other adults say about Hadley in the past month.

“Oh, well!” Mom says, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “Forgiven and forgotten. Girls your age—”

The phone rings, and she stops midsentence with a disgruntled little
huh
, like the phone has purposely interrupted her. It rings again. She doesn’t move to answer it, so I duck out from under her hands to pick it up.

“Did you talk to him?” Hadley asks without even returning my hello.

“Yeah. Hold on.”

“What did he—?”

I hold the phone away from my ear and glance at Mom. She picks up my glass of juice and walks into the living room, sipping it, without even asking if she can. I walk in the opposite direction, down the hall into my bedroom, and close the door.

“Where’d you go?”

“I said to hold on.” I hear the annoyance in my voice along with a little thrill that I would speak to Hadley in a rude tone. How do I even dare? I wait for a reaction, but she doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe she notices but doesn’t care.

“You were supposed to come over.”

“I had to go home.”

“So, he took you there?” She barely waits for the ends of my sentences. I feel like she’s dancing around me in a circle and I’m spinning to keep her in my sights.

“No.” It was a while ago that I decided not to tell Hadley the truth, but I realize this only as I speak. I decided back in Hokepe, back at the bushes when I watched the line of ants. There’s relief in this lie that I can’t explain. The anger in Hadley’s voice, the questions and accusations that are sure to come, seem tinny and small in the face of my decision to keep this knowledge from her. I picture the mud between the trees, the mud Zabet lay upon. God made people out of mud, didn’t he? I feel wise.

“What?
No?
Why not?”

“He wouldn’t take me.”

Hadley’s silent. I sit down on my bed and pinch the bedspread fabric, rubbing it between my fingers until it feels rough instead of soft.

“Sorry,” I add, though I hardly feel sorry at all. It’s a relief not to feel sorry. Usually I feel sorry all the time—sorry for myself, for others, for Zabet.

“Did you say it how we practiced it?” Hadley asks.

“Yeah.”

“You did?” she presses.

“Word for word.”

“I don’t understand, then. Doesn’t he care?”

“Care?”

“About us.”

“I don’t—”

“He’s a jerk.”

“I don’t—”

“He’s obviously a jerk—a cold-hearted, asshole jerk.”

“He said that it would look bad. He said, ‘It’s a bad time to take girls into the woods.’”

“That’s creepy.”

“It’s practical.”

“It’s creepy. I’m putting him on the list.”

“He’s already on it.”

Hadley’s silent again. I say her name. For a second, I think that she’s hung up and that any second the dial tone will buzz through.

Then she says, “You’ll try again next Sunday. We’ll practice some more, and you’ll try again.” Her voice wobbles at the end of this, and I’m shaken by the idea that she’s crying, so much so that I almost fess up and tell her the truth—that Jonah did show me the place, that I could take her there right now, if she wanted, which she certainly would. I keep quiet, though. I think of the muddy spot on the ground between the two trees and I feel scared, not of the spot itself but of the idea of Hadley being there. Not that she could
do
anything, I repeat in my head. It’s just dirt, just mud.

“Next week,” I say, “I’ll try again.”

“You will?”

“If you want me to.”

She sighs, and this time she does hang up.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, before first period, Hadley doesn’t meet me in the stomping area like she normally does. I wait there until past the tardy bell, thinking that maybe her morning smoke break has run long and she’ll show up any second. No Hadley, though. During the next passing break, I wait at her locker, but she doesn’t show up there, either. I’m thinking that maybe she’s at home, sick, but on a whim, during third, I ask for the bathroom pass and walk over to the math hall and past her calculus class. I can see Hadley in there, her head bent over her math book, her hair spilling all over the place. I stand in the doorway, willing her to lift her head and look over, until Mrs. Marshall catches sight of me and makes a shooing motion. Most of the rest of the class turn in their seats to see who Marshall’s waving at, but Hadley doesn’t even look up.

I’ve got a feeling in my gut that’s both giddy and terrible. Is Hadley mad at me? At lunchtime, when I can’t find her in the cafeteria, the feeling grows. I save a spot for her, but when lunch is half over and she still hasn’t come in, I move over to the Whisperers’ table, ready to be snubbed some more. But when I stand at the head of the table for a second, the Whisperers shift to make room for me, just like
I’ve been eating there every lunch for the past two months. None of them ask me about Hadley; in fact, they don’t ask me anything at all, not that I expect them to after I’ve ignored them for weeks.

But then Kier says shyly, “I like your shirt,” and I realize that, instead of being mad at me, they’re all assuming I’ve been mad at them, when the truth is I haven’t thought about them at all.

“Thanks,” I say, and it dawns on me—terribly, horribly—that maybe Hadley hasn’t given a thought to me either.

Out past the bus circle, on the other side of the street, is one of Chippewa’s only remaining crop fields. If you can make it by the jaded hall monitors and across the wide arms of the bus circle, across the pressed blacktop of the teachers’ parking lot and then across the road, you’ve traversed an invisible border. You’ve stepped from one country to the next. You’re off school grounds—the field grants you asylum, international waters, an embassy. And you’re free—free, chiefly, to smoke. Every once in a while, the vice principal will walk out to the field and herd kids back to class, but technically he can’t write them up for smoking if they’re not doing it on school grounds.

Everyone knows which kids smoke. “Next?” they say to each other during class, which is short for
Next break, wanna go smoke?
They keep packs of cigarettes in their front pockets, perfect rectangles, or line up loose cigarettes in the slots of their bags that are meant for pencils. They groan during the last half of class and shift in their seats in a way that’s more feisty than it is bored. They come back from break in a tribe, smelling of cold air and filthy habit, ducking into their desks just before last bell sounds. It’s not the smoking so much as
what the smoking implies: carelessness, hedonism, willingness to say
fuck my silky lungs
, and the promise of worse behaviors to come.

I’ve never been to the field to smoke. Before that party I’d never drunk alcohol; I’ve never kissed a boy. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t count as a teenager at all, that I’m much younger or maybe much older than I should be.

So when I stand at the school door, peering through its scored glass window and pressing on its bar, the bus circle seems like a long distance to run without getting caught. I can see them out there, slouching figures in the winter wheat. They stand a few feet away from the stalks, bold but not too bold. I can’t tell for sure if Hadley is with them. From where I am, the smokers are just muddy shadows that every few seconds shift, rustling the spears of wheat.

The bus circle is vacant, bare except for a puddle of shiny oil where one of the buses has dripped. I suck in a breath and press the bar to open the door. The bar makes a clicking sound like something being fastened into place. I push the door open and step out of the building, and then I’m walking across the bus circle.

The smell of the school is gone, its damp, rubbery carpets and pencil shavings mixed with whatever’s moldering in the bottoms of our lockers. The wind hits my face, and I can feel the tiny hairs along my cheek stand up and wave. I think of days when I’ve left school early with a note for a doctor’s appointment. Walking across the parking lot to Mom’s car, with that buoyant feeling of stolen time, is like being awake in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. It’s like everyone else has been frozen into slowness and stupidity and inattention, except for you; you are still quick, alive. You can watch them breathe. You can touch their eyelids, the fringe of their eyelashes, without waking them.

I try to walk at a brisk pace, like I have a purpose, some business to attend to in the wheat. I wait to hear a shout from one of the hall monitors or the vice principal. I don’t dare look over my shoulder because I’m sure that I’ll see one of them running after me, write-up slips in hand. I can glimpse pieces of the smokers now dissected by the stalks, the sleeve of a shirt, a section of a jaw, shoulders hunched over to light a cigarette in the wind. Then I’m stepping across the road and into the wheat.

The thing about standing in a wheat field is that there are rows, so you can’t really gather in a group. It’s like trying to hold a party in the library stacks; all your guests are forced to arrange themselves in lines. So the first person I meet up with is at the end of one of these lines, a senior boy with thick slabs of both jaw and hair. He’s using the end of his cigarette to light the cigarette of a sharp-faced girl with shadowy arrows of eye makeup. I know this girl, though not her name; she’s the girl who got last year’s photography teacher fired after he asked her to sit on his lap. I stare at them, their faces inches apart, bridged by the slender white cigarettes. I wonder if this act means something more, like a kiss, or if it’s just no big deal, the kind of thing you’d do anywhere with anyone.

Cigarette lit, the two of them turn and see me.

“Hey,” the boy grunts. He flicks his cigarette to the ground, barely smoked, and snuffs it with his shoe.

“Derek,” the girl complains, “that’s still good.”

“
That’s still good,
” the boy mimics her, taking hold of a stalk of wheat and bending it to shake near her face.

“Or at least it was,” she says, pushing the stalk back at him.

The ground near the base of the wheat is scattered with cigarette butts, swollen and curled like pupae that have come up from the ground with the rain.

“Is, um . . . ,” I mutter. They both look at me. Derek stops shaking the wheat. “Do you know Hadley? Smith? Is she here? Like, around here?”

“Who?” The boy hunches his shoulder and cups a hand to his ear, drawing the word out.

“She said
Hadley
,” the girl tells him.

“Who?” he asks again in the same clownish voice.

The girl rolls her eyes. “You know. Hadley.” She flicks her eyes to the left, deeper into the wheat. “Hadley,” she repeats.

“Oh,
her
.” He straightens up and smiles a smile like he could chomp up half the wheat field with those teeth. “She went down on me last week.”

“She did not,” the girl says.

“Naw. But she could have.”

I look down at my feet, but then I make myself look up again because I don’t want them to know that I’m embarrassed, uncool.

“Stop,” the girl orders, giving him a look that indicates me. “You’re going to scare her away.”

And I surprise myself by feeling angry that she would think I was so easily scared, which, I realize, is a Hadley sort of reaction to things. In fact, I hear Hadley’s voice in my head:
No one can scare me.

“Is Hadley here?”

The girl shrugs a saucy little shrug, one shoulder rising up before the other. She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “That way, maybe.”

Because of the narrow rows of wheat, I have to squeeze past them to walk the way that she’s pointed. I press my back into the wheat so that I won’t brush up against them. As I pass the boy, he giggles, a strangely girly sound tinkling its way out of his ten-pound mouth.

“He’s an idiot,” the girl says. Up close I can see how elaborate her eye makeup is, dovetailing lines of black and gray.