“I NEED TO GET HOME,” I say to Hadley. We’ve been sitting in her car in the parking lot for five minutes now, Hadley with her hands wrapped around the wheel but the engine left dead. She’s staring at the diner blinds, and I’m afraid that any second Vanessa is going to wander out with a picture of her dead aunt for us to admire.
“Maybe you can go back and ask where Laura Grossman lives. Maybe we could go to her house or apartment or trailer or . . . whatever.”
“She’s not going to tell us that,” I say. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“She might tell you. She loved you.”
“She didn’t love me. She felt sorry for me. Fake sorry.”
“Maybe we could find a phone book.” Hadley chews on the edge of one of her thumbs. “Maybe she’ll come back in for her paycheck or something, if we just wait.” She turns in her seat and looks around the parking lot like Laura Grossman might be there already. She stops halfway through her survey and takes her thumb from her teeth, wiping it dry on the edge of the seat. “Look there.”
“Let’s go.”
“Look!” Hadley hisses, and so I do.
Hadley’s got her eyes fixed at the opposite edge of the parking lot where a few cars are parked with spaces in between like unevenly set teeth. A man, in silhouette, stands at the foot of one of the cars. Even though his features are doused in shadow, I can tell that he’s facing us.
“What? Him?”
“He’s looking at us.”
“He’s probably waiting for somebody,” I say.
“He was in the restaurant,” Hadley says, and she’s cranking the keys. “I saw him in there. They follow you out sometimes.”
As if beckoned by her words, the shadow man takes a step toward us as if he might come over here.
Who follows you? I start to say, but I’m thrown forward against my seat belt so hard that it locks up, and my question is severed in half. Then the car’s backing up and turning around, fast enough that the tires actually squeal.
Hadley’s driving at the man, right at him. I think that I should tell her to stop, and then I try to, but my voice won’t work. All that comes out is a huff of breath—Hhhh—and not the rest of her name. The scary thing is that Hadley looks just how she does when she drives anywhere, down any normal road, her face blank, the wheel steady in her hands. As we get closer, the man’s details get clearer, and I realize that he’s not a man at all but younger, a guy about our age.
The guy sees us coming and tries to scramble up on the trunk of his car. He perches on the edge of the trunk, teeters there a second, but then tilts off, falling onto the ground hard on his side. I close my eyes. I think, It’s going to crunch; it’s going to thud. At the moment that it must be too late to stop it from happening, Hadley hits the brake. The rubber screams, and I’m hanging from my seat belt again for the split-second that the car stops but our bodies still speed forward.
Then I’m back in my seat, and everything’s still—the car, Hadley in the driver’s seat, the ground in front of the car. Hadley unfastens her seat belt and leans her forehead against the wheel. She turns her head sideways, my way. I think maybe she’s hurt. I reach over and brush the hair from her face; her hair is soft as nothing, and her face, when I push her hair back, is quiet like she’s just been sleeping. She blinks and then looks up at me without moving her head.
“I just wanted to scare him,” she says. “I should . . .” I unfasten my own belt. My chest is sore in a stripe where the seat belt was. I reach for the door and get out. For a second, I feel like my legs are going to buckle, but then my knees catch me and I stand. I glance back at the restaurant. The blinds are still down; no one is looking out at us. I tell myself it all happened in a second, it wasn’t that loud. I tell myself that nothing happened at all, not really.
But the guy is there in front of me, evidence, lying on the ground on his back. He coughs and hitches himself up on one elbow, spitting. The glob of spit dangles from his mouth by a filament. He waits for it to drop before looking up at me.
For a second, I think I know him. I think of Jonah Luks, but it’s not Jonah. The guy is about Jonah’s age, though. Otherwise, he’s just a guy, just some guy with startled pale eyes and a hairline receding too early. He looks down at his legs, and I look, too. Hadley’s car had stopped less than a foot from him. Both of us stare at the tires so close to his legs, the place they meet the ground in a crevice of rubber and pavement.
The guy looks back up at me, and it takes me a second to see that his face has fear on it. I want to say something, but I don’t know what. I don’t understand why Hadley had done what she did, so I don’t know how to explain it to him. And an apology just doesn’t seem like enough. I open my mouth, not knowing what will come out of it. But before I can even think of word one, the guy is on his feet and rushing past me in a series of scrabbling, dizzy steps.
He mumbles, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” as he goes by. And for a second again, I think that maybe I do know him. But then he’s across the parking lot, pulling open the door to the restaurant, and disappearing inside.
When I get back into the car, Hadley has her forehead pressed to the steering wheel and her eyes closed.
“Hadley—”
She exhales and then lifts her head from the wheel. “We should go,” she says, her voice suddenly flat and businesslike. I watch her adjust the mirrors and her seat methodically, like they make you do at the start of your driving test. I’m scared to speak. Finally, I say, “Do you think that maybe—”
“Put your seat belt on.”
And I almost laugh at the absurdity of this request.
“We’re going,” she repeats. She turns around in her seat, pulling the nose of the car back from where it’d almost hit the guy, circling around the place where his body fell, even though she could have just as easily driven through it. She pulls out onto the road. I keep expecting to hear sirens, and I even glance over my shoulder a few times to look for the lights.
A few minutes later she finally asks, “He okay?” in a tone of voice like she’s being forced to ask it.
“You didn’t see? He got up okay. He ran.”
“I couldn’t look.” She’s silent for a moment, then adds, “He shouldn’t have been watching us,” Hadley says, turning in her seat and looking right at me. “Strange guy. Two young girls. He shouldn’t be following us into the parking lot, staring at us. Someone might think . . .” She trails off, pinching her lower lip so that it folds in half against itself.
The guy’s words play through my head: I’m sorry. I didn’t know. “He was just some random guy. He probably wasn’t even trying to follow us.”
“I’m not apologizing,” Hadley says, and, Christ, it isn’t like I ever expected her to.
We’re almost all the way back to my house before I relax. I’d forgotten that I was sick, but as we pull into my neighborhood, the itch grabs around my throat again. Hadley pulls to the curb, but when I try to open the door, she clicks the lock shut. I unlock it, only to have her lock it again as soon as I lift my hand.
“Cute,” I say, but she’s not smiling. “Hey, let me out.”
She won’t look at me. She’s staring straight ahead, her hands tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel, the same rhythm she tapped on my door this afternoon, not whimsical but methodical, a clock ticking down. Then her hands stop.
“We have to find him,” she says.
“Who? The guy you just ran over?”
“No,” she says. “Him. You know: him.”
“Um, the cops are—”
She looks at me with eyes that I can’t really describe. Maybe I’d call them sad, or maybe angry. From the right angle, in the right light, I might even call them frightened. “We’re Zabet’s friends, aren’t we?”
I bite down on my lip.
“Aren’t we?”
I nod. I have to.
“We can find him, Evie, you and me.”
She unlocks the door.