The Space Between Trees (24 page)

Principal Capp has Hadley by the arm, like he’s pulling her along, except he’s not. Hadley walks a step ahead, leading
him
back to the principal’s office. She keeps her head up, and her eyes dart at the kids around her, landing on one bystander then skipping to the next as if she’s making a list of them all in her head. The kids watch her quietly, none of them turning to nudge or whisper to their friends.

“Hadley!” I call out, but her eyes flit past me like I’m just one of them. Then she’s gone, and the wall of kids closes up behind her.

Bill Grauer lets out a low whistle. “Freak,” he says to the brownpaper cover of his textbook. Whenever he wants to say something to me, he addresses the cavity of his locker, his mechanical pencil, the sleeve of his winter jacket. I feel a swell of outrage against shy Bill and his stupid homemade textbook covers. I think about how I could add his name to our list if I felt like it, simple as that and he’s a suspect. Simple as that, he’s accused.

That afternoon, I walk past the principal’s office nearly a dozen times on a dozen pretexts with half a dozen hall passes, but Hadley’s not out in the waiting room or anywhere else, not in her classes or the girl’s bathroom or the tiny detention room at the back of the library. Finally, following a couple of office aides down the hall, I hear one of them say to the other, “At-home suspension is all,” and there’s only one person they could be talking about.

By the end of the day, I don’t need any sleuthing to figure out why Hadley’s been suspended. Wiry, jack-o’-lantern-faced Garrett Murray’s been suspended, too. It’s all the smokers can talk about and, soon, all anyone can talk about. During last passing, I hear
the girl with the pointed eyeliner say Hadley’s name, so I inch up behind her.

“She totally attacked him,” she’s saying, somehow both indignant and pleased. “He
had
to hit her to get her away from him. She wouldn’t stop. She bit his face! With her mouth! There was blood down his cheek and teeth marks, all that. The human bite is a dirty thing,” she announces, “probably hers especially. We pulled her off, of course, but . . . goddamn.” She looks down at her hands, her fingers splayed as if something has slipped through them. “Goddamn,” she says.

She’s impressive in her telling of the story—eyes wide with surprise and outrage, the extra line about the human bite. It makes me think about all those times that I’d tell Jonah-stories to the Whisperers—how I’d weigh a phrase or spit out a particular word like I couldn’t hold it in my mouth any longer, how I’d say a sentence quietly to make them lean in, how I’d collect their wide eyes and sucks of breath like beads I could string on a bracelet.

Hadley’s been driving me home, but this afternoon, I’m back on the bus with the other latchkey kids, the renters, the off-branders, and the sack-lunchers. There are only about twenty of us, enough to sparsely populate an old school bus. Once I’m home, I try calling Hadley, but no one answers. No one answers the next morning, either.

Tuesday afternoon after school, I bike over to her house, her homework piled in my backpack, and knock on the door. I hear someone walking around inside, but no matter how many times I knock or press the bell, the footsteps never approach.

“Hello!” I call through the door. “Hadley?”

I end up leaving the homework on the porch under a rock stolen from the next-door neighbor’s garden.

I go back again on Wednesday with more homework. The homework I’d left the day before has been taken in; either that or it’s blown away across all the Hokepe lawns and into the woods. The rock sits on the porch alone, bald. I don’t even wait this time but just dump the stack of papers and set the rock on them—done.

The week is a quiet one for me, though everyone else is restless with only a week left until summer break. The Whisperers continue to make room for me at their cafeteria table, and not one of them asks me about Hadley or the fight. I don’t talk about it either; I just sit and listen to the crunch of their carrot sticks. I raise my hand a couple of times in class on my own, instead of listlessly providing the required answer only when called on like I’d been doing lately.

“Good job today, Evie,” Mr. Denby says as I gather my things.

I feel shy. During the next class break, I push my notebook with the suspect list to the back of my locker. (I can’t bring myself to throw it away.)

Just as Hadley’s presence fades during the week that she’s suspended, Zabet’s emerges, as if they are two characters in a stage play performed by the same actress, one entering the drawing room moments after the other has left it. I start to dream about Zabet. She sits on the end of my bed in my mother’s favorite hat—a green felt cloche. I beg her not to take it off, because I know that there’s something wrong with her head underneath. “It itches,” she tells me, scratching her scalp through the felt of the hat. I wake with my own hands tangled in my hair.

I see her face again, in the smudge on my unwashed window or the nest of hair in the shower drain, in the swirl of sugar in my cereal. I stir my cereal until she disappears. “Wash away,” I tell her in the shower. The water hits her face, breaking it back into hair. I bat out the wrinkles in my bedspread shaped like the neck and shoulder of a girl resting curled on the ground.

Then, on Thursday night, I have Hadley’s dream, the one where all the shops in the mall are selling people. But in my dream they’re not selling a random assortment, only Zabets—tangle-haired, mudcovered, beaten-up Zabets like the one Jonah pulled out of the woods. She’s piled in bargain bins in the bookstore, lined up on racks in the clothing shops, tucked onto shelves, and posed in the display windows.

I wake up Friday morning not remembering any of it, lost for a minute in the white noise from Mom showering down the hall. Then the phone rings, and the entire dream hits me all at once. My heart is already pounding before I pick it up and hear Hadley say, “Hey, Vie.”

“How
are
you?” I ask, and my voice sounds cheap and false, an aunt at a birthday party.

“Mmmm,” she hums, as if everything is normal. She doesn’t ask me back how I am, but this isn’t unusual; she never asks back. She tells me, “You’re going to sleep over tonight.”

“Over there?”

“Of course over here, idiot.”

“I thought maybe you were grounded.”

“My parents will be, most definitely, out for the evening. And also, I’m
bored
.” She draws out this last word, making its one syllable into two, like how a little kid would say it.

“I’ll . . . I’ll have to ask my mom.”

There’s a pause. “Oh, yeah?” she says.

“She’s been, you know, wanting me home a lot.”

“Fine, but make her say yes.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try,
do
,” she says, mimicking Principal Capp’s start-of-the-year speech.

We say our good-byes, but as I’m pulling the phone away from my ear, I hear her say, “Vie?” I waver for a moment, the receiver between my face and the cradle, not knowing whether to hang up or listen. I end up pressing it back against my ear.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for the homework.”

A few minutes later, Mom emerges from the shower, but I don’t ask if I can sleep over at Hadley’s. I’m not sure I want to see her, to get into all that again. So I go to school and return and don’t call her back, and I don’t think about it. She shows up around seven anyway. I probably should have predicted this.

Mom answers the door, thinking it’s Rick-from-the-bank. She’s spent the past hour scurrying from her room to the mirrored wall in the kitchen where, she says, there’s the best natural light. She’s appraised fluted skirts and plunging blouses; she’s blended eye shadows and smeared on lip goo. She studies herself from all angles, turning her back to the mirror, even, and glancing over her shoulder as if she’s accidentally caught sight of her own behind.

With all of Mom’s running about, I miss the sound of the door, so the first thing I hear is her startled, “What happened to you?”

When I get out to the living room, Mom is circling Hadley with the look of disapproval she reserves for rude saleswomen and slow
elevators. Hadley’s got a black backpack over her shoulder, like she’s the one sleeping over. Her bruises have darkened to blooms of pen ink and grass stains. Garrett Murray hit her three times that I can see: one on the eye, the other on the cheek, the third on the chin, opening up her scar. The scar has been stitched back together and is held with butterflies of tape, which have grown grimy from their tenure under Hadley’s fingertips. She sees me and grins. All the old facial expressions are there, curled lip and waggling eyebrow, sly winks, rolling from one countenance to the next under her bruised skin. Looking at her makes my face hurt.

“Sorry. I forgot to call you back,” I say sheepishly.

Hadley lifts one side of her mouth into a smirk that looks more like a wince. “I figured you’d call if you couldn’t come.”

“Couldn’t come where?” Mom says, now holding Hadley lightly under the chin and turning her face this way and that, as if it’s an item in a store that she’s thinking about purchasing.

Before I have a chance to say anything, Hadley cuts in. “Evie’s sleeping over.”

Mom nods absently, her eyes still stuck on Hadley’s face. I stare at Mom, willing her to look at me and understand that I don’t want to go, that she should say I can’t, but she’s lost in the bruises.

“Gotta powder my nose,” Hadley announces. “Is that all right?”

“Sure. Down the—”

“I know where,” Hadley interrupts. “Powder my nose,” she calls from the hallway, snickering, “Isn’t it weird that I just said that?”

“What happened?” Mom whispers as soon as Hadley’s out of earshot. “She said she got in a fight at school.”

“Yeah. That’s what happened.”

“
Oh,
” Mom groans. “That poor girl.” Mom shakes her head, then, liking how it tosses her curls, shakes it again. “How does the other girl look?”

“I was thinking, what if I stayed?”

“Stayed where?” Mom asks her reflection.

“Well, here. Home. I mean, you’re going out, and, well, no one will be here.”

“The house can be empty for a night, Evie. We won’t be robbed. Go to your sleepover!”

“But what if I want—”

Mom glances over at me through the mirror, and our eyes lock for a second, but we’re really just looking at each other’s reflections, which feels like we aren’t looking at each other at all. I will her to understand me—that I want her to forbid me to go. I almost say it to her,
I don’t want to go.
But then Hadley returns, her backpack still on her shoulders, and Mom breaks our gaze, reaching out toward Hadley’s face.

“I could do something with makeup,” she says running her fingers in the air over Hadley’s cheeks as if she were blending the makeup in right that moment. “Cover the bruises.”

“No, thanks. I sort of like them.”

“Pardon?” Mom drops her hand, steps back, and blinks.

“I like the colors they turn.”

“Well,” Mom says, and nothing after that.

T
HE NIGHT AT
H
ADLEY’S
is surprisingly normal. Her parents aren’t home. Are they ever home? We pop popcorn for her little brothers the old-fashioned way, with oil and a pan, and slice apples that turn yellow before we have the chance to eat them. The five of us watch a beauty pageant on TV. We pick our favorites and razz the contestants who are clearly ugly under their makeup and hairstyles.

“I should be in a pageant,” Hadley announces. “Just like this!” She waves her hands around her bruised face, presenting it.

“A Halloween pageant, maybe,” the oldest of her brothers says. Hadley wolf howls, and the boys giggle, and one of them grabs her arm tight in both hands, his face contorted with painful glee. In that moment everyone loves her, including me.

Upstairs, there’s Hadley’s queen-sized bed, but we’ll sleep on the floor. She sets up two sleeping bags at its foot. I don’t say anything about this, or Garrett Murray and her suspension, or Chad in the burgundy car, and I’m relieved when Hadley doesn’t mention any of these topics, either.

We lie in the dark next to each other, both on our backs. Hadley’s stuck plastic glow-in-the-dark stars to her ceiling; they have dark
spots in them—shadowy tumors—from the wads of poster putty that hold them aloft.