THE NIGHT AT HADLEY’S is surprisingly normal. Her parents aren’t home. Are they ever home? We pop popcorn for her little brothers the old-fashioned way, with oil and a pan, and slice apples that turn yellow before we have the chance to eat them. The five of us watch a beauty pageant on TV. We pick our favorites and razz the contestants who are clearly ugly under their makeup and hairstyles.
“I should be in a pageant,” Hadley announces. “Just like this!” She waves her hands around her bruised face, presenting it.
“A Halloween pageant, maybe,” the oldest of her brothers says. Hadley wolf howls, and the boys giggle, and one of them grabs her arm tight in both hands, his face contorted with painful glee. In that moment everyone loves her, including me.
Upstairs, there’s Hadley’s queen-sized bed, but we’ll sleep on the floor. She sets up two sleeping bags at its foot. I don’t say anything about this, or Garrett Murray and her suspension, or Chad in the burgundy car, and I’m relieved when Hadley doesn’t mention any of these topics, either.
We lie in the dark next to each other, both on our backs. Hadley’s stuck plastic glow-in-the-dark stars to her ceiling; they have dark spots in them—shadowy tumors—from the wads of poster putty that hold them aloft.
She’s the one to speak. “What are people saying about me?”
I figured she’d ask this, and I have an answer ready. “That you got in a fight and that you got suspended.”
“I attacked him,” she says.
“Yeah?” I’ve made a promise to myself to sound casual, no matter what she tells me.
“Do people know that?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“It wasn’t him at all. He only hit me because I wouldn’t stop. I told Capp and everything.” She shrugs, and the fabric of the sleeping bag whispers under her shoulders. “I don’t care anyway.”
I wait for a second. “Hadley?” She doesn’t answer. “Hadley? Why’d you . . . do that?”
Silence, then finally, “Dunno.”
“Did he, you know, threaten you?”
“No.”
“Did you argue?”
“No.”
“You just attacked him?”
“I guess so.”
Neither of us says anything after that. I’m exhausted suddenly, body tired. I’m dropping down into sleep when I think I hear Hadley say, “I wanted to know what it felt like.” But by then, I’m already gone.
I have the dream about Zabet again, the one in the mall, all those identical beaten faces on sale. I wake up to find Zabet herself, sitting Indian-style at the foot of my sleeping bag. I almost say her name, but then I realize that it’s not Zabet but Hadley, her face painted in a soldier’s camouflage of shadows and bruises.
When she sees that I’m awake, she whispers, “Get up.”
“It’s still night,” I mumble.
“Yeah,” she agrees and rises, grabbing my wrist and half pulling me up. I stand the rest of the way and stumble after her as she gathers sweaters and sneakers.
When I see the shoes, I’m suddenly all the way awake. I shake my head. “I’m not going outside.”
“Get dressed,” she says. She already has her jeans on and her nightshirt tucked into the waistband.
I take a step back and grab on to the edge of her dresser. “I’m not going into the woods,” I say because suddenly I realize that of course that’s where she wants to go, where she’s wanted to go all night, where she wanted to go when she invited me over.
She doesn’t respond, just yanks a sweater over my head. I stand and endure it, feeling suddenly like a child dressed hurriedly in the dark. She lifts her backpack from the corner and shrugs it on.
“Come on,” I say, sitting down. “Let’s go back to sleep.”
“No.”
“What’s the point? No one’s . . . nothing’s out there.”
Hadley sizes me up. “So why not go, then?” she asks.
And that’s how I trap myself, because the reason I don’t want to go into the woods is precisely the opposite of what I’ve said: I’m scared that something—someone—is out there, which, Hadley would argue, is exactly the reason to go look. She kneels down in front of me, lifts my leg, and wrestles my foot into a shoe. I wonder if Zabet were here, alive and here, if she would go out into the woods at night if Hadley had wanted her to. My shoe draws tight against my foot as Hadley gives the laces a last yank and crosses them into a knot.
In stories the woods always look completely different at night than they do during the day, spooky and scary and oogy and boogy. But in Hokepe Woods, the trees are still trees, and the leaves are still leaves. And Hadley is still tugging me along after her, like always. She’s got ahold of my wrist, and she counts off the tree ribbons as she passes them, “One, two, three . . .”
We get to the spot where I know we’re headed, the muddy spot where Zabet was found. But instead of stopping there, Hadley yanks me past, a few rows of trees away, until I can’t see it anymore. She stops in front of a toppled tree. Tree into log, body into corpse. Hadley sits on the log, crossing one leg over the other, and pats herself down until she realizes that she has no coat and, therefore, no cigarettes. She shrugs her backpack off and sets it on her lap to rifle through it. As she does, something in it clanks, metallic.
“What’s even in there?” I ask. “Tent poles?”
She looks at me mysteriously, then reaches in and pulls out a flashlight.
“You didn’t want to use that while we were walking here?” I grumble.
She shrugs. “Someone might have seen it.”
“No one’s out here,” I say; then wish I hadn’t, because it sounds like a dare.
There are night bugs shuttling along the grooves of the log, their shells silvery and bluish, their legs translucent. Hadley gives up looking for cigarettes and looks around at the forest instead, nodding like she’s satisfied.
“We’ll hear anyone coming from here.”
I squat down in the leaves in front of the log. I touch two fingers to the ground to hold myself steady, and my fingers sink into the soft dirt. The ground is cold at its surface, warmer underneath.
“Killers return to the scene of the crime all the time.”
“In the movies,” I mutter.
“I wish this were a movie,” Hadley says.
“Why?”
“My boobs would be bigger.” She gestures at them. I smile despite myself before looking away, embarrassed.
“And if we were in danger, we could tell by the music,” I offer.
“And, in the end, he’d come,” Hadley says.
We both hush then, and I feel a frisson, something cold trickling at my center, drip after drip. I reach out for Hadley’s arm, even though I’m angry at her for waking me, for dragging me out into the woods, for calling the killer to us with her bravado. It seems like wherever he is now, whatever pickup truck he’s driving, whatever bar fight he’s fighting, whichever back alley he’s lurking in, his path will bend to us, curving along the line of her voice.
As I reach for Hadley, she’s reaching for me, too. When we see what we’re both doing, we laugh at how we’ve spooked ourselves, and it feels like a regular slumber party again, as if we’ve indulged in nothing more serious than scary stories. It would have been something if the killer had come crashing through the woods right then and there. You wouldn’t believe it, not even in a story.
In reality, it takes almost an hour more before he arrives.