The Space Between Trees (6 page)

Zabet loved this story. She had me tell it about twenty times, and she’d correct me if I described something even a little bit different than the time before. For a while, we’d steal the colander and ladle out of her kitchen and act out the scene in the woods behind her house. She always insisted on being my mom so that she could catch the ladle in midair. “Quick eyes!” we’d yell, instead of “think fast” or “heads up.”

Every once in a while, Zabet would leave her hands at her sides and let the ladle hit her. Then she’d rub her face and say, “Yeah, that hurt.”

One time, I threw the ladle harder—much harder—than I ever had before. I don’t remember if I planned to throw it like that or if it just came out of my hand that way. Later I’d think that maybe I had meant to throw it hard because Zabet was so gullible, so willing to take whatever I threw. I didn’t even yell “quick eyes!” that time. I just watched the ladle spin, handle over scoop, a baton of silver, and waited to see if this would be one of the times that Zabet let it hit her in the face. She kept her hands down at her sides; she was staring at me. My breath rose up high in my chest and my stomach lurched, but still I didn’t call out a warning. At the last second, Zabet reached up, caught the ladle, and held it shining in the air.

H
ADLEY
S
MITH
is back at her locker on Thursday morning. While she was gone, I had tried to imagine what she would look like when she came back. I’d pictured her in a long black dress with a ragged, old hem that dragged on the floor or maybe all her clothes mismatched like she’d put them on without even looking at them. But instead she’s in the ratty, gray fisherman’s sweater and jeans that she always wears. She’s got girls on either side of her, leaning on the locker bank, staring up at her solemnly, expectantly, like cats waiting for a treat.

Hadley and her friends are the so-called bad girls. They’re not really that bad, though. It’s just that all the other kids at Chippewa High are so well behaved that these girls look bad by comparison. They steal lip gloss, skip pep rallies, talk back to teachers, cut in line, and maybe some of them have had sex—only maybe, though. The other girls at school are scared of them, and the boys ignore them, except for the few that don’t.

There are rumors about them, especially Hadley—that she carries mace in her boot, that she goes to college parties, that she’s having an affair with a married man, that she’s having an affair with a teacher, that Capp wants to expel her but her dad threatened to sue
the school. I saw her smack a girl on the back of the neck once, hard. And another time I heard her call the vice principal by his first name. It was strange to think that Zabet was her best friend—Zabet, so gullible, so malleable.

Hadley slams her locker door, and the girls leaning next to it flinch. She says something quick and breaks out of their circle. A couple of them start to follow her, but then fall back into meaningful looks like they don’t dare. Hadley’s walking right toward me, her face screwed up in a snarl that makes me want to fall back, too. But I stay where I am, and when she gets close, I say, “Hadley.”

She blows right past.

I find her again in the cafeteria. She’s in the a la carte line by herself. The boy behind her keeps looking at her and then looking away. Kids at the tables are doing the same thing. In school, even if you don’t know someone’s name, you know who her best friend is. Everyone knows that Hadley Smith was Zabet McCabe’s best friend or, rather, that the girl with the scar on her chin was best friends with the girl who was murdered.

I think about how if Hadley hadn’t moved here, then it might have still been me, and not her, who was Zabet’s best friend, me everyone would be staring at now. And Zabet would still be Elizabeth. And maybe if she’d still been Elizabeth, then she wouldn’t have died. Maybe the two of us would have been together that night, having a sleepover, and she wouldn’t have been out in the woods by herself. Or maybe we both would have been out there in the woods together, and I would’ve been the one who was killed.

Zabet and I hadn’t been friends for a long time, if we ever were. When I was starting middle school, Mom decided I was old enough to take the bus home and stay by myself. I told her I wasn’t and begged her to still let me go to the McCabes’, but this baffled her; she didn’t think I liked being babysat. Besides, we’d relied on the kindness of the McCabes for long enough. So she had a talk with Mrs. McCabe, ending the arrangement, and I returned grudgingly to the bus circle.

Zabet invited me over a few times after that. But I was too embarrassed to invite her back to our rented apartment, with its rough orange couches and the smell of our Pakistani neighbors’ vindaloos and masalas pressing through the walls. Hadley Smith moved into Hokepe Woods that year. After that, when I’d see Zabet in the halls of the middle school, she was always with Hadley. At first, Zabet would wave and offer me shy hellos. But a few weeks after that, it was like we’d never known each other at all.

In the lunch line, Hadley reaches under the sneeze-guard and sets an order of fries onto her tray like nothing’s wrong in the world. While she’s paying, I make my way over to the ketchup station. I have no food, nothing to put ketchup on, so I fiddle with the napkin dispenser. The cashier gives Hadley her change and touches her hand briefly when she does it, saying something. Hadley nods but slides her hand out from under the cashier’s fingers, hiding it behind her back. I can see it there, closed into a fist like she might, any second, sock the cashier in the mouth.

Finally, Hadley comes my way. She sets her fries under the ketchup spigot and pushes. I try to think what to say. I’d practiced earlier, testing and rejecting different sentences.
How are you doing?
I rejected because everyone was probably saying that to her already. Besides,
how did they think she was doing? I also rejected
I’m sorry
because I hate when people apologize for things that aren’t their fault.

I guess I’m staring at Hadley while I think about all this (I don’t mean to be staring, but sometimes I do it without thinking) because she gives one last push to the ketchup dispenser, then turns and says, “What?”

“Hi,” I say, which is not what I mean to say at all.

“Yeah, hi.” She grabs her fries and tries to walk around me.

“Wait.” I don’t step in front of her, but I shift a little to keep her from getting past me. I’m surprised that I’ve done this, and even more surprised that Hadley actually stops at the barrier of my shoulder.

“What?” she says.

I still don’t know what to say.

“What?”

I come up with “So, everyone’s probably bugging you, right?”

She makes a noise that means, me—I’m the one bugging her. “They’re all talking about Zabet,” I say. I want to say that they don’t have the right, and I want Hadley to agree, but she only shrugs.

“They don’t even know her,” I say, but it comes out in a whine.

Hadley mutters something.

“What? What did you say?”

She looks at me in a way that makes me feel like I’ve done something unforgivably rude.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, but it’s not because you talk quiet,” I babble. “It’s just . . . it’s loud in here.”

She shrugs as if to say that the noise in the room is not her fault. “I have to eat,” she tells me, looking down at her tray and adding, “Everybody’s real concerned about it.”

“That’s annoying,” I say. “I mean, you’ll eat when you want, right?”

She cuts around me then, and I follow. She didn’t invite me, but I figure that she didn’t
not
invite me either. I figure that maybe we can sit and talk. I could tell her what I saw—the body carried out of the woods—and maybe she’ll touch her fingers to the back of my hand and say,
Oh, Evie. I’m so sorry.

But then Hadley glances over her shoulder, sees me following her, and starts walking faster. And it’s silly, but I start walking faster, too. We pass lunch tables where kids nudge each other so that their friends won’t miss a glimpse of Hadley Smith. The talk dies as we approach and rises as we pass, dies and rises again. They’re all talking about her, about Hadley. She looks back at me again, a glare. We’re still walking fast, as fast as we can without running. But it’s not like a chase, because there’s nowhere to go really. We’ve already circled the cafeteria once, and now we’re going around again. I feel stupid, but once you start doing something like that, it’s hard to stop.

It’s Hadley who finally stops, turning and letting me catch up. Her face is red all over, except for the scar on her chin, which doesn’t color up with the rest of her. I wonder how she got that scar. Zabet must have known how. I used to think that maybe Hadley was so tough because of that scar, like if you have a mean-looking scar on your chin, you sort of have to act tough to live up to it.

Hadley leans in and whispers, “Stop it.”

“I just wanted to say—”

“
Please
,” she says, and I realize something astounding: She might cry then—she really might—and I don’t know how that happened. Her chin is trembling, the scar quaking like a fault line, and she won’t
blink. I wanted to say something to her is all. I still do, but I realize then that there’s nothing for me to say.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She doesn’t even nod at this, which makes it terrible, like my apology was a coin left dropped on the floor.

When she walks away this time, she doesn’t turn to see if I’m following. I’m not, though. I stay where I am. People sneak looks as she goes by. They look at her and then at each other and then back at her again. Hadley finds an empty table, pushes her tray onto it, and sits down. She leans over her fries and her hair falls around her face so I can’t see her scar anymore. She starts putting food in her mouth and chewing it, and after a while people stop looking at her and they go back to their conversations. Hadley keeps chewing.

That’s when I figure out what she’d said before, at the ketchup station, when I couldn’t really hear her. She’d said, “You don’t know her either.” And she’s right. I don’t.

P
RINCIPAL
C
APP
makes an announcement that we can go to the funeral on Friday as long as we sign up with our homeroom teachers in advance. I ask Mr. Denby to put me on the list; most of our class is on the list already. Even the Whisperers are going.

“It’s the right thing to do,” one of them says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Why what?”

“Why is it the right thing to do?”

She just looks at me.

I sit with them on the bus. They’re all wearing floral dresses under their coats, but they make pretty lame flowers. I think of the talking flowers in
Alice in Wonderland
. Then I think of the garden that I hid in the morning that Jonah found the body and how, even though it was a garden, none of the flowers had bloomed yet.

Jonah was in the news on Thursday night, but not his name—just “local man,” as in “the body was discovered by a local man.” The number at Jefferson Wildlife Control still rings through to the answering machine. I keep thinking about last Sunday, when I ran away from Jonah and he yelled out my name. I replay it a lot in my
head, the way it sounded when he said it.
Evie.
That it—my name—was there in his mouth. But after thinking about it a few dozen times, it’s like I’ve worn the memory out, and the voice yelling my name isn’t his anymore, but my own.

The bus to the funeral smells like sack lunches and teacher perfume. Everyone is dressed up, but I’m one of the only ones wearing all black. I thought that was what you were supposed to wear to a funeral—black. I chose my clothes the night before. I laid them on my bed, placing the sweater above the skirt, the skirt over the tights. There was something orderly about the way they looked set out like that. When I was done, I didn’t want to put the clothes away, so I slid in under them and slept there, making sure not to move too much so that they wouldn’t get wrinkled.

“Have you ever been to a funeral before?” one of the Whisperers asks the others.

A few of them nod. I don’t because I haven’t been to a funeral. In fact, I’ve only been to church half a dozen times in my life—only when Mom’s upset about something. So I’ve always thought of going to church as something you do when you’re in a pinch, like eating at a restaurant because you forgot to go to the grocery store. Afterward, when we walk out with the crowd of real churchgoers, with their brunch plans and khaki pants, Mom always stops on the front steps and looks up at the sky for a second, like she’s going to see something up there.