I HAVE HADLEY DRIVE US all around Hokepe Woods first to make sure that Mr. Jefferson’s truck is gone. On the way over, she announces that her mysterious man is not following us, not right now anyway. She’s eager in the car, punching the buttons of her stereo, digging under her seat for cassettes, flicking the windshield wipers on and off even though there’s no rain.
We park where Jonah always does, and I take us in through the trees, along the same path that he had walked with me a week earlier. I find the wheel of a roller skate on the ground, ball bearings rattling inside it. Hadley plucks it out of my hand and tosses it in the air, batting it back up with her palm when it drops. She’s jubilant—humming shreds of the songs that were on the radio during our drive over. She slings her arm around my shoulders and squeezes my neck, somewhere between a hug and a wrestling hold. She whips the wheel at me, and I catch it and stick it in my pocket, after which she pleads that I give it back to her. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.
I remember the way to get to the spot by following the ribbons on the trees. There were five of them before. I count them off silently, and when we pass the fifth, I see the two trees and the patch of mud between them. I sneak a glance at Hadley. She’s singing “I’m the luckiest by far . . .” while braiding a tiny braid into a strand of her hair, each V perfect. I’d expected our walk out here to be a dirge, a solemn procession, a wake, or else for Hadley to be angry (like she is so much of the time), kicking at leaves and swiping at trees. I don’t know how to respond to this sudden goofiness. She acts like a child who’s played a trick on her mother, peeking at me out from around the column of her braid.
“There,” I say. “Right there.” I point at the spot.
Hadley’s song trails off into a noise that sounds like hmmm, as if she’s considering something. She drops the braid, and the bottom of it begins to unwind, the crisscrossed strands spreading and sliding over each other, growing fat without her hand there to hold them tight.
“Where?” she says.
I point to the patch of mud, the two trees.
“Where exactly?” she asks impatiently.
I walk over and point my finger directly at the place. “Here.”
She walks to me, her brows knitted, focused on where I’m pointing. She steps onto the spot with precision, lining up her toes, as though she’s stepping onto the photographer’s X to have her school picture taken. Then she begins to lower herself onto the ground.
“It’s muddy!” I cry, but she looks at me blankly and sits. She stays there cross-legged for a moment, and then she uncrosses her legs and lowers herself flat on her back. I watch all this agog. In fact, my arm is still out, my finger pointing down, not at the ground now, but at Hadley lying beneath me.
“Get up,” I say, but she ignores me.
I remember how horrified I was to slip, to plant my hand in the center of that spot, my palm sinking into the dirt where Zabet’s blood had sunk, where her head had pressed into the mud as he’d hit her again and again. And now Hadley is lying exactly there.
Hadley opens her eyes and gazes up at me. She looks past me at the trees and the sky up above us. She stares for a moment, very still, as if listening for something.
“Yes,” she says finally, nodding so that the leaves shift and crunch under the back of her head.
“Sit down,” she tells me. I act like I haven’t heard her. She half rises and grabs my hand, yanking me to the ground.
She lies back down next to where I half squat, half sit. She looks up again at the sky, the blue cut into jagged teeth by the tree branches. She seems content, peaceful, like she’s cloud gazing. I wonder if she lies down like this in the smokers’ field. I picture Garrett’s narrow back and brown nipples, the undone sides of his shirt draping over both of them.
“This is the last thing she saw,” Hadley says.
This is almost exactly what I had thought when I was here with Jonah. I wonder if this is the thought that anyone would think, lying here. I wonder if Zabet thought it, too: This is the last thing I’ll see. I look where Hadley’s looking, the underskirts of the trees.
“The last thing she saw,” I repeat.
“Either this or that asshole’s face.”
“I’m sure it was this,” I say.
“No you’re not. No one knows but her. And him.”
“Well, I hope it was this, then, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” She reaches out and gives my leg a clumsy pat.
Without thinking, I lower myself onto my back next to her. The mud is soft and wet on my neck and hands, and there’s something satisfying about this, mud squished between the fingers, a long-forgotten pleasure.
“What was Zabet like?” I say. It’s the first time since after Mr. McCabe’s dinner that I’ve directly referred to what Hadley and I both know and don’t talk about—that I hadn’t known Zabet since we were both kids, that at the time she died, I didn’t know her at all.
“She was . . . whatever.” I hear the leaves stir once, twice, Hadley lifting her shoulders—up, down—in a shrug. “She was okay. She was my friend.”
“But what was she like?”
“She was like a person, just like . . . someone. Like anybody.”
I can hear the annoyance in Hadley’s voice, which means that any second she might rise up and storm off. But I stumble on. “What about something, like . . . specific, like, something she liked?”
“What else did Jonah tell you?” Hadley asks, her voice daring me to accuse her of changing the subject.
“I don’t know,” I say, then, knowing she’ll want more than this and hoping that she’ll give me something of Zabet in return, “That this was the spot. That she was lying here.”
“How was she lying? On her back?”
“Yeah,” I say, though Jonah and I never had this conversation, not anything like it.
“And was there anything around her? Any”—Hadley bites her lip—“rope or a rock or something with maybe blood on it?”
“No. Just her.”
“What about her face?”
“Her face?” I echo.
“Were her eyes closed?”
“No,” I stutter.
“No?” Hadley asks sharply.
“I mean, he didn’t know. Her hair was over her face, covering it. So he couldn’t see.”
Hadley studies me for a second out of the corner of her eye. She rolls on her side so that she’s facing me. I roll on my side to face her, too, resting my cheek on both of my hands, like how little kids sleep in picture books. The mud flattens under my hands; we’re going to be covered in it, our clothes, our hair, and the sides of our faces.
“She was nice,” Hadley says. “She was a good person. Much better than me, anyway. And she liked”—Hadley chews on her lip—“Velcro.”
“Velcro?”
“Yeah. Sneakers and stuff. And science class and loud music, and she pretended she liked coffee, but really she put a shit-ton of cream and sugar in it so it was more like coffee-flavored milk. And she was real easygoing mostly. If you wanted to do something, she’d do it with you.”
I pictured it again: the ladle spinning toward Zabet’s face.
“Do you think you’d know him if you saw him?”
“Who?” I say.
“Who?” she repeats. “The one who killed her. Him. Do you think you could look at him and know it was him? Say, if you saw him, like, at a gas station or the mall or something. Would you know?”
I close my eyes and think for a minute, trying to puzzle out the right answer, the answer that will make her happy. “Maybe.”
“I’ll know,” she says and then, as if I’ve argued with this, “I will.”
We walk back to the car, muddy. I brush the flakes of it off my arms, comb my fingers through the mud-glued strands of my hair, and pluck my shirt away from my back so it’ll dry. But Hadley lets her mud stay, the streaks across her cheek and dark wet smudges on the back of her shirt, as if it weren’t even there. She must have memorized the tree ribbons on our way in because she nods to each one we pass like she’s thanking it for its guidance.
I can see the neighborhood ahead of us, the primary-colored plastics of swing sets, kiddie pools, and deck chairs; my view of them striated by the trunks of the trees. Hadley reaches the edge of the woods first and steps out into the neighborhood, but then she spins right back around and is running at me. She grabs me by the arm, pulling me away from the backyards, deeper into the trees.
“He’s here,” she says.
“Who?”
“Him. The car.”
“Jonah’s car?”
She glares at me, then jabs a finger out past the tree line. “Look.”
There’s a car there, a junky old burgundy station wagon parked just behind Hadley’s car. I think I see a shadow shift in the driver’s seat, but the windows are dark, and besides, we’re yards away. I can’t be sure anyone’s even in there.
“He followed me here,” Hadley says, shaking her head like she should have known.
“Are you sure it’s the same one, because—”
She looks at me levelly and, as if in punishment for my ineptitude, steps out from the trees. She’s going to walk straight to the car, open the door, and climb in the backseat, I think. I’ll never see her again.
“Wait!” I say, grabbing her by the arm, tethering her to me, to the trees. Her arm is covered with tiny bumps. She lets herself be pulled back to safety.
“I’m just gonna look.”
“No,” I tell her. And when she tries to take a step, I clutch at her arm. “Hadley, no.”
She sizes me up. “So you believe me now?” “It’s a possibility.” I glance back out at the car, sitting there. It’s too old for the cars in this neighborhood, too shabby. “Just stay here for a minute.”
“It’s fine,” she says, prying up my fingers one by one. “It’s the middle of the day in the middle of the street. Okay?” She pulls up on my hand. “Let go. Okay?”
She fixes an eye on me, steady, staring me down past the lock of hair she’d been braiding. Finally, I let go. I reach forward and comb out the remnants of her braid.
“I’ll be right here,” I say.
“Fine. Watch me.”
She squares her shoulders and steps out into the backyard in front of us. The car is up ahead of her, parked at the curb. She takes a step toward it and then another, bringing her feet together after each step like she’s marching in a wedding.
As she gets closer to the car, my heart starts to pound its blood against my neck, knees, and wrists. There’s definitely someone in the driver’s seat, I’ve decided; I can almost make out a shadow now, and the windows are streaked with his breath.
Hadley walks out between the houses with her purposeful stride. I can’t stand to look anymore, so I study something in my pocket, a scrap of paper, half a note I’d written to Hadley: After school? I don’t even remember what the complete question was, what we were supposed to do after school. I stare at this little bit of paper like it has the last paragraph of one of Hadley’s mother’s mystery novels scribbled on it, the solution.
I hear a creak as the door of the car opens. I look. Someone is getting out of the car. I can’t see who, though, because the car is parked with the driver’s side facing the street. This driver, he could grab Hadley; he could shoot her; he could stab her. I take a breath and bolt forward, out of the woods, shouting Hadley’s name as I go. As I run forward, everything else runs in reverse. The car door slams shut, the driver ducking back in, and the car swings out of its spot. Hadley, who had almost reached the car, takes a couple of dancing steps back and stumbles on the curb, landing on her ass on the sidewalk. The car straightens and speeds off.
It was nowhere near hitting her, but still my heart is pounding. I’m there next to her in a second, gasping her name and oh my God. Instead of taking the hand I offer to help her up, she slaps my arm with a stinging clap more startling than the noise of the car engine.
“Believe me now?” she asks, and I nod and press the place where she’s hit me too hard. “See? You should always believe me.”
She yanks herself up roughly, but when she’s gotten to her feet, she holds my hand with one of her hands and my arm with her other hand, as if I’m elderly and might fall and break something.
“I hope he comes to get me,” she whispers as we walk, her mouth blowing the hair near my ear, her breath fetid. “I hope he gets close enough so I can—” She squeezes my hand tight enough so that the tendons roll over the bones, the squeeze the final word of her sentence.