HADLEY DICTATES THE LIST, and I write the list. She can’t write, she says, because no one can read it when she does. This isn’t true. I’ve seen her handwriting—clean, thick block letters constructed like houses. I tell her that we should take turns.
“But I can’t move when I write,” she says. “I need to move. That’s what’s wrong with school, you know. Who can even think when you’re sitting still?”
This is my first time inside Hadley’s house, though I’ve set a rolled paper on her porch for years and have coveted it as I covet all of the houses in Hokepe Woods. The Smiths’ house is a dark brick box, two stories, its porch held up with wide beams and no welcome mat set in front of the door. Its outside is lush and posh and proud. It has the look of a nurse with dry, capable hands or an old-maid aunt with her hair pulled back tight in a bun, which is why I nearly gasp when Hadley yanks me through the doorway.
A mess. Wrinkled clothes are heaped over the banister and tucked in the crevice of each stair; child-sized, pilled socks dangle from the rail like ivy; I’m not sure if this laundry is unironed or unwashed altogether, though the rank, close smell of the room hints at the latter. The dining room has no furniture, only a tower of moving boxes in one corner and a torn-up patch of shag carpeting at the other. The kitchen counters are covered with instant-dinner boxes, microwave trays crusted with old food, and glasses striped with sticky rings of soda or juice. In the sink, a stack of dirty dishes teeters within an inch of the faucet’s dripping mouth, and a jumbo pack of paper plates has been left in the drying rack, cellophane torn open, ready for use. The room smells of spoiled milk.
Hadley makes no apologies for the state of her house. She doesn’t seem embarrassed at all, and I think of how ashamed I’d been to bring anyone home; at least Mom and I keep our house clean. Hadley tromps ahead of me, through the kitchen and into the living room, where three towheaded boys sit on a wraparound couch, hypnotized by a video game that makes the room whistle with laser-gun fire.
“You have brothers,” I say.
One of the boys, hearing my voice, whips around, a video-game controller in the shape of gun gripped between his hands. He fixes me in his sights, and then turns back to the TV screen, as if I am only some figure from his game that must be identified, eliminated, and promptly forgotten. Hadley fishes a few pens out from a nest of newspapers and bills on an ottoman.
“Don’t you dare bug us,” she commands. Though her warning seems unnecessary because none of the boys turn, nor do their guns slow in firing.
Upstairs, Hadley’s bedroom is from another age, one of Hadley’s own earlier ages. It’s startlingly girlish with a pink petal design on the bedspread and a vanity with a mirrored tray like the women in old movies have. “I mean to redecorate,” she says when I first step in, waving a hand to include all of it.
Hadley doesn’t have any paper handy, so we use the blank pages in the back of my science notebook, past the careful grids of my labs, which makes the list feel empirical—our own controlled experiment. Despite what Hadley said about needing to move in order to think, she doesn’t. She lazes on the bed, her feet planted on the wall above the headboard. I sit on the floor against her bed, and her voice floats down to me.
“Justin Paluski,” she says.
“Who’s he? A senior?”
“Junior. He totally beat up this kid for getting his sleeve wet with an umbrella.”
I look back at her. All I can see from where I’m sitting are her sneakers and the chewed bottoms of her jeans. “For getting his sleeve wet?”
“Rule one: People are fucked up, Vie.” She steps her feet against the wall in place, like she could walk up it. “Evidently.”
“P-A-luski or P-O-luski?”
“A, I think. Whatever. I’ll know who it is.”
I have the yearbook out next to me. I flip to last year’s sophomores, the Ps. Justin Paluski smiles out at me. I recognize him as one of the boys who sits at the lunch table next to the Whisperers’ table. Once when I was struggling with the top of my milk carton, he reached over my shoulder, peeled it open, and handed it to me without a word.
“Thanks. I can never do it right,” I said to his back.
“No sweat.” His head was shaved for swim team, and there was a little spot on the back, about the size of a fingernail, where the hair didn’t grow. The skin of his scalp was a soft white-blue, like a tooth or a candle.
I’d thought about the moment for weeks after that, always with a liquid feel in my stomach and the taste of sweet milk on the back of my tongue. I’d wanted him to open my milk carton again, but I was also simultaneously afraid to order milk in case it would seem like I was trying to get him to do it again. So I bought pop after that instead, snapping the can open with a hiss that I was sure sounded over to the next table.
Back in Hadley’s bedroom, I count. Justin Paluski’s name is the eleventh on our list. The list of suspects was my idea for how to find Zabet’s killer. Hadley’s idea was for us to hang out alone in Hokepe Woods at night as bait. She even wanted us to dress like Zabet. I suggested the list as a saner alternative. I lied and said that I’d seen them make a list like this on a police show.
Hadley said that the police are no help. She should know. They came over to her house the week after Zabet’s death to question her.
“Mostly they talked to my parents,” she told me. “Like they know anything. Like they even exist in the, like, world.” Even though she was out of sight on the bed above me, I knew she was rolling her eyes. “They asked me about two questions: Did Zabet have any enemies? Did Zabet have a secret boyfriend? It was some lady officer who asked me, like they thought I’d open up to her guidance counselor bullshit. They kept apologizing for bothering me. They’re proba bly talking to the real killer right now without even knowing it, apologizing for bothering him.”
The springs squeal up above me as Hadley lets her feet fall down from the wall.
“Write Wendy Messinger,” she says. Wendy is one of Hadley’s old friends—the tough girls. “She and Zabet didn’t get along,” Hadley adds. “And, God, you could probably write down the whole entire soccer team. They’re always getting into fights and getting high on stuff and following girls around, flipping up the backs of their skirts.”
This is news to me, and I feel both relieved and deficient that my skirt has never been flipped up, not that I even wear skirts.
“Should I write down . . . ?” I pause. “I’m not going to write them all down.”
“You said anyone, no matter how unlikely.”
“Okay.” I write down The Soccer Team. “Should I specify varsity or JV?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Hadley says, swinging around so that she is leaning over my shoulder. She reads for a minute, her hair tickling my cheek. She’s so close that I can see a crumb of dried milk in the corner of her mouth. I have the strange impulse to lick it away. After a moment of thought, she says, “And this is just the high school. There’s still the entire town, the college.”
“Yeah, like that creep at the party, that Chad,” I say carefully. We haven’t talked about the party since it happened a week and a half ago. I don’t know what Hadley’s reaction might be. Turns out, it’s not much of one.
“Who?” she says blankly, and I can’t tell if she’s just pretending not to know who I mean.
“That guy at the party. The one who, you know, scared you.” Hadley makes a face. “Nobody scares me. I don’t even remember that night.”
“But he was really—”
“Add him. Definitely,” she says in a neutral voice. “And that one who you messed around with.”
“Tony? I didn’t mess arou—”
“I don’t care, Evie. Put him down anyway.”
I write down Tony, but then ask, “Do you think Zabet would’ve met them, though? I mean, we just met them that night.”
Hadley sighs exasperatedly right in my ear and swings back to her original position on the bed. “Why not? Zabet and I went to parties like that all the time. What? You think those guys only invited us because you were there? You think you’re so damn alluring?”
“No,” I say, stung.
We sit in a tense silence. I press my pen into the paper; I want it to leave a dark blot of ink, but it only leaves a tiny dot.
“When you think about it, we could put down almost anyone,” Hadley finally says.
“No. Not anyone,” I say. “That’s why we’re making a list.”
“But when you think of who maybe could have done it, it’s anyone.”
“It’s not anyone,” I say again.
“Who isn’t it then?”
“There are some people who we can reasonably assume aren’t capable of murder.” I’m pleased with the big words marching out of my mouth.
Hadley rises up on her knees, her hands on her hips. “Like who? Who’s not capable?”
“Kier Dylan.” I name one of the meekest Whisperers.
To my surprise, Hadley knows who she is. “Maybe she could. Maybe we just don’t know the real her.”
“Right. She has wheat allergies and sociopathic tendencies.”
Hadley snorts. “Who the hell is allergic to wheat?”
“I don’t know. People.”
“People.” Hadley snorts. “It could be anyone.”
“Even me?” I ask.
“Even me,” Hadley says, grabbing the list from my hand, her eyes running down it once more.
That week that we make the list, Hadley’s angry. No, it’s more like she was always angry, but the incident in the diner parking lot gave her permission to stop hiding it. She’s in detention nearly every day after school for mouthing off to her teachers, and her little brothers hunker down into tiny blond rocks when she storms the living room. She’s starting to get paranoid, too. She’s convinced that cars are following her.
“Look now!” she’ll shout while we’re driving, turning both her head and the steering wheel so that we nearly veer off the road. I grab the wheel and steer us back center, but by the time I’ve done that, she claims the mysterious car is gone.
Things get even worse when the waitress-witness, Laura Grossman, turns out to be a bust. The two guys she overheard in the restaurant turn themselves in. They’re bag boys on break from the supermarket down the street, and the dead body they’d been discussing was from a movie they’d watched the night before. On the evening news, they shake their heads and open their eyes wide.
“We were just talking about movies,” one of them says.
“We didn’t mean to sound like we’d hurt anybody,” the other adds.
“We like scary movies.”
“Like anybody, right?”
“We like to be scared.”
“But just pretend. We’re not scary.”
“No, we’re not scary.”
The newscasters take a moment to chuckle after the clip before dialing their facial expressions back over to serious in order to announce that the hunt still continues for the murderer of local teen Elizabeth McCabe.
“Liar,” Hadley hisses over the phone. “That waitress wanted attention, that’s all. Sad little waitress life. Wonder how she’d like the attention I could give her. Liar.”
The next part of our plan is to look for suspicious behavior and add any instances of it to our list. We try and fail to sneak into the principal’s office to see if there’s any information about the students the police questioned just after Zabet’s murder. The police haven’t come to the school in a couple weeks, or at least the rumors about police interrogations have stopped. Hadley says this proves her point even more; we can’t count on the police for anything. We have to rely on ourselves, our list.
After our first brainstorming session, our list had twenty-eight people on it, and each day, during passing or lunch, Hadley asks me to add more. You wouldn’t think that people would do much that’s suspicious, but you’d be wrong. When you start looking for it, everyone is suspicious almost all the time.
For example, it starts to seem creepy the way Mr. Denby is so obsessed with his plants, especially after some research into Hadley’s mother’s detective novels, which teach us that sociopaths often express an interest in owning flower shops. Or the way that Greg Lutz doesn’t use a fork to eat his Salisbury steak, just his sloppy, gravy-covered fingers. Or how whenever anyone mentions Zabet, Wendy Messinger rolls her eyes and says, “Let the girl rest in peace.”
But Hadley and I won’t. In addition to the list, we launch a whisper campaign. The plan is to mention Zabet as much as possible in order to shake up the killer, whoever he or she is. We start rumors about why Zabet was in the woods that night—that she was pregnant and waiting to tell her lover, that she had a drug habit and was meeting her dealer, that she knew a secret about a teacher and was there to blackmail him. The rumors hiss through the school like wind through those old Chippewa cornfields, coming back to us during the next passing break on different lips, with different details.
After we spread a rumor, my job is twofold. I write any new details or changes from the story of our initial rumor. There might, I tell Hadley, be something true there, a clue that has worked its way into our rumor like a stray hair in your homemade pie. I use the signout log in the office to record anyone who goes home sick after the rumor has been spread. Just in case guilt or fear might drive the killer underground. The data is never quite right, though. For example, we spread the drug rumor just before a stomach flu outbreak, and a dozen people leave by lunch. On top of that, I worry that we’re ruining Zabet’s reputation with rumors about pregnancy and drugs.
“She’s dead,” Hadley says. “She doesn’t have a reputation anymore.”
Our number one suspect, however, is easy to find. He can be located in one of three places: slumped in a chair in the main office, slouched against a locker bank after being ousted from class, or hunched across the street in the smokers’ field with the bright bloom of a cigarette between his hands. Suspect One resists our methods of detection and defies our data. Garrett Murray skips at least one class every single day. He doesn’t, as far as we can tell, bother with gossip. Even so, gossip bothers with him. Hadley knows all the rumors.
“In seventh grade he punched a teacher.”
“He started a fire in the chem lab.”
“He got kicked out of his last school and the one before that, too.”
“The police called him in for questioning twice.”
“He’s supposed to be on about five different types of medication for”—she circles her finger around her ear—“but he never takes them.”
“Once, he totally beat up this kid for getting his sleeve wet with water from his umbrella.”
I don’t remind Hadley that this last incident was the exact same one that she’d told me about Justin Paluski.
We try to scrutinize Garrett Murray. We move in close to gather more data. Hadley posts herself in the smokers’ field with full packs of cigarettes, knowing that Garrett’ll almost always ask to bum one. She trades the clean, white cylinders for dirty tidbits.
“He said he wanted to kill Ms. Hauser.”
“He got kicked out of gym class for swinging a softball bat into the wall.”
“I memorized his shoe print. We could match it to the scene of the crime.”
“I asked him if he knew who Zabet was, and he said, ‘Yeah, the girl who got squelched.’” She ducks her head. “I hate him a lot.”
Still, she trudges back to the field during the next passing break, and I can see her through the stalks of winter wheat, letting him light his cigarette off hers, the ember glowing between them bright enough that I can see it through the stalks, past the cars, all the way to where I’m hidden behind the school doors.