THE CALL COMES THE NEXT WEEK. Mom is in the kitchen, so she gets to the phone first. I hear her say, “Hello?” and then, “Yes,” and then, after a pause, “Pete, is that you?” I turn the volume down on my show, though not so much that Mom will notice that I’ve gone quiet. Pete is my dad’s name—well, Peter, really. She tries to call him Peter or “your father” when she refers to him, to show that she’s mad at him, but usually she forgets and just calls him Pete. It’s not him on the phone after all, though, because next Mom says, “I’m sorry. My mistake.” And then a startled “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And then, “Of course. I’ll get her.”
There she is in the doorway of the living room with the phone held out to me. She shakes her head a little, hitches herself up against the door frame, and stays there even after I take the phone from her.
“Hello?”
The man on the phone says, “Hello, Evie.” I don’t know how Mom mistook him; he doesn’t sound like my dad at all. Though I’ll admit that it’s been years since I’ve talked to him. In my memory, my dad sounds like he’s about to laugh, and like, if you didn’t know better, you might be the joke. This man sounds like he has to try hard if he wants to laugh, and even then he might only cough.
“This is Ray McCabe,” he says. “Elizabeth’s father. We met at the funeral. Maybe you remember?”
I tell him, “Sure, of course.” My first thought is that he found out that I had lied to him about being Zabet’s friend and is calling to yell at me. So I stay quiet, which is the best thing to do if you aren’t sure whether or not you’re in trouble. I bite the inside of my cheek and avoid Mom’s eyes.
But Mr. McCabe hasn’t called to yell at me after all. At first, it seems like he’s called just to ask questions. He asks me about school and my friends and my after-school activities—all the regular things adults ask about. I give my answers, and it feels boring and awkward. But then I think about how he’ll never get to ask these questions to his daughter because she’s dead, and so I’m nice about it and answer in an enthusiastic voice.
Then Mr. McCabe says, “I’d like to invite you and Hadley to dinner on Friday.”
“At the school?” They’d had a pancake supper after those two kids died in the car crash so that they could raise money for a memorial scholarship and the twin trees.
“No,” Mr. McCabe says. “No. At my house . . . well, condo, actually. Hadley will be there, and I thought we could eat and”—the cough that’s been in his throat makes its way out.
“Did you ask her already?”
“Who?”
“Hadley.”
“Yes. She said she could come.”
“Did you tell her that I was coming?”
I try to sound casual when I say this, but Mr. McCabe must hear something in my voice because he says, “I did. Is that . . . ? She seemed to feel that was okay. Is it okay with you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. Of course. Definitely.”
The next day at school, when I see Hadley in the hall, she doesn’t turn and dart away like usual, but instead checks her path to head right at me. Now I’m the one who wants to get lost in the crowd, and I look for some shoulders or backpacks to hide behind. But it’s too late. She’s right on me with her cig breath, stink eye, and the slice taken out of her chin. Her skin has gone all white along the road of that scar, like it’s bone, like it’s ghost.
She doesn’t say hello, just sort of shrugs her shoulders instead. She yanks her ponytail around to one side and begins to rake her fingers through it, over and over. It reminds me of a movie I saw where this guy—this evil villain guy—sharpens a knife on a leather strap while he’s talking to people, and he’s so cool, he doesn’t even have to look at it. In the scene, the knife’s going on the strap, and the person the villain’s talking to is staring at it (because wouldn’t you?) and it’s making this whisk whisk sound, which is almost the sound Hadley’s fingers make going through her hair.
“You’re going to dinner tonight?” she says.
“At the McCabes’? Yeah.”
“Not McCabes.” She frowns. “Just Mr. McCabe. They’re divorced.”
“I know,” I say, though obviously I hadn’t.
She screws up her mouth and gives her hair another tug. “So you’re coming, then?”
“Well, yeah. He invited me, so I thought—”
“Right.” She furrows her brow, like she’s very worried about something, and then, swift and graceful, turns her head and blows a wad of spit onto the ground. I’ve never seen anyone spit like that, right out onto the floor. I stare at the glob of it, pearly, shimmering, until someone treads through it.
“Sorry. That was gross.” She smiles for a second, brilliantly, but then it’s gone like a camera flash.
“We met at the funeral.” I speak these words in almost a whisper. “Mr. McCabe and me.”
She shrugs again like she doesn’t care and tosses her hair back over her shoulder, finished with it and me.
That night, I tell Mom that I’m meeting some friends at a school basketball game. She’s so excited about it that her cheeks get pink without even any blush to help them along. She asks for the friends’ names, so I choose three of the Whisperers’ names at random. She repeats each of them like they’re foreign words she must remember.
“Are you going to wear colors?” she asks. “Colors?” I look down at my green sweater and think, Green isn’t a color?
“Your school colors—Chippewa Braves. Let’s see, you’re gold and crimson, right?”
“No. We don’t really do that.” Though I honestly have no idea whether people do that or not. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems like the exact sort of thing that people at my school would do.
“We used to paint our faces”—she grazes her cheeks with her fingertips—“before games. You’re going to have so much fun. You can stay out late,” she says, pleased. “I won’t even look at the clock.”
I ride my bike to Mr. McCabe’s condominium, my nose and fingertips freezing in the wind, my scarf flying out behind me. The condominium parks popped up a few years after the big neighborhoods, one across the street from each. Mr. McCabe’s condo park is across from Hokepe Woods, where Mrs. McCabe still lives in the pretty house I walked to after school years ago. She must have been at the funeral. Not with Mr. McCabe, though, now that they are divorced. Maybe with a new husband? I hadn’t seen her there. Of course, I’d missed the entire thing. I ride on the other side of the street from Hokepe Woods like it’s cursed. I can’t see much of it from the road—just a few peaked roofs and the stone sign.
I was back on my paper route last Sunday; I even went back to the place where they had brought out Zabet’s body, out in front of that ancient woman’s modern house. I had deliveries, after all. Turns out that even after a dead girl is carried across their lawns, people still read the newspaper. As I approached the house, I caught myself looking at my feet, at where I was going to step, like I might accidentally trample some undiscovered clue or tromp through an errant puddle of blood. Of course there was nothing like that. The neighborhood was just the neighborhood, tidy as ever.
Jonah wasn’t there on Sunday. I saw his boss, Mr. Jefferson of Jeffer son Wildlife Control, struggling with a trussed deer. The spring rains had begun this week, and the sled’s runner was caught in a tire rut made from last night’s mud. Mr. Jefferson’s stomach was astounding, folded over his belt like a sack of loot. I went over and helped him right the sled, my satchel knocking into the deer’s flank with a dull sound. The deer’s eyes were lined in black with tiny white feathers of fur in their corners.
“Beyond the call of duty, sweetheart,” Mr. Jefferson said when we were done, sticking his hands on his hips and puffing a bit.
“No problem. How’s Jonah?”
“Oh, ho!” He pressed at his side. “I assume she’s altruistic—that she’s here to help. Now I see her true motives. She’s in love with the boy!”
“We just talk,” I said, hating this man, hating the whole expanse of his stomach. “Just sometimes.”
“Sure, sure, honey. Sure. Jonah’s on a little sabbatical, a little restup-and-feel-better.”
“Is he okay?”
He made a great big gesture in the air like he was presenting something, a trophy maybe. “He’s fine. Strong, young boy.” He winked. “I’ll tell him his girlfriend misses him.”
Before I could help myself I said, “Tell him his girlfriend’s pregnant.”
Mr. Jefferson’s face turned pink and his belly rippled with a fit of coughs. I only said it to punish him for what he said, but then I worried that he might flop into a faint over the dead deer, and I’d have to pull them both out to the truck. Finally his coughs slowed down, and he wiped his hands over his face and mouth. Somewhere between coughs he’d figured out that I was only joking. He offered another “Oh, ho, ho!”
“Well, I gotta deliver these,” I told him and left him there, panting for breath over the dead deer.
I turn my bike into Mr. McCabe’s condo park and weave through. They’ve got the condos blocked out in groups of three or four, which repeat over and over like the background in old cartoons. Their porches are empty except for a plain doormat in the center of each, like a postage stamp stuck to an envelope. I aim my bike between two shiny cars. Almost all the cars are nice here, since it’s mostly divorced dads in these condo parks; they get to keep the good car but not the house.
I imagine dads in condo after condo, just home from work in their rumpled suits. One wields a martini shaker; the next, a billiards cue; and the third, a high-class skin magazine. I picture Mr. McCabe cooking, an artichoke cupped in his hand. The artichoke is small, delicate, a mossy green; its leaves are wrapped tight over its middle like it’s protecting something there. I wonder where my dad lives, if it’s in a place like this.
I park my bike and walk up to the door. The porch light is on, even though it’s not dark yet. I straighten my coat and scarf and the sweater underneath and think that maybe I should have worn a dress. I knock on the door. After a long moment, Hadley answers it, in a dress.
“Hey,” I say.
She steps back, and I step in. She hunches against the wall and grimaces like I’ve just said something horrible.
“He’s in there.”
“Oh,” I say. She tips her head back against the wall like she’s going to tack herself up next in the line of watercolor seascapes hanging at measured intervals.
“Evie!” Mr. McCabe steps into the hallway, working a dish towel between his hands. He looks different from the way he did at the funeral, or maybe I’m just not remembering him right. His eyes are bright, almost glassy. Before I can say hello or “thanks for having me,” he’s closed me up in a hug. His shirt is rough on my cheek, and he smells like a lot of garlic. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I end up patting him on the back until he pulls away to reveal Hadley still leaning on the wall, disgruntled and ponytailed and heaving with unaired sighs.
“Do you like pasta?” Mr. McCabe looks at me expectantly, and when I nod, he nods back so that both of us are nodding at once like we’ve agreed on something, and I guess what we’ve agreed on is that I do like pasta. “I made spaghetti, and this sauce is not from a jar.” He wheels around and uses his dish towel to wave us on after him.
Hadley doesn’t move, so I go in first. For a second, I think she might stay there, leaning and frowning, but then I hear her push off of the wall and follow me. The kitchen is small, and the appliances are three-quarter size and squeezed in. There’s a little bar jutting out of the wall, and Mr. McCabe leads me to it, setting his hand just behind my shoulder and sweeping me along. There are bar stools tucked under it, so I pull one out, drape my coat and scarf over it, and then sit on it. Hadley is swept into the seat next to mine. She sits astride it like a horse, her dress falling over her knees. Her dress is splashed with yellow flowers. It has the faded fabric and mothball smell of a thrift store, but it’s pretty, like one of the dresses my mom has on in pictures from when she was my age. It’s strange to see her dressed up.
“I like your dress,” I tell her.
She doesn’t look at me.
Mr. McCabe leans over a tall pot on the stove. He peers into it, stirs, tastes whatever’s in there. Then he’s up watching us again. All of his gestures are quick, his words, too, like a timer’s been set somewhere, ticking down to zero, and he’s racing to beat it.
“Ten more minutes. At first, I thought that I’d make lasagna. You girls remember how Elizabeth loved lasagna.”
He looks at us, and I look over at Hadley for help, but she leans on the counter, her jaw set.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s right.” Though, truth be told, I don’t. I don’t know Zabet’s favorite foods; I don’t know her middle name; I don’t know anything but what little snatches I’ve gotten from the hallway gossip at school and the afternoons I spent with her years ago. I can’t even remember what foods Zabet liked then. Sandwiches, I think. We ate a lot of ham sandwiches and nachos made with strips of American cheese laid over tortilla chips.
Mr. McCabe is still talking. “I’d say that was her favorite food—lasagna was—and I thought that if she liked it, then probably you girls would like it, too. But then I thought maybe I shouldn’t make it because she liked it so much. So I thought spaghetti. Everyone likes spaghetti. And you do? You like spaghetti?”
Hadley stares at nothing.
“Sure,” I say again. “Spaghetti’s great.”
It’s like this for the next half hour. Mr. McCabe talks about Zabet, dogging each sentence with the question “Do you remember that?” I keep nodding and saying “that’s right” and “yeah, exactly,” even though I don’t remember any of it—how could I? Hadley sinks lower and lower, until one of her cheeks is actually resting on the counter. Mr. McCabe doesn’t seem to notice her disgruntlement; he’s flying around the kitchen, lining up spice jars, pouring us ginger ale, and tearing apart a head of lettuce.
“Are you okay?” I whisper to her while he’s bent over the cooking pot.
“Fine,” she says.
She’s so listless and huffy that I’m almost surprised when she rouses herself to join us at the table for dinner. I tell myself that her mood has nothing to do with me. But as a test, I ask her to pass me the bread. She does, but when she swings the basket over to my side of the table, she lets it go before I’ve got my hands on it. It drops, careening off the edge of the table. Somehow I catch it before it hits the floor.
“Hey,” I say softly.
“Watch out!” Mr. McCabe says in a hearty, jokey voice, oblivious to the fact that it was anything but accidental. He grabs a hunk from the basket in my hands and adds it to his plate, which is still full of food. He’s moved the spaghetti around a lot, stirring and whirling it, but I haven’t seen him take one bite.
Hadley says something under her breath. “What?” I say. “Nothing,” she says, but I’m pretty sure she repeated his words: Watch out.
“Reflexes,” Mr. McCabe tells us, making a swinging gesture as if to bat the bread across the table. “Hand-eye coordination. Do you remember when Elizabeth took tennis lessons? Her mother’s idea.” He pulls apart the slice.
“She threw the racket,” Hadley says, then snaps her mouth shut, determined, I’m pretty sure, to say no more. She hits her fingertips against her bottom lip like she’s punishing it for opening at all.
Mr. McCabe points at Hadley with his clump of bread. “That’s right! She threw the racket.”
Which is when Hadley turns to me and says, “So you remember that, too, Evie?” Her voice is even and sweet, like the voice boxes that they put in talking dolls. And I realize that I’ve been nodding all this time.
“Uh . . . I . . .” I try to stop my head from nodding, but it’s still going, ticking along on the end of my neck. “I don’t—”
“Last summer,” Hadley prompts, and she’s looking at me now, suddenly animated. “She threw the racket because . . .” She twirls her hand in the air like it’s up to me to finish the sentence.
“Well,” I say.
“Come on. You remember.” She tugs at her hair; Mr. McCabe looks at me with his watery eyes, and I wonder if they’ve been this watery the whole time or if he’s just now about to cry. “She threw the racket because . . .”
“Because,” I repeat dumbly.
I hate Hadley then, even though she has every right to hate me back, to try to expose my lies. Even though she’s the hero and I’m the villain, I hate her still, backed into my corner like I am. I stare at the scar on her chin like it’s a fault line. I imagine digging into it, her face fissuring, cracking, falling to pieces on the peach condo carpet.
“Because?”
“She had a lot of spirit?” I offer, and both of us jump a little as Mr. McCabe shouts, “Yes!” His bread is now pointing at me. “Yes, that’s just the right word for it.”
I don’t look at Hadley, but I can tell that she’s still staring at me.
“Not everyone has that,” Mr. McCabe says and takes a bite of the bread with each word. “Spirit. Gumption. Chutzpah.”
“You tell us a memory now, Evie,” Hadley says, her sentence nearly on top of his. “I’m sure you have one. About Zabet.”
“Oh, well I don’t want to—” “Hmm?” She inserts the noise into my protest, and it’s like that little noise pierces and paralyzes me. I stop, my mouth still partway open.
“Come on. A memory about Zabet, your friend.”
I listen for the sarcasm in this, but there isn’t any, not even a hint. She says it so straight that I almost believe she means it. But, of course, she doesn’t. She knows that Zabet wasn’t my friend. She’s angry and determined to catch me out. Maybe this should make me feel guilty or apologetic or scared, and I do feel all those things, but more than any of that, I’m impressed. I’m impressed by the gentle blink of her eyes and the way that, even though she’s pissed, she can make her face still and lovely like one of the yellow roses on her sleeve.
“Yes,” Mr. McCabe says. Even though he’s sitting down, he looks like he’s standing on his tiptoes.
And I realize that this is why he invited us over. This is why he told all the Elizabeth-this and Elizabeth-that stories. He wants us to tell our stories in return. He wants what’s left of her, every scrap. And I can hardly blame him.
“Go on,” he tells me.
“Sure,” I say. “Right.” But I have nothing to say. I think of my only Zabet story, the one I won’t tell—the two of us in the trees acting out my parents’ fight, the ladle spinning, shining, toward her face. Mr. McCabe watches me through his watery eyes. Hadley sits back an inch, her lips tight. I try to think of the Zabet I would want to be told about, the one I’ve tried to imagine this past couple of weeks—fiery, beautiful, clever, and strong. The one who wasn’t carried out of the woods.
“We were—”
“When?” Hadley interrupts.
“When?”
“When did this happen?”
“Last year.”
“Last year?” she repeats. And it would be rude—this sentence—if it weren’t for her polite voice. “So you were friends then?”
Mr. McCabe sets his hunk of bread down on his plate and cups his hands over it as if it is something he is hiding from us.
“We had a class together.”
“Which class?” Hadley asks.
And this is dangerous because I don’t know any of Zabet’s classes, don’t even know which track she was in. I think she was in the lower track, most of the bad girls are, but sometimes one of them pops up in accelerated, bringing with her a hard amusement over the fact that the rest of us expect her not to have done the assigned reading.
“Gym,” I say. Everyone has to take gym. “Gym,” Hadley repeats as if the word tastes bad.
I picture the gym, its reek of salt and piss that lingers even after they’ve sent us all in to shower, the gritty pebbled tile of the locker room floors, the nests of hair left in the drains, the burn of chlorine that wafts up from the pool. I picture Zabet among all of this.
“She was good in gym.” I feel like I’m pretty safe saying this. Zabet wasn’t on any of the sports teams, but I’d bet that this was because of attitude, not ability. “Good reflexes,” I add, “like you said.” I see the flash of the ladle. “So she got chosen first for teams, and Coach Kenk liked her and everything.”
Hadley leans over the table and makes getting another ginger ale as loud a process as possible. I wait until she sits back again, cracking the can and letting it fizz.
“But then, in April or so, there’s the swim unit. It’s terrible. The water’s cold, and they use too much chlorine, so everyone’s eyes turn pink. We have to wear the school suits, which smell like oatmeal. And, at the end of the unit, Kenk makes everyone go off the high dive.”
Hadley sucks the overflow from the top of her can. “It’s the worst, right, Hadley?” I say. “Don’t you think? Swim unit is the worst?”
I stare at her, and Mr. McCabe looks at her, too, so that she has to respond. Finally she nods, once, a little dip of the chin like she can hardly stand it.
“So the high dive is really tall, Mr. McCabe, and lots of kids are sort of . . . well, scared of it. But no one thinks Zabet will be scared, because like I said, she’s been so good at gym and first pick for the teams and all that.
“Well, the thing is, I can tell that really she is scared of it, really scared of it—maybe more scared of it than the rest of us. She doesn’t say that to me or anything, but she keeps looking at the board, like when we’re doing other things, and she asks me once if I think that Kenk will make us go off it again this year.”
“Zabet wasn’t scared of heights,” Hadley says, but the story is mine now; I’m in it, and I let it roll right over her.
“The high dive is different. Lots of people who aren’t normally scared of heights are scared of a high dive. I mean, it’s the difference between standing on something high and jumping off something high, right?” I say it simply and I picture Zabet, the board above her like a gallows, her flat freckled cheeks tipped upward. “So Friday, the last day of the unit, Zabet doesn’t change into her suit. She tells Kenk she’s sick, that she’s got”—I glance at Mr. McCabe and feel my cheeks heat up—“her period. But, Kenk is Kenk. She says that it’s not an excuse and to put on the suit. I sit with Zabet while she changes, and she’s going off about Kenk and how unfair she is. I don’t tell her that I know it’s not really Kenk, that it’s really the high dive that’s got her upset, because there are some things you just might as well not say to Zabet.”
I’m glad when Mr. McCabe nods at this observation of mine, because it was only a guess based on what Zabet was like when she was younger. I’m glad, too, that I know something about Zabet that is still true.
“Well, we’re late because of all that, so when we come out, everyone is already around the high dive, but no one’s gone off it yet. Kenk is telling us that we don’t have to do a perfect dive or anything. We can cannonball or just jump or whatever we want as long as we try it. We have to try it. And we’re all shivering in these oatmeal suits and hating Kenk, who’s in her gross, evil sweat suit and doesn’t even have to get wet, much less jump off a skyscraper. Zabet is next to me, and she’s shivering more than anyone, even though she never gets cold.
“Then Kenk tells us to line up. Right away, everyone looks at Zabet. In fact, they just line up behind her. See, she’s always the one to do it first, whatever it is.
“I’m trying to catch her eye, but she won’t look back at me. Zabet. She just walks over to the ladder, puts her hands right on the rungs, and starts climbing up the damn thing . . . sorry . . . the thing. So we’re all down there on the ground, watching her just go. You wouldn’t believe it. Really, you wouldn’t. She goes right up, step after step, all the way to the top. Then she walks out to the end of the board, just like that.”
The crazy thing is, as I’m telling them this, I can actually see Zabet up there—the racerback of her suit, the frazzled rope of her braid—she’s blurred, all the details gone because she’s up so high with the fluo rescent lights sending yellow down on her head. I can see all of our faces tipped up, too, all the rest of us in the class, gawking at her, waiting for her. For a second, it’s all so real that I believe it might actually have happened the way I’m telling it.
Hadley sets her can down with a little clink. This time she doesn’t even pretend to be polite. “And she does a perfect dive off it, right?”
This was exactly what I was going to have Zabet do in my story. I was going to have her dive off, not perfect, but a dive, all right. And it was going to make the rest of us bold enough to go up and off the board, too. A hero’s ending. But I can hardly say that now, with Hadley watching me with her tight little screw of a smile like she’s got it all figured out.
“No,” I say. “No, she doesn’t. Actually, she turns around and climbs right back down. She couldn’t do it after all.”
As I say it, I can still see it, Zabet’s bottom, the pads of her feet pink from the rough surface of the board, the purple birthmark on the back of her right knee, all of it growing closer as she steps down the ladder rungs. And as I see it, I realize that this—this—is the right ending.
Hadley’s mouth unscrews a turn. She fiddles at the sleeves of her dress, fussy like a cat licking its paws. “No offense, but what was the point of that story? I thought you were supposed to tell—”
She glances at Mr. McCabe and has good enough sense to stop. He holds the wrist of one of his hands between the fingers of the other, like he’s taking his own pulse. He’s looking across the table at me, but also not at me. He has a faint smile on his face like maybe he can see Zabet up on that board, too.
“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for sharing that, Evie.”
Hadley pulls the sleeves of her dress over her hands and balls them in her lap, mad as hell. I wish I could tell her what I’d just figured out, what she’d helped me figure out: The point of the story isn’t that Zabet triumphed. The point is that Zabet climbed down the ladder, that she survived.
Dinner ends soon after that. Hadley lets Mr. McCabe fuss over her, helping her with her coat and sending her off with a steamed-up container of leftover spaghetti. She’s a different Hadley now than she was before—with a warm wick of a smile and quick, bright eyes. And if for a minute I think that she’s come around, given up trying to expose my lies, maybe even making an attempt to be friends, it is only for a minute. Because if I observe closely, I can see that the edges of Hadley’s smile are yanked up by force and her voice is almost tearful in its good cheer. She’s putting on a face. I’ve seen my mother do it a million times. She’s still angry; she’s just decided to fake it.
Hadley dips into a darling bow when she thanks Mr. McCabe for the dinner. “Don’t make spaghetti again without me,” she says sweetly.
If Mr. McCabe notices the difference between the pouting Hadley of earlier in the evening and the charmer she is now, he doesn’t mention it. She smacks his cheek with a kiss and slides out the door while I’m still fiddling with my shoes. When I finally get them done up, Mr. McCabe is holding out a portion of spaghetti for me.
“You, missy,” he says in a way that’s sad instead of playful.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the container.
He sets a paw on my shoulder. “No, no. Thank you. It’s good to know that Eliz—well, I won’t talk about her anymore tonight.”
“You can.”
“No.” He smiles under his mustache. “My battery’s wound down.” He looks at me for a second, steady, and I look down at my fingers crossing the top of the spaghetti container because I can hardly look back at him. “You’re a good girl,” he says.
I nod and shuffle my way backward until I bump into the door. “Dinner was really good. Really. And thanks for”—I lift the container—“the spaghetti.”
I slip out the door with his good-byes heavy at my back and the spaghetti losing heat in my hands. Out front, Hadley’s sitting on my bike, the hem of her dress floating perilously close to the grimy gears. She’s like a kid once again, her forehead wrinkled up in determination. She stands up on the pedals so that the bike wavers, trying to go forward but stuck, its lock pulled taut between the pole of the carport and the back wheel. When she sees me, she steps onto the ground.
“I would have ridden it away if it weren’t locked up.”
“I have the key in my bag,” I say dumbly, offering what? To unlock it and let her go?
She snorts. She’s none of the Hadleys I’ve seen before—not desperate like she was in the cafeteria, not furious like she was tonight at dinner. She’s something else, something a little more like I’d imagined she would be all the times I’d watched her from across the hall at school.
She eyes me. “You’re hanging around because she’s dead, huh? It’s exciting for you?”
“No.” I feel my cheeks burn up.
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Doing what?”
She gives me a look. “What you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing . . . I got sick at the funeral, or almost. Then I said something to him, to Mr. McCabe. I didn’t know, and I didn’t really mean to.”
Hadley watches me sputter; she rocks my bike, going up on her tiptoes and taking it an inch forward, sliding onto her heels, taking it back. She sets her eyes on the juncture of my handlebars.
“She was beaten up. Did you know that? They didn’t say it in the paper. He—whoever killed her—he beat her so bad her head was big, swollen, like . . . huge. Her nose was broken.” Hadley rocks forward. “All her front teeth were broken out.” Rocks back. “Her cheekbones. Her face was practically gone.” She rocks once more back and forth, and then she looks up. “My parents don’t think I can hear them talk when they go downstairs, but their voices come up through the vents.” She gets off without bothering with the kickstand, and so the bike wheels around, hanging off the pole. “They’re so stupid sometimes.”
“That’s awful,” I say, seeing the body bag again, now seeing what was in it.
“That’s awful,” she mimics.
“It is,” I say, my voice wobbling.
Hadley looks at me for a second, sizing me up. “It is, isn’t it?” She walks around the front of her car, letting her keys scratch along the hood. “You want a ride home? It’s cold, and besides, I don’t know how you think you’re going to ride home with that thing of spaghetti.”
Hadley and I barely talk on the drive back. When she pulls in front of my house, she doesn’t help me get my bike out of the trunk, and she doesn’t wait until I get in the house before she drives off. She winks her brake lights at the end of the street, and I tell myself that maybe she means it as a sort of good-bye.