THE NEXT DAY, before first period, Hadley doesn’t meet me in the stomping area like she normally does. I wait there until past the tardy bell, thinking that maybe her morning smoke break has run long and she’ll show up any second. No Hadley, though. During the next passing break, I wait at her locker, but she doesn’t show up there, either. I’m thinking that maybe she’s at home, sick, but on a whim, during third, I ask for the bathroom pass and walk over to the math hall and past her calculus class. I can see Hadley in there, her head bent over her math book, her hair spilling all over the place. I stand in the doorway, willing her to lift her head and look over, until Mrs. Marshall catches sight of me and makes a shooing motion. Most of the rest of the class turn in their seats to see who Marshall’s waving at, but Hadley doesn’t even look up.
I’ve got a feeling in my gut that’s both giddy and terrible. Is Hadley mad at me? At lunchtime, when I can’t find her in the cafeteria, the feeling grows. I save a spot for her, but when lunch is half over and she still hasn’t come in, I move over to the Whisperers’ table, ready to be snubbed some more. But when I stand at the head of the table for a second, the Whisperers shift to make room for me, just like I’ve been eating there every lunch for the past two months. None of them ask me about Hadley; in fact, they don’t ask me anything at all, not that I expect them to after I’ve ignored them for weeks.
But then Kier says shyly, “I like your shirt,” and I realize that, instead of being mad at me, they’re all assuming I’ve been mad at them, when the truth is I haven’t thought about them at all.
“Thanks,” I say, and it dawns on me—terribly, horribly—that maybe Hadley hasn’t given a thought to me either.
Out past the bus circle, on the other side of the street, is one of Chippewa’s only remaining crop fields. If you can make it by the jaded hall monitors and across the wide arms of the bus circle, across the pressed blacktop of the teachers’ parking lot and then across the road, you’ve traversed an invisible border. You’ve stepped from one country to the next. You’re off school grounds—the field grants you asylum, international waters, an embassy. And you’re free—free, chiefly, to smoke. Every once in a while, the vice principal will walk out to the field and herd kids back to class, but technically he can’t write them up for smoking if they’re not doing it on school grounds.
Everyone knows which kids smoke. “Next?” they say to each other during class, which is short for Next break, wanna go smoke? They keep packs of cigarettes in their front pockets, perfect rectangles, or line up loose cigarettes in the slots of their bags that are meant for pencils. They groan during the last half of class and shift in their seats in a way that’s more feisty than it is bored. They come back from break in a tribe, smelling of cold air and filthy habit, ducking into their desks just before last bell sounds. It’s not the smoking so much as what the smoking implies: carelessness, hedonism, willingness to say fuck my silky lungs, and the promise of worse behaviors to come.
I’ve never been to the field to smoke. Before that party I’d never drunk alcohol; I’ve never kissed a boy. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t count as a teenager at all, that I’m much younger or maybe much older than I should be.
So when I stand at the school door, peering through its scored glass window and pressing on its bar, the bus circle seems like a long distance to run without getting caught. I can see them out there, slouching figures in the winter wheat. They stand a few feet away from the stalks, bold but not too bold. I can’t tell for sure if Hadley is with them. From where I am, the smokers are just muddy shadows that every few seconds shift, rustling the spears of wheat.
The bus circle is vacant, bare except for a puddle of shiny oil where one of the buses has dripped. I suck in a breath and press the bar to open the door. The bar makes a clicking sound like something being fastened into place. I push the door open and step out of the building, and then I’m walking across the bus circle.
The smell of the school is gone, its damp, rubbery carpets and pencil shavings mixed with whatever’s moldering in the bottoms of our lockers. The wind hits my face, and I can feel the tiny hairs along my cheek stand up and wave. I think of days when I’ve left school early with a note for a doctor’s appointment. Walking across the parking lot to Mom’s car, with that buoyant feeling of stolen time, is like being awake in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. It’s like everyone else has been frozen into slowness and stupidity and inattention, except for you; you are still quick, alive. You can watch them breathe. You can touch their eyelids, the fringe of their eyelashes, without waking them.
I try to walk at a brisk pace, like I have a purpose, some business to attend to in the wheat. I wait to hear a shout from one of the hall monitors or the vice principal. I don’t dare look over my shoulder because I’m sure that I’ll see one of them running after me, write-up slips in hand. I can glimpse pieces of the smokers now dissected by the stalks, the sleeve of a shirt, a section of a jaw, shoulders hunched over to light a cigarette in the wind. Then I’m stepping across the road and into the wheat.
The thing about standing in a wheat field is that there are rows, so you can’t really gather in a group. It’s like trying to hold a party in the library stacks; all your guests are forced to arrange themselves in lines. So the first person I meet up with is at the end of one of these lines, a senior boy with thick slabs of both jaw and hair. He’s using the end of his cigarette to light the cigarette of a sharp-faced girl with shadowy arrows of eye makeup. I know this girl, though not her name; she’s the girl who got last year’s photography teacher fired after he asked her to sit on his lap. I stare at them, their faces inches apart, bridged by the slender white cigarettes. I wonder if this act means something more, like a kiss, or if it’s just no big deal, the kind of thing you’d do anywhere with anyone.
Cigarette lit, the two of them turn and see me.
“Hey,” the boy grunts. He flicks his cigarette to the ground, barely smoked, and snuffs it with his shoe.
“Derek,” the girl complains, “that’s still good.”
“That’s still good,” the boy mimics her, taking hold of a stalk of wheat and bending it to shake near her face.
“Or at least it was,” she says, pushing the stalk back at him.
The ground near the base of the wheat is scattered with cigarette butts, swollen and curled like pupae that have come up from the ground with the rain.
“Is, um . . . ,” I mutter. They both look at me. Derek stops shaking the wheat. “Do you know Hadley? Smith? Is she here? Like, around here?”
“Who?” The boy hunches his shoulder and cups a hand to his ear, drawing the word out.
“She said Hadley,” the girl tells him.
“Who?” he asks again in the same clownish voice.
The girl rolls her eyes. “You know. Hadley.” She flicks her eyes to the left, deeper into the wheat. “Hadley,” she repeats.
“Oh, her.” He straightens up and smiles a smile like he could chomp up half the wheat field with those teeth. “She went down on me last week.”
“She did not,” the girl says.
“Naw. But she could have.”
I look down at my feet, but then I make myself look up again because I don’t want them to know that I’m embarrassed, uncool.
“Stop,” the girl orders, giving him a look that indicates me. “You’re going to scare her away.”
And I surprise myself by feeling angry that she would think I was so easily scared, which, I realize, is a Hadley sort of reaction to things. In fact, I hear Hadley’s voice in my head: No one can scare me.
“Is Hadley here?”
The girl shrugs a saucy little shrug, one shoulder rising up before the other. She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “That way, maybe.”
Because of the narrow rows of wheat, I have to squeeze past them to walk the way that she’s pointed. I press my back into the wheat so that I won’t brush up against them. As I pass the boy, he giggles, a strangely girly sound tinkling its way out of his ten-pound mouth.
“He’s an idiot,” the girl says. Up close I can see how elaborate her eye makeup is, dovetailing lines of black and gray.
He plucks the cigarette from her mouth and hands it to me. “Here. A gift of apology,” he says.
I take it, mostly so that I don’t offend him, and walk past them farther out into the wheat.
“Light me another,” I hear the girl say behind me.
The wheat grows high and thick on either side of me, and I don’t know how to look for anyone out here. Sometimes I can hear conversations in the rows, but I don’t hear Hadley. Finally I turn around with the idea that I’ll go back to the school, that I’d tried and failed, when the wall of wheat next to me rustles. I gasp and draw my hands up to my mouth. The cigarette flips from between my fingers, arcing up over the stiff heads of wheat. I am still for a moment, and so is the wheat. But then, just as I’m about to exhale and drop my hands from my face, it rustles again.
“What the hell?” someone says from the other side of the stalks.
And then Hadley’s voice, wry: “You’re on fire.”
The wheat shakes more, and there’s a list of curses in the voice that isn’t Hadley’s. I place myself just on the other side of the shaking wheat. The stalks have grown so thick that I can’t see through them.
“Are you even going to help me?” the voice asks.
“Hadley?” I say, and when no one answers, I stick my hands into the wheat and push it apart.
The two of them are on the ground. Hadley sits on the far side of the row, her ponytail pulled loose so that her hair is a deflated balloon against the back of her neck. The skin all around her mouth and chin is pink, like she’s been scrubbed raw. When she sees me looking at her, she puts a hand up to her face as if to cover this pink. The boy is the one rustling the wheat. His shirt is unbuttoned to his waist, hanging open in a silly V. He scuttles back on his heels, batting at his back, which sends up a thread of smoke like the tiniest smoke signal. Finally satisfied that he’s gotten it out, he strips off his shirt to assess the damage.
“You were gonna let me burn?” he asks, brushing at the little hole burned there.
“You handled it,” Hadley says to him, though she’s looking at me when she says it. I try to interpret her look. Is she angry at me, as I suspect? She seems shuttered, guarded.
The boy, distracted by his shirt, hasn’t seen me yet, even though my head and hands are poking through the wheat just above him. I feel like some bizarre hunting trophy, but I can’t move. If I let go of the stalks of wheat to duck back through, it’ll make all sorts of noise, and he’ll definitely see me. But if I stay here, he’ll look up any minute and see me, too. I don’t know what to do. I’m stuck. What’s more, I don’t know what Hadley wants me to do. She watches me steadily, her hand slides down from her chin to her neck, but she doesn’t give me any direction about what to do and even still no sign about whether she’s mad at me. This, I realize, is my punishment for failing her with Jonah. Hadley won’t help me, won’t keep me safe.
“What the hell?” the boy says as he’s shrugging on his shirt, and at first I think he’s talking about me, but then he bends forward to pick up something off of the ground. “Look. Someone dropped this on me.” He’s holding my cigarette, a whisper of smoke rising from it. Then he looks up at me, and I’m staring into the squinty, infamous face of Garrett Murray.
“What the hell?” he says again.
I make a noise that is meant to be sorry but isn’t even close and try to disappear back through the wheat. Before I can go, he reaches up and catches my wrist, yanking the upper half of me through to their row.
“You did this?” he demands. He brings his face up close to mine, so close that I can see the squinch of sleep in the corner of his eye and the flakes of his chapped lips. He holds the cigarette up between our two faces. I’m scared, and it’s all I can do not to gasp in his face. He gives my wrist another tug. The stalks of wheat are rough, even through my coat, and my body is twisted between the rows so that they poke at all the soft parts—belly and ribs.
Suddenly, Hadley is between us. She plucks my wrist out of Garrett’s hand. “She came to get me before the bell,” she tells him. “I asked her to.”
Garrett is still for a second, then he blows his breath out into my face. I flinch. “Don’t drop things on me.” In a slick movement, he draws back and spins my cigarette into his mouth.
His nipples are tiny on his chest, tiny brown dots like a little boy’s. I can’t help looking at them. Hadley pushes me back through the wheat and steps through after me, not even saying good-bye to Garrett. We walk back toward the school, shoulder to shoulder because of the narrow ness of the row. We don’t walk too slow or too fast, and Hadley keeps her face forward. I want to say Are you mad at me? I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say Thank you, oh, thank you. But she still has her hand circling my wrist, like a handcuff or a bracelet, and I don’t want to say anything that might make her pull her hand away.
So Hadley is in love with Garrett Murray. I feel stupid for not figuring it out and hurt that she didn’t tell me herself. Still, her hand is around my wrist.
“Garrett seems nice,” I say.
Hadley snorts, and I wonder if my words sounded sarcastic. I play them back in my head. I don’t think they did.
“No. Really,” I say. “He does. He was just . . . on fire.”
Hadley inhales through her kiss-mashed mouth, and I think that she’s gathering breath to yell at me. But instead of yelling, she starts laughing.
“Really, anyone would . . .” And, then I’m laughing, too. Hadley takes her hand from my wrist in order to slap it against her thigh. “Fire!” she gasps between laughs. We trudge forward, doubled over like the laughter is a weight on our backs. And I know that she’s forgiven me.
We stop at the edge of the wheat. The guy and girl I’d met earlier are gone. All the smokers are gone. The tardy bell rings faintly from the school as if someone has trapped it under a cup.
“It was my cigarette,” I whisper. “The one that set him on . . .” I can’t say fire again.
She nods and her laughter turns into little bursts of escaping breath.
“I’m sure he’s nice,” I offer. “Garrett, I mean. It was just a bad way to meet.”
“Don’t be dumb,” Hadley says, her laughter all gone.
Just then, Garrett bursts out of one of the rows near ours. Hadley and I watch in silence as he slinks back across the bus circle to the school, not running—never running. I look for the hole burned in his shirt, but I can’t see it from here. When he gets close to the school, one of the hall monitors opens the door and waves him in wearily.
“I still hate him and everything,” Hadley says and shrugs.
“You do?”
“Sure,” she says.
A thought occurs to me. “Are you saying that he, like, made you . . . you know, in the wheat? Because if he forced—”
“No,” Hadley says. “No one can make me do anything.” She shrugs again, casting it off.
“But, then, if you don’t like him, why would you kiss him?”
She turns and tucks my hair behind my ears on both sides like I’m a kid. “Vie,” she says, “shut up.”