The Space Between Trees (20 page)

He plucks the cigarette from her mouth and hands it to me. “Here. A gift of apology,” he says.

I take it, mostly so that I don’t offend him, and walk past them farther out into the wheat.

“Light me another,” I hear the girl say behind me.

The wheat grows high and thick on either side of me, and I don’t know how to look for anyone out here. Sometimes I can hear conversations in the rows, but I don’t hear Hadley. Finally I turn around with the idea that I’ll go back to the school, that I’d tried and failed, when the wall of wheat next to me rustles. I gasp and draw my hands up to my mouth. The cigarette flips from between my fingers, arcing up over the stiff heads of wheat. I am still for a moment, and so is the wheat. But then, just as I’m about to exhale and drop my hands from my face, it rustles again.

“What the hell?” someone says from the other side of the stalks.

And then Hadley’s voice, wry: “You’re on fire.”

The wheat shakes more, and there’s a list of curses in the voice that isn’t Hadley’s. I place myself just on the other side of the shaking wheat. The stalks have grown so thick that I can’t see through them.

“Are you even going to help me?” the voice asks.

“Hadley?” I say, and when no one answers, I stick my hands into the wheat and push it apart.

The two of them are on the ground. Hadley sits on the far side of the row, her ponytail pulled loose so that her hair is a deflated balloon against the back of her neck. The skin all around her mouth and chin is pink, like she’s been scrubbed raw. When she sees me looking at her, she puts a hand up to her face as if to cover this pink. The boy is the one rustling the wheat. His shirt is unbuttoned to his waist, hanging open in a silly
V
. He scuttles back on his heels, batting at his back, which sends up a thread of smoke like the tiniest smoke signal. Finally satisfied that he’s gotten it out, he strips off his shirt to assess the damage.

“You were gonna let me burn?” he asks, brushing at the little hole burned there.

“You handled it,” Hadley says to him, though she’s looking at me when she says it. I try to interpret her look. Is she angry at me, as I suspect? She seems shuttered, guarded.

The boy, distracted by his shirt, hasn’t seen me yet, even though my head and hands are poking through the wheat just above him. I feel like some bizarre hunting trophy, but I can’t move. If I let go of the stalks of wheat to duck back through, it’ll make all sorts of noise, and he’ll definitely see me. But if I stay here, he’ll look up any minute and see me, too. I don’t know what to do. I’m stuck. What’s more, I don’t know what Hadley wants me to do. She watches me steadily, her hand slides down from her chin to her neck, but she doesn’t give me any direction about what to do and even still no sign about whether she’s mad at me. This, I realize, is my punishment for failing her with Jonah. Hadley won’t help me, won’t keep me safe.

“What the hell?” the boy says as he’s shrugging on his shirt, and at first I think he’s talking about me, but then he bends forward to
pick up something off of the ground. “Look. Someone dropped this on me.” He’s holding my cigarette, a whisper of smoke rising from it. Then he looks up at me, and I’m staring into the squinty, infamous face of Garrett Murray.

“What the hell?” he says again.

I make a noise that is meant to be
sorry
but isn’t even close and try to disappear back through the wheat. Before I can go, he reaches up and catches my wrist, yanking the upper half of me through to their row.

“You did this?” he demands. He brings his face up close to mine, so close that I can see the squinch of sleep in the corner of his eye and the flakes of his chapped lips. He holds the cigarette up between our two faces. I’m scared, and it’s all I can do not to gasp in his face. He gives my wrist another tug. The stalks of wheat are rough, even through my coat, and my body is twisted between the rows so that they poke at all the soft parts—belly and ribs.

Suddenly, Hadley is between us. She plucks my wrist out of Garrett’s hand. “She came to get me before the bell,” she tells him. “I asked her to.”

Garrett is still for a second, then he blows his breath out into my face. I flinch. “Don’t drop things on me.” In a slick movement, he draws back and spins my cigarette into his mouth.

His nipples are tiny on his chest, tiny brown dots like a little boy’s. I can’t help looking at them. Hadley pushes me back through the wheat and steps through after me, not even saying good-bye to Garrett. We walk back toward the school, shoulder to shoulder because of the narrow ness of the row. We don’t walk too slow or too fast, and Hadley keeps her face forward. I want to say
Are you
mad at me?
I want to say
I’m sorry
. I want to say
Thank you, oh, thank you.
But she still has her hand circling my wrist, like a handcuff or a bracelet, and I don’t want to say anything that might make her pull her hand away.

So Hadley is in love with Garrett Murray. I feel stupid for not figuring it out and hurt that she didn’t tell me herself. Still, her hand is around my wrist.

“Garrett seems nice,” I say.

Hadley snorts, and I wonder if my words sounded sarcastic. I play them back in my head. I don’t think they did.

“No. Really,” I say. “He does. He was just . . . on fire.”

Hadley inhales through her kiss-mashed mouth, and I think that she’s gathering breath to yell at me. But instead of yelling, she starts laughing.

“Really, anyone would . . .” And, then I’m laughing, too. Hadley takes her hand from my wrist in order to slap it against her thigh. “Fire!” she gasps between laughs. We trudge forward, doubled over like the laughter is a weight on our backs. And I know that she’s forgiven me.

We stop at the edge of the wheat. The guy and girl I’d met earlier are gone. All the smokers are gone. The tardy bell rings faintly from the school as if someone has trapped it under a cup.

“It was my cigarette,” I whisper. “The one that set him on . . .” I can’t say
fire
again.

She nods and her laughter turns into little bursts of escaping breath.

“I’m sure he’s nice,” I offer. “Garrett, I mean. It was just a bad way to meet.”

“Don’t be dumb,” Hadley says, her laughter all gone.

Just then, Garrett bursts out of one of the rows near ours. Hadley and I watch in silence as he slinks back across the bus circle to the school, not running—never running. I look for the hole burned in his shirt, but I can’t see it from here. When he gets close to the school, one of the hall monitors opens the door and waves him in wearily.

“I still hate him and everything,” Hadley says and shrugs.

“You do?”

“Sure,” she says.

A thought occurs to me. “Are you saying that he, like, made you . . . you know, in the wheat? Because if he forced—”

“No,” Hadley says. “No one can make me do anything.” She shrugs again, casting it off.

“But, then, if you don’t like him, why would you kiss him?”

She turns and tucks my hair behind my ears on both sides like I’m a kid. “Vie,” she says, “shut up.”

G
ARRETT
M
URRAY
doesn’t talk to Hadley in school, at least not that I see now that I’m watching. Sometimes he passes us in the hall; he’s always in a hurry, turning his bone-skinny body to sidle between the bumping shoulders of the kids walking ahead of us, looking like he’s stepping between the bars of a jail cell. He never even glances at us. Or Hadley at him, either. It isn’t even that studied sort of
not
looking, where you can sense that the person is purposely keeping his eyes averted. It’s like Hadley and Garrett are strangers to each other, or ghosts, and I’m left to gawp at the phenomenon of the two of them.

Hadley doesn’t talk about Garrett again, and though I’m always thinking of ways to bring him up, I never have the nerve to actually do it. The day I found them in the field, I went to my locker and crossed out his name on our list of suspects. The scribble looked bad somehow, like uncertainty, so I rewrote the entire list, leaving him off it and stowing it back on the shelf in my locker. The next day, I saw that Hadley had added his name again in her bold block letters.

After that day in the field, Hadley stopped eating lunch with me altogether. She spends her lunches in the smokers’ field now, feeding
herself with cigarettes and the sticky red peppermints that she pops to cover the smell. Sometimes I sneak out of the cafeteria early and stand at the door by the bus circle, staring across at the nodding tufts of winter wheat. I lean into the door and press the bar, making it click and unclick, looking out over the field for the places in the wheat that shake. Hadley will find me after lunch, but we won’t talk about where she’s been or what she’s been doing.

Hadley’s mouth and chin are raw pink these days; her lips are rubbed down to a shine; buttons have gone missing from her shirts, their threads still hanging—tiny nooses; she sports fingertip-shaped bruises on her arms and wrists like a gray pox. I don’t know if this is passion or injury. I blame Garrett, want to hurt him back for her, until one morning I see him in the hall with an angry pink scratch curling around the side of his neck, pricked with blood. I fight the urge to grab Hadley’s hand and look under the fingernails for peelings of his skin.

Hadley doesn’t seem any happier or sadder now that she’s with Garrett. She’s determined to keep our investigation going. She spends hours after school completing detailed profiles of each person on our list, which has grown to include sixty-three suspects. She dictates the information, and I take it down: age, occupation, physical description, known associates, episodes of violence, connection to the deceased, etc. She got the categories out of a chapter in one of her mother’s crime novels, which stand in mildewed towers, bricking up one wall of the downstairs bathroom. Our notes have expanded way beyond the capacity of my science notebook, though our main list of suspects still lives in its back pages. We keep the rest of our investigation in file folders that Hadley steals from a stack of boxes in
the dining room. Her dad’s old work stuff, she explains, though not why the contents of his office are packed into boxes. She crosses out the words written on the tabs of the folders—“MediaBlitz,” “Travel ’88,” and “Lonigan, Sheryl”—replacing them with her own labels: “Suspects, Chip. High,” “Suspects, College,” “Newspaper Articles,” and “McCabe, Elizabeth.”

I’ve yet to meet either of Hadley’s parents, though I saw her father’s silhouette once as he drove away from the house. His profile was fatherly, the face of a man who might chew on a pipe. Veronica told my mother once that both of Hadley’s parents are having affairs, that each knows that the other is and doesn’t care. Does that mean they love each other more than other parents or less? Hadley does nothing to explain or defend them. “They didn’t want kids,” she said once with a dark grin, “so they had four.”

The other three, her little brothers, remain at their station in front of their video games. The detritus of the house—crumbles of food, clouds of laundry, webs of dust—sometimes recedes, only to creep forward again, like the banks of dirty snow as winter ends.

In Hadley’s room—that tidy, girly island—we pile our case files around us like children building a fort. We alphabetize, sort, and label. We keep the finished files in the bottom of her sweater drawer, hidden under the scented drawer liner, until the stack grows too thick, thicker than two folded sweaters, and Hadley buys an actual file box from a store in the mall and slides it to the back of her closet. We annotate and cross-check and tend to our folders, and I promise Hadley that if we’re patient, a pattern will emerge.

I tell her this not because I believe it, but to keep her from following through on one of her crazy plans. Her latest idea is to type
a letter composed of only one sentence—
I know you killed her
—and send it to our top ten suspects, which include the shop teacher at school, a couple of men who loiter in a back booth at the diner, and Garrett Murphy. Hadley keeps trying to get me to walk through the woods at night dressed like Zabet.

“You could almost look like her if you put on some of her clothes,” she says, studying me. “Your hair’s kind of the same, and you’re about the same height.”

“She was prettier than me,” I say, hoping just a little bit that Hadley will disagree.

“Well, yeah, but in the dark, from behind,” she says and absently presses a tiny bruise on her elbow, causing it to fade and then flush back like a word written in disappearing ink.

She’s still obsessed with seeing the place where Jonah found Zabet’s body. And I’ve promised, reluctantly and falsely, that I’ll try to talk to him again. The entire week, we practice what I’ll say.

“Touch his hand like this,” Hadley instructs, resting her fingers on the back of my hand. When I look down, her hand flits away like a moth and lands on her neck just under her jaw, the same place where Garrett’s scratch was. “Now you try it on me,” she says.

On Sunday, Jonah’s not even in Hokepe Woods. Pervy Mr. Jefferson is there instead, plunked in the cab of his truck like an old beanbag, eating generic Cheerios straight out of the box. When he sees me, he raps on the window and then rolls it down to call out, “You wanna trade jobs, darlin’?” I’m tempted to grab the sled out of the back of his truck and set off for the trees just to see what he’ll do.